We're Not Winning This War

[Snowden]

We're Not Winning This War

Despite Some Notable Achievements, New Thinking Is Needed on the Home Front and Abroad

By John Lehman
Thursday, August 31, 2006; A25



Are we winning the war? The first question to ask is, what war? The Bush administration continues to muddle a national understanding of the conflict we are in by calling it the "war on terror." This political correctness presumably seeks to avoid hurting the feelings of the Saudis and other Muslims, but it comes at high cost. This not a war against terror any more than World War II was a war against kamikazes.

We are at war with jihadists motivated by a violent ideology based on an extremist interpretation of the Islamic faith. This enemy is decentralized and geographically dispersed around the world. Its organizations range from a fully functioning state such as Iran to small groups of individuals in American cities.

We are fighting this war on three distinct fronts: the home front, the operational front and the strategic-political front. Let us look first at the home front. The Bush administration deserves much credit for the fact that, despite determined efforts to carry them out, there have been no successful Islamist attacks within the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. This is a significant achievement, but there are growing dangers and continuing vulnerabilities.

One of the most deep-seated of these problems is the U.S. government's tendency to treat this war as a law enforcement issue. Following a recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission, Congress sought to remedy this problem by creating a national security service within the FBI to focus on preventive intelligence rather than forensic evidence. This has proved to be a complete failure. As late as June of this year, Mark Mershon of the FBI testified that the bureau will not monitor or surveil any Islamist unless there is a "criminal predicate." Thus the large Islamist support infrastructure that the commission identified here in the United States is free to operate until its members actually commit a crime.

Our attempt to reform the FBI has failed. What is needed now is a separate domestic intelligence service without police powers, like the British MI-5.

The Sept. 11 commission catalogued in detail how our intelligence establishment simply does not function. We made priority recommendations to rebuild the 15 bloated and failed intelligence bureaucracies by creating a strong national intelligence director to smash bureaucratic layers, to tear down the walls preventing intelligence-sharing among agencies, and to rewrite personnel policy with the goal of bringing in new blood not just from the career bureaucracy but from the private sector as well. This approach was completely rejected by the Bush administration, which decided instead to leave this sprawling mess untouched and to create yet another bureaucracy of more than 1,000 people in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It was the exact opposite of what we had recommended.

The greatest terrorist threat on the home front is, of course, the use of weapons of mass destruction by Islamists. Here the president has moved to establish a national counter-proliferation center to share and act on intelligence, and he has recently initiated a cooperation agreement with Russia and our allies to work together in preventing nuclear materials from getting into the hands of the Islamists and to undertake joint crisis management if such an attack takes place. These are real accomplishments.

Turning to the operational front, our objectives are to destroy the capability of Islamist organizations to attack us and to deny them geographic sanctuaries in which they can recruit, train and operate.
The post-Sept. 11 threat demanded preemptive attack against Islamist bases, and this was done without delay in the invasion of Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban government, its ally and supporter. It was a brilliantly executed operation in which all our armed forces and CIA operatives combined in a ruthlessly efficient victory. In the succeeding years, however, the Taliban and al-Qaeda have been able to regroup, rebuild and re-attack because they enjoy a secure sanctuary largely free from attack within the border areas of Pakistan.

The next military operation of the war was, of course, the invasion of Iraq. Here again the combined military operations of the United States and Britain were brilliantly successful in defeating Iraqi forces and removing Saddam Hussein and his regime. But in the aftermath of that victory, grave blunders were made. There was a total misunderstanding of the requirements for successful occupation.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was proved right in his keeping the initial invasion force small and agile, but desperately wrong in disbanding all Iraqi security forces and civil service with no plan to fill the resulting vacuum. Certainly it is hard now to understand the logic of that decision.
The military occupation in Iraq is consuming practically the entire defense budget and stretching the Army to its operational limits. This is understood quite clearly by both our friends and our enemies, and as a result, our ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating.

