Doubting Thomas

The majority speaks?

In his latest, "Calling All Democrats", Thomas makes some good points. He also writes:

The war on terrorism is a war of ideas. The greatest restraint on human behavior is not a police officer or a fence - it's a community and a culture. Palestinian suicide bombing has stopped not because of the Israeli fence or because Palestinians are no longer "desperate." It has stopped because the Palestinians had an election, and a majority voted to get behind a diplomatic approach. They told the violent minority that suicide bombing - for now - is shameful.

I hope that Thomas is right about this, but I'm not convinced that the state of the Iraqis is comparable to that of the Palestinians. The elections in 1996 came before an increase in terror. That's because Palestinian nationalism is predicated on the destruction of Israel. Iraqi nationalism doesn't have a similar destructive element to its ideology.
I can believe that the Iraqi election marks a turning point in the war against the terrorists, because those voting defied the terrorists. In the case of the PA the voters and terrorists are on the same side.

No reward

In "Marking Down Bin Laden," Thomas argues that offering rewards for Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is counterproductive and actually enhances their stature making it less likely that Pakistanis or Iraqis will actually turn them over. What would we do with the money?

What I would do with the $75 million we have budgeted as rewards for bin Laden and Zarqawi is use it instead to sponsor an essay contest for high school students in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria and Egypt. The contest entry form would say the following: "In 2,000 words, write an essay on one of these two topics: 1. Why do you believe the Arab-Muslim world is fully capable of achieving democratic, representative government and how do you envisage it coming about through peaceful changes inside your country, without any American or other outside help. 2. Write an essay about the lives of any of the great medieval Arab or Muslim mathematicians, scientists or philosophers and how their innovations helped to shape our world today."

The winners would be awarded visas and four-year scholarships to any accredited university in America to which they could gain acceptance. The winning essays would be posted on the Web in English, Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and French. What do you think would make America more secure? Rewarding one person for turning in bin Laden or putting thousands of young Arabs and Muslims through American schools?

Maybe we could even call them the "Bin Laden Scholars." I sort of like the idea of bin Laden sitting in a dark cave somewhere, composing his latest nutty video message, and suddenly learning that all the reward money we were devoting to killing him will go instead to killing his ideas - and to bringing young Arabs and Muslims closer to America rather than pushing them farther away.

Noble sentiments to be sure. But what do Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and Mir Aimal Kasi have in common?
All were wanted by the United States and all were captured with rewards on their heads.

Where Credit is Due II

Thomas has an excellent column on Sunday's elections, "A Day to Remember". Though critical of the President, he avoids his gratuitous slams that come accross as infantile. These 3 paragraphs sum up things nicely:

Then there is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. This Charles-Manson-with-a-turban who heads the insurgency in Iraq had a bad hair day on Sunday. I wonder whether anyone told him about the suicide bomber who managed to blow up only himself outside a Baghdad polling station and how Iraqi voters walked around his body, spitting on it as they went by. Zarqawi claims to be the leader of the Iraqi Vietcong - the authentic carrier of Iraqis' national aspirations and desire to liberate their country from "U.S. occupation." In truth, he is the leader of the Iraqi Khmer Rouge - a murderous death cult.

The election has exposed this. Because the Iraqi people have now made it clear that they are the authentic carriers of their national aspirations, and while, yes, they want an end to the U.S. presence, they want that end to happen in an orderly manner and in tandem with an Iraqi constitutional process.

In other words, this election has made it crystal clear that the Iraq war is not between fascist insurgents and America, but between the fascist insurgents and the Iraqi people. One hopes the French and Germans, whose newspapers often sound more like Al Jazeera than Al Jazeera, will wake up to this fact and throw their weight onto the right side of history.