Nemesis

By Con George-Kotzabasis

For Whom the Bell Tolls

At the threshold of the Twentieth-first century Western civilization as a cultural political and economic formation encounters an elemental danger emanating from a Muslim brotherhood of religious fanatics, supported openly and covertly by a league of theocratic-rogue states, who use the ultimate means of terror, i.e., suicide bombers clad in civilian raiment against the infidels of the West. This great danger will not be neutered or eliminated by opening a dialogue, as is the naïve wont of the Obama administration, with such vehement implacable irreconcilable enemies of the West and its dominant power America, but can only be settled in the field of battle by the decisive defeat of these religious fanatics.

It’s the ultimate nonsense to believe, as President Obama does, that there could be “mutual interests” between the United States-European Union and these theocratic-rogue states on the basis of which an open door policy of diplomacy would be the most effective instrument to extinguish the present bellicosity between them. The knock on any door diplomacy of the Obama administration has crashed at its first experimental flight. Neither the gentle style of Obama nor his mournful penance speech in Cairo replete with mea culpas of past American actions and ‘sins’, were able to persuade either Iran or Syria or the PLO or the Taliban to take their seats at the diplomatic table. This resounding deafness of the enemies of the U.S.–excluding the PLO– to the ‘reasoning’ calls of the Obama administration to substitute diplomacy for an escalating belligerence between the opposing parties, shows clearly how doltishly unreasonable and futile has been President Obama’s overture to diplomacy toward recalcitrant and irreconcilable enemies. It is quite obvious by now that the burning issues between the belligerents are not going to be resolved on the part of the United States by soft power diplomats bearing olive branches but by hard power diplomats ‘rattling their sabres’. And in case this bellicose diplomacy also fails then the issues will ultimately have to be settled by the United States and its allies by unsheathing the sword.

Setting Up an Anti-Terrorist Foreign Legion

The menace of Islamist terror is moving like a migratory bird across the continents to find suitable safe havens in which to propagate and train its deadly species and from which it can launch its destroying operations against the infidel west. It is for this reason that the war on terror cannot be localized and must be fought on a transnational terrain. And as we have witnessed with the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq, jihadists who survived the lethal attacks of U.S. Special Forces, under the command of General McChrystal, and of the Marines, moved into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen and increased the local ranks of the jihadists in those countries and brought to them the knowledge and deadly methods of how to kill Americans, infidels, and their Muslim collaborators. And the latest news are that jihadists from Afghanistan have moved into Somalia and the lethal attack on a Mosque in Mogadishu few days ago that killed and injured close to a hundred civilians is being attributed to them.

To counter and to clip the wings of this migratory deadly bird it is necessary that a conglomeration of worldwide powers, that would include Russia, China, and Japan, should come to an agreement to set up a global anti-terrorist foreign legion that would operate trans-nationally covertly and overtly in all areas where jihadists are trained, nourished, and engaged in fighting. The rationale for setting up such an anti-terrorist international entity is based on a strategy that clearly recognizes that since terror operates in a world without borders and trespasses the sovereignty of nations, the forces that are countering terror must also operate on the same principle. In such conditions to uphold the precept of national sovereignty axiomatically, especially when the particular nation is either unwilling or militarily incapable to prevent the incursion of terrorists in its own territory and stopping them from using it as a safe haven, is to severely disadvantage militarily the nations which are fighting terrorists and to prolong the conflict at the expense of higher civilian and military casualties.

Moreover, since Islamic terror threatens the economic stability of the world and the prosperity of its people, the burden of fighting it should fall on its Atlas’s world shoulders and not solely on the shoulders of the United States. Hence by the logic of the situation it must be a multilateral reaction by all the nations of the world that are under this menacing threat. Further, it will inflict a serious blow to the jihadist propaganda that the United States is anti-Muslim and will irreversibly deprive al-Qaeda and its sundry affiliates of this false claim that has become a roll call for recruiting Muslims into their ranks, since now the whole world will be fighting and killing the holy warriors of Islam and not only America. This in itself will gravely damage the ability of al-Qaeda to attract future terrorists from Muslim countries and the Diaspora to join it as it will discourage young Muslims to become terrorists seen that the whole world is hostile toward Muslim terror and is being mobilized to fight it. Also, the prowess of the foreign legionnaires, along with other state forces of American, British, Australian, and European, will erode the potency of the jihadists to actuate successful operations with the great possibility that such a series of failures in their terrorist actions will implant great doubts among them that they are implementing the wishes of Allah. It is precisely in this, once the terrorist fanatics are ‘bedded’ on the Procrustean bed of measured failures, that the decisive defeat of the jihadists lays. As terrorists lose their faith that Allah is on their side they will be sided-out from the ranks of al-Qaeda, and all radical imams will be emasculated of their spiritual ability to be the incubators of jihadist terror.

Whose Task is to Train and Lead the Foreign Legionnaires?

Like in all difficult tasks, the training and leading the foreign legionnaires must be assigned to the best experts in the field. And beyond any doubt the countries that are deemed to have such experts in the art of Mars are the United States, Russia, Israel, Britain, France, and Australia. It is from these countries that the technical and military leadership of the Foreign Legion should sally forth. But the lower echelons that will form the Legion will come from all over the world excluding only Muslim countries and not delimited to the above named countries. There is a huge reserve of young armed forces veterans and adventurers of all types, as the private security personnel deployed both in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate, that will be willing and eager to join such a high powered elite military world-unit whose tasks and high pay for their accomplishment would be enormously attractive to people of picaresque swashbuckling temperament and the world prestige that their successful overt and clandestine operations against formidable enemies will confer upon them.

Moreover, since the formation of the Foreign Legion will be composed of multi-colored personnel it will easily brush off the racist strictures and condemnation of its hostile critics and its Islamic foes that it is a white imperialist venture and attack upon all those who have no Caucasian pigmentation. Also, the ingress of this multi-colored force in countries, where the jihadists are using them as safe havens or are attempting to overthrow their less than stable fledgling governments, as currently happening both in Somalia and Yemen, for the purpose of capturing or eliminating the jihadists, will be seen by the local population more favourably and not as an American or British occupation, as they tended to view it in Iraq and as they presently view it in Afghanistan. If it will still be seen by the locals as a foreign occupation of their land it will come under the colors of a “United Nations” one and not of the “hated” Americans. And once it becomes clear to the local population that the aim of the occupying force is to defeat and expunge the jihadists from their midst, such an “occupation” might be more tolerant and agreeable to the local inhabitants, especially when its necessity will be perceived by them of having no other goal than their security and the restoration to their country of a safe and normal life.

