Truce

Yesterday's media event was a new tape made by Osama Bin Laden and aired by Al-Jazeera (All Terrorism, All The Time). The voice on the tape apparently is that of Bin Laden, and in it he referred to the July 7 bombings in London. This surprised me since I thought he'd been turned into a pinkish mist a year or more ago and the only reason it hadn't been reported was that the Daisy Cutter bomb didn't leave enough to identify.

The big news here is twofold, one, he's promising more attacks and two, he's offering a truce. The first should come as no surprise, we know Al Qaeda wants to attack us, inflict more damage on us and kill more of our people. Honestly, there's nothing to see there.

The offer of a truce is interesting though. Since 9/11 he's been threatening to destroy the US, he's been saying that American troops would be running in disarray, driven by terrorists with the full support of God. He promised blood running in the streets and his followers climbing over the piled bodies of our soldiers to get at the survivors. Now he's offering a "truce", and I have have to wonder why.

Your average American is a fundamentally decent person. He or she doesn't want to spill other people's blood but they also know that sometimes people force you to choose between either hurting them or being hurt yourself. We also tend to be naive, we tend to think other people are also basically decent people, so our first impression may be to look at Bin Laden's offer of a truce as a means of preventing bloodshed on both sides. We may think he's decided he made his point, now let's all take our weapons, go home, and live in peace.

Such a policy would, I believe, be a disaster. Bin Laden is the same man who ordered the 9/11 attacks. In case you forgot, a group of young men armed with box cutters took over four jets and crashed them in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania killing a total of three thousand people who did nothing more than go to work that day or try to fly from one place to another. If these attacks don't show a complete and utter disregard for human life, ours or theirs, I don't know what does. If the terrorists really were winning (as he claims), he wouldn't be offering a truce, he'd be planning our total destruction.

I can think of only one reason for his offer, and that's that he knows that if we keep going as we are his terrorist organization will lose, utterly and completely. In the last four years we've killed or captured thousands of Al Qaeda terrorists, including many high up in their command structure. If we accept their truce we give them the time and opportunity to rebuild.

Another thing about Americans, we tend to take a short view. We decide to do something and we try to get it done next week. The longest-term goal I can recall was JFKs promise to land on the moon within a decade, for us ten years is long-range planning. The terrorists don't think that way, they have no problem waiting ten or twenty years for us to get complacent and for them to rebuild before they attack again. They WILL attack again, truce or no truce. Only one thing will prevent that, and that's eliminating terrorists. We've been doing a darn good job of that for the last four years.

So over the next days and weeks, when you hear people talking about a truce with the terrorists, you'll hear about how it'll prevent bloodshed. Ask how we'll verify that Al Qaeda is keeping that truce. After all, in a truce between two sides of a war each side makes sure the other knows they're keeping the truce and aren't just using it as a cover for preparing for a new attack. Do they plan to just take Osama's word for it? Do they trust him that much?

Yes, we're decent, and we can be naive. We don't have to be foolish, and I believe any talk of truce, any talk of any end to the War on Terror that doesn't end in total defeat of the terrorists is a mistake. Just as in World War II when the US would accept nothing but unconditional surrender from Japan, we can't afford to let this end until our mission is accomplished. That will happen when we say it will and not before.