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The
Accidental War on Terror
By Mark Helprin
FrontPageMagazine.com
America
has approached the war on terrorism as if from two dream worlds.
The liberal, in which an absurd understanding of cause and
effect, the habit of capitulation to foreign influence, a
mild and perpetual anti-Americanism, reflex allergies to military
spending, and a theological aversion to self-defense all lead
to policies that are hard to differentiate from surrender.
And the conservative, in which everything must be all right
as long as a self-declared conservative is in the White House
no matter how badly the war is run; no matter that a Republican
administration in electoral fear leans left and breaks its
promise to restore the military; and no matter that because
the Secretary of Defense decided that he need not be able
to fight two wars at once, an adequate reserve does not exist
to deal with, for example, North Korea. And in between these
dream worlds of paralysis and incompetence lies the seam,
in French military terminology la soudure, through which al-Qaeda,
uninterested in our parochialisms, will make its next attack.
The
war is waged as if accidentally, and no wonder. For domestic
political reasons and to preserve its marginal relations with
the Arab World, the United States has declined to identify
the enemy precisely. He is so formless, opportunistic, and
shadowy that apparently we cannot conceive of him accurately
enough to declare war against him, although he has declared
war against us. Attribute this to Karl Rove’s sensitivity
to the electoral calculus in key states with heavy Arab-American
voting, to a contemporary aversion to ethnic generalities,
to the desire not to offend the Arab World lest it attack
us even more ferociously, to the fear of speaking truth to
oil, to apprehension about the taking of hostages and attacks
upon embassies, and to a certain muddled ness of mind that
is the result both of submitting to polite and obsequious
blackmail and of having been throughout the course of one’s
life a stranger to rigorous thought. Reluctance to identify
the enemy makes it rather difficult to assess his weaknesses
and strengths. Thus, for want of a minimum of political courage,
our soldiers are dispatched to far-flung battlefields to fight
an ad hoc, disorganized war, and, just as it did in the Vietnam
War, Washington explains its lack of a lucid strategy by referring
to the supposed incoherence of its opponent. From the beginning,
America has been told that this is a new kind of war that
cannot be waged with strategic clarity, that strategy and
its attendant metaphysics no longer apply. And because we
cannot sufficiently study the nature of an insufficiently
defined enemy, our actions are mechanistic, ill-conceived,
and a function of conflicting philosophies within our bureaucracies,
which proceed as if their war plans were modeled on a to-do
list magnetized to some suburban refrigerator.
The
enemy must and can be defined. That he is the terrorist himself
almost everyone agrees, but in the same way that the United
States extended blame beyond the pilots who attacked Pearl
Harbor, it must now reach far back into the structures of
enablement for the sake of deciding who and what must be fought.
And given the enormity of a war against civilians, and the
attacks upon our warships, embassies, economy, capital, government,
and most populous city, this determination must be liberal
and free-flowing rather than cautious and constrained, both
by necessity and by right. The enemy has embarked upon a particular
form of warfare with the intent of shielding his center of
mass from counterattack, but he must not be allowed such a
baseless privilege. For as much as he is the terrorist who
executes the strategy, he is the intelligence service in aid
of it, the nation that harbors his training camps, the country
that finances him, the press filled with adulation, the people
who dance in the streets when there is a slaughter, and the
regime that turns a blind eye.
Not
surprisingly, militant Islam arises from and makes its base
in the Arab Middle East. The first objective of the war, therefore,
must be to offer every state in the area this choice: eradicate
all support for terrorism within your borders or forfeit existence
as a state. That individual terrorists will subsequently flee
to the periphery is certain, but the first step must be to
deny them their heartland and their citadels.
Recognizing
that the enemy is militant Islam with its center the Arab
Middle East, it is possible to devise a coherent strategy.
The enemy’s strengths should not be underestimated. He has
a historical memory far superior to that of the West, which
has forgotten its thousand-year war with Islamic civilization.
Islamic civilization has not forgotten, however, having been
for centuries mainly on the losing side. Its memory is clear,
bitter, and a spur to action. And it dovetails with a spiritual
sense of time far different from that of the West, where impatience
arises in seconds, for the enemy believes that a thousand
years, measured against the eternity he is taught to contemplate
and accept, is nothing. Closely related to his empowering
sense of time are his spiritual sense of mission, which must
never be underestimated, and Islam’s traditional embrace of
martyrdom.
This
militant devotion, consciously or otherwise, pays homage to
the explosive Arab conquests, which reached almost to Paris,
to the gates of Vienna, the marchlands of China, India, and
far into Africa. War based on the notion of Islamic destiny
is underway at this moment in the Philippines, Indonesia,
Sinkiang, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya, Iraq,
Palestine, Macedonia, Algeria, the Sudan, Sub-Saharan Africa,
and throughout the world in the form of terrorism without
limitation or humanitarian nuance all in service of a conception
far more coherent than the somnolent Western nations seem
to comprehend. The object long expressed by bin Laden and
others is to flip positions in the thousand-year war. To do
this, the Arabs must rekindle what the 10th-century historian
Ibn Khaldun called ‘asabiya, an ineffable combination of group
solidarity, momentum, esprit de corps, and the elation of
victory feeding upon victory. This, rather than any of its
subsidiary political goals, is the objective of the enemy
in the war in which we find ourselves at present. Despite
many flickers all around the world, it is a fire far from
coming alight, but as long as the West apprehends each flare
as a separate case the enemy will be encouraged to drive them
toward a point of ignition, and the war will never end.
