Splendid. A very thoughtful Fisking whilst in the clutches of Demon-Vodka. Maybe I should switch from gin.

JMM is a reactionary, desperately wishing a return to the status quo ante, when Persian Gulf despotism was seen as the inevitable lot for population of the region. One can erect all the barriers, and all the metal and chemical detectors one can manufacture, factories operating 24/7. One can breed an army of explosive-sniffing dogs, and have MP-10 toting guards every 100 yards. If one wishes to tremendously reduce or eliminate terror attacks from Islamic radicals, however, there is only one solution: the populations of the Persian Gulf must become self-governing, and with some degree of speed.

When Reactionary Josh has a proposal for that objective, lemme know. Unitl then, he's merely yammering.....

Well, if Josh has any scruples, he doesn't let on... He's just angling for a highly remunerative gig writing not-quite-as-dumb-as-Durbin-but-just-as-asinine crap for Hillary's campaign... Watch!

Oh! So THATS what an ass-kicking looks like.

So many words said, and no solution offered. What does he suggest at the end of the day?

As for eliminating terrorist attacks... a noble goal, to be sure, but I find it more important to eliminate the TERROR. What good is it to live in fear of government as opposed to terrorists?

I don't know what it will take to finally make it clear to people the real reasons for such attacks. The attackers aspire to create a worldwide Islamic state. I could understand the confusion if this was some well kept secret. I could understand the reasoning if people thought I was a lunatic for suggesting such a thing. I could understand except that this insane idea has been expressed over and over again by islamists in every media that I have access to. Sure it is a ridiculous goal but it is the goal of the bombers. And they believe that God has ordered it. If the USA, Britain and Australia dropped off the globe tomorrow the bombings would continue. People that keep searching for some elusive reason should try just simply reading and listening to the words of the attackers.

one thing that really bothers me and angers me is how open our borders are. And Bush is not doing a darned thing about it. Terrorists just like those that set these bombs are the same ones that are slowly crossing the Mexican border.

Nice fisking of Josh. I know many reactionary librals just like him. I will remember your fisking, and use your words and ideas to fisk them when I need.

off to get another glass of wine.

Good fisking. You have to wonder if the schools have really dumbed so many people down that Marshall is taken seriously by more than a handful. I guess so.

The radicals just want power. They don't care about the lies, the killings, or the chaos they create.

On 9/11 we were told by the MSM that it was our own fault because of Israel. Then OBL told us it was because we had military bases in Mecca. NOW - Madrid and London get attacked and it becomes because of Iraq and Afghanistan. Keep your REASONS straight people. In 1979 Islamists took Americans hostage for 444 days...in 1982 Islamists bombed our Marines in Beirut - killing them. Should I go on? If you're (our liberal friends) still making excuses for how it's OUR FAULT that terrorists want us dead - then you just don't get it. And you sound really foolish trying to make excuses for them. Actually, you sound like chickenshits - which is worse than being a chickenhawk. "WHY DO THEY HATE US?" The answer to that question is so painfully simple that it will scare the hell out of you - they HATE US because we are living FREELY, but according to them we are living in sin and must 'submit or be destroyed' (quote attributable to OBL - from the 9/11 report). If you (liberals) keep helping terrorists think of new excuses to how it's OUR fault and not the MURDERERS fault - then I suggest to you something Thomas Jefferson once said - 'becoming friends with crocodiles only ensures that he eats you last.' If it were that simple - then you'd be safe for a while. But the problem is the crocodiles don't give a crap if you're against us or with them - they'll behead you nonetheless. Allah will forgive them and all that happy horse shit. I just wish people would wake up.

What's this about "...implacable resistance to terrorists' desire and aim to disrupt the rhythm of our daily lives..."??? (Shirley, you jest :-) These are the same folks that laughed when Mr. Bush asked the public to continue their daily routine, please don't hide and hoard but get out and shop? And these are the same folks that claimed that 9-11 meant that great sacrifice was required (of the rich), and our patriotic duty (was to get it from them)?

You mention that our security has stopped furthur attacks.
Don't be so sure,
I find it hard to believe the Muslims can't hit us when they please.
Could it be they are under orders not to hit the U.S. until they have the bomb?
It will not be so easy to retaliate then.

bb, you put that very well.

The jihadis are clear about what they want and why, and the Left ignores all that, projecting instead its own grievances.

JMM not only rewrites common history, he rewrites his own. Hard as it seems for him to remember, Josh was a pro-war Iraq hawk in the leadup to the war, switching sides only as the bullets began to fly.

Anyone remember his near obsession with Ken Pollack's The Threatening Storm? I do! He was about as hawkish as they come, then the war came and he flinched. Soon after, he became exactly what his site's name proclaims - the Talking Points Memo of the DNC.

