While Senator Kerry and his allies strive to turn the country’s attention backward – should we have left Iraq’s Ba’athist regime in place? – forward is a more interesting direction. Given today’s facts, what strategy should America pursue against terrorism?
The historical discussions are useful, of course, for the insights we can glean about the enemy’s nature, objectives and modus operandi. The most obvious ones are, first, that a large number of Islamic extremists really do believe that bombs and beheadings can bend Western nations to their will and, second, that they will not stop attacking us if we ignore them.
Responding to terrorist attacks with investigations, indictments and occasional pinprick retaliation is a tried and disproven policy. During the sleepy Clinton years, extra-governmental quasi-armies, trained for terrorist warfare, grew in size, skill and sophistication: not just al-Qa’eda but also Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and others. At its height, al-Qa’eda alone had an estimated 20,000 “soldiers”. One could say, as the enemy’s left-wing and paleoconservative apologists do, that this expansion was “provoked”, but it wasn’t provoked by any actions or policies that the West could or should have altered.
To appease the Islamofascists would have required expelling the Jewish population of Israel, overthrowing current Arab governments in order to install fascist theocrats and restricting civil liberties in our own countries for the sake of Moslem sensitivities. Those points were the essentials of Osama bin Laden’s casus belli against what he thought of as “Christendom”. In many respects, the leading Western nations have gone astonishingly far toward meeting his demands: relentlessly pressuring Israel to abandon territory to declared enemies and to rein in its own fight against terrorism, refraining from promoting democratic reform in Moslem countries (a development that would move them further from the Islamofascist ideal), supporting Moslems militarily in conflicts with Christians (as in Bosnia and Kosovo (which was the right thing to do but should also have pleased fervent Moslems)), and, in multiculturally sensitive lands, ignoring unsavory behavior by Moslem minorities in a manner that would never if tolerated if the perpetrators were Christians, Jews or secularists.
The concessions that the West made to Islam were insufficient to dissuade bin Laden and his ilk from war. The concessions that might have succeeded were impossible to make. Hence, war was unavoidable and cannot be ended by benevolent gestures on our part. The only question is how we will fight.
There are constraints to consider. While converting Islamofascists to a less malign ideology, or at least outcompeting them for Moslem opinion, would be wonderful, no one has any idea how it can be done. Extolling the merits of tolerance and diversity will sway Hamas foot soldiers as much as it would have SS men in World War II. At root, we have very little prospect of changing the enemy’s attitudes. For at least a few generations, large portions of the Moslem world are bound to regard our civilization as satanic. To maintain a tolerable state of armed truce, we must reduce their capability to harm us, which necessitates both destroying organized terrorist groups and convincing potential terrorists that their efforts will be futile and unsatisfying.
The Bush Administration has set forth a reasonably coherent strategy for achieving those ends. The key element is the elimination of state support for terrorist entities. The logic is that, without the sanctuaries that only a government can provide, terrorists will be forced to restrict their apparatuses to small, loosely connected cells. Anything bigger will be dangerously liable to penetration by security agencies. The problem with that mode of organization, from the terrorist point of view, is that, while it is very hard for the authorities to exterminate every cell, it is equally hard for the cells to do much more than keep their heads down and survive. Operations like 9/11 and the Bali and Madrid bombings needed a greater resource base that Mohammed Atta and 19 companions could by themselves have supplied.
Once the enemy’s organization begins to dissolve, a downward spiral will begin. As attacks against the infidel become less frequent and spectacular, recruitment will decline, donors will turn to other causes, and leaders will grow discouraged. Weakness will beget weakness, until the War on Terror fades to a matter for policemen rather than soldiers.
The Bush strategy has scored three major successes so far: The Taliban, who formerly ruled Afghanistan as al-Qa’eda puppets, have been routed. A democratic government has been installed in Iraq. Libya has abandoned its support of terrorists. Of those victories, Iraq is the most crucial. It removed a hostile regime with strong ties to terrorist groups and the wherewithal to give them valuable assistance. It also demonstrated that enmity toward the United States is risky. As long as Saddam Hussein could disregard the conditions of the Gulf War cease fire, subsidize suicide bombers and fire on American aircraft without suffering harm, benevolence toward terrorists looked like a safe proposition for Third World governments. Now the perceived dangers are higher.
In the long run, the President’s more ambitious advisers want to bring liberal democracy to Araby, on the theory that democratic governments aren’t likely to turn into terrorist sponsors and that democratic institutions, once introduced into one country, will spread to others. They also believe, like almost all Americans, that democracy is a good thing in itself, but that is not their main motivation. Until the War on Terror, strikingly few of the individuals now identified as “neoconservatives” advocated spreading democracy by any means other than persuasion and example; none ever proposed invading any place for democratic ends. In the present circumstances, democracy is a hard-headed tactic, not an idealist’s dream.
It may not be a wholly successful tactic, but it doesn’t have to work perfectly. A Third World of struggling democracies and frightened autocrats will be less hospitable to terrorists than the present one where the autocrats, out of sympathy or fear, refuse to interfere with the enemy’s operations, financing or propaganda – or furnish all three.
The potential flaw in concentrating on state sponsors is that the West may lack the will to carry through, and failure runs the risk of touching off an upsurge of Islamofascist optimism. Unfortunately, experience suggests that the enemy is easily encouraged by what we would regard as dubious successes. When U.S. Marines did not obliterate Fallujah last April, it was self-evident to our side that we had exercised ostentatious restraint and that any fool would realize that the Ba’athist enclave survived only on sufferance. We assumed that the locals, acting rationally in their own self-interest, would drive out terrorist leaders and accept reconciliation with the Iraqi government. Instead, the enemy crowed that it had defeated the Marines and consolidated its hold on the Sunni Triangle.