The
proper strategic objective for the West, therefore, is the
suppression of this fire of ‘asabiya in the Arab heartland
and citadels of militancy a task of division, temporary domination,
and, above all, demoralization. As unattractive as it may
seem, in view of the deadly alternative it is the only choice
other than to capitulate.
How
might it be accomplished? As much as those who make war against
the West find advantage in Arab history and Islamic tradition,
they are burdened by its disadvantages. Living in a world
of intense subjectivity where argument is perpetually overruled
by impulse, they suffer divisions within divisions and schisms
within schisms. Though all-consuming fervor may be appropriate
to certain aspects of revealed religion, it makes for absolutist
politics and governance. A despotic political culture in turn
decreases the possibilities of strong alliances and is (often
literally) murderous to initiative, whether technical, military,
or otherwise. And it is of no little import that the Middle
East has developed so as to be unreceptive to technology.
The
natural environment of Arabia is so extreme that the idea
of mastering it was out of the question, submission and adaptation
being the only options, and the Middle East had neither the
kind of surplus agriculture that permitted Europe to industrialize,
nor the metals and wood upon which the machine culture was
built. Technology was viewed not as a system of interdependent
principles, but rather as finite at all stages, not an art
to be practiced but a product to be bought. Magical machines
arrived whole, without a hint of the network of factories,
workshops, mines, and schools, and the centuries of struggle
and genius it took to build them. Islam provides a successful
spiritual equilibrium that the whole of Islamic society strives
to protect. The West, by its very nature, stirs and changes
everything in “creative destruction.” Wanting no
part in this, the Middle East, to quote the economic historian
Charles Issawi, “believed that the genius of Islam would
permit a controlled modernization; from Europe one could borrow
things without needing to borrow ideas,” which is why,
perhaps, in 19th-century Egypt, students were sometimes taught
a European language to master a craft, and then told to “forget”
the language.
Even
more potentially fatal to the Arabs than the fact that they
cannot ever win a technological duel with the West is their
Manichean tendency to perceive in wholly black or wholly white.
In the Middle East the middle ground is hardly ever occupied
and entire populations hold volatile and extremist views.
This is traceable perhaps to the austerities of the desert
and nomadic life, and is one of the great and magnetic attractions
of Islam severity, certainty, and either decisive action or
righteous and contented abstention. In Arab-Islamic culture,
things go very strongly one way or they go very strongly the
other, and, always, a compassionate haven exists for the defeated,
for martyrs, as long as they have not strayed from the code
of honor. In the West, success is everything, but in the Arab
Middle East honor is everything, and can coexist perfectly
well with failure. The Arabs have a noble history of defeat,
and are acclimatized to it. Their cultural and religious structures,
far less worldly than ours, readily accommodate it. Though
wanting victory, they are equally magnetized by defeat, for
they understand, as we used to in the West that the defeated
are the closest to God.
The
West seems not to know, George W. Bush seems not to know,
and Donald Rumsfeld seems not to know, that there can be but
one effective strategy in the war against terrorism, and that
is to shift Arab-Islamic society into the other of its two
states out of nascent ‘asabiya and into comfortable fatalism
and resignation. The British have done this repeatedly, and
the United States almost did it during the Gulf War. That
the object of such an exercise is not to defeat the Arabs
but to dissuade them from making war upon us means it is more
likely to succeed now than when it was joined to religious
war in the Crusades or to the imperial expansion of Europe.
Now we want only to trade with the oil states even at scandalous
expense, and not (assuming that “nation-building”
is properly allowed to atrophy) to convert, control, or colonize.
How, exactly, does one shift Arab-Islamic society into the
other of its two states?
If
one were to calculate a fortiori the scale of military effort
involved in the 19th-century division of the Ottoman Empire
and the subsequent European domination of the Middle East,
one would undoubtedly assume that the Europeans deployed great
armadas and large armies. More than 30 years ago, a graduate
student asked the late and eminent Oxford historian Albert
Hourani what numbers the Europeans did, in fact, deploy. He
said he would look into it, and a week later reported that,
to his astonishment, the only European military presence within
the periphery of the Ottoman Empire that he could discover,
from Napoleon until the latter part of the 19th century, were
1,500 British and 500 Austrian troops in 1840, and 6,000 French
in 1860. Thus can minuscule expeditions conquer vast empires,
Aztec, Inca, or Ottoman. But not today, or at least that would
seem to be a reasonable conclusion. For in the last century
the Arabs have organized into separate and self-stabilizing
states; they have raised large military establishments, so
that now Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and (non-Arab)
Iran have 1.5 million regulars under arms; they have bought
and sometimes successfully absorbed huge inventories of modern
weapons; they have fought wars of independence and revolution,
civil wars, against Israel six times, and against the great
powers; and from T. E. Lawrence, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh they
have learned at least the rudiments of asymmetrical warfare.
