The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (24 page)

Asymmetries Everywhere

T
HE ENEMIES OF
Western democracies grasp these contradictions in postmodern life in American and Europe perhaps better than we do ourselves. Once the jihadists understood that America was no longer content with punitive retaliation, largely by air, but would instead fight on their own turf to achieve larger political aims by winning hearts and minds, the terrorists subtly changed their tactics. So successful have they been that, after years of combat, much of Afghanistan is still not secure. And in Iraq, the U.S. military only recently was able to secure Baghdad. Saddam is gone, and our ground troops are backed by billions of dollars, the finest air force in civilization’s history, sophisticated technology, and advice from seasoned counterinsurgency veterans. Yet for years the Sunni Triangle was not safe for anyone.

The same dilemma frustrates even Israel, that veteran of counterterrorism. We were told that, after nearly a month in Lebanon, the Israeli Defense Forces were no closer to destroying Hezbollah’s Katyusha missiles than they were to eliminating the even more primitive Kassem rockets Hamas launched from Gaza—notwithstanding the Arab fear of taking on the IDF as in the conventional wars of 1967 and 1973. It almost seems that the less the United States and Israel worry about a Syrian armored corps or an Iranian air wing, the more loath they are to fight Iraqi insurgents or Hezbollah, because of the difficulty of cleaning up terrorist enclaves and the public relations fiascos that follow in the global press.

There are relatively easy conventional military methods of removing Iranian centrifuges and nuclear installations; there are less easy remedies in countering the resulting terrorist response that an Iranian-backed Hezbollah, Hamas, or other Islamic organizations would unleash regionally as well as globally—not to mention attacks on tankers passing through the Persian Gulf.

Why, critics moan, can’t prosperous Western societies, sobered by September 11 and possessing superb conventional militaries and sophisticated antiterrorism forces, overwhelm this latest generation of ragtag jihadists—and convey the importance of victory to the world at large? After all, aren’t the terrorists’ arsenals limited to cobbled-together improvised explosive devices, outdated and underpowered missiles, suicide bombers, and rocket-propelled grenades?

The West’s GPS- and laser-guided bombing was supposed to usher in a new age of warfare in which Western arms could reach the most distant mud-brick hut in the Hindu Kush. Islamic terrorists even in faraway Afghanistan were no longer immune to missiles that could appear from nowhere and shatter their remote caves. And precision weapons allowed us to minimize civilian casualties and avoid the collateral damage of Vietnam-style bombing. On some occasions all of the above may well be true.

But the ongoing fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, and Lebanon—and even NATO’s 1998 bombing campaign in Serbia—suggests otherwise. As the Americans have learned in Baghdad, and the Israelis in southern Lebanon, it is not easy to use commandos and specially trained antiterrorist forces to quickly defeat insurgents who know that time is on their side and that any death—enemy or friend, civilian or combatant—advances their cause. It is much easier to create misery than to prevent it, easier to blow up a marketplace than reconstruct it with proper wiring, plumbing, and drainage—especially when the general suffering of the people is blamed on the prosperous Western interloper and so aids the cause of the terrorist. And missiles cannot always change hearts and minds, much less distinguish on the ground between a terrorist, his ten-year-old girl, his civilian sympathizer or shield, or his principled opponent.

In short, for a variety of reasons, many of the advantages of contemporary warfare seem to lie with the insurgents and terrorists who would challenge the postmodern West. First, it matters less than ever that the global arsenal of munitions is largely designed in the West. While all the world’s militaries are parasitic on technologies and weapons expertise that originate in Europe and the United States, it is now far easier to steal, buy, or be given weapons suitable for terrorists than to acquire those suitable for traditional armies.

