David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
Posted on 10/01/2003 8:24:37 AM PDT by Tolik
David Warren
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When the "war against terrorism" -- we still don't have a decent, memorable name for this unwarlike war -- began, precisely in the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, it was obvious how to proceed. Those who had doubts 9/11 was an Al Qaeda job, soon got over them. Al Qaeda was then centered in Afghanistan. It was patronized by the Taliban regime, and vice versa. It was clear within a week that the U.S. would depose Mullah Omar, and hunt down the terrorists in their camps. The Iraq invasion was likewise predictable, almost from the beginning. It was unfinished business that could no longer be ignored. Colin Powell's delightfully vulgar old Bronx expression of the other week, calling Saddam Hussein "a piece of trash waiting to be collected", succinctly expressed the mission as a whole. The United States did not go into Iraq for the sake of weapons of mass destruction alone, though the Bush administration did sincerely expect to find many. (And as U.S. intelligence is discovering, went in against a Saddam Hussein who sincerely thought he had many to hide.) That reasoning was emphasized because it was germane to the U.N. Security Council resolution the administration sought -- but didn't get. There were many other reasons, which various members of the administration spelled out on alternate days. The single most important received the least emphasis, however. It was that no progress against the background conditions of Islamist terrorism would be possible without changing the nature of the Middle East. There were plausible reasons to invade, or otherwise physically molest Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, even Saudi Arabia. The task had to start somewhere, and the Saddamite regime had earned its position at the top of the list. Most unanswerably, every other candidate among the regimes that openly sought hideous weapons and conspired with terrorists could arguably be changed without the use of main force. The Iraqi regime was -- perhaps after North Korea's -- the world's most ruthless and brutal. Saddam and his sons could not be displaced without direct external force, for they had annihilated internal opposition too efficiently. Whereas the change of the Iraqi regime would add pressure elsewhere. It would -- it already has contributed to new and more constructive attitudes in the totalitarian or nearly-totalitarian states around it. Democracy, or rather, something somewhat resembling democracy in Iraq, is indeed a means to open to the air and light a region increasingly closed by terror and Islamist ideology. The new Iraqi regime, if stable and successful, becomes the opposite pole to that of Osama bin Laden. There is a visible way up as well as a way further down. There was no way forward without invading Iraq. But it remains to be seen whether even invading Iraq was a way forward. The international opposition, and even the domestic American opposition to doing what had to be done there, did not relent when the country was liberated. The reality is that the Bush administration now finds itself in the position of the one adult in a room full of unhappy children. The adult carries responsibilities that none of the children fully understand. A mortal threat presents itself to adult and children alike, but only the adult appreciates this. He must find a way to proceed in spite of the children's very active non-cooperation. I realize this is not a flattering account of the spectacle of the "United Nations" at work, but it is unfortunately true. And it is the most useful analogy I have found to guess how the Bush administration must proceed, given the nature of its actual problem -- an enemy vowed to the destruction of the West, which will stop at nothing, and must soon be armed with unimaginably lethal weapons and nearly undetectable methods for delivering them. My impression from speaking with several administration, especially Pentagon, insiders, and by observing what one can discover of the extension of U.S. operations overseas (through the securing of basing and landing rights and other joint agreements), is that we should expect the field struggle against international terrorism to disappear off our television screens. The media have been discovered to be an enemy, pure and simple, and no attempt to brief or include them in operations makes any sense. Indeed, shaking off media attention is now intrinsic to the strategy. Moreover, it has been discovered that for both political and tactical reasons, it is counter-productive to build up forces in any one location. Since this is necessary to full-scale invasions, full-scale invasions have to go. They only give the enemy a chance to prepare his resistance, whether directly or indirectly. U.S. troop, navy and air force deployments are now entirely to a network of remarkably small, numerous, almost portable bases across what in Pentagon jargon is called "the arc of instability" -- which is to say, wherever there are weak governments or rogue regimes, not only in the Middle East, but in Central Asia, South-east Asia, Africa and Latin America. And technological innovation is likewise being focused upon improving the ability to strike suddenly "out of the clear blue sky", then disappear. There are some resemblances to the ancient piracy wars, or frontier wars, but really, nothing like it before in history.
David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
Go here: http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/about.shtml
He is on my "Must Read" list.