Strategic Advantages

The formation of the Foreign Legion will bring a cascade of political and strategic advantages to the countries of the world that are fighting the holy warriors of Islam in this stealthy war of terror. In the political arena, by ‘mobilizing’ the world against fanatic terror it will eliminate any misconceptions about the seriousness of the terrorist threat that some people may still have. And by showing the determination of their political leaders to protect their peoples by all savvy means, including that of a force of international condottieri that will be decisive to the defeat of the jihadists on a global scale, it will rally the people behind them. Further, it will lighten the burden of those countries such as the U.S., the UK, and Australia that carry at this moment the major weight of the war–that has provoked an anti-war sentiment in their own countries that serves willy-nilly the interests of the enemy as it has done in the past in Vietnam–by shifting it on more shoulders and hence making it an international serving duty.

In the strategic arena, by being able to operate on a transnational legitimate base without national sovereignty restrictions been placed upon its military movements, it will be able to deploy its lethal forces swiftly in all areas of this borderless war in search and destroy operations and it will deprive the jihadists of safe havens and cripple their tendency to move from countries where they have been defeated– as it happened in Iraq when many of the foreign jihadists who survived the Petraeus Surge moved to Afghanistan and Pakistan–to other countries, such as Somalia, Yemen, and Morocco, to continue their fight against the infidels and the regimes that collaborate with the latter. Moreover, it will have a decisive impact upon the whole psychological structure of terrorism which is pivotal to attracting young Muslims to its cause. Since by making it more difficult, and indeed, preventing, jihadists from entering other Muslim or semi-Muslim countries, such as Nigeria, to foment jihad and by their mere presence in those countries to recruit locals in their ranks, it will turn off the tap of recruitment and hence their ability to launch large successful operations against the non-believers.

Hence the Foreign Legion by chasing the jihadists wherever they are, in the East or the West, and depriving them of their potency to succeed in their actions, will inflict a devastating blow both to the recruiting grounds of terror, i.e., to the Madrasas and Mosques, and in the field of battle, where the issue will be decided. And the paucity of martyrs and their eventual unavailability will make the seventy-two virgins to keep everlastingly their chastity.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now

By Con George-Kotzabasis

It’s the “leg-breaking soldiers in fatigues,” to quote Dan Kervick who denigrates them, that are indefatigably and with great sacrifices defending liberal values and the democratic and entrepreneurial mores of Western societies from the mortal danger that rises from the barbaric atavism of fanatical Islam. But it is not surprising that the ideologues of the serially bankrupt left, like Kervick, would lambast great Americans, like General Petraeus, with their vitriolic sarcasm.

It’s obvious that Kervick as a hubristic member of the gang of General “Betraeus” is divinely apportioning from his Olympian abode his moral legless strictures upon great successful Americans who stand on, and leap with, strong legs. And it’s clear that Kervick with his intellectually and morally rickety feet cannot stand and ‘fight’ on the superb motto of Virgil, “Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito”. But what other could one expect from nipple-fed liberals?

The above emitted the following comments on The Washington Note

Posted by Dan Kervick, Mar 07 2010, 6:44AM – Link

“…defending liberal values and the democratic and entrepreneurial mores of Western societies from the mortal danger that rises from the barbaric atavism of fanatical Islam.”

Mortal danger … right. You might as well say that the English language faces a mortal danger from Portuguese. Your sense of proportion and connection with the real world are seriously impaired.

From my own seat here in America, I don’t see many fanatical Muslims about. What I do see is a danger to liberal values rising from the diseased fears of the neurotically terrified. My concern is not with David Petraeus, who is just doing a job the civilian government gave to him, but with the poisonous weakness of the cowardly right, who seem ready to hand over their most valuable possessions to soldiers like Petraeus, if the latter promise to protect the relatively insignificant hides of the former.

Posted by kotzabasis, Mar 07 2010, 5:23PM – Link

Kervick

The reason that you don’t see the great danger “to liberal values,” and indeed to civilization as we know it, issuing from the few “fanatical Muslims” that you see is due to your lack of imagination. This is an asymmetrical conflict or war in the context of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and nuclear ones and one doesn’t have to see a myriad of fanatical Muslims to perceive the mortal danger to these values.

And do you consider within this context, that the professionals of HUMINT(Human Intelligence), not amateurs and dilettantes like you, who warn that in the near future there is a high probability that these few fanatical Muslims will be armed with WMD and nuclear ones are disconnected from the “real world” and “are seriously impaired” from “the diseased fears of the neurotically terrified,” to quote you?
Who in this case is “seriously impaired” in one’s sense of reality? And in your continued inveterate sickly sarcasm you degrade and make a vaudevillian mockery of this stupendous danger by turning it into a protection of the “hides” of the rich.

Threats

By Steve Coll The New Yorker January 18, 2010

A reply by Con George-Kotzabasis

While Americans and international law are violated by the fiendish jihadists and the U.S. is involved in a relentless war with these fanatics, Clemons is concerned with “inhumane detainee operations.” What a memorial of mockery Clemons makes of Americans killed by the jihadists.

Here we have the ‘playwright’ Steve Coll staging on The New Yorker his burlesque play of al-Qaeda and terrorism and receiving the plaudits of Clemons in the form of a standing ovation. Proudly displaying his originality by writing, that because “Al-Qaeda provides no social services [like Hamas] and thus has built no political movement” it has no mass support among Muslims. But Al-Qaeda is and remains a powerful ideological movement and Coll is oblivious of the historical fact that ideology is the sire of politics and the foundation stone of political movements. Think of Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

Furthermore, no radical imam has denounced bin Laden or al-Qaeda in Muslim countries or in Western ones and there are thousands of worshippers who follow those imams who vehemently preach violent death to the infidel West and its Great Satan America, and therefore many Muslims are sub rosa, if not open, supporters of al-Qaeda.

Also the closing of Gitmo for the purpose of improving “America’s image abroad” does not come free and pays a heavy price: U.S. weakness in the eyes of terrorists and thus a centripetal force for recruiting jihadists.

Obama’s “forward defense” is a red herring. He has already adumbrated the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and his latest stupid ‘forward’ announcement that he is not going to deploy U.S. forces in Yemen, and by implication in Somalia, makes his “forward defense” a fiasco. As this advanced announcement by Obama signals and encourages jihadists from other Muslim countries and from the Muslim Diaspora to move into these two countries without fearing that they will be met by the might of the U.S. military.

Lastly, it’s monumental idiocy for Obama to believe that by ‘recruiting’ American “values and institutions” in the fight against fanaticism, he will defeat the “hateful ideology.” And, indeed, President Obama “has neither overestimated nor underestimated terrorism,” he has nullified it. For what else means his initial reaction to the Nigerian suicide bomber when he dubbed him as being an “isolated extremist” not connected to a terrorist organization?