Tanks, jets, and missiles are expensive and hard to operate. True, the Syrians and Iranians may not be able to field them in such a way as to establish operational equivalence with the Americans or Israelis. But they can buy off-the-shelf surface-to-air missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, mines, and machines guns. These are all cheap, require little expertise, and, in the right urban landscape of hit-and-run attacks amid civilians, can provide a sort of parity against a Merkava tank or an Apache helicopter. As September 11 demonstrated, sometimes a few hundred thousand dollars’ investment and a score of terrorists can do more human and material damage inside the continental United States than all the deadly conventional arsenals of the Nazis, Fascists, Japanese, and Soviets put together.

A second challenge is the widening gap between the quality of life in a successful West and that in a failed Middle East. Other than a few Gulf principalities, globalization has passed by most of the latter, whose governments resist modernity and the bounty that accrues to open societies. Oil wealth epitomizes this dilemma and ensures the worst of both worlds: Petrodollars have a way of circulating to terrorists and paying for their weapons, but they do not filter down to the Middle East street, and so create social tensions rather than alleviate the general poverty that fuels Islamic fundamentalism.

Blaming the West for the Middle East miasma—which is actually induced by autocracy, statism, fundamentalism, and gender apartheid—lies at the heart of the radical Islamic creed. Yet we often forget the military consequences of the wide gap between our own wealth and theirs, as affluence in strictly military terms can almost become a liability, while poverty transforms into a weird sort of advantage. Rarely have the criteria of victory and defeat been so radically redefined, with the mostly secular combatants on our side having so much to lose, while the enemy dreams of an Islamic paradise of sexual pleasure and riches far more enticing than the slums of Sadr City or Jericho.

The more leisured and affluent an America at war becomes, the less willing it is to endure the deaths of its youths seven thousand miles away, in awful places like Somalia and the Sunni Triangle, in fighting deemed not immediately connected to the survival of the United States. The result is that the West assumes it need not mobilize much of its enormous military strength to crush the impoverished enemies, who in fact continue to grow as formidable as before.

The West’s revulsion at losing lives in such distant and unfamiliar theaters is only magnified by the televised savagery of beheading and mutilation. Most Americans—already tired of high oil prices, the spiraling debt, the monotony of the fist-shaking Arab street, and the lack of sympathy from our so-called Muslim friends from Jordan to Iraq—are returning to the 1990s mood of punitive isolationism. The result is that four thousand war deaths in Iraq eroded public support for war much more quickly than did the much more numerous losses in Vietnam. The message conveyed by the terrorists to the West when dead American contractors are strung up and mutilated outside Fallujah or Israeli corpses are dismembered in Lebanon is something like, “Go back to your twenty-first-century suburbs and leave the seventh century to us.”

Third, not since the early twentieth century has the West been more chaotic, disparate, and divided. In the present age, Hezbollah’s best chance of reining in the Israeli Defense Forces is not through a cascade of missiles, but rather through E.U. and U.N. pressure. The French foreign minister flew to Lebanon to praise Iran as a force for “stability in the region”—the very regime that has promised to wipe Israel off the map and given Hezbollah rockets to try to do just that.

Indeed, condemnation from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan or U.N. envoy Javier Solana during the summer 2006 invasion of southern Lebanon may have ultimately harmed Israeli operations more than a dozen suicide bombers could. Wealthy cosmopolitan Israelis worry when the Westernized world shuns their country; poor and often bitter Shiite Muslims care little. An Israeli does not like stares at Frankfurt Airport when he shows his passport, a Lebanese Hezbollah operative may well not have a passport—or if he does, care little about the reaction of a German official.

A largely unarmed Europe worries over reliable supplies of oil, and desires to recycle petrodollars through arms sales. Europe also fears Islamic terrorism and the ominous presence of unassimilated Muslim minorities in its midst. Add in its envy of America the hyperpower and old anti-Semitism, and Europe, with its economic and cultural clout, often sides with anti-Western belligerents. And this fact is well known to jihadists, who simply add an Islamic touch to a preexisting well-established European anti-Americanism.

Fourth, the antiwar movement has become more sophisticated than in the days of Vietnam. Of course, there has been dissent for Western wars from the days of Aristophanes’
Acharnians
and Euripides’
Trojan Women
. But today modern and postmodern ideologies question not just the wisdom or morality of particular wars, but also, as we have seen, the entire notion of war itself. Once more such doubts conspire with instantaneous media to make it arduous to fight in the Middle East on the terrorists’ turf.

