AS OUR ENEMIES GET MORE CAPABLE, SO MUST WE

Challenge Upon Challenge
As our enemies get more capable, so must we
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

"Once the jihadists grasped that America and Israel were no longer content with punitive retaliation, largely by air, but would instead fight to achieve larger political aims by winning hearts and minds, the terrorists changed their tactics. So successful have they been that, after nearly four years in Iraq, the U.S. military cannot secure Baghdad. Saddam is gone, and our ground troops are backed by billions of dollars, the finest air force in civilization’s history, sophisticated technology, and advice from seasoned counterinsurgency veterans. Yet the Sunni Triangle is still not safe for anyone.
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It almost seems that the less the United States and Israel worry about a Syrian armored corps or an Iranian air wing, the more loath they are to fight Iraqi insurgents or Hezbollah, because of the difficulty of cleaning up terrorist enclaves and the public-relations fiascos that follow in the global press.
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In short, for a variety of reasons, many of the advantages of postmodern warfare seem to lie with the insurgents and terrorists.
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[1] it matters less than ever that the global arsenal of munitions is largely designed in the West. While all the world’s militaries are parasitic on technologies and weapons expertise that originate in Europe and the United States, it is far easier to steal, buy, or be given weapons suitable for terrorists than to acquire those suitable for traditional armies.
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[2] the widening gap between the quality of life in a successful West and that in a failed Middle East. Globalization has passed by most of the latter, which resists modernity and the bounty that accrues to open societies.
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yet we often forget the military consequences of the wide gap between our wealth and theirs. Never have the criteria of victory and defeat been so radically redefined, with the mostly secular combatants on our side having so much to lose while the enemy dreams of an Islamic Paradise far more enticing than the slums of Sadr City or Jericho. The more leisured and affluent an America at war becomes, the less willing it is to endure the deaths of its youths 7,000 miles away, in awful places like the Hindu Kush and the Sunni Triangle, in fighting deemed not immediately connected to the survival of the United States. The result is that the West self-defeatingly assumes it need not mobilize much of its enormous military strength to crush the impoverished enemies who in fact are growing more formidable than ever.
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[3] never has the West been more disparate and divided. In the present age, Hezbollah’s best chance of reining in the IDF is not through a cascade of missiles, but rather through EU and U.N. pressure. The French foreign minister flew to Lebanon to praise Iran as a force for “stability in the region” — the very regime that has promised to wipe Israel off the map and given Hezbollah rockets to try to do just that. Indeed, condemnation from a Kofi Annan or a Javier Solana may ultimately harm Israeli operations more than a dozen suicide bombers could. Europe’s worries over reliable supplies of oil, its desire to recycle petrodollars through arms sales, its fear of Islamic terrorism, the ominous presence of unassimilated Muslim minorities in its midst, its envy of America the Hyperpower, and its old anti-Semitism all conspire to put it, with its economic and cultural clout, often on the side of our enemies — a fact well known to jihadists who simply repeat and add an Islamic touch to a well-established anti-Americanism.
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[4] the anti-war movement has become more sophisticated than in the days of Vietnam.
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today a number of modern and postmodern ideologies — multiculturalism, moral equivalence, and utopian pacifism — conspire with instantaneous media to make it nearly impossible to fight in the Middle East on the terrorists’ turf. It isn’t thought merely that Americans should not die in wars deemed “optional” given their great distance from the United States, but also that Americans should not kill the “other.”
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So strong is the tug of multicultural romance that it trumps even the revulsion of Western progressives at the illiberal jihadist agenda, with its homophobia, sexism, religious intolerance, and racism. Even black leaders have often voiced empathy for the enemies of Israel, as if Palestinian radicals were fellow civil-rights advocates and not chauvinists who publish racist cartoons of Condoleezza Rice.
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[5] But there is another unspoken problem. The United States has usually waged war most effectively with Democratic presidents — Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy — who appear as reluctant warriors forced to fight, rather than with supposedly bellicose right-wingers who “enjoy” settling issues by force. This is an increasingly important factor in a therapeutic society that has chosen to ignore the tragic truth that wars will continue to break out until the nature of man changes.
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So, in the future, how will America — particularly under presidents who cannot posture as reluctant liberal warriors — fight well-trained terrorists and insurgents who have access to lethal weapons and who use the media to portray themselves as sympathetic victims?
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if in the short term terrorists find it helpful that explosions and mayhem are aired daily on Western television, in the long term globalization, democratization, and international communications will undermine the parochial world of the Islamic fundamentalist and the Middle East patriarch.
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Unfortunately, the United States will probably have to fight more wars, in places and in ways it would otherwise not choose, and against ever more sophisticated terrorists. What we have done in Afghanistan and Iraq — sometimes well and sometimes not so well — will not impede us from achieving our objectives. But neither will it help us — unless we take time to learn from our recent history, as well as from the long tradition of the Western world at war. "


Pertinent Links:

1) Challenge Upon Challenge