My first order of business today is to thank Owen Johnson for the exceptional essay he put together describing our Strategy, our goals, and offering reasons for optimism in this Long War against our enemies. I do not think I have seen such a comprehensive piece anywhere else and I found it invaluable for organizing my thinking about the current conflict. To Recap:
Part I offered a description of the who we are fighting and the various components of our Strategic armamentarium.
Part II focused on the Information Warfare aspects of the conflict.
Part III examined the role of Islam and the goals of the Islamists in this war.
Part IV summarized our strategy and offered evidence that we are winning at this point in the Long War. In an Epilog, Owen pointed to one potential future paradoxical outcome.
In the Part IV section On Victory, Owen suggests that the best metric we have for determining we are winning is the behavior and beliefs of our enemy, and they act and believe as if they are losing, all the while protesting they are winning:
The Jihadis have watched the progress in Iraq and Afghanistan, considered the consequences for Islam and for themselves, and I think they are ones who now see the writing on the wall: that they are divided, that they have been found wanting, and that their days are numbered. They are not fighting for time anymore — they are fighting for their lives.
Notice the mention that the Jihadis are not fighting for time anymore. Time and Will are of the essence and those are the areas of most concern for me.
Owen makes the point that we will never be able to break the will of the Jihadis, but can isolate and starve them:
There is only one way to deal with an enemy who will never give up: you convince the larger society of which he is a part to give him up. As I have pointed out throughout this essay, without the support of their larger society, the Jihadis cannot survive.
I agree with Owen that, at the moment, we are indeed winning the long war against Islamic fascism, but I wonder about our ability to remain mobilized in the face of the forces arrayed against us. Furthermore, I wonder if our impatience and our mutual incomprehension will inevitably lead to worse coming to worst.
For our strategy to work, we need perseverance, which means our will must be sustained over a long period of time. The very best way to undermine our Strategy would be for us to retreat from the field periodically, reacting in spasms of rage and/or studied violence to future attacks. This is essentially the reactive Strategy that the Democrats and much of the MSM would prefer, though they rarely articulate it in those terms. After all, if your Strategy is passive containment and policing, then you are, by definition, accepting a position of reacting to future attacks rather than trying to drain the swamps from which the evil arises. By withdrawing troops from Iraq, for example, and allowing the area to decline more swiftly into anarchy and eventual strongman rule, you are negating your advantage of being situated in the middle of a bad neighborhood where the "bad guys" can be monitored most closely and fought most effectively.
It is our will and our ability to sustain our will over time that is most at issue in this war. Owen addresses these questions on his own blog and, not unexpectedly, makes some excellent points in his post Outflanking the Left:
For one thing, we seem to have a problem with the moderates apparently be missing in action. Oddly — and I ask forbearance for making a widely disproportionate analogy — we hear a lot about the silence of moderate Muslims in the face of terrorism, but we don’t hear nearly as much about the silence of American moderates in the face of repeated determined efforts by the Left to undermine our resolve to fight those same terrorists. Yet the terrorism and the antics of the Left, abetted by the MSM, have exactly the same immediate goal: to get us to retreat from the war.
Unfortunately, our most powerful forces of Information Warfare are allied with the left and the far left, and although they may be unaware of their own bias and the potential results of their biased reporting, they are too often effectively on the side of the enemy. Even such venerable conservative publications as the Wall Street Journal have minimal appreciation for Strategy, as per Richard Fernandez, in his comments about a recent WSJ article:
Those paragraphs provide a stepping-stone to climb out of the article to view it from a second level: the role of the US military within a national strategic outlook. The WSJ description of Abizaid's strategy encapsulates all that is potentially revolutionary, controversial and misunderstood about the War on Terror. When President Bush declared his goal was to "bring democracy to the Middle East" it was immediately derided by those who believed democracy could never come to the region; and if it did would come only in the form of Islamism. Others argued that America already had a politco/military fighting team in the State Department and Department of Defense. Why should there be need of another?. But the WSJ article clearly describes a subtly different thing: politico/military warfare primarily executed by the military personnel at the level of communities, tribes and sects. It is integrated warfare many levels down from the sphere inhabited by diplomats. And if the WSJ speaks admiringly of it; it is nevertheless a method without a national strategy.
The genuine tone of amazement in the WSJ is a reminder of how poorly understood the military role of the War on Terror has been, especially in Iraq.
Meanwhile, another major component of our IW capacity resides in our professoriate which seems to have taken Marxist derived radical feminism and political correctness to suicidal levels. Judith Apter Klinghoffer links to an article which describes the treatment (mistreatment) of women in one of our Muslim allies in this war. That the left can offer their support to those who would murder apostates and homosexuals, push women back into submission, threaten "infidels" to Convert to Islam or Die and attempt to finish Hitler's genocide is stunning, but no longer surprising.
