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http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/fall2003/helprin.html
Home » Writings » Claremont Review of Books » Fall 2003 » War in the
Absence of Strategic Clarity More than merely winning the war in Iraq,
we needed to stun the Arab World.
By Mark Helprin
Posted September 17, 2003
This essay appeared in the Fall 2003 issue of the Claremont Review of
Books. Click here to send a comment. Print version -----
America has approached the war on terrorism as if from two dreamworlds.
The liberal, in which an absurd understanding of cause and effect, the
habit of capitulation to foreign influence, a mild and perpetual
anti-Americanism, reflex allergies to military spending, and a
theological aversion to self-defense all lead to policies that are hard
to differentiate from surrender. And the conservative, in which
everything must be all right as long as a self-declared conservative is
in the White House?no matter how badly the war is run; no matter that a
Republican administration in electoral fear leans left and breaks its
promise to restore the military; and no matter that because the
Secretary of Defense decided that he need not be able to fight two wars
at once, an adequate reserve does not exist to deal with, for example,
North Korea. And in between these dreamworlds of paralysis and
incompetence lies the seam, in French military terminology la soudure,
through which al-Qaeda, uninterested in our parochialisms, will make its
next attack.
The war is waged as if accidentally, and no wonder. For domestic
political reasons and to preserve its marginal relations with the Arab
World, the United States has declined to identify the enemy precisely.
He is so formless, opportunistic, and shadowy that apparently we cannot
conceive of him accurately enough to declare war against him, although
he has declared war against us. Attribute this to Karl Rove's
sensitivity to the electoral calculus in key states with heavy
Arab-American voting, to a contemporary aversion to ethnic generalities,
to the desire not to offend the Arab World lest it attack us even more
ferociously, to the fear of speaking truth to oil, to apprehension about
the taking of hostages and attacks upon embassies, and to a certain
muddledness of mind that is the result both of submitting to polite and
obsequious blackmail and of having been throughout the course of one's
life a stranger to rigorous thought. Reluctance to identify the enemy
makes it rather difficult to assess his weaknesses and strengths. Thus,
for want of a minimum of political courage, our soldiers are dispatched
to far-flung battlefields to fight an ad hoc, disorganized war, and,
just as it did in the Vietnam War, Washington explains its lack of a
lucid strategy by referring to the supposed incoherence of its opponent.
>From the beginning, America has been told that this is a new kind of war
that cannot be waged with strategic clarity, that strategy and its
attendant metaphysics no longer apply. And because we cannot
sufficiently study the nature of an insufficiently defined enemy, our
actions are mechanistic, ill-conceived, and a function of conflicting
philosophies within our bureaucracies, which proceed as if their war
plans were modeled on a to-do list magnetized to some suburban
refrigerator.
***
The enemy must and can be defined. That he is the terrorist himself
almost everyone agrees, but in the same way that the United States
extended blame beyond the pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor, it must now
reach far back into the structures of enablement for the sake of
deciding who and what must be fought. And given the enormity of a war
against civilians, and the attacks upon our warships, embassies,
economy, capital, government, and most populous city, this determination
must be liberal and free-flowing rather than cautious and constrained,
both by necessity and by right. The enemy has embarked upon a particular
form of warfare with the intent of shielding his center of mass from
counterattack, but he must not be allowed such a baseless privilege. For
as much as he is the terrorist who executes the strategy, he is the
intelligence service in aid of it, the nation that harbors his training
camps, the country that finances him, the press filled with adulation,
the people who dance in the streets when there is a slaughter, and the
regime that turns a blind eye.
Not surprisingly, militant Islam arises from and makes its base in the
Arab Middle East. The first objective of the war, therefore, must be to
offer every state in the area this choice: eradicate all support for
terrorism within your borders or forfeit existence as a state. That
individual terrorists will subsequently flee to the periphery is
certain, but the first step must be to deny them their heartland and
their citadels.
Recognizing that the enemy is militant Islam with its center the Arab
Middle East, it is possible to devise a coherent strategy. The enemy's
strengths should not be underestimated. He has a historical memory far
superior to that of the West, which has forgotten its thousand-year war
with Islamic civilization. Islamic civilization has not forgotten,
however, having been for centuries mainly on the losing side. Its memory
is clear, bitter, and a spur to action. And it dovetails with a
spiritual sense of time far different from that of the West, where
impatience arises in seconds, for the enemy believes that a thousand
years, measured against the eternity he is taught to contemplate and
accept, is nothing. Closely related to his empowering sense of time are
his spiritual sense of mission, which must never be underestimated, and
Islam's traditional embrace of martyrdom.
This militant devotion, consciously or otherwise, pays homage to the
explosive Arab conquests, which reached almost to Paris, to the gates of
Vienna, the marchlands of China, India, and far into Africa. War based
on the notion of Islamic destiny is underway at this moment in the
Philippines, Indonesia, Sinkiang, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Chechnya, Iraq, Palestine, Macedonia, Algeria, the Sudan, Sub-Saharan
Africa, and throughout the world in the form of terrorism without
limitation or humanitarian nuance?all in service of a conception far
more coherent than the somnolent Western nations seem to comprehend. The
object long expressed by bin Laden and others is to flip positions in
the thousand-year war. To do this, the Arabs must rekindle what the
10th-century historian Ibn Khaldun called 'asabiya, an ineffable
combination of group solidarity, momentum, esprit de corps, and the
elation of victory feeding upon victory. This, rather than any of its
subsidiary political goals, is the objective of the enemy in the war in
which we find ourselves at present. Despite many flickers all around the
world, it is a fire far from coming alight, but as long as the West
apprehends each flare as a separate case the enemy will be encouraged to
drive them toward a point of ignition, and the war will never end.
The proper strategic objective for the West, therefore, is the
suppression of this fire of 'asabiya in the Arab heartland and citadels
of militancy?a task of division, temporary domination, and, above all,
demoralization. As unattractive as it may seem, in view of the deadly
alternative it is the only choice other than to capitulate.
***
How might it be accomplished? as much as those who make war against the
West find advantage in Arab history and Islamic tradition, they are
burdened by its disadvantages. Living in a world of intense subjectivity
where argument is perpetually overruled by impulse, they suffer
divisions within divisions and schisms within schisms. Though
all-consuming fervor may be appropriate to certain aspects of revealed
religion, it makes for absolutist politics and governance. A despotic
political culture in turn decreases the possibilities of strong
alliances and is (often literally) murderous to initiative, whether
technical, military, or otherwise. And it is of no little import that
the Middle East has developed so as to be unreceptive to technology.
The natural environment of Arabia is so extreme that the idea of
mastering it was out of the question, submission and adaptation being
the only options, and the Middle East had neither the kind of surplus
agriculture that permitted Europe to industrialize, nor the metals and
wood upon which the machine culture was built. Technology was viewed not
as a system of interdependent principles, but rather as finite at all
stages, not an art to be practiced but a product to be bought. Magical
machines arrived whole, without a hint of the network of factories,
workshops, mines, and schools, and the centuries of struggle and genius
it took to build them. Islam provides a successful spiritual equilibrium
that the whole of Islamic society strives to protect. The West, by its
very nature, stirs and changes everything in "creative destruction."
Wanting no part in this, the Middle East, to quote the economic