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June 8, 2005
Taking the Battle to the Enemy
Austin Bay pulls together a lot of threads around a
The first problem we face is defining the enemy. "Knowing him when we see him" is not good enough, particularly in a society where dupes and outright seditionists in our own society are willing to use our open system of justice in attempts to keep the enemy free and free to operate. Here is how I see the major enemy: the enemy comprises people motivated by the violent jihadi ideology that arises out of Salafist/Wahabbi Islam to attack those they see as unislamic.
The major enemy breaks down into several categories:
- The actual jihadis, who take up arms or become suicide bombers, or train and arm the fighters: These are the actual fighters, and are analogous to the enemy military in a conventional state-on-state war.
- The terror masterminds, who guide and fund the jihadi fighters. These include such obvious characters as Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership, and are the analog of the enemy government.
- The producers of terrorists, which include the madrassas and their Saudi (and other) backers; the despotic, terror-supporting Arab governments (Syria, Iran, "Palestine", Saudi Arabia and a few others); and the imams and mullahs and what have you who preach the jihadi ideology. These are the analog of the enemy economy.
- Those who are sympathetic to the jihadi cause for religious, ethnic, nationalistic or ideological reasons, and are willing to donate money, time, shelter, and other aids and comforts ot the other enemy groups. These are the analog of the enemy population.
In addition to this, we have minor enemies and opponents to deal with. These include the loyalists of current or deposed regimes, who will fight us only in their own country and to protect or restore the regime they are loyal to; anti-Enlightenment Westerners (and some who are just anti-American and anti-Israeli) who don't particularly care whether the jihadis win, but are determined to see free-market, representatively-governed, Enlightenment-derived, classically liberal societies lose (this, by the way, is sedition, not treason; it's only treason if they cross over into actively helping the enemy), and who are willing to see the jihadis win to accomplish that goal (think Ward Churchill); and the "useful idiots" who for multiculturalist or internationalist idealistic reasons actually believe that there is no moral difference between us and the enemy or are simply unable to form clear judgements about consequences (think Jimmy Carter).
Right now, we are fighting actively against the jihadi fighters, the terror masterminds, and the remnant Ba'athist loyalists in Iraq. We are doing little to nothing against the other groups.
The enemy's advantages include our reluctance to fight every aspect of the enemy's power base (a far cry from WWII and even Viet Nam), and to argue forcefully against Western and Arab/Muslim opponents of our conduct of the Terror Wars. The attempt seems to be to trade taking our time in dismantling the enemy so as to be able to provoke less outrage amongst our non-enemy opponents. Our restraint is not provoking less outrage, butmore, as our enemies and opponents take our restraint to be weakness.
Defeating Iraq's Ba'athist loyalists (the only force in Iraq legitimately entitled to be called insurgents or a resistance) has proven much easier than I would have expected a year ago. How long has it been since platoon-sized attacks on our troops or overrunning Iraqi police stations and driving police from the cities has happened? Those were the work of insurgents. The car bombings and beheadings and such are the work of the jihadis, and the insurgents are largely either giving up, or are joining the jihadis and switching to terrorism. I don't think that the jihadis will be crushed in Iraq for some time, given our current strategy, but I think that the insurgency is all but over.
We have a major advantage in this war, beyond our unprecedented military might and unprecedented economic strength: we have the ability to sustain operations at a much higher pace than the enemy, who is limited to slow and fragile communications links, has little central control authority, cannot react as quickly as we can act, and can only see concentrated threats centrally (distributed threats look smaller, and are only seen locally, because the enemy's intelligence is limited to what he can see and what he can read in the news). Our ability to sustain a faster optempo distributed over a wide area can break the enemy.
This would require continuing what we are doing now, and adding some other things, such as attacking the jihadi infrastructure in places like Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. This could include everything from killing terror-supporting imams to occupying Saudi oilfields. Given our military's current loads, and the need to be ready to move into Iran if they get close to a nuclear capability, most of the action would have to come at the smaller-scale end. By killing the imams, smugglers, government officials providing training and weapons and so on, we could seriously dent the appeal of supporting terrorism.
Much of this could be accomplished by simply paying off the local enemies these guys have already made to kill them, and if we leave some of the most vitriolic alone while killing others, and letting it be quietly whispered that it's us, the ones we leave alone may be tagged as collaborators. In any case, these attacks would reduce the inflow of recruits, and have a major impact on the jihadi ideology. After all, if God is on their side, why do they keep ending up being found dead in alleys? Leaving raw pork on the dead might help drive that message home.
Before you raise the objection that doing this in countries like Syria is an act of war, go read the Austin Bay article above: we're already at war with these people; we're just fighting on their terms. And before you raise the cultural sensitivity of pork to Muslims, consider that that is precisely why I suggested it: this is a war largely of ideas, and that means that the idea of violent jihad to restore the Caliphate has to be discredited. I'm all for other methods, as long as whatever we do has the desired effect of making adherence to the ideology of jihad less attractive. Winding up dead and damned has a way of doing that.
We're taking the battle to the enemy in Iraq, which is far better than having them bring the battle to us like they did on and before 9/11, but we need to take it elsewhere at the same time. We need to so overpressure the enemy (both the jihadis and the producers of terrorists) that they cannot keep up, and collapse utterly. And we need to do this before the seditionists in the West either succeed in convincing a majority that dishonorable defeat is better than "unfair" victory or become targets of vigilantism.
War is unpleasant, but losing a war is more unpleasant than winning it using ruthless means. This is a war of national survival: we won't have another chance to prevent the intersection of terrorism, anti-Americanism and nuclear weapons. I'll be prepared to apologize for what we do today to win, a couple of generations after we've won.
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