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August 11, 2006
Flypaper
Soon after 9/11, I came to the conclusion that there were three simultaneous conflicts driving world events. The obvious conflict is between the jihadis and the West. Less obvious was the conflict for control of the West, being argued mostly peacefully (since the end of the Soviet Union and their sponsorship of Leftist terrorist groups) between the statists and the individualists. Even less obvious to Western eyes was the Muslim civil war, which at the time looked to be between jihadis and Pan-Arab nationalists.
Well, the Muslim conflict has decisively altered: the Pan-Arab nationalists have lost. The Palestinians have gone over to Islamism; the Syrians have become little more than Iranian sock-puppets; the Egyptians and Libyans have abandoned Pan-Arabism for simple dictatorship; and the Jordanians seem to be Westernizing as an eventual constitutional monarchy. The battle within Muslim countries now seems to be whether fundamental Sunni jihadis like al Qaeda or fundamental Shi'a jihadis like Hizb'allah will lead the Muslim world. However, the outcome is still the same: each group is fighting against the West to score points with uncommitted Muslims, because Muslims killing Muslims is not seen as a good thing by uncommitted Muslims.
McQ and QandO makes the point that Hizb'allah has gained the upper hand in this struggle, and I think McQ is correct. Hizb'allah is after all killing Jews, and al Qaeda is largely hiding in caves, dying in Iraq, or being penetrated and taken apart in Britain and Europe generally. This gives Hizb'allah major mojo among Islamists, because to them it looks like Hizb'allah is making progress. The strong horse, as it were.
But this has another implication as well. If al Qaeda's role was diminished by a combination of removing their unfettered sanctuary in Afghanistan (despite the failure to subdue Waziristan in the Pakistani tribal areas) combined with al Qaeda's mistakes in Iraq (fighting against the US military directly, combined with killing a lot of uninvolved Muslim civilians), this means that we are winning against the Sunni brand of jihad. It also suggests a path to winning against the Shi'a brand of jihad: first, remove any sanctuaries; second, provide a battlefield where the enemy must fight and cannot win.
So here's my take: to defeat the Shi'a jihadis, we will likely have to take down Iranian and Syrian governments, and one of those two countries (my guess would be Syria) will have to be done in such a way as to ensure that the Shi'a see it as fight here or die.
Now for the bad news: we simply do not have the forces to do this without a massive mobilization of the National Guard and Reserves, or a sustained build-up of forces to the level we had at the end of the Cold War, and we don't have the public will to do either right now. Almost worse, the actions in Afghanistan and Iraq that have been so successful in marginalizing al Qaeda are constantly propagandized by the Left as failures, to the point that most Americans and Europeans seem to take that view as a given (see the note about the struggle between statists and individualists for control of the West). This makes it unlikely that, absent another massive terror attack on the US, we will recover our public will any time soon, and that should we do so, we will have learned the lessons of what can and should be done. I think that is much of what is behind Bill Quick's rant (hat tip: Instapundit) in which he says, among other things:
The first administration of the first century of the American Third Millennium will, in my estimation, be remembered as one of the biggest failures of that century. Bush's great failure was, not invading Iraq, but not weathering the adversity that followed through acts of real leadership, and then pressing on with the necessary military destruction of the other regimes he, himself, named as most dangerous five years ago.
I've been feeling pretty depressed about our mid-term prospects lately. While Bill Quick's hope of a "fast war" would have been possible after 9/11, even as late as early 2003, I don't believe that it is possible now, without greater changes than a single election can bring. We're winning now tactically, and I believe we'll win in the end strategically, but I think we are going to have to go through some very painful episodes before we actually begin as a nation to focus on "victory" instead of "peace" as the marker for when the war is over.
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Comments
Depressingly accurate. President Bush does not lack for determination and fortitude. But like his father, he struggles greatly with 'the vision thing'. Your description, Jeff, requires great vision and clarity purpose- something that's been sorely lacking. In many ways, following Baghdad's fall, the President has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And the preliminary result is that Iran has been emboldened as a regional power.
Posted by: kreiz at August 12, 2006 1:06 AM