A Different Kind of War

I frequently complain that President Bush has failed to mobilize opinion and support for the war against terrorism on the home front as Franklin Roosevelt did in WWII; instead, he has let us fall into a frenzy of anger over each setback, and a continuous and morbid count of each and every soldier that dies. It’s been pointed out that there is virtually no parallel between the war on terrorism and WWII--after all, Hitler's army marched in the streets of Paris and Japan occupied dozens of Pacific islands. Al-qaida had neither invaded nor occupied Iraq. There are no nations or territories to win back from enemy occupation. The war we should be fighting is against terrorists, not against Iraqis.

I accept that there was little or no Al-qaida influence in Iraq when we invaded in 2002. In effect, the invasion of Iraq diverted our war on terrorism to a war on Iraq's sectarian insurgents. But that can't be undone; we are there now, and so is Al-qaida. To stem the violence in Iraq will not only strengthen the Al-Maliki government; it will defeat an arm of Al-qaida. We do need to get out of Iraq and back onto the main targets as quickly as we can, but not at the expense of turning Iraq into another Pakistan. A key step in that process is to disarm the sectarian militias. That we and the Iraqi government have failed to do so in over 4 years is disgraceful.

We have made several tactical and strategic blunders in Iraq. But we and our allies made lots of blunders in WWII, and the resulting losses were orders of magnitude larger. What are disheartening are the attitudes of citizens and politicians at home who dwell on the mistakes instead of pressing us onward for the noble cause. It's partly because President Bush is incapable of communicating with us and motivating us to forge ahead the way President Roosevelt did. It's also because most people do not seem to understand how and why the war on terrorism is so different from WWII.

WWII was typical of the classic, or traditional, wars between nations. The Axis Nations sent large armies into the sovereign lands of the Allied Forces. Our enemy was tightly organized under central control, and they wore uniforms. Their weapons were thousands of tanks, squadrons of aircraft, and fleets of ships that were concentrated to gain physical possession of specific territories. The strongest guys won, and the losing nations signed peace treaties. In the war on terrorism, however, the enemy is not a specific nation. There is no large, uniformed, well-equipped army massing at the border of our nation with the intent to occupy. In fact, the enemies will not defeat us with military force and make us sign a treaty of surrender. Guns, bullets, and explosives are ancillary weapons; the real weapon is the psychology of fear. Soldiers without uniforms sneak into a country not to possess the land, but rather to gain possession of the minds and souls of the people, or else to kill them. Their strike is not merely against the country’s armed forces, but against all non-believers. They sacrifice their own lives in the attack, so there is no force to counter-attack. Eventually, they believe, the people of our nation will be so horrified, so confused, so dejected, so afraid, that they will embrace the true faith. Their government will fall and be replaced by a government of people who embrace the faith. The terrorists do not want our land, they want our allegiance, or our death. Victory belongs not to a man or to a nation, but to a belief.

Traditional military forces and tactics are not very effective to defeat this kind of enemy. New techniques must be tried, and some of those will fail. The public must be patient, accept some failures, but continue the struggle. To try to get the enemy after a strike is too late; the soldiers are dead. Fighting him at the time of the strike is extremely difficult; the attack is designed to be a complete surprise. While the terrorists are setting up the attack is a difficult time to capture them too, since the participants are scattered and secretive. What is left is to attack the places where they train their soldiers—in the countries that harbor and support the training camps. We can also disrupt their finances and their communications. We can attempt to identify terrorists in our midst and jail or deport them. The terrorists view our constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom from unlawful searches, and protection of prisoners from cruelty as weaknesses that they can exploit. But the terrorists have renounced our constitution--they are not playing by the rules of our game. Because of that, they should not receive the full benefits of constitutional protection. We can show them that we will not be defeated psychologically, nor by deceit; that we will take all actions necessary to foil their attempts to kill us.