The Fallacy of a Safe World

As the mid-term elections approach one can hear the Democrats far and wide nearly all singing from the same hymnal, “The war in Iraq has not made the world safer!” The point of a statement like this is to, among other things, imply that for those who vote Republican over national security issues, that there vote would be wasted. The Democrats are attempting to sell voters on the premise that Republicans have lost sight of the main objectives in the War on Terror and if said Democrats are voted into power then they will essentially pull the troops out of Iraq and concentrate on solely the terror cells, thus making the world a safer place.

The Democrats are serving voters a fresh plate of hooey! First off, if you really believe that any American political party can make the world a safer place then I suggest you pause reading this column and set out a plate of milk and cookies because Santa Clause should be along shortly. But seriously folks, it’s this sort of juvenile, two-dimensional thinking about geopolitics that makes me a sad panda.

I haven’t a clue what people mean when they say they want to make the world a “safe” or “safer” place. Certainly since the Manhattan Project and the advent of nuclear missiles, most would say that the world is a decidedly unsafe place. Once it became relatively easy to make war half a world away and kill millions of people with just the push of a button, any sense of safety one might have had definitely evaporated. I suppose folks were lulled into a false sense of security once the Cold War ended, in thinking that once the Soviet Union broke apart, the potential threat of nuclear war fell into the dust bin of history. Some would say that 9/11 shattered the belief that we were safe in the world post-Soviet break-up. I am here to tell you that those people just weren’t paying attention.

People seem to limit their scope of the world to only those issues, which are reported in the major mainstream or elite news outlets. Contrary to popular opinion, the Soviet Union was not our only nuclear threat in the world. China first tested their own nuclear bomb in 1964 and their most recent test was in 1996. China has threatened to use their arsenal of ballistic missiles against the US if we intervene (by law) against any attempt by China to take Taiwan by force. And just so we are clear, China too can just press a button and send any number of missiles into the West Coast of America (more if we somehow manage not to see one of their submarines off of our coasts).

That is just one example of how we are not safe in this world have not been for quite some time. The Democrats have no plan to limit our exposure to another countries nuclear missiles; rather they just keep repeating the same old tired phrase that somehow if we ever catch Osama bin Laden (UBL), that will mark the end of the War on Terror.

Let me be clear about this fallacy. Even if we had committed all of our resources to eliminating the Taliban and finding UBL, not only would that have not made the world any safer, but in reality it would have been next to impossible.

I’ll deal with the former assertion first. Much like in Iraq, not too long after the US and coalition forces commenced with an attack on enemy forces, we were able to take control of the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul. As a matter of fact, for some time Hamid Karzai was sardonically referred to as the Mayor of Kabul because despite the coalitions best efforts, the reality was that greater Afghanistan was in the hands of war lords and local militias. In addition to which, shortly after the Taliban regime fell, poppy farms, the precursor to opium and heroin production, rose like a high tide. Also, you had absolutely no infrastructure to connect greater Afghanistan and thus no real way or reason for those outside of Kabul to buy into this new government. Lastly, members of the Taliban and those that supported it didn’t just disappear into the ether, they went into hiding only to regroup and attack coalition forces just as their brothers in Al Qaeda do.

Given all of the above, how exactly would the Democrats have gone about correcting those issues and make the world a safer place? Am I along with the rest of the American voters to assume that the Democrats had a plan for building Afghanistan’s infrastructure instantaneously? Did John Kerry or Nancy Pelosi have a plan to somehow woo the tribal leaders and war lords to adopt Karzai as their rightful ruler and join the infant Islamic democracy brewing in Kabul? And what about the War on Drugs? One hardly hears a peep from the Democrats about how they would have squared our current policy toward drug production and trafficking with Afghanistan’s right to farm a high demand cash crop. Maybe they would have advised the Afghani rural community to grow passion fruits like they tried in Colombia. I’m sure that would have worked just as well.

On the subject of UBL, I have yet to hear how the Democrats would have gotten anyone in Waziristan to give up a man whom many feel is on the right side of the clash between Islam and the rest of world. The Bush Administration and the Pakistani army tried to move into that area but to no avail. The bottom line their was even if we blanketed the lawless areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan, most of the people living in those regions would not have turned him in for any amount of money.

Even if UBL had been caught, nobody has shown me how that would have made he world safer. The invasion of Afghanistan fundamentally changed the structure of Al Qaeda. Instead of it being a top-down chain of command with UBL and Kalid Sheik Mohammad at the top and their soldiers at the bottom, once UBL became a fugitive, the structure transformed from vertical to horizontal. Now what we have is independent cells attempting use whatever resources are available to commit as much mayhem as humanly possible. That’s right, instead of sleeper cells waiting for word from the executive branch of Al Qaeda, all of the cells are acting autonomously in whatever way they are able to. I don’t know about you but the thought of thousands of cells all over the world with lots of bombs and no leadership doesn’t make me feel safer and I seriously doubt that the Democrats have a comprehensive plan to put that genie back into the bottle.

As I’ve said before, endless diplomacy with a group of people who have stated that there can be no peace until we are all dead or converted is a recipe for defeat and disaster. While the Bush Administration has made a ton of errors prosecuting the War on Terror, making the world “safer” was never in their ability nor was it most probably even a goal. The world is too complex for that kind of simplistic thinking. There are too many variables to consider when making an assessment on how one should make the world safer. Essentially, the way to do that is to get rid of all ICBM’s and nuclear devices. Under Clinton there was no real progress there. Neither Kerry nor any other Democrat could convincingly explain how they would go about getting members of the nuclear club to voluntarily give up their arsenals. Let us remember, even France has nukes and there are not fixing to give them up.

In short, it is fallacious thinking to believe that anyone can make the world safer. One can argue that invading Iraq was poorly timed or even poorly planned but the invasion itself has nothing what-so-ever to do with the safety of the world. Again, the world was a great big mess before Iraq and there has not been real measurable change in the fundamental structure of the world and the way it works since. In other words, don’t believe the hype, nobody, not even Hillary Clinton can make the world safer, they can only expose us to more danger.