Flypaper and Quagmire

David Warren was one of the first commentators to propound the idea of US presence in Iraq as flypaper - the jihadis are attracted to the place where the US is most able to deal with them (i.e. kill them). He now believes that "quagmire" is the second step of the flypaper process, and is exactly what is needed to actually succeed in changing the despotic nature of Arab regimes.

I shocked, or tried to shock, a prominent Washington "neoconservative" over lunch the other day by declaring that the Iraqi mission was a complete success. "I hoped the U.S. would get into a quagmire in Iraq, and now they' re in the quagmire. The operation has in fact gone more smoothly than I could have foreseen." This is because, as I went on to explain, simply by being there, and not budging, the U.S. has moved the focus of the international Jihad from the West back to the East.

We thus return to the "flypaper hypothesis" I first expounded a couple of years ago, in which the U.S. hangs out its flypaper far away from home, and also as far from Israel as possible, to collect as many as possible of the world's moveable Jihadis in a place where the U.S. has installed the equipment to kill them.

It's working, after a fashion. Iraq continues to soak the enemy up. But whereas I formerly thought the Bush administration had adopted this policy consciously, I now realize it was a happy accident. They have consciously "taken the battle to the enemy", but the quagmire -- the "flypaper" -- was hung by mistake.

Which makes the U.S. hesitate to do what needs to be done next, given the existence of fly-hatcheries all over the region. And that is to put out more flypaper, by moving U.S. troops on, over Iraq's frontiers. Or to put it another way, it is time to create a few more quagmires.