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My question, which is both literal
and rhetorical, is "Can we
win?"
Here is the literal
part:
You have many years
in the armed forces (I don't), you went to one of the service academies (I
didn't), and you presumably have contact with those who have contact with those
doing the fighting (I don't). Do you Lex, based on your knowledge &
experience, think that this is a war that we can be
win?
Here is the rhetorical
part:
Can we win this war?
From my perspective, I don't see
how.
-What does 'victory'
in a war on terrorism look like? Does that mean "most of the terrorists"? Does
that mean "Nearly all of the terrorists"? Does that mean "all of the terrorists
who want to kill Americans"? I don't know the answer to this. President Bush
has stated that we will keep at it until we stomp out terrorism, period. That's
my read on his position, anyway. I am less concerned with how *I* define
victory, and more concerned with how the President defines it. The part that
scares me is that I don't think that his definition is any more specific than
mine is...
As long as there
is some dirtbag with a rifle who is willing to die to try and kill one of us
(you or I specifically, other Americans generally), then terrorism will survive,
simple as that.
-Isn't "War
on Terror in Iraq" a different way of phrasing "Defending our Homeland", the
only difference being the perspective of the speaker? What I am getting at here
is that no one has ever won a war like this without being (forgive my sounding
flippant; I can't think of a better term) the Home Team. The British couldn't
do it here, nor could they do it in Afghanistan, the French couldn't do it in
Russia, the Germans couldn't do it in the U.S.S.R, the French couldn't do it in
Indochina/Vietnam, We couldn't do it in Vietnam, the Soviets couldn't do it in
Afghanistan. In Iraq, we clearly do not have the home court
advantage.
-I believe that
Robert McNamara came to the realization that Vietnam couldn't be won at around
~6000 casualties (I can't remember the source of this. Sorry for the lack of a
footnote). He didn't speak up about it until 10's of thousands of casualties
later. We just passed ~1400 casualties in Iraq, and I fear that it will be a
long time until the powers that be arrive at the same conclusion. The fact that
President Bush is famously resolute and unbending will make this realization
that much more painful.
The
question that remains in my head is this: How many Americans will die before we
leave Iraq, victory or no? I don't have an answer to this question. Once
again, the scary thing is that I don't think that President Bush or Secretary
Rumsfeld have an answer
either.
Like I said
earlier, I know we have to be there. I know that we have no other choice. Now
that Iraq is broken, someone has to fix it, and that someone is us. I am also
very aware that I am not privy to the thoughts of any of the decision makers,
and that I may have missed the proverbial mark in my comments by quite a
distance. I am simply concerned about the cost in human terms, and I'm looking
to you as a counterpoint to my
perspective.
Again, my
intent is not to start a pissing contest. I'm really interested in an
articulate position that I imagine differs from
mine.
Now that's a serious set of
questions, written by a concerned citizen with a far different point of view
than mine, and worthy, I thought, of a serious response. And because it took me
so damned long to write that response, I thought I'd go snacks with my
correspondent by sharing our exchange here on the blog. (Hope you don't mind,
DM.)
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This
is a large and complex topic and I apologize if my reply seems in any place
pedantic. Your questions, and the cultural divide they represent within this
country come down at the last to a philosophical discussion about how we as
individuals and collectively as a people see the world. It also reflects
questions about how, having formed that world view, we choose to interact with
it. The problem with philosophical questions is that they go to root of people's
belief and values systems, and are very difficult to change. From my
perspective, as a career warrior (and southerner by birth) the question of "can
we win?" is perhaps not even the right one to ask. Would we not, should we not,
fight even if we could not win? If we're having a hard time defining victory
conditions, have we considered what surrender conditions might look
like?
But I'll give it a go anyway,
because I believe you've asked the question
seriously.
What does it mean to win
the war on terror? First thing, in my humble opinion, is to recognize that "War
on Terror" is in fact a euphemism. Terror is merely a tactic. It would have made
as much sense to have called World War II a "War on the Blitzkrieg." What we're
actually fighting is a political and ideological army, that of the Salafist
jihad.
