Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001
War on Terrorism: Complete failure?
Thomas M. Miovas, Jr.
I'm struggling to understand the position of several outspoken Objectivist
regarding our war on terrorism, which they claim is a complete failure. I'm
referring to Andrew Lewis on his December 16 show, and Dr. Peikoff on the
Fox News Channel special airing the same day.
In essence, I think their position is that if we don't go after Iran, then
we are not taking the war on terrorism seriously enough, because Iran is
the source of Islamic fundamentalism, which seeks to destroy us via
terrorism. And if we don't go after Iran, we will lose the war.
The best analogy I can come up with regarding their position would be that
if during WWII we attacked Poland instead of Nazi Germany, and then said
that we had had a major victory against Nazism, and then made no plans to
go after Germany because we defeated Poland.
Granted, Afghanistan was an ideological satellite of Iran in that the
Taliban and Al Qaeda were implementing the ideology of Iran, but wasn't it
Al Qaeda that launched the attack against the WTC and weren't they
operating out of Afghanistan? Doesn't that mean that we had to get rid of them?
I do think we need to get rid of Islamic fundamentalist states wherever
they exist, because so long as such fundamentalism is permitted to have a
country based on that ideology we will be a target; but does that mean we
shouldn't celebrate the fact that the activities of Al Qaeda have been
severely disrupted by not only our war in Afghanistan but also by other means?
It does bother me that Iraq rather than Iran seems to be our next target,
especially since this may be motivated out of a desire not to offend
Muslims by avoiding attacking another fundamentalist Islamic state.
In other words, we seem to be willing to destroy satellites of Nazism, to
further the analogy, but we are not willing to destroy Nazism per se. This
sort of action (or inaction) would have lead to a dual Cold War -- one
against Communism and one against Nazism. We certainly shouldn't be setting
up a similar Cold War against Islamic fundamentalism, and yet this
administration has come out and said the war against terrorism will be like
the Cold War.
So...is our war on terrorism a complete failure?
