I just wrote this in response to a friend’s post on LiveJournal regarding Israel. It was a random musing of sorts, but I thought it would be interesting to throw it out here.
By all means, please tear this apart. 🙂 It’s more of a brain dropping than an absolute, calculated belief.
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The fact is, terrorist cells and organizations, by their very nature, are nearly impossible to wipe out completely. They’re like a virus (Mr. Anderson); their ability to replicate and stay out of sight is impressive, and it’s very hard to attack them without doing severe damage to the body they inhabit. In this case, Lebanon.
Furthermore, their heirarchy is so spread out that you cannot behead the dragon. Nor can you capture your opponent’s major supply centers or invade their country. Again, they are too diverse.
So it follows, therefore, that if we cannot achieve victory through defeating their leaders, conquering their territory, or even annihilating them completely, we must adopt a new way to win.
So, flying in the face of all conventional military thought (which has gotten us nowhere with this new enemy), I propose we must fight an almost purely defensive battle. We don’t outsmart them, we don’t outmaneuver them. We simply outlast them. There’s an old Irish saying that in war, it’s not those who can inflict the most, it’s those who can suffer the most that emerge victorious. And we can take a lot more than they can, if we only would realize it.
Because we’re big (I’m speaking mostly of America here, but it applies on a lesser level to Israel as well, so long as Israel maintains its friendships with big countries). We’re very big. And we can take a hell of a lot more than they’ve been dishing out so far. Looked at from a purely statistical standpoint, September 11th was barely a scratch on the surface of America’s numbers and strength. Al-Qaeda’s best minds spent years of preparation and planning, consumed a large amount of resources throwing themselves into a concerted attack, and a few years later we find that Nature, acting in her normal completely random way, can dwarf their best efforts when it comes to devastation. Al-Qaeda did not hurt us that deeply on September 11th. What ended up screwing us over was that we overreacted.
Our problem is that as a country we’re still pursuing the myth of perfect safety. But so long as we accept that the occasional attack, no matter how hard we try to safeguard against it, is an inevitability, and learn to live with them, then we remove the “terror” from the equation. Once we start expecting them, they stop taking us by surprise, and we can both prepare and budget for them. Storing up grain against the inevitable bad harvest, if you will. Terrorist threats are then no longer the boogeyman, the horrible possibility that keeps us up at night, but become instead(at least in the national consciousness) a frustration, an annoyance. On an individual level it’s no less heartwrenching to those who are affected by the strikes, but from the perspective of a community or a nation they can be thought of as minor inconveniences. And in so thinking we say to our enemies: “We will be here long, long after time has taken its toll on you.”
Terrorist groups have hardly ever lasted for even a generation, as evil always finds a way to turn upon itself. A strong nation lasts for centuries.
Also, taking this stance frees up a ton of resources that were previously wasted attacking targets that vanished as soon as we arrived and left us no safer than before. And those resources can be put to tremendous humanitarian use. A group based out of Rome analyzed what could have been done with the money that we’ve thrown at Iraq in the past few years – hundreds of billions of dollars – and determined that such money would have been sufficient to bring clean water to every single person on the globe. Every town, every village, every camp.
That’s obviously an extreme example, but if we start implementing programs even a fraction as large, over time the terrorist recruiters will find their pool drying up quickly. Violent religious fervor *thrives* on poverty. Improve your average person’s lot in life, and they’ll be less likely to turn desperate and angry.
So that’s my plan for long-term victory.
Of course, there’s one tiny little thing that throws a wrench in this entire argument: the atom. Or, more precisely, the fact that it can be split.
To take the analogy further
If we’re comparing terrorism to a virus, then how do you get rid of a virus? You have two options: Rowan’s aforementioned outlasting the cold. You also have another option. Turn the body’s defenses against the virus.
What we’re doing now is akin to radiation and chemotherapy. The idea of raising the standard of living is akin to turing the body’s defenses against the virus or cancer.
Look what we did with Germany and Japan after WWII. It’s common sense: aiding works out better than attacking almost every time.
