Posted on 10/07/2001 4:01:28 PM PDT by Pokey78
PRESIDENT BUSH'S threatened war against terrorism has begun. What is so striking at the outset is the brief lapse of time between its declaration and its outbreak.
The Gulf War, also led by the United States, took six months to prepare. This war, declared on September 11, the day of the atrocities, is in full swing only 27 days later. All the same stages have been gone through - organisation of an alliance, diplomatic preparation, positioning of forces. The first blow has been struck in one-sixth of the time.
Striking quickly, as well as hard, may be a quality of this war deliberately chosen, and with good reason. A harsh, instantaneous attack may be the response most likely to impress the Islamic mind. Surprise has traditionally been a favoured Islamic military method. The use of overwhelming force is, however, alien to the Islamic military tradition. The combination of the two is certainly designed to unsettle America's current enemy and probably will.
Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist, outlined in a famous article written in the aftermath of the Cold War his vision of the next stage hostilities would take. Rejecting the vision of a New World Order, proposed by President Bush senior, he insisted that mankind had not rid itself of the incubus of violence, but argued that it would take the form of conflict between cultures, in particularly between the liberal, secular culture of the West and the religious culture of Islam. Huntington's "clash of civilisations" was widely discussed, though it was not taken seriously by some. Since September 11 it has been taken very seriously indeed.
If I thought Huntington's view had a defect, it was that he did not discuss what I think the crucial ingredient of any Western-Islamic conflict, their quite distinctively different ways of making war. Westerners fight face to face, in stand-up battle, and go on until one side or the other gives in. They choose the crudest weapons available, and use them with appalling violence, but observe what, to non-Westerners may well seem curious rules of honour. Orientals, by contrast, shrink from pitched battle, which they often deride as a sort of game, preferring ambush, surprise, treachery and deceit as the best way to overcome an enemy.
This is not to stereotype Afghans, Arabs, Chechens or any other Islamic nationality traditionally hostile to the West as devious or underhand, nor is it to stereotype Islam in its military manifestation. The difference in styles of warfare is borne out by the fact of military history. Western warfare had its origins in the conflicts of the citizens of the Greek city states who fought to defend the strictly defined borders of their small political units. Beyond their world the significant military powers, however, were nomads, whose chosen method was the raid and the surprise attack. Once they acquired a superior means of mobility, in the riding horse, they developed a style of warfare which settled people found almost impossible to resist.
The Arabs were horse-riding raiders before Mohammed. His religion, Islam, inspired the raiding Arabs to become conquerors of terrifying power, able to overthrow the ancient empires both of Byzantium and Persia and to take possession of huge areas of Asia, Africa and Europe. It was only very gradually that the historic settled people, the Chinese, the Western Europeans, learnt the military methods necessary to overcome the nomads. They were the methods of the Greeks, above all drill and discipline.
The last exponents of nomadic warfare, the Turks, were not turned back from the frontiers of Europe until the 17th century. Thereafter the advance of Western military power went unchecked. One Islamic state after another went down to defeat, until in 1918 the last and greatest, the Ottoman empire, was overthrown. After 1918 the military power of the Western world stood apparently unchallengeable.
The Oriental tradition, however, had not been eliminated. It reappeared in a variety of guises, particularly in the tactics of evasion and retreat practised by the Vietcong against the United States in the Vietnam war. On September 11, 2001 it returned in an absolutely traditional form. Arabs, appearing suddenly out of empty space like their desert raider ancestors, assaulted the heartlands of Western power, in a terrifying surprise raid and did appalling damage.
President Bush in his speech to his nation and to the Western world yesterday, promised a traditional Western response. He warned that there would be "a relentless accumulation of success". Relentlessness, as opposed to surprise and sensation, is the Western way of warfare. It is deeply injurious to the Oriental style and rhetoric of war-making. Oriental war-makers, today terrorists, expect ambushes and raids to destabilise their opponents, allowing them to win further victories by horrifying outrages at a later stage. Westerners have learned, by harsh experience, that the proper response is not to take fright but to marshal their forces, to launch massive retaliation and to persist relentlessly until the raiders have either been eliminated or so cowed by the violence inflicted that they relapse into inactivity.
