A New Enemy Gains on the U.S. ("It abides by no laws of war")

POUND for pound and pounding for pounding, the Israeli military is one of the world’s finest. But Hezbollah, with the discipline and ferocity of its fighters and ability to field advanced weaponry, has taken Israel by surprise.

Now that surprise has rocketed back to Washington and across the American military.

United States officials worry that they’re not prepared, either, for Hezbollah’s style of warfare — a kind that pits finders against hiders and favors the hiders.

Certain that other terrorists are learning from Hezbollah’s successes, the United States is studying the conflict closely for lessons to apply to its own wars. Military planners suggest that the Pentagon take a page out of Hezbollah’s book about small-unit, agile operations as it battles insurgents and cells in Iraq and Afghanistan and plans for countering more cells and their state sponsors across the Middle East and in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America.

To attack Israel, Hezbollah dispersed its fighters with no distinguishing markings or uniforms or vehicles. Fighters access the weapons only at the moment of attack, and then disappear. This makes preventing the attack all but impossible. It is a significant modernization of classic guerrilla hit-and-run tactics. Israel has been unable to significantly degrade the numbers of rockets because of this approach. Hezbollah fired more than 100 a day at the start of this conflict; they are still firing more than 100 a day, despite Israeli bombardment.

Hezbollah still possesses the most dangerous aspects of a shadowy terror network. It abides by no laws of war as it attacks civilians indiscriminately. Attacks on its positions carry a high risk of killing innocents. At the same time, it has attained military capabilities and other significant attributes of a nation-state.

I assume you're asking what my "response" to 9/11 was rather than my "reaction" to 9/11. Moreover, I think we ought to be judged not so much in hindsight but upon what we knew or reasonably ought to have known at the time. So I am going to answer your question in full as though it had been asked in earnest.

I approved of Bush's speeches including his virtual declaration of war against terrorism.

I approved of his explicit definition of the "axis of evil."

I approved of his "you are either with us or against us" declaration.

I approved of the Bush doctrine of preemption, and still do.

I fully approved of the invasion of Afghanistan.

I fully approved of the war against Iraq.

I even remember posting about the time of the invasion of Iraq my hope that the international inspectors would find weapons of mass distraction because, "God help me" I thought it imperative that we invade Iraq and achieve regime change. I took this position not so that we could impose a Jeffersonian democracy on Iraq but because I feared then, and continue to fear now , that the gravest danger to the United States consists of a terrorist group, with a suicide bent, striking our homeland with a weapon of mass destruction especially an atomic weapon. I consider this threat to be nothing less than an existential threats to the very survival of the Republic. I have many times posted my fear that once such a weapon is used in the heartland, our resolve will crumble and the left will force us into appeasement which ultimately will mean the destruction of our democracy. The reaction of the Spanish to the terrorist attacks on their country is evidence of how easily the left can exploit these disasters to seize power and when they do so, they will embark on appeasement. Lenin's peace with Germany is also instructive in this regard, the left will do anything to further its own quest for power.

So, I believe that it was necessary to effect a regime change in Iraq to prevent this bloody dictator from passing weapons of mass distraction off to a crazed terrorist group. The fact that weapons of mass destruction have not been found, at least according to popular belief, have weakened the rationale for this policy, but not fatally, because the sanction regime was crumbling and about to give way entirely and Saddam would then have been free, with his restored access to petrodollars, to fund the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. I have no doubt he would have done so if left in power, although one cannot be sure that he would have passed them off to terrorists.

I say that the absence of WMD's weakens this policy rationale but is not fatal to it. But it has been fatal to the Bush doctrine, which, if not entirely dead, is certainly comatose and cannot be revived apart from another massive strike on our homeland which I believe is coming and which I pray will not be done with WMD's. In addition to being fatal to the Bush doctrine of preemption, the absence of the WMD's has been nearly fatal to America's moral position around the world. This becomes terribly important as the world perceives America, rightly or wrongly, to be unable to cope with the insurgency in Iraq. It becomes terribly important as Israel is seen to be unable to cope with the situation in Lebanon and the world identifies Israel as America's puppet.

The result of all this is that America, inextricably joined at the hip with Israel in the world's perception, is seen as a thug and an inept thug to boot. The invasion of Lebanon is seen as a ghastly replay of the invasion of Iraq, unjustified and unsuccessful.

