Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (29 page)

So that is Europe’s problem in a nutshell—or time bomb?—made of cold, hard demographic statistics. Today Europe is faced with a shrinking and aging native population that will require an ever increasing flow of immigrants to maintain a workforce to keep its social-welfare system from bankruptcy for a bit longer. Where will the new workers come from? “[A] talented ambitious Chinese or Indian,” Mark Steyn has correctly argued, “has zero reason to immigrate to France, unless he is consumed by a perverse fantasy of living in a segregated society that artificially constrains his economic opportunities yet imposes confiscatory taxation on him in order to support an ancient regime of indolent geriatrics.”
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Europe’s thirst for young workers therefore will be quenched by the high birthrates of its already on-hand Muslim citizens and increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants from the Islamic world, especially North Africa.

This number-driven coming reality seems to have so far escaped the notice of Europeans—leaders and led—who continue to speak and behave as if increased funding for national-level and EC-wide social-welfare programs will satisfy Muslim discontent and buy them away from the faith. In many ways European leaders have come to resemble Saudi rulers, by attempting to fix all problems with the checkbook, the difference being that the Europeans are edging toward bankruptcy and have neither the Saudis’ oil-based cash cow nor their jugular-cutting instinct for survival. There are no duplicates of Riyadh’s execution square in any European capital. So bribery will not work for the Europeans. Indeed, the more social programs are used to bribe Muslims, the more taxpayers will be needed to pay for them, the more Muslim immigrants will be needed to become taxpayers, and the larger will become the mass of Muslims still confronted and angered by Europe’s racism and aggressive war on religion.
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And so the cycle will begin over again and continue until the euro is replaced by the riyal.

Europe is determined not to pay the piper for having governed for the last thirty years by the philosophy of the French Enlightenment; that is, for trying to mandate through universal laws and coercive regulations the perfection of that absolutely nonperfectible entity, man. The EC elite’s decades-long effort to legislate the end of class, public debate, religion, nationalism, and history in Europe will come to its unintended but predictable end by producing a passive, homogenous, self-centered, non-competitive, bureaucrat-ruled, militantly secular, and antimilitary society that is consuming itself and heading toward extinction. The contemporary EC’s elites are much like the French philosophes, of whom the brilliant Gertrude Himmelfarb has written: “[T]hey could aspire to bold and imaginative thinking, unconstrained by such practical considerations as how their ideas might be translated into reality…[They] believed that the function of reason was to produce universal principles independent of history, circumstance, and national spirit.”
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As things stand, Europe seems destined to leave its decaying and bankrupt hulk in the hands of a vibrantly religious, semimartial, youthful, and hardworking Muslim population.

But hold on. What is of interest to the United States will be to see if Europe goes quietly into its Islamic good night. The end of French Enlightenment thought, the end of all efforts to produce the perfect European man, has been massive human destruction. From the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars through the eras of fascism, Communism, and Nazism, totalitarianism and mass murder have been the end-state of political systems aimed at perfecting humanity. Total warfare and genocide, moreover, are European inventions and thus reside in the history locker that contemporary Europeans have kept double-padlocked and tried to ignore. Who is to say that Europe, in extremis, will not try to save itself by taking recourse to that at which it has traditionally excelled: chauvinistic nationalism, government-sponsored persecution of minorities, and unlimited warfare? And because history suppressed has a way of roaring back to life, might not a last-ditch European survival effort wage its battles under the banner of a revived Christianity? EC leaders already have fully absorbed the attitude Walter Bagehot attributed to the French philosophes—“everything for the people, nothing by them…they wished to do everything by fiat of the sovereign”
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—and might well turn into supernationalists in order to save their own skins. Whether Europe seeks to save itself or simply begins studying Arabic and the lunar calendar, the United States can do little to affect events as they unfold, save perhaps stopping our idiotic insistence that the EC leaders commit demographic suicide even more quickly by allowing Turkey and 70 million more Muslims into the EC.

What Does It Mean for the United States?

Although geographically dispersed, the locations just discussed have several commonalities. None of the six, for example, is a direct nation-state threat to the United States. Rather it is the internal instability and rising Islamist militancy in each that poses concerns for Washington, challenging its traditional fixation on threats from nation-states.

