by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n The synchronized attacks in Mumbai, by their targeting and timing, designed both to do the maximum amount of damage and to be iconic in nature, frame the recent assassination of a Karzai brother, the shake-up in American command, announced pullbacks, quite understandable curtailing of US aid to Pakistan, and a general impression by Islamists (assuming they indeed turn out to be the culprits) that a weary and insolvent US is retreating into multilateral irrelevance, resulting in not much deterrence left against radical Islam in that part of the world.<\/p>\n One underappreciated fact of our engagement with Pakistan, well aside from its ambiguous role in Afghanistan, was our awkward obligation to restrain India in the face of occasional Pakistan-based terrorism. If the Mumbai attacks prove (as much as anything is \u2018proved\u2019 in the wars against terrorism) to have originated from Pakistan, it is likely that a disengaging US will not be so willing or able to restrain India, which would usher in a new cycle of response\/counter-response. India, as a great power, will not long allow Mumbai to become a terrorist training ground.<\/p>\n As for the chance of a Mumbai-like bombing here, the prognosis seems ambiguous. On the one hand, Obama has adopted most of the Bush anti-terrorism protocols that he once demonized (Guantanamo, tribunals, preventive detention, renditions, wiretaps, intercepts, a fivefold increase in the drone targeted assassination program, etc.). But to make such a 180-degree turn palatable to his base, Obama et al. have also simultaneously had to boast about trying KSM in a civilian court, showboat about Miranda rights accorded to terrorist suspects, pontificate about the proposed Ground Zero mosque, hector about profiling, etc. \u2014 all of which has resulted in weird reactions to everything from the attempted Christmas-day airline bombing to the Fort Hood mass murderer. It is almost as if superficial rhetoric is undoing the perception of deterrence that was so assiduously followed in the first years of the Obama administration.<\/p>\n And we must factor in the fact that US popularity is at an all-time low in the Middle East, lower than during the Bush era, most probably because Obama, with his \u2018I\u2019m not Bush\u2019 PR campaign in 2009\u201310, raised hopes in the Arab world that (in Obama\u2019s words, not mine) Barack Hussein Obama, with Muslims in his family\u2019s past, would be unusually sympathetic to Islamic concerns. When the new president proceeded to continue as before in Iraq and Afghanistan and start a third war in Libya, he sorely dashed those lofty expectations in many minds. Unrealistic hopes, encouraged and then realistically curbed, can prove dangerous.<\/p>\n So we are unsure whether terrorists contemplating bringing back mass murder to the US are still deterred by the Bush\/Obama 2.0 protocols that have made it far harder to repeat a 9\/11. Perhaps they are, or perhaps they have convinced themselves of the much more widely reported Holder-Obama fantasies about terrorist-suspect rights, and therefore think we are not quite as vigilant as in the past.<\/p>\n The point is that bad actors, whether contemplating conventional wars or unconventional attacks, are often emboldened by even superficial outward signs of appeasement (from Dean Acheson\u2019s slip that Korea was not in the US sphere of defense to April Glaspie\u2019s supposedly casual reference to unconcern with Mesopotamian border disputes, to a few British references to the Malvinas and the withdrawal of an otherwise insignificant ship from the Falklands) \u2014 even if the potential target is militarily prepared and quite able to reply in deadly fashion. If I were the administration, I would send out a memo to cut the \u2018worry over the rights of the terrorist\u2019 talk, and quietly send messages that the US is fully prepared, as in the past, to take all full measures to prevent an attack, and would respond with overwhelming force to even a small assault.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner The synchronized attacks in Mumbai, by their targeting and timing, designed both to do the maximum amount of damage and to be iconic in nature, frame the recent assassination of a Karzai brother, the shake-up in American command, announced pullbacks, quite understandable curtailing of US aid to Pakistan, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[196],"tags":[1051,12,707,1076,162],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-ED","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3189,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/back-to-the-old-911-world\/","url_meta":{"origin":2519,"position":0},"title":"Back to the Old 9\/11 World","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 8, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services For three days, Islamist gunmen nearly shut down Mumbai, the financial center of India.The terrorists \u2014 Pakistani militants, according to Indian authorities \u2014 murdered almost 200 innocents and left hundreds of others wounded, giving reprieve only to hostages they thought were Muslims. The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2008"","block_context":{"text":"December 2008","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2008\/december-2008\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3080,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/adios-pakistan\/","url_meta":{"origin":2519,"position":1},"title":"Adios, Pakistan","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 19, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner \u201cI don\u2019t care if someone is giving us money; we are not a purchasable commodity. We cannot be bought. We can live in hunger, but we won\u2019t compromise our national interests.\u201d \u2013 Bashir Bilour, a Pakistani senior minister, in angry response following an al-Qaeda\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Pakistan"","block_context":{"text":"Pakistan","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/pakistan\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3192,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/political-madness-some-hotspots\/","url_meta":{"origin":2519,"position":2},"title":"Political Madness–Some Hotspots","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 7, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner New and Improved? As Mark Steyn has warned for years, the Western attitude toward reports of terrorism is about as anti-empirical as one can imagine. We hear that Jewish hostages in Bombay were horrifically tortured, even as pundits assured us that the terrorists were\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2008"","block_context":{"text":"December 2008","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2008\/december-2008\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1807,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/politically-correct-killing\/","url_meta":{"origin":2519,"position":3},"title":"Politically Correct Killing?","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 3, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Obama needs to clarify his anti-terrorism policy. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online By all accounts, President Obama has vastly increased the number of Predator drone strikes during his 13 months in office and expanded the theater of missile operations by thousands of square miles. Indeed, since inauguration day,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "March 2010"","block_context":{"text":"March 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/march-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6212,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/how-dare-you-the-supremacist-nature-of-muslim-grievances\/","url_meta":{"origin":2519,"position":4},"title":"How Dare You?! The Supremacist Nature of Muslim ‘Grievances’","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 17, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim \/\/ Jerusalem Post In 2012 in Pakistan, as Christian children were\u00a0singing carols inside their church, Muslim men from a nearby mosque barged in with an axe, destroyed the furniture, desecrated the altar, and beat the children.\u00a0 Their justification for such violence?\u00a0 \u201cYou are disturbing our prayers\u2026.\u00a0How dare\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Islam"","block_context":{"text":"Islam","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/islam\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/islamic_rage_boy.jpg?fit=400%2C219&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3181,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/no-monopoly-on-moral-paralysis\/","url_meta":{"origin":2519,"position":5},"title":"No Monopoly on Moral Paralysis","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 14, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner We usually associate Westernism with globalized notions of consumer capitalism, free markets, advocacy for consensual government, and human and property rights. We certainly see all of that in the spectacular growth of contemporary India, vis \u00e1 vis its prior socialist and state-controlled past. 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