The notion that in withdrawing from Iraq we would enhance our security by removing a cause for provocation is the merest superstition.
That's
Oliver Kamm commenting on a new piece by Christopher Hitchens, in which Hitchens for his own part opposes a withdrawal from Iraq. I liked
this passage:
Many of those advocating withdrawal have been "war-weary" ever since the midafternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, when it was discovered that the source of jihadist violence was U.S. foreign policy... To this way of thinking, victory is impossible by definition, because any response other than restraint is bound to inflame the militancy of the other side. Since the jihadists, by every available account, are also inflamed and encouraged by everything from passivity to Danish cartoons, this seems to shrink the arena of possible or even thinkable combat. (Nobody ever asks what would happen if the jihadists had to start worrying about the level of casualties they were enduring, or the credit they were losing by their tactics, or the number of enemies they were making among civilized people who were prepared to take up arms to stop them. Our own masochism makes this contingency an unlikely one in any case.)
And people don't much consider in this context whether someone's propensity to get inflamed is a useful guideline in determining the actions of others.