All the great struggles of history have been won by superior will-power wresting victory in the teeth of odds or upon the narrowest of margins. Winston Churchill

By Con George-Kotzabasis

President Obama’s “knife-throwing” Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, as depicted by New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, has put the ‘Vietnam knife’ on the throat of an already scared president. It has been reported that he has been telling Obama that if he goes for victory in Afghanistan, he will become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. While his Vice-President Biden to save him from President Johnson’s fate, recommends to him a cowardly decrease in effort, “the chimera of painless counterterrorism success,” to quote The Washington Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer. What is President Obama going to do standing between a knife and a chicken?

It’s quite clear that due to President Obama’s ambivalence toward the Afghan war he is delaying his response to Gen. McChrystal’s urgent call for a substantial increase in U.S. troops as the only way to defeat the Taliban. And this delay does not only expose Obama’s indecisiveness but also opens a window to the contours of his thinking of how to handle the war and the rationale he will provide to Americans about the reversal from his previous original position.

On August 17, the president standing before an assembly of veterans declared that Afghanistan was “a war of necessity,” that is, to prevent the Taliban from taking over the country and turning it into a safe haven for terrorists that could attack the American homeland. What has fundamentally changed on the military ground within the short span of two months that is making the conflict no longer “a war of necessity?” Is it possible for the president to cogently argue that al-Qaeda has been weakened to such an extent since August 17, when by his own declaration on that date had conceded that it was not, or that the Taliban has no strong connections with al-Qaeda, as some of his principle advisers are arguing, and if the Taliban were allowed to take over certain areas of Afghanistan it would not provide a safe haven to terrorists? And once they took over these areas Obama’s strategy would ‘contain’ them and would prevent them from taking over Kabul, which the president would not accede to under any circumstances? By what magic formula would Obama stop the fanatically imbued Taliban who would perceive such a back down by the Americans as a defeat of the latter as well as a lack of resolve to stay the course and defend Kabul from its future incursions? Has he forgotten what happened to the Swat Valley in Pakistan when the PakTaliban made an agreement with the perceived enfeebled government of President Zardari to impose Sharia jurisdiction in the area and once it were ensconced in the Valley it begun making incursions in adjacent areas forcing the Pakistan government to rescind the agreement and to attack the PakTaliban militarily? So what guarantees will Obama have that compacts made by the Taliban will be kept and not be broken when all the evidence shows that all its agreements are temporary until the moment it feels strong enough to attack its enemy and subdue him? And how wise will the president’s new strategy be, as foreshadowed by a series of meetings of his close advisers, that by providing the Taliban with bases in the country and hence strengthening its hold upon these areas either by the willing or forced support of their residents, when the end result will be the absolute strengthening of the Taliban?

In the history of warfare there is no example of a political leader of implementing a strategy that deliberately and fatuously has empowered his resolute and determined enemy with new strength that in a future confrontation with him would make it more difficult to defeat. The iron law of war is to fight an irreconcilable and ruthless enemy whilst he is still weak and deprive him of all opportunities to become stronger. The Ivy Leave lawyer of Harvard, the superlative novice in the intricate affairs of war, is about to ignorantly disregard this iron law and its instructions written “in blood, iron, and sweat,” to quote Winston Churchill. At the great expense of many more American casualties and materiel in the future–if he would be willing to fight his foe and not withdraw with his tail between his legs–than if he continued to fight his enemy as now and defeat him. It’s by such reigning sentimentalism that President Obama will be attempting to decouple the American hegemon from its historic responsibility to defeat the Taliban and save both Afghanistan and Pakistan from the reign of barbarians that would threaten the U.S. homeland and, indeed, the West.

General McChrystal’s Recommendations to President Obama

General McChrystal, with the unflinching support of the victor of the Iraq war, veni, vidi, vici, General Petraeus, is recommending to his Commander-in-Chief an increase of American troops of the order of 40,000 to 60,000 that in his estimate would have a great chance of defeating the Taliban. He stated,
“we must show resolve” and warned that “uncertainty disheartens our allies and emboldens our foes…failure to gain initiative and reverse insurgent momentum” within a year “risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.” Asked whether a limited counterterrorism effort would succeed—Vice-President Biden’s proposal– he said, “the short answer is: no.” To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war, according to McChrystal. This assessment coming from a general who as commander of Special Forces in Iraq played a pivotal role in defeating the insurgency by spreading terror among the jihadists themselves by killing them and capturing them, and who according to his troops “is a one all general.” For these remarks of General McChrystal in the public domain The National Security Adviser of Obama, General James Jones, upbraided and chided him—what a difference makes “a one all general” from a one for all general–saying that he should convey his thoughts to the President through private channels while the latter is in the process of creating a new strategy for the Afghan war. A ‘new strategy? ’ President Obama on March 27, flanked by his secretaries of defense and state, announced: “Today I’m announcing a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” The new strategy “marks the conclusion of a careful policy review.”

What is the reason for Obama to be elaborating an even newer strategy when his own picked commander on the ground McChrystal is implementing the president’s “comprehensive new strategy” as set up back on March 27? What has radically changed on the ground since this date other than a relative increase of U.S. casualties and difficulties arising from a resolute enemy forcing an irresolute and strategically weak president wriggling out of his original position and commitment that the war was a war of necessity that the U.S. must win?

It’s beyond any doubt that the president is reviewing his strategy not because the military conditions on the ground have changed within such a short span of time but because his mind has been changed by his close advisers not to persist in a war that the latter consider to be unwinnable. But such advise issuing from his political consigliore is contrary to the foremost expert advise on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism of General Petraeus and General McChrystal respectively. The politically minded Obama, however, is more in tangent with his political advisers than with his military commanders and more concerned to protect himself politically in the short term than to defeat an irreconcilable permanent enemy. Hence, by placing his own interests as primal to the vital interests of the country, he will be contriving disingenuous designs and arguments to convince the American people that his new strategy in Afghanistan is wiser than that of his generals. This is why he needs the time to concoct his deceitful strategy and not because there is a paucity of strategic options that prevent him from deciding.

But Obama is fully conscious that to go against his generals in times of war is far from easy. That is why he is delaying his decision as he weighs the pros and cons of rejecting the advise of his generals. But since his decision will be a decision of character, it’s more likely than not that the timorous president will be convinced by the knife-throwing Emanuel than by the judicious advise of McChrystal.

