The wars since September 11 have once more revealed the superiority of
Western arms. Afghanistan may be 7,000 miles away, cold, high, and full of
clans, warlords, and assorted folk who have historically enjoyed killing
foreign interlopers for blood sport, but somehow a few thousand Americans
went over there and took out the invincible Taliban in eight weeks. What
followed was not perfect, but Mr. Karzai offers far more hope than a Mullah
Omar - and without half of Afghanistan ceded over as a terrorist sanctuary
to plan another September 11.
Iraq is a long way away too. And the neighborhood is especially eerie, with
the likes of hostile Syria and Iran, and triangulators on the dole like
Jordan and Egypt. When we become ecstatic because a megalomaniac like
Khaddafi says he's taken a hiatus from nuclear acquisition, you can see that
good news over there is rare indeed.
Add in the hysteria over oil, three decades of the Baathist nightmare, and a
potpourri of terrorists, and the idea of even getting near Iraq seems crazy.
Yet we defeated Saddam in less than three weeks - in far less time than the
125- to 225-day conflict originally predicted by many Pentagon planners.
True, the year-long reconstruction has often been depressing and bloody; but
here we are a year later with some hope for a government better than Saddam
set to take power. Success, remember, need not be defined as perfection, but
simply by leaving things far better than they were.
Despite the tragedy of nearly 600 American combat dead, we did not see
thousands of American fatalities, millions of refugees, burning oil wells,
and the other assorted Dante-esque scenarios that were promised before the
war. In other words, distance, climate, weather, the foul nature of the
enemy - all those and more challenges were predictably trumped by the U.S.
military, which cannot be defeated on the field of battle by any present
force in existence.
Yet will we always see political successes follow from our military
triumphs? Hardly - and for a variety of reasons. We are confronted with the
paradox that our new military's short wars rarely inflict enough damage on
the fabric of a country to establish a sense of general defeat - or the
humiliation often necessary for a change of heart and acceptance of change.
In the messy follow-ups to these brief and militarily precise wars, it is
hard to muster patience and commitment from an American public plagued with
attention-deficit problems and busy with better things to do than give
fist-shaking Iraqis $87 billion.
Still, we must give proper credit to our enemies for our present problems in
Iraq and indeed in the so-called war against terror in general. The
fundamentalists and holdover fascists are as adroit off the conventional
battlefield as they were incompetent on it. If Middle Eastern fanatics
cannot field tens of thousands to meet the United States in battle, they can
at least offer up a few hundred spooky assassins, car bombers, and suicide
killers seeking to achieve through repulsion what they otherwise could not
through arms.
Thus while hundreds of thousands of Saddam's soldiers ran - as Egyptians,
Syrians, and Jordanians did from the Israelis in five wars - hundreds most
certainly did not once the rules of war changed to the protocols of peace.
Recently we were within hours of smashing the resistance in Fallujah once we
accepted war anew. But when the mujahedeen, Gollum-like, decided to slither
out in the open, then in terror scampered to safety, then remerged on all
fours defiant and barking when we stopped firing, our forbearance and fear
of global-televised condemnation handed them a victory they did not earn. In
short, we should have listened to Sam and strangled the creep on the spot.
But our problems are not just with the paradoxes of the fourth-dimensional,
asymmetric warfare that the United States has dealt with since the fighting
in the Philippines and knew so well in Vietnam.
No, the challenge again is that bin Laden, the al Qaedists, the Baathist
remnants, and the generic radical Islamicists of the Middle East have
mastered the knowledge of the Western mind. Indeed they know us far better
than we do ourselves. Three years ago, if one had dared to suggest that a
few terrorists could bring down the Spanish government and send their legion
scurrying out of Iraq, we would have thought it impossible.
Who would have imagined that Americans could go, in a few weeks, from the
terror of seeing two skyscrapers topple to civil discord over the diet and
clothing of war in Guantanamo, some of whom were released only to turn up to
shoot at us again on the battlefields of Afghanistan? Our grandfathers would
have dubbed Arafat a gangster, and al Sadr a psychopathic faker; many of us
in our infinite capacity for fairness and non-judgementalism deemed the one
a statesman and the other a holy man.
So our enemies realize that the struggle, lost on the battlefield, can yet
be won with images and rhetoric offered up to alter the mentality and erode
the will of an affluent, leisured and consensual West. They grasp that we
are not so much worried about being convicted of being illiberal as having
the charge even raised in the first place.
The one caveat they have learned? Do not provoke us too dramatically to
bring on an open shooting war, in which the Arab Street hysteria, empty
threats on spec, and silly fatwas nos. 1 through 1,000 mean nothing against
the U.S. Marines and Cobra gunships. Instead, their modus operandi is to
push all the way up to war - now provoking, now backing down, sometimes
threatening, sometimes weeping - the key being to see the struggle in the
long duration as a war of attrition, if you will, rather than a brief
contest of annihilation.