I stopped taking Josh seriously a long time ago, when it became clear that partisanship was more important to him than intellectual honesty.

Why waste all that vodka on fisking a known jerk?

A few other thoughts:

So, if the claims of responsibility are correct, then London was bombed in part because of the British participation in the war in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan? Isn't that the good war, the one that even liberals accept as necessary? Exactly how does not fighting in Iraq further the goals of stopping terrorism, if terrorists will bomb "because of" Afghanistan?

And the aim should be to prevent terrorism? But as the Left has incessantly pointed out, the "War on Terror" is an oxymoron, because terror is a tactic. If that's the case, then how can one pursue the aim of ending terrorism, yet denigrate the idea of a "war on terror"?

At the end of the day, w/ the constant yammering about how domestic targets remain unsecured, it's worth listening to some of the many experts who pointed out that defending mass transit lines is one of the most difficult, simply because there are so many vulnerabilities.

"He who defends everywhere, defends nowhere." The JMM's, in their hope to revert to a law enforcement approach, would have us defend the least defensible lines and systems, before moving on. Another basis for doing darn little.

Outstanding point about Afghanistan. What the Democrats and liberals don't understand is that the terrorists hate the West not for what it does in Iraq, but for what it stands for.

Iraq is simply just another battlefield among the battlefields of Afghanistan, Bali, Nigeria, Madrid and NYC...

Liberals, unfortunately, make common cause with the Terrorists because they both hate George Bush. Sadly, when Liberals in the US are willing to sellout the people of Iraq and leave them to the monstrous rule of the terrorists, they are doing the terrorist's bidding simply in an effort to make Bush's domestic polling number fall by 5%.

Is there anything more cynical and anti-American than the attempt to use the blood of Londoner's to score domestic polling advantages??

Leftism is Slave Morality. Are you starting to see that yet?

I sometimes wonder why JMM is considered more moderate or a "good liberal". His prose is more measured and careful, but the thinking behind it always struck me as run of the mill moonbat. He's as intellectually dishonest as any other.

"Good liberal" needant be an oxymoron, but sadly these days it often seems so. In the '60's, Dissent Magazine lamented the rise of "the liberal who can't be taught." Unfortunately, those are the liberals who have taken over the left side of the divide. They don't have principles, they have poses.

All you need to do to make JMM's theory work is ignore the thousands of Filipinos, Thais, Pakistanis, Hindus Balinese and even the thousands of other Muslims the Islamist fanatics have butchered.

In short, keep it white, and JMM's right.

Joshua Michael Marshall is just another insular bourgie bigot.

By the way, TM — Madrid already fell.

Great piece! Switch to Vodka more often!!

BTW: Was that John Kerry....

A defensive strategy in this war would be idiotic folly. It cannot work. I saw way too many democrats yesterday whining about how we need to stop spending money in Iraq in order to defend ourselves. I would truly like to throw the Republicans out of the oval office, but the democrats just...don't...get...it.

Iraq may not have been the perfect second move in the war, but it was a perfectly sensible one, and personally I saw no other good option. A democratic Islamic state in the region HAD to be accomplished to start draining the swamp, and going after Saudi Arabia or Iran first would have created a lot of issues with the oil supply.

This is a war. Defense will fail. I voted for Bush in the hope that he would pursue the war aggressively. He is, as far as I can tell, failing to do so. We dither in Iraq while Iran slouches dialy closer to the bomb. As VDH says, "Faster please."

We must pursue an offense. That will not preclude more London bombings. It may, in fact, make the problem worse in the short term. Joining the war against Nazi Germany meant that for a good while there were a lot more Germans killing us than befroe we joined. Err... That is the way war works.

doug

Great job! Thanks.

I hope that all your new friends are OK. (We spent at lot of time yesterday calling to find out if our family and friends are all accounted for. So far, so good.)

Josh asks an interesting question: "... how we defend our innocents from such religious fanaticism and the violence it spawns."

OK, to Josh and any other anti-war lefties: I would like to here your answer to that problem. Tell us.

If your answer is the General Wesley Clark approach, throw a shield over the country and swear that no terrorist attacks are possible, well, I'd like to see the plan because I don't think that it can be done. There are too many holes in a free society, and the London bombings are probably going to show it. Building and planting four bombs weighing ten pounds each doesn't take a lot of effort. I have friends that manufacture very complex fireworks by hand. They can roll out forty pounds of floral shells in an afternoon. When the investigation is done, the splinter cell that did this may be less than ten guys, and the coordination required is very, very simple. The bottom line is: you can't protect soft targets like public transportation without imposing rules that will make liberals scream. And if your enemy goes to suicide bombers, you have no defense.