Posted by kotzabasis, Sep 16 2009, 12:09AM – Link

Clemons offered a broken “wing of the foreign policy spectrum” that will not fly. Only a member of the New America Foundation related to Nostradamus could predict the “length” of any war and consequently its “cost.” As to consequences these could either be positive or negative. Positive if the war is won and negative if it is lost. To ask “lucid questions” to unanswerable ones like the length of a war is an unproductive, futile, wasting exercise. And the eminent signatories of the letter have signed a document that is “lucid” in its fatuousness that will have no impact on American strategy in Afghanistan, providing Obama does not go to water on his initial stand.

Posted by Dan Kervick, Sep 16 2009, 12:23AM – Link
As these wars grind on, I know I should feel disturbed by what is happening, especially given the increasing casualties of late. But I can’t help feeling that the situation is now more sadly, fatalistically absurd that horrifying.

Are there really any models of success in state-building projects such as the US has been involved in this decade? I know there are examples of well-organized states with well-organized militaries that have been defeated in war, and which having surrendered were then susceptible to systematic reform, because they were just about as unified in defeat as they were in war. But are there any examples of the successful use of militaries to build real states out of disordered despotisms and anarchic warlord-run battlegrounds, on territories the size of Iraq and Afghanistan?

The authors of the letter say we should “focus U.S. strategy more clearly on al Qaeda”. But we just saw a news report this past week that told us there is barely any Al Qaeda left. We continue to beguile ourselves with images of a global posture of permanent war against some hideous phantom horde. But in fact, there is no such horde.
We remain bogged down in two foreign military interventions that we can’t possibly win, but that we can ignominiously lose. So we just stand there with our backs to a crumbling levee, holding back the tide of the inevitable indefinitely. Both of these interventions are extremely long by historic US standards. Yet serious people talk about one or both of them going on for decades, and then defend them anyway. Surely something has changed for the strange when a country like the United States gets to the point of contemplating decades of war to accomplish aims of such dubious strategic urgency; and when it internalizes a distorted view of itself as a weak and threatened island state surrounded by a sea of enemies, and treats states and disorganized peoples with sick and feeble economies, and relatively paltry militaries, as though they were mortal threats.

It is really not that mysterious what is happening in our world in actual, historical time. The United States, which built a sustained era of global primacy on the ruins of a world war from which it emerged victorious and relatively unscathed, in possession of a populous industrial powerhouse by which it could subordinate the wretched and pulverized global remnant for decades as the latter built and rebuilt, is entering a new phase in its history, when it will consolidate, contract and assume a slightly more modest role as a great power among other powers in a more multipolar and economically dynamic world.

The United States helped build the world that increasingly circumscribes its power. And that’s actually a good and natural thing. My sense is that most everyone instinctively understands and recognizes these historical processes, even those who strike assertive poses and pretend not to believe in them, and even though it is still considered impolite or heretically unpatriotic to acknowledge them. And it is at least possible that these processes can take place in a somewhat rational, non-cataclysmic way. But perhaps it is more likely that the movement will take place with some rough and very destructive jerks.

Maybe this is the way such changes usually go, but it seems that as US power declines the US torments itself with ever more fantastic conceptions pf what can be accomplished with limited power. Iraq and Afghanistan are such torments, and one might guess that only one of two things can happen. Either some great statesman, who understands the movements of history, will use some foresight and pull the plug on these two transitional adventures before they take their greatest toll, and will bravely take the fall for the ruinous entanglements of the final generation of imperial over-extenders. Or else we go along in the way states usually go along, letting events determine us, blundering toward a larger calamity.

It’s probably not going to be pretty here in the US. No matter when the retrenchment comes – this year; five years from now; fifteen years from now – the president who orders it is going to have to deal with the bitter, frustrated imperial dead-enders, possibly even gangs of violent brownshirts, who don’t live in actual history but in a mythical kingdom, and who will revile the leader who dares look reality in the face, and dashes their immortal pretensions.

Posted by kotzabasis, Sep 16 2009, 2:08AM – Link
Kervick

Four fatal flaws lay in your argument. First, we live in times where SOME wars have become asymmetrical and great dangers arise from the latter. Yet you are stuck to a redundant past of solely symmetrical wars between powerful or well organized nations. Secondly, you assume wrongly and against all documented evidence that both wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were “entanglements of the final generation of IMPERIAL OVER-EXTENDERS.” (M.E.) Thirdly all the great statesmen of the past were conservative and of the centre-right. And fourthly, while you admit that al-Qaeda has been ‘defeated’, you loathe conceding that they were defeated in the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq which you opposed and you still do.

Posted by Dan Kervick, Sep 16 2009, 9:33AM – Link
Kotzabasis,

Thanks for focusing on what I wrote, and not on me.

I believe the war on terror has been won partly through the kinds of methods that were brought to bear against Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan this week in Somalia – in this case, a commando raid. I have long argued that the real, effective part of the war on terror is based on a combination of improved intelligence, collective law enforcement and apprehension, and covert small-scale military operations against key individuals. It has also depended on infiltrating, shutting down and interfering with financial networks, communications networks and weapons networks. This part of the war on terror began in real earnest under Bush – although it actually began earlier than that – and has continued under Obama. And I generally support it.

I supported the assault on Afghanistan back in 2001, and I freely admit that the assault did play an important early role in the fight against Al Qaeda. I stopped supporting Afghanistan later in the game, as it was transformed into something that, as I see it, had less and less to do with Al Qaeda. I elevated my criticism of the Afghanistan war last fall, after Obama was elected, because I saw his election was likely to bring a dangerous escalation of the war, and also bring some liberal interventionists to power – people like Richard Holbrooke, Susan Rice and Hilary Clinton who have tended to support the use of ambitious military operations to spread democratic liberalism and give a makeover to various parts of the world.

I have arguing been against these liberal interventionists and their grandiose plans for years, especially in connection with the war against terrorism. I have argued that terrorism is a more or less permanent problem, the threat and incidence of which can definitely be minimized, but that can’t be ended by these hugely ambitious and unrealistic plans for “draining the swamps”, or by new “Marshall plans” for the Middle East. My attitude has been that jihadist terrorists don’t attack us because they are poor, or because their societies don’t grant them enough dignity, or for any of the other psychological reasons liberals frequently offer. Terrorism is not a social-psychological sickness to be cured with social therapy. They attack us because they have clear and intelligible strategic aims – mainly to get us out of parts of the world they don’t want us to be in – and have adopted terrorism as the most effective tactic in pursuing those strategic aims. Personally, I would like to give these guys their wish and get our military the hell out of their region altogether. But in the meantime, we have people plotting to kill innocent Americans, and we have to get them before they get us.