Now I would not normally be so terribly concerned about world opinion if the world situation were different. But three grim realities confronts us, and we have markedly wounded our ability to deal with them because we have lost world opinion. They are:

1. The proliferation of nuclear weapons to North Korea and Iran; the former having demonstrated a historical proclivity to sell to anyone every weapon they ever possessed, and the latter being a regime wholly given over to a bizarre and cataclysmic Muslim fundamentalism which could be even so extreme as to deliberately provoke gotterdammerung. Iran has a history of funding murderous terrorists and it has openly called for the destruction of the United States, not to mention Israel. It must be the primary foreign policy objective of the United States to prevent Iran from obtaining atomic weapons. Because America has lost many of its allies (see the next paragraph), and seen the Bush doctrine die, we cannot organize the world for really effective sanctions and we will be forced to a position of appeasement or war, and war which we must conduct alone, with attenuated forces, and the prospect of $100 oil. We simply do not have the resources to occupy Iran in the fashion that we have occupied Iraq, and we have no allies to help us do it. Can air power alone disrupts Iran's nuclear program? Clearly air power alone cannot effect regime change in Iran and so cannot grant us a permanent solution.

2. We are involved in a world war of generational duration for the preservation of the Republic as we know it. I have already alluded to a propensity of the left to appease, this has two fields of play: the first is the world at large, but especially Europe, from which we will ultimately be left alone as one nation after another is peeled off like Spain into the oblivion of appeasement and neutrality and ultimate thralldom. This is not inevitable, of course, but it is the strategic aim of the Moslem fanatics. The second field of play is our own homeland which is half blue and which is the practical equivalent of Europe and it is just as vulnerable to the sirens of appeasement as Spain. We are always only one election away from being Europe. If the stars misalign, if Europe succumbs, if America turns blue, then we are unlikely to be equal to the challenge of atomic terrorism (or to the challenge of a nuclearizing Iran). We cannot win this war alone with one arm is already tied behind our back (read Democratic Party) at home. We must lead the entire world against islamo-fundamentalism. We simply cannot win alone. Our primary weapon in this war must be intelligence-an area which events have demonstrated us to be willfully inadequate. Without the cooperation of the intelligence agencies of virtually every country of the world, I do not see how the Western world can prevent terrorist attacks in their respective homelands with weapons of mass destruction. When that happens, the game is over. It must be stopped before it happens and that means we must have the intelligence to stop it and that means we must have the cooperation of virtually every country in the world (especially Muslim countries) to coordinate every scrap of technological and human intelligence. It is impossible to assess how well the administration is doing this job since the rude awakening of 9/11. We can only say that we have not yet been struck at home.

3. The third reality, which I suspect you are not going to like, is the hard truth that this war against Muslim terrorism can only be won by Muslims. Certainly the amen chorus for Israel will not like this reality at all. America must have its own war aims, just as Israel had its own aims when it suborned Pollock to spy against us. This hard truth means that in the war against Muslim terrorism, Muslim allies are even more important than European allies and certainly more important to victory than Israel. That portion of the Muslim world which retains rationality must be cultivated and deployed against the part gone mad. In a war which turns on intelligence, it will be the Muslim world which provides it. In a world with 1.4 billion Muslims we cannot hope to prevail by exchanging casualties with madmen. We must deploy the Muslim world against the Muslim world. This can only happen if the rational part comes to believe that its own survival depends on extinguishing the crazy part. Finally, we cannot hope to mount a campaign by Muslims against fanatic Muslims so long as it's so unpopular in the Muslim world to do so that any leader who attempts a jihad against islamo fascism would be immediately taken down.

These are strategic truths which have to do with America winning America's war against terrorism. Nowhere among them do we see any benefit from Israel's war in Lebanon and very little from our own war in Iraq. I wish this were otherwise. In fact, the longer these two wars persist, the worse our strategic position becomes. So far in Lebanon the Israelis have confirmed what the Americans have betrayed in Iraq: Western technology is not sufficiently superior to suicide tactics in a war of insurgency. Hence America and Israel have lost their aura of invincibility while gaining virtually nothing in these campaigns. (In the political world of policy making, perception is everything. So 2600 war deaths in three years fighting in Iraq seem excessive to an American public which has been conditioned by the left-wing press. This perception will remain until the next strike on the homeland.)

In Iraq, America may well have succeeded in legitimatizing a Shi'ite regime whose writ may ultimately run, with its connection to the Hezbollah, from the mountains of Pakistan to the shores of the Mediterranean. The war in Lebanon may have made it impossible for any sane Muslim leader to openly cooperate with the United States of America.

If your idea is to preserve and protect Israel, you may take a different view of the war in Lebanon. My idea is to preserve and protect America and to win America's war against terrorism. In this context, Abraham Lincoln's observations about choosing to abolish or preserve slavery if it would preserve the Union, are analogous.

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