The captain of the Maersk Alabama is safe, but it took the the world's most powerful Navy four days to get him out of a lifeboat manned by a handful of fishermen turned kidnappers.
As grateful as Americans have to be over the rescue of Richard Phillips, his travail adds a punctuation mark to what the military experts call asymmetrical warfare but looks very much like impotence in the face of lawless attacks by those who have nothing to lose in a world of asymmetrical power and wealth.
On all sides, 21st century sophistication is beset by crazed criminals--Taliban thugs who live in caves, Pakistani gunmen who terrorize India's most upscale city, drug dealers who make a shooting gallery out of America's Mexican border--and there seem to be no answers to what is more like the gang warfare of the Roaring Twenties than the high-tech world of today.
Afghanistan, Iraq et al are treated as military and diplomatic dilemmas, but the world is looking more and more like one big crime scene.
Where is Eliot Ness when we need him now?
Showing posts with label Mideast policy. Taliban. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mideast policy. Taliban. Show all posts
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Iraq in the Rear-View Mirror
Barack Obama and John McCain are squaring off on foreign policy this week, but there is an oddly retrospective quality to the debate over Iraq. Both promise to end the war, albeit on differing timelines, but the main issue is whether we should have fought it at all.
In his foreign policy speech today, Obama's answer was a resounding no, claiming the effort should have gone into hunting down Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, the Taliban and terrorists responsible for the attacks, and that the billions spent on the war could have been invested in alternative sources of energy to "end the tyranny of oil" and strengthening our position in the world.
"Instead," he said, "we have lost thousands of American lives, spent nearly a trillion dollars, alienated allies and neglected emerging threats--all in the cause of fighting a war for well over five years in a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks,"
Meanwhile, McCain's foreign policy adviser is harrumphing that his candidate "would rather lose an election than lose a war and see the nation lose a war. Senator Obama seems to think losing a war will help him win an election."
New polls are reflecting uncertainty among voters on how to react to all this. In the coming weeks, after he travels to the Mideast, Obama is going to have to make an effort to persuade the public to sign on to his five foreign policy goals:
"(E)nding the war in Iraq responsibly; finishing the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban; securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states; achieving true energy security; and rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21st century."
In his foreign policy speech today, Obama's answer was a resounding no, claiming the effort should have gone into hunting down Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, the Taliban and terrorists responsible for the attacks, and that the billions spent on the war could have been invested in alternative sources of energy to "end the tyranny of oil" and strengthening our position in the world.
"Instead," he said, "we have lost thousands of American lives, spent nearly a trillion dollars, alienated allies and neglected emerging threats--all in the cause of fighting a war for well over five years in a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks,"
Meanwhile, McCain's foreign policy adviser is harrumphing that his candidate "would rather lose an election than lose a war and see the nation lose a war. Senator Obama seems to think losing a war will help him win an election."
New polls are reflecting uncertainty among voters on how to react to all this. In the coming weeks, after he travels to the Mideast, Obama is going to have to make an effort to persuade the public to sign on to his five foreign policy goals:
"(E)nding the war in Iraq responsibly; finishing the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban; securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states; achieving true energy security; and rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21st century."
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