Still on light posting. But this is an important article by Andrew Bacevich: The Islamic Way of War American Conservative 09/11/06 issue; accessed 08/28/06.
Bacevich writes about how the Arab governments and movements of the Middle East have finally unlearned their commitment to a conventional, Soviet-style military strategy. Defeating armies committed to such an approach, but with inferior equipment, training and motivation was the basis of the perceived brilliance of the Israeli and American militaries in the Middle East.
This was the mistaken lesson that the neoconservatives and hardline nationalists (like Rummy and Cheney) learned in particular from the now-long-ago Six Day War of 1967 and the Gulf War of 1991. Bacevich warns that it's time to unlearn that lesson ourselves:
What are we to make of this? How is it that the seemingly weak and primitive are able to frustrate modern armies only recently viewed as all but invincible? What do the parallel tribulations - and embarrassments - of the United States and Israel have to tell us about war and politics in the 21st century? In short, what’s going on here?
The answer to that question is dismayingly simple: the sun has set on the age of unquestioned Western military dominance. Bluntly, the East has solved the riddle of the Western Way of War. In Baghdad and in Anbar Province as at various points on Israel’s troubled perimeter, the message is clear: methods that once could be counted on to deliver swift decision no longer work. (my emphasis)
He gives a brief history of the new and, for Israel and the US, dramtically unwelcome development:
In Afghanistan during the 1980s, the Mujahadeen got things started by bringing to its knees a Soviet army equipped with an arsenal of modern equipment. During the so-called First Intifada, which began in 1987, stone-throwing and Molotov-cocktail-wielding Palestinians gave the IDF conniptions. In 1993, an angry Somali rabble - not an army at all - sent the United States packing. In 2000, the collapse of the Camp David talks produced a Second Intifada, this one persuading the government of Ariel Sharon that Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank was becoming unsustainable. Most spectacularly, in September 2001, al-Qaeda engineered a successful assault on the American homeland, the culmination of a series of attacks that had begun a decade earlier.
First in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, the United States seemed briefly to turn the tables: Western military methods overthrew the Taliban and then made short shrift of Saddam. After the briefest of intervals, however, victory in both places gave way to renewed and protracted fighting. Most recently, in southern Lebanon an intervention that began with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowing to destroy Hezbollah has run aground and looks increasingly like an Israeli defeat.
So it turns out that Arabs - or more broadly Muslims - can fight after all. We may surmise that they now realize that fighting effectively requires that they do so on their own terms rather than mimicking the West. They don’t need and don’t want tanks and fighter-bombers. What many Westerners dismiss as “terrorism,” whether directed against Israelis, Americans, or others in the West, ought to be seen as a panoply of techniques employed to undercut the apparent advantages of high-tech conventional forces. The methods em-ployed do include terrorism - violence targeting civilians for purposes of intimidation - but they also incorporate propaganda, subversion, popular agitation, economic warfare, and hit-and-run attacks on regular forces, either to induce an overreaction or to wear them down. The common theme of those techniques, none of which are new, is this: avoid the enemy’s strengths; exploit enemy vulnerabilities. (my emphasis)
It can hardly be strssed enough right now that the US contributed mightily to the current development through the strategy of promoting radical Sunni militance in the Afghanistan war against the Soviet Union. I certainly recognize that even the best-intentioned American policymakers sometimes have to make cynical deals with ambiguous moral and practical implications. But making those deals and not being realistic about what's being done, and not learning the lessons and recognizing the negative developments that such deals often produce, is just foolish.
Bacevich also describes well what the current US and Israeli dilemmas are and are not. What they are is a major practical problem if we continue to pursue Cheney-Bush style Napoleanic wars of liberation in the Middle East. What they are not is a basic threat to the existence of the United States or Israel - a matter certainly not to be confused with the ability to do us serious and deadly harm:
What are the implications of this new Islamic Way of War? While substantial, they fall well short of being apocalyptic. As Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has correctly - if perhaps a trifle defensively - observed, “Our enemy knows they cannot defeat us in battle.” Neither the Muslim world nor certainly the Arab world poses what some like to refer to as “an existential threat” to the United States. Despite overheated claims that the so-called Islamic fascists pose a danger greater than Hitler ever did, the United States is not going to be overrun, even should the forces of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraqi insurgents, and Shi’ite militias along with Syria and Iran all combine into a unified anti-Crusader coalition. Although Israelis for historical reasons are inclined to believe otherwise, the proximate threat to Israel itself is only marginally greater. Although neither Israel nor the United States can guarantee its citizens “perfect security” - what nation can? - both enjoy ample capabilities for self-defense.
What the Islamic Way of War does mean to both Israel and to the United States is this: the Arabs now possess - and know that they possess - the capacity to deny us victory, especially in any altercation that occurs on their own turf and among their own people. To put it another way, neither Israel nor the United States today possesses anything like the military muscle needed to impose its will on the various governments, nation-states, factions, and political movements that comprise our list of enemies. For politicians in Jerusalem or Washington to persist in pretending otherwise is the sheerest folly. (my emphasis)
Bacevich is one military analyst who knows how to use the concept of militarism realistically. And he has been emphasizing for quite a while that the United States under the Cheney-Bush administration is foolishly relying on military might as the primary tool of foreign policy, even at times the exclusive one. This is a bad, bad idea.
And it's very obviously having bad results.
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