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July 18, 2005
The Enemy's Strategic Problem
The enemy has a very serious problem strategically: they attacked too late, and they picked the wrong form of attack. From the beginnings of widespread access to network television to the mid-1990s, when talk radio became powerful enough to get disputes with the mainstream media into people's heads, opinion was by and large shaped by about a dozen people at two newspapers and three television networks. It is common perception that the news networks drove (and largely still do) their coverage based on what the New York Times was covering. There was no effective alternate voice, and since these dozen or so über-editors were from similar backgrounds, there was basically one narrative in American opinion.
The talk radio shows, Fox News Channel, and later the blogs have changed that: there is once more a competing set of narratives in the US, as it was when we depended upon newspapers and magazines for our news. This onset of choice has led to, gasp, a better-informed public (scary though that can be) and a fragmentation of opinion. This has, in turn, led to a reduced ability to scare the US (and to a lesser extent, Europe) into a stampede, which in turn has made us stronger.
The reason we are stronger for this is that our military is unbeatable in any practical exercise. Even the Chinese admit they would lose a conventional war with us, which is why they recently declared their willingness to use nuclear first strikes to prevent US intervention in any Chinese attempt to take Taiwan. The only way to beat the US is for the US to give up from lack of will. And compelling the American will now requires more than stampeding the dozen or so mandarins that used to push the rest of us along. There is still an American herd, but it is increasingly smaller than the American pack.
So into this comes the enemy, attempting to shape our will. Why? Because the enemy's intermediate goal is a caliphate - a theocracy claiming authority over all Muslims - in the entire Middle East. To get that caliphate, local governments have to be overthrown or co-opted. To overthrow the local governments, the West must not have troops in the Middle East, nor the will to use force to support local governments (particularly Israel, which is not subject to the slow process of jihadi conversion, nor to being driven out, and so must be destroyed in place). And since the only forces with any decisive and intransitive power were the Soviet Union and the US, those two had to be driven out.
The Soviets broke on a combination of Afghanistan and poor leadership (Brezhnev took two years to die after he became incapable of rule, and his two successors served short and uninspired terms). The Soviet will broke, and soon thereafter the USSR literally disintegrated. It should be noted that the Soviets were unable to win militarily, but they were not beaten militarily, either: the Soviets only committed about 90-100,000 troops to Afghanistan at any one time, a small fraction of their force. (And appallingly, some 484000 of the 642000 or so Soviet troops that served in Afghanistan were casualties, mostly to diseases like typhoid and hepatitis!)
That leaves the US, which is similarly unbeatable militarily, and due to the increasing fragmentation of opinion, unlikely to be scared into submission. There were (and remain) two means of altering US will to support the regimes in the Middle East: direct attack and co-option.
The enemy could try to break our will to support the regimes - pretty much all some flavor of appalling totalitarianism - through attacking us in the Middle East and elsewhere abroad and, eventually, at home. The idea was that by terrorizing the population, we would force the government to withdraw into a shell and leave them alone. An attempt to co-opt, on the other hand, would look like South Africa or India: resistance that is, or can be portrayed as, the non-violent struggle of people for equality and decent treatment.
It's an interesting question whether a strategy of co-opting our will could have worked: as it is, a shockingly large percentage of the Western Left is ready to be co-opted even in the face of massive violence against the West and anyone in the Middle East seen as "not Muslim enough". It's telling that the Left is not scared away from arguing the jihadis' case by attacks - real, physical, brutal killings - of women and homosexuals and children, shutting down schools by bombing them, and so on, sacred objects of the Left at home. Given that, and a prominent realist strain in US policy, it's possible that a co-opting strategy could have driven the US out of the Middle East utterly. The sticking point would have been Iraq, but I can think of a few ways that could have been worked around, including by enlisting the US to help jihadis overthow Saddam Hussein, as the mujahideen overthrew the Soviets in Afghanistan.
But the enemy was impatient, or felt it had a better chance with violent attack, or maybe just didn't understand the power of ANC appeals in the West. Whatever the reason, the enemy chose violent attacks. And that presents them with a paradox: since the Western will is, by and large, stronger than it used to be (particularly in the US), attacks more often strengthen Western will than weaken it (London, 9/11, Bali, as opposed to Madrid). So to break the West's will, it is necessary to attack targets more and more sensitive or innocent. I believe that Beslan presages attacks in the West, and it would surprise me not at all to see hospitals, day care centers and so on attacked with suicide bombers. The point is, to break our will, the enemy has to get our attention. Short of nuclear or chemical weapons (and the resulting genocide of the Arabs), this means more spectacular attacks. But those attacks, as I noted, are actually driving people away from the enemy.
It's probably too late for the enemy to switch to a full-on attempt to co-opt our will: who would believe them who is not already effectively arguing for surrender? But the enemy cannot continue to attack us without eventually building our will to a point that, if the Western governments do not crack down brutally on Muslims in the West, the mobs will. That is not a best-case scenario for us, but it's pretty much a worst-case scenario for the innocent Muslims among us.
I'm sure some President would apologize for our behavior, in a couple of decades.
But the enemy cannot retreat, either, because an obvious systemic defeat (as opposed to defeats in specific campaigns, like Afghanistan or Iraq) would undermine the central tenet of the jihadis: God sent them. And if their god didn't send them, or won't help them, then who would follow them?
So the enemy has only one real option: ratchet up the violence in the West. And they have to do it before we pull the rug out from under them by co-opting to democracy or imposing democracy by force of arms. And they have to create a sufficient level of fear and panic to cause us to run, but not a sufficient level of fear and panic to cause us to rise up and destroy them in the West, along with the innocents they hide among.
Our options are not great, but I wouldn't trade strategic situations with the enemy: their options are dismal.
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