It's a new World.
After the WTC attack, the world is a different place. We are at war. There have been small skirmishes before, but this is the first major battle, and we lost it.
Our attackers are not criminals, they did not commit a crime, and our goal should not be to bring them to justice. Rather, they are soldiers in a war, serving an opponent whose ideology is incompatible with ours. There is not room enough on this planet for us and them. All truces and negotiations are merely temporary expedients. Our permanent goal should be to utterly destroy their ability and will to harm us.
Americans avoid war, and habitually hope that World Wars will not involve us. We tried to stay neutral in the first years of WW1 and WW2. At the end of WW2, we invited the Soviet Union to enjoy the benefits of the Marshall Plan. We offered to rebuild their country. Because we don't want war, we have acted so far as if the various attacks on us have been isolated small acts by small groups. We have dealt with them after the fact, and we have attacked them with only a tiny fraction of the power at our disposal, and we have not attacked if it meant a lot of civilian casualties. These methods will not suffice any longer.
Our goal in WW2 and the Cold War was to destroy Fascism and Communism, not to destroy the German or Russian peoples. Likewise, our goal should be to destroy the Fundamentalist Moslem ideology who thinks of America as the Great Satan, and who has declared holy war against us. Our goal cannot be to destroy the Arab or Moslem people. It is critical to make that distinction.
In war, whoever chooses the time and place of battle, whoever surprises their enemy, usually wins that battle. That's why we lost at Pearl Harbor, and that's why we just lost again. A war against an enemy who does not identify himself, is a new thing. We are going to have to make up the rules of engagement; there aren't precedents. In many ways, this is going to be like a guerilla war: a war against many small dispersed enemy units, who make no distinction between combatant and civilian, who avoid battle whenever they don't have a local advantage. We lost the last time we fought a guerilla army, in Vietnam. The way to win the current war is:
1. Mao said: "the Red Army and the People are like a fish swimming in the ocean". The way to win against a guerilla army, is to drain that ocean. Identify where the enemy is getting his money, food, weapons, information. Identify his logistics. Then systematically destroy them, by any means available (using diplomatic and economic pressure if that works, and military means otherwise. Do not allow the enemy any Safe Sanctuary, where he can train, resupply, and rearm. The diplomacy will work better, if it is understood the next step is a rapid escalation without limit in military responses).
2. When I said, "without limit", I meant exactly that. We must be prepared to achieve our goals, by applying whatever means are necessary. As a nation, we need to understand that the next time an office building in a major American city is attacked, the weapon will be a nuclear bomb, or some other weapon of mass destruction. Our enemy, clearly, will not restrain himself; there is overwhelming evidence that he has been actively and successfully acquiring the means to make and use these weapons, for years. This is not a vague, theoretical danger for the distant future. It is present reality. When we go after the enemy in, say, training camps in Afghanistan, conventional weapons may not work. Using ground troops would be extremely difficult, as the Russians (and before that, the British) learned. It may take a few dozen tactical nuclear weapons. My initial response to this idea was revulsion, a horrified rejection. But, given a certainty that the enemy will acquire these weapons, and use them unless we destroy him first, and that we may not be able to destroy him any other way, I am led to this horrible conclusion.
3. In Vietnam, we lost the war for "hearts and minds", at home and on the battlefield. We have got to win the coming battle for hearts and minds, in the countries where support for Moslem Fundamentalism comes from. If we don't, our enemy will have an endless supply of suicidal martyrs to target at us. I realize that using nuclear weapons against targets in Moslem countries is going to make a lot of people, from New York to Cairo, think of us as the Great Satan. It's going to be a difficult balancing act. We made the Japanese our loyal allies, after Hiroshima. It can be done. There is no other choice but to try.
4. Actually, there is another choice. We can fiddle and do half-way measures, and wait until our dead are in the millions, and then make the difficult choices I've listed above. |
