And operationally, it's impossible to grant every "front" (Iran, Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, the Gulf monarchies) equal strategic importance, or your attention and your forces will be distracted and spread too thin.
On some level, even the Bushies and neocons realize this; almost arbitrarily, they've declared Iraq the central front in the war on terror, although there were no terrorists in Iraq pre-2003. To them, it doesn't matter where the fight is, as long as we're fighting on "their" (the terrorists') turf. Al Qaeda is almost equally indifferent as to where they attack us: we've decided to park our army in Iraq, hence Iraq for them becomes the central front. Wherever American forces are concentrated and vulnerable in the Mideast, that's where they'll go after us. It's really that simple. They're not out to defeat us (nor can they, militarily), only humiliate us. To do that, all they have to do is give the appearance of not losing, of being able to stand toe to toe with us, and be able to stage new attacks at the time and place of their choosing.
Thus we have the present absurd situation in Iraq. It's not about Iraqis at all, not for us or for al Qaeda. It's about who will blink first. It's about who will say "enough!" first. And what's the grand prize? Saving face. Appearing to have struck some mighty blow against one's foe. The goal of Bush and al Qaeda is exactly the same.
Only there's this one pesky difference between us: They're a small band of loony tunes who live in caves and hide in basements; and we're the world's oldest democracy with the deadliest army ever assembled. For them, the prospect of defeat (i.e. losing face) is not nearly so devastating as it would be for us, now that we've staked our reputation on victory. After all, the underdog isn't supposed to win. If all he does is keep standing until the last bell, he'll be judged a formidable adversary. If America, on the other hand, with all its money, resolve, and technological might, manages only to appear to win a draw with al Qaeda, it will still have "lost" (i.e. lost face).
America is now in a terrible pickle. Bush, personally, is in a terrible pickle. His and his country's prestige are on the line. This pickle was foreseeable and avoidable, yet here we are, four years later, with no exit in sight, no way to declare victory credibly and go home in a face-saving manner.
Which leads to my ultimate point: Who cares about saving face in front of al Qaeda? Should America make its foreign policy based on what will vex al Qaeda? They're not even a state! We're better than they are! We don't behead innocent people or fly planes into buildings to kill civilians.
The only question that matters with regards to them is: Are we safer? Has invading and occupying Iraq made us safer? The answer is abundantly clear, by any metric.
We should be more concerned with saving face among our traditional allies in the West, who think America has gone insane. And, truth be told, our European and Asian allies have not been nearly so gullible as we have (until recently) about our progress in Iraq. When Bush says "we're winning" in Iraq, 30% of Americans still believe him; but 90% of the world thinks he's delusional. Ponder that for a moment. The rest of the world, including our strongest allies over the past 50 years -- Britain, Canada, Australia, Japan, France, Germany -- think Bush is either blind, or a hopeless idiot, who can't see what's really happening in Iraq. And by extension, every American citizen is under suspicion in the rest of the West as a delusional apologist of a failed enterprise.
So who cares what al Qaeda thinks, if we've already lost the West? Who cares what al Qaeda thinks, when 70% of Americans think there's nothing left to win in Iraq?
As Samuel L. Jackson said in 187, "Macho is bullshit." Let's find some way -- any way -- to declare victory ASAP and go home. We'll still be the USA. We'll still be spending $600 billion a year on our military, and we'll still be the biggest kid on the block. And if our interests were really at stake, we'd be even more capable of fighting for them, without the heavy burden on our shoulders of occupying Iraq.
April 2, 2007
Beyond Iraq
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services
The threat from radical Islamic terrorists will not vanish when President Bush leaves office, or if funds for the Iraq war are cut off in 2008.
A frequent charge is that we are bringing terrorists to Iraq. That is true in the sense that war always brings the enemy out to the battlefield. But it's also false, since it ignores why killers like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (the late al Qaeda chief in Iraq), Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas (Palestinian terrorists of the 1980s), and Abdul Rahman Yasin (involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) were already in Saddam's Iraq when we arrived.
Moreover, the unpopular war in Iraq did not create radical Islamists and their madrassas throughout the Middle East that today brainwash young radicals and pressure the region's monarchies, theocracies and autocracies to provide money for training and weaponry. All that radicalism had been going on for decades — as we saw during the quarter-century of terrorism that led up to 9/11. And rioting, assassination and death threats over artistic expression in Europe have nothing to do with Iraq.
Right now, most al Qaeda terrorists are being trained and equipped in the Pakistani wild lands of Waziristan to help the Taliban reclaim Afghanistan and spread jihad worldwide. These killers pay no attention to the fact that our efforts in Afghanistan are widely multilateral. They don't care that our presence there is sanctioned by NATO, or involves the United Nations, or only came as a reaction to 9/11.
These radical Islamists gain strength not because we "took our eye off Afghanistan" by being in Iraq, but because Pakistan's strongman, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, can't or won't do anything about al-Qaeda's bases in his country. And neither Bush nor Nancy Pelosi quite knows how to pressure such an unpredictable nuclear military dictatorship.
The Iraq war has certainly sharpened our relationship with Iran, but, of course, it's also not the cause of our tensions with Tehran. For decades, the Iranian government has subsidized Hezbollah, which during the 1980s and 1990s murdered Americans from Saudi Arabia to Beirut. It was not the current Iranian lunatic president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but an earlier more "moderate" president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who remarked, in 2001, that "one bomb is enough to destroy all Israel."
So Iraq is only one recent theater, albeit a controversial one, in an ongoing global struggle. This larger conflict arose not from the Iraqi invasion of 2003, but from earlier radical Muslim rage at the modern globalized world, the profits and dislocations from Middle East oil, and Islamic terrorism that ranges worldwide from Afghanistan to Thailand.
Should a peace candidate win the American presidency in 2008, prompting the U.S. to pull out of Iraq before the democracy there is stabilized, in the short term we will save lives and money. But as the larger war continues after we withdraw, jihadists will still flock to the Sunni Triangle. Hamas and Hezbollah will still rocket Israel. Syria will still kill Lebanese reformers. Iran will still try to cheat its way to a nuclear bomb. Ayman al- Zawahiri will still broadcast his al Qaeda threats from safety in nuclear Pakistan. The oil-rich, illegitimate Gulf sheikdoms will still make secret concessions and bribe increasingly confident terrorists to leave them alone. And jihadists will still try to sneak into the United States to kill us.
Critics of the present war can make the tactical argument that it is wiser to fight al Qaeda in Pakistan than in Iraq. Or that money spent in the frontline Iraqi offensive theater would be better invested on defense and security at home. Or that the human cost is simply too great and thus we should instead make diplomatic concessions to radical Islamists in lieu of military confrontation.
But, again, those are operational alternatives found in every war — as familiar as the old controversies over the French defensive Maginot Line of the 1930s or the American decision to defeat Germany first, Japan second. In the case of staying on in Iraq, at least, our long-term plan is to go on the offensive to confront radical Islamic terrorists on their own turf, and try to foster a democratic alternative to theocracy or autocracy.
That may be felt by the American public to be too expensive or too naive, but it is a direct strategy aimed at an enemy who seeks to terrorize the West and plans on being around well after 2008.
Depending on how we leave Iraq, this global war against radical Islamic terrorism will either wax or wane. But it will hardly end.
No comments:
Post a Comment