I think most Americans get it. They realize that we are at war with Islamic fundamentalism. We hear criticisms of the War on Terror, but it's mostly partisan sniping, political opportunism, Monday morning quarterbacking on this tactic or that strategy, this funding or that priority. I realize that there are some Americans, (can you spell A.N.S.W.E.R.?) who think it would be a good thing if America and the West lost this war. One presumes that while they wish to see the evil America brought to her knees, they'd just as soon have the airplane fly into someone else's office building.
That said, there are of course valid criticisms of the administration's conduct of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns and their aftermath, that are well-intended and principled, while still rooted in the idea that it's wrong to randomly murder "infidels", subjugate women, and deny free religious expression. It is with some of these serious critics that I share certain concerns about the actions and priorities of the Bush administration, and frustrations with the way things have gone so far.
I think the President spoke with clarity and conviction early in the war, establishing the so-called Bush Doctrine of preemption, and the idea that those states and entities that harbor and finance terror are themselves "terrorist" in nature, and can expect to be dealt with as such. I do not think however, that he has been direct enough in confronting the worst offenders in that regard, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the PLO.
And the idea that we can somehow separate the "Islam" from radical Islamic terror, while supposedly mainstream Islamic organizations and groups continue to balk at repudiating and policing the radicals, is an increasingly dangerous distinction. That is not to say that "we are at war with Islam". But the use of the vague "catch-all" terms "terrorism" and "terrorists" by the administration and the media has the effect of a self-applied blindfold, preventing us from openly addressing and discussing the part that Islam plays in the ongoing war.
An article by Mark Helprin from the Claremont Review of Books entitled "War in the Absence of Strategic Clarity" made the rounds of the blogosphere about six weeks ago, and I just reread it the other day. While thoroughly spiced with hindsight, he makes some great points about the need to identify the enemy in order to defeat him, and the fact that militant Islam has a much longer memory than does the West. Why don't we call the enemy by his name?:
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.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.
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.
Helprin contends that Islamic civilization is "accommodating" of defeat and marginalization, and that we should not have let them off the mat in the the first Gulf War. He feels that had we stunned them (with somewhat more "Shock and Awe" I suppose) immediately after 9/11, that they would have presumably become resigned to their accustomed position of martyrs with "honor", and the War on Terror would be largely over by now. I suspect we had given them a few too many "victories" in their terror attacks throughout the 80's and 90's for them to be discouraged into quitting the jihad by a brutal campaign of whatever sort in 2001. But Helprin's larger point, that we can't fight what we won't identify, remains valid, in my opinion. And his other key point, that we had better be serious, vigilant and relentless, because they sure as hell are, is well made also. Here are some more selected excerpts from an article that is well worth reading in its entirety:
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...Posted by dan at November 2, 2003 07:46 PM...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.
...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.
...it is still possible to maneuver the Middle East into quiescence vis-à-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.
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.