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Edwards: Fight War on Terror With Hippies

By Brian Faughnan
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John Edwards’s idea of counterterrorism.

John Edwards has given a policy address on his plan for fighting the war on terror. Wait, scratch that. That’s nothing but a bumper sticker. If you go to his website, Edwards explains we are engaged in a ‘fight against terrorism.’ See the difference? Nuance! Anyway, Edwards has revealed his strategy for addressing the underlying causes of terrorism:

The plan Mr. Edwards presented yesterday – which he dubbed “A Strategy to Shut Down Terrorists and Stop Terrorism Before It Starts” – calls for a 10,000-person “Marshall Corps” to deal with issues ranging from worldwide poverty and economic development to clean drinking water and micro-lending. He said investing in those areas would shore up weak nations and help ensure that terrorism does not take root there. That, he said, would allow the country to stop potential terrorists before they even join the ranks. There are “thousands committed to violence” today, he said, and America needs to use all of its tools to go after them. But he said millions more people are “sitting on the fence” about whether to join those ranks. “We have to offer them a hand to our side instead of a shove to the other side of that fence,” he said.

A cynic might suggest that this represents a strategy to combat violence with the Peace Corps rather than the Marine Corps. Left unanswered is what would happen if one of these well-intentioned kids Edwards packs off to the Middle East with nothing but a pair of birkenstocks is killed by somebody who fell over the wrong side of the proverbial fence. Do we send more hippies as reinforcement? But, again, that’s an argument for a cynic to make, we prefer to point out that there is nothing new here. President Bush supports a doubling of the Peace Corps; candidates Kerry and Edwards likewise called for dramatic increases in the Corps’ size in their losing effort in 2004. A larger Peace Corps may serve to improve the image of the United States abroad, but as a substitute for serious efforts to combat terror, this will fall far short. As critics of the war on terror frequently note, those who attack us are not products of poverty. Osama bin Laden, his associates, and the 19 who attacked us on September 11 were all from prosperous backgrounds. Clean water, better education, and expanded commerce are good things–but they won’t reduce the dangers of terror. To get at the root causes of terrorism we must replace religious extremism with the values of democracy. The Marine Corps may not be the best instrument for prodding this kind of cultural change, but the alternative Edwards is floating sounds dangerously naive, most of all for the kids he would send to implement it. And Edwards may not be the best person to determine just where al Qaeda is, and where the population is more “sitting on the fence.” He said today that “There was no group called al-Qaida in Iraq before this president’s war in Iraq.” For starters, we’d encourage the former senator to read this piece that appeared yesterday in the New Republic, and which describes a December 2002 visit by French Socialist Bernard Kouchner, now Sarkozy’s Foreign Minister, to pre-war Iraq:

The Iraqis in 2002 were afraid of Al Qaeda. Kouchner was perfectly aware that, all over the world, people had listened to the Bush administration fulminate about the dangers of a secret alliance between and Saddam and Al Qaeda. He knew that, all over the world, entire publics had come away convinced that Bush was an atrocious fabulist, and no such alliance existed. But the Iraqis told Kouchner about precisely such an alliance, or what they concluded to be an alliance, between Saddam and a group called Ansar al-Islam, which was Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq (and the ancestor of what became, after the invasion, a number of splinter groups affiliated with Al Qaeda). In 2002 Ansar al-Islam was already battling against Saddam’s worst enemies, the anti-Baathist Kurds. Ansar al-Islam was growing stronger, too. Hundreds of bin Laden’s militants had fled Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban, and some of those militants had turned up in Iraq and had taken their place in Ansar al-Islam.

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