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I. Military
The general
outlines of the campaign in Afghanistan are now becoming evident:
air strikes on selected Taliban and terrorist leadership, along
with attacks against air defense and their conventional assets,
to aid indigenous forces in their motorized assaults against the
cities. Our on-the-ground reconnaissance and special operations
— thanks to the advances in technology of the last decade —
may well make these missions far more destructive than even what
we witnessed in the Gulf War, perhaps resulting in a precipitous
collapse in Taliban resistance in weeks or even days, rather than
the predicted months or years. We were warned of "thousands
to be killed" in Iraq, and instead lost a few dozen to actual
hostile fire. Pompey, under the Lex Gabinia of 67 B.C., was given
an imperium for three years to rid the Mediterranean of pirates;
he destroyed them in three months. Overconfidence is the supposed
bane of all armies, but in fact, wise generals more often deliberately
downplay their chances of success in the dawn of battle.
Tanks and artillery,
we must remember, are not obsolete in Afghanistan; at some point,
such American conventional forces may need to help direct and organize
resistance movements that move out of the hills and onto the plains
— if only to ensure that a particular local thug or warlord
does not hijack the temporary unity of the resistance. While our
Defense Department has been adroit at emphasizing the unconventional
nature of this conflict, we are in fact seeing just how effective
the symphony of conventional (planes, carriers, submarines, destroyers)
and special operations forces actually is. Some traditional armored
units on the ground will also be critical in guarding our smaller
teams from any sudden movement from Iran, or a precipitous change
in government in Pakistan — as well as readying operations
for action in Iraq.
Commandos and
air strikes will win the Afghani phase of the war against terrorism,
but large battle groups are also critical in showing and using American
muscle. We must remember that Pakistan is now neutral, and Iran
wary — not out of sympathy for our dead or in moral support
of our cause, but out of fear that the United States is acting unpredictably
and most out of character from its behavior of the past eight years.
The most visible signs of this new resolution are our ships and
planes — symbols of confidence not lost on the American people
themselves, who will never know the full story of our efforts at
stealth and ruse on the ground. Terrorists and mullahs will fear
our commandoes, but Iraq and Iran must be reminded of the conventional
strength of the United States they saw in Libya rather than in Somalia.
With a frightening presence in the area now, our future campaigns
against other terrorist hosts may become somewhat easier. Neither
Saddam, Assad, Khadafi, nor the Iranian mullahs wish to lose billions
of dollars of planes, armor, and bases to sustained American air
and naval strikes — or to see that followed by an arms blockade
and embargo.
Comparisons
with past war-making are commonplace. Perhaps we should emphasize
the similarity of our present struggle with the masterful American
action in the Pacific during World War II. Then, too, we had enormous
logistical problems, vast and daunting landscapes, savage and often
suicidal enemies, propagandists to threaten us with a vast racial
war of Orient versus Occident, and few friends with any real power.
Nimitz and Macarthur nevertheless saw even the first tiny steps
clearly as evolutionary and ending in Tokyo, as paired boxing gloves
of alternating American battle groups advanced from one island to
the next. We should see Iraq and its sympathizers as our fathers
saw the Gilberts, Marshalls, Mariannas, and Carolines — with
one of our task forces fighting while the other, in reserve, prepares
the next strike. Once our enemies understand the non-negotiable
logic of our sequential strategy, they may well decide wisdom to
be the better part of valor, kill or expel their terrorists, and
close down their bases. In this regard, just as we learned of General
Schwarzkopf in the Gulf, so too should the American people soon
be introduced to our theater commanders in the Middle East.
II.
Diplomatic
The vocal support
of allies is, of course, critical to our success. Yet the United
States finds itself militarily unsurpassed in a manner civilization
has not seen since the Rome of the first to third centuries A.D.
— and quite unlike even its own singular position during the
two World Wars. Quite simply, there is no other friend or rival
that really can help us, so great has the imbalance in the world's
militaries grown in our favor. Allies, who pledge support now in
the adrenaline rush of the first bombs, will bow out when the critical
issue of Iraq arises in the next few weeks. We should not expect
or welcome their armed assistance, but should demand, as the price
of their neutrality, at least public signs of support. Again, the
coalition (is there not a better name?) is a critical, but largely
cosmetic entity — and a means, not the end in itself: That
must remain the single-minded destruction of terrorist havens that
have helped kill our women and children. We can excuse the
relative inaction of the Europeans with praise of NATO, but only
on the condition that they not fire up their vast cultural engines
of cynical demagogy to denigrate the efforts of America. And it
is one thing to entice a powerful ally like Russia with sympathy
for their similar problems with fundamentalism — quite another
to do much of anything to win over a suspect Iran.
III.
