Horror and humiliation in Fallujah (How humilating Islam is a winning strategy in the WOT)

The Israeli problem is based on the Palestinian position that the state of Israel must be destroyed and all Jews removed from the middle-East. Unless there is a change in Palestinian attitude there is no solution.

Thanks for posting.

I think though that the article fully deserves its own thread. Do you mind posting in it full?

Cheers.

That is, we are being blackmailed into Sharon's camp, abandoning the Palestininans and our role as hoest broker.

Walt, it is impossible to be an honest broker for a cause and a people who consider honesty a weakness. Our policy should be to show the Islamic world, and especially the Arab world, that honesty will be rewarded with good faith but that treachery will result in total humiliation.

Sir John Keegan is wrong: radical Islam could win
Address:http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/545815/posts

There you go... :-)

I am looking forward to check out the comments.

Caution to all:

In the midst of the Cold War, Burnham and others wrote of the "Death of the West" and other such missives declaring the fight lost.

This defeatist essay is instructive in some ways, it reminds us of what we are up against - not Islam per se, but a westernized totalitarian ideology that takes the evil elements in Islam and mixes a witches brew of political extremism akin to leftist ideology; it reminds us the fight is not easy, and that in many ways our western psychology is not up to the task.

But it is not as if we werent here before, in the Cold War, up against a brutal Communist enemy with a wicked yet surprisingly appealling (to some) ideology. And we won. Despite 5th columns internally and an international system in many ways stacked against us, our empire stood and the enemy's fell.

So too in this war, world war 4. The first world war ended the era of monarchic empires; the second world war ended the ideology of fascim; the third world war, aka the cold war, defeated communism as a claimant to the global future; now we have a pretender to defeat the global empire of liberal democracy and freedom. This pretender cannot ever take the throne since it is really nothing more than a reactionary force against the liberalizing powers of democracy. But it can be like a virus or cancer, eating away at our international system, pulling us down, and even, in the mideast collapsing states or nations into chaos.

But then what? The rule of taliban? or the rule of theorats like in Iran? or more dictators like Assad of Syria? It's no template for the world.

So, there is not 'end game' for their success, just a template for more conflict. If we are "losing" merely because there are enemies who fight us, then we have lost the capacity to understand war at all. Having radicals who want to bomb the west is not 'losing' the war, but changing govts and policies on that basis is.

So our real solution is to do a few things:
1. Innoculate our politics from the terrorist threat by never ever changing policies due to terrorist acts or acknowledging they have any rightful place in political discourse.
2. Take the battle to the enemy. That is, make liberal democracy win in the lands of Islam. Perhaps Bush really did know best how to bring the war in focus when he called for democracy in the mideast.
3. Know that this is an ideological war, so defeat the ideas behind extremist Jihadist thinking.

We've won tougher battles and wars than this.

We will win.

Whiskey, you've got some interesting use of language when discussing Israelis and palestinians. For Israel, and Sharon, it is "blackmail". You have not supported that term at all, yet used it twice. The definition of blackmail: Extortion of money or something else of value from a person by the threat of exposing a criminal act or discreditable information.

When it comes to pallies, you use the terms "abandoned" and "betraying" - surprisingly, however, you mean it is the United States abandoning and betraying the pallies.

As for Israel blackmailing the U.S.: please explain what dark secret Israel knows about the U.S. to force our actions.

As for the U.S. abandoning and betraying the Pallies: please explain what obligation we have to a people that are outspoken in their hatred of the U.S.

The West would be left with the horrific fact of mass destruction of civilians combined with continued insecurity.

Should it come to that, so be it! Hundreds of millions died in the 20th Century (many for a far less noble cause)! I only would hope that the means of distruction not make the affected surface of the earth barren and uninhabitable for thousands of years! Misguided masses who cling to a belief that their view of the "path to the hereafter" must be forced upon ALL are the enemy of ALL (whether Muslim, Hindu, Christian, etc.)!!!

