In Frontpage magazine, Victor Davis Hanson has finally run out of patience with a civilizational adversary that claims the moral highground from Western decadence and cultural toxification, but which cynically and hypocritically uses both the technology of the West and its civic institutions to advance the cause of historical regression – a tactic which, perversely and against our interest, we seem committed to abetting.
His recommendation is far more simple than the preceding sentence:
The time is over both for coffee-table talk in the West about a pie-in-the-sky “reformation” needed in Islam, and the endless habit in the Middle East of blaming others for self-inflicted miseries.
Instead, right now we should hold the Muslim world to the same standards of tolerance that we demand of ourselves — no more apologies for things like our insensitive cartoons or excuses for their insane anger against novelists.
In turn, the Middle East must grow up and accept, like the rest of the world, that there are social and cultural costs and consequences for any who wish to embrace the benefits of modernism.
We cannot guarantee the latter outcome, but it is far past time to cease infantilizing the Islamist conscience by betraying our founding principles in kowtowing to their intolerant preferences.
I think.
(H/T to occasional reader Zane for the link)
Sigh … I sometimes feel that we’re the only grown-ups in the room.
If only it could really happen. Well said Lex – we will patronize ourselves into oblivion if we aren’t careful.
The tiniest nugget of awareness seems to be emerging. I read a news report recently of a British Airways jet out of Milan to London in which there was a sizable group of Muslims from Oman (I think). The Muslim men, after pull back from the gate, demanded that everyone switch places to accomodate their sense of propriety regarding the distance between females and non related males.
Bottom line,no one would move!
After 3 hours of nonsense, the Muslims were escorted off the aircraft to the cheers of the other passengers.
It’s a start…
Doncha think that at least 80% of Americans agree completely with Victor Davis Hanson? Average Americans are long past wanting to mollycoddle Muslim sensibilities. And I’m drawing some hope from anecdotal items in oh-so-politically-correct Europe, such as the one Babs cites above.
On a tangent, Prof. Hanson talks about the historical Battle of Thermopylae on the extras DVD for 300.
As if we needed another reason to get the movie. (But it’s certainly a good one!)
Hanson writes: “Instead, right now we should hold the Muslim world to the same standards of tolerance that we demand of ourselves.”
I’ve read lots of good VDH, but the above reads like a plea that even ardent pacifists would agree with. The operative word is “how” we should do this and except for a distinct minority “in theater” et al, our National Will appears very unwilling.
I sympathize with Hanson’s message, but as a good friend of mine said: “It will take several more hard kicks in the b_lls before we hold them to the standard.”
That could work, if they weren’t 80% savages. I’m thinking we’ll need a big stick.
AMEN! to what VDH says!
Inshallah!
Oh yeah, and “those people” (as Lee would say) have managed to get the Cambridge University Press to de-publish the book “Alms for Jihad” by taking advantage of the libel law in the UK.
C.U.P. is reportedly trying to get libraries in the USA, even, to remove copies of that book from their shelves. Sadly, I betcha a bunch of them will do so, one of the reasons for the URL I chose for my blog.
I wonder if it is possible, as VDH says, to stop “the endless habit in the Middle East of blaming others for self-inflicted miseries.”
Now I realize I’m being rash, politically incorrect, probably engaging in stereotyping and somewhere along the line I might have gone overboard into crass generalizations, but it seems to me that Islam is not a religion that begets personal responsibility. When one speaks of any action, even such a mundane action as brushing one’s teeth, and reflexively adds “God Willing” to the sentence, I suspect that fatalism is at work. Islam is submission to God’s will, after all — some are just more submissive than others.
In “Hunt for Red October” one admiral aptly stated that “Your average Russian doesn’t take a a dump without a plan.” I’d posit that your standard stereotype fundamentalist Muslim doesn’t take a dump without God being so willing. Therefore, to our Muslim in question, constipation is not a result of poor diet, inadequate hydration, but rather that God was unwilling to back that particular action and Our Intrepid Hero is nothing more than a pawn in the Cosmic Comedy that is defecation, prevented by God from fulfilling his destiny prior to showering and breakfast.
