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 hat
will be one quick way to determine whether the American response
to yesterday's outrage is adequate?
Whether it
primarily involves cruise missiles or not.
Cruise missiles
are a very nice weapon in the abstract, and even have important
uses in this instance — primarily, I would think, as an instrument
of assassination.
But, in general,
over the years cruise missile attacks have become synonymous with
symbolic pinprick strikes that are an excuse for not taking serious
action against our enemies.
They have been
made a tool of the sort of carefully calibrated warmaking that should
have been forever discredited by Vietnam.
They have become
a way to avoid ever-incurring American casualties in foreign engagements,
even a way to avoid incurring casualties among our enemies — the
perfect weapon with which to inflict deadly damage on empty warehouses
in the dead of night.
Cruise missiles,
in short, were the weapon of choice during America's long vacation
from the imperatives of blood and steel that ended yesterday.
You can't turn
on the TV without hearing some expert say that our enemies in the
current conflict are elusive, that finding targets to punish and
bomb and raze will be difficult or impossible. Nonsense.
We know the
states that harbor our enemies. If only Osama bin Laden and his
50 closest advisers and followers die in the next couple of weeks,
President Bush will have failed in a great military and moral challenge
of his presidency.
The American
response should be closer to something along these lines: identifying
the one or two nations most closely associated with our enemies,
giving them 24-hours notice to evacuate their capitals (in keeping
with our desire to wage war as morally as possible), then systematically
destroying every significant piece of military, financial, and political
infrastructure in those cities.
Today in Manhattan,
if you open your windows, you can smell the smoke from downtown,
ever so slightly burning your eyes and your throat. People in the
nations that empower our enemies should get a big whiff of such
smoke.
Two of the
greatest American warriors ever, William Sherman and George Patton,
understood, as Victor Davis Hanson points out in his excellent book
The Soul of Battle, that war could not just be waged against
an enemy's army.
It had to waged
against his infrastructure, his culture, and his will, it had to
make the populace feel the pinch of the aggression it cheered from
the sidelines — and this lesson is as applicable to southern belles
in the Civil War as it is to the "Arab street" today.
So, by all
means annihilate Osama bin Laden. But the task is much larger than
that, and cruise missiles alone won't be equal to it.
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