Is London a new front in the war on terror? Shall we invade?

In his weekly radio address today, President Bush once more trotted out his “flypaper” rationalization for the invasion of Iraq.

We are now waging a global war on terror — from the mountains of Afghanistan to the border regions of Pakistan, to the Horn of Africa, to the islands of the Philippines, to the plains of Iraq. We will stay on the offense, fighting the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them at home.

Once again: the idea that invading Iraq and throwing open its borders to foreign terrorists somehow prevents other terrorists from striking us or our allies is absurd. No clearer declaration of the intellectual poverty of that argument could have been made than the fact of the atrocities in London.

But never mind the strategic imbecility: the notion that we have the right to invade another country and throw open its borders to foreign terrorists who then kill the citizens of the country by the hundreds, so that those terrorists will not attack our citizens in our country, is morally heinous. The open implication is that Iraqi lives are worthless compared to American ones, and that we therefore have the right to sacrifice them in whatever numbers are necessary to protect ourselves.

That attitude begets terrorists without end. It is its own antithesis. Our government is already perceived by tens of millions to hold the lives of other peoples of little account. It doesn’t help to come right out and announce that the perception is true.

And of course the truth is that we are fighting terrorists in our own country. We have massive resources — although often misdirected ones — dedicated to just that purpose. So does the UK and every stable country in Europe and throughout the world. No amount of killing in Iraq will change that. So long as terrorists of whatever stripe believe we and others are interfering with their goals, their object will be to drive us from their countries so that they can pursue those goals without interference.

In bin Laden’s case, the goal is to topple governments in Islamic countries and replace them with the repressive theocracy he favors. He wants a benighted Islamic caliphate. Opposing him and his followers and their bent view of the world is not only morally appropriate but morally necessary, not to mention any of the practical considerations that accompany the moral ones.

President Bush obviously thinks he is pursuing a moral cause, although he appears to confuse it on occasions with a religious one. But morality doesn’t excuse stupidity or ignorance, and it doesn’t excuse the decidely anti-moral insistence that other lives are less worth living than ours.

We will inevitably face more terrorist attacks here. It is devoutly to be hoped that they won’t be on the scale of Spetember 11, or even of July 7. But London has survived those attacks in the past and will in the future. We have survived the worst terrorist attack in history, and we will survive the ones to come, and we can and must do so without abrogating the values, either here or elsewhere in the world, we hope to represent to that world.

We need to be smart. We need to conduct ourselves in a manner that will not create more terrorists. We need to act in a manner that will lessen the sympathy so many in the world appear to have for those terrorists. And pace Karl Rove, whose idea of a just cause appears to be damaging our own national security in service of discrediting administration opponents, we need to understand what motivates terrorists. We need to understand what impact our behavior has on them, and we need to modify that behavior where it is counterproductive in combatting them. The invasion of Iraq and the insistence that we have the right to sacrifice Iraqis to terrorists so that we don’t have to lose our own lives to them is patently, glaringly, insanely counterproductive.

Do Democrats and liberals have a plan for salvaging the situation in Iraq? Not a workable one. No one does, least of all the administration. It may in fact not be possible to salvage Iraq; there is no natural law that says we can mend everything we break. We have begun a process that we clearly do not control and that the Bush administration show every sign, publicly at any rate and through their actions as well, of not understanding.

The administration do understand that their goals for Iraq are not being met. They have bowed repeatedly to reality: Sistani’s insistence on the elections that ushered in an Iran-friendly government that has now arranged for Iran to being training Iraq’s army; Rumsfeld’s acknowledgement that the insurgency will probably persist for years if not a decade or more; the military’s acknowledgement that any progress will include negotiating with insurgents and their supporters; the loose federalism of the Iraqi government, assuming it survives and gains the capacity to physically govern the country, that includes virtual autonomy for the Kurdish north.

But as the situation drifts ever farther from their control, they show no signs of developing a coherent alternative to more of the same. Maybe no one can; we should at least try, though, and one thing we do control, or the administration do control, is their own rhetoric. That’d be a good place to start.

So please: no more talk of using Iraqi bodies to shield our own from harm.