WAR AS RHETORIC: An as-yet-undeveloped thought: Both uberhawks and “Don’t Tread On Me War” types agree that defeating Al Qaeda is difficult but not decisive. It won’t ensure US security. That’s because of the networked, flexible, and shifting nature of Al Qaeda’s threat–it can strike and then blend quickly into a mass of other subterranean terrorist groups. But it’s also because of the ideological nature of the threat. If you kill everyone in Al Qaeda, you haven’t stopped the threat, because you haven’t gotten people to stop wanting to behave just like Al Qaeda. You’ve removed one of an innumerable array of conduits that Islamists/jihadists can take to their goal.

Hawks and less-hawks (by which I mean, people who want us to attack anything that pisses us off in the Middle East, starting with Iraq and moving on as necessary, and people who want us to stick to fighting Al Qaeda) both acknowledge this reality, but they have sharply different strategies for overcoming the problem. Hawks want to use war as rhetoric. By slamming the Iraqi army, we’ll show that you don’t mess with Texas, and so no matter how resentful and jihad-enthused the terrorists might be, they will direct their energies to non-superpower targets. The guy at the felicitously-named Whigging Out blog summarizes: “After we defeat Saddam’s army, the new world order will be based on quite different premises:

“The US is the world’s sole Superpower. It’s military can do as it pleases, where it pleases, short of marching on Russia, India or China, and the US has shown that it will aggress for reasons other than a direct threat to her borders.

“At this point, our relationship with the middle east alters considerably. There will not be any more nonsense from the imams, ayatollahs and dictators to their people about how the infidel will be slain and humbled and destroyed. Humility will surely settle in, even among the most foolish.”

I doubt that (it sure didn’t help Israel–and it’s not called the Six Day War for nothing); you can find reasons for doubt spelled out very well here. I also worry a lot about the domestic consequences of this approach. The hawk approach accepts from the outset a need to fight wherever a perceived threat can be most humiliatingly demolished. If Iraq isn’t enough–and I don’t think it will be–the hawk approach becomes a road to endless war.

But the hawks are grappling with a real problem. We need, desperately, a rhetorical offensive. I don’t think what Unqualified Offerings calls “The Million Mom War” is the right one. I think we need something more Reaganesque, if you like–and Reagan’s greatest contributions to ending the Cold War were not skirmishes in Grenada or Afghanistan, or even covert actions in Central America. His greatest contributions were rhetorical. He gave our side confidence; he forced a debate on the awfulness of the world behind the Iron Curtain; and he articulated some of what America stands for, what we (and the rest of the world) understand by American freedom and American hope. Because radical Islam is much more attractive than even Communism was, we need a “hearts and minds” campaign all the more. Yes, we need to snuff out terrorists (a task requiring at least as much intelligence work as infantry); yes, we need to cut off the money that fuels terrorism. (Whether that requires “regime change” in Saudi Arabia, let alone Iraq, is an open question. “Regime change” has a lot of unpredictable and nasty consequences–do you replace one tyrannical freakshow with another? Or do you set up shop as a colonial power, with all that that implies? Or what?) But we also need to make terrorism less attractive than peace, and repression less attractive than freedom. The war-and-humiliation rhetoric is much easier to implement, of course, but in the long run I don’t think it will work as well as the much more difficult task of making jihad unappealing.

I’m still mulling all this stuff over. The rhetorical understanding of the struggle against Islamist attacks can mesh very well with the “dynamist war” suggested by Spiders (which I blogged about earlier); and it can also respond to the deep need that a lot of Americans feel to do something to help our country’s cause. More on this later.