I just had to repost this gem posted by JasonC on that old thread from 2001:

This article has the merit of being interesting because of the issues it addresses. It has the failing that the author's ideas about those interesting subjects are almost entirely wrong. And it began with a misunderstanding of Keegan's original point, about culturally different ways of war. It is worth examining some of these issues in detail.
First, he reduces Keegan's point about the "western way of war" vs. others to upright westerner vs. underhanded oriental. Which is a gross misunderstanding - although that stereotype within the west did reflect such impressions, from the western attitudes towards war. In terms of such ways of fighting, others appear cowardly because they do not seek to decide the issue in pitched battle, without reserve. And they appear unscrupulous, because they do not obey ritualized western forms of procedure and honor, that the west uses to isolate and contain the destabilization its form of war creates.

From the other side, the western way of war appears idiotic in its formulas and restraints, hypocritical because those are combined with great violence in head to head confrontation, not with a tender humanitarianism others associate with all such rules, and shockingly arrogant rather than brave, in seeking to directly overthrow the enemy's will to resist, in a decisive clash.

The non-western way of war seeks to contain the destabilization war causes by avoiding direct and decisive clashes between the warriors, and their wills, which are implicitly assumed to be constant or unshakeable. It does not seek to contain war in time, with ritual declarations of war and peace, and regards war as a normal or background condition between rival human groups. And it does not seek to contain those effected by war, through distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, and "chivalrous" limitations on violence employed toward the defenseless.

There is more mutual respect and less confrontation between the warriors, who "butt heads" by strategem and cleverness, and then grant each other "space" based on proved dangerousness. While there is less respect for non-warriors and less restraint in dealing with them. Battles are typically less violent and decisive, and treatment of non-warriors typically far more cruel. In fact, cruelty to the defenseless becomes a kind of ritual of demonstrated resolve, acted out (more on that below). Warriors act politically on non-warriors at least as much as against the warriors of a rival society.

Which strikes westerners, used to norms of chivalry instead, as shockingly evil. The western way of war isolates the warriors from the civilians, and regards them as champions sent forth to ritually decide the struggle. The struggle between the rival groups of warriors is, however, face to face and total, until one group of champions loses its will or ability to fight. The respect between rival warriors is dramatically less, and even if felt is rigorously suppressed as long as the issue remains in doubt. While respect for the defenseless is ritually acted out, even if not sincerely felt.

These are real cultural differences. They show up in battlefield tactics (charge home vs. harass at range e.g.) but are not limited to tactics. They are differences in the role and place of war in the different cultures. Keegan thinks it is obvious that in a determined head to head confrontation the will behind the western way, united as we currently are, will scattered the harassing expectations of our enemies. He is probably right, though perhaps too complacent about both the risks involved and about how much will really be settled thereby.

The usual outcome of such confrontations is that the western way wins, but cannot achieve "pacification" as a result, leading to an end state of low level, endemic warfare against a locally successful western side. The western way expects the warriors of the other side to at some point, usually after being scattered in direct confrontation, to admit defeat and make their peace. Historically this was done to avoid the enemy military doing what it liked to the civilian populace (e.g. sacking a city), but this has become so ritualized in the west that armies rarely do anything to such civilians anymore, after conventional victory. Since the enemy regards war as normal, evading battle not as defeat but as mere strategem, and does not have the same attitude about leaving its own civilians "defenseless", this western expectation is usually disappointed.

It is true that contemporary Islamic radicalism and terrorist violence has ideological roots in the west, and especially in varied strands of fascist thought - in Sorel, Nietzsche, the "jargon of authenticity", ultramontanism, etc. Similar propaganda lines - anti-semitism, anti-capitalism and communism both, anti-liberalism, denouncing moral degeneracy, dreams of reviving thousand year old dead empires, exploiting shame and foreign policy impotence, pretending internal justice will result from total dedication against an outside enemy, denouncing all others as lackies of foreign powers or hidden conspiracies - are used. In some cases contemporary Islamic parties are direct descendents of fascist organizations of the 1930s. But this does not mean they have adopted the western way of war, and indeed many elements of fascism were themselves eastern imports, stemming from colonial experiences, eastern pantheist philosophies, etc.

Next the writer makes a number of innaccurate or far fetched statements about WW II, and then about earlier traditional societies. While remote from the previous, I will address them, because they are serious distortions getting in the way of the general argument. He asks if the US would have declared war on Germany had Germany not done so first, and the answer is definitely yes.

