The most remarkable thing about the war we are in is that we
haven’t won it yet.
This war didn’t begin on 9/11: it began in August 1996
when the London newspaper Al Quds al-Arabi published Osama
bin Laden’s fatwa against America. Now is it ten years and one day
after 9/11. U.S. forces have been fighting in Afghanistan for
nearly a decade, in Iraq for more than eight years and even longer
in countless other corners of the world where special operations
and CIA paramilitary forces work covertly.
Whether you count this as a fifteen-year war or begin your
accounting on 9/11, it is the longest war in U.S. history. Although
bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and many other enemies are dead, we have
not won the war and victory not only isn’t ours: we haven’t even
defined what it would be.
Where do we go from here? What path does the god of war
dictate we travel if we do not heed his warnings? Quo vadis,
Mars?
Much of what we learned about our enemy, and how he
fights, we knew before 9/11 but hadn’t learned. We saw Islamism do
its best to blow up the World Trade center in 1993 and fail because
the terrorists didn’t use a bomb large enough to accomplish their
objective. We saw the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in
1996, the embassy bombings in Africa in 1998, and the attack on the
USS Cole in October 2000. We saw, but we did not
learn.
We knew then, and have suffered painful lessons in Iraq
and Afghanistan, that Islamic terrorists abjure the Law of War. By
that Law’s definition, terrorists aren’t lawful combatants because
they intentionally attack civilians and — almost always — do not
fight in uniform or under a national symbol. Even some in uniform
reject the Law of War: Saddam’s forces repeatedly ambushed U.S.
troops by feigning surrender and then opening fire on those who
advanced to capture them. This, like attacks on civilians, is a war
crime under the Geneva Conventions. But so what? Only we fight by
the rules. This enemy follows its own rules, rules prescribed in
its own barbaric code.
We have learned some things. We knew before 9/11 that al
Qaeda and the other largest, most dangerous terrorist groups could
not pose an existential danger without the sponsorship of nations.
But, we were told, no matter how many of them we killed, more would
flock to their banners because of our “aggression.” We couldn’t
kill them fast enough, said the experts.
But, to borrow a phrase, yes we can. By the time bin Laden
was turned into chum, al Qaeda’s capability had been dramatically
reduced by our special forces’ relentless pursuit of its leaders
and operational groups. Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC —
has, for years, conducted operations against terrorist leaders and
cells almost every night.
According to several sources, the pace has been
tremendous: sometimes eight to twelve operations in a single night.
But this comes at a price. We don’t have enough people to keep up
this pace forever. And the enemy knows this.
Which brings us to Lesson One: terrorist operations are
cheap and defeating terrorist groups one by one is too expensive,
in blood and treasure. It is just as British economic historian
Niall Ferguson said last year: America is approaching the point at
which it will no longer be able to defend itself. It is not just
terrorism we must defend against but also cyberwarfare,
anti-satellite weapons, and other threats that are far cheaper for
the aggressors to create than it is for us to defend against them.
And yet we are about to cut defense spending massively because our
economy is weak and our president believes defense is less
important than his ineffective “jobs” and “stimulus”
programs.
Lesson Two is that by disabling terrorist networks —
killing their leaders, destroying their bases, and interrupting
their finances — we are tactically reducing the threat, but the
reduction is only temporary. Though a terrorist leader may be
indispensable to his group, he is not to the movement. Terrorist
fighters can shift among groups easily. Terrorist groups can come
and go, but as long as the movement they represent and the ideology
that propels it remain undefeated, we cannot win this
war.
Mars is not just a false god, but an evil that will always
haunt our world. His earthly prophets point us to the path we need
to follow in the coming years if we are to win this war. Both Sun
Tzu, who wrote about 2300 years ago, and Carl von Clausewitz, who
followed him by almost two millennia, assumed that a nation
fighting an enemy could identify that enemy clearly and easily.
That we have not done.
As I wrote on 9/11, in an article published in the Washington
Times the following day, the nations that sponsor terrorism
are our enemy. It is they who make terrorism an existentialist
threat. And we have failed comprehensively to hold them to account
for their acts.
Consider how our false ally, Saudi Arabia, spoke of us on
the eve of the tenth anniversary of 9/11. In an editorial
published last Saturday, the government-controlled Saudi newspaper
Arab News wrote:
… as it flexed its military, economic and political might
in two wars, Washington forgot, or deliberately overlooked, the
fact that its foreign policies, globally and toward the Arab and
Islamic world in particular, were a crucial factor in generating
the forms of violence it was combating…
It is hard to escape the conclusion that the war on
terror, to use its popular designation, became a war on Islam. The
West was and is still not fighting to eradicate terrorism.
Terrorism is just a tool. It is fighting to defeat an ideology. And
given the global supremacy of the Western media, the net effect has
been a distorted picture of Islam.
There is one compelling truth to what the Saudis wrote:
terrorism is a tool the Islamists employ to defeat our ideology,
which is expressed in the freedoms preserved by the Constitution.
The truth about Islam is that its core beliefs — its ideology —
compel violence against non-believers. It is time for our leaders
to say that and to pose the choice for its believers between the
freedoms we defend and the slavery they preach. It is much cheaper
for the Saudis to preach than it is for us to attack what they say.
Oil is their insurance policy. It is in our power to invalidate
that insurance, but our politicians don’t have the fortitude to do
it.
We cannot defeat the Islamist ideology by pretending Islam
is a religion of peace. That way is the way of the appeaser. Those
such as Obama who counsel compromise with Islamic ideology follow
in the footsteps of Neville Chamberlain, not Thomas
Jefferson.
Did we defeat communism by saying it wasn’t the problem
but that the KGB and the Soviet army were?
Sun Tzu wrote that it is of supreme importance in war to
attack the enemy’s strategy. The enemy’s strategy is — by
subornation, propaganda, and violence — to establish an Islamic
caliphate across the globe. Terrorism is only one of the tactics it
uses. When Ronald Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as an “evil
empire” he was not only speaking the truth, he was — as he well
understood — fighting an ideological war. To defeat the Islamist
ideology, we have to attack it head-on. It is just as evil, as
oppressive, and just as hegemonistic as communism.
If we are to remain free, we cannot accept the
continuation of the terror sponsors’ war against us as some “new
normal.” This is not a Clausewitzian war in which massed armies
fight on the poppy fields of Europe. It is something else,
something just as dangerous to our future.
America wants, needs — and, yes, is entitled to — a
return to the “old normal.” To get it back we have to fight this
war — ideologically and kinetically — in a manner calculated to
win it decisively. As long as the enemy and its ideology remain
undefeated, that cannot occur.
We face two futures. One is the goal of the Islamists in
which America is no longer free and its ability to defend its
freedoms. The other is a world in which nations no longer sponsor
terrorism against us and Islamic fascism is sent to the ash heap of
history. The results of next year’s presidential election may be
the last chance we have to make the choice. Quo vadis,
America?