The war on terror was not assisted by the war in Iraq, which only created a branch of Al Qaeda where none existed before, and provided a recruiting tool for jihadists by providing a vivid example of US barbarism and iniquity. It was an old-fashioned bomb ‘em up and shoot ‘em up war – not a subtle application of asymmetric warfare. It was based on a crude psychological estimate of the impact of “shock and awe” – in other words, on the beliefs promoted by some that Arabs are dumb, skittish animals who can be deterred by indiscriminate combinations of loud explosions and sexual humiliation. It was not justifiable by any of the standards applied to war by civilized people, on either the left or right. It was a criminal and counterproductive atrocity that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. That war was both a massive blunder and a hideous crime.
I made no implicit or explicit claims about where great statesmen can be found on the political spectrum. So I’m not sure how that part of what you wrote applies to my argument. Still, since you brought it up, I think many people would classify Franklin Roosevelt as a great statesman, and he was definitely not of either the right or the center right.

Kotzabasis says
Kervick
Your second post makes a cogent argument of your position whereas your first one in my opinion was redolent with ideology than with clear cold analysis. Certainly what you say about “commando raids” is true. I myself argued back on October 2001, that Special Forces would play a pivotal role in defeating terrorism. But it’s not enough to ‘hit’ individuals such as Nabhan but more importantly to deprive the terrorists collectively of their ability to be successful in their operations as General McChrystal did—the present commander in Afghanistan—in Iraq with his Special Forces by killing or capturing a great number of al-Qaeda leaders and thus depriving al-Qaeda in Iraq of being successful in its operations, according to Bob Woodward, and hence leading to its defeat.

In regard to Franklin Roosevelt, you are forgetting that he was president of the United States at a period when Americans were most conservative and ‘locked’ in their isolationism after the liberal excesses and capricious follies of Woodrow Wilson. So the highly subtle politician Roosevelt hardly exhibited any leftist tendencies during this peak of American conservatism, even if he was a closet leftist who in my opinion never was.

Posted by Dan Kervick, Sep 17 2009, 1:02AM – Link

So the highly subtle politician Roosevelt hardly exhibited any leftist tendencies during this peak of American conservatism.
OK … New Deal, not leftist. Got it.

Posted by kotzabasis, Sep 17 2009, 1:13AM – Link
In the context of the Great Depression you depict the pragmatic politics of the New Deal as leftist?

Posted by Dan Kervick, Sep 17 2009, 7:42AM – Link

In the context of the Great Depression, leftist economic policies are particularly pragmatic.

But please come to America and help convince all of the Republicans that FDR was not on the left, as we all think, but was actually either a conservative or on the center-right! Maybe we could even get a single-payer health plan if they swallow that.

Posted by kotzabasis, Sep 17 2009, 8:50AM – Link
Kervick

I can’t let this go for the amusement of your reply.

So you take partly your cue from the obscurantist part of the Republicans who considered Roosevelt to be leftist as a result of your inability to make your own assessment about the latter’s political credentials. Roosevelt was a patrician by birth, education, and temperament. And William Randolph Hearst himself hammers the nails onto the coffin of your argument. It was he who supported Roosevelt’s candidacy for the presidency. Was Hearst also a leftist?

You really confuse pragmatism-which has no political ‘gender’ of either left or right-with leftism. Was the pragmatic New Economic Policy of Lenin that he was forced to implement in 1921 after the inimitable disaster of his initial economic policies, a revolutionary leftist policy?

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Steve Clemons in the dizziness of “cocktail sotting diplomacy,” to quote him, forgets that diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means, to paraphrase Clausewitz. Like war, one deploys one’s ‘intellectual armaments’ in the field of diplomacy on the condition that there is a high probability that one will come out a winner from the diplomatic contest. And the timing of the opening of this contest depends on the strengths and weaknesses of one’s enemy. Engineering “strategic shifts” and achieving “strategic priorities,” to quote Clemons, depend on the condition that one’s enemy negotiates from a position of weakness.

I would also like to remind Steve that although it’s certainly true that one has to accept the world as it is and perforce negotiate with one’s foes on this realist principle, as he stated at the New American Foundation conference, one accepts the world as it is only for the purpose of changing it. To merely accept it without the ability to change it, because one’s actions are based on wrong calculations, is a barren futile exercise.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

There is a great possibility of replicating the strategy of the Surge in Afghanistan with the following economic-political-military strategy: To shift the estuary of the stream of revenue from narcotics from the Taliban’s and narco-lords’ mouths to the government mouth with the aim to feed the hungry mouths of the tribal chiefs of Afghanistan. That is, to nationalize the poppy industry and make the tribal chiefs of Afghanistan the direct equity holders of the income that accrues from the production of opium. Such a policy will create a powerful self-interest and lead to a Tribal Chief’s Awakening that will be more widespread and potent than the Iraqi one, since it will mobilize the whole country, through its tribal chiefs, against the Taliban and the narco-lords.

Thus U.S. forces will not have to go to a wild goose chase of serendipity to get “their lucky break” in Afghanistan, as some liberals place their hope for the ending of the conflict on the casting of the dice.

This idea was floated by me in a paper of mine on October 2008.

Con George-Kotzabasis says

Somali piracy needs speedy, decisive, and relentless action by the U.S. and its European allies. To wait for the ability of Somalis “to police their own territory” and Somali leaders “to take action against pirates,” to quote Secretary Clinton, involved in the only highly profitable enterprise in a poor country, is to fly in the face of reality. In the event that Somali leaders were willing to do so, their military capacity to achieve this would take years to consummate.

Further, an increase of U.S., European, and Asian vessels and a better coordination between them is totally inadequate to police such a huge “expanse of ocean” as Secretary Clinton herself remarks. To pursue such a policy as Secretary Clinton delineates in her speech is to pursue a chimera. What the U.S. and its allies must do is to attack by relentless means, i.e., by air and commando raids the Somali towns from which piracy stems, and at the same time placing the requisite armaments on merchant ships that will protect them from any approaching pirate vessels. No amount of “carrots” will dissuade the pirates to desist and stop them, repeat, from such lucrative business in such impoverished country. Only their decisive military defeat will persuade them to do so.

Dan Kervick says

I agree in part with C-G Kotzabasis’s assessment. We certainly can’t wait for the restoration of the ability (and inclination) of Somalis to police their own territory and to take action against pirates. Somalia is the most failed and dysfunctional of failed states. I also agree that the linchpin of the problem is that piracy in that part of the world is extremely lucrative. The piracy won’t end until piracy is made an ill bargain for the pirates.

But, given that assessment, I have a different view on the best means for addressing the problem, and the chances of success of a coordinated international response.

Yes, the area to be policed is very large. But this isn’t a matter of just sailing around hoping to encounter pirate ships, or hoping to be in the right place at the right time. I assume we have the ability to identify and track most of the ships belonging to these pirates, to share the needed information (though not the sources and methods) with merchant vessels, and to direct force where it is needed in a timely way, especially if we have a larger multinational force of ships in the area. I am also assuming that some of the tagging and tracking means available are clandestine, and are unlikely to be discussed in public.

