Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (30 page)

Ironically, the antinationalist organizations also are the victims of the Cold War hangover. During that era the issues they fought for and the goals they achieved were played out under the peace-inducing nuclear umbrella. Their largely theoretical and unrealistic world flourished because, on balance, U.S. and Western leaders valued them as useful symbols of Western freedom to dissent without censorship, harassment, or imprisonment. These leaders dealt politely with the groups but never for a moment let them cast doubt on their willingness to use the U.S. nuclear deterrent. Like pacifists and conscientious objectors, the antinationalist groups are able to aggressively champion their views because most Americans were willing to risk their lives to defend the society that allows them to do so. Now, however, these groups significantly damage U.S. security, especially the human rights advocates and the just-war theorists, by constraining America’s ability to wage war aggressively and ruthlessly.

Oddly, the ascendancy of these organizations comes at a moment when they have proven themselves to be driven, not by any real ethical or moral considerations, both of which require a religious grounding that most do not have, but by anti-Americanism. While human rights groups and others describe Washington’s half-hearted and ineffective war-making as unjust and overly bloody, none of them seem to have the least interest in bringing Vladimir Putin and his colleagues to justice. These men were participants in and are the direct legatees of a system of government that killed more than forty million innocent people over its history. It is, of course, much easier and more fun to make cowardly U.S. politicians squirm and to criticize the intelligence officers who did their bidding than to take on a man who was a proud and distinguished member of a regime that out-Hitlered Hitler seven times over.

Once the dust settles from America’s military debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. leaders will have to find a way to reestablish a deterrent that is credible in the eyes of the world and our Islamist enemies. Sadly, proclaiming the existence of such a deterrent will not make it believable; the only way to achieve credibility will be to build a deterrent and use it. Al-Qaeda and its Sunni militant allies come from an Islamic civilization in which force remains a lingua franca, an environment in which the weak are exploited and the strong who are afraid to use their power are destroyed. Bin Laden and his allies place the United States in the latter category, and frankly we have fully earned the top spot on that list since 1996. They will continue to do so until we prove that we do not belong there. Most emphatically, the onus is on the United States. What this means, of course, is that the next time that Washington concludes that it must project military power somewhere in the world to defeat Islamist fighters, it must do so with an intensity the world has not seen from the United States since 1945. Whether the theater of operations is South Asia, the Horn of Africa, or some unexpected arena in the Middle East or elsewhere, U.S. forces must be sent to score a definitive victory, one that is clear to the world and irrefutable in the minds of the defeated Islamists and their supporters. And because we are fighting an enemy who wears no uniforms and is supported by local populations, such a victory necessarily will mean massive and unavoidable noncombatant casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure; indeed, the object lesson delivered for the world, friend and foe, will be the sheer breadth and totality of the destructiveness attendant to the projection of American military power. This course of action will have to be undertaken if America is to survive, and the longer we wait to do so, the more destructive the action will have to be when it is finally taken. We had the opportunity to establish such a baseline reputation for ruthlessness in Afghanistan—a window for savagery was open for six months or more after 9/11—but we chose to use minimal force in order to keep our European allies on board and appease Muslim oil producers and their populations. We thereby allowed the enemy to escape and reconfirmed in the Islamists’ minds that Washington’s threats to annihilate them are hollow, even when they attack in the continental United States.

To reestablish a credible perception that the United States has a military deterrent and will use it—just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the essential predicates for the U.S. Cold War deterrent—U.S. leaders will have to accept the reality that while suicide attackers cannot be deterred, the populations that aid and abet them may well be persuaded to reduce such support if they are punished with sufficient vigor. When U.S. power is projected after the next attack by al-Qaeda inside the United States, the best way to honor the attack’s casualties will be a military response that obliterates something that is prized by the enemy—not an improvised bier of flowers, silly placards, whining prayers, and flickering candles. America today would be a far more credible military power and a far safer place if, instead of endless, puerile bickering over what sort of monument should be built at the site of the World Trade Center, we had fire-bombed Kabul and Khandahar, demolished whatever ruins were left, and sown salt over the length and width of both sites. That would have been a proper monument to the dead of 9/11, and one that would have made their surviving countrymen safer.

