How would you define "conciliatory posture"? Would this only apply when the enemy is an actual state or government?
My definition would place a great deal of emphasis on the “posture” element. A posture is a position adopted for public consumption. I think we should make a great public show of rethinking our relationship with Israel, for one thing, though that public show need not result in immediate changes in actual policy.
At the same time, of course, we need an absolute and ruthless war against our actual enemies. In order to attack us, the terrorists need people who have both absolute commitment and the ability to cross borders, to move money, set up cover businesses, etc. A limited number of such people are available. These are the people that we need to destroy, the terrorist core operating outside the Middle East and the key leaders inside the Middle East. We are speaking here of no more than a few hundred individuals spread among dozens of nations. This is not an enemy against whom armored divisions are particularly effective.
Against these people we must spare absolutely nothing. They must be identified, located, and neutralized by every means available to the intelligence and law enforcement communities. Every dirty trick in the book should be authorized: blackmail, bribery, manipulation of foreign governments, kidnapping and/or murder where the individual can be reached in no other way.
It’s often said that we just don’t do those things and have no ability to do them. That’s not quite true. At the height of the war on drugs we used all kinds of dirty tricks in the fight against the drug lords. Those included arcane laws that justified the seizure of property even peripherally related to dealing, and enormous diplomatic and economic pressure applied to force other nations to arrest and extradite key individuals. They included kidnapping individuals and spiriting them across borders. They included a whole lot more than that, if you want to look closely. We need an effort along those lines, only several orders of magnitude larger, against the terrorist networks.
The war on drugs, of course, was unwinnable: as long as the demand for drugs is there, somebody will find a way to supply it. The war on terrorism is winnable, because terrorism is not profitable and the number of people willing and able to organize and manage it is intrinsically limited. If a large number of key people are removed and others are forced into living as harried fugitives, the terrorist networks can be neutralized.
It should be pointed out, of course, that Islamic terrorism is an enemy totally unlike, say, Hitler’s fascism. In WW2 we knew that once we conquered Germany and got rid of Hitler the war would be over. In the Middle East there is no country we can invade, no individual that we can remove, that will end the war in a single stroke. Despite all that is said about Saddam, regime change in Iraq will not be a fatal or even seriously damaging blow to al Qaeda. Even a military occupation of the entire region – which we could impose but almost certainly not sustain – would not provide any real protection against terrorism. It would provide the terrorists with an almost unlimited supply of what they need most: motivated volunteers.
My preferred strategy, then, involves 3 components. The shortest term goal is to track down and eliminate terrorists, all over, by all possible means. The medium term goal is to reduce the heat level around the Middle East: chill the war talk, keep a low military profile, lots of negotiations and conferring, big show of multilateralism and concern for the process by which things are done. We need a whole lot less of the “raghead” talk. The point is simply to get populations on a peace footing. One reason for that: people at war rally behind their leaders and accept hardship; people at peace criticize their leaders and want more from them. This is true everywhere.
The long-term goal is to sell openness, prosperity, democracy and the benefits they bring directly to the Muslim people, bypassing the leaders and exposing them to dismissal by people who want more from a Government than these medieval lunatics can deliver. We don’t want to conquer bad governments. We want to see bad governments fall from the inside.
An enemy like Al-Queda would I think view any conciliatory posture, whether to themselves or to a government that supports it, as a victory and a reason to continue the battle.
Do you think that al Qaeda will stop fighting if they don’t have immediate victories at hand? The record in Afghanistan suggests otherwise. I don’t think their strategy is to break our will with a few high profile attacks. I think they are trying to draw us into a conflict at their level, which is where they believe they can win.
I’m not honestly, that concerned with what the al Qaeda people think. They will detest us and try to destroy us no matter what we do. I don’t want to make them question their beliefs; they stopped doing that long ago. The audience we’re posturing to is not al Qaeda or any similar group, but the populations that support them. We’re not adopting a posture to make peace with al Qaeda, we are adopting a posture to make al Qaeda supporters doubt and resist the rhetoric they hear from people they have every reason to distrust, meaning their own leaders.
Well, the US IS a military threat (theoretically) to any country or entity it opposes.
The question is how we choose to use that threat. We need to make it clear that we are a threat only to those who attack us, and that we are not trying to occupy anybody’s country, take over their industries, or reshape the Middle East in our image. We can appear firm but reasonable.
I don't see radical Islam adopting "live and let live" or "win-win" philosophies, so it must be destroyed or neutralized.
I agree. I just think that it will be cheaper and more cost-effective in the long run to have them destroyed or neutralized by their own people.
I believe the short-term threat is too strong for the US to limit itself to strategies that are either reactive or will take decades to have a noticeable effect.
Invading and occupying nations is a reactive strategy. It is also a strategy that has little real potential for striking a critical blow against terrorism: al Qaeda could lose the support of any nation, or any several nations, and still attack us effectively. It is a strategy that makes one of our opponent’s key tasks – persuading their people to hate and fear us – much easier.
We want to simultaneously neutralize terrorists and deprive terrorists and radicval governments of their public support. Policies should be assessed against those goals. |
