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June 20, 2005
Objectives
Those who do not study history, or omit the military parts of it1, and who are not trained in warfare, generally miss a lot of the big characteristics, strategies, and determinants of war. It's not just the "little" things, like what particular equipment can and can't do, and how units are organized for different tasks, but big things, like the importance of morale, the inevitability of escalation, and the fact that the opponents aren't fighting the same war.
Aren't fighting the same war? Well, let me put it another way: aren't fighting for the same end state. It is, in fact, more uncommon for two belligerents to have the same conditions for victory than it is for them to have different conditions. For example, in the US Civil War, the North's objective was to reunify the nation, while the South's objective was to successfully separate from the North. So the condition for victory for the North was the defeat of the South; the South did not have to beat the North, just get the North to stop trying to beat it. Yet this is a case where the objectives are relatively similar - they flowed from the same choices of outcome. This is not always the case: sometimes the goals diverge markedly, such as the War of 1812, where our goal was to prevent British predation on our merchants, and the British goal was to defeat the French (for which aim the British needed seamen, which it got in part by preying on American merchants).
In the Terror Wars, our objectives started out markedly different from the enemy's: we sought to punish the terrorists for 9/11, and to destroy the terrorist organizations so that they wouldn't threaten us again; the enemy sought to kick us out of Saudi Arabia as part of their plan to restore the Caliphate. To them, we were a sideline, interesting mostly because of our support of the regimes they intended to bring down.
But while the enemy objectives have not changed, except that we are now in Iraq instead of in Saudi Arabia, our objectives have changed dramatically. As we came to realize that defeating the terrorists now would be meaningless, because the totalitarian fascist ideology that drives them would simply create new terror groups, our objective shifted to democratizing and modernizing the Middle East, so as to remove the ideology of jihad as a threat. This change in goals took place between the beginning of the build-up to war in Iraq and the replacement of General Garner - in fact I think that it was the replacement of General Garner that marked the acceptance within the administration that our long-term strategy must include democratizing the Middle East.
In other words, our goals have converged with our enemy's goals, and as a consequence, our objectives have become symmetrical: they seek to restore the Caliphate, and we seek to ensure conditions that would prevent the Caliphate from being established: representative government, economic prosperity, and a more realistic world-view. In order for the enemy to win, they must continue fighting - not necessarily effectively, just noticeably - until we withdraw. At that point, they claim victory and, greatly strengthened, proceed to attack the Arab governments in order to restore the Caliphate. In order for us to win, we must establish representative governments strong enough to resist the jihadis or we must destroy the jihadis and the funding and ideology-generation systems that create them (which effectively means destroying every Wahabi and Salafist mosque and imam, as well as the jihadis, so thoroughly that no one will be tempted to try preaching jihad out of fear for their lives). Since we aren't prepared to do the latter (yet), we must attempt the former.
What's very interesting is that this means that the primary determinants of the war are time and public will: so long as we are able to sustain the public will to simply not withdraw, we will eventually succeed in establishing representative governments in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. And it is here that we come to the third force in this war: the Western Left (and to a much lesser extent, the extreme right).
For these groups, their goal is to gain political power. At the moment, the balance of power in the US is highly in favor of the Republicans, which is not helpful to the Left. So how does the Left gain power? Well, certainly, the last time that there was a significant Leftward lurch electorally was after Viet Nam, where the Republicans - humiliated by a combination of Watergate and losing the war after a politically-forced withdrawal - lost heavily. And thus, from the Left's goals and history, we get their objectives: embarrass the Republicans, and force us to withdraw from Iraq. The combination of the two will (at least in the mind of the Left) return the Left to power.
Thus, the left's objectives have become congruent to the enemy's objectives: forcing the US to withdraw from Iraq, and in general to lose the Terror Wars, serves both the enemy's and the Left's purposes. This is why it seems that the Left is on the side of the enemy: they are working to the same midpoint. The Left seems to believe that it stops there, that the enemy will simply work on restoring the Caliphate, behead a bunch of other Muslims and who cares? and will happily mind their own business. How they can think this after 9/11 escapes me totally. There are a few other things they are missing as well about the probable consequences.
1No kidding: my college American history professor made very clear up front that we would not study any wars, because they weren't relevant to how people live, which is what's important about history. Ever since then, I've understood how we get people waving paper and declaring "Peace in our Time" - fantasy is so much less upsetting than reality.
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Comments
There are two major ideological wars going on around the world. One is going on within the Muslim world between Islamic fundamentalism and liberal democracy. Invading Iraq, deposing Saddam and beginning the long process of the establishment of democratic institutions was an essential component of a strategy of opposing Islamic fundementalism with liberal democracy. Not only did we create a battlespace where we could fight and defeat the terrorists on our terms, but we created a real world alternative to the stagnant status quo and the Islamist vision of the Caliphate.
The other war of ideas is one you have written about here in the past: the war of ideas within the West. This is an ideological conflict between the latest manifestation of socialism, Transnational Progressivism, characterized by its holy trinity of massive regualtion, taxation and welfare and its hostility to individual initiative and a market economy; and the latest manifestation of the classical liberalism, characterized by its focus on individualism, entrepreneurship, free markets and trade, and limited gov't. For the left, Europe is seen as the exemplar of their vision while the United States is the great capitalist satan.
You're right, Jeff, that both the Islamists and the Western (including American) left have the same goal of defeating the US in Iraq. US success in Iraq will deal a mortal blow to the Islamist project. But the left will continue to devour its host from within as the Moores and Spurlocks and others continue fighting the war of ideas with movies, books etc. And so what is our strategy? How are we going to oppose the left? They are very good at spreading their ideas and we can learn a lot from them.
Posted by: phil at June 21, 2005 8:29 AM