This brings us to the third front, the strategic-political. The jihadist regime in Iran feels no reservation about flaunting its policy to go nuclear, and it unleashed Hezbollah, its client terrorist organization, to attack Israel. In Somalia a jihadist group has seized control of the government. In Pakistan, Islamists are becoming more powerful, and attacks within India are increasing. Governments in Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan are under increasing Islamist pressure. In the Pacific, North Korea now feels free to rattle its missile sabers, firing seven on America's Independence Day. China is rapidly building its 600-ship navy to fill the military vacuum that we are creating in the Pacific as our fleet shrinks well below critical mass. Not one of these states believes that we can undertake any credible additional military operations while we are bogged down in Iraq.

The indoctrination and recruiting of jihadists from Indonesia, South Asia and the Middle East are carried out through religious establishments that are supported overwhelmingly by the Saudi and Iranian governments. Even in the United States, some 80 percent of Islamic mosques and schools are closely aligned with the Wahhabist sect and heavily dependent on Saudi funding. Five years after Sept. 11, nothing has been done to materially affect this root source of jihadism. The movement continues to grow, fueled by an ever-increasing flow of petrodollars from the Persian Gulf.

There is no evidence that the administration has ever raised this matter with the Saudi government as a high-level issue, and -- just as damaging -- it has never acknowledged it as an issue to the American people. Thus Rumsfeld's question -- are we killing, capturing or deterring jihadists faster than they are being produced? -- must be answered with an emphatic no.
In reviewing progress on the three fronts of this war, even the most sanguine optimist cannot yet conclude that we are winning or that we can win without some significant changes of policy.

The writer was secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and later served as a member of the Sept. 11 commission. This is a condensed version of an article that appears in the September issue of the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings magazine.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/30/AR2006083002730.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

[Caldric]

What exactly was his point? I must have missed it.

Fact is we create with our actions as many terrorist as we kill. I know people do not want to admit that but it is just what it is. Iraq has created thousands and thousands of new terrorist.

[odannyboy]

Originally Posted by Caldric

What exactly was his point? I must have missed it.

Fact is we create with our actions as many terrorist as we kill. I know people do not want to admit that but it is just what it is. Iraq has created thousands and thousands of new terrorist.

That is what must infuriate the many, many high ranking Generals and experts on the Middle East who are critical of this invasion.

Not only is the strategy this administration cooked up fir invading Iraq and establishing a Democracy fatally flawed, based on the manner in which they planned to fight it, but also will cause the problem of terrorism to greatly worsen.

Just today Bush said that "Iran must not have a nuclear weapon", this is the mans latest obsession.

Seems he got bored with Iraq and Afghanistan and is now moving on to Iran.

If he seriously proposes bombing Iran we need to start impeachment proceedings immediately.

Surely this country wont let him start WWIII in the next 2.5 years. (At least I hope it wont)

[Snowden]

This man agrees with you - I still have hope of something positive coming out of all this for us and for the Iraqis. This is the opinion of this man, however and of interest, I believe. Especially the idea of circumventing the Islamic way of fighting this war:

No Win

With the failure of the United States and Israel to achieve decisive victories in Iraq and Lebanon, the age of Western military dominance in the Middle East appears to be ending. It's time for a new strategy.



A US soldier at the scene of a suicide car-bomb explosion in central Baghdad in August 2005. (Getty Images Photo / Wathiq Khuzaie)


By Andrew J. Bacevich | August 27, 2006

EVER SINCE BRITAIN AND FRANCE overthrew Ottoman rule in World War I to create the modern Middle East, Western nations have relied on unquestioned military superiority to secure their position in the region. Between the world wars, European imperialists ruthlessly employed firepower to crush nationalist uprisings. After World War II, as the United States supplanted Europe, American military power underwrote the oil-for-protection bargain forged with Saudi Arabia and eventually made Washington the ultimate guarantor of regional stability. When Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had the temerity to challenge American primacy in 1990, the outcome served only to affirm US military preeminence.

Meanwhile, Israel was subjecting its Arab neighbors to recurring military humiliations. The Israel Defense Forces improvised in 1948 became by the 1960s a seemingly invincible army. That Israel was itself a Western implant and that it relied increasingly on weapons with a "Made in the USA" label seemed further proof of Western military superiority.