How to cope with these problems? First, Washington must look at each with the narrow and more accurate definition of
national interest
captured in the idea of life-and-death issues. From this perspective, it is clear that of the six locales only two, the North Caucasus and Nigeria, meet the life-and-death standard; the former because it provides access to the FSU for Islamists seeking to procure WMD, and the latter because of the fast-growing importance of its energy resources to the U.S. economy.

Three of the locations, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Somalia, present no obvious threat to U.S. national security. That said, the risk that Washington will become involved in each is significant and already under way on a small scale in Somalia. In Thailand, Cold War–era commitments leave open a possible requirement for U.S. military support for the Bangkok regime against the growing Thai Muslim insurgency. Such a U.S. involvement would dramatically increase the anti-U.S. focus of Islamists across the Far East and would provide further validation for bin Laden’s claim that Washington intends to keep Muslims under the control of oppressive governments. U.S. interests therefore would be best served by revisiting and abrogating any commitments that could lead to U.S. military involvement in Thailand.

Washington has no treaty obligations in Bangladesh or Somalia, but antinationalist groups are certain to press for U.S. intervention, and it will be at risk of involvement to the extent that it lacks the will to resist their entreaties. As political instability and the Islamists’ ascendancy increases in each place, NGOs, human rights groups, and women’s rights groups will demand that the United States “do something.” But in neither country would U.S. involvement be wise, let alone necessary. Violent human tragedies seem certain to unfold in each place, but none of that violence will be directed against America or its interests unless we intervene. Washington should turn back the pressure from the antinationalists. If Amnesty International, or an NGO, or Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse organization wants to ride to the rescue in Bangladesh or Somalia, the U.S. government should advise them of the dangers in each and likewise warn them that if they do go into such dangerous environments they will be on their own—no U.S. military units will be coming to their aid. This must be made especially clear regarding Somalia, as antinationalist groups tend to couple Somalia, Sudan, and Darfur into a single “cause” and already have the support of Senator John McCain and several of his colleagues for sending some sort of U.S.-U.K. military force to Darfur, where no conceivable U.S. national interest is at stake.

Europe is a quandary for Americans and their government. There is nothing that the United States can do to slow or halt Europe’s demographic free-fall and the inevitable reshaping of societies and foreign policies there in a more Islamic direction. Only the Europeans can save themselves, but it seems too late for them to do so simply by having more babies. Their only other option is to take a draconian approach to limiting Muslim immigration and apprehending and deporting all Muslims who are in Europe illegally. But given Europe’s need for ever more workers to fund their pensions and other social programs, and the impervious-to-reality nature of EC institutions and member-state governments, such draconian measures are likely to be put off until their implementation is futile. The choice at that point would be a turn toward authoritarianism or get fitted for a burqa. For the United States, the beginning of wisdom seems to be to plan deliberately for a troublesome future for NATO and overall transatlantic relations due to the demographic realities of Europe.

Two final points are pertinent for the still-mentally-in-the-Cold War U.S. elite when examining these six locations. First, five of the six are hosting Islamist militants armed with weapons that the RMA advocates have deemed obsolete and for which, as the Afghan and Iraq wars have shown, U.S. ground forces are neither armed correctly nor numerous enough to defeat. While never losing sight of potential nation-state threats, Washington must act to ensure that it has enough appropriately armed and trained U.S. ground forces to avoid defeat in the next Islamist insurgency that America confronts.

Second, the Islamist unrest and violence in all six locations is being driven by entities in Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, the other states of the Arabian Peninsula. Through Saudi-government-sponsored educational, religious, and social programs; the work of Islamist NGOs based in or supported by the kingdom; and the steady and large donations from wealthy Saudi individuals and families, Salafisim and Wahhabism are spreading in all six locales and in all but Europe appear to be supporting armed groups. In Europe the Saudis spread their militant doctrines from their embassies or through individuals or groups associated with their diplomatic and cultural facilities. Though both Democrats and Republicans regularly praise Saudi Arabia as an important ally in the war on terror, the truth is that these assertions are untrue and that outside the kingdom the goals of al-Qaeda and the al-Saud regime are similar, although of the two Riyadh is much more imperialistic, anti-Christian, fascist-like, and oriented toward the creation of a caliphate.

