Zarqawi is gone, but there will be others--and that is only natural in this Long War
Barnett
Good news that Zarqawi is gone. I am not a believer in the notion that Al Qaeda will get smarter each time we kill or capture one of their leaders. I believe that is a cherished myth among their ranks, one perpetuated by some--but surely not all--Fourth Generation Warfare theorists. I think every time we kill one of their best and brightest, we achieve some incoherence within their ranks. Yes, tactical victories are always there for their taking, but strategic ones require strategic coordination, and killing top leaders makes such coordination much harder.
That doesn't mean less terrorism from their ranks, just less strategically effective terrorism. And the less effective their strategy becomes, the more the terrorists move into the same pool as the narcos and others who live off grid and regularly abuse the nets for their particular purposes. In short, they become less the vaunted enemy and more the chronic problem to manage.
On the other hand, Zarqawi's elevation to "master terrorist" was useful to our purposes. Here's what I wrote in Blueprint for Action (pp. 114-18) on this notion. In lieu of further comment, I offer it here to mark the occasion for what I believe it's truly worth:
"We don't really fight regimes anymore, and we can't find armies willing to take on the might of our Leviathan force. What we engage in today is primarily warfare against individuals: either killing them or rounding them up for prosecution in onesies and twosies. In fact, the U.S. military has progressively specialized in warfare against individuals across the entirety of the post–Cold War period. Consider this trajectory of our major interventions: We went into Panama in 1989 looking for one guy (Manuel Noriega); after entering Somalia in 1992, we subsequently became fixated on toppling a single warlord (Mohamed Farrah Aidid) and his top leadership; in the Balkans across the 1990s, we settled on a strategy of targeting the leadership clique of Slobodan Milosevic with very specific sanctions and a bombing campaign that ultimately put him in the docket of the International Criminal Court in The Hague; in Afghanistan we entered with specific goals of killing or capturing al Qaeda's senior leaders; and in Iraq we went in looking for a "deck of cards." Think of the big successes of this war so far: assassinations of individual al Qaeda leaders, arrests of small terrorist cells, capturing Saddam. Think of our most gnawing failure to date: our inability to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Think about our likely targets in years to come—individuals all.
We have left the era of mass war and entered the era of customized warfare. There are no interstate wars of note in the global security system today, but there are a host of bad actors inside the Gap that the Core would prefer to see disappear—violently, if necessary. The questions are how, and under what circumstances. If the Core can't come to some explicit consensus on the rule set needed to dispatch these bad actors, then not only are the Core's powers likely to work at cross-purposes but ultimately their shared perception that this is a zero-sum process will foster a dangerous sense of competition. When that happens, the Core risks dividing itself into conflicting rule sets, where the United States is viewed by other Core pillars of having a "hit list" that advances our security interests inside the Gap while damaging their own.
The question of the "most wanted" or "hit list" is not a trivial one, because it says to the world that these are the essential rule breakers in the system, meaning the transnational terrorist networks, such as al Qaeda, who've declared war on globalization's creeping advance and all the integrating dynamics that historical process triggers. Identified as such, we send strong signals to both Core and Gap about the implied rules we seek to uphold: transparency, free markets and trade, collective security, and individual freedom. Moreover, the identification of such a list is a rallying point for domestic support for the global war on terrorism. It says, this is the face of the enemy and this is what he represents. America has always personalized its wars, whether it was King George or Adolf Hitler, and we have and will continue to personalize this war in much the same way. For the retribution of 9/11, the face of the enemy is Osama bin Laden, and for the next generation of Iraq-fueled terrorists, that face is now Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—a Kaiser Soze–like figure if ever there was one.
Okay, that Dennis Miller–like reference requires some explanation.
