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July 8, 2005

In the Beginning...

Wizbang asks when the War on Terror began, and gives some suggestions. Some of the suggestions, though, and others made in the comments, are way off track, because they fail to distinguish between the beginning of an event and the precursors of an event, and tend to see named events as distinct from the history within which they occur. Let's take WWII as an example: when did it start?

WWII started in 1941, when the US declared war on Japan and Germany within a few days. Prior to that point, what would come to be known as WWII was actually several different wars: the Japanese wars in SE Asia, which led to the Pearl Harbor attack (the Philippines were in Japan's way, and if we took up with the Australians, as we showed signs of doing, Japan's southwards expansion would fail unless the Philippines were reduced and the US Navy kept in the eastern Pacific); the German war in Europe, beginning with the invasion of Poland, which later subsumed the Russian wars in Europe, including the joint campaign with Germany in Poland and the attacks on Finland; the Italian war in N. Africa (beginning with the attack on Ethiopia). It was when the US joined into the major wars already ongoing that it became WWII in any real sense. Without US involvement in the Pacific, we would likely today talk about WWII (meaning the war in Europe) and the largely-forgotten (by the US, anyway) Sino-Japanese War. WWII didn't start with the Treaty of Versailles, the Beer Hall Putsch or the failure of the League of Nations to oppose Italy in Africa; those were all precursors.

I prefer to call the War on Terror the Terror Wars. There are a series of wars and almost-wars going on around the world, that all tie together because one side in each of them is the jihadis attempting to restore the Caliphate and put first the Arab world, then the Muslim world, then the rest of the world under its rule. These separate conflicts include:

  • The terror campaigns against Israel that began after 1967's Six Day War and continue to this day, and subsume the war in Lebanon in the 1980s and the two Intafadehs.
  • The wars in Chechnya, lately spreading into the whole region, that began with the breakup of the USSR.
  • The Muslim insurrections in the Philippines and Indonesia and other areas of SE Asia.
  • The cold war between Iran and the US since 1979.
  • The invasions of Islamists throughout northern Africa, including Somalia, the Sudan and others.
  • The Muslim insurrection in Kashmir.
  • The Algerian civil war.
  • The GWOT as Americans usually define it, beginning with the attacks of 9/11 and including the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The point is, there are a lot of different wars going on that are tied into the Terror Wars, because of US involvement after 9/11. Without that, there would be a series of disconnected (to our eyes) events: Chechnya has nothing to do with Israel, right? Well, no, it's not right: there is an enemy that has started a series of wars on its borders, and those wars are becoming tied together because of US involvement in all of them.

And the start of the wars won't be truly determinable until the wars are much further along, because we don't yet know what will happen to change our perception of today when we look back on it. Israel may get tied much more closely into the Terror Wars more broadly (for example, the US and Israel could theoretically jointly invade Lebanon (going after Hizb'allah) and Syria). Russia might realize that Chechnya is not isolated, and might tie into the US campaigns in the Middle East. India could invade Pakistan to root out jihadi training camps. Iran could become actively belligerent against the US, attacking our shipping in the Persian Gulf. And so on.

If you have to pick a date now, the logical date to my mind would be 9/11, because that's what tied all of these disparate wars together, and defined the enemy.

Posted by jeff at July 8, 2005 10:41 AM

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"The cold war between Iran and the US since 1979."

Which included the "Tanker War" in the Persian Gulf from 1987-89.
The address below has a history of the combat operations:

http://www.nightstalkers.com/history/4.html

Posted by: phil at July 8, 2005 2:31 PM

The terror campaigns against Israel began far before 1967's Six Day War. This war is not the reason for Arab terror but the result (consequences). The Arab terror against pre-Israel begun in the 20th of the 20th century. The main cause is the denial the right of the Jewish people to creat their national state in Israel land Palestine)in the heart of the Islamic hamosphere (Dar el-Islam).


Posted by: Dondan at July 8, 2005 6:25 PM

I realize that there was both Arab and Jewish terrorism against the British and each other back to when the Jews began to deliberately settle in what is now Israel, during the early 1900s. However, that is qualitatively different from what has been happening since the PLO formed with the explicit intention of destroying Israel (as opposed to subjugating Jews in place).

I don't think of PLO and subsequent terrorism against Israel as a result of the 1967 war per se; it's more that, having seen the efforts of their armies fail repeatedly, the Arabs tried another way to defeat Israel, which has also failed.

Posted by: Jeff Medcalf at July 8, 2005 8:53 PM

Your comments on December 1941 being the starting point of WWII as a single global war rather than two regional conflicts echoes the thesis of SIUC history professor Dr. Donald S. Detweiler--my own thesis committee chair.

As for the GWOT, I'd say that while 9/11/01 was when most Americans realized that we were at war, the seminal event was the 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis. It was at that point that Islamic terrorism ceased to be a Cold War proxy and took on a life and emnity toward the US of its own. This became readily apparent with the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beruit.

The nature of Islamist terrorism from 1979 to 2001 (indeed, until 2005) was obscured by the focus on one man in particular--Yasser Arafat. Even after the USSR's implosion in 1991 he continued a war against Israel which was originally orchestrated largely from Moscow. What we failed to see was how Arafat's terrorist war differed from that waged by Hezbollah and later Al-Qaeda. Until now, although there still are plenty who still don't see it....

Posted by: TJenk at July 10, 2005 2:34 PM

Would that be the Dr. Detweiler of World War II German Military Studies fame? If so, it may very well be that he was in fact the genesis of my thinking on that.

I've written before, by the way, on the two distinct forces contending for Muslim rule: pan-Arab nationalism and jihadism. (Most of those posts are on my old blog, and haven't been moved over yet.) In general, the pan-Arab nationalists - like Arafat/PLO, the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Libyans and Saddam - favor uniting the Arab world under a communist dictatorship run by them. The jihadis favor uniting the Muslim world under a theocratic dictatorship run by them, and then to spread that to the whole world.

For a long time, there was effectively an Arab-Muslim civil war between these two forces, and to some degree there still is. However, the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of Saddam have definitively shifted that civil war in favor of the jihadis. The Iranian revolution was, from my point of view, a battle in that civil war (in this case, against the least-represented political view in the Arab world, until recently: pro-Western).

I think that we will not be able to truly extricate ourselves from the Middle East until pro-Western democracies have the upper hand, and that will likely not happen for decades.

Posted by: Jeff Medcalf [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 10, 2005 3:47 PM