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Your only problem is you’re caught up in a time-warp and can’t get out of it.

I hope my predictions are too strong. We should all hope so. I have two friends from Muslim countries (Saudi Arabia and Iran). Both are American citizens.

I would hate for them to be caught up in the middle of this.

That is one reason it is so important to fight this war effectively – especially the PsyWar.

John

“We have no way, at present, to discern which of you Muslims is the enemy; i.e., acting neutral/pacifist in the face of this conflict, could very well be your death sentence.”

Anyway, thanks to you both, Rhod and John, for your thoughts.

Henry

Great post, but a bit of disagreement:
I don’t advocate expedience in losing our values. I do advocate not doing unnecessary damage to our country. I think that this affair could have been done without releasing those photos. In fact, ironically, those photos will make it less likely that the perpetrators are properly punished.

The best information I have (which may be incorrect) is that a father of one of those involved involved retired Col. David Hackworth who may have given them to the media. If this is true, my already low opinion of Hack (as he likes to be called) will drop to almost the level I have for Kerry, which is higher than only one other person in the U.S. – Jane Fonda.

If it is false, then hopefully we will know pretty soon.

What a terrific American you are. Hope springs eternal in me when I am lifted above my concerns and cynicism to read words like yours. I never despair, but middle-age is a damnable state sometimes. It consists chiefly of wanting things to be again what they actually never were and blaming everybody else for it. I don’t believe for a moment that the things you describe are irrelevant.

Your first paragraph even posed the rhetorical question that America might be a failed experiment. James Madison in one of the Federalist Papers (Number 10, I think) ruminated that the type of system he was proposing had always failed, and if it fails again, the idea ought to be abandoned entirely.

But we are here today because of the things you’ve defended and described so eloquently. I think most of us are so inculcated with these values we can’t objectify them. It is simply who we are; I want to go off and join my sons in this mess too, in part because I want to get in on the fight, but also because of my fury at the nature of the enemy. All I can do at my age is bitch about it, at great and tedious length too.

JOHN:

I was unfair in my response to your post. You have written so many words on this topic, I already knew what you meant. Your command of this subject is expert, complete and unflinching in your suspicions about the future.

I agree with you on the potentialities also.
I see nothing to convince me that Islam is a religion of peace, and its claimed similarity to the more strident features of Christianity is specious and expedient. Christianity and Judaism have made their peace with modernism, and still adhere to their codes. They have accepted the political, philosophical and theological fact of free will without compromising the faith itself. Islam will have the make the same accomodation. It’s inevitable.

Thanks for your thoughts pertaining to my post. You and John both seem to have similar beliefs in the ideals of America that I hold, but if I’m reading you correctly, seem to incline toward the view that those ideals are now irrelevant in the face of the practical measures necessary to prevail. If I am correct in this, and YOU are correct in your assessment, then it would appear to me to follow that America has already proven to be a failed experiment in the ideals of our country’s founders. But I refuse to accept that.

I understand fully what you each have said concerning the degeneracy of our society, and in large measure have to agree. But I cannot accept that we who still hold to the original ideals must abandon them now for expediency’s sake in order to survive. Of what possible use or good are ideals if one has to abandon them in order to win?

One of you mentioned psychological warfare and its importance in this war on terrorism. I believe that that is precisely what the debates, the speeches, the pamphlets such as Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” were, leading up to our Delaration of Independence. To truly win the hearts and minds of others, they must become convinced that your ideals are superior to the ideals that they and/or their leaders have held. We have no better weapon available to us than the noblest ideals that led to our nations birth.

If we are in the minority today in our own country, well, so were Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, Gouvernor Morris, Thomas Jefferson et al. If the post industrial left has captured the minds of our youth so that the original ideals of America exist only among a few dinosaurs such as ourselves, then we simply have to win them back! We have to fight a two front war, not only for the hearts and minds of Islamics, but for the hearts and minds of our own countrymen as well! In that, we are little different from those who grasped the vision of America as an ideal of human liberty and self governance back then, for they too had to fight a two front war. They had to fight a psychological battle of ideas to win the hearts and minds of their countrymen in order to plant the seeds of liberty in their minds, and they had to fight the armed might of the strongest nation on the earth at the time.

Ideas are our only means of true victory, for victory through coercion will only lead to settling for an existence of uneasy relative peace and continued acts of terrorism. And the cost of that may well be in the hundreds off millions of lives that John speaks of, in the nuclear holocast of everybody’s greatest fears.

