Ye Olde Staging Point

To get political here for a bit, I've been quite interested by all the recent talk about Bush's "flypaper" strategy in Iraq--that is, the deliberate creation of a "terrorist magnet" in Iraq to which Islamic terrorists can be drawn and hopefully defeated. It's a sneaky and clever idea, and it's based on the fundamental strategic principle of forcing your enemy to fight you on your own terms--instead of waiting to respond to the next terrorist bombing in a city or pizza parlor, you goad them into attacking a target (in this case, the American military itself) that can hit back effectively.

There are a lot of people talking about the flypaper strategy, speculating on its positive and negative aspects. I thought that Andrew Sullivan's comments were particularly interesting, highlighting as they do the strategy's goals while pointing out the risk involved. This statement in particular caught my attention:

The extra beauty of this strategy is that it creates a target for Islamist terrorists that is not Israel. A key objective of the current U.S. strategy is to show that Israel is not the fundamental cause of instability and mayhem in the Middle East--but a victim of the same kind of pathological religious extremism that has destroyed Iran, brutalized Afghanistan and blackmailed Saudi Arabia. Before the Iraq war, the U.S. could do little to counter these maniacs directly. Now they have a theater of war--and it isn't the West Bank.

I wonder if the primary audience for this drama, then, is the "Arab street," average citizens living under repressive regimes who have been raised to see Israel not only as the cause of the Palestinian crisis, but as the sole reason for virtually the entire Middle East's post-WW2 descent into intellectual and cultural poverty? As Iraq begins to resemble a healthy, free-thinking society, it will by definition become the target of Islamist terror attacks. The better things go for Iraqis (education, free elections, representative government, freedom), the clearer it's going to become that al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups (now launching attacks at Arab leaders and Iraqi-built infrastructure, not just at Americans) are not fighting a holy war against corrupt Western imperialism. They are fighting a war against many of the basic pillars of enlightened, free society.

If things go well for Iraqis in coming months and years, the terrorists will find themselves fighting to make things worse again for Iraq--after all, blowing up water treatment plants hurts Iraqis a lot worse than it hurts Americans. But now, the enemies aren't the hated Israelis--they're everyday Iraqis who are just trying to improve the state of their country. If the terrorist worldview identifies Iraqi civil workers (and the US/UN forces working with them to improve Iraqi infrastructure) as the enemy, is it a worldview worth buying into? This might prompt some to make the realization that a) repression, poverty, and tyranny do not need to be the default state of an Arab nation, and b) the blame for the Middle East's 50-year-old problems can't be pinned solely on an outside entity like Israel or the U.S. The Middle East's most persistent problems spring largely from unhealthy ideas, regimes, and movements allowed to thrive within the Arab world itself.

The mind reels at the implications of such a plan--of goading terrorists into hitting the most defensible target; of putting the lie to the idea that terrorists have the Middle East's best interests at heart or that their solutions--"destroy!"--will solve anything. I'm not entirely certain what I think of all this. If this is what Bush is aiming at, I'm really, really impressed--and I really, really hope that it works. It's about time that something changed for the better in the Middle East. Maybe this will be the catalyst.