We are nearing the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks which woke most Americans up to the fact that radical Islam has been at war with us since 1979, and to some ways of thinking, has been at war with the West for over a thousand years. Since 9/11, there have been several successful terror attacks, in Spain and London, especially, but America has not been hit again. And therein lies the paradox of this war:
The more successful we are in protecting ourselves, the less support our efforts receive.
Only some of this can be attributed to our failures to mount an effective information war, especially at home, where mobilizing the home front is always crucial in any war. Every day that passes without a direct attack on America, the support for the overt manifestations of the war (Afghanistan and Iraq) seeps away. I doubt that there is anything that can be done to stem the erosion of support and our Islamic enemies and their witting and unwitting allies in the anti-war media, political parties, and academia are quite skillful at using events of opportunity (a truck accident in Kabul, for example) to advance their cause.
Anti-war Americans, by and large, are not unpatriotic or anti-American (although there clearly are those in the Chomsky camp who are exactly that) but because of our great success in prosecuting the war, they evaluate our danger much differently than those of us who believe that it is 1938 all over again.
As Owen West pointed out in yesterday's New York Times, the war is being fought by a tiny fraction of our population, one tenth of 1%. America has not mobilized in the way we had to mobilize for WWII, when everyone knew members of the military and recognized our stake in the outcome, as well as the consequences of losing.
Today, most people not only don't know any soldiers fighting in the Middle East but don't even know anyone in the military. On the home front, people are more concerned about their mortgage interest rates, health care costs, The Da Vinci Code and American Idol; there is nothing wrong with this but these are the preoccupations of a nation at peace, not at war.
Since 9/11 the threat to Americans at home has diminished markedly. Islamist attacks and attempted attacks have typically been labeled as criminal acts, as in the case of Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad, free lance terrorists treated as criminals unconnected to Islamic radicalism.
With peace at home, it is easy for opportunistic politicians (as well as their well meaning but ignorant brethren) to pretend that they are standing on principle when they are in fact using our success to attack the opposition and regain power that they believe is rightly theirs. As one example, Hilary Clinton voted against the confirmation of General Hayden to head the CIA. The base of the Democratic party is rabidly anti-War, in all its manifestations, even going so far as to demand we disarm ourselves from an important weapon in our armamentarium (data mining); those who oppose such efforts clearly either do not believe we are at war or don't think there will be any significant consequences to their opposition. Yet if we were forced to close down the NSA programs involved, it is indisputable that doing so would increase the likelihood of the success of future attacks.
Too much of our country acts as if the war on terror, as exemplified in the Iraq theater of operations, is a conventional war, just like Vietnam; they imagine that having destroyed the Iraqi army and Saddam's government, and recognizing that there is essentially no conventional army in the world that can face our military in armed conflict, that this war should and can be understood like past wars. Since no armies are massing on our borders (illegal immigration excepted), there is no need for our nation to support an overseas American army with soldiers killing and being killed. This reflects a fundamental misconception about the paradoxical nature of this war.
The opposition either does not think we are at war, and more importantly, does not think we can lose this war.
Dinocrat noted that we do not yet act like a nation at war and that this increases our danger; in another paradox, our best ally may end up being the hubris of our enemies:
Our enemy plans on the decadence of the West to help them in their goal of bringing us to submission. It’s a pretty good plan, as we have noted. If they are patient, they just might win; much of Western Europe looks to be within their grasp, after all. Yet history is full of examples of aggressive leaders who felt divinely or otherwise inspired to bold attacks, and who suffered the consequences of their overreaching; the Axis powers did that the last time around, and paid the price, but at a terrible cost to America and the West. Sad to say, but such arrogance and overreach may turn out to be our greatest ally this time too.
The sad f act is that we can lose this war and our current success makes our future success more uncertain. This is very much a war of paradoxes.
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