Do you have a plan, Josh? Let's hear it. Write that in your blog, and open it up for comments so that the rest of us can show you how we'd defeat it.

President Bush has a plan. He wants to change the political landscape of the Middle East. He wants to offer an alternative to Islamofascism. In simple terms, he wants to eliminate or at least discredit religious fanatacism. Let's get fewer people willing to blow themselves up to kill infidels, and let's get more people helping us find the die-hard religious nuts so that we can stop them.

Religious extremism is the problem. That's why this statement is so stupid: "The real threat we face isn't in Iraq. And being in Iraq isn't diminishing it." Yes, religious extremism was in Iraq; it is also in other places. We can change it, and in the process, who knows, maybe women will get the right to vote, maybe the Lybians will move more toward the mainstream, maybe the Syrians will get out of Lebanon, and maybe the despots who are using religious fanatacism will start to feel pressure to change.

You don't like Bush's plan?
OK, I'm open to alternatives.
But right now, his is the only plan on the table.

"There will be peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate others."
- Golda Myer

"We don't have twelve years to dick around, and we don't have the luxury of pulling out."

Heh

Osama Bin Forgotten...

Phir R. Up:

No one's forgotten about bin Laden.
And when Osama bin Laden is gone, they'll be tens of thousands to take his place. Josh is right, the problem is "religious fanaticism and the violence it spawns." Kill bin Laden, and the problem is still there.

My finger is stinky.

To all you nitwits out there; Osama Bin Laden could die of stroke this afternoon, and the strategic situation would change very little.

I have to say I think this is a very mediocre fisking. A good fisking should begin with Marshall's advocacy of "implacable resistance to terrorists' desire and aim to disrupt the rhythm of our daily lives and our civilization itself." Maybe "disruption" of our daily lives is an actual aim of the terrorists, maybe it isn't - I haven't the slightest idea - but even if so, is it really as significant an aim as "discouragement" of our will to resist? The terrorists have specific political aims - and toward those aims, the rest of Marshall's post suggests an attitude somewhat more agnostic than "implacable resistance."
After making such a point of his opposition to their aim of "disruption" (which we can hardly but oppose anyway), I think Marshall exhibits true weaselry in not being more forthright about where he stands on the somewhat more concrete aims of the terrorists. Am I missing something?

And I think richard mcenroe gets at what is the really disturbing thing about Marshall's reaction - he goes on and on about defending ourselves, about how "the real threat ... in the great metropoles of the West," about "our innocents," but devotes not a single word to the main targets of Al Qaeda - the Muslim world in general. Does Marshall not mention them because to do so, he knows, would take the edge off of his critical stance toward Bush - or perhaps reveal the unseemliness of his preoccupation with the status of criticism of Bush?

I had my own thoughts on Marshall's piece.

Josh writes: "The real threat we face isn't in Iraq. And being in Iraq isn't diminishing it."

Then why is it that the terrorists, and the Left, say "it's because of Iraq"? I'm thinkin' bad guy terrorists are getting killed over there. How is that NOT a good thing in the WOT? Duh.

Bravo, Old Chap!

And hear, hear!

Or hear, here!

Or here, hear!

Or here, here!

Or whatever the hell they say over there.

Thanks for letting them know that at least SOME of us are with them.

Even though we might not completely understand thier language.

Oh, Paul Abers? Why hasn't it happened here? JMM and Stephen and you all forget to point out another very important point: Let's say that we had a few years of various prominent and radical Muslim-Americans holding conferences celebrating 9/11, and calling for bombs in New York, etc. Then one day, half a dozen bombs went off in a transit system, killing / injuring lots of people. A section of said transit system, BTW, that ran within walking distance of the Muslim majority section of the city. What then?

Within about 48 hours, lots of Americans, who already own firearms legally guaranteed to them under the basic law of the land, or who can get them by driving less than 3 hours from even such gun control cities as NYC, would be hunting Muslims in the streets outside the torched Islamic centers where said conference was held and such speeches were made.

And you can say all you want to about how Americans would never do that, because we're too decent / soft / etc. That's your estimate of INTENTIONS. When you (or any terrorist with two brain cells to rub together) looks at our CAPABILITIES, then you have to say "You know, if we pull something like this, then they COULD do that. Maybe we better not."

Stephen — There are plenty of good liberals left: you can find them being run out of the Democratic Party on rails by the screamers. They used to call us Reagan Democrats. Now you can just call us embarrassed by the company we used to keep.

JMM: "Most people are sick to death of our bumbling in Iraq..."

I wouldn't underestimate American bumbling; I was with them when they bumbled into Berlin in 1918.