Hey, Anybody Remember 2004?

Me neither. But I was reminded of its craziness when I saw that "Wretchard The Cat" aka Richard Fernandez, a freelance boil on the body politic, has gone to Pajamas Media. Hopping around that miracle of the intertoobz known as google I found the old, old, old "Belmont Club" site where Wretchard or one of his contributors explained using science (!) and social network theory (!) why eliminating Saddam Hussein had made us all safer from state sponsored terrorist groups like Al Quaeda:

His last paragraph is crucial to understanding why the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the toppling of Saddam Hussein may have cripped global terrorism so badly. Without the infrastrastructure of a state sponsor, terrorism is limited to cells of about 100 members in size in order to maintain security. In the context of the current campaign in Iraq, the strategic importance of places like Falluja or "holy places" is that their enclave nature allows terrorists to grow out their networks to a larger and more potent size. Without those sanctuaries, they would be small, clandestine hunted bands. The argument that dismantling terrorist enclaves makes "America less safe than it should be in a dangerous world" inverts the logic. It is allowing the growth of terrorist enclaves that puts everyone at risk in an otherwise safe world.

Alas that it turned out that, of course, Al Quaeda was not, in fact, an example of state sponsored terrorism and Falluja was not its state sponsored home. Thus, not only could you not destroy Al Quaeda by hanging Saddam Hussein but you couldn't destroy home grown insurgents by labeling them foreign fighters. In fact, as it turned out, you couldn't isolate the entire of a society from itself in order to prevent it from talkin' about shit and getting pissed at the invaders no matter how many civilians you bomb.

When I tell you that his blog roll proudly included Michael Totten as well as Michelle Malkin and Hindrocket you will grasp that this utterly random but totally stupid quote is just the tip of the iceberg for the idiocy that Pajamas Media is happily employing. No doubt Sadly, No! has more. I seem to remember they have archives on Wretchard.