It is no accident that, in early 2008, the United States is losing the war against al-Qaeda and Sunni Islamist militancy. U.S. leaders have ignored their own country’s history and that of Muslims; they have lied to Americans about their enemies’ motivation, size, and capabilities; and they have used the military forces for which Americans pay so dearly in such a sparing manner that our Islamist enemies not only have survived but also are flourishing and hold U.S. soldiers and Marines in contempt. Washington has no credible public diplomacy campaign to win Muslim hearts and minds (because it ignores the enemy’s claims about its motivations and maintains the status quo in U.S. foreign policy), and it continues to falsely claim that the many tactical victories scored by U.S. forces have moved the strategic situation in America’s favor. Not surprisingly, this litany of failures speaks directly to this governing generation’s lack of talent, worldliness, historical knowledge, and sadly, concern for genuine national interests. The leadership desert that exists in American politics mirrors the one that bin Laden has taken full advantage of in the Muslim world. Alas, America’s bin Laden has yet to emerge from its political-leadership desert.

In early 2008, the worldwide Sunni Islamist insurgency led, inspired, and symbolized by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are gradually accomplishing the war aims defined by bin Laden: bleed America to bankruptcy, and spread out U.S. military and intelligence forces. The former is being pushed toward realization because of the wars won by the mujahedin in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the latter by U.S. spending on those wars, on homeland security, and on bountiful bribes to keep U.S. allies in the war on terror. Bin Laden’s ability to send two mujahedin with an al-Qaeda banner to multiple spots on the earth, then sit back and watch U.S. forces deploy and spend money, most recently in Somalia, pushes forward the latter goal and assists in accomplishing the former.

Taking Stock for America in 2008

In the first days of 1862 a weary and worried Abraham Lincoln surveyed the Union’s failing war effort against the Confederacy. In the face of defeat at First Manassas the previous July, General George McClellan’s idling away of the fall 1861 campaign season, and a deeply troubling economic situation, Lincoln said that “it is exceedingly discouraging…nothing can be done.” The disconsolate president enumerated the problems America confronted to his splendid quartermaster general, Brigadier General Montgomery C. Meigs, on January 10, 1862. “The people are impatient,” Lincoln said. “[Treasury Secretary Salmon P.] Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army [McClellan] has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub.”
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In early 2008 Americans again find that “the bottom is out of the tub.” The United States has been defeated, stalemated, or frustrated on every front on which it has chosen to engage al-Qaeda and the forces it leads and inspires. And despite this unfolding disaster, neither U.S. party in the 2006 midterm election campaign gave any hint that it saw defeat ahead: one urged Americans to stay the course, the other called for course corrections, and after the elections nothing changed. The hard reality is that the U.S. government and, more especially, the American governing elite have bitten off far more than the country can chew. At the most elemental level, that of population base, the Muslim world outnumbers America by nearly five to one, roughly 1.4 billion to roughly 300 million. A nation the size of America would be hard put to defend itself against such odds, and the United States today is operating under a doctrine that calls for offensive operations without limit. A counterinsurgency is said to require ten counterinsurgents for every insurgent to have a fair chance of prevailing. Even with the reintroduction of conscription, America could not field the number of military personnel needed to fight an offensive war in every place in the world troubled by Islamist fighters. In addition, the blind devotion of the Pentagon to an ever-increasing reliance on precision weapons and high-tech gadgetry spurs a coordinate growth in number of support personnel; a heavy tail coupled to a few sharp teeth is a certain prescription for defeat in an insurgency.

The geographic dispersal of our Islamist enemies also poses a daunting and nearly insurmountable obstacle to U.S. victory. The Sunni Islamic world circles the globe, and Sunni militants can strike U.S. interests and personnel almost anywhere on earth. As important, the presence of Sunni communities in virtually every country creates a milieu in which the fighters of al-Qaeda and like-minded groups can safely reside, work, transit, and plan. Many U.S. and Western leaders have declared that al-Qaeda’s attack on September 11, 2001, was a failure because the Muslim masses, the much-vaunted Arab street, did not rise up in support of bin Laden, overthrow their governments, and drive every last vestige of the U.S. presence from their world. This assertion misses the mark twice. First, there is no evidence in the pre-or post-9/11 rhetoric and writings of bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, or their lieutenants that they believed the attacks would prompt such a reaction. Western leaders are rightfully relieved that a civilizationwide rebellion did not occur, but they can identify this nonrevolt as a defeat for al-Qaeda and the Islamists only by falsely claiming that the 9/11 plan meant to spur such an uprising. Indeed, no one knows better than al-Qaeda’s leaders and their allies the absurdity of attempting to motivate the largely unarmed Muslim masses to man the barricades against murderous police states backed unequivocally by the planet’s only superpower.