I also suspect that the economic and other hurdles that need to be cleared so that merchant ships can better defend themselves can be cleared quickly with vigorous, multinational government involvement.
I am somewhat shocked that Kotzabasis would recommend air raids on the home towns of the Somali pirates. No honorable man would defend the intentional killing of the women and children of one’s adversaries as a means of deterring those adversaries. I thought C-G was more chivalrous than that.

Maybe it’s an old-fashioned American outlook based on too many cowboy movies, but I was brought up to believe there were certain acceptable and unacceptable ways of handling these kinds of problems with banditry. Arming and funding more people to ride shotgun on the stagecoach is certainly called for. And sending out posses to track and engage the bandits, and either apprehend or kill them, is also appropriate and in bounds. But sending people to shoot up the towns and encampments where the bandits’ families are located? Not OK.

Kotzabasis says

Dan Kervick,thanks for your intellectually amicable and positive response to my post. I’m however surprised that you so facilely assume that these raids will intentionally be killing women and children. The latter will be killed only if the pirates adopt the tactics of the terrorists and use women and children as human shields. So if there is no intentional killing my ‘honor’ and ‘chivalry’ are not besmirched.

Moreover, if you are prepared to put ‘stagecoach shotguns’ and send “out posses to track and engage the bandits” then you have to go the whole hog. You cannot exterminate the scourge of piracy by half measures or by chivalric ones.

Posted by Paul Norheim, Apr 16 2009, 7:54PM – Link

A comment to the exchange between Kotzabasis and Dan
Kervick.
Kotzabasis says:

“I’m however surprised that you so facilely assume that these
raids will intentionally be killing women and children. The
latter will be killed only if the pirates adopt the tactics of the
terrorists and use women and children as human shields.”.

Of course no single innocent human being will be killed
intentionally by the Americans (that would be bad PR). But if you
attack by “relentless means, i.e., by air and commando raids the
Somali towns from which piracy stems”, much more innocent
civilians are likely to die than those killed by pirates.

This is an excellent illustration of a certain paradox, namely
between those “irregular” elements who target non-combatants
(or, in direct terrorist operations: civilians), and a regular army
targeting the enemy in ways that inevitably kill a lot of civilians,
not because they are targets, but because the regular army
decides to target the enemy by means that often, and inevitably,
kill more civilians than the irregular elements (pirates/terrorists)
do.

When you look at the tactics and outcome of some recent
events (like the Israeli attack in Gaza, and the Sri Lanka`n army
against the Tamil Tigers), it is indeed very difficult to
distinguish between “terrorists (who) use women and children
as human shields”, and states who send their armies to kill
indiscriminately. If you look at statistics regarding the
percentage of civilians killed in wars during the last hundred
years, you would come to the conclusion that the respect for
civilian lives seem to have diminished drastically – regardless of
terrorists, guerillas, or pirates. The regular armies and the
politicians behind them have their significant share in this
development.

There is no point in mentioning Dresden, Hiroshima, and
Nagasaki to prove that: Iraq is a fresh example.
How many innocent civilians did Saddam Hussein kill? And how
many innocent civilians did Clinton and Bush kill –
unintentionally?

To me it`s always been difficult to distinguish between terrorist
methods and Kotzabasis`”relentless means”. For poor, innocent
women and children, hit unintentionally, I would imagine that
this distinction would make no sense.

Posted by Dan Kervick, Apr 16 2009, 9:49PM – Link

Kotzabasis,
I may have misinterpreted you. There are some people who have recently advocated the *intentional* targeting of the pirates’ towns and kin in order to teach the pirates a lesson. You instead seem to be advocating going after the pirates themselves, and regard whatever happens to the communities around them as collateral damage brought on by the pirates decision to live among other people.

I appreciate that when you talk about “exterminating the scourge of piracy”, you are only logically implying that it is the scourge that must be exterminated, not the people. I hope that’s all you mean. Because as for the people themselves, I think experience with banditry shows that it is by no means necessary to exterminate all the bandits – even if such a thing were possible – in order the deter them from banditry. It is only necessary to change the cost-benefit analysis with which they operate. When it becomes to hard to profit from banditry, and too risky, the banditry ends.

This isn’t a half-measure. It is just a question on of re-asserting the rule of law without inflicting more death and pain on our fellow human beings than is necessary.

Unlike the case with some terrorists perhaps, the pirates do not hide continually among civilian populations plotting their crimes. They frequently float around in boats on the open ocean. Thus, if they are to be targeted for attack, there is no excuse for not targeting them when they are out there on the high seas, away from innocent people. If one can kill or apprehend some transgressor in a way that doesn’t risk the lives of innocents, then one should do so. It is not relevant whether we can pin the “fault” for the innocent deaths on the wrongdoer. What is relevant is that we avoid causing absolutely unnecessary deaths, whom ever is to be assigned the ultimate fault for those deaths.

Let’s not build these bandits up into something more than they are. What is needed now is stepped-up global policing of international shipping lanes, and that calls for increased levels of economic, manpower and intelligence commitment. The pirates are not an army, and civilization isn’t crumbling. We just need to invest more resources than we have previously.

Posted by kotzabasis, Apr 17 2009, 1:18AM – Link

Dan Kervick
Of course you don’t have “to exterminate all the bandits,” and your “cost-benefit analysis” is a perfect measure that would end such banditry. But to reach that measure that would deter the pirates from practicing their deadly enterprise one cannot do it by “half-measures.” It would be a half-measure to draw the gun and not shoot at your enemy. However, your “rule of law” is not a half-measure but no measure at all. These are lawless people that no law will ever restrain their actions.

I’m afraid you are too well- intentioned and too replete with humane genes that disqualify you from being a pragmatic strategist in deadly conflicts. No war has ever being fought clinically without the spilling of innocent blood. The price of freedom and the continuation of a civilized society at times is quite high. Nothing of great value is costless. The question always is whether people have the sagacity, the will, and mettle to pay the price.

Paul Norheim
This is a ‘straitjacket’ detachment from reality Paul. An “excellent illustration” that totally destroys your fabricated “paradox” is Iraq that by indisputable statistics shows that more civilians were killed by “irregular elements” i.e., by terrorists, than by the regular army of the U.S. and its allies. And to infer, sarcastically, that Americans don’t kill intentionally because that would give them “bad PR,” is to denigrate shamefully U.S. armed personnel who have been trained not to kill civilians, unlike the terrorists who are trained to kill them deliberately. .

