Posted by
Old Bill on Tuesday, May 06, 2008 10:53:11 PM
Clausewitz observed that the successful prosecution of a war depends on first understanding the essential nature of that war, and any misunderstanding will lead inevitably to failure. This must include both an understanding of the enemy and his motives, his strengths and weaknesses, and also our own. "Know your enemy, know yourself: a thousand battles, a thousand victories." (Sun Tzu, 'The Art of War'). Let us therefore ask ourselves: What is the essence of the war in which we are now engaged? Who are our enemies? What are their motives for making war on us? What are our own objectives, and how can we attain them? I will answer these questions, and because I know that, being an employed American you have neither time nor patience, I will be brief.
We were attacked on 9-11, 2001, by Al Quaeda--but it was not the first time Al Quaeda had attacked us; neither was Al Quaeda the only Moslem terrorist group who had attacked us by that date, nor are they now the only group waging war against us. By "us" I mean the United States--but let us remember that our enemies see themselves as waging war not merely against the United States, but against the entire world not currently under their control. Our enemies are a coalition of groups--terrorist organizations, political parties, and sovereign nations--and their motives are as diverse as their nature. "They" are not the Moslem world--what Moslems call the "Umma"--but only a collection of groups within it. They include political parties officially secular and socialist (such as the Baath of Iraq and Syria), Marxist and atheist (such as the Communists, of whom there are still quite a few in the Moslem terrorist galaxy), and fanatically theocratic (such as the regime of the Ayatollahs in Iran) or a mixture of theocratic and socialist such as Hezbollah and Hamas, Islam Jihad and the Moslem Brotherhood.
We can divide these enemies into camps according to their motives and consequently the aims of their violence against us. The secular parties and governments seek to become, or remain, the ruling elites in their respective countries, sometimes in furtherance of their socialist ideology (Marxist or otherwise) but invariably because as Willy Sutton said when asked why he liked to rob banks, simply because "that's where the money is." The more fanatic theocrats, regardless of their particular Islamic sect, attack us because they like to kill infidels and because they too seek to become (or in the case of those in power, remain) the government of their various nations.
They also, according to their own words, see themselves as obeying a divine injunction to spread Islam by war all over the world--'jihad' is what they call it, and we needn't be diverted by the protestations of the Moslems and their occasional non-Moslem apologists that 'jihad' means a struggle of the soul to submit to God's will; in Arabic, it has both meanings, but the latter, violent assault on the infidel world--the 'dar al harb', or 'world of the sword'--for the purpose of spreading Islam all over the world, is the meaning most familiar to, and most in use by, the great majority of Moslems around the world, regardless of sect or politics.
Now it should be obvious that these different groups, with their different motives and aims, will employ different political rationales for their war against us--some will aim at killing infidels in order to spread Islam, others will speak of fighting American (or Western) Imperialism in order to liberate the Arabs/Middle East/Moslems/Third World, some will speak of killing Jews/Israelis/supporters of Israel in order to 'restore' the rights of Arabs/Palestinians/Moslems, etc.---but in the end, all of these various enemy groups will do the one thing that makes them our enemies in a war: they will kill Americans, and destroy American property (such as, for instance, the USS Cole and the World Trade Center).
These enemies of ours will hope to make themselves popular with the populations of their various countries by killing Americans, and thus appealing to the various groups in their countries who hate America and Americans, for the variety of reasons suggested above. We can also add to these ideological/theocratic motivations for hatred of America the simple but universally widespread motive of vindictive envy and resentment of those who have more than one's own people, and the 'schadenfreud' that accompanies seeing such rich, presumably happy people forced to leap from high buildings in order to escape burning to death--this 'schadenfreud' was very widespread on Sep. 11, 2001, not only in the Arab world (where people danced in the streets on seeing Americans killed on television) but also in such places as Europe, Mexico, Asia, and of course the faculty centers of many American universities (let us not forget Ward Churchill) and the rectories of some American churches (such as that of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, former domain of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, only one of many advocates of 'Black Liberation Theology' which preaches hatred of America, Americans, and white people in general).
These, then, are the true motives of our enemies. They will not cease their efforts to kill us simply because we listen sympathetically and patiently to their diatribes explaining why they hate us, let alone because we give them money to help their economies or do anything at all they want in hopes of placating them. Neither changing our foreign policy (e.g., by abandoning support of our one democratic and true ally in the Middle East, Israel, or abandoning a potential future ally in the form of the nascent democracy of Iraq), nor even our domestic policy (say by requiring all schools to excuse Moslem students from class to pray five times a day) will dissuade them from seeking to popularize themselves with their ethnocentric and propagandized populations, nor move the theocratic fanatics to stop seeking to convert all us infidels into either equally fanatic Moslems, or else corpses. Have you ever heard of the behavioral theory of human psychology?
If you reward a behavior, you get more of it. You don't need a college degree to figure this out.
So what do we do? Well, at risk of being called simplistic, let me remind you of our BASIC WAR AIM: to make our enemies stop making war on us, and deter them from doing so in the future. Forever would be a nice period of lasting peace, but is probably not attainable. Something like 50-100 years is not unrealistic, though--how long has it been since Germany or Japan started a war?
Of course, both these warlike societies were transformed into peace-loving democracies by a decade-long US occupation. That occupation, of course, was made possible by our first breaking their will to resist our occupation and governance of their countries. How did we achieve that? How did we get them to give us the oppportunity to win their hearts and minds?
Let's take a little stroll back through history, and listen to the words of a proven war-ender (which has to preceed the peacemakers):
"War is like this: somebody wants something of ours, or they just hate us, so they want to kill us. So they start killing us. So, we have to kill them befor they kill all of us. After we kill enough of them, they give up, the war's over, and all the killing stops. That's all there is to it." The words are those, allegedly, of Gen. Curtis Lemay, then commander of the 14th US Air Force, which had just dropped 2 atomic bombs on Japan, and was prepared to keep on dropping bombs until the Japanese surrendered. Whether actual or apocryphal, the sentiment undoubtedly reflects Lemay's understanding accurately, and I insist it is absolutely correct--and morally justifiable to boot.
If we do not do whatever is necessary to defeat those who seek to kill us, we will be killed--or forced to surrender to their will, whatever it may be. What is the end of such retreat or surrender? It is a world ruled by the most murderous aggressors. We must remember that self-defense is not aggression, and that we Americans did not start this war.
So who do we have to kill to defend ourselves? Our enemies--until they give up; and not just pretend to give up, in order to get a little 10-year armistice as the Koran advises Moslem Jihadis to do when things are going badly for them militarily, but give up in real earnest, give up any intention of waging war on the United States or our allies, now or in the future, at least for the rest of their lives and their children's lives.
Waging war, by the way, also includes waging war by starvation as well as terror, so no embargo on oil for the infidels is acceptable as a means of converting us--too many Americans and Europeans would freeze to death in the dark in a world deprived of Middle Eatern oil supplied at free-market prices, and that's not nice--dead is dead, whether you are burned, shot, crushed or frozen to death.
Please note, as pointed out above, our enemies do not include all Moslems, let alone Islam as a religion: just the people who use it, or 'Islamism', socialism, Marxism, Communism, racism, fascism, or any other 'ism' as an excuse to justify killing us and blowing up our airplanes, ships, and buildings. They don't get to kidnap us either--whether inside our embassies, or off the streets of Beirut. Kidnapping is a form of slavery, and that's wrong.
Now that I've made our general political objectives clear, and the moral justification for our use of deadly force as well, what do I have to offer as specific policy and grand strategy recommendations? Tune in tomorrow.