The character Kaiser Soze appeared in the 1995 crime film The Usual Suspects. More myth than reality, Soze was described to police by a captured criminal as everyone's worst nightmare, or an almost fairy-tale figure of grotesquely evil proportions. His feats of barbarity were legendary and were clearly passed along by his subordinates in an attempt to buttress his unchallenged standing within the criminal organization atop which he allegedly reigned as kingpin. At the end of the movie, the audience discovers that Kaiser Soze is a complete fiction, created by the captured criminal to convince the police holding him that he could be released as a trivial underling in the crime syndicate they were seeking to dismantle, when in reality this self-professed snitch was the very character that he successfully mythologized with his diversionary tale of the make-believe Soze.
Throughout this global war on terrorism, you will witness time and time again this tendency for our side to elevate individual representatives of our enemy to similarly legendary status. We will create many Kaiser Sozes along the way, in part to give our enemy a defined face and in part because such figures focus our attention on the evil of our foes. Is either bin Laden or al-Zarqawi the all-powerful figure that we consistently make him out to be in our popular imagination? In the end, it doesn't matter, for if they did not exist, we would have to create them, and indeed, we will have to replace them whenever they are caught or killed. Because, as with any war, we need to provide the larger pool of real and potential enemies with an escape route toward peace, so personalizing this war allows us discretion not only in whom we choose to kill but in whom we offer the option of peace as well. As we have shown repeatedly in our post–Cold War interventions, as well as in this war on terrorism, our conflict is never with the affected nations themselves but merely with the bad actors found within. We are not at war with the Middle East or with Islam, but with a particular strain of religious totalitarianism that we seek to extinguish so that Muslims worldwide and the region itself can migrate toward peaceful integration with the Core. So these bogeymen are not only useful in this struggle, they define it.
The Kaiser Sozes define this war in the same way that grotesquely exaggerating depictions of globalization as a "Jewish-American plot to rule the world" serve to embody the fears of many inside the Gap that the global economy's advance is both overwhelming and inescapable. Anything powerful enough to elicit the response of suicide bombers and willing martyrs must—by definition—be a transformational experience of stunning proportions, otherwise why the mindless sacrifice? Again, international terrorism associated with the Salafi jihadist movement is fundamentally a function of globalization's progressive unfolding as a historical process. Yes, the grievances of this movement are local, as are the actual wars to be waged, but the millenarian-tinged, willingly apocalyptic vision that it offers demonstrates the profound sense of fatalism with which these quixotic adherents wage their struggle. They have no hope of victory but merely the chance to deny us the future we know is ours.
And so, as that future unfolds in our favor, the efforts of our enemies to thwart it will become all the more desperate, all the more fantastic, and all the more pointless. In return, our descriptions of their motivations will grow commensurately more absolute in our sense of moral purpose. We will exhibit this growing certitude because it will be many years before the threat posed by transnational terrorism will be reduced to the status of simple criminality or social nuisance, even though this is obviously our long-term goal in shrinking the Gap and extending the Core's legal rule sets around the planet. What we need to remember in this struggle, however, is that we do not offer any truces to the determined forces of disconnectedness, for they have no future in our shared world, our global community. These individuals are indeed slated for extinction, and so we must expect them to fight to the bitter end, triggering more and not less violence as globalization effectively penetrates their relatively isolated worlds.
The strategy of the Big Bang in the Middle East was never about instant peace or democracies-in-a-box, but about speeding the killing to its logical conclusion. The integration of globalization's frontier areas will always engender violent resistance by young males who feel disenfranchised, disempowered, or emasculated by the resulting new order, which inevitably involves more universal freedom unencumbered by restrictive culture or tradition. Denied the promise of their presumed authority in social hierarchies defined by brute force and gender, these angry young men will unleash their fury in mindless violence that's only too easily organized and packaged by cynical elites who will likewise lose power and authority if their preferred definition of the status quo crumbles. So let us be clear and realistic in our purpose: to actualize our definition of a future worth creating, one defined by universal freedoms enabled by connectivity and the rule sets that engenders, we are effectively killing our foes' definition of a future worth preserving. For every dream of individual freedom we enable, competing dreams of collective oppression are destroyed.
thomaspmbarnett.com |