Posted by Dan Kervick, Apr 17 2009, 7:37AM – Link

“These are lawless people that no law will ever restrain their actions.”
You seem to be confusing enforcement of the rule of law with respect for the law, Kotzabasis. Obviously, these pirates have no motivation to obey the law simply because it is the law. They are not law-abiding people.

For such people, reassertion of the rule of law always requires the imposition of harsh, credible penalties. Some percentage might be deterred by the mere credible threat of these penalties. But others will only be prevented from violating the rules of the road on the high seas by the actual infliction of the penalties.

I didn’t say that we should draw the gun and not use it. I said that in this case it seems likely that whatever force needs to be applied can be applied away from land, and away from innocent people. Yes, sometimes innocent people are killed in justifiable actions. But we shouldn’t recklessly endanger innocent lives just to prove our “will” or “mettle”, not when we can bring the required force to bear without endangering those innocents.

While the pirates aren’t motivated by respect for international rules, they are, as you have pointed out, motivated by profit. As it becomes less and less likely for the pirates that they will profit from attempted acts of piracy, and more and more likely that they will lose their lives or liberty, their banditry will be brought to an end.

Posted by kotzabasis, Apr 17 2009, 9:45AM – Link

Dan Kervick
Lawless people are not concerned with what MIGHT HAPPEN to them if they break the law, but, as you correctly say, by the “actual infliction of the harsh penalties’ imposed upon them, and I would add in this case wherever they are, on sea or land. It would be strategically foolish and inutile to confine one’s tactical operations solely on the “high seas” as well as reveal one’s tactics to one’s enemy.

Just a thought experiment. If one had credible intelligence of a high concentration of pirates on land that by hitting them one would have inflicted upon them a devastating blow from which they could never recover, it would be utterly doltish not to use such an opportunity that would shorten the war and overall casualties just because it could entail that some innocent people would be killed.

I used the “draw of the gun” figuratively, not that you said it, in response to your “stagecoach” post, that if you draw it you have to shoot your deadly foe wherever he is, even in a ‘crowded street.’
War has too many imponderables to compute them beforehand with algorithmic precision. McNamara’s “fog of war” is the constant condition. That is why people, and even professional soldiers, avoid it justifiably like the plague. But once one has decided to ‘unsheathe the sword’ then like the “feudal knights one has to make “literal mincemeat of one’s enemies, leaving the clergy to handle the morals,” to quote the great Austrian writer Robert Musil.

Posted by Dan Kervick, Apr 17 2009, 10:25AM – Link

“Just a thought experiment. If one had credible intelligence of a high concentration of pirates on land that by hitting them one would have inflicted upon them a devastating blow from which they could never recover, it would be utterly doltish not to use such an opportunity that would shorten the war and overall casualties just because it could entail that some innocent people would be killed.”

This sort of scenario paints an unrealistic picture of the pirates as some kind of “pirate army” that is best countered by attrition of their numbers until they surrender. I don’t think it works that way. The pirates are fishermen, who have taken to using their fishing trawlers to mount pirate attacks. Piracy in the Gulf of Aden has become a lucrative profession, and people will continue to pursue that profession as long as it remains lucrative. There is no fixed supply of pirates, just as there is no fixed supply of investment bankers. There is no pirate army to defeat.

We can’t bomb all the fishermen in Somalia, nor would that make sense. There is simply no need for this kind of overkill. The pirates attacked a US-flagged ship earlier this month, and that mistake resulted in an extended nuisance, the rescue of the captain, a week of media pants-wetting, three dead pirates and one captured pirate. This outcome is going to have a deterrent effect, and the pirates were dealt with out on the water. With stepped up resources and commitment, we can turn this piracy business into a non-viable enterprise.

Posted by kotzabasis, Apr 18 2009, 12:22AM – Link

It was a thought experiment and you missed its point.
You are digressing into ‘softer areas’ from your previous posts and I’ve nothing to add. Piracy now has become to you an ‘economic’ issue and merely an “extended nuisance” and an entertaining vaudevillian play, “media-pants wetting.”

Join the debate

American says:

For those who think we need to redouble our efforts to “win” the war in Afghanistan, I take it they mean we need to do whatever it takes, militarily and financially, to build a stable Afghan state run headed by a secure and US-friendly government. I have two problems with this idea. First, I tend to doubt that the US has the wherewithal to accomplish such a goal in such a rugged, decentralized and forbidding country – no matter how much our surge surges. The whole idea seems fantastical.

Second, I don’t see how even achieving this fantastical aim would really help with the Al Qaeda issue, since I find it hard to believe that any Afghan government that we can realistically imagine taking shape will have the capacity to prevent Al Qaeda elements from gathering in remote locations and forming bases. As a basis for comparison, can we realistically imagine an Afghan government with even half the capacity of a state like Pakistan? Hardly. And yet Pakistan itself is not in control of large swaths of its country. Pursuing the quixotic state-building plans of the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is a distraction from the methods that actually work.

My understanding is that we have been engaged in a global campaign against jihadist terrorism for several years now, and the main practical method is to rely on intelligence to stay one step ahead of the folks who actually pose a threat, and then disrupt their efforts, kill their leaders and interdict their operations. We’re probably going to have to keep doing that sort of thing for quite some time, just as the effort against organized crime in the US never really ends. If Al Qaeda cadres build some kind of training base in Afghanistan, we go in and blow it up. If they build another one, we blow that one up too. We use predators and covert methods. The same is true of al Qaeda redoubts in Pakistan or Somalia or Yemen, right? We are going to have to do this no matter what kind of government we get in Kabul.

I can’t believe that at this late date American political leaders and opinion leaders are still deluded by the theory that the chief enabling cause of terrorism is “state sponsorship”, and so that our aim is too manufacture strong states where none exist now. This seems wrong-headed to me. I’ve used this analogy before, but the militant jihadist movement seems something like the anarchist movement of a century ago. Parts of that movement were violent. Was the solution some sort of state-building process in Europe and the United States? No. There were already strong states in Europe and the US. But it is of the nature of terrorist groups to slip between the cracks in the sovereign power of states.

Anarchist terrorism was basically a law and order problem. The idea was just to stay ahead of the perpetrators of terrorist attacks, and outlast the movement as its ideological fervor gradually dissipated and it burned itself out.

We should never have gotten involved in state building in Afghanistan. Now we have a generation of American leaders who are invested in that project, and see their personal honor and the national honor as riding on its very unlikely success. They need to get real.

