| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: WoT |
| Tuberculosis Like Terrorism -- Don’t Stop the Treatment Halfway |
| 2004-03-06 |
| An interesting analogy by Steven den Beste ... Most bacterial diseases can be licked with a ten-day treatment with antibiotics (as was the case with my walking pneumonia last year). But it takes months of continuous treatment to be cured of tuberculosis. ... But the problem was that in too many cases, they’d take the drugs until they started feeling better, and then they’d stop, before they’d actually been fully cured. A few weeks later, they’d become sick again, and once more ask for help. ... Once the disease reestablished itself, it was descended from the bugs which survived the first partial treatment. And, of course, once the victim again became sick, he had a good chance of infecting others with his specific strain of the disease, which was preferentially selected to be drug resistant. Disease treatment is not the only area where half-a-cure is worse than no cure at all. The stupidest thing any nation can do is to fight half a war, to wound an enemy but leave him standing. We made that mistake in Iraq in 1991, And that’s the risk this nation faces now, against a far bigger and more serious threat. 30 months ago, our enemies launched a devastating attack against us. It was bold and creative and targeted a major security blind-spot, and the resulting damage made a major psychological impact on the people of this nation. In response we went to war. But the cultural disease which ultimately spawned that attack grew slowly, and the process of eliminating it will also be slow. And we are at risk of deciding that we feel better and ceasing to work on it before it has actually been eliminated. .... If we stop too soon, leaving enemies wounded but still alive, they will learn from the experience. They will heal, grow, and some will come to oppose us once again – but next time they’ll be more difficult to fight, since they’ll have had plenty of time to analyze what we did and to figure out how to reduce their vulnerability to us.... ... the apparent failure of al Qaeda to follow up the 9/11 attack against us in a substantive way has created a situation which is ripe for political rhetoric. .... Given no further attacks within the US itself, and even a total absence of attacks against symbols of the US around the world or our citizens overseas (except in Iraq and other places where we’re actively prosecuting the war), some have argued that the Bush administration has exaggerated the threat, and argued that our invasion of Iraq was unneeded and uncalled for. They now argue that we should stand down and rely on less violent, less confrontational approaches: more carrot, less stick. Supporters of the war, such as myself, believe that the invasion of Iraq was an essential part of the long term strategy we must follow in order to have a chance of winning this war. We caution that there may be further attacks against us even though we hope there won’t be, and we point to the lack of major attacks against us so far (except for that one) as evidence that things are going well. ..... |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |