« Decision in the West | Main | Small Victories »

September 12, 2006

Beyond War

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

--William Butler Yeats

I sometimes think it is to our credit as a nation that we are often so late coming to wars. World War I was almost three years along before the United States joined the fight against Germany, and World War II was (at least, depending on how one considers the Sino-Japanese war) two years along before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor jumpstarted the U.S. into war. And on September 11, 2001, al Qaeda had been trying to strike at the United States for the better part of a decade, with little more response than the occasional cruise missile barrage. It is not uncommon to hear people decry this lack of action. If only President Clinton had struck back more forcefully after the attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, or if President Clinton or President Bush had done something after the attack on the USS Cole, perhaps 9/11 wouldn't have happened. Given what we know about the planning that went into the September 11 attacks, these theories seem implausible, but they are comforting because they appeal to that very American desire to take action.

As a people we really hate being acted upon. That's probably true of most human beings, I suppose, but it often seems a particularly American trait. The biggest lesson of World War II, to listen to the popular press, is the failure to act against Hitler prior to his 1939 invasion of Poland, and prevention of dire consequences was the rationale of the American war in Vietnam as well, characterized by the domino theory. So it is unsurprising that people tend to complain bitterly about the failure of the U.S. government to prevent the September 11 attacks.

Yet looking back over the past five years, a policy of restraint and patience seems better than ever. No, there have been no major attacks on American soil since September 11, but that absence does not prove the success of our policies in the years since the attacks. Afghanistan remains in a perilous state, almost five full years after the Taliban were removed from power, and Iraq is either on the brink of or in the throes of a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, with the final resolution of that fight still to be seen. The American people are at each other's figurative throats, with words like 'treason' used like punctuation in many political arguments against the other side. About the only thing people seem capable of agreeing with these days is that the other side is unquestionably comprised of scoundrels and knaves.

Perhaps it is time to chart a new course. It hardly seems beyond the bounds of reality to point out that our current strategy has been mediocre at best. Even assuming we can credit it with the lack of attacks on U.S. soil since September 11 (setting aside the numerous attacks against our allies), neither Afghanistan nor Iraq appears to be a great success story as of this writing, nor does either appear likely to become so in the near future. Osama bin Laden remains on the loose, and while many senior leaders of al Qaeda have been killed or captured, we know many remain at large. Worse, we don't know how many others may have emerged. Our daily lives have been markedly affected for the worse by the intrusive security policies in place to protect air travel and various high value targets, not to mention the immense amount of money that has been spent, much of it on protecting 'targets' in states widely removed from the threat of terrorism as pork barrel politics holds sway even over the common defense.

There are many things we probably could do better in this fight. But one big step in the right direction would be ending the war. No, not the one in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the big one. The Global War on Terror. The war to end all wars du jour. The war on terror has turned out like all the wars America has started over the past fifty years: it's never really ended, it has cost a fortune, and nobody has won. War just isn't a good metaphor for many things, and terrorism is one of them. Yes, the terrorists are at war with us, in that they want to kill us and force us to do their bidding. But it's no more a war in the real sense of the word than the war on poverty or on drugs. We can't defeat terrorism with big battalions or high-tech toys. Even if the United States prevails in Iraq and Afghanistan, the problem of militant Islam will still threaten us. The only way this will become a war in the traditional sense of the word is if the West ends up at war with Islam, an outcome we should all be praying never occurs.

Defeating terrorism requires extensive intelligence combined with occasional, tightly controlled force. We need good intelligence both to ferret out plots against the West and to locate our enemy around the globe. When we do locate the enemy and we have a clear shot, tightly controlled violence should be employed to kill them. That requires some tools we do not yet have, and it requires us to change our focus with many of the tools we do have. It will require us to shift resources from SWAT equipment for Wyoming farming towns to paying more for people with the skills we require, like speaking foreign languages and being willing to immerse oneself in an alien culture for years, if necessary, to infiltrate terrorist operations. It is probably going to require that the Congress get rid of 'Don't ask, don't tell,' so the linguists we have already trained aren't put out of the service because their choice of sexual partners is considered non-standard. It will require a President and a Congress who are willing to work together to make laws that give the government the powers it needs to defeat terrorist threats while still protecting civil liberties. Clearly we have a long way to go.

But first we've got to get rid of the war rhetoric. As long as this fight is viewed through that prism, we will struggle to defeat it. As a soldier I am sympathetic to the desire to use a familiar metaphor, particularly when there is a superficial resemblance between the threat we face and real war. But if we try to defeat this foe using the tools and tactics of war, we will fail. It's about time we faced up to that and fundamentally rethought how to deal with this enemy. Because we can rest assured he is continuing to rethink how he will deal with us.