This Isn't How to Fight a War

I listened to President Obama's speech yesterday about the Underpants Bomber and to his credit, he clearly said that we are at war with al Qaeda on a global scale. So far, so good. But then he blamed Yemen becoming a birthing center for terrorists like the Underpants Bomber on Arab reaction to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq. Sigh. One of the key components in winning a war is knowing your enemy. He doesn't.

The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. The reports on Abu Ghraib began coming out in 2004. If the President is right, then Yemen became a terrorist center after 2003-2004. Well, not exactly.

On November 7, 2002 a Predator took out some high level al Qaeda operatives. Where? Yemen.
www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1108-05.htm

In October, 2000, al Qaeda operatives blew a large hole in the USS Cole, a destroyer, killing 17 sailors. Where? Yemen.
www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec00/cole_10-12.html

And has al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations been operating in Yemen well before 2003-2004, sometimes with the cooperation of the Yemeni government. Well, yes.
www.cfr.org/publication/9369/

So what are we to conclude? Probably that the President's head is slowly coming to the right conclusion but his heart definitely isn't there. His first impulse in response to the Underpants Bomber was to call him an "isolated extremist." Even the President has now backed away from that. When you capture an enemy combatant in war (his words), the first thing you do is interrogate him for useful intelligence about your enemy. But what did the Obama Administration do? It Mirandized him and gave him a lawyer, at which point he quit talking to us. Can you imagine doing the same thing with a Nazi commando in WWII? Probably not.

Austin Bay, a retired Army colonel, has coined a useful distinction: lawfare vs. warfare. Organized criminal activity requires lawfare, i.e. - Elliott Ness, Justice Department strike forces, etc. Warfare requires soldiers. If we really are at war with the Jihadists, and we are, then it's time we turned from lawfare to warfare - we need the soldiers and not the suits.