Interesting Times: Who's defensive now?

Saul Singer, The Jerusalem Post:

As heir to William Safire's op-ed spot at The New York Times, John Tierney has big shoes to fill. While most of his writing provides the expected refreshing contrast with the Times' stable of pundits, we can only hope that what he has written about terrorism does not represent the gold standard of conservative opinion.

After praising Tony Blair for not letting the 7/7 attacks completely dominate the G8 summit, Tierney wrote: "It's clear that no one can stop terrorists from killing. Spending billions on airport security has simply diverted them to transit systems, and spending billions on transit systems could at best divert them somewhere else: stores, restaurants, sidewalks."

Tierney continued, "President Bush briefly admitted last summer to Matt Lauer that the war on terror couldn't ever be won, but he got so much criticism that he promptly backtracked. It was a textbook Washington gaffe: perfectly true but terribly inconvenient."

What is true is that there is no way to hermetically seal a free society against terrorism.

What is not true is that the world must resign itself to living with organized terrorism on the scale of 9/11, 3/11 (Madrid), and now 7/7.

Just as crime can be divided into at least two distinct types, so can terror. Individual criminals do not need any "infrastructure" to speak of, but generally, neither can they take over whole neighborhoods and threaten governing institutions the way organized crime can. Sometimes the line between individual and organized crime can be blurred, but roughly speaking, the latter represents the former in metastasized and institutionalized form.

It is perhaps impossible to eliminate crime or terror on the level of individuals or small groups, though good police work clearly makes a huge difference. But what is both possible - and absolutely necessary - is to eliminate institutionalized crime or terror before it is able to destroy our ability to live normally as free societies.

This is possible because the strength of organized crime or terror, its organization, is also its vulnerability. Organizations need leadership, an ability to communicate, bases of operations and a means of replenishing the ranks.

None of this is easy to eliminate, nor can the good guys ever count on winning permanently. The price of freedom remains eternal vigilance. But it is possible to win because free societies have the power to knock organized terror out of business and, so long as they don't let their guard down, keep swatting back its attempts to recover.

The greatest danger from organized crime or terror is when the societies it victimizes lose their will to fight back. This, indeed, is the goal of those who prey on society: to become so strong and established that no one can imagine eliminating them.

TERRORISTS ARE more ambitious than criminals. Al Capone, we can assume, did not aspire to become mayor of Chicago, governor of Illinois, or president of the United States. Osama bin Laden and his followers do aspire to establishing a new caliphate that will subjugate the free world.

The first step, of course, to addressing either organized crime or terror is to admit that it exists and not to shrink from establishing its elimination as the goal. Governments live with organized crime for years before leaders come along who are willing to do something about it. Similarly, before 9/11, the world lived with a growing threat of regime-backed organized terror without fully admitting the problem, let alone rooting it out.

The heart of the Bush Doctrine was to say that, henceforth, support for terrorism would be punishable by regime change. The US then proceeded to provide three illustrations: Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (which gave up its nuclear program and support for terrorism in exchange for being untargeted for regime change).

On Monday, President George Bush told the FBI Academy: "In this war, the Marines will fight, in the words of the Rifleman's Creed, 'Until victory is America's, and there is no enemy.'" Even more to the point, he said, "The best way to defend America is to stay on the offense."

But here's where Bush veered off course: "And we're staying on the offensive. We're fighting the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan and across the world so we do not have to face them here at home... We will keep the terrorists on the run until they have no place left to hide."

Bush was right that a good offense is the best defense - but fighting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan is not offense; dealing with the regimes in Iran and Syria would be.

Bush was right that "the success of democracy in Iraq is sending forth the news from Damascus to Teheran that freedom can be the future of every nature ... [and] inspiring democratic reformers in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia." He deserves tremendous credit for setting such a democratic revolution in motion in the heart of the tyrannical Middle East.

But the terrorists still very much have "places to hide." They are called Iran and Syria. The mullahs in Teheran were confident enough to allow an "ultraconservative" to win Iran's powerless presidency in June. And while the president's spokesman did call for the freedom of one jailed Iranian journalist, Bush has yet to publicly meet with a single Iranian dissident or declare that regime change in Teheran is a goal of the US government. READ MORE

Waiting until Iraq is "done" is a recipe for perpetual defense. The litmus test for whether America is successfully on the offense is whether the mullahs are too afraid and busy defending their own regimes to continue trying to undermine democracy in Iraq, not to mention sowing terror against Israel.

The side where the fighting is going on is the side that is on the defensive. Right now, that side is the West, whether by battening down the hatches against terror at home, or fighting off terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

saul@jpost.com

- Editorial Page Editor Saul Singer is author of the book, Confronting Jihad: Israel's Struggle & the World After 9/11