If I am wrong, and I hope I am, personal responsibility and a live-and-let-live attitude can take root. If I am right, and personal responsibility was never an option to consider when God (or Allah, or whatever name one happens to call the God of Abraham) calls all the shots, then the series of self-inflicted injuries shall continue because, quite simply, they are the result of Divine Will and not the mistakes of mere mortals.
Simply put, there’s no incentive to stop shooting yourself in the foot if you can convince yourself the blame for the injury rests with your omnipotent friend. Such fatalism and assigning of blame aren’t going to change in a mere generation.
– Max
Justthisguy, I managed to get an E-book copy here, don’t know if it’s still good:
http://www.mobipocket.com/en/ebooks/bookdetails.asp?BookID=56971
I been saying for a long time, some might say ad nauseum, that Islam will always be hostile towards the West and particularly Christianity, as it is imbedded in their religion. Their disgust with the West’s continued slide into the moral sewer doesn’t help matters either. Perhaps a bit of a generalization but it would seem they confuse that decadence which permeates Western culture today with Christianity itself. The license to do whatever floats your boat is the child of the so called “Enlightenment”. Regardless, Islam is coming after us, and has been for 13 Centuries and however glacial the assault, it is relentless.
I think it would kind of make sense that they confuse Western decadence (the lifestyle) with Christianity (the religion). Because, as I understand it, in Islam the lifestyle IS the religion. I don’t mean just walking the walk but Islam seems like so much more than a religion. Forget separation of Church and state, with Islam the Church is the state and vice versa. Its more than a religion, its a political system as well.
Dear Michelle,
This is likely why many Muslims are so confused – precisely because so many of them live in more integrated societies where religion has a much more pronounced public, social role. In a religious culture where separation of “Church and State” doesn’t even parse as a theological concept it is very hard for many of them to make the leap conceptually and believe that we have distinct spheres of religious, political and secular social space that in some instances are separate and in some instances not (we take oaths on bibles, our public life does have elements of Christianity still present, we have official chaplains serving with US forces, etc). We aren’t always able to agree on where the line between religion, politics and social expression should be drawn. For many Muslims I imagine our distinctions seem meaningless and we are “Christian” the way many of their own polities are “Muslim” hence when they see things that don’t match up with their understanding of morality I imagine many of them assume it is due to the weakness and hypocrisy of most Christians.
Makes sense to me.
And, unfortunately, from that point of view, it would be more than just the weakness and hypocrisy of Christians …
if you look at what Hollywood puts out, well I can see how Soddom and Gemorah (I know I likely butchered that one) might look like the appropriate solution.
I expect that Muslims will “grow up” when the West does, and not until then. Our own worst behavior enables their historical arrogance, and their endless inferiority complex enables our patronizing vanity.
Individuals may come to a respectful understanding of each other, but as separate cultures we’re probably going to do this the hard way.
The very hard way.
Dear Capt. J
And maybe we wont “understand” each other at all, particularly if understand is a synonym for sympathize? And do we need to? I just want to help them kill the jihadis among them, who are as dangerous to most Muslims as they are to us(and who have killed more fellow Muslims for a lot longer than us). And if we start making demands of Muslims that they behave as we would like them to at home in all circumstances we might find that they have other, more dangerous friends to whom they can turn for help to resist too heavy an American hand – http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/956wspet.asp . If we want to pick a fight with 1/5 of all humanity who call themselves Muslim the danger is that they are thin skinned enough (and we can at our worst be arrogant enough) that we could succeed. And, contra Casca, I don’t know if there are enough big sticks in this continent sized country of ours to deal with the ensuing “fun.”
Dr. Curp,
The Cold War strategy of our adversaries didn’t go away after 9/11. China sees themselves as the coming dominant global power, whether their internal trends support that or not. So arming Iran as a proxy against us is no surprise. In one way or another this has been going on for decades.