Australian says:

Ben Katcher’s intellectually malodorous, and disingenuous, argument has reached the other shores of the Pacific. While he claims that “pouring more troops…into Afghanistan means fewer resources to pursue our other national security objectives across the globe,” he does not mention any of them by name other than the economic crisis mentioned by Dennis Blair. Hence his statement that “strategy is about priorities and trade-offs,” while true in general, is a contrived fiction when he applies it to international terrorism since these other priorities remain nameless. The reason why he does not name them is that if he had identified these priorities and contrasted them with the priority of global terror he would embarrass himself for being ludicrous.

Dan Kervick’s paragraph that contains “we use predators and covert methods,” which incidentally is an idea that I suggested myself too eight years ago, is very interesting although he contradicts himself further down on his post when he contrasts present terror with anarchist terror in the past and says for the latter that it “was basically a law and order problem,” which he first ventilated in a riposte to me on TWN three years ago. Surely, Kervick, who has learnt his logic by sitting in the spacious intellectual laps of Hume and Russel, could not cogently argue that “predators and covert methods” fall in the ambience of “law and order.”

American says:

Kotzabasis says:

“Surely, Kervick, who has learnt his logic by sitting in the spacious intellectual laps of Hume and Russel, could not cogently argue that “predators and covert methods” fall within the ambience of “law and order.””

I do. When I say that terrorism is a law and order problem, I don’t mean that the only tools to be used are the methods of the criminal justice system. Those latter tools have proven effective in many cases, including operations interdicted in the UK and Canada. But given the limits of applying these tools across borders and inside rugged countries, sometimes more aggressive means must be employed. What I mean is that terrorism is fundamentally a problem of a limited number of militant “outlaws”, and that the strategy for addressing it should focus on that fact, rather than be distracted by extravagant projects for state improvement and state overhaul.

What I am most skeptical of is the idea that the problem of terrorism is a conventional military problem that calls for the use of conventional military operations – in the form of armies, invasions and occupations – against either states or sub-national “armies”. And I am especially skeptical of the idea that the way to address the problem of terrorism is to launch massive – and generally very unrealistic – state-building operations in the hope that some day the dangerous backward parts of the world will be filled with well-functioning and capable states that will be able to suppress all of the militants operating inside their territories.

There are other means that need to be used as well, including denying the terrorists the ideological foothold that multiplies their influence and capability. That means not doing so many things that provide evidence of the very charges the terrorists make. To counter jihadist charges that the United States is hostile to the interests of Arabs and Muslims across the world the United States should stop behaving as if it is indeed universally hostile to the interests of Arabs and Muslims.

Australian says:

Kervick says:

“When I say that terrorism is a law and order problem, I don’t mean that the only tools to be used are the methods of the criminal justice system.”

Your quote states the obvious. Of course one does not fight terrorism only with police methods but the question is out of all the methods which are the most effective by which one can defeat the jihadists. And while your paragraph in your previous post that mentions “predators” and all the other ‘hard things’ that one has perforce to do against the jihadists is full of strategic clarity, by reverting back to your old argument of three years ago that the present terrorists are similar to the anarchist terrorists of the past and can be interdicted by ‘police’ methods, you unconsciously downgrade the seriousness of your ‘hard things’ position.

Moreover, you are locked in the fallacy of a rational person who premises his actions that his enemies that ‘round’ him up are also rational and if he shows by his actions, in our case America, that he is not against Arabs and Muslims this will bring a definitive change in the attitudes of the jihadists. This is a ‘straightjacket’ delusion that has lost all contact with reality. Islamic fanaticism will not be influenced, soothed, abated, or defeated by moral examples or olive branches but only in the field of battle and that is why a military deployment against it is a prerequisite. In short, it’s just another but more effective method in defeating the jihadists in a shorter span of time.

American says:

C-G Kotzabasis,

I’m talking about the hearts and minds issue. There is a hard core of dyed-in-the-wool militant jihadists with an uncompromising Salafist ideology. They are not going to be swayed by US public diplomacy, or by forseeable changes in US policy. They can only be dealt with forcibly. They must either be captured or killed, and their plans must be disrupted.

But the hard core is surrounded by concentric circles of people who are associated with the hard core by various degrees of fellow-travelling or sympathizing or onlooking. The extent to which the jihadists are able to expand their movement to get material or moral assistance from people in the out rings depends on how well their message resonates.

In my view, the jihadists have been the beneficiaries in recent years of a number of wrong-headed US policies that help their message resonate strongly. If hundreds of innocent people in Gaza have their lives snuffed out in an over-the-top Israeli attack, some as a result of deliberate crimes, with nary a peep from the US Congress, then when your friendly neighborhood jihadist says, “Muslims lives mean nothing to the Americans,” that message is going to get much more play on the street than it would if the US Congress had stepped up and condemned the excessive use of force.

Australian says:

Dan Kervick,

Certainly the “hearts and minds issue” is a core issue. But the “concentric circles of people,” will not be influenced by US Congress pronouncements and condemnations, in this case of Israeli actions, if they perceive, which they will, that this change of American policy arises from the weakness of the latter and from the strength of the “hard core” “militant jihadists” in their war with the US. The concentric circles of support for the militants will only disappear by depriving the latter of the ‘aura’ of being seen as the victors (The ethos of Arab pride trumps all.) against the American hegemon. And that entails the imminent and decisive defeat of the militants in the field of battle, as it happened in Iraq to the Sadrist militias and al Qaeda.

Furthermore, your concentrated reasoning loses its force since your policy contains these two incongruous parts: The first one will destroy by predators and covert operations (Which will be seen in the Muslim world as American excesses) the incubators of “Salafist ideology”, which are the madrassas, while the second, will denounce American and Israeli excesses. Do you seriously believe that such denunciation will have greater influence upon fellow-travellers and sympathisers, than the destruction of the madrassas in which many civilians will be killed, and will win their hearts and minds?

Join the debate

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The author Dilip Hiro is thoroughly confused between Iran without a bomb, obviously his optimal position, and Iran with a bomb when on the one hand he states, and inexpressively hopes, that the National Intelligence Estimate finding is correct that Iran has “ceased working on a nuclear military program,” and on the other, when he believes that we could live with a nuclear Iran. But he doesn’t realize that to live with a nuclear Iran is to live with the widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons in the region, as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Libya mount the horse of the nuclear race. This is where the catastrophe of astronomical dimensions lies and not in a pre-emptive attack on Iran.

He is also ‘fatefully’ pessimistic about any positive results issuing by such an attack and focuses his attention, rightly so, on its dire repercussions that could lead to a conflagration of the region. In my opinion however, he underestimates the strategic nous of the planners of such an attack that would target not only the nuclear plants of Iran, such as Natanz, but also the military, civilian and religious leadership of the country with the aim of decimating it. If the latter somehow miraculously escaped its destruction and took retaliatory action against the Americans or on any other countries of the region then such action would be calling for Iran’s nuclear destruction.