Placating the childeren will inadvertantly open the door for more disaster. Why is that so hard for the media to see? Or would they like nother calamity to blame Mr. Bush, maybe?
But it is in the foreign affairs arena that a sea change has really taken place. It now does not appear as if the UN has a great deal substantive to contribute under any circumstances; NATO is being returned to its regional role by the U.S. itself, over and above the EU tendencies toward a nascent force de frappe that seems, at the moment, more frappe than force. Recognition of U.S. "unilateralism" (however inappropriate that term actually is) makes many uncomfortable but it was always there under the surface.
I don't believe the war on terror is necessarily limited to its Islamist manifestation. This is something just a bit wider in scope than that. Terrorism per se as an instrument of state policy has developed as a non-apocalyptic means of surrogate confrontation as an outgrowth of a MAD-gripped Cold War; when Bush refers to an "Axis of Evil" he is referring to states who have adopted it outside that arena as a means of carrying on war as a state policy without crossing the threshold into a formal, all-out response. What changed on 9/11 was that the threshold was crossed, and the all-out response in Afghanistan (from the Taliban's point of view) was something new - that government was put to an end where such a response was not possible in the status quo ante WTC. The world changed there.
What disturbs most people who were comfortable with the lower level of military activity in that previous status quo is that the threshold of response seems to have been lowered without being strictly identified. But the ability of terrorism to stay sub-threshold was one of its signal characteristics - it was always designed to constitute pinpricks short of that threshold. Now the latter is blurred, and it isn't just the terrorists who are uneasy at this.
But that comfort level was always a bit of a sham - it was a demand on the part of the world community for a country possessing power to self-limit it in the interests of a "fairness" that was purely illusory. It was the demand that a country attacked endure a low level of damage indefinitely if the rules were to be abided by. One of the reasons Israel has excited such fury on the part of many of the onlookers to her conflict is that she has decided that those rules imperil her state were they to be abided by and has declined to do so. That fury writ large is now being heaped on the United States in the person of Bush for doing precisely the same thing.
I believe that media role as a watchdog against power is a pillar of our free society as important as the separation of power in government. Unfortunately, the media is too much interested in promoting its ideological agenda. It is watchdogging only ideological opponents, and too many of the bad guys are receiving a free pass.
So, paradoxically or not, in the war against terrorism I see Bush (the most powerful person on Earth) and his team as good guys, and BBC and CNN and many others as the bad guys.
I don't want to censor them, but I understand frustration the front guys might have with them.
The pre- 9/11 unimaginable actions became real or at least possible. Lots of decent people in the world who oppose us still don't really believe that the threshold was overstepped. An exercise in hypothetical before 9/11 is now a possible reality Bush and Co must deal with.
It's like people who are saying that if somebody resorts to terrorism and suicide bombing, it's so horrific, that they must have been really pushed to it by their miserable circumstances. These apologists don't understand that it was a calculated step, exploiting somebody misery for sure, but a cold political calculation that brought real political benefits. Decent people do project their decency onto others, terrorists are smart enough to count on this.
The whole situation is like that frog in boiling water story. The temperature is rising slowly in Israel, so they continue to endure. It shot up once here, so it was noticed. But because its dropping here, its like back to pre 9/11 mentality for many. Fascinatingly short memory.
The reality is that the Bush administration now finds itself in the position of the one adult in a room full of unhappy children. The adult carries responsibilities that none of the children fully understand. A mortal threat presents itself to adult and children alike, but only the adult appreciates this. He must find a way to proceed in spite of the children's very active non-cooperation.
David Warren common sense, ping!
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What disturbs most people who were comfortable with the lower level of military activity in that previous status quo is that the threshold of response seems to have been lowered without being strictly identified.
In my conversations with the overseas guys, and reading some foreign stuff, I see that they are much more scarred by the seemingly unchecked power of the United States than by any terrorists. Some truly believed that Bush presented bigger threat to the world than Saddam. Without a pause, they simultaneously want and don't want USA to be the world policeman. They were OK with threatening Iraq with force, but ONLY if we did not really planned to go ahead with the invasion. If had only one magic wish granted to wipe off just one country from the face of the Earth they would sooner erase us than Iraq, or North Korea. It was amazing.
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