Nevertheless,
the fundamental relation has not been altered, and it is still
possible to maneuver the Middle East into quiescence vis-?-vis
the West. It is a matter mainly of proportion. The unprecedented
military and economic potential of even the United States
alone, thus far so imperfectly utilized, is the appropriate
instrument. Adjusting military spending to the level of the
peacetime years of the past half-century would raise outlays
from approximately $370 billion to approximately $650 billion.
If the United States had the will, it could, excessively,
field 20 million men, build 200 aircraft carriers, or almost
instantly turn every Arab capital into molten glass, and the
Arabs know this. No matter what the advances in regional power,
the position of the Arab Middle East relative to that of the
United States is no less disadvantageous than was that of
the Arab Middle East to the 19th-century European powers.
But, given the changes listed in the previous paragraph, the
signal strength necessary to convey an effective message is
now far greater.
In
the Gulf War, the overwhelming forces marshaled by the coalition
might have sufficed as such a signal but for the fact that
they were halted prematurely and withdrawn precipitously,
gratuitously leaving both Saudi Arabia and Iraq an inexplicable
freedom of action that probably left them stunned by their
good luck.
Before
the Iraq War, high officials were seriously considering an
invasion force of 500 backed by air power. The numbers climbed
steadily: 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 25,000, 40,000, 50,000, 60,000,
and so on, with the supposedly retrograde “heavy army”
prevailing finally, and 300,000 troops in the theater. When
offered vehement advice to go into Iraq with massive force
and many times overkill, a brilliant and responsible senior
official responded, almost with incredulity, “Why would
we need the force that you recommend, when in the Gulf War
we used only 10 percent of what we had?” In the Gulf
War, we did not occupy a country of 23 million.
As
of this writing, the army reportedly has 23 combat brigades,
18 of which are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, three of
which are in refit, one in Kosovo, and two in Korea, leaving
nine brigades, or about 45,000 men, to pick up the slack anywhere
and everywhere else. Though independent echelons and the Marines
increase this figure many fold, they do not have sufficient
lift and logistics, and even if they did it would not be enough.
This is as much the result of the Bush Administration’s failure
to increase defense spending appreciably and rebuild the military
before (and even after) September 11, as the lack of real
shock and awe was the result of the administration’s desire
to go to war according to a sort of just-in-time-inventory
paradigm. Managers rather than strategists, they did not understand
the essence of their task, which was not merely to win in
Iraq but to stun the Arab World. Although it is possible,
with just enough force, to win, it is not possible, with just
enough force, to stun. The war in Iraq should have been an
expedition originating in the secure base of Saudi Arabia,
from the safety of which the United States could with immense,
husbanded force easily reach anywhere in the region. The eastern
section of the country, far from Mecca and Medina, fronting
the sea, with high infrastructure and large spaces for maneuver,
basing, and an air-tight defense, is ideal. Had the Saudis
not offered this to us, we might have taken it, which probably
would have been unnecessary, given that our expressed determination
would likely have elicited an invitation. As it was, we were
willing to alienate the entire world so as to thrust ourselves
into a difficult situation in Iraq, but unwilling to achieve
a commanding position in Saudi Arabia for fear of alienating
the House of Saud. One might kindly call this, in that it
is about as sensible as wearing one’s clothes backwards, “strategic
hip hop.”
It
was, in any case, some kind of deliberate minimalism. Sufficiency
was the watchword. The secretary of defense wanted to show
that his new transformational force could do the job without
recourse to mass. The president wanted no more than sufficiency,
because he had not advanced and had no plans to advance the
military establishment beyond the levels established by his
predecessor. With the magic of transformation, he would rebuild
it at glacial pace and little cost lest he imperil his own
and Republican fortunes by embarking on a Reagan-style restoration
after an election decided by as many voters as would fit in
a large Starbucks, and that he won by leaning, un-Reagan-like,
to the center.
The
war in Iraq was a war of sufficiency when what was needed
was a war of surplus, for the proper objective should have
been not merely to drive to Baghdad but to engage and impress
the imagination of the Arab and Islamic worlds on the scale
of the thousand-year war that is to them, if not to us, still
ongoing. Had the United States delivered a coup de main soon
after September 11 and, on an appropriate scale, had the president
asked Congress on the 12th for a declaration of war and all
he needed to wage war, and had this country risen to the occasion
as it has done so often, the war on terrorism would now be
largely over.
But
the country did not rise to the occasion, and our enemies
know that we fought them on the cheap. They know that we did
not, would not, and will not tolerate the disruption of our
normal way of life. They know that they did not seize our
full attention. They know that we have hardly stirred. And
as long as they have these things to know, they will neither
stand down nor shrink back, and, for us, the sorrows that
will come will be greater than the sorrows that have been.
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