Pierre Legrand’s Pink Flamingo Bar

A sampling from around the blogsphere regarding our war against Islamic “radicals”. It is not a time to be optimistic about our chances of success given the viewpoints that are starting to spring up. In this country we do not seem to have anyone in any position of influence be it political, national press or in higher education who remember what it is like to face an enemy who doesn’t wish for concessions but victory. No one seems to be able to shake away the idea that negotiations and a war of signals, compromise and half measures will work against an enemy who merely wants your civilization to end.

Lets start with an interesting look at the viewpoints of an admittedly small sampling of the Egyptian population. Sandmonkey admits that this is not a big enough sampling to represent an accurate poll but the results are interesting nonetheless.

Rantings of a Sandmonkey Some slightly uncomfortable questions
Impressed by this point of view that I haven’t considerd before, I asked him what he would’ve thought, if a Hezbollah rocket had attacked a building in Israel, killing 55 civillians, of which 30 were children. He responded immeidtely “I would’ve thought it was great! A7san!”.

Then take a look at this comment left at INDC by a Marine who was against the war in Iraq. Certainly I disagree with him that Iraq was not part of our war but everything else he says hits home.

What should be done in Lebanon? Well, Isreal should flatten the southern portions of it as well as the Bekaa valley. They should invade and eliminate their enemies house by house. If it takes 4 years and much loss of life on both sides, then so be it, but utterly destroy them. 

Of course I know what exactly that means to enage our enemies that way. It means a total commitment of our nation’s resources to the effort. It means casualties on a grand scale. It means the outrage of the world against us. It means so much hatred towards us.

Funny how none of that mattered 60 years ago. How much time do you think FDR spent wondering whether or not the German people would hate us for fire-bombing their cities? Hell, much of the South in this country still hate Yankees, so what, they lost without ambiguity. This concept of not wanting to anger the locals is an invention of the late 20th century. Our willingness to win has slowly declined in direct proportion to our desire to be liked. We half-ass our efforts and get half-assed results. We’re not fighting a war on terror, we’re performing ‘police actions’ with as few as troops as possible doing as little harm as possible. It’s war redfined.

So there it is in a nut-shell. This is why I am so reluctant to commit Americans to battle, because when we do, it should be balls-to-the-wall, all out warfare.

It should be noted that his comment was left to this post which in part attempts to claim that some on the right are calling for wanton slaughter as a strategy.

But the global war on terror is a wildly asymmetrical conflict that’s only going to grow more frustrating and complex as the ubiquitization of destructive technology erases the easy lines of malicious nation states, and consequently mutes the effect of the kind of total warfare that historically pushes political solutions. As a result, much of the bluster about ditching Queensbury rules and going “Dubya Dubya Too” on our “enemies” as an evident solution to the conflict is simply that: bluster.

When I call for taking the gloves off it is always in reference to actually going after those who enable the terrorists, like the States who sponsor them. No doubt though I have some posts that mirror that Marines wish for total war or no war.

Both INDC and Washington Monthly seem to make the mistake of accepting the idea that no states are involved in terror. This was a fantasy concocted by those unwilling to hold states to account for the vast terror attacks already perpetuated by their proxies. Avoiding reality is no way to win wars and yet we seem to be sliding into an abyss of wishful thinking. Evidence of this idea can be seen in Kevin Drum’s post here where he states:

The fight against Islamic jihadism is essentially a vast, global counterinsurgency, something that the United States is lousy at. But we’d better get good at it fast, and the first step is to discard the fatuous notion that more violence is the obvious answer when the current amount of violence isn’t doing the job. History suggests very strongly that the truth is exactly the opposite.

Nowhere in either INDC or Kevin Drum’s arguments can we find any recognition that it is States that provide the fuel to power most of the massive terror strikes in the world. And yet we know for a fact that it was Hezballah that struck the Marines in Lebanon in 1983. We know as well as can be known that they were funded and trained by Iran. It would seem fairly logical to assume that one of the first tasks in fighting the Islamic “radicals” would be to end their sponsors ability to fund and train them. And yet they are not alone in missing the connections between States and the Terror that we are fighting so hard to prevent from happening again in this country.

