A Quick Comparison

Here's what I wrote just about a year ago, with regard to the whole point of the WOT:

The Bush Doctrine, issued soon after 9/11, was clear: there is no distinction between terrorists and states who support terrorists. Afghanistan, the crash-pad of Public Enemy Number One, was the first state to discover that Bush meant it. The link between the Taliban and al-Quaeda was evident. With Iraq it was more tenuous, but put your mind at rest. Saddam knew terrorists, and gave them money and safe haven. He had to go. Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia will all be dealt with, according to different schedules and strategies. The fact that his WMD's are better hidden than we had anticipated isn't relevant. That's one less source of support for Hezbollah and every other cell of hate that plagues our world. Let's not be legalistic. Do you really think we can annihilate al-Quaeda, leave the rest, and be any safer?

Here's what Michael Totten wrote in TechCentralStation today, on the same subject:

It makes little sense to declare war on Al Qaeda while ignoring Al Qaeda's Islamist allies in terror like Hezbollah and Hamas. And it makes little sense to declare war against Hezbollah and Hamas while ignoring the Baathist states (Syria and Saddam Hussein's Iraq) and the Islamist states (Saudi Arabia and Iran) who provide them financial aid, material aid, military aid, and real estate. Most are networked together, sometimes loosely, other times less so. Hezbollah was created by Iran. The Taliban was a product of Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency and was backed by Saudi Arabian patronage. Not every group is linked to every other group. Sometimes the connections are slight and indirect, as seems to have been the case with Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. (No one should be surprised, though, that Sudan did for a while harbor Osama bin Laden.) Algeria's death squads appear to be hooked up with no one, but they are products of the same cultural sickness. They're the ideological twins of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. All these groups have a few things in common. They're all Islamic, they're all totalitarian, and they're all up to their eyeballs in terror. If Al Qaeda ceases utterly to exist tomorrow, and if everything else in the Muslim world is preserved exactly as it is now, would it really be time to declare victory? I do not think so. Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central Asia would continue to suffer spasms of massive violence while we in the West await the next extremist wave to crash on our shores.

If there's a fault I have for the Bush Administration, it's that he hasn't made this quite clear enough: that the enemy is larger than al Qaeda. Perhaps if he had, we wouldn't be wasting our time arguing about legalities like WMD's. The status quo in the Middle East is the enemy. We must devote ourselves to undoing it. That is forward-thinking, revolutionary, and the only way we'll ever win.


And I called it then. Should I be paid for this, or what?