This doesn’t mean that I am for abandoning our military efforts, by any means. It means that the military efforts of the America I want to see emerge would be as a supplement only to our greatest weapon, our ideals. Today, those ideals have given way to expediency, and too many who have in the past and who do today hold the power have a greater belief in what they call practicality than they do in the ideals to which they give lip service. And this is what our enemies and even our friends have been saying for more than 50 years.

Ho Chi Minh used to like to ask Americans with whom he came in contact, “Is the Statue of Liberty still standing? Sometimes I think that she must be standing on her head.” In his early manhood, he first approached America for aid in freeing his country from the colonial grasp of France, but France was our ally and he was given short shrift. It was then that he turned to the communists who were only too glad to embrace him and give him aid.

Expediency had already won out over ideals in the hearts and minds of our leaders and men in power even then. And you see where that led. Eventually we won the Cold War, and as I have expressed here before, that was in large measure due to our efforts in Viet Nam. The Soviet Empire collapsed; the communists lost their grasp over Russia and her sattelite nations. But Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Nam remains communist to this day. Expediency and practicality sent Ho packing when he came to call, seeing in the ideals of the American Revolution a hope for freedom for his land and people. Can anyone calculate the cost?

Think about that! And while you do, think also about this: What do Muslims believe? What are their ideals? What does their religion give them? How do their ideals match up against ours?

When I was in the Army, virtually every post had billboards on it, and every unit had posters saying “Know your enemy!” I bought a Koran after 9/11, and while I haven’t read the whole thing by any means, what I have read in that book, plus some more on their history, has given me a much better understanding of how hijackers steeped in Islamic idealism could seize a commercial airliner and slam it into the World Trade Center, dieing willingly and even eagerly for their cause. I can understand far better how a West Bank Palestinian can strap a bomb to himself and explode it in a crowded Israeli restaurant, or on a bus, or alongside an israeli checkpoint. And I will take our ideals over theirs any day! I am willing to put our ideals up against theirs any day, in a debate of ideals to live by and for! And I would do that even now when so much seems on the verge of collapse because of recent events in Iraq. And as to that, I have to ask, isn’t it because Americans chose expediency over ideals that we are in the mess that we are, both in Iraq and at home?

We have something of extraordinary value to offer humanity. We dare not sacrifice that for expediency’s sake, and expect to emerge as the Americans of our founding fathers vision.

Henry

I may not have stated it clearly, but the only option that I see other than a full scale war of cultures (with hundreds of millions dead) is psychological warfare, waged well. In that scenario, military operations (other than those necessary to remove significant threats) become a tool in that overall approach, rather than a sufficient by itself approach.

I believe that democratization, if it works, is the most effective way to do that, because it taps into a deep human desire for freedom, a desire that exists in many Muslims, especially in Iran, which coincidentally is one of the greatest dangers to us.

Democratization is “viral” in the sense that it spreads itself. So is radical Islam. Think of democratization as a phage which destroys the Islamist bacteria.

While I have a strong desire to see many Iraqis achieve freedom and prosperity, I don’t let that cloud my vision. We are in a war to the death with radical Islam. We may in fact be in a war to the death with Islam, itself. We may not – it is always hard to judge the power of some of these ideas.

Combined with the incredible danger of relatively easy to transport WMDs, and the many potential ways that terrorists can get hold of them, we must succeed in removing the motivation of the terrorists. If we do not succeed in that which creates terrorists (and that motivation is complex, but ultimately involes radical Islam, critical because it provides the feeling of righteousness and the “courage” to commit suicidal attacks), we will be unable to stop megaTerror attacks in our homeland.

It won’t take more than one or two more mega-terror attacks before the leftists and anti-war types are completely marginalized. People will not only want safety, they will want retribution. And they will support, and probably demand nuclear war. The signs in the street marches will say “nuke ‘em.”

This is why I am so concerned with staying the course (with appropriate steering corrections) in Iraq, even if it costs 10,000 American lives. I fear, however, that we don’t have the national will to do so.

I think my last post satisfied me, but didn’t answer your question. And I’m sure I don’t have the answer because no one does.

I didn’t know that you believed that a failure to democratize Iraq would leave only the alternative of de-islamization of the entire world. I have never thought that far along as a possibility. I am more inclined to the view that the agonies of the Islamic world are anomalies.

I think the book entitled “The New Map” or similar title, develops the theory that the problems in the Middle East arise from resistance to globalization. The author calls these trouble spots “The Gap”, cultures resistant to modernization rather than Westernization in general. Globalization has provided them the technical and strategic ability to reach into our cultures with violence, and our response must be to reach into theirs with the same thing.

