Evil Does Not Die of Natural Causes

[Geee]

Human Events:



WASHINGTON -- Two months and a day before 9/11, terrorism expert Larry C. Johnson published "The Declining Terrorist Threat," a New York Times op-ed decrying the fact that "Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism," when, in reality, "the decade beginning in 2000 will continue the downward trend" in lethal terrorism.

Not quite.

A decade later, Osama bin Laden is dead and the old chorus of pre-9/11 complacency has returned. The war on terror is over -- yet again, it seems. Bin Laden was but "a distraction," writes Peter Beinart, and the war on terror "a mistake from the start." 9/11 was nothing more than "an isolated case," argues Ross Douthat. And "bin Laden was always the weak horse."

The new post-bin Laden dispensation is that the entire decade-long war on terror was an overreaction -- as shown by the bin Laden operation itself, which, noted one critic, looks a lot like police work, the kind of law enforcement John Kerry insisted in 2004 was the proper prism through which to address the terror threat.

On the contrary. The bin Laden operation is the perfect vindication of the war on terror. It was made possible precisely by the vast, war-like infrastructure that the Bush administration created post-9/11, a fierce regime of capture and interrogation, of dropped bombs and commando strikes. That regime, of course, followed the more conventional war that brought down the Taliban, scattered and decimated al-Qaeda and made bin Laden a fugitive.

Without all of this, the bin Laden operation could never have happened. Whence came the intelligence that led to Abbottabad? Many places, including from secret prisons in Romania and Poland; from terrorists seized and kidnapped, then subjected to interrogations, sometimes "harsh" or "enhanced"; from Gitmo detainees; from a huge bureaucratic apparatus of surveillance and eavesdropping. In other words, from a Global War on Terror infrastructure that critics, including Barack Obama himself, deplored as a tragic detour from American rectitude.

It was all not just un-American, now say the revisionists, but also unnecessary.

[pollyannaish]

I sure would hate to be Larry Johnson.

 

A good warning to all of us to be careful about our prognostations I suppose. The world is an unpredictable place.

 

Edited to add: Being a pundit, a politician or a journalist means you never have to say you're sorry though!