Oh, some may claim we are too aggressive and must show more sensitivity to the listed grievances of our enemies, but that cannot last. Even if those allegedly more nuanced win power here and nuancify our war, our enemies won't respond positively to our efforts to "understand" them. And then, when even our nuanced find their assumptions undermined, they will fight the war with more fury than we've dared to employ so far. Hell hath no fury like the nuanced scorned, as the saying goes.
John Keegan, writing in the London Daily Telegraph on October 8, 2001 (noted in Air Force magazine December 2001 which I recently dug up as I was throwing out old magazines), argued for persistent violence to kill or cow our enemies:
The crucial ingredient of any Western-Islamic conflict [is] their quite distinctively different ways of making war. Westerners fight face to face, in stand-up battle, and go until one side or the other gives in. They choose the crudest weapons available, and use them with appalling violence, but observe what, to non-Westerners, may well seem curious rules of honor. Orientals, by contrast, shrink from pitched battle, which they often deride as a sort of game, preferring ambush, surprise, treachery, and deceit as the best way to overcome an enemy ...
On September 11, 2001, it [the Oriental tradition] returned in an absolutely traditional form. Arabs, appearing suddenly out of empty space like their desert raider ancestors, assaulted the heartlands of Western power, in a terrifying surprise raid and did appalling damage ... Westerners have learned, by harsh experience, that the proper response is not to take fright but to marshal their forces, to launch massive retaliaion, and to persist relentlessly until the raiders have either been eliminated or so cowed by the violence inflicted that they relapse into inactivity.
Yet this resolve to fight seems absent and our enemies perceive it. As Mark Steyn (via Real Clear Politics) writes this week, our enemies aren't cowed anymore, believing we are too exhausted from the Afghan and Iraq campaigns and so we won't dare destroy any more of our enemies:
What's the difference between September 2001 and now? It's not that anyone "liked" America or that, as the Democrats like to suggest, the country had the world's "sympathy.'' Pakistani generals and the Kremlin don't cave to your demands because they "sympathize.'' They go along because you've succeeded in impressing upon them that they've no choice. Musharraf and Co. weren't scared by America's power but by the fact that America, in the rubble of 9/11, had belatedly found the will to use that power. It is notionally at least as powerful today, but in terms of will we're back to Sept. 10: Nobody thinks America is prepared to use its power. And so Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad and wannabe "strong horses" like Baby Assad cock their snooks with impunity.
We have failed to be relentless in destroying our enemies. Our enemies are neither killed nor cowed in totality. They take heart by our failure to inflict massive retaliation. Yet our apparent pull back from destroying our enemies cannot last. Emboldened, our enemies will strike us harder believing they are winning. But they misjudge our character. Ralph Peters writes that enemy victories are minor and certainly short term since they will inspire greater efforts on our part: (via RCP)
The florid American master of horror fiction, H. P. Lovecraft, warned his characters, "Do not raise up what ye cannot put down." Islamist terrorists are reviving the West's thirst for blood. And this time it won't be slaked in Flanders.
Things are going to get uglier east of Suez. And we're going to win.
I've written many times that we can win this Long War by saving Islam from its fanatics or by relentless massive violence until our enemies are dead or cowed:
Losing is not an option. Moslems need to carefully consider whether they wish to indulge the wishes of a violent jihadi minority to spark a war of civilizations between Islam and the West.
Right now we have a choice of winning strategies and we've decided to win by saving Islam from its violent minority. Should our casualties grow too high and should the wider Moslem world remain too detached from fighting the terrorists, we can always decide to fully exploit our power to win the old fashioned way--by destroying our enemies.
I won't sleep well at night if we have to decide to destroy our enemies utterly to avoid defeat. But the alternative of defeat is no alternative. Not to me and I imagine not to a majority in the West. How we win depends on the Moslem world.
That scares the hell out of me.
We won't pause to determine when enough are dead and the rest our cowed. We'll just keep going until it is obvious. As I wrote in September 2001, if September 11, 2001 was our Pearl Harbor, then the war might not end until our final strikes with our version of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to utterly defeat our enemies who have attacked us at home:
It is common already to call September 11, 2001, this generation's Pearl Harbor. After the actual Pearl Harbor, America eventually used nuclear weapons to end the war and preclude a devastating and bloody ground invasion. While I hope we will never need to resort to such horrible weapons, once again a terrible war has been thrust upon us and we must not lose. Our enemies must fear what we will do to them more than we fear what they can do to us.
Indeed, even Europeans will, if hurt badly enough, revert to their ruthless ways. Perhaps so much that we will be shocked.
Our kindness can in the end only kill our enemies. Remember that when you are told we caused our enemies to hate us and so we must atone for our crimes.
But I don't think that our determination to fight is gone or that we need our enemies to renew our commitment to win. I think Iran is next. As our President stated about our enemies in October 2001 (reported in the Wall Street Journal on October 8, 2001; noted in Air Force magazine December 2001):
I gave them fair warning.
Our enemies have been warned. Yet they keep trying to kill us. We don't need to warn them again before we strike.
Iran is next. There is no way this President has decided not to defeat this threat to our lives.