Along with this argument is the view that these cultures are already moving in our direction, and the resistant factions are on a road to nowhere. I’m tempted to accept a Containment Theory here, but that only works if they aren’t blowing up your cities.

You asked me for my idea of an “intermediate scenario” arising from, I think, a mixture of the problem of the “atrocities” combined with the full problem of this culture collision in the Middle East.

I think all of us start with impressions and reason back to logical constructions to uphold what we already concluded intuitively (or emotionally). I didn’t believe from the beginning that there would be a Pavlovian response in the Middle East to the apparent humiliation of Iraqi prisoners. Why? I’m not sure, except that every human being and every human setting is so complicated that anything you say about it is both true and false. Sure, the issue will be used by opportunists but I see more of that in The West than in Iraq.

I also don’t give a damn what individuals or groups in the Middle East think of this matter. And if they are galvanized to fight because of this event alone, then the complexity of war would have offered something else to them along the way anyway. We can posture about our moral and political superiority as a Tactical matter, but our Strategy is to win, and this is just a bump in the road. We aren’t the good guys. We have an evolutionary goal, not exactly Social Darwinism but close enough, which is to continue as the ascendant culture. More on that in a minute.

Mark Steyn’s observation is that Osama and his type have a bet with The West. That we will run away. Most of us on this site have dismissed that possibility and claimed that we will fight to the death…UNTIL something like this casts us as the guys in the black hats. Seems like we will only fight to the death as long as we are the good guys. When we aren’t, we descend in a trough of despair about our motives, our capabilities and our self-advertisement. We’ll gaze at our navels until a bullet passes through from behind. Screw that and screw the Iraqi prisoners. We bombed Dresden because we were, at least temporarily, convinced that destruction anywhere, in any degree, was a step toward victory. We need at least some of that thinking now.

You asked me about ascendance. Are we the ascendant culture? I agree that the rot in The West goes pretty deep. But as someone else said (I wish I had) that the Middle East can produce people who fly planes into buildings but they can’t build a plane. They can make car bombs but not cars. Islamism is coincident with poverty and despair or the other way around. It doesn’t matter. We are still ascendant in every category that matters, in Art (even there) technology, science, medicine, you name it. Without the complexity of Western Culture, there would also be no Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia or anywhere else that relies on everything from aspirin to sewing machines produced in The West. “We” are everywhere. The Middle East isn’t non-Western, it is anti-modern, which is different.

I also don’t care about Democracy in Iraq. Democracy is a side effect of regulated pluralism and a system of law which balances competing interests. Without this nothing else can happen, especially a system for putting people to work, which is the worst problem among Middle Eastern populations. Unemployment.

Finally, I think the great unexamined systems issue here is that every pseudo-modern country in the Middle East is held together by WESTERN money, technology, ideas and influence but governed by corrupt and cynical cabals. Without The West they would again be covered in sand. We don’t understand how deeply we have penetrated these societies already, or how false or durable political conditions are in the Middle East. We can pay attention to the Zeyads of Iraq out of courtesy, but the game is being played out on the battlefield. IX was right to this extent. Until they are subdued militarily, nothing else of importance can happen.

Thanks for your comment. Remember that under Reagan we fought a much more expensive war (the dramatic buildup of our military along with lots of expensive R&D) after cutting taxes. Our country prospered.

Supply side economics, within appropriate limits, works fine. The tax reductions still leave us with higher taxes as a percent of GDP than our historical average – 14% higher. As our GDP grows we will greatly reduce the deficit.

We really don’t have economic problems stemming from the Vietnam War. In fact, our economy is doing very well right now, and expanding rapidly.

Government debt is very different economically from personal debt, but the best measure is the debt as a percentage of GDP. We are in good shape there.

Would I be willing to pay the tax to pay for this war? Yes, if I thought it was the right way to finance it, which it isn’t.

Wuld I be prepared to send my children overseas to fight it? If I had a child of that age, I would , with great worry, do so, although it would be especially hard since I only have one child. I believed in and volunteered to fight in the Vietnam War myself. As it turned out, I ended up an REMF Vietnam Veteran. I had a combat specialty that I worked hard to earn (P-3 Orion radio operator/ on-board technician / on-board instructor ) – I trained some of you blokes) but didn’t actually end up in a combat assignment. This war is far more important.

If I didn’t have a family, I would be in Iraq right now helping the Marines build their TV stations, or some other job that my engineering, technical and programming talents make me eligible for. That isn’t an idle statement. My wife sensed the desire in me without me even saying anything.

