"Withdraw and Quarantine"

Andy Bacevich's prescription for Iraq is worth mulling over. The question not fully answered by the column is: how do we actually quarantine a brand of Islam that wants to destroy the rest of Islam and the West as well? You can't quarantine what you can't even see. The answer, surely, is that, sure, we cannot quarantine it entirely. Such a religious ideology will always appeal to losers and fanatics; it will always seep out; and the laws of asymmetrical warfare mean that it will be successful at some point. All we can do is minimize the amount we do to needlessly foment more of it (like ineptly occupying Muslim countries, thus giving Islamism both oxygen and a rationale); do what we can to encourage democratic and secular movements among Muslim Arabs and Persians; strike selectively against al Qaeda-style terrorists, and then ... we have to be honest, I think. The odds of avoiding more terror attacks are low. A policy of quarantining Islamism will have to live alongside it by definition. And that means enduring some terror in order to prevent more of it down the line. The alternative - trying to extirpate it by force of America arms - is not going to work. We surely know that by now.