It All Comes Out the Same
Putting the GWOT in perspective is extremely difficult because it is so vast. The ‘enemy’ is diffused throughout an entire culture. Their religious texts, their religious leaders, their schools, all their fundamental beliefs are dug in square up against ours. To ‘win’ they need to do nothing. And they are more capable of digging in their heels and doing nothing than we are.
Currently American morale is suffering. Support for a military reprisal for 9/11 is ebbing. Consider the following two observations:
1. Kopi Luwak is a rare Indonesian or Vietnamese coffee (kopi) made from beans that have “passed through” the digestive track of a luwak, otherwise known as a palm civet or civet cat. The luwak eats the ripe coffee cherry and passes the bean, which is then harvested from the ground and shipped to coffee roasters where it is processed into “gourmet” coffee. Research has determined that coffee passed by a luwak has been changed chemically. Specifically the process seems to break down some of the bean’s proteins which are known to contribute to the bitterness of coffee, making it more palatable.
2. Regardless of when Osama bin Laden is caught, if it happens during President Bush’s administration, he will be accused of staging it for political advantage. This is part of what I am going to refer to as the ‘poisoned well’ approach to the GWOT.
How are these two observations linked in my tiny little reptilian brain? It appears to me that the current political climate for the Long War is now in a state where the necessary commitment exceeds the public’s will to support. Honestly, this may or may not be a function of politics; it’s entirely likely that people have just gotten tired of bad news and want to be rid of it. Except for the fact the war isn’t over, this is understandable.
One of the great observations I read lately was that the fastest way to end a war was to lose it. It may be that now when anyone says they want the war over at any cost, that is exactly what they mean. There has been no recent, immediate strike; no 9/11-like attack, only the slow low-volume meat-grinder of Iraq and the looming threat of the alliance between the two remaining Axis of Evil members. People are getting tired, want to wave their hand at the problem and make it go away. They no longer have a concept of what “losing” means in the way they did on 9/12.
The next administration will have no choice but to scale back.
Consider, though, the nature of the war from the other point of view . Long term, low level, almost evolutionary in it’s approach, this type of change has been called “parlimentary revolutionism” when it was plotted by the Communists. Their idea was that short, violent wars of revolution kill the host economy and make the implementation of socialism a social structure that redistributes poverty instead of wealth -- not much of a selling proposition. Obviously, it is much better from their perspective to start with a wealthy country and use the system to implent change slowly enough that socialism is still inevitable, but not so destructive as to destroy the underlying wealth of the country. Socialism will then have a much longer life and slower decline, appearing almost as stasis.
Along come the radical Islamists, well schooled in the political science of Arabic-centric socialism. They asked the question, that instead of secular socialism with it’s long, gray, inevitable slide to totalitarianism, why not Islamic socialism, ending with the installation of a theocratic caliphate? Certainly there is history behind it, this would be the third Great Jihad. Praise Allah that no one really reads history anymore and that the Christians seem to be out of favor and they can probably take the Jews down while no one is watching.
Great theory. Even though we are watching, of course, we are impotent to do anything about it. We are tired. We are not devoted. It’s been years since we were attacked and that’s over now. The bad people have gone away, we want to party.
Except the the bad people haven’t gone away.
Within a generation or two, absent a bloody, vigilante-style civil war, Europe will be Muslim. The great cathedrals will eventually be sacked and torn down, replaced by the grandest mosques in the world. It will all come down to numbers, demographics, babies and birth control. It will all be legal, fairly elected. There will be a small Muslim party that will grow into a large Islamist party that dominates the legislatures of one or two, then three and more European countries.
That will mean that England, Europe, Arabia through to Pacifica, most of Africa and even large parts of Russia and China will be dominated by Islam. It will take years for this to happen, 30 to 80 years or more, but it will happen. The last holdouts will be Austrailia/New Zealand, South/Central America, maybe Mexico although a good socialist upheaval will pave the way for conversion, and the U.S. Canada, as part of the British Empire, has already granted Islam a toe-hold via Pakistani immigrants and won’t be sufficiently blood-thirsty enough to play nasty. Nope, they’ll roll over and say, “It’s the will of the people. PBUH.”
The only hope is that the Islamists get greedy or can be provoked into a shooting war. A couple strikes against the U.S., half a dozen nukes or other mass terror attacks and the U.S. mood will change. The coffee cherry will come out the other end. But not now. For the foreseeable future, we are going to have to take a beating before we are ready to fight and kill and win. If they play the slow, evolution not revolution gambit, they will win in the long run.
You and I are coffee cherries; Islamist politics, the civet. Soon, when their world is big and ours is small, we will understand the price we paid for growing weary. When that happens, when we’re surrounded and our lifestyles are under attack, when homosexuality is punishable by death, when women cannot drive or leave the house without being covered and escorted by a male, then we will understand why the USAF put together a plan to drop 2,000lbs of bombs on every one of the 14,000 mosques in Iran on a sunny Saturday morning at 10:17am in the year of our Lord 2008 during High Service.
What we will not understand, is why anyone ever thought it was reckless to put the plan together in the first place. Until then, we need to do everything we can to make their world smaller:
Confront and destroy the radical Islamists
Destroy their havens
Make true peace with the moderates
Instill democracy
Integrate our values into their culture
Live our lives without fear of death
From The Defense Forum Washington, DC (Aug. 2008), Josh Manchester of The Adventures of Chester reports that Dr. David J. Kilcullen (a reserve LtCol in the Australian Army, currently on loan to the State Department, at the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism) argued that insurgents can adapt faster than we can, and can exploit the media better. He referenced a video of Zawahiri from some time ago in which he described the strategy to be used against the US: We “can beat Americans by being slower than them because they have attention deficit disorder.” This ability to think differently in terms of time is key to Al Qaeda’s abilities.
