<You are paying too much attention to propaganda and not enough attention to facts>
Successful guerrilla methods (and successfull anti-guerrilla methods) all rely heavily on constant ideological education among the Believers, and constant progaganda to the Undecided. It has to be a priority, it has to be planned and systematic. GettingTheMessageOut is more important than anything else, in winning these kinds of wars. Americans tend to think that our WayOfLife is like a virus that instantly and permanently gets into anyone who is exposed to it. So we don't even try; we don't even pay any attention to how others react to us.
<1) Defeated the Taliban and disrupted AQ in Afghanistana.>
You don't measure success in a guerrilla war, by who holds what ground, or the body count. That's conventional-war thinking. You win a guerrila war by separating the guerrillas from their civilian base of support. Short of a Strategic Village program from Morrocco to the Phillipines, we can only do this by convincing the civilians to stop supporting the guerrillas. Which we haven't even begun to do. Afghanistan isn't even the main logistics base for AQ. Where did AQ get their money, their recruits? Where did the training for the WTC attacks happen? In Saudi Arabia (and in Florida), right under our noses. Just like in Vietnam, where the Viet Cong has large training/recruiting operations in the Mekong Delta around Saigon, ground our Generals thought they owned, because our soldiers swept through it regularly.
<year long campaign to convince the UN>
What happens in the UN is effect, not cause. What happens in the alleyways of the slums of Cairo and Karachi, that's what's decisive.
What I'm saying is, this is a struggle of memes, our BigIdea against theirs. Our BigIdea is Western MarketDemocracy, secular and materialist. Their Idea is a violent, totalitarian theocracy. And a heavy armor division of the U.S. Army isn't the best tool for spreading our meme in the Muslim world. It may even be counterproductive, convincing the Arab Street that Bin Laden is right, America is on a Crusade to conquer and colonize the Arab heartland.
I hear our leaders coming up with really stupid ideas, like having our soldiers camp out in Iraq for a decade, doing "nation-building". That's exactly what would be most likely to provoke a nationalist uprising, an Iranian-style Revolution, in Iraq, and then in Saudi Arabia. It scares me, how unprepared and ignorant and proud we are. |