The US was maneuvering for war with Germany for a year and a half prior to actual entry, and the US navy was already fighting German U-boats in the Atlantic. US industry was already providing Britain war material. And the military staffs were already involved in joint war planning for eventual US entry, which the president was actively seeking occasion for. Then you ask would Germany have lost without us, and the answer is probably yes as things went. The Russians had them beaten before the second front became important, and the UK would have been supporting them regardless. It is also academic because of the previous point - there never was anything the Germans could do that would keep us out or beat us when we came in. Then you ask if a failure of the British at Dunkirk would have changed everything, and the answer is no, because the Germans still wouldn't have made it across the channel. It was the air force and navy that stopped them, not the men brought off at Dunkirk. As for what if the Nazis had treated the Ukrainians as allies, they wouldn't have been Nazis if they did, and non-Nazis wouldn't have attacked in the first place. Depopulating the Ukraine to resettle it with so-called teutons was the primary German war aim. Incidentally, they still did get 100,000 "Hiwis" to fight for them, even with their policy of mass murder, but they didn't make any difference. They had plenty of axis minor manpower as it was, what they didn't have was more tanks than the Russians fielded. All of that is a giant aside, however.

Next the writer claims that "no traditional society destroyed for the pleasure of destruction", which is simply false. The word "vandal", which means exactly that, is the name of a traditional society. The reputation of the Huns or Mongols were not undeserved. Tamurlane built pyramids of skulls, going even further than the Mongol practice of exterminating any city that resisted rather than surrendering, and doing it even to surrendering cities. The ordinary practice of war in the ancient mediterrean was to kill all the men and sell the women and children into slavery at the conclusion of a successful seige - unless disorganized "sacking" had already gone even further. The evil of destruction for its own sake is as old as recorded history; it is acting otherwise that was a civilized innovation.

Next the writer says, almost as an aside, that the west "drove back" Islamic incursions and "broke the back" of "Islamic power". This is seriously misleading if not outright false. Islam broke up internally for domestic reasons, due to inability to solve the related problems of legitimate succession and loyalty of the army to the ruler. Long before the Crusades, even. If this internal breakup still does not amount to a "broken back", then one can clearly identify the incident that destroyed the power even of the disorganized states of Islam, and it wasn't done by the west. It was done by the Mongols, who smashed the Islamic near east, from Afghanistan to Syria, in the 1200s. Or if "Islamic power" is supposed to survive that, in the remnant form of the Ottoman Empire, that was eventually destroyed by the British along with the Arabs.

Lack of internal unity had more to do with the eclipse of the empire once held by the unified caliphate than anything the west did alone. This is not without present interest, because Bin Laden's ideology is based on lies about this process, because his school of thought is unwilling to admit that any political problems would remain among Muslims themselves, except those caused by supposedly outside influences. This is a theological dogma to him, and thus immune to factual refutation. It must be so because he needs it to be so, and therefore he directs lies and uses of power toward making it as retroactively "true" as he can, like Stalin airbrushing Trotsky out of photographs.

The writer is correct that the goal of Bin Laden and company is the destruction of the west, and the US in particular, and that he doesn't care in the least if millions of Muslims die in the process. But he is wrong that he wants no territory or conversions. He wants to rule the world, or for those who agree with him to rule the world, even long after his own death. The destruction of the west is merely a necessary means to that end, in his mind.

People seriously underestimate his ambitions (as when they think he only wants the US out of Saudi, which is just a propaganda line for fellow travellers). Probably because those ambitions seem sufficiently insane, or perhaps sufficiently threatening, that they seem unthinkable. But they are not unthinkable. Bin Laden looks forward to a time when proliferated nuclear weapons in everyone's hands have been used hundreds or thousands of times, when no great cities remain on earth, when the west is an irradiated ruin that has dissolved internally into tiny and competing, desperate mini-states. Islam the religion will still be there, he believes, and its followers will eventually conquer, because only they will remain completely united by the promise and will of God (see the lie about unity, above). His favorite boast is that Islam lived to see the Soviet Union dissolve, and it will live to see the US dissolve too; he constantly claims the Soviets were the stronger of the two (he thinks that because it was more ruthless - see below), so the US should be easy by comparison.