I agree that our best strategy is to help the vast majority of Muslims free themselves from jihadi oppression
In Iraq and Afganistan our troops are making a people to people connection. The ‘Al-Ameriki’ tribe is showing tribal peoples to themselves their importance and worth as individuals –as Americans we personally find it hard to relate to others face to face in any other way. Whether our efforts ultimately succeed or not, a new idea has been introduced into the tribal nexus, that the individual has value. Once people experience this, they are changed in unpredictable ways. Elites everywhere find this frightening.
Muslims who see first hand the possibilities of thinking and living differently may find a new path that does not automatically assume that Islam must dominate all others, as a way to make up for the wretched deficiencies in their own lives. If they overcome their own frustations with our help, then we aren’t the all-purpose so-convenient enemy anymore. Something’s gotta give.
It takes strength, patience and above all self-respect to make this slow progress. Our military makes it look easy, which it most certainly is not. If we look and act weak at home, we only make a difficult future harder on ourselves. Reclaiming our own self-respect as a Nation is the first step on that ‘harder way’, demanding first of ourselves, then Muslims, that that the gifts of the West of freedom and individual rights be respected, defended and ultimately shared. Self-respect in the West is the limiting factor, and I think this was what VDH meant.
Dear Capt. J.,
Perhaps, though I read VDH’s article a bit differently. I want us to get our act together as well, first and foremost for our own good, but also so we can be more admirable to more peoples with whom we would ally around the world. My concern is that if we set the bar too high and, from their perspective too crooked (asking them to embrace attitudes and values that grew organically out of Western experience), and become too forceful in our efforts to impose our values, we could provoke a reaction that might undo what good we are capable of doing.
My fear is that for every Muslim who might find a new path by being around American soldiers, there could easily be many more who are so alienated as to embrace the visions of al Qaeda. That is something where I trust the people on the ground a great deal, though I would caution against the possibility that we have influence right now the degree to which we are doing most of the heavy lifting and providing lots of goodies.
The problem with a post titled “running out of patience” and how I read some of VDH’s tone is that if the real goal is transformation of a culture, then less than half a decade is way too early to feel impatience. If it took decades before we could be sure that Germany had denazified, how much longer is it going to take to bring about real cultural change in the Middle East? And what if, we discover a’la Kipling that “east is east, and west is west and never the two shall meet?” I think we need to have both minimum and maximum goals, so we don’t define failure as the inability to get every Afghani to send their daughters to coed schools or some such metric that is coming from us and not from them.
I’m sure we are having good influence also, but it is worth always remembering how deeply alien are the political and cultural assumptuions of the people in whose midst we have put ourselves, first and foremost for our own security and safety, and then, if all works out very well, for their good as well. I think we should entertain the possibility that they might reject our ways and remain in many ways mired in a society that is more repressive than our worst nightmares. I hope not, but if so, we have to find a modus vivendi that they can live with. Again, I don’t presume to tell professionals how to do their job, it is just that there is a long history to the West’s interaction with peoples in this part of the world, little of it happy, but not all of it a story of both sides being at daggers drawn. We might just do something new and maybe people in parts of the Muslim world are ready for a change, but we have played footsy before (we uprooted in an unseemly haste in the tribal areas of Pakistan in the late 80s and lost a lot of the goodwill which would have helped us immensly right now), and in this part of the world, memories are very long. Them’s my concerns, Captain.
Sincerely,
David
PS: A book I wish I could encourage people to read to get a bit of a sense of what we could be up against is by Milovan Djilas, called Land without Justice, where he describes growing up in a Montenegro which as late as the 19th century was a culture of blood feud and head hunting where Serbs moving in from the north came accross as kind’a girly cosmopolitan sophisticates. It might provide some perspective on just how much of a leap has to be made to embrace many things we take for granted.
