America will never win the 'War on Terror'

If Pro really believes that America will never win the war on terror, then Europe and the rest of the world will lose as well. So should we surrender immediately and volunteer to be slaves of Muslim extremists, a possibility sometimes offered by the terrorists as an alternative to killing every man, woman, and child in the Western world? When asked squarely about the inevitably of loss, Pro won't respond. The fact that no one suggests surrendering or is even willing to discuss the consequences of losing means that no one really believes the war on terror cannot be won. There are many legitimate differences on tactics, but the notion that the war cannot be won is no more than a bogus talking point pressed in the hope of gaining political power. 1. Pro claimed that the war on terror cannot be won because "war on terror" is not defined. I pointed out that if it is not defined then Pro has posted a meaningless resolution. Pro responded, "[I] can safely assume that we all know that the ‘war on terror' is the battle against Muslim extremism." When it suits his purposes, Pro asserts that the war on terror is perfectly well defined and well understood by everyone. However, other times he simply repeats the unsupported assertion that the whole effort is ill-defined. Pro says my definition is "extremely transparent" and "not rounded at all." What does that mean? He says we don't know who the terrorists are or where they are. Knowing who they are and where they are has nothing to do with the definition of the war. That has to do with the difficulty of winning the war, and it clearly is not an insurmountable difficulty. I pointed out Britain's war against IRA terrorism. Those terrorists posed the same problems, and that conflict was nonetheless won by Britain. Pro ignored the example. Pro quotes the British Foreign Secretary that the notion of a war on terror is "misleading and mistaken." What the Secretary is espousing is that the rules of engagement in the fight against terrorism should be police rules with search warrants, lawyers, and forensic evidence gather on battlefields and presented in trials. The idea is that we must first and foremost impress terrorists with our love for proper procedures rather than rudely shooting back when they try to kill us. That viewpoint is an opinion about methodology for winning that features wimpy terminology as a strategy. It is strategy for winning, however, and does not support the resolution of this debate that the war cannot be won. Nor does it suppose that the Secretary has no idea what the war is. Lurking behind Pro's arguments is the false notion that "you cannot defeat an ideology." He says, "the fact that the Communist party is still the second largest in Russia today shows out right that it was not the lure of democracy that encouraged Russia to end the Cold War.....therefore showing you can't defeat an idea." There are also Nazis in the world, but the Allies won World War II. The objective in not to make the ideology disappear, the objective is to remove it as a significant threat. The Soviet example shows that is achievable. Communists being the second largest largest party in Russia is certainly much better than their being in charge and striving to destroy the West. If Muslim extremists are reduced to ruling some isolated enclaves in Asia, that is tolerable so long as they are not attacking the US. Pro claims the Soviet example doesn't count because the Soviets were defeated economically, not militarily. Defeating them economically still counts as winning. Al Qaeda is likely to be defeated in part by cutting off their economic support, and that is certainly part of the strategy. I'm not sure from where the notion derived that wars must be neatly defined. Throughout history, there are many times when proper lists of names and locations of the enemy were unknown. Vikings, Visigoths, Mongols, Native Americans, and IRA terrorists were all notable for their failure to provide their names and addresses. The American Revolutionaries had some of that element. It's true that such wars have a different character than the opposing-armies-standing-in-the-field style, but some of the non-stereotyped wars are won and some are lost. There is nothing that makes them inherently unwinnable. In the case of the present war on terrorism, we know that the key organizers are in northern Pakistan, and a good deal of the organizational structure under bin Laden has been identified and published. It's true that there are cells around the world capable of operating independently of the central al Qaeda structure. Cutting off the central structure makes it more difficult to coordinate and fund major attacks. A fragmented structure is more difficult to stamp out entirely, but they pose less of a threat and there is no chance that independent terrorist cells are going to precipitate the surrender of a country. They cannot win. Pro asks what stops anyone from setting up a terrorist cell. There are several things. One is that there is limited supply of nutcases to recruit, and as civilization intrudes into the feudal strongholds of the world the supply will be diminished. Second, it's not just building a cell, but being able to carry out significant attacks. We can reasonably assume that terrorists would like to have launched major attacks on the U.S. every week since 9/11. Roughly two hundred plots have been uncovered and foiled. If Pro's claim that attacks are unstoppable is true, how can he explain that they have been stopped? Pro did respond to any of my arguments in (2) above. He restated his assertions. Technological societies will always have some vulnerability to limited attacks. What we most worry about, however, are nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks that have the potential for killing tens or thousands of people. Those types of attacks require a fixed technological infrastructure to build the weapons. For example, Iran or North Korea might supply the nukes. Hence, a major objective in the war on terror is very well defined one of preventing that from happening. Freelance terrorists pose a limited threat. Pro says, "Con asks me at the end of his article what [I] propose the alternatives are...do we just give up the struggle?.,...well [I] propose this question to him...how does he propose on fighting a failing war?" I answered Pro's question directly in (4) in the previous round. If there are parts he does not understand, he should specify what he needs to be clarified. But what is Pro's excuse for not answering my question? He knows full well that any straightforward answer will lose the argument. He must claim that America either give up and surrender or will be defeated despite even the most massive efforts to win the war on terror. That's what "America will never win" implies. But such a claim would be absurd, so he must ignore the question and try to divert attention from it in the hope that it will be overlooked. The resolution is negated. (I urge Pro to use an extra carriage return after paragraphs so I can more easily sort out his arguments.)