Evil for its own sake predates Christianity. You can find as refined a diabolism as you please in the jungles of the Yucatan, or on the coast of the Levant in the time of Abraham, or in murder cults in India, or Uganda. The desire to destroy what one cannot possess is certainly involved in recruitment to radical Islam, but so are ordinary bigotry, dislike of western secularism and libertinism, wounded pride, crazy conspiracy theories, and decades of refined anti-western propaganda ginned up by leftists. The most characteristic comment you will see in the Arab press explaining the attraction of Bin Laden to Islamic radicals is simply that he has taken on and humiliated the most powerful empire in history. They admire his audacity, his unwillingness to be cowed by western power, his resistence to seduction by western enticements - and see all of these as evidence of strength of will, which they worship with a crawling servitude, feeling the submerging of their own will in his evil projects as a participation in that perceived strength, instead of a conquest by it. All of which is familiar enough from the history of fascism.

As for the pretended magical power of horror, it is the oldest kind of superstitious evil thought, the one behind every tradition of human sacrifice throughout the ancient world. People imagine that by conquering their own instincts, they call forth a magical response from the nature of the world itself, and that therein lies the secret of power. As Chesterton put it, "pretty soon a man deliberately sets out to do the most disgusting thing he can think of." The writer basically agrees with this superstitious notion, and hardly recognizes what this makes of his own moral philosophy.

The reality is there is no special power to be had, in cruelty. It simply makes more enemies, and more determined ones. A craven enough people might be stunned into silence by fiendishness, but courage is not so scarce a thing as this view would have it. The Nazis, to take the writer's won example, did not "almost succeed" because they were more evil than others. On the contrary, they went to war with 5/6ths of the world and predictably lost. The ranks of their enemies were swelled, unified, and made more resolute in action, by their evil. Tamurlane left nothing; the Kymer Rouge left nothing; the Rwandan Hutus left nothing; nothing but bones and ruins. Nor is it true that only the same can fight them - the Russians were as frightful as you please and no longer in Afghanistan. The parts of the world that subscribe to this maxim about the innate power of evil are the poorest and least powerful places on earth, because evil does not produce strength but disunity, opposition, destruction of means, and thus weakness. As Plato explained long ago, even a band of robbers can only succeed through internal justice, not injustice. People continually try to extricate themselves from the resulting morass through more and more determined evil, because they remain as superstitiously deluded on the subject as the writer of this piece. So is Bin Laden.

Nor is the west vunerable to horror. When engaged in face to face war, the west drinks horror like wine and dishes it out in industrial quantities. Waterloo, Gettysburg, Verdun and the Somme, Stalingrad, the Hurtgen forest, Okinawa, to say nothing of Hamburg, Tokyo, and Hiroshima, saw more horror per square yard or per minute than anything the Islamic world has ever experienced, at least since Tamurlane and in some cases ever. Only the Iran-Iraq war, or the war in Afghanistan against the Russians - both in the 1980s - are even in the same league.

Some find the horror of western war incomprehensible, some find it monstrous, some envy it - in the rest of the world - but only in refined, polite, western cities is the west thought of as particularly delicate, rather than particularly warlike and unusually victorious. Westerners tend to forget that what people see first and foremost about us is that the US and Britain have lost perhaps one war apiece in more than two centuries, while fighting more than almost any other societies in world history. They think of us as ruling military powers first, and as decadents a distant second (though our supposed moral decadence makes our military victories seem like outrages). Indeed, they see claims about western delicacy as outright hypocrasy, not paying much attention to our cultural nuances about who starts things, justifications of war, generousity to the defeated, peace as the ordinary condition of men, etc, because those are mostly lacking in their own military culture.