Capt. J.,
And the one difference between the Cold War and the current would-be hegemon is that methinks domestically Communist ideology hurt the Soviets more than it helped them. The disconcerting thing about the PRC is how, for all of the Communist symbolism, we are basically dealing with a neo-fascist state where hyper-nationalism is the real ideology, but it is combined with a tradition of predatory mercantalism. And the only reason I point this out is to draw attention to the fact that there are dangers an order of magnitude greater than those posed by our opponents in the GWOT, hence we need to be careful about how and what we we commit to in the Muslim world, especially the Arab part of it.
Dr. Curp,
I can’t disagree with you on most points, especially the part about long memories. That is a very clear warning from history, and one that short-attention span Americans will find difficult to take as seriously as we should. Tribal bonds are forever, and a promise made must be kept.
Pershing understood this in the Phillipines.
I would say the combination of American impatience, naivete, and pragmatic what-the-he$$, let’s-try-something-anything attitude has developed a better on-the-ground local understanding than what what we’ve been able to achieve so far at the regional or national levels. When you have Iragi tribes asking American officers and NCOs to be their sheiks, something is happening. It isn’t classic imperialism, because we aren’t cut out for that. Instead it is the power of personal example, of moral leadership and just dealings that the Muslim world hungers for. How ironic that an infidel army should be source of individual liberation. Do they want us there? Of course not. They want what we brought with us, what we want them to keep and claim for their own –a way to trust each other at least enough to survive together.
See the story of “Hammer” an Iraqi interpreter:
http://www.michaeltotten.com/
We owe this man and his family a debt of honor. There may be, as you say,an unbridgeable gulf between our world and the one he comes from. But he’s already there in that gulf. Should we abandon him, the vacuum would swiftly be filled by Al Queda and the Taliban, ultimately threatening our own security here in the CONUS. The bottom line, is that ultimately we can’t accept their rejection of modernity because the inevitable result is the harboring of regressive forces with the motivation and means to destroy us. Its already happned once. Long term relationships with people in this region are no longer optional –they’re permanent.
To quote Chuck Colson, “When you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”
lol, couldn’t resist.
Dear Capt. J.,
I agree wholeheartedly with the thrust of your argument that we need to see this through like we finished the job in Germany, Japan and South Korea. Let’s just take it nice and easy though, and realize that they need to embrace change at their pace, not according to our timetable, particularly not one linked to our election cycle, or even to our impatience with the rate and manner of change of their religious culture. As you point out, there is evidence they are starting to do that, but patience and humility are part of the mix of moral leadership, and wisdom can further enhance the accomplishments of such leadership. And part of wisdom is realizing the difference between winning the people of real stature and authority in the community and pealing off the stray misfit (who might be misfitting for perfectly legitimate reasons, but winning such a person doesn’t advance our cause – and I am not calling the interpreter a misfit, was just generalizing).
It is especially dangerous to being too receptive to people telling you what you want to hear and trying to get you to do things for them (not meaning to pile on, but see Prof. Cole’s blog for the impact of that kind of echo chamber on one’s psyche). We have to have a real objectivity about the communities we are attempting to win over, and how far they are willing to come to meet us, and where we can meet them in terms of their values – something that will be harder to accomplish if we take VDH’s criteria of demanding of them the same behavior we expect of our own. They are not us, and as you wrote on the other thread, there is a kind of certainty that is the enemy of the good, and where I think that is particularly true is in a tendency of some Americans to assume we’ve got all the answers for everybody (and I write that as someone who likes most of our answers to most things – but then, my wetware has been wired the American way). I do believe in a common humanity and core shared values, honest injuns, but I also think their (and our) culture, religion and history creates lots of possibilities for mutual incomprehension, which, when mixed with an unstable geopolitical neighborhood, al Qaeda, and a lot of troops who’ve had to spend a good deal of time in the furnace, can make for very bad things if we don’t play our cards right.
When I read this I couldn’t believe Hanson would document such a wishwashy statement as:
“…must grow up and accept, like the rest of the world,..”
IMO, that’s sorta squishy and ever hopeful. He deep down must know, as do I, that swords are not beaten into plowshares, rather a stronger sword beats ‘em into plowshears…This Islamic sword will NEVER transform itself out of any rational, western process of what we call logic or even self-preservation..