Not that Arabs had hesitated to contest that superiority. Beginning with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and ending with Saddam Hussein, a series of Arab strongmen attempted to beat the West at its own game. They acquired massive fleets of armored vehicles, heavy artillery, jet fighters, and missiles, calculating that with a large enough arsenal they could overcome the West's advantage. Although the Egyptian army came close to defeating Israel in October 1973, this approach never worked -- Arab tanks and fighter-bombers tended to end up as smoking heaps of twisted metal.

Today the tables are turning. Despite a massive American and Israeli technological edge, including nuclear arsenals, mounting evidence suggests that the age of Western military ascendancy is coming to an end. Muslim radicals have evolved an Islamist way of war that is as complex as it is cunning. As a consequence, in and around the Persian Gulf the military balance is shifting. The failures suffered by the United States in Iraq and by Israel in southern Lebanon may well signify a turning point in modern military history, comparable in significance to the development of blitzkrieg in the 1930s or of the atomic bomb a decade later. Although the full implications of this shift are not clear, they promise to be huge, calling into question basic strategic assumptions that have held sway in the United States and Israel.

. . .

In Washington and Jerusalem alike, officials and commentators classify the activities of diverse groups like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iraq's Sunni insurgents as "terrorism." That label sells our adversaries short. Resistance, the term that these groups favor to describe their actions, is more accurate. Although the methods employed by radical Islamists include terrorism -- that is, violence directed against civilians for purposes of intimidation -- they do not rely on terrorism alone.


Today's resistance blends violence and nonviolence. It includes abductions and assassinations, subversion and insurgency. It entails attacks on infrastructure to produce economic paralysis, but also against military targets to induce exhaustion or provoke overreaction leading to the killing or abuse of civilians. But resistance also includes popular mobilization and protest, social services and legitimate political activity, propaganda designed for internal consumption and propaganda intended for foreign audiences. Resistance means Molotov cocktails and roadside bombs, but also implies distributing alms to the destitute and running for elective office. It is, in short, a sophisticated strategy that integrates political and military action.

We should take care to avoid exaggerating what this strategy can accomplish. For the moment at least, the Islamist way of war does not pose an existential threat. Hamas and Hezbollah are not going to overrun the IDF and occupy Jerusalem anytime soon. As long as the United States remains vigilant in guarding its borders, the Islamist ability to penetrate North America will remain minimal.

What the Islamist way of war does represent, however, is the ability to prevent conventional armies from achieving decisive results. Resistance is a strategy not of conquest but of denial. Wars undertaken with the expectation that they will be short and conclusive -- on the model of the Six Day War or Operation Desert Storm -- instead become open-ended and inchoate. Politically, the Islamist way of war is demonstrating that the West can no longer impose its will on the Middle East.

The inhabitants of that region now have options other than submission or collaboration. Both the United States and Israel must grapple with the implications of this fact. Predictably, the initial reaction of both is to look for ways of tipping the military balance back in the other direction.

Hoping to turn things around in Iraq, the Pentagon is presently engaged in a furious effort to resurrect and relearn the lessons of Vietnam. Once discredited counterinsurgency doctrines have suddenly returned to favor. The warriors of the US Army and Marine Corps are again contending for "hearts and minds." For its part, Israel, determined not to repeat the mistakes that marred its encounter with Hezbollah, is launching a top-to-bottom examination of that conflict. Some politicians and generals will probably lose their jobs, clearing the way for other politicians and generals to reform the way that the IDF trains, operates, and equips itself.

However worthy, these efforts will prove to be beside the point strategically. The truth is that, for reasons that go far beyond questions of technique or tactics, history shows that countries like the United States and Israel just don't do protracted unconventional war especially well. It requires patience, self-restraint, bureaucratic agility -- qualities not found in abundance in modern liberal democracies. In a strictly military sense, we're about as likely to beat the Islamists at their game as Nasser or Saddam Hussein were to beat us at ours.


. . .

For both the United States and Israel, the real issue is not how to defeat the Islamist way of war but how to circumvent it, rendering it irrelevant. This implies resetting the terms of the competition.