Philosophical
Our public
pronouncements so far have been both judicious and politic, especially
in the repeated emphasis that ours is no war against either Islam
or the Arab world in general. But just as critical, here and abroad,
must be the constant refrain of our poor dead. Only that way will
our allies fathom our single-mindedness, and our enemies at last
realize that Americans are not merely a just, but also an angry
and avenging power. Rumors that a B-52 had its nose cone painted
with "NYPD" are a good start. There must be much more.
In every great
struggle, proclamations of intent, purpose, and values emerge when
even the mere hint of victory is in the air — whether they
be Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation or Roosevelt's declaration
of the formation of the United Nations. Within the year, President
Bush should establish a formal American doctrine of military principle.
The Bush Doctrine should supplant the Powell manifesto, and thus
state unequivocally that a terrorist attack on the citizens or the
shores of the United States is defined as an act of war, and will
bring immediate retaliation of all our forces, without qualification,
against any state that hosts, aids, or comforts the perpetrators.
This is no small commitment, and may in the future raise real risks,
involving nuclear rogue states like North Korea or perhaps even
changed governments in Pakistan or South Africa. But the Bush Doctrine
will warn the world — and Americans here at home — of
the seriousness of the present danger and the audacity of our response.
Only that way can our children some day sleep in peace.
At the same
time, our president must also craft something more recognizably
humane and visionary — akin to Roosevelt's enunciation of the
Four Freedoms, even as it is less utopian than Wilson's Fourteen
Points — a creed that will send a strong message of American
purpose to "moderate" Arab governments in the aftermath
of this crisis. The United States should declare that it supports
the right of all Islamic peoples to self-determination through consensual
government; and, indeed, we shall work for the gradual evolution
of democracy in countries where the impoverished have no voice or
freedom. Failing to do so in Kuwait may have been as critical an
error as stopping before Baghdad.
Such unsophisticated
idealism also offers real peril: Fundamentalists may well be elected
and replace autocrats professedly sympathetic to America. But such
reform offers the only chance to avoid repetitions of the present
disaster in which corrupt Westernized strongmen buy off indigenous
criticism, by allowing their fundamentalists to vent popular outrage
against us rather than them. These illegitimate governments have
a free press only in the sense that they are free to damn America.
In this regard,
we must recognize that much of America's energy policy is a concern
of the Department of Defense. Can we at last realize that cheap
imported oil from corrupt Saudi fundamentalists is not really cheap
at all, but rather the real fuel funding the killers of our innocent?
So many moral anomalies arise from our shortsighted energy policies!
Our Defense and State Departments lecture us ad nauseam on the "special
relationship" we have with Saudi Arabia; yet no government
— through its autocracy, hypocrisy, and misogyny — is
more inherently repugnant to the American people. Rarely in our
history has a foreign country enjoyed so little popular, yet so
much official, American support.
IV.
Cultural
Our visionaries
must be far clearer and more eloquent about the nature of our struggle.
In their understandable efforts to say what we are not doing
— fighting Islam or provoking Arab peoples — they have
failed utterly to voice what we are doing: preserving Western
civilization and its uniquely tolerant and humane traditions of
freedom, consensual government, disinterested inquiry, and religious
and political tolerance. In this regard, we must especially distinguish,
in the manner of Roosevelt and Churchill, the historic ties between
Great Britain and America — something either ridiculed or forgotten
in the current fashions of multiculturalism.
Our institutions
are shaped by the British inheritance of the classical tradition.
The English Enlightenment, far more so than the French, tempers
and moderates our ongoing evolution toward greater equality. And
had it not been for British resistance from 1939 through 1941, the
United States may have well lost millions in World War II. It is
time our leaders explained these intellectual bonds and shared sacrifices
to a new generation of largely ignorant Americans, who are perhaps
either dumbfounded by or else completely oblivious to the singular
loyalty of Great Britain.
Finally, Americans
must answer the Islamic world bluntly, and with pride rather than
reticence, about why we support and always will protect the Israelis.
Our sympathy is not attributable to some mythical Jewish lobby,
a CIA plot to put down Islam, or a worldwide conspiracy of Zionists;
it is simply because they are the Middle-Eastern state most like
ourselves in their commitment to a free society based on the rule
of law and the consent of the governed. Our special relationship
with Israel is open equally to any Islamic country that accepts
the idea of democracy and the essence of freedom. We must, as a
nation, cease the apologetic tone we have developed with the Arab
world, and make it clear that their ministers who hector us are
not legitimate without elections, their spokesmen are not journalists
without a free press, and their intellectuals are not credible without
liberty. The right to admonish Americans on questions of morality
in not an entitlement, but something earned only through a shared
commitment to constitutional government.
This war really
is on all fronts, as we are told. Our leaders need to remind friends
and enemies alike that we are as confident in our values and ideas
as we are in our carriers and commandos.
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