No, it will take maximum force to change it. BTW, what we are doing now is not maximum force.
b2
Pan Casca,
And reaching for their balls the better to guide them tends to make many people get all upset, strangely enough (those wacky Arabs and Kurds), which in that part of the world can lead to someone strapping on a belt choc a bloc full of C4 and giving some of our own people, or almost as bad, those Iraqis working with us, a one way ticket to a different world.
I know you know that, but the rhetoric matters, including rhetoric on impatience or on them all being savages. We have depended upon and worked with some of these people in the Middle East for a long time (Jordanians, Egyptians, Turks, Gulf sheiks, etc and Kurds especially). To start realizing that they are different and some of those differences concealed dangers this late in the game points to our need to pay closer attention.
Monsieur badbob
(Since I might sound French with this…)Getting the job done can be accomplished at least as well, mayhap better by precision and targeted force than maximum force. Breaking too many things could cause some of these countries to fly apart, making it easy for Al Qaeda and their ilk to scurry around in the wreckage. Oh, and there is that little problem with oil and the need to not create a situation that leads to the collapse of the world economy. That would be nice, non?
“Maximum force” is only for conventional wars. Within irregular, asymmetric, guerrilla wars, non-state sponsored terrorism and insurgencies; maximum force is usually ill advised and mostly counterproductive. Indeed, the use of maximum force in 4GW, except in very rare and specific instances, gains nothing but it does usuallly exacerbate the overall strategic problem – sometimes significantly.
Insurgents often deftly use a counterinsurgency’s overwhelming force against the counterinsurgency. Oftentimes, the greater the force, the worse the results.
As Galula told us half a century ago regarding this type of asymmetric warfare, “a soldier trained as a pediatrician may be more important than a mortar expert, a copy machine more important than a machine gun.”
The objectives are people and politics; hearts and minds. Geographical territory or body counts gained by “maximum force” mean little and are often counterproductive. It takes an entirely different mindset to wage this type of war that is mostly, counterintuitive.
Filterman and folks,
Several examples that I believe have important paralells with our current situation are Western Ukraine, Lithuania and Chechnya. The Soviets during and after WWII when faced with national/religious resistance (by some very not nice people, to be fair) went in hammer and tongs, with the most brutal and sweeping measures (of a kind we will never get US troops to do, and a good thing to). The result was that they “won” in that they crushed the immediate uprising but they created a political scorched earch throughout these regions that retained their hatred for the Soviets for generations. It is not squishy or overly optimistic to want to use the right tools for the job.
“I know you know that, but the rhetoric matters, including rhetoric on impatience or on them all being savages.”
OK Doc, I’m getting the point –mutual incomprehension is a very real danger. And different groups could indeed be modeling what THEY think WE want to hear. Gaming the naive Yanks is the childs play of elites everywhere, what Pundita calls ‘The Pasha Mindset’++ Still, B2 and Casca are fundamentally right, at least in teh attention-getting phase.
It is very tempting to play to our overwhelming and as yet un-used kinetic strengths. And unrealistic cultural expectations –especially related to time–are our weak point. So I will ask this: if the military has adapted amazingly well to a situation they were not initially prepared for and are now achieving visible results, how come all other “elements of our national power” are not saddled up by now? They’ve had the same amount of time as the grunts and they ain’t bleeding. They aren’t even breaking a sweat.
Is is denial, confusion, dissociation, indifference –what?
My guess is that junior officers and NCOs in theater have a greater edge over the striped pants set, precisely because they’ve personally had to adapt, improvise and overcome. An idea is pursued if it works, discarded if it doesn’t. On to the next thing. The passions of the Muslim world will continue whether our non-military intellectuals and diplomats effectively engage with that world or not. Maybe our own Pashas haven’t figured that out yet:
++”Thus, simply arguing for democracy is naive. The arguments need to be shored at a much deeper philosophical level. And they need to be reinforced by practical demonstrations, which is just what the US military units that Robert Kaplan describes are doing.