Preventing repetitions of Fallujah means not settling for half victories. Full victories, however, are not easily won without casualties, to which a large segment of Western opinion is extraordinarily sensitive – even if the dead are enemy soldiers under arms.
A key reason why the enemy’s hopes are so easily roused is that it can see how easy the West is to push around. From the Islamofascist point of view, one series of bombings toppled an unfriendly government in Spain and replaced it with one that seems eager almost to reverse the Reconquista. A suicide bomb every day or two is close to driving the Americans out of Iraq. Those perceptions are rather disconnected from objective reality, but they form the subjective reality that keeps the enemy in the field. And our society’s virtues – our desire to minimize violence and our belief that all men are good at heart – deter us from exerting the force necessary to destroy false perceptions.
The pessimistic verdict on the Bush strategy would be that it will ultimately fail, because we will shrink from victory. Its more rational critics are, I think, pessimists of that sort. They resemble the Kissingerian Cold War pessimists, who thought that the West was too enfeebled to roll back communism, so that accommodation was the only realistic strategy. There is one significant difference: In 1974 it was possible to imagine how accommodation between the United States and the Soviet Union might work. The “realists” foresaw mutual recognition of spheres of influence, coupled with competition, normally nonmilitary, in a zone of insignificant countries. That is not a possibility in the conflict between the West and Islamofascism, nor is any other accommodation foreseeable that would not involve intolerable violations of our values. How many votes are there for a forced exodus from Israel? For setting up a shari’a-based legal system for Moslems who live in the West? For acknowledging one of Osama bin Laden’s heirs as Caliph and installing him in Mecca?
If, for the sake of argument, one rejects the current strategy and recognizes that an accommodationist alternative does not exist, what are the other options? Neither Bush opponents in general nor Senator Kerry in particular have presented their own grand strategic concepts very clearly. What we can be fairly sure of is that a President Kerry would not take action against terrorist-supporting states except with the (virtually unobtainable) permission of the U.N. Security Council or, perhaps, in the event of a narrowly defined, judicially provable “imminent threat”. The corollary is that, for at least the next few decades, terrorists will always be able to find safe havens. All that they need are significant governments that (a) sympathize with their ideology or (b) find them useful allies in other conflicts or (c) can be intimidated into cooperation or (d) are too weak to control their nominal territory. Does anyone expect all of those opportunities to vanish in our lifetimes?
The task, therefore, that Senator Kerry has, wittingly or unwittingly, set for his Administration is to defeat terrorism without denying terrorists secure bases of operation. In other words, he is committed to a purely defensive struggle for an indefinite period. The most hopeful parallel is the Cold War, which also lasted a long time and which was “purely defensive” in military terms. With minor exceptions like Grenada, the U.S. never attacked a communist-dominated country. The communists, however, had two disadvantages that Islamofascism doesn’t share: First, their ideology had shallow roots; very few men were ever willing to give their lives for Karl Marx (which is why Stalin reinvented himself as a Russian nationalism during World War II). Second, a principal communist objective was to overmatch the capitalist nations in economic and military power. Their failure to do so was fatal to a materialist ideology that claimed to know with certainty the best way to create wealth.
Furthermore, the West could tolerate a drawn-out Cold War, because its adversaries confined themselves to diplomatic maneuvers and proxy wars. We did not worry seriously about communist suicide bombers. Far Left terrorist groups like the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Italy’s Red Brigades and the Weathermen had their bases outside communist-controlled territory, had to follow a cell, rather than an army, structure, and were too weak to pose a threat that couldn’t be handled by police work. Americans might worry about eventual communist domination; we didn’t fear car bombs in shopping centers.
The Islamofascist threat is entirely different. First, extremist zealots may be a small percentage of all Moslems, but a small percentage of a billion people is a large number, magnified by the unwillingness so far of the majority of their co-religionists to oppose them actively. Second, Islamofascism doesn’t base its appeal on its ability to deliver an abundance of material goods. It calls for a return to the supposed purity of Islam’s first century, and it can claim to be making progress toward that goal as long as it can inflict damage on giaour states and backsliding Moslems. Third, the primary Islamofascist tactic is to kill civilians, preferably Americans, which will make patience difficult to sustain.
From these considerations, one can only conclude that Islamofascism will not collapse in the relatively near future of its own accord and that defensive measures against it will have to intrude heavily on traditional liberties if they are to be effective. Our present hit-and-miss precautions are unlikely to provide long-term security. The enemy will learn from experience, establish new sanctuaries, enjoy runs of luck, acquire a more formidable arsenal (possibly up to and including nuclear weapons). To prevent a repetition of 9/11 or worse, we will need a moratorium on rights that we take for granted. What’s more, a couple of new 9/11’s would make that a popular idea.
Disregarding embellishments, we have only three strategic options: to maintain the offensive against terrorism and its sponsors, to try to build an impregnable defense or to give in to so many Islamofascist demands that the bulk of the zealots will be satisfied. Senator Kerry has explicitly or implicitly rejected all elements of the first approach, save for occasional hints that he would send large additional forces to Afghanistan to track down the no longer relevant (and almost certainly late) Osama bin Laden. I doubt that he likes the third, so a Kerry Administration will be, barring a to-be-hoped-for flip-flop, left with the second. Conceivably, passive defense will be executed with superlative skill, but success will mean only that we will surrender our freedoms to our own government. That is better than giving in to Islamofascism, but is it the victory that we desire?