My $.02 Weed
Resources?
And yet I cannot help but wonder if we have the resources to do a Germany or a Japan again. At least in Germany, we had the collected resources of many nations behind us. Not the least, the Soviets. Japan, again, had international cooperation behind rebuilding their economy.
I was talking with my mother and stepfather tonight, and finally vocalized what has long been a growing threat in my mind. A history lesson may be required first, though.
Mao Tse Tung was upset with Russia. Stalin had passed away, and his successor had spent a great deal of time and money decrying Stalin’s methods and his mission. Mao, on the other hand, had gotten along really well with Stalin, and shared a vision with him of a Communist utopian China and USSR. As Stalin’s successor’s became increasingly hostile towards China, China sought — and found — an ally in the United States.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Mao feared being surrounded on all sides by Soviet-style Communist states, as Soviet-backed military and PR campaigns succeeded throughout the East. Korea. Siberia. India gaining independence and becoming immediately very friendly (as it is today) with Russia. Vietnam. And…
…Afghanistan.
Continuing Mao’s efforts even after he stepped down, China poured billions into efforts to fund the terrorists who were fighting Soviet rule in Afghanistan. The United States was also pouring money into these “freedom fighters”, secretly and openly. In a U.S. camp, a young rebel named Usama Bin Ladin earned the nickname “The Archer” from US servicemen for his skill with US-made rocket-propelled grenades.
For ten years, the Soviets fought the insurrectionists in an attempt to maintain order. But, after ten years of constant guerilla attacks, they withdrew in 1988, and the USSR fell only a few years later, largely due to the enormous debt they had racked up attempting to maintain control of Afghanistan.
The combined efforts of the US and China, along with Afghani freedom fighters including Usama Bin Ladin, bankrupted the USSR.
I see our current situation in Iraq the same way. What was a “coalition of the willing” is today a US-maintained outpost in hostile territory. We have mobilized massive numbers of troops and stretched ourselves thin to maintain order in the area. We are under-reporting our debt to the tune of over $400bn a year, and those checks are coming due.
I see, in the face of Afghanistan and Iraq, a mobilizing new nation. An Arabic nation, choosing to unite against the perceived common foe of the West. With a billion people in the region, should a potent enough leader arise and a complacent, over-spent West be powerless to intervene, we could see the uniting of the Arab nations (colonies, really, with boundaries arbitrarily drawn in the wake of World War II) in a way that hasn’t been seen since the Crusades.
Do we want to stop such an event? Is it our right? We profit from a fragmented, divided Arabia. Their petty tribal war games assure us a steady supply of oil, because somebody’s always willing to break ranks. We’ve made ourselves a player in those wargames, though… the biggest player, in fact. Can we win, or have we positioned ourselves for an eventual stalemate?
I suspect that the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics may be followed by a similar dissolution of a nation an ocean away if we do not figure out what to do to prevent it.
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Matthew P. Barnson
A scary possiblity…
You may well be on to something there. I would say that the best way to prevent becoming defeated like the Soviet Union was would be to make our presense less felt in the region.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend… but if suddenly that big enemy’s not as much of a threat or a presence, that friendship isn’t going to last long. Even in Iraq, we’re seeing that tribal and pseudo-religious infighting is blossoming. Islamic terrorist attacks are hardly exclusively targetting Americans.
We’ll never be able to make ourselves a non-target. But if we’re not constantly there, not constantly reminding every person in the Middle East about the Great Satan looming from far beyond the sea, it’s going to be a lot harder for a leader to unite them.
The Crossroads Of The East
But do we want to prevent a Middle-Eastern Empire? Many have risen and fallen in the area over millenia, and while they exert great power over trade routes while present, their history is inevitably war-torn. The Middle East is the crossroads of commerce between the East and Europe. With abundant natural resources, it’s a constant target for expansionistic neighbors.
Maybe we should just leave and let them fight amongst themselves until they’ve made an empire. Then, at least, they wouldn’t have us as a scapegoat for their time-honored tradition of intercine genocide.
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Matthew P. Barnson