Believe you me, seeing men wearing the uniform of the most powerful military in the world pick up shovels and work like coolies alongside the poorest locals is a better illustration of what America stands for than a million lectures on human rights…Why couldn’t they see this when the Peace Corps came calling? Because of Pasha Logic 101: Peace Corps workers must be coolies in their own tribe and pansies to boot, else why would they be in my village digging a well?
But it’s quite another argument when a man carrying enough firepower to blow my village to Kingdom Come rolls up his sleeves and picks up a shovel.”
http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2005/10/dead-man-laughing.html
I don’t believe anyone serving in our armed forces for a period hasn’t tried to live up to the adage “adapt, improvise & overcome”. That problem seems to reside elsewhere.
Capt. J,
Could it be cluelessness, or someting I’ve suspected – the narrative of triumphant democracy? 1989 and the Wall coming down was a very powerful image for lots of folks, and we would like to think that lurking underneath every dictatorship is a patient, essentially good people just waiting to breath free and roll up their sleaves to heal their country (the voting and all the purple stained v for victory signs during the last election likely reinforced it).
This vision of triumphant democracy appeals to us (leaders and led) on a very deep level, and I think in this case was an honest, wrong-headed mistake. My own sense is precisely because much of our national leadership believed in the model of triumphant democracy they chose military and political strategies that have assumed that Iraqis are ready and able to simply forgive and forget decades of truly horrific and divisive rule among a people whose traditions aren’t exactly geared toward forgive and forget. It might make better sense for them to do that if the goal was THE FUTURE (an intangible that looms very large for us as well) but if you and yours are very much concerned with THE PAST and settling scores, and your brothers’ blood crying out from the ground, then you will have a very different agenda. I think these are the kinds of things that have gotten us in trouble.
As to why our soldiers on the ground have adapted so well, having never served, I’m speculating but perhaps there’s nothing like the threat of getting killed to encourage lots of creativity? I really don’t mean to be flip, but the incentives are so much more real and immediate.
And as for why we are not more completely mobilized, I don’t think this is that kind of war. I’m going to put this out as an analytical point without praise or blame, but it seems to me that the GWOT has a large preemptive element, and as such is going to look very different than WWII. And if we expect all wars to look like WWII things will not go well for us. We need to be able to fight something like Vietnam or the Boer War, except this time without as much controversy (and at times, treason) at home or the complications that a largely conscript force can create abroad. But those are the thoughts of an amateur willing to receive instructions from those of you that know better and have deeper experience.
Capt. J.,
The only other problem, is that it could be that instead of respect, when seeing us do grunt work, this is the kind of foreigness that alienates and subverts. Many of their elites likely as not do not want to follow our example, so while we see the roll up your sleeves, get a shovel thing as a sign of humility that might indeed appeal to the “lower orders” what we are doing and how we are doing it likely carries a price tag in terms of some elites being willing to risk their lives rather than be forced to live the way our leaders live and work.
Dr. Curp –my most profound bow.
Identification with the Future, as opposed to the Past –the classic American blindspot.
Why deadender Baathists, Taliban and other Pashas would “rather fight than switch” –if your total identification is with the past, you don’t see [or want to see] a different future –even a better one, though all the trends may be against you in the current situation. In civil wars, there is not Past that is Past, all grudges are immediate and now, even if the root events were centuries ago –the Balkans.
The only uniting enemy –the outsider–is the one who interrupts the grudgefest. A blood enemy is better than the chaotic unknown. And to the rest of the world, America is Chaos.
We may be living in a parallel universe with the people we are trying to help in our own self-interest –same physical space but not the same time. Is that your meaning?
If so, we are still stuck with the consequences of these regressive mindsets harboring ruthless killers who will attack us in our own place and time at their next opportunity. As much as we might want to leave these tribal folks to their own devices, we can’t ignore the evil they tolerate or can’t/won’t eradicate on their own.