Fighting the IW with two major elements of our weaponry working for the other side is a problematic handicap that is likely to lead directly to another major problem with our long term Strategy. In his essay, Owen points out that Iran remains a serious stumbling block. If Iran obtains nuclear weapons, all bets are off and the number of causalities in this war increases exponentially. The single best way to deter Iran is to convince the Iranian Mullahs that the threat of force is a valid one. Unfortunately, all evidence points to the meta-communication to the Iranians being "full speed ahead!" Marc Schulman links to a Times article describing the The Collapse of Resolve of the West:
The awkward reality is that Iran will only reconsider its plans if it decides that there is a plausible chance of a military strike against it.
The equally inconvenient situation is that it has absolutely no reason at the moment to assume this . . .
Finally, there are signs that time is growing short. The West, including America, is increasingly impatient with Islam (and the distinctions between Moderate Islam and the Islamic fascists are becoming harder and harder to parse) and the reticence of their governments. Caerdroia may be unduly alarmist when he links to Britons threaten Muslim beheadings in footage and says, in It Was Only a Matter of Time:
I have long maintained three things: 1) people will fight the war against the jihadis if their governments don't; 2) Europe will have a civil war (Muslims v everyone else) in our lifetime; 3) Europe's politics, at the next tipping point, will go radically right wing to the same degree that they have been radically left wing since before WWII. I believe that this is evidence that the first point is starting to come about, and that it will lead to the second.
Dinocrat notices our growing impatience and suggests it bodes poorly for our long term Strategy, We hear growing impatience to end the war, by doing whatever it takes to win:
We hear from many Americans who now have a terribly itchy trigger finger versus America’s declared enemies. That may be a good thing, or it may be a very bad thing, from the standpoint of making policy for a great power. Nonetheless, it is a sentiment to be ignored by politicians at their peril.
UPDATE
It would be a very fair question to ask: just how do these sentiments translate into action or policy, and we don’t know that we have an answer to that question. But we have the feeling that soon enough, the frustration we sense may well translate into the mother of all disproportionate responses after some enemy provocation. We’re not there yet, but we are nearer the tipping point than ever.
Finally, there is the troublesome sense that even when we translate the words of our enemies and/or speak the same language, we are misunderstanding each other in fundamental ways. David Bogner, an American who has relocated to Israel, posted an interesting story last week which suggests there is much in our thinking that is at odds with the thinking of our enemies; one wonders if the gap can be bridged. In Cultural puzzles... and disconnects he described a visit to the Emergency Room (for reasons he reviews in his blog post). Various people try their hand at a children's puzzle to wile away the time; all are a bit pre-occupied and none solve the problem. However, when the puzzle is handed to a young Arab man there with his child, he proceeds to solve the puzzle by "cheating." What is most interesting and significant is that what is so clearly "cheating" to almost anyone raised in a Western culture is not seen as a "cheat" but is apparently taken as perfectly acceptable behavior:
To be clear, this young Arab man made only a cursory attempt to create the picture by sliding the puzzle pieces the traditional way. And once he abondoned the traditional method, he didn't try to conceal his somewhat non-traditional method of 'solving' the puzzle from others. There was neither guile nor shame evidenced in what he did, and he was as proud of the end result as anyone would have been had they completed the picture of the ladybug in the way the puzzle's manufacturer intended.
This story isn't intended to cast aspersions on one approach to problem-solving over another. I've simply shared this story of the ladybug puzzle... and the underlying cultural puzzle it represents... because I am pretty sure Zahava has inadvertently stumbled upon the roots of the hopeless cultural disconnect extant here in the middle east.
This is a small example of a larger problem. When one culture doesn't even recognize that their behavior breaks the rules of another culture, conflict avoidance becomes highly problematic.
Many people have written about the Honor-Shame culture prevalent in the Middle East, with its emphasis on appearances and lack of the guilt that motivates Western cultures; Honor-Shame cultures are peculiarly resistant to notions of responsibility. It may be that the gulf between us causes us to speak past each other rather than to each other. If that is true, then there is minimal basis for negotiation since we are not agreeing on the basic questions we need to negotiate. Further more, our restraint is interpreted as weakness and our criticism is interpreted as attacks. At the same time, the constant complaints of their victimization increasingly fall on deaf ears and alienate those they are trying to make allies, or perhaps more likely to lull, subvert, or intimidate.
Wars are fought between societies and we do not yet know if the West has the Will and if we have the Time to win this war with a minimum of bloodshed.
[I am opening the comments without moderation in the interest of increasing the flow of conversation. Please keep all comments respectful and free of ad hominem attacks and gratuitous epithets. If your comment steps over the line I will let you know and offer a chance to emend your thoughts, but I will summarily remove particularly noxious comments.]
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