Every fight occurs on three
levels: Tactical, Operational and Strategic. The tactical level could be defined
as protecting the polling booth, government buildings, and critical
infrastructure while killing every Salafist jihadi armed with an AK-47 or
suicide bomb belt and minimizing casualties to friendly forces. This is the
detailed execution piece down at the company/battalion level (I'm just talking
military effects here). And you're never going to, in any campaign, win
everywhere and at all times. Even in battles we win, soldiers die. This is the
least coherent form of any fight to the outside observer (and especially to the
people actually engaged in combat) but it's also where the media (which helps to
form public opinion, a strategic center of gravity) tends to focus its lens.
Here's where you get your money shots, as a reporter. But coherence is an issue
because victory conditions are met (or not) day to day, sometimes hour by hour,
or even minute by minute. If you choose to focus on today's car bombing, and
link it to last week's bombing that killed 36 in Kirkuk, and the one back in
July that killed 58, you'll develop one narrative (and this is the common one
you'll find in the newspapers - entirely without context or analysis). If you
focus instead on Iyad Allawi's continued survival today, the registration of
voters and numbers of jihadis rounded up today, you come up with a different
picture - by itself equally misleading and out of context. If we rounded up 30
military aged males at a suspicious gathering, have we prevented an explosion at
a hospital tomorrow? Or have we alienated 15 fence sitters who will now take up
arms against us as soon as they are released in three days time? We don't know
at this level, and really we never will - we lack perspective. This fight is
detailed execution of the operational plan, in many places
simultaneously.
At an operational
level we develop a campaign to insert and sustain both kinetic and non-kinetic
forces and effects to develop intelligence on where to find Salafists, fix them
in place, deny them logistical aid and sanctuary, and kill them in detail, while
winning the information operations campaign both in the court of public
(Western/US) opinion and at least neutralizing the hostile elements in the
Arab/muslim press. This part sounds simple, but it's the critical bridge between
high flown strategy (which will take us back to philosophy, in a bit) and the
tactical fight, and synchronization of effort is critical. This is really where
the war gets won or lost, since the strategy involves the decision (in this
case) whether or not to fight at all, and that's already been
made.
Which leads us to strategy, and
what is, I think the concern of many serious American critics of the war on
terror: How is what we're doing in Iraq aligned to the defeat of this ideology
and defense of the homeland?
I think
a lot of folks, both here and abroad, are tired of Americans waving the bloody
sheet of 9/11 over our heads and using the deaths of nearly 3000 of our citizens
as carte
blanche to embark on all manner of
international adventures. In Europe, the birthplace of modern colonialism, what
we're doing looks suspiciously familiar. But understanding what 9/11 meant to
the national and foreign policy apparat now holding the reins in the US is truly
is fundamental to understanding our current national strategy for survival
(first) and victory (second) - realizing that while the second goal is
desirable, the first is necessary.
So, when I speak of survival, what
is it that I mean? What are we
defending?
The historical West, taken
to mean "Christendom" has been at war with Islam more or less continuously for
over a thousand years. For much of that history, the West was on the defensive
in nearly every way, militarily, culturally and in the realms of medicine,
mathematics and science. Constantinople, the seat of Eastern Orthodoxy, was
lost to the Turks, and remains to this day Istanbul. Islamic armies were
repelled twice from the gates of Vienna in the Romantic era, rather than
European armies from Istanbul, Cairo and Baghdad. Only in relatively modern
industrial times has the civilization defined by Arabic Islamic culture
(including the Turks) been thrown on the defensive, culminating with the
collapse of the Ottoman Turkish Empire at the end of World War I. The reasons
for the reversals of fortune leading to this collapse are too lengthy to share
here - if you are truly interested (and have not already done so) I recommend
reading Bernard Lewis' "The Middle East, a brief history of the last 2000
years." The important thing to realize is that a once vibrant, ascendant and
messianic culture with a great deal of well-earned pride in its history of
accomplishment was suddenly and comprehensively subjected to a civilizational
reduction in stature that they were almost unable to assimilate, far less
resist.
After World War II, Christian
Europe was physically, materially and morally exhausted, almost bankrupt. From
the ashes rose a post-Christian orthodoxy of social support systems, democratic
government and commercial materialism - our new "West" then, what we prefer to
call think of as the union between democracy and modernity, is in gross cultural
conflict with classical Islamic culture, which views with contempt the excesses
to which our freedoms entitle us to choose, labeling it "Westoxification." In
the aftermath of the dual assaults of the Ottoman collapse and the creation of
the state of Israel, Arab culture first turned to regionalized nationalistic
socialism (the Ba'ath party) and pan-Arab nationalism - both turned out to be
empty holes so far as progress was concerned and the West continued its long
march on the path of modernity, while the Arabic civilization fell further
behind. These fascist ideologies, while unable to evolve a greater standard of
living for their citizens, at least proved capable of repressing their own
masses through the well-known levers of the internal security/terror apparatus
and externally focused propaganda. But that particular witches' brew, through an
almost Marxian dialectic, in turn created the Islamist, and eventually Salafist
political and military movements that all of the Arab dictatorships have been so
very busy ruthlessly suppressing on the home turf.