I don’t discuss my religious beliefs or lack thereof with anyone.

I am perfectly happy to let my government hold a large amount of information on me and who I associate with. They have certainly had it in the past, when I had security clearances or because of security clearances of others I was very close to. Furthermore, much of that information is available to commercial organizations, so why not the government. In fact, you may find interesting the fact that I advocate a surveillance society – see this and this.

I would disagree with your final assertion. This war is essentially a psychological war. It is an attempt to plant a viral democracy in the middle east in the hope that it will spread and remove some of the root causes of terrorism. This means we have that among other things, the attack on Iraq was necessary in order to show adversaries that not only are we powerful, but that we are so serious about our defense that we are willing to ignore the United Nations (a corrupt organization that we now know would never have approved war due to the conflicts of interest of France and Russia).

Libya got the message. Apparently so did Sudan.

On other fronts, we use other techniques. For example, we have advised the Chinese that if they cannot keep North Korea from being a nuclear state and weapons proliferator, we cannot keep Japan and Taiwan from becoming nuclear armed. It may not have been an accident that a huge train full of explosives, near the Chinese border, blew up around the time Kim Jong Il was supposed to be traveling through, a fact known to the Chinese since he was returning form Taiwan.

I am curious why you ask all those questions. What does sending my child overseas have to do with political and economic war?

By the way, nuclear weapons are not the most dangerous threat. Genetically engineered biological weapons are potentially far more dangerous. For example, smallpox (which North Korea has), with the ILK4 gene added, would probably kill most of the people on earth. In mouse experiments with a different orthopox virus, even most vaccinated mice died when ILK4 was added.

Since our enemies are willing to go back to the dark ages, and are willing to die for the cause, the release of such a weapon is not illogical as it would be with a normal state actor.

One more thing. Before I payed the gasoline tax I would remove a number of very expensive subsidies for big business – especially farm supports. I would reduce welfare benefits. Right now, out defense budget is only about 3% of our GDP. In World War II it was over 30%. We have a huge margin if this war goes to the hard-war scenario.

Now, since you are also at risk in this war, and your country has been a target and will be again (your good works in East Timor are enough to set off these crazies), please answer your own questions.

Furthermore, I do not believe that we are “too military” in this war.

We had no choice but to destroy the Taliban. The fundamental principles of geopolitics require retribution for an attack like 9-11. Furthermore, only the physical occupation of Afghanistan would disrupt Al Qaeda.

We also had very strong reasons to take down Iraq. As I mentioned, one of them was demonstrating our willingness to do so. Throughout the Clinton years, I argued that if we did not put troops on the ground, in mortal danger, and defeat some Islamists or others, we would be viewed as weak and terrorism would escalate.

On 9-11, I was not surprised that we were attacked in our homeland and I was not surprised at the number of dead. I was only surprised about what day it was, and the method of attack. The 1993 attack on the world trade center showed that the Islamists were willing to break the consensus terrorist paradigm (high publicity low casualty attaccks) and kill as many as they could. That attack was intended to kill 100,000 people. It was a declaration of all-out war that the administration in power failed to recognize.

We had a number of other good reasons to take down Iraq. The most important was the possibility of them providing either WMDs or WMD training or both to Al Qaeda. We knew they didn’t have nukes, but they had a long history of chemical weapons and biological weapons, including Anthrax. We were attacked with Anthrax also ihn 1991, which had been partially weaponized in a way we did not know how to do. We still don’t know the sources.

In addition, Iraq was engaged in daily acts of war against us, attempting to shoot down our aircraft. The no-fly-zone operation was very expensive and likely to generate a sudden crisis when a plane went down either to hostile file or accident. Furthermore, Saddam being able to shoot as us every day added to the negative side in psychological war – it allowed us to be painted as cowards.

I could list more reasons, but if you look around at this blog,you will find them.

So what are we doing that is too much in military terms, and what give you the idea that we are not operating in the other domains? You might imagine what Ghadaffi might say if you asked him about our strategy. Watch the Sudan closely also – things are happening there that are in our favor. It is not a coincidence given that we have forces very close to them, including offshore, we have humanitarian reasons to overthrow their regime, and they have a past history of working with Al Qaeda but also a past history of trying to sell out Al Qaeda.

We aren’t perfect, and I think we are not putting enough effort into the psychological warfare front (I would have covert operations working to defeat the effectiveness of hostile propaganda, including Al Jazeera, by coopting them or causing them to disappear from the airwaves).