Some argue that the way to accomplish this is through escalation, enlarging and recasting the fight in hope of making it "our kind of war." Here lies the appeal of attacking Iran. As advocated by some American and Israeli hawks, such a confrontation would play to our strengths and negate the enemy's. High-tech air forces with precision munitions would render resistance of the sort encountered in southern Lebanon or Iraq's Anbar Province moot. A quick win over Tehran would restore both the perception and the reality of Western military dominance and pay large political dividends.

That such expectations reflect the same sort of naive optimism heard prior to the US invasion of Iraq goes without saying. In 2003 the hawks predicted that the march to Baghdad would be a cakewalk; in 2006, they make similar predictions regarding a war with Iran.

A second approach to circumventing the Islamist resistance, premised on a more sober appreciation of war's efficacy, begins with admitting the possibility that the problem posed by radical Islamists has no military solution.

Over the past five years, the quasi-permanent "war on terror," as conceived by the Bush administration and generally endorsed by the government of Israel, has enjoyed a fair trial. During that period, it has bred widespread anti-Americanism, generated sympathy for the Islamist cause, and provided "the terrorists" with a ready supply of recruits. To continue down this path will only produce more of the same.

If the "global war on terror" is unwinnable as currenty conceived, what is to be done? For the United States, here's a five-point alternative strategy.

First, terminate actions that are self-evidently counterproductive, above all by extricating ourselves in an orderly way from Iraq.

Second, revive in modified form the Cold War principles of containment and deterrence, incorporating explicit security guarantees for Israel, much as the United States has long guaranteed the security of Europe, Japan, and South Korea.

Third, initiate a new Manhattan Project to develop alternative sources of energy, thereby increasing US freedom of action and reducing the flow of wealth to the Persian Gulf, wealth that ends up subsidizing the Islamist cause.

Fourth, through police action, in collaboration with our allies, redouble efforts to dismantle the organizations comprising the radical Islamist network.

Fifth, patiently nurture liberalizing tendencies within the Islamic world, not by preaching or threats of regime change, but by demonstrating at home and inviting Muslims abroad to witness, the manifest advantages of freedom and democracy.

This alternative strategy will also entail costly exertions over a long period of time. Unlike the current "war on terror," however, it promises to be affordable and sustainable, while holding out the prospect of delivering success in the long run.

For Israel, the risks posed by such a shift in strategy are considerable and very much at odds with the self-reliant strategic traditions of the Jewish state. A US strategy of containment places Israelis in the position in which West Berliners found themselves throughout the Cold War: a democratic island in a hostile sea, their survival dependent on the good faith of the United States. An Israeli government might well judge those risks unacceptable. Rather than relying on Washington, it may count instead on the IDF to hold the Islamists at bay.

What makes sense for the United States does not necessarily make sense for Israel. Israel must do whatever best serves its own interests; so, too, must the United States. We are two nations. Our circumstances differ. At some point Israeli policies and US policies for dealing with the Islamist threat may diverge. This pivotal juncture in modern military history may bring us to that moment.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/08/27/no_win/?page=full

[Red Recon]

Originally Posted by Caldric

What exactly was his point? I must have missed it.

Fact is we create with our actions as many terrorist as we kill. I know people do not want to admit that but it is just what it is. Iraq has created thousands and thousands of new terrorist.

I can agree with that to an extent. Also the fact that we came here to Iraq gave the "terrorists" from other countries to say "ok guys, we got ourselves a battlefield, LETS GO!", as well as influence the Iraqi poeple to fight against us. It seems as this madness will ever end. Dont get me wrong I love the USA and would do anything for her, but Im just not sure where this is headed. Seems as if this is becoming the forgotten war.

[Snowden]

Originally Posted by Red Recon

I can agree with that to an extent. Also the fact that we came here to Iraq gave the "terrorists" from other countries to say "ok guys, we got ourselves a battlefield, LETS GO!", as well as influence the Iraqi poeple to fight against us. It seems as this madness will ever end. Dont get me wrong I love the USA and would do anything for her, but Im just not sure where this is headed. Seems as if this is becoming the forgotten war.

Not forgotten, Red. Politicians are using it; many of us are just waiting for you all and praying you home safely. Never, never feel forgotten!