Headline Inversion: The Consequences of a Jennifer Rubin Mindset on Terrorism

Washington Post neoconservative and big
government cheerleader Jennifer Rubin published her
latest bit of agitation for a renewed War in Iraq under the
misleading headline: “The consequences of a radical mindset on
jihadist terror.” The word radical is evidently code
for anyone who disagrees with Jennifer Rubin, which she
makes much clearer in the Twitter version of the headline: “The
consequences of the libertarian/leftist view of
terror fighting.”

According to Rubin, those consequences include foreign fighters
flocking to ISIL’s cause. Rubin cites some instances of
this—American Douglas McAuthur McCain was killd in Syria fighting
for ISIL last weekend—before deciding:

This should put radicals who object to effective anti-terrorism
on defense. We don’t know whether this specific jihadist killed
anyone, but he
reportedly had taken up arms in league with an enemy of the United
States. So let’s play out what would happen at various stages
in his evolution as a jihadist if anti-government extremists got
their way.

Rubin then concludes that we should all be grateful for the NSA,
drone strikes against American citizens, torture, and Guantanamo
Bay:

But if we rip out the National Security Agency surveillance
program or make it so cumbersome that intelligence officials can’t
detect developments in real time, any chance to stop the jihadist
wannabe before he left the country would be lost. I suppose the
libertarians would shrug and say that’s acceptable.

Shrug? Last I checked, the NSA was still merrily spying on
American citizens, obviously failing to catch McCain in time.
(According
to this report, McCain even tweeted to another jihadist, “I
will be joining you guys soon,” so he clearly hadn’t passed
terrorism 101.) As my colleague Jesse Walker points out on Twitter,
it is hard to say which of Rubin’s intrusive, unconstitutional,
statist policies would have actually stopped McCain, given that
most of them are currently in effect and none of them did.

But this gets at the larger point: We are not living with the
consequences of a libertarian foreign policy. We are living—right
now, at this moment—with the consequences of a Jennifer Rubin
foreign policy. The new bad guy, ISIL, has arisen from the
situation her neoconservative policies created when the U.S.
deposed the old bady guy, Saddam Hussein.

At the close of her screed, Rubin sneeringly asks:

What, then, do they favor — more ambulances for the next
9/11-type attack on the homeland?

We favor fewer body bags, how about that? Not because we are
ideological or naive, but because we were around the last dozen
times the war-agitators got their way.