Withering Western Unity

Even a brief review of the media shows that the Western unity engendered by the 9/11 attacks on the United States is ebbing. The reason for this is that the U.S. government should have seen the death and destruction of 9/11 for what it was: an attack solely directed at the United States, its people, and its economy. Nothing could have been more incorrect than, for example, Secretary of State Powell’s September 14, 2001, claim, “This is not just an attack against America, this is an attack against civilization and an attack against democracy.”
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Echoed in one form or another by President Bush, National Security Adviser Rice, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, former president Clinton, all members of Congress, and most NATO leaders, such words were simply those of Cold Warriors defaulting to comfortably familiar rhetoric. Any untoward action by the USSR against the West was always labeled a “threat to the Free World,” and after 9/11 the phrase “Free World” was simply replaced by “Western civilization” or another synonymous phrase. Powell’s words also sharply underscored several other Cold War assumptions that are still deeply and debilitatingly embedded in official Washington’s mind: proxies would be needed, a coalition was necessary, and the traditional ballet of international politics had to be managed, each of which subsumed that old Cold War standby, time is on our side. As Powell said, “We are engaging with the world. We want to make this a long-standing coalition.”
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Well, we engaged the world, and most of it came along. But that unity was ephemeral from the first. Once the emotions spurred by 9/11 faded, our coalition partners began to recognize that they are, at most, secondary targets for al-Qaeda and its allies. Bin Laden and his lieutenants knew this from the start—they are not mad, apocalyptic men, eager to take on the whole world at once—and began to target Western unity. A core tenet in al-Qaeda’s grand strategy is that the United States and its allies, Western and others, cannot stand martial pain over prolonged periods. The examples the Islamists use as evidence are familiar to all: the U.S. and French withdrawal from Beirut after being attacked by Hezbollah in 1982 and the collapse of the U.S.-led multinational UN humanitarian intervention in Somalia in 1993–94. Iraq and Afghanistan will provide weightier examples in the years ahead. Both the 1990s interventions were in areas and about matters that were at best peripheral to genuine U.S. and Western national-security interests, and once the troops were bloodied, Western leaders quickly concluded that which was obvious before the interventions began: the game was not remotely worth the candle. After 9/11 bin Laden operated on the assumption that while the United States probably would not disengage after minor casualties—the attack, after all, had struck the continental United States—most U.S. allies were unlikely to stay the course after suffering even minor damage. He was right.

Bin Laden has long seen the need to conduct political warfare that is tied closely to Islamist military activities, and he has laid out a doctrine for al-Qaeda and its associates to follow. This political-warfare policy is designed to be delivered over the heads of U.S. and Western leaders to opposition political leaders and the mass of voters in non-Muslim countries. It is meant to do two things: change the policies of countries allied with the United States by eroding popular support for assisting America to fight a war against Islamist militancy, and second, by so doing, slowly strip allies away from America and leave it increasingly isolated. Bin Laden laid out this political-warfare doctrine after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. In a November 2002 speech he explained to the populations of America’s European allies that the United States was attacked because “[America] is killing our sons in Iraq [through UN economic sanctions], and [because of] what America’s ally Israel is doing, using American airplanes to bomb houses in Palestine with old men, women, and children in them.” These are “crimes” that were conducted by the United States, said bin Laden, adding that al-Qaeda thought such U.S. actions would cause “the sane leaders among you to distance themselves from this criminal gang [the Bush administration.]”
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Because no distancing occurred, bin Laden told the peoples of U.S. allies that the status quo between the Islamist movement and their governments was not sustainable. “The road to safety begins by lifting the aggression,” bin Laden concluded. “Reciprocity is only fair.”
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Bin Laden then explained that the cost of supporting the United States would be attacks by al-Qaeda and its allies on the interests of countries providing such support. Citing al-Qaeda’s 2002 attacks on German tourists in Tunisia and on Australian and British tourists in Bali as examples of al-Qaeda’s ability to apply reciprocal violence, bin Laden warned the Europeans: “Just as you kill, so you shall be killed.”
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Bin Laden suggested that the peoples of states allied to America ask themselves the following questions:

In subsequent speeches bin Laden and al-Zawahiri reiterated this message, and over time they designated twenty-three countries by name as allies of the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, or both. They pledged each would be attacked. At this writing all twenty-three have been attacked, either domestically or in the geographic theaters in which their military forces are deployed with the U.S. military. Of course not all of these attacks can be linked to fighters directly under bin Laden’s command-and-control, but it cannot be a coincidence that al-Qaeda and its allies have exhausted the target list. In determining whether these attacks can be accurately described as complements to al-Qaeda political-warfare strategy, it is worth noting that the attacks were carefully modulated in their destructiveness. In their aftermath European populations, in particular, tended to blame their political leaders for stimulating the attacks by maintaining pro-U.S. policies in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. After the July 2005 subway attacks in London, for example, much of media commentary immediately linked the attacks directly to Prime Minister Blair’s resolute commitment to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Thus, the attacks were sufficiently painful to incite anger among European publics toward their leaders, but they were not damaging enough to inspire widespread fear and vengefulness and thereby drive the Europeans to closer counterterrorism cooperation with the United States.

In April 2004, bin Laden had also spoken to the populations of America’s allies, warning them that the previous month’s attack on the Atocha train station in Madrid was an example of what al-Qaeda has in store for them. He went on to claim that the European peoples and those of other U.S. allies were being lethally exploited by their leaders and multinational corporations, and he suggested a possible peaceful resolution of the situation.