Los Angeles Times: We can't win this war the old way: "But the right response does not lie, as commentators on Fox News would have us believe, in more military firepower to zap 'the enemy' in Iraq or elsewhere. It lies in skilled policing and intelligent policy. Quietly refusing the melodramatic metaphor of war, officials of London's Metropolitan Police described the sites of the Tube and bus bombings as 'crime scenes.' That's right. Crimes.
Working in the most ethnically diverse city in the world, they have developed patient techniques of community relations and intelligence-gathering, as well as evidence-gathering after the event. That won't stop every attack. It didn't stop this one. But skilled policing at home, not soldiering abroad, is the way to reduce the threat from terrorists who operate and sometimes, as in the Madrid bombings last year, live for years in the immigrant communities of our great cities. If that is true of London and Madrid, it applies equally to Toronto, Paris, Sydney or Berlin.
Then there is intelligent policy. It was right to drive Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. By contrast, it becomes increasingly clear that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, almost certainly creating more terrorists that it eliminated. But now we have to make the best of a bad job there. The last thing we should do in response to this attack is to scuttle out of Iraq. On the contrary, now is the time for all democracies to rally round the cause of building a peaceful and halfway free Iraq, while insisting on further changes in occupation policy from a sobered United States, no longer infused with the neoconservative hubris of three years ago.
A peace settlement between Israel and Palestine would remove another great recruiting sergeant for "
No comments:
Post a Comment