KERRY WAS CORRECT ABOUT HOW TO FIGHT

Today, Hugh Hewitt interviewed a colonel about Iraq and other issues. The transcript isn't up yet but I did catch something interesting. The colonel made a remarkable statement:

"The insurgency in Iraq is primarily a police problem."

When Sen. Kerry was running for President, he made a similar statement about how we should be fighting terrorism in the NY Times Magazine:

When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. ''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'' Kerry said. ''As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.'' ... But when I spoke to Kerry in August, he said that many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror.

A few paragraphs later, Matt Bai, the author of the Times piece, makes this observation:

If Kerry's foreign-policy frame is correct, then law enforcement probably is the most important, though not the only, strategy you can employ against such forces, who need passports and bank accounts and weapons in order to survive and flourish. Such a theory suggests that, in our grief and fury, we have overrated the military threat posed by Al Qaeda, paradoxically elevating what was essentially a criminal enterprise, albeit a devastatingly sophisticated and global one, into the ideological successor to Hitler and Stalin -- and thus conferring on the jihadists a kind of stature that fight actually work in their favor, enabling them to attract more donations and more recruits.

Recently, the Brits have realized that Pres. Fredo's war rhetoric is counter-productive but the talk radio gasbags like Hannity still speak of a "clash of civilizations."