So I see the Pashas having to pay a price –either from their own people they’ve oppressed for so long, or from us if they don’t cull the jihadis in their midst. If their societies evolve, wonderful. But we won’t control that, or probably care much either way. Strictly bidness.
Capt. J,
In part, because, with some notable exceptions, on the whole, our experience as Americans of future time is so overwhelmingly positive. For them, they not only have the weight of tradition and custom, but if you just think about what someone born in Iraq after, say in 1945 (my sainted mother’s b-day) has experienced, linear progression has not happiness brought.
And add to that the fact that even if we assume that the past doesn’t hold as much allure for the rest of the people in Afghanistan and Iraq (and that is a risky assumption) who suffered under the old order, but had a particular and guarenteed place (even if it was low, it doesn’t follow that everyone would want to undo the old hierarchies). Still, the question they have to ask themselves, after years of very straightforward conditioning, is, is it worth dying (and maybe even seeing my family die) to change things, particularly given the possibility that Uncle Sam might not be here for long?
And yes, we are going to have to teach the Pashas and powers that wannabe locally a thing or two, we just need to be careful and deeply, deeply patient about how we go about that, but then, folks on the ground get that, I’m sure.
And I am honored by your bow, sir. I am glad this is helpful.
Cpt J, Dr. Curp
Great conversation. I just love being able to listen in on these. Same as the conversation in the ‘Fake But Accurate’ thread the other day. Its an honour to just be able to soak it up.
Easy Curp, I was just lighting the moment with a little rhetorical arson. Maybe it’s only 20%.
You’re making an argument for proportionality, unless I’ve missed something, which is entirely likely. I don’t see any chasm of thought between what you’ve written, and what anyone else has had to say. We may not be on the same paragraph, but we are on the same page.
We’re not doing something in Iraq that we haven’t done before; e.g. Bing West The Village, or the Banana Wars. The scale is larger, and those implementing the strategy arguably more talented. At the same time, it is war different from that Weigley analyzes in The American Way of War. That is what accounts for the difficulty of organizationally shifting from active combat to the war we’re fighting today.
On the GWOT scale, no fear of us going all Shermanesque on their collective asses. Our military assets are finite, and this fact alone channels us into a strategy that will minimize force. Unless of course, something transformational happens, then all bets are off. Then, we won’t have an option of proportionality.
So, where do I send the check for my (3)hrs of National Security Policy credit?
Pan Casca,
It is not so much the good ol’ US armed forces getting in touch with their inner Shermans that bothers me – given the awfulness of the kind of counter-insurgency going on over there anyone whose read anything (i.e. I’ve just excluded 99.9% of all journalists) knows that what stands out is the professionalism and self-control of our troops (and it was frankly why I was careful with the whole Beauchamp thing – what he described struck me as possible precisely because Iraq is such a pressure cooker oven, which in no way is meant to disparage our soldiers). It would be presumptuous of me to suggest to professionals the need for proportionality.
Rather, I’m more concerned about the “civilizing mission” undercurrent of some of the observations combined with an Islam is the enemy approach than some people who are rightly angry by some elements of Islamic extremism are flirting with. I think human rights are just swell, and that our advancing human dignity is all to the good. But there is a balance between helping and pushing too hard too fast on their culture that we have to maintain.
And your going to have to call the help desk on the check sir, I’ve got some little girls to whom I’ve promised a night time story.
Wow, go away for a while and the comments really took off.
I think VDH misspoke, though. His context was the use of a UK court to suppress publication of a book some Saudis felt was critical of them. I suspect VDH was less hoping the Saudis would grow up, than hoping to encourage the rest of us to hold our ground and enforce our own standards against the barbarians. In other words, stop letting the barbarians use our own laws against us.
Islamic hatred of the West will only destroy Islam. The fanatics think they have a chance. When the West starts fighting like the fascists fight–without lawyers–this war will be closer to ending. If we wanted it to end tomorrow, 90% of Americans need to support Pres. Bush’s strategy for the Middle East. The Islams will only stop when they know their propaganda–like their AK47s–wins them only death.