Sullivan: Killing Americans Diverts Terrorists' Attention from Israel

[QC]

Every time I think Andrew Sullivan could not slip any lower, he proves me wrong.

Here's his take on the so-called "flypaper strategy," which holds that drawing terrorists in Iraq allows us to kill them all in one place. Sully sees a further advantage:

The extra beauty of this strategy is that it creates a target for Islamist terrorists that is not Israel.

http://www.usndemvet.com/blog/archives/000938.html

[Beetwasher]

1. The point that these morons are overlooking

is that terrorist recruitment has increased by several orders of magnitude. They can now afford the resources (bodies) for a guerrilla war in Iraq and Afghanistan and at the same time plan and use resources for terror attacks in Israel and the US...

[Frances]

2. Stupid, stupid, stupid

I haven't noticed that there are fewer deaths in Israel.

Violence begets violence. There are just more deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The best I can tell Osama is very happy right now. I am not. I feel less safe, not more safe.

[Frances]

3. I think Americans have forgotten our history

Many people in the present day southern U.S. were not for fighting the British in 1776--until the British occupied South Carolina.

[QC]

5. True.

It reminds me of a story that my dad and I discussed during the leadup to the war.

During the Civil War, a Union camp guard asks a Confederate prisoner why he, a poor man who would never own a plantation or slave, was fighting in that war.

The prisoner's reply: "Because you're here."

Nobody likes being invaded, regardless of how unhappy they are with the system.

[Plaid Adder]

4. Here's MY favorite:

"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..."

...because now, WE are the fundamental cause of instability and mayhem in the Middle East!

The expression "shit-for-brains" never seemed as apt to me as it did when I read that paragraph.

As for the "flypaper" strategy:

I'll skip the rant abotu referring to human beings as insects and for the moment accept the validity of comparing the war on terrorism to pest control. I have roses in my garden, and so, perforce, I have Japanese beetles. These things are the very devil to control; they come out in hordes, eat everything in sight, copulate on the decaying corpse of what was once a beautiful bloom, and then go underground to lay more grubs. So naturally I have been looking for a way to kill them all.

They sell these hormone traps you can use that mimic the Japanese beetle sex phermones and draw the beetles in like it's a magnet. The idea is that you put them up *near* your garden, so that the beetles will go into the trap instead of onto your roses. Same logic as starting a huge fucking disaster in Iraq in hopes that the terrorists will go into Baghdad instead of, say, Israel.

However, if you research this in gardening books, they will all tell you: DO NOT USE THOSE STUPID PHERMONE TRAPS. Why? Because they work SO well that they will draw Japanese beetles to your yard who would otherwise be chewing up the plants across the street, down the block, or indeed in the next neighborhood over. They will draw in far more beetles than they can actually trap. And once the beetles have figured out that there is no hotblooded beetle there ready to give them a good time, they will start looking around for food...and they'll be right near your garden. So you actually make the problem worse by using these things.

Instead, what they generally recommend is using milky spore to kill the grubs. This system works better, but it takes a long time, and it's a huge PITA (you have to drop this stuff by the teaspoonfull all over your entire lawn and garden).

So who would buy a hormone trap? Someone who doesn't have the patience or the smarts to do it the hard way. Or, someone who enjoys watching the beetles die more than they enjoy actually seeing the plants bloom unmolested.

Remind you of anyone you know?

:argh:

The Plaid Adder

[Sagan]

6. MWO is going to have a field day with this...

Sully should give it up. He's dug himself so far into a rhetorical hole, he'll be swimming in liquid hot MAG-ma soon.

[QC]

7. Sully will backpedal furiously,

just like when the shit hit the fan over his "fifth column" slander.