[Note: Typepad was down yesterday for much of the day and managed to lose this post; I am re-posting it this morning.]
The war on Islamic fascism (or Islamic totalitarianism) is often described as involving asymmetric warfare. Whether we are discussing the insurgency in Iraq, the Palestinians against Israel, the Islamists in Mumbai, the general sense is that the Islamists do not have access to the same level of weaponry as the West and have to use their disadvantages, leveraged by the Western media, to carry their message and support their cause. However, there is one area in which the Islamists have a major advantage and in which the West is fighting from a position of weakness; that area is the asymmetry in psychological warfare.
The Islamists are fighting from a position of absolute certainty:
God is on their side and they cannot lose. Therefore, even minor "victories" with minimal strategic value, such as the desecration of the bodies of American soldiers, the murderous explosions on trains in Mumbai or the kidnapping of two more Israeli soldiers, are great victories to be touted throughout the Muslim world as evidence of their prowess. Defeats are only temporary.
This leads to a major advantage for the Islamists:
They can only lose by being completely discredited or completely destroyed and the West may well lack the will to do what is necessary to win on this battlefield.
Because the attacks by the Islamists, thus far, do not appear to most Westerners as truly existential threats, the West does not feel threatened enough to be desperate. As long as the West is not feeling desperate, there can be no consensus on an approach to the Islamists. Not only do we have a sizable minority among us who do not believe we are in the right, we also have a sizable minority among those who do see us as in the right who cannot tolerate the idea that we might occasionally have to resort to tactics that might discomfit the barbarians we are fighting.
This threat assessment has always been the unspoken issue at the center of our response to terror. The Islamists are willing to do whatever it takes, commit any atrocity, sacrifice any number of their own women and children, target our innocents, in order to win their cause. We are not willing to do whatever it takes.
This does not mean that I am advocating that we begin perpetrating wide spread, wholesale atrocities on our enemies (though if it ever comes to "total war", that is inevitable; please be clear on this, it is a prediction, not a wish.)
Our diffidence, in fact the nature of our civility, remains our greatest weakness. We continue to hope that by midwifing a functioning democracy in the heart of the Middle East we will eventually be able to co-opt the Muslim world into consensual political systems which would then reduce the fires of religious Jihadi intensity. This may yet work. However, the intersection of absolute religious belief and tribal societies makes this an uncertain endeavor, as we are finding out almost everyday in Iraq. Relying on the Muslim world to moderate the worst instincts of Islam may well prove to be a vain hope. Since we are not ready to defeat our enemies militarily, the default choice becomes to tolerate a certain baseline level of terror, as Israel has done for so long, until our enemies gain the capacity to inflict severe enough damage on us to convince the West that the war is truly a life and death struggle.
And then there is this report on the growing ease of DIY genetic engineering:
We might not have long to wait. Every hands-on gene hacker I polled during my project estimated they could synthesize smallpox in a month or two. I remember that game from my engineering days, so I mentally scale their estimates using the old software manager's formula: Double the length, then move up to the next increment of time. That gives us two to four years—assuming no one has already started working.
One indicator of how close we are to the "tipping point" will be the extent and intensity of the Israeli responses in Gaza and Lebanon. If the past is any guide, the Israelis will fall short of their goals (getting their soldiers back without releasing terrorists) and will eventually pull back from the brink without any resolution of the war they have been fighting for 30-60 years.
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