The second miss is more dangerous for U.S. security. Whatever the immediate post-9/11 reaction was in the Muslim world, Western polling firms, as noted, have since detected only increases in the level of hatred for the same U.S. foreign policies that al-Qaeda has identified as constituting attacks on Islam and its followers. As noted earlier, nearly 80 percent of Muslims worldwide deem the United States Islam’s foe.
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Thus the countries dominated by or hosting Sunni communities, within which Islamist fighters can live and move, are at least indifferent to their presence and activities and at worst more than willing to shelter and assist these defenders of the faith. At base, al-Qaeda at this stage of its activities does not expect or require (though it surely would not oppose) a popular, multistate Muslim uprising. It simply needs the broad acquiescence of its brethren. And while the current status quo of U.S. foreign policy continues, they will have it.

Numbers and a globe-straddling dispersal are major advantages for al-Qaeda and its allies in their contest with the United States, and given the growth rates of the world’s Muslim population compared to that of America, both of the Islamists’ strategic pluses will only grow with the passage of time. Unfortunately, these two issues are only the tip of the iceberg toward which the good ship America is blithely sailing. Other problems fall into the military, Western unity, public diplomacy, and leadership categories.

The Cost of Our Military Burlesque

While it does not yet seem to be sinking into the minds of Americans, our al-Qaeda-led enemies have become confident that the main characteristic of the U.S. military—the strongest that the earth has ever hosted—is that it never wins any war it fights, whether against a strong or a weak enemy. Among Islamist fighters, the appropriate motto for the U.S. military probably is a wordy paraphrase of Caesar’s: “We came, we saw, we claimed to conquer, and we left defeated with the enemy intact and reinvigorated.” Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans are all places where this motto can be accurately applied, although the Balkans are now hovering in a holding pattern until we and the Europeans leave and that religiously motivated war of all against all can resume.

As bad as these examples of past mediocre military performances are, the coming defeats of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan will be much worse. The pride and specialty of post–Cold War U.S. military power has been the projection of that power to even the most remote locales on the planet. Our military’s exercises with NATO members, with India, Israel, the Philippines, and Latin American states, and with a host of other nations are designed to perfect the projection of power and to familiarize all military personnel, from the general to the foot soldier to the logistician, with foreign militaries we may one day have to fight with or against, as well as with often barely known topographies. All told, we have learned to project military power with breathtaking speed—and yet we never win. Getting there, as the saying goes, may be half the fun, but in war there is really no point in going if you do not intend to do whatever it takes to win an unambiguous victory after you get there. And what is winning? Three things: first, setting out with clear and achievable goals; second, using whatever force is necessary on arrival; and third, leaving immediately when the job is done.

In projecting U.S. military power into Iraq and Afghanistan, we have proven once again that America’s stunning ability to rapidly deploy military force abroad is an expensive and self-defeating exercise because U.S. political leaders have neither achievable war aims nor an intention to win. Most U.S. general officers, moreover, are unwilling to object to that reality, preferring safe routes to promotion that are paved with the waste of their soldiers’ lives and their nation’s resources. We have taught the Islamists that if they can ride out the initial U.S. air campaign—the childish shock-and-awe part—they have little to fear from the U.S. military.
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By 2008, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the host of Islamist insurgent groups in Iraq have rightly concluded that they have survived the best shot U.S. leaders decided to deliver (though certainly far from the best they could have delivered) and that they are now well along in the process of sending the U.S. military home with its tail tucked between its legs. To paraphrase Alexander Hamilton writing in
Federalist 15,
when our Islamist foes look on the post-Iraq U.S. military, they see not a genuine and irresistible military power but a mere pageant of mimicked military power neutered “by the imbecility of our government.”
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Why is this the case? Again, there are two answers, both of which emanate from the extended duration of Washington’s Cold War hangover. In the Cold War world peace was maintained because the Soviet Union’s leaders not only knew the strength and survivability of our nuclear arsenal but also truly believed that Washington would use those forces to annihilate the USSR if Moscow launched a first strike on the United States. In large measure the U.S. deterrent consisted not only of its land-sea-air nuclear triad but also, as important, the Bolshevik chiefs’ conviction that U.S. nuclear weapons would be used if a situation warranted their use. Moscow projected the same nuclear reality and demeanor in response and thereby happily locked the world into the peaceful era of Mutually Assured Destruction. So strong was the Soviets’ belief that U.S. leaders would complete Armageddon if it was initiated by Moscow that even Washington’s abject failure to use the full force of U.S. military might to prevail in Vietnam (a crystalline reality in Moscow, notwithstanding the efforts of Nixon, Kissinger, and many U.S. generals to disguise their sellout of the U.S. military) did not fatally shake Moscow’s faith in Washington’s willingness to use nuclear weapons.

