Sometimes - often, really - someone expresses what your thinking so much better than you could do. Today, riffing off others’ writing, Henry at Crooked Timber writes,
Both Dan and Matt Yglesias provide us with empirical evidence that the number of insurgents in Iraq is snowballing. It’s a far cry from the ridiculous predictions of Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds that jihadists from across the Arab world would get sucked into Iraq, leaving the US safer. Indeed, if the Brookings people are right, the number of foreign insurgents has grown only slightly since December, while the number of domestic insurgents has grown fourfold. Flypaper, my ass. This whole nonsensical theory was never more than ex post wishful thinking masquerading as foreign policy analysis - as I argued last year, it seemed to be based on the fallacious notion that there was a limited “lump of terrorism” floating around in the international system that could be absorbed by a conflict in Iraq.
For the record, let me add local Republican analyst and PBS pundit Avi Nelson to the list of proponents of this theory.
What was especially galling about the flypaper theory was its part in a larger Copernican intellectual edifice that kept patching over holes in what was essentially a tenuous theoretical proposition - namely, that invading Iraq would instigate a region-wide democratization in turn suffocating the sources of terrorism. That premise is hardly disproved, but its timeframe and scope have been pushed so far into the realm of the distant and hypothetical that it’s really not the same calculus of surety the warbloggers began with.
And they have the gall to paint liberal questioners of that highly theoretical premise as enemies of the state.
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