neo:
I don’t know exactly what kind of “premature withdrawal” you have in mind, but in the case of Iraq, the Iraqi people will clearly set the pace. A status of forces agreement setting a timetable for US forces to cease all urban combat operations in six months, and to leave in three years, has just passed Iraq’s parliament. However, Iraqi legislators have tacked on a provision for the people to vote on the agreement in a referendum that will probably take place next July. If the people of Iraq vote against the agreement, the US will have to withdraw by the middle of 2010, within President-elect Obama’s time frame of sixteen months.

Terrorism is a form of information war, intended not just to frighten their own populations into obedience, but also to frighten any foreign powers who could put an end to the terrorists’ reign by convincing them that fighting back against the terrorists only makes them more powerful.

For an excellent definition of terrorism, and the links between terrorism, government, and war I recommend (again) Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent. I don’t agree with everything; he’s unreasonably hard on GWB and events with SCOTUS have overtaken his judgement on what ought to be done (probably just why GWB didn’t go down that road) but his framework of reasoning is sound, and needs to be applied and advanced.

God bless the media; they never stop. He neglected to mention the transition from Clinton to GW Bush. Anybody with a brain who could read the constitution knew how that was going to come out, the Florida supreme court notwithstanding. Yet Clinton never started the transition process until it was almost time for Bush to take office, and as a result Bush started out in the hole. The transition was very jagged and disorganized and something really ferocious could have happened in what was in fact an interregnum.

The looting of the furniture, the removal of the W’s from the White House typewriters, and the final insult of Clinton’s being late for the trip to the Capitol, I’m sure GW Bush remembers these things and decided that he would try to help America by doing everything he could to make things go smoothly.

In an article about how invested Bush is in making things go as seamlessly as possibly I was actually astounded that not one thing about the 2000 transition was mentioned. Even, expecting as I do, almost nothing of merit from an appendage of what has come to be called the MSM, which, as this article demonstrates, should stand for Muck, Spleen, and Misdirection.

Correct. Osama bin Laden incorrectly perceived that the attack on 9/11 would cause the USofA to react by acceding to his demands that we withdraw from the “lands of Islam” and throw Israel under the bus. At worst, we’d throw a few missiles at some empty training camps in Afghanistan.

After all, that had been our pattern. They’d strike, we’d retaliate. His boys would blow up a barracks, we’d send the FBI. His boys would try to sink a destroyer, we’d send the FBI. The Somalis would kill a few of ours, and we’d place our tails betwixt our legs and run home.

I’m sure his military advisors had assured him that the USofA would never put ground forces in any number into Afghanistan, or if we did, it would result in a Soviet-style quagmire of misery and defeat. And provide new jihadi’s a training ground to gain ample experience under fire.

What he didn’t expect was that Americans can be quite a bit tougher than he assumed:

Score: USMC 50, Taliban 0.

Object lesson: bullies won’t stop until you give them a reason to stop. In this case, that being a terrorist is a good way to get killed, and that maybe we should try a different tact to get our grievances heard.

Just because you don’t think weakness gets people killed, I still don’t see how you can refuse to believe, in your own mind if nowhere else, the fact that weakness on the part of a nation does get its citizens killed.

Logic, as well as overwhelming evidence, tells us that people do things for their own reasons. Terrorists have specific ends in view; they do not simply respond to perceived “weakness”. They attack those whom they perceive will react in ways that help their cause. Often, they hope to provoke a reaction their victims will see a “strong”, either repression or military confrontation. The least effective response to terrorism starts with the question: how do I/we look tough, rather than asking what aims the terrorists have that we can frustrate.

Is that the price you are willing to pay for your forever peace goal, John? Letting weakness gobble up however many victims, in the billions or millions, so long as it things go according to your plan and view?

Look, if you believe that you can define “weakness” in each instance, if you believe that this “weakness” you think you can define somehow offends the universe so as to cause retribution in the form of otherwise unprovoked attacks, then your world view diverges profoundly from both history and logic. Consider the Second World War: virtually all of combatants thought of themselves as strong, and the ones who thought of themselves as strongest, because they chose to begin the war, ended up suffering the most devastating defeats.

The lesson of the last bloody hundred years teaches us goes like this: real weakness consists of disrespect of disregard for other people. That breeds dictatorship, war, and lawlessness.

You mean, like this? Or perhaps this?

The truth, however, is that the calls for withdrawal were nearly entirely from Democrats, and the votes that prevented it were almost entirely Republican. That’s just a fact (see this, for example).