This happy era of deterrence crumbled simultaneously with the Berlin Wall. Soon thereafter America began to encounter Islamist enemies who were unafraid of the U.S. nuclear and conventional deterrents and unconvinced that we would use them with definitive effect. Our current Islamist enemies used the 1990s as a decade-long educational exercise in which they kept pushing the envelope to see how much pain they could inflict on the United States without triggering an annihilating U.S. military response. Al-Qaeda’s attacks on U.S. targets in Yemen (1992), Somalia (1993–94), Saudi Arabia (1995–96), East Africa (1998), and Yemen again (2000) proved what bin Laden had anticipated: America was a paper tiger that could be attacked with impunity and declared war upon repeatedly (1996 and 1998) and whose response would be “proportional” (another word for ineffective) and designed to please international opinion, antinational organizations, and the just-war theorists. Bin Laden was right. The net U.S. military response over the 1992–2000 period was the August 20, 1998, launching of seventy-five cruise missiles against training camps around Khowst, Afghanistan, which cost the Islamists fewer than forty dead and at most a few weeks’ delay in training cycles.
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It was, then, in this context that al-Qaeda launched the 9/11 attack. Bin Laden had not—as then-DCI George Tenet and other senior Bush administration officials claimed—underestimated the ferocity of the U.S. military reaction to the attack but rather had gambled, on the basis of a decade’s worth of feckless U.S. military responses, that the odds were in his favor, that America would respond in a way that would leave al-Qaeda and the Taliban intact to fight another day. The gamble paid off: President Bush, senior officials in the administration and Intelligence Community, the neoconservative clique and their media acolytes, and Democratic Party chieftains swaggered as if simply possessing a huge nuclear arsenal and the world’s most powerful conventional military would so frighten the Islamists that a relatively mild application of lethal force in Afghanistan would destroy the enemy physically and induce an abandonment of their jihad. Clearly this conclusion merited at least one more serious think-through before being implemented, but no careful second review occurred, and the same losing modus operandi was applied in Iraq.

U.S. political leaders, policymakers, and generals must now face up to the fact that as far as America’s Islamist enemies are concerned, the United States has no credible military deterrent. Al-Qaeda and its allies believe that the attacks of 9/11, in and of themselves, destroyed the concept of deterrence. This conclusion is only partially accurate. The 9/11 attacks pushed the already weakening believability of the U.S. deterrent to the edge of a deep abyss, but it was the anemic and ineffective military invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq that put deterrence flat on its back at the pit’s bottom. Too few troops, too little boldness, far too few enemy corpses, too tight rules of engagement for U.S. soldiers and Marines—all these have proven that America’s bark is loud and its bite virtually toothless. Today America possesses no deterrent in the minds of al-Qaeda and its allies and at this late date must seek to reestablish one.
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And precisely here a second impact of the Cold War hangover kicks in as a major obstacle to recasting a credible deterrent. This obstacle is the amalgam of antinationalist groups that have survived and proliferated since 1991: human rights organizations, NGOs, disarmament groups, environmental organizations, and the school of just-war theorists. Even though the United States and its allies are clearly losing the war against al-Qaeda-ism, these organizations are trying to limit in every way possible America’s ability to capture or kill the enemy in sufficient numbers to give us a chance at victory. Truculent, sensationalist, and media-abetted campaigns by these organizations are in full swing to halt the CIA’s antial-Qaeda rendition program, ban depleted-uranium ordnance, maintain rules of engagement that make U.S. military personnel targets not killers, close prisoner camps, and allege war crimes against as many American military personnel as possible. President Bush and his administration are slowly buckling to the demands of these groups, and Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) and most Democrats appear eager to have the opportunity to outbuckle Mr. Bush in the name of protecting the rights of those endeavoring to kill Americans. Overall the political influence of the antinationalist groups is undermining the already tepid U.S. military and intelligence response to the attacks of 9/11.
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