As part of their fiftieth anniversary festivities, NRO has been posting various articles from yesteryear. One of them, an angry and beautiful piece written during the infancy of the Cold War about the revolt at Poznan, caught my attention:
The embryo revolt in Poznan was not isolated, but the latest act in a series that extends over the past four years: the slave labor revolts beginning in 1952, before Stalin's death, in the Vorkuta complex; the East German uprising; the large-scale recent fighting in Eastern Tibet; the riots in Tiflis. Every such demonstration proves, contrary to the skeptics, that a policy of liberation is closer to Soviet realities than any policy of containment or coexistence.
1.) It's not too hard to draw parallels between the people of Poznan and the students in Iran, or the various factions resisting Saddam's regime. When encountering Communist regimes and autocratic Middle Eastern states that sponsor terrorism, the choices are similar: containment or engagement. What's different is that the internal politics in the Middle Eastern states are a lot more fragmented than in they were in Eastern Europe.
2.) Can the West fight terrorism the same way the West once fought Communism? The counterargument today is that terrorism is a "tactic", and that one cannot eradicate a tactic, however illegitimate its use. I think that a similar argument could have been made during the Cold War, that Communism is an idea, or an ideology, and one cannot eradicate an idea, lest one promote a totalitarian state that will burn all the books. Today, however, there is no one that claims that Communism in its pure, orthodox form, is soundly defeated, despite the fact that Cuba, North Korea, and China remain, at least nominally, Communist. The great power--the U.S.S.R.--that sustained Communism is no more. Could the War on Terror reach a similar stage, where terrorism as a tactic is only used rarely, and where only one or two small states--with no WMD capabilities--flirt with providing hospitality to terrorist groups?
This is what Bush has said:
"We meet today at a time of war for our country. A war we did not start, yet one that we will win," the president told members of the American Legion at their annual convention.
"In this different kind of war, we may never sit down at a peace table, but make no mistake about it, we are winning and we will win.
"We will win by staying on the offensive. We will win by spreading liberty," Bush said.
That's all pretty vague, and I don't expect a very philosophical--or dare I say, "nuanced"--answer in the middel of a political campaign. But if the idea of victory means that terrorism, as a tactic of war, will never be used again, then I say the war will never be won. In that sense, fighting "terror" would be like fighting burglary--you can fight burglars, but you will never end burglarly as an activity. I think the more reasonable thing to say is this: the War on Terror is a fight against an ideology, radical political Islam, which is just as totalitarian as Communism, which depends on the sponsorship of sympathetic regimes in the Middle East, and whose modus operandi is terrorism. There will be a lot less terrorism once state sponsorship has been sundered, and once all those terrorist groups have been dismantled and suppressed. Even then, you'd still have to deal with smaller, non-Islamic groups, like the IRA, which have not declared jihad against the West.
And as they rolled over Polish bodies the Communist tanks flattened also the soft rhetoric of our George Kennans and Stewart Alsops, our experts and smug journalists, who have been telling us how the Soviet regime has come to be accepted by its subjects, how (in Kennan's servile words) "there is a finality, for better or worse [sic], about what has occurred in Eastern Europe." The people of Poznan, clasping hands as they faced the tanks demanding food and decent working conditions and an end to Moscow's rule, and the soldiers who joined them instead of firing on them: these in one day communicated more of the truth about the Soviet Empire than a decade's dispatches by correspondents and diplomats.
The embryo revolt in Poznan was not isolated, but the latest act in a series that extends over the past four years: the slave labor revolts beginning in 1952, before Stalin's death, in the Vorkuta complex; the East German uprising; the large-scale recent fighting in Eastern Tibet; the riots in Tiflis. Every such demonstration proves, contrary to the skeptics, that a policy of liberation is closer to Soviet realities than any policy of containment or coexistence.
Two thoughts:
1.) It's not too hard to draw parallels between the people of Poznan and the students in Iran, or the various factions resisting Saddam's regime. When encountering Communist regimes and autocratic Middle Eastern states that sponsor terrorism, the choices are similar: containment or engagement. What's different is that the internal politics in the Middle Eastern states are a lot more fragmented than in they were in Eastern Europe.
2.) Can the West fight terrorism the same way the West once fought Communism? The counterargument today is that terrorism is a "tactic", and that one cannot eradicate a tactic, however illegitimate its use. I think that a similar argument could have been made during the Cold War, that Communism is an idea, or an ideology, and one cannot eradicate an idea, lest one promote a totalitarian state that will burn all the books. Today, however, there is no one that claims that Communism in its pure, orthodox form, is soundly defeated, despite the fact that Cuba, North Korea, and China remain, at least nominally, Communist. The great power--the U.S.S.R.--that sustained Communism is no more. Could the War on Terror reach a similar stage, where terrorism as a tactic is only used rarely, and where only one or two small states--with no WMD capabilities--flirt with providing hospitality to terrorist groups?
This is what Bush has said:
"We meet today at a time of war for our country. A war we did not start, yet one that we will win," the president told members of the American Legion at their annual convention.
"In this different kind of war, we may never sit down at a peace table, but make no mistake about it, we are winning and we will win.
"We will win by staying on the offensive. We will win by spreading liberty," Bush said.
That's all pretty vague, and I don't expect a very philosophical--or dare I say, "nuanced"--answer in the middel of a political campaign. But if the idea of victory means that terrorism, as a tactic of war, will never be used again, then I say the war will never be won. In that sense, fighting "terror" would be like fighting burglary--you can fight burglars, but you will never end burglarly as an activity. I think the more reasonable thing to say is this: the War on Terror is a fight against an ideology, radical political Islam, which is just as totalitarian as Communism, which depends on the sponsorship of sympathetic regimes in the Middle East, and whose modus operandi is terrorism. There will be a lot less terrorism once state sponsorship has been sundered, and once all those terrorist groups have been dismantled and suppressed. Even then, you'd still have to deal with smaller, non-Islamic groups, like the IRA, which have not declared jihad against the West.
