Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (14 page)

The final reason for the no-shoot decision was simple moral cowardice. Though the Soviet threat is long gone, U.S. leaders in both parties still foist on Americans the Cold War tune about the massive complexities involved in managing the ballet of international politics. Inured by a half-century of this Cold War rhetoric, Americans buy it much too readily, losing sight of the fact that they pay exorbitant taxes for the protection of their families, not to have their government worry about the tender feelings or lives of foreigners—especially those who abet U.S. enemies. Mr. Clinton et al. did not try to kill bin Laden on that and several other occasions because they did not want to sacrifice the world’s admiration for something so petty and commonplace as protecting Americans. On numerous occasions Mr. Clinton proved that claims about the daunting complexity of international affairs are an extremely effective shield behind which to hide moral cowardice.

War Within Bounds:
So reliably peaceful was the halcyon era of Mutually Assured Destruction that U.S. officialdom—and its counterparts in NATO countries, Japan, and Australia—came to believe that wars could be managed, and that relatively low upper limits on their intensity and destructiveness could be established and maintained. As noted, each superpower’s use of paramilitary proxies worldwide lent documented credibility to this belief; none of the proxy wars of the Reagan years came close to spinning out of control. Those wars, like the superpower relationship, were managed. Then came the first U.S.-led war against Iraq in 1991, which, as Andrew Bacevich has written, taught the American governing elite “that war can be—and ought to be—virtually bloodless. As with an idea so stupid only an intellectual can believe it, the imperative of bloodless war will strike some as so bizarre that only a bona fide Washington insider (or a techno-geek soldier) could take it seriously.”
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But contra common sense, Washington insiders went for the concept of virtually bloodless war like lemmings go for the sea.

The evidence for the U.S.’s predilection for bloodless war can be seen over and over again. Two al-Qaeda declarations of war on America were discounted or ridiculed as the rhetoric of fanatics, and multiple attacks on U.S. citizens, facilities, and interests were responded to with precise and precisely useless discrimination and proportionality—so unashamedly hawked by the just-war flim-flammers—or not at all, like the 1995 attack in Riyadh, the 1996 attack in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and the October 2000 attack on the USS
Cole.
Each al-Qaeda attack was more destructive than the last, as bin Laden had promised in 1996, and long before 9/11 he had promised to use a nuclear device or other mass-destruction weapon against the United States as soon as he could acquire one.

Well before 9/11, then, it was clear that the only limits bin Laden would respect on the destructiveness of his attacks on the United States were those he himself established: just enough violence to make America change its policies toward the Muslim world and leave the Middle East, but ever-increasing violence until both goals were accomplished. When Washington deigned to respond to al-Qaeda’s pre-9/11 attacks, it sought to match him in violence rather than to kill him and eliminate his organization’s ability to conduct additional attacks. Indeed, U.S. policymakers continued to use the Cold War’s means of sending messages through the modulated use of force, as in: “This or that amount of violence will send a message to the enemy that we are serious and will, in turn, intimidate them.” Well, the message al-Qaeda received was that U.S. leaders were afraid and unwilling to use America’s power in more than a tit-for-tat manner and did not believe al-Qaeda was willing to use any amount of violence it could obtain and deploy. And the tepid post-9/11 U.S. military performances in Iraq and Afghanistan—temperate, compassionate, punch-pulling, and therefore enemy-preserving—suggest that, for all its warrior rhetoric, the George W. Bush administration still believes that the enemy can be intimidated and dissuaded through the application of moderate force that sends a “do not mess with us” message made effective because of the awesome potential military power we theoretically could deploy. This is Cold War deterrence thinking, but the USSR is not there to get the messages Washington is sending. Al-Qaeda not only does not fear U.S. escalation, it intends to escalate its own violence as far as necessary to win.

In his posthumously published novel
Islands in the Stream,
Ernest Hemingway presents a scene via the story’s narrator, Thomas Hudson, that perfectly captures America’s current quandary in its fight with al-Qaeda and the overall Islamist movement. In the scene, a youthful gentleman from New York City, who is a well-trained boxer and standing on his yacht, loudly demeans and threatens a slovenly-looking writer friend of Hudson’s named Roger. Roger tells the gentleman to take his pick: quiet down or get up on the dock and fight. The gentleman chooses the latter tack, and once the fight begins, Roger proves to be a street-fighter who is unconcerned with the pugilistic niceties the unnamed gentleman had learned in his New York gym and administers to him a bare-knuckled thrashing.

Well, prior to the anomalous Cold War era, “fights that no one is going to stop” were not rare, and they are not going to be rare on this side of that anomaly. Al-Qaeda is Roger and America is the gentleman boxer from New York. The U.S. government has issued warnings and threats, called bin Laden and his lieutenants names—gangsters, nihilists, psychopaths, killers, fanatics, etc.—and applied moderately, at most, the world’s fittest, best-trained armed forces. But America is still being thrashed by al-Qaeda’s Roger-style street fighters. Why? I suspect, as I’ve mentioned, it’s because the U.S. government is still in the Cold War mindset; the U.S. military fought no fights to the finish between 1945 and 1991, and as a result, many U.S. officials have “probably never heard of fights no one stopped.” Hemingway writes that the gentleman was “ruined” in the fight and his servants “picked him up from where he lay on his side…and carried him sagging heavily.”
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Unless U.S. leaders begin to recognize that they are in a fight with al-Qaeda that no one is going to stop, they better hope there is someone left to pick America up—“sagging heavily”—after al-Qaeda detonates a nuclear device inside the United States.

