Posted on 10/11/2001 7:44:09 PM PDT by aculeus
No, against all Muslim terrorist breeding grounds (read post more carefully). We're talking about hypothetical survival of Western civilization here - so by breeding grounds I'm talking about all predominantly Muslim nations. Once the source of new recruits is eliminated, the ensuing years can be used to route out the ones who are "among us", including any in Idaho, until the vast majority are effectively eliminated.
If the "staring into the abyss" point is ever reached, it is a guarantee that all PC nonsense will be tossed out the window, and anyone left in the Western world who might even be remotely suspected of being a terrorist will be rounded up and incarcerated or executed - any left that haven't been murdered by vigilante mobs that is. Not fair, I admit, but TRUE war for survival is hell, as history teaches. The routing out process won't take long under these circumstances.
What I do have a problem with is the underlying assumption that we will be stuck fighting a WWII type battle. We will be doing a lot of sneak attacks, shooting, looting and scooting. This was not done to a large extent in WWII. But the main thing that I see is that our enemies have no conventional military power. They have no planes, no warships, no artillery, no rockets. The only means they have of hurting us is from agents within our borders. If we are able to summon the will and the resources to defeat this enemy within, we are sure to win. This will mean massive deportations, interrogations, tightening up our borders, and people taking responsibility and not leaving it all up to government. Political correctness and multi-culturalism will have to go.
On the other hand, if we are uable to marshal these resources and to change to a war-time footing, their agents will be free to roam among us at will, and they won't need rockets, or planes, or guns, they will have the "delivery systems" that they need. It's up to us. Are we up to the challenge?
Let me present a slightly different point of view. This current situation is a continuation of World War II and unfinished conflicts since that time.
How many conflicts have been NO WIN (did not result in the total defeat and occupation of the offending Party) - since WWII?
Korea
Vietnam
Gulf War
Various Isreali and Arab conflicts
All of these wars resulted in a tenuous peace treaty or end of hostilities.
Afganistan will need to be rehabilitated by someone - and there are other offending Nations that must be dealt with.
This will be a long continuous Conventional War - just like those of the past - the only thing different is that we must destroy the enemy and their entire capacity to fight and survive - then change their ways - as in a new government - how that happens - is another problem.
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.
That's exactly what I was going to say.
Seriously, great writing, and all very, very accurate. It's
well worth saving for future reference.
Thanks.
Well if we wont stand up for what we believe in then what we believe in must not be all that.
Your other illustrations seem to show that Muslims possess a greater degree of faithfulness when compared to Christians. Yes they are willing to kill,damage and die by the rules they have been taught. I live by a different "rule" book and try to live my life accordingly. My book doesnt teach me to kill others or commit suicide but completely the opposite
That said, it also teaches me to not fear death nor wring my hands in worry over what will happen tommorrow. Im not afraid of what any man can do to me. Im not worried about when my last day on earth shall be.
I have a family with two very young daughters and would love to see them grow up with the same freedoms I have enjoyed and if that means putting my life on the line then that is where I want to be.
Would you be willing to strap a bomb to your body and kill innocent bystanders, along with yourself, in the name of your belief?
No, but I would be willing to strap bombs on my plane and drop them where my government told me to at the risk of my life and innocent bystanders on the ground.
Readers who reproached me for using the word "racism" to qualify Washington's orientation toward the Islamic world should read Keegan's essay carefully.
To prove that the United States is in the grip of racist hostility towards Islam, one need only read an article by a historian who has no connection with the administration, and lives in Britain. That makes sense. Above all, don't pay any attention to anything the Administration might have said about Islam.
To quote a great American, "What a maroon!"
That's the benefit of faith. But that's not quite what I was referring to.
There's a bit of difference in not worrying about when death will come,
and knowing when it will; planning that day; knowing how, where and
why. And handing your life over, leaving behind your family, at that
instant that you've chosen.
My writing needs some serious work, I'm not as proficient as some
others. My post 14 should indicate the context of my remark regarding:
"We are all "believers" of one sort or another, but are we truly
willing to die for our belief?"
I don't think too many of us are, at least not in the manner the radical
Islamic terrorists are. It's like firing a shot at a crack-head, they're so
high and impervious to reality, they don't know when they've taken a
fatal shot. It makes a fight very difficult to win.
The reason we will have a tough time, is summed up in your comment:
"..Your other illustrations seem to show that Muslims possess a greater
degree of faithfulness when compared to Christians. Yes they are willing
to kill, damage and die by the rules they have been taught. I live by a
different "rule" book and try to live my life accordingly. My book doesn't
teach me to kill others or commit suicide but completely the opposite..."
Unless you are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice as they are, your fight
against them will be tough. And it will be made tougher because they not only
are not afraid to die, they welcome death; they plan it.
I asked:
"..Would you be willing to strap a bomb to your body and kill innocent
bystanders, along with yourself, in the name of your belief?....."
You commented:
"No, but I would be willing to strap bombs on my plane and drop them where
my government told me to at the risk of my life and innocent bystanders
on the ground....."
Would you, in your own country, your own neighborhood, on your own family?
Our war against terrorists may end up taking place on our soil, not theirs.
If so, the ramifications will be great. And the decisions to be made will go
against your religion.
This isn't the normal war, it may be unlike any we have ever seen. It isn't
against a country, it's against a group without a country; without a conscience,
and without a belief that many can comprehend.
And so did the suicide pilots of Japan but it is really not fair to compare them to these latest. At least they had honor in battle. These new folks are nothing more than organized criminals. They are only human no matter how lofty some want to portray them. They are not invulnerable. They are not super-human but just criminal and will be treated as such.
If attacks continue to happen here then I would expect that regular folks will just rise up and take matters in their own hands. It will be a dangerous place for those fitting the description or even resembling it. I hate to see things get that bad but tough times call for tough measures.
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.