The lesson that the US military took from Vietnam was to stick to the western goal of overwhelming victory, without limitations of means, sanctuaries, etc. Those ritual aspects of typical western strategy were avoided in Vietnam in an attempt to prevent escalation to a general war with communism. Present doctrine, often associated with Powell who merely stated it publicly, is focused on unlimited commitment to achieve total victory, as the only way of keeping the populace on board. The champion clash rituals have to be observed, and for them to prove decisive requires definite military goals, no sanctuaries, etc. Other forms of low level and ongoing struggle are relegated to below media coverage, using proxies, special and intelligence operations, diplomacy, etc, precisely because the western way of war requires certain ground rules for employing conventional military force. Actions that do not fit that way of fighting will not be supported indefinitely. It was not "horror" that detached the American people from supporting the war in Vietnam (only a few cafe intellectuals reacted that way), but indecisiveness, the sense of futility and endlessness involved in the purely defensive strategy employed.

Bin Laden is not expecting us to crumble through weakness of stomach, he expects to triumph eventually through the physical destruction of our cities, people, and means of living as we do. He thinks things of the spirit are in the long run stronger than any material forces, and underestimates us as spiritual and political enemies. If it takes hundreds of years of continual WMD terrorism to dissolve the west, so be it. All you have to do is listen to what he regards as important when talking to his followers, and this is clear. He says it is the duty of all Muslims to kill Americans, and the duty of all Muslims to try to acquire WMDs.

He thinks if these propositions are accepted by most Muslims and acted upon, the rest is just a matter of time. Since he thinks eventual "victory" is destined, anyway. He does not care in the least how much of the world is a smoking ruin when that "victory" arrives; he has no stake in progress, technology, wealth - all mere material things of the ephemeral world. His contemporary terrorist attacks are meant to show it can be done, to stand as propaganda posters for our vunerability, and to "inspire" future terrorists to get on with it. If he can convince most Muslims their duty and destiny is to kill all of us who will not submit to them as God's agents on earth, by every means attainable, then he thinks he will eventually win. He is really quite exactly that nuts, and those who consider him a hero are swept away by what they see as the strength of will and grandeur of thought in these murderous fantasies.

As Burke once put it, "nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysican. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of a man...They are ready to declare, that they do not think two thousand years too long a period for the 'good' they pursue. It is remarkable, that they never see any way to their projected 'good' but by the road of some evil. Their imagination is not fatigued by the contemplation of human suffering through the wild waste of centuries added to centuries of misery and desolation. Their humanity is at their horizon - and like the horizon, it always flies before them."

The superiority of the chivalrous way of war, which includes direct confrontation undertaken with what Keegan rightly calls "appalling violence"; and the superiority of justice and political discrimination over superstitious cruelty and ruthlessness in generating power, will be amply demonstrated in the coming confrontation. Bin Laden and his followers are certainly a dangerous enemy, and their goals are not as narrow as some still seem to think, but they are no more dangerous than many we have seen off successfully before. We will fight their disgusting ideas with attractive ones, their focus on civilian targets with a focus on their warriors, their superstitious ruthlessness with a unifying justice that will bring most of the world in against them.

And then we will be relentless and in their face as they try to temporize and hide in shadows and avoid direct confrontation. In all of which, more and more people in their own part of the world will see weakness, shiftlessness, irresolute bluster, and impotent rage in their whole position. We are going to humilitate them thoroughly. And that, too, was part of Keegan's point - that whether they like it or not, they and those watching them will regard their evasions and avoidance of our strength as humiliating, not as any clever strategem. The western way of war rests on an underlying fact about human nature and political conflict which is as true in their part of the world as in ours. They can pretend to be as indifferent to honor as they please, the truth remains that men are recruited to political struggles by questions of honor. That is what he meant when he said this will be "deeply injurious to the Oriental style and rhetoric of war-making". He knows what he is talking about.

Good post.

Thanks.

The author reveals some knowledge of the "thinking" of mad Moslems. But, really, his whole premise is bass ackwards. We shouldn't be trying to adopt the "thinking" of the mad Moslems; we should be forcing the mad Moslems to a stunning realization of WHAT WE THINK and WHAT WE INTEND to do about their murder and mayhem. There is nothing that clarifies the mind like facing the overwhelming force, uninhibitedly unleashed, of American might and RESOLVE to OBLITERATE THE ENEMY. Without this uncompromising resolve, the mad Moslems may be right in their opinion that they've already won the war!