Now we are truly beginning to see the evil fruit of the Bush administrations decision to mute the terror connections between Saddam and worldwide Islamic terror. More specifically, the Bush administrations downplaying of the incredibly damning connections between Saddam and Terrorists allowed the ridiculous construct of an incompetent CIA, the idea that terrorists were stateless actors, to regain status as an accepted truism without a shred of evidence. Even though it was people like Douglas Feith and even Vice President Cheney who again and again showed the blatant and egregious collaborations between the State of Iraq and numerous terrorists, not the least being Al Qaeda.

It goes without saying that it takes a much different sort of war to take down a state like Iran or Iraq than it does to end a local insurgency. And yet even if we grant them the idea that some of our enemies are local insurgents, indeed this is the case in Iraq

, I find myself disagreeing with both Bill and Kevin when they try to make the point that less is better. Specifically this statement at INDC bothers me a bit:

***** UPDATE: SeanH points out that more force does not “usually” work in modern counterinsurgencies. He’s right. But I was referring to the trend in all of recorded history, and certain modern yet ruthless societies. There is a threshold of violence that works just fine in crushing insurgencies; it’s simply not crossed by modern Western powers, a truism which makes agitating for a more aggressive military approach all the more unrealistic.

And I am not much happier with this statement by Kevin.

I believe it’s fundamentally nonmilitary and revolves around engagement: trade agreements, security pacts, genuine support for grassroots democracy, a willingness to practice the same international rules we preach, etc. The idea is to slowly but steadily promote democratic rule, liberal institutions, education of women, and international commerce. When military responses are necessary, they should be short, highly targeted, and designed to piss off the surrounding citizenry as little as possible. This will, needless to say, take a very long time and a lot of self restraint, but it won’t succeed at all if every few years we set things back a decade with a conventional war.

It is worth remembering a few lovely quotes from our enemy about this time.

We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.Hussein Massawi, a former Hezbollah leader.

And lets not forget that paragon of Islamic Faith Ayatollah Khomeini who refers to Jihad in the following context;

“…the conquest of non-Muslim territory. The domination of Koranic law from one end of the earth to the other..is the final goal…of this war of conquest.”

Another gem from the Leader who Jimmy Carter thought would be better than the Shah.

Islam divides the whole of humanity into two parties, the Hizbe Allah (Muslims) and the Hizbul Satan (non-Muslims). The former should feel a hatred, a revulsion, an abhorrence of everything un-Islamic. To quote the Ayatollah Khomeini again, “Eleven things are unclean: urine, excrement, sperm, blood, a dog, a pig, bones, a non-Muslim man and woman, wine, beer, and the perspiration of a camel that eats filth.”
- “The Dhimmi” Bat Ye’or, NJ, 1985, quoting Ayatollah Khomeini

Exactly how we fight a limited war against these folks has yet to be described adequately. What Kevin has described was tried and it failed miserably. No one can accuse either Ronald Reagan who stood aside and did nothing after 241 Marines died, the single highest death toll since Iwo Jima, or Bill Clinton who did nothing after an attempt was made to murder thousands in the WTC of embarking on a Crusade. Yet all it bought for us was time enough for our enemies to gain training to succeed on 9/11. Now by our desire to be loved we are risking terrible consequences not only for our own population should a nuclear weapon detonate in San Francisco but we are also risking the most terrible genocide in world history should the United States be provoked into a massive retaliation.

By our own reluctance to defend ourselves we are sending a deadly message of weakness to our enemies. We are not fighting a bunch of people who are sending signals. We are fighting a people who believe that killing us in large enough numbers will win the war for them. And a fraction of them believe that even if they don’t win the war that killing us gives them some sort of blessing in their version of heaven. They understand the basic goal in warfare that we seem to have become too sophisticated to remember, you win when the otherside’s will to fight has vanished.

Sadly this usually only comes after massive numbers of people have died. And yet better them than us. What we need to be mindful of are the people in this country who believe that they would rather die than to kill enough people to win. Those are the most dangerous sorts.

Tags: BlogDesk, Cheney, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Muslim, Khomeni, terrorist, terrorism

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