The point is not merely that Americans should not die in wars deemed “optional,” given their great distance from the United States, but also that Americans should not kill the “other.” The fallen terrorist is usually not in uniform, and pictures of his charred remains can be beamed around the globe as proof that another underprivileged civilian has been murdered by bullying American troops. Note that the media usually distinguish between civilian and military Israeli losses to suicide bombers or incoming rockets. Not so with Hezbollah or Hamas: Almost everyone who dies in Lebanon or in Gaza is portrayed as a “civilian.” Remember, also, that the anti-Western Hezbollah has a very Western media-relations department, whose director, for all his hatred of America, issues American-style business cards complete with e-mail addresses, and in times of war is in hourly contact with Western news services. Again, so strong is the tug of cultural neutrality that it trumps even the revulsion of Western progressives at the jihadist agenda, with its homophobia, sexism, religious intolerance, and racism. The poor, the nonwhite other, the non-Christian, and the former colonial may seem at times illiberal to suburbanites in the West, but who would not, given prior exploitation and present-day global inequality? Westernized Hezbollah elites understand Western media and Western public opinion, and thus how to package their own “narratives” in such a way as to draw on our well-intentioned sympathies.

But there is another unspoken challenge. The United States has usually waged war more easily with Democratic presidents—Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson—who appear as reluctant warriors forced to fight, rather than with supposedly bellicose right-wingers who “enjoy” settling issues by force. Again, note the absence of much criticism when Clinton failed in 1998 even to approach Congress or the United Nations, and instead unilaterally ordered American planes to war.

Many of Osama bin Laden’s and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s talking points come right from the Westerners—from the myth that the Iraq War was about oil, to the evils of Halliburton, to the “war crimes” at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Bin Laden often issues not mere communiqués, but even lists of suggested readings, ranging from the works of Noam Chomsky to those of Jimmy Carter. When a U.S. senator claims that we are continuing the work of Saddam Hussein or another compares our actions to those of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, the jihadists fathom all too well that it matters little to the West that its enemies are politically incorrect—since the West at times seems happy to declare itself worse.

Western Advantage?

S
O, IN THE
future, how will a confused America—particularly under presidents who cannot posture as reluctant liberal warriors—fight well-trained terrorists and insurgents who have access to lethal weapons and who use the media to portray themselves as sympathetic victims?

The West has always found ways of overcoming these checks on its conventional power. And its options extend beyond improvements in military technology that can lessen both its own losses and collateral damage. In an interconnected and globalized world, the example of Western consensual law and economic prosperity can, in fact, undermine insurgents by winning over the proverbial hearts and minds of their countrymen.

For all the negative press concerning neoconservatism’s naive trust in the universal appeal of free institutions and personal liberty, it is to America’s advantage that we are now more likely to be caricatured as dreaming idealists than as cynical realists. And if in the short term, terrorists find it helpful that explosions and mayhem are aired daily on Western television, then in the long term, globalization, democratization, and international communications will undermine the parochial world of the Islamic fundamentalist and the Middle East patriarch.

We forget as well that Western popular culture is radically egalitarian. Its video games, pop music, informal dress and manners, diction, and easy and cheap fast food all conspire to destroy hierarchies and break down traditional protocols and prerequisites. The result is a sort of undermining of tribal culture. For good or evil, Middle Easterners are more likely to wear Princeton sweatshirts and listen to iPods than Westerners are to don burqas and establish all-male coffeehouses.

In free societies, the best weapon against those who choose not to fight an aggressive enemy is simply to tell the public—constantly and candidly—why we should fight. This is true even in ugly wars that present only bad and worse choices. Western armies always do better when a Pericles or a Franklin Roosevelt explains—rather than asserts—how difficult the task is, what the enemy is up to, and how we will, as in the past, ensure its defeat.