Which brings us up to the present,
except with this important caveat - the technology with which the West has
rocked the Arab Islamic culture back on its heels for the last couple centuries
has reached a level of lethality and portability which would allow a stateless
ideology to inflict potentially devastating destruction on the enemy culture -
us. This is why the WMD issue was so very important, and why not knowing what
Saddam was cooking up in the post-9/11 reality was so unacceptable. Here was a
man that fancied himself the next Sala' adin, unifying the Arab peoples under
his banner and marching those unified armies together against their enemies. A
man that had passionate reason to hate the US, and the resources of an actual,
relatively modern state at his disposal. A man who was heartlessly using the
crippling effects of international sanctions designed to proscribe his freedom
to maneuver to bilk his people of aid and use their suffering as a weapon to end
the sanctions against his regime. Prior to 9/11, all of our foreign policy
efforts were designed around what looked to be a losing battle to maintain
sanctions, making them more efficient under the "Smart Sanctions" regime, which
was itself in grave danger of being blocked by both Moscow and Paris. After 9/11
we had to awake to the reality that there were people out there that not only
hated us, but who hated us enough to slaughter our innocents in their thousands,
and whose will to do so was limited less by the morality of the act than by the
power of the weapons they could lay their hands on to fit the
purpose.
So, there were clear-eyed,
pragmatic reasons for seeing him gone, and checking for ourselves what happened
to the WMD that we knew he had. That he had admitted to having. That there were
programs of public record concerning. That he had previously used against his
own people, and his neighbors. Fortunately for us (and for our own messianic
vision of exporting democracy) there was also an opportunity in Iraq - the most
modern and secularized of the great Arab states - to discover if the seed of
democracy could take root in the Arab world, once a deeply entrenched and
powerful dictatorship had been swept aside. So now we had not just a pragmatic
reason, but a moral reason to feel good about ourselves while doing it. What we
failed to recognize, in my opinion, were the importance of the tribal culture in
Iraq, and the depth of fear the Sunni minority had of the Shia majority - fear
they had earned through their decades of repression of those selfsame
Shia.
In my opinion, the only
possible off-ramps we had for this struggle were passed by in 1991, when George
Bush (41) built his coalition to liberate Kuwait, and Saddam chose to retaliate
by firing Scuds at Israel. If we had treated this as some issue not of our
concern, a squabble among the wogs perhaps, then we wouldn't have had to base
troops in Saudi, thereby radicalizing and internationalizing the Salafist jihad.
Then we wouldn't have delegitimized Arab regimes (who spent propagandistic years
redirecting the anger of their seething masses at someone, anyone but
themselves) by associating them in the eyes of that street with our defense of
Israel against an Arab attack. But all of that is in the
past.
I don't know whether this
experiment will work. I wish I could tell you I did. We might well yet fail. But
having failed will not eliminate the existential threat that the Salafist jihad
represents - it will, instead, coalesce it. Our defeat will be their rallying
cry, and the next fight, the next milestone on this thousand year struggle will
be a fight for
our
survival rather than
their
freedom that will be all the more horrible because the balance of power is still
so far out of their favor.
This is
not a military fight, not a stand up fight, so much as it is a bloody clash of
wills using military power on our side and asymmetric tactics on theirs. We will
win when they realize that we will not be beaten. How many have to die for that
to happen? I don't know. Neither does the President. My feeling is that the
Ba'athists are cold-eyed realists who have only made a marriage of desperation
with the jihadis - once they know that their only access to the levers of power
are through the democratic processes, they will join the table. As for the
jihadis - I'm afraid that many of them will have to
die.
But what, really, is the
alternative? Soldiers fight so that civilians don't have to. And when soldiers
fight, soldiers
die.
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So
anyway, that's what I wrote him - awaiting his volley (and thanking him for the
hard questions).
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