News of the first strikes against Afghanistan indicate that a tested Western response to Islamic aggression is now well under way. It is not a crusade. The crusades were an episode localised in time and place, in the religious contest between Christianity and Islam. This war belongs within the much larger spectrum of a far older conflict between settled, creative productive Westerners and predatory, destructive Orientals.
It is no good pretending that the peoples of the desert and the empty spaces exist on the same level of civilisation as those who farm and manufacture. They do not. Their attitude to the West has always been that it is a world ripe for the picking. When the West turned nasty, and fought back, with better weapons and superior tactics and strategy, the East did not seek to emulate it but to express its anger in new forms of the raid and surprise attack. September 11 was a declaration of war. October 7 was the declaration of a counter-offensive. The counter-offensive will prevail.
Sir John Keegan is Defence Editor
Wasn't too many years ago that I was taught that the Muslims of Indonesia were "moderates." Then they slaughtered the Chinese among them. And now I see they are riled up as much as the mobs in Islamabad. So I think you are right.
I'm curious: Isn't that where the Basques are concentrated. Then the Moors couldn;t handle them either?
I'm curious: Isn't that where the Basques are concentrated. Then the Moors couldn;t handle them either?
Galicia... Basque? Cough, hack, gasp.... No, Man! We conquered those Basque pansies. We were the meanest, nastiest, head-chopping, bunch of savages that the Romans ever encountered in Iberia.
We were Celts!
We were the last Celtic tribe conquered by the Romans on the European continent. After that, the Visigoths didn't conquer us and the Muslim Moors did not conquer us.
Today, the traditional musical instrument of Galicia is the bagpipe. During the Spanish colonial period, a very large number of Galicians (Gallegos) came to the Spanish colonies, especially Cuba. So, when you meet a blue eyed, blonde Cuban or Cuban American such as myself, don't say, "Gee, you don't look Cuban". Say, "Were your ancestors Gallegos?".
Anthropologists are not sure what the Basque origins are as their language has no common roots with any other European language. Some scholars think they may be the descendants of the original Iberians before the coming of the Celtic, Greek, Carthegenian and Roman invasions of ancient Iberia.
Well, not necessarily "our" guys but our cousins and the cousins of all the other Celts.
The Celts invaded lands extending from Turkey to Spain and from Italy to the British Isles.
Extent of the Ancient Celtic World
"Galicia" derives from the Roman name meaning "Land of the Celts". So, you will find a "Galatia" in Roman Turkey and a Galicia in Spain. You will also find a "Galicia" in Poland corresponding to the easternmost extension of the Celts. The Roman name for Celtic France was "Gallia" and, as Julius Caesar has taught every schoolboy suffering through Latin class, "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres..."
The "Dying Gaul" is a famous statue from the ancient Greek city state of Pergamon in what is now Turkey commemorating a victory over the Celts in 239 B.C. The battle dress (buck naked), the battle trumpet, the shield and the gold neck collar (torque) is typical of Celtic warriors and is identical to the battle gear encountered by the Romans in their wars with the Celts in northern Italy, France and northern Spain.
The Celts did succeed in conquering central Turkey and that became the "Galatia" of St. Paul's letter.
In the British Isles, the Romans pushed back the Celts into Scotland and Ireland which was never invaded by the Romans. The Germanic invasions of Britain by the Angles and Saxons replaced the Romans in England but the Celts kept their bastions in Scotland and Ireland. The Romans could have called Britain "Galicia" also. Instead, they named it "Brittania" which was a corruption of the Greek name "Pretanic Islands" which in turn came from "Pritani" which is what the Celts in Britain called themselves.
Thanks. I found a transcript of the show at the PBS NOVA web site.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.