These rules of the strategy of exhaustion are complex, and yet have been
nearly mastered by the radicals of the Middle East. First, shock the
sensibilities of a Western society into utter despair at facing primordial
enemies from the Dark Ages. The decapitation of a Daniel Pearl; the probing
of charred bodies with sticks, whether in Iran in 1980 or Fallujah in 2004;
the promise of torturing Japanese hostages - all this is designed to make
the Western suburbanite change channels and head to the patio, mumbling
either, "How can we fight such barbarians" or - better yet - "Why would we
wish to?"
If, on occasion, an exasperated and furious West sinks to the same level -
renegade prisoner guards gratuitously humiliating or torturing naked Iraqi
prisoners on tape - all the better, as proof that the elevated pretensions
of Western decency and humanity are but a sham. A single violation of
civility, a momentary lapse in humanism and in the new world of Western
cultural relativism and moral equivalence, presto, the West loses its
carefully carved-out moral high ground as it engages not merely in much
needed self-critique and scrutiny, but reaches a feeding frenzy that evolves
to outright cultural cannibalism.
For someone in a coffee-house in Brussels the idea that Bush apologizes for
a dozen or so prison guards makes him the same as or worse than Saddam and
his sons shooting prisoners for sport - moral equivalence lapped up by the
state-controlled and censored Arab media that is largely responsible for the
collective Middle East absence of rage over the exploding, decapitating, and
incinerating of Western civilians in its midst.
Key here is our own acceptance of such moral asymmetries. Storming the
Church of the Nativity is a misdemeanor in the Western press; shelling a
minaret full of shooters is a felony. Blowing up Westerners in Saudi Arabia
or Jordan is de rigueur; asking Muslims to take off their scarves while in
French schools is a casus belli. If Afghanistan has roads, a benevolent man
as president, and al Qaedists on the run, call it a failure because Mr.
Karzai has not been able, FDR-like, to tour the countryside in a convertible
limousine waving to crowds.
Institutionalized cowardice plays a role as well in this weird way of war:
Call the few dozen dead in a West Bank town the wages of Jeningrad or the
fire-fighting in Fallujah an atrocity, but don't utter a peep about the
80,000 dead in Chechnya or the flattening of Grozny. The Russians are not
quite folk like the Israelis or Americans. They really don't care much if
you hate them; they are likely to do some pretty scary things if you press
them; they don't have too much money to shake down; they don't put you on
cable news to yell at their citizenry; and you wouldn't really wish to
emigrate there for a teaching fellowship anyway.
The moral of all this? The West can defeat the enemy on the battlefield, but
in distant and much-caricatured wars on the dirty ground it can only win
when it has leaders who can convince a fickle public into sacrificing, being
ridiculed, and putting up with inevitable short-term disappointment that is
the price of long-term security and stability - a sacrifice that in turn
will never be acknowledged as such by the very people who are its
beneficiaries both here and abroad.
How weird is our way of war! When we embrace Clintonian bombing - in Kosovo,
Serbia, or in Iraq - and kill thousands, America sleeps: few of our guys
killed, so who cares how many of theirs? Out of sight, out of mind. Yet when
we take the trouble to sort out the messy moral calculus and go in on the
ground shooting and getting shot, then suddenly the Left cries war crimes
and worse - so strong is this Western disease of wishing to be perfect
rather than merely good. Such is the self-induced burden for all those who
would be gods rather than mere mortals.
What then are we to do when choices since September 11 have always been
between bad and worse? We at least must have enough sense not to stand down
and let Iraq become Lebanonized, Talibanized, or Iranicized, even though
when all is said and done Americans will be blamed for bringing something
better to the region. And yes, we need more democracy, not less, in Iraq and
the surrounding Middle East in general.
We have to return to an audacious and entirely unpredictable combat mode;
put on a happy, aw-shucks face while annihilating utterly the Baathist
remnants and Sadr's killers; attribute this success to the new Iraqi
government and its veneer of an army for its own 'miraculous' courage;
ignore the incoming rounds of moral hypocrisy on Iraq from Europe (past
French and German oil deals and arms sales), the Arab League (silence over
Iraqi holocausts, cheating on sanctions), and the U.N. (Oil-for-Food
debacle); explain to an exasperated American people why other people hate us
for who we are rather than what we do; and apologize sincerely and
forcefully once - not gratuitously and zillions of times - for the rare
transgression.
Do all that and we can really complete this weird peace in Iraq.
Probably, your imagination runneth away with you.
), there are the Saddam Baathists, al Qaedas, Iranians, Syrians et al who killed or maimed, or attempted to kill or maim, innocent people. 