Revolution in Military Affairs:
Even before the Berlin Wall’s last cement block hit the ground, America’s defense establishment—bureaucrats, think-tankers, and the U.S. defense industry’s reliable allies in both houses of Congress, such as Duncan Hunter (R-California) and legions of others—was already touting the need for American taxpayers to fund all-out U.S. participation in what they called the “Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA).” Weakness and vulnerability, they argued, would naturally flow from any failure by Washington to spend untold billions of dollars on ever-more sophisticated technology and smart weapons. Federal government–funded studies proliferated, and most were framed in words that suggested that the RMA was a unique historical phenomenon. While it is true that enormous changes had occurred repeatedly in the past, and that weaponry and military communications had obviously evolved toward ever-greater sophistication since the introduction of the longbow and encoded handwritten letters, the studies asserted that the current pace of technological advance was such that this new edition of the RMA was utterly unique and dangerous.

Well, no. The RMA was both a failure and a hoax. “Its dishonest claims,” wrote Ralph Peters in his magnificently sulphurous prose, “was concocted by theoreticians unburdened by practical experience and by defense contractors whose greed can never be satisfied.

In the sixteen-plus years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Colonel Peters’s analysis has been validated by the discrepancy between what the champions of the RMA predicted and the military reality that U.S. soldiers and Marines are confronting on the battlefield, a gap that has widened to astounding dimensions. U.S. military forces find themselves in Iraq and Afghanistan fighting insurgents who are armed with a smattering of modern weaponry—shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles and mortars aimed with the help of Global Positioning System satellites—but who overwhelmingly depend on weapons and ordnance in use during World War II and the Korean War; ordnance on which, of course, they were trained in the paramilitary camps that Washington and its allies ignored for two decades. Our Islamist enemies today are using the same armaments used by the Afghan mujahedin against the Red Army’s troops between 1979 and 1989: crew-served 12.7mm and 14.5mm machine guns, recoilless rifles, AK-47 assault rifles, mortars of various calibers, and explosive materials and captured artillery shells that are used to build improvised explosive devices (IEDs). And while there are certainly Islamic insurgents who employ sophisticated communications systems—such as INMARSAT radios, encrypted computer-to-computer Internet communications, and satellite telephones—a good portion of their battlefield communications still depend on 1950-or-earlier vintage high-frequency and push-to-talk radios. For the Islamist insurgents, moreover, these effective weapons and communication tools have the additional advantage of being in production, cheap, extremely durable, available everywhere, and nearly maintenance free—unlike the host of U.S. precision weapons, which are maintenance intensive, touchy on the battlefield, and so expensive that plentiful they are not.

The problem is not that the RMA advocates were wrong in predicting quantum advances in the sophistication of some military equipment and communications gear—such an advance is occurring, primarily in the arena of potential state-vs.-state conflicts—but rather that they refused to pay more than lip service to the continuing usefulness against U.S. forces of what they considered archaic military equipment. And they never believed for a moment that such equipment, if used by our enemies, would pose a serious problem for the U.S. military’s thoroughly RMA-ified arsenal. Their error, in other words, was not in anticipating the RMA but rather in arrogantly believing that the RMA made all earlier military weaponry not only obsolete but also unusable, and that the only thing they had to prepare for was the ever-modernizing threat. They were wrong because they did not take account of enemies who had a different target to prepare to fight and defeat. “The ‘revolutions in military affairs’ so prominent in our discussion of defense today were not revolutions at all,” Colonel Thomas X. Hammes (USMC, Ret.) accurately concludes. “Rather they were the culmination of practical men seeking practical solutions to the tactical and operational problems of their day.”
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America’s Islamist opponents are exactly the “practical men seeking practical solutions” Colonel Hammes describes, and the solutions they have settled on just happen to be massively less than state-of-the-art. Just a few examples suffice to show how wrong the RMA advocates have been in places like Iraq and Afghanistan: the high levels of man-to-man combat
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and the limited usefulness of precision weaponry; insurgents armed with early Cold War weaponry but savvy enough in their use of modern tools to deny us the “information dominance” that U.S. military doctrine requires; and a foe adaptable enough to bleed the most technologically sophisticated military in history into paralysis with roadside bombs made of World War II–vintage 155mm artillery shells detonated with timers from washing machines.

So completely forward-looking were the RMA’ers in the 1996-to-9/11 period that they helped to make sure that bin Laden stayed alive to kill Americans. When I was chief of CIA operations against bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the National Security Council’s (NSC) instructions were to pinpoint bin Laden’s location, either to permit an effort to capture him or to give the U.S. military the opportunity to try to kill him. This task the clandestine service accomplished repeatedly,
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but the NSC and DCI Tenet always wanted to be more certain of the intelligence before deciding to act. These demands for more and better corroboration are, parenthetically, yet more evidence of the policymakers’ Cold War hangover. Transnational terrorists, insurgents, narcotics traffickers, and WMD proliferators are by definition dispersed around the globe; they have few or no fixed targets against which to focus intelligence-collection operations, as well as no Soviet-like communication hubs, headquarters buildings, missile sites, airfields, barracks, arms-production factories, navies, or strategic bombers. Access to intelligence on transnational Islamist organizations, therefore, is likely to always be less complete and confidence-inspiring than was the intelligence we acquired against the USSR or any of today’s nation-states.