Currently American morale is suffering. Support for a military reprisal for 9/11 is ebbing. Consider the following two observations:
1. Kopi Luwak is a rare Indonesian or Vietnamese coffee (kopi) made from beans that have “passed through” the digestive track of a luwak, otherwise known as a palm civet or civet cat. The luwak eats the ripe coffee cherry and passes the bean, which is then harvested from the ground and shipped to coffee roasters where it is processed into “gourmet” coffee. Research has determined that coffee passed by a luwak has been changed chemically. Specifically the process seems to break down some of the bean’s proteins which are known to contribute to the bitterness of coffee, making it more palatable.
2. Regardless of when Osama bin Laden is caught, if it happens during President Bush’s administration, he will be accused of staging it for political advantage. This is part of what I am going to refer to as the ‘poisoned well’ approach to the GWOT.
How are these two observations linked in my tiny little reptilian brain? It appears to me that the current political climate for the Long War is now in a state where the necessary commitment exceeds the public’s will to support. Honestly, this may or may not be a function of politics; it’s entirely likely that people have just gotten tired of bad news and want to be rid of it. Except for the fact the war isn’t over, this is understandable.
One of the great observations I read lately was that the fastest way to end a war was to lose it. It may be that now when anyone says they want the war over at any cost, that is exactly what they mean. There has been no recent, immediate strike; no 9/11-like attack, only the slow low-volume meat-grinder of Iraq and the looming threat of the alliance between the two remaining Axis of Evil members. People are getting tired, want to wave their hand at the problem and make it go away. They no longer have a concept of what “losing” means in the way they did on 9/12.
The next administration will have no choice but to scale back.
Consider, though, the nature of the war from the other point of view . Long term, low level, almost evolutionary in it’s approach, this type of change has been called “parlimentary revolutionism” when it was plotted by the Communists. Their idea was that short, violent wars of revolution kill the host economy and make the implementation of socialism a social structure that redistributes poverty instead of wealth -- not much of a selling proposition. Obviously, it is much better from their perspective to start with a wealthy country and use the system to implent change slowly enough that socialism is still inevitable, but not so destructive as to destroy the underlying wealth of the country. Socialism will then have a much longer life and slower decline, appearing almost as stasis.
Along come the radical Islamists, well schooled in the political science of Arabic-centric socialism. They asked the question, that instead of secular socialism with it’s long, gray, inevitable slide to totalitarianism, why not Islamic socialism, ending with the installation of a theocratic caliphate? Certainly there is history behind it, this would be the third Great Jihad. Praise Allah that no one really reads history anymore and that the Christians seem to be out of favor and they can probably take the Jews down while no one is watching.
Great theory. Even though we are watching, of course, we are impotent to do anything about it. We are tired. We are not devoted. It’s been years since we were attacked and that’s over now. The bad people have gone away, we want to party.
Except the the bad people haven’t gone away.
Within a generation or two, absent a bloody, vigilante-style civil war, Europe will be Muslim. The great cathedrals will eventually be sacked and torn down, replaced by the grandest mosques in the world. It will all come down to numbers, demographics, babies and birth control. It will all be legal, fairly elected. There will be a small Muslim party that will grow into a large Islamist party that dominates the legislatures of one or two, then three and more European countries.
That will mean that England, Europe, Arabia through to Pacifica, most of Africa and even large parts of Russia and China will be dominated by Islam. It will take years for this to happen, 30 to 80 years or more, but it will happen. The last holdouts will be Austrailia/New Zealand, South/Central America, maybe Mexico although a good socialist upheaval will pave the way for conversion, and the U.S. Canada, as part of the British Empire, has already granted Islam a toe-hold via Pakistani immigrants and won’t be sufficiently blood-thirsty enough to play nasty. Nope, they’ll roll over and say, “It’s the will of the people. PBUH.”
The only hope is that the Islamists get greedy or can be provoked into a shooting war. A couple strikes against the U.S., half a dozen nukes or other mass terror attacks and the U.S. mood will change. The coffee cherry will come out the other end. But not now. For the foreseeable future, we are going to have to take a beating before we are ready to fight and kill and win. If they play the slow, evolution not revolution gambit, they will win in the long run.
You and I are coffee cherries; Islamist politics, the civet. Soon, when their world is big and ours is small, we will understand the price we paid for growing weary. When that happens, when we’re surrounded and our lifestyles are under attack, when homosexuality is punishable by death, when women cannot drive or leave the house without being covered and escorted by a male, then we will understand why the USAF put together a plan to drop 2,000lbs of bombs on every one of the 14,000 mosques in Iran on a sunny Saturday morning at 10:17am in the year of our Lord 2008 during High Service.
What we will not understand, is why anyone ever thought it was reckless to put the plan together in the first place. Until then, we need to do everything we can to make their world smaller:
Confront and destroy the radical Islamists
Destroy their havens
Make true peace with the moderates
Instill democracy
Integrate our values into their culture
Live our lives without fear of death
From The Defense Forum Washington, DC (Aug. 2008), Josh Manchester of The Adventures of Chester reports that Dr. David J. Kilcullen (a reserve LtCol in the Australian Army, currently on loan to the State Department, at the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism) argued that insurgents can adapt faster than we can, and can exploit the media better. He referenced a video of Zawahiri from some time ago in which he described the strategy to be used against the US: We “can beat Americans by being slower than them because they have attention deficit disorder.” This ability to think differently in terms of time is key to Al Qaeda’s abilities.
Labels: GWOT
posted by Dewage | 3:39 PM
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