On Swatting Flies...

Well, I'm back, and nothing's improved. Still plenty of fodder from the administration and the lemmings over at NRO, though, so I figure it's time to come back off hiatus.

One of the points that hasn't been emphasized during the 9/11 hearings/media spectacle is this notion that the president was ahead of the curve in thinking about al Qaeda because he said he was sick of "swatting flies." The story says that he wanted a broad, all-encompassing strategy to go after aQ.

Seems to me this is a rather damning point, not a redeeming one. It belies a certain simplicity of thought, an inability to see shades of grey on the part of the president. The fact is, there was nothing to do but swat flies. Al Qaeda was not the Soviet Union, or Iraq, or some centralized, cohesive body. And we certainly weren't going to go barrelling into Afghanistan and start dropping daisy cutters all over the place. AQ was swarms of flies, all over the globe, buzzing around, waiting to be swatted. What we needed was a correspondingly decentralized, case-by-case-basis strategy to get intel operatives on the ground and take the bastards out wherever and whenever we could. The only overarching strategy, as I think Dick Clarke understood better than anyone, should have been "take them out whenever you get the chance."

One approaches a beehive differently than one approaches a bear, even though both could threaten to do one harm. The fly swatting remark was made in the president's defense. It seems to indicate he couldn't get his head around the fact that we were facing a non-state, loosely coordinated group of maniacs that we had to swat every time we got the chance. That's a pretty bad defense in my book.