While Jeff Danziger isn’t my favorite political cartoonist, he did have an interesting one the other day — it showed Radical Islam as a hydra with Al Sadr as one of the heads. I suppose it’s supposed to be Rumsfeld astride the beast saying, “Don’t worry, as soon as we get Al Sadr, everything will be fine.” I can’t recall anybody in the Bush administration or in the military saying anything like that – here for instance Rumsfeld does not single out Al Sadr.
But the conception of Islamic Terrorism as a hydra is an interesting one – if you’ll recall, the hydra was a mythological beast that when you cut off one head, two would grow back in its place. So we’re faced with a difficult choice in how to fight such a beast.
We can decide resistance is futile, and thus condemn ourselves to a period of terror, death and ultimately our own destruction – but at least we didn’t make the bad guys any angrier. This is the course those few who didn’t want us to topple the Taliban advised.
Or we can stamp out a particular group such as al Qaida, and have two groups take it’s place. This is the course the many who didn’t want us to topple Saddam advised. In the cartoon, simply replace Al Sadr’s head with Bin Laden, and the anti-Iraq war people are now the ones saying “Don’t worry, as soon as we get Bin Laden, everything will be fine.” Oddly enough, Danziger was firmly opposed to going after Saddam.
Or we can try to kill the hydra – all the heads and the body too. This means kill each head and cauterize the wound in mythological terms, or in real terms it means destroy all the different islamic terrorist groups and reform the nations they sprang from.
The first choice leads to our own destruction; the second choice leads to war without end (or a different choice); the third choice leads to our enemies destruction. Realistically, I don’t think we have a choice.