Surely the quickest path to demoralizing humiliation would be demonstrating that the moon deity Allah is powerless (and non-existant!) to defend everything that is "holy" by destroying every holy city and shrine on the same day: Mecca, Medina, Dome of the Rock, Najaf, etc. The ultimate shock and awe! Brutal? You bet. In the long run though, even more lives will be saved.

Three words: Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.

Our leaders promised *overwhelming* force after the initial mutilations. Repeatedly.

MILITARY leaders promised that. But that decision was above their pay grade. So they wound up looking like fools.

Our leaders promised *overwhelming* force after the initial mutilations. Repeatedly.

MILITARY leaders promised that.

I guess I am confused. Do not the military leaders work for the Commander in Chief? Who are they taking orders from? Do they not have a plan, or do they just make any statement that suits them at the time?

That is, we are being blackmailed into Sharon's camp, abandoning the Palestininans and our role as hoest broker.

Walt, it is impossible to be an honest broker for a cause and a people who consider honesty a weakness. Our policy should be to show the Islamic world, and especially the Arab world, that honesty will be rewarded with good faith but that treachery will result in total humiliation.

Not my point. I could care less about the Palestinians.

My point is what does it say about the War on Terror? If we've made a fundamental policy shift after 35 years, why?

Is it because Sharon, a very hard ball player indeed, has said, we will share our intelligence and assets to help you better in the WOT, if you support permanent Jewsh settlements in the West Bank?

If we -need- to concede our position as "honest broker", does that indicate that we are in a fix for info?

I don't know, I am asking. I think that at least implicit in why we did this big policy change. It's scary.

Walt

Bump for later. Good stuff.

"Is it because Sharon, a very hard ball player indeed, has said, we will share our intelligence and assets to help you better in the WOT, if you support permanent Jewsh settlements in the West Bank?"

Isn't it true that this is just your dogmatic theory of Bush administration's motivation and that there are other plausible interpretations, uncolored by dislike of Sharon?

My point is what does it say about the War on Terror? If we've made a fundamental policy shift after 35 years, why?

I'd say that it has become very obvious that what we have been doing for the past 35 years hasn't been working. At the least, since the 1972 Olympics, our wierd Foggy Bottom driven "policy" of averting our eyes away from Pali terrorism and treating the parties as having equal legitimacy has come back to bite us in the ass big time.

I'd say it is about time for a change, but look at what the change really is. It will work out to be nearly the same thing that clinton tried to get the thug Arafat to agree to back in 99. All Jewish settlements in Gaza will be gone! That's the best land available. Only a few left on the West Bank in strategically vital areas that the Israelis would have never given up under any circumstances. The Palies get all the rest and a nice new wall so they don't ever have to deal with those nasty Jews ever again. They should be overjoyed. They will have their own country. And they will have to run it.

They can have all the fun they want killing each other after Friday prayers or if they a really want to play some games, they can mess with their brothers in Egypt or Jordan and find out what real oppression is.

My point is what does it say about the War on Terror? If we've made a fundamental policy shift after 35 years, why?
I'd say that it has become very obvious that what we have been doing for the past 35 years hasn't been working. At the least, since the 1972 Olympics, our wierd Foggy Bottom driven "policy" of averting our eyes away from Pali terrorism and treating the parties as having equal legitimacy has come back to bite us in the ass big time.
I'd say it is about time for a change, but look at what the change really is. It will work out to be nearly the same thing that clinton tried to get the thug Arafat to agree to back in 99. All Jewish settlements in Gaza will be gone! That's the best land available. Only a few left on the West Bank in strategically vital areas that the Israelis would have never given up under any circumstances. The Palies get all the rest and a nice new wall so they don't ever have to deal with those nasty Jews ever again. They should be overjoyed. They will have their own country. And they will have to run it.
They can have all the fun they want killing each other after Friday prayers or if they a really want to play some games, they can mess with their brothers in Egypt or Jordan and find out what real oppression is.

I grant all that, and I hope you are right.

I don't recall much discussion beforehand of this policy change.

In a way, it may be throwing down the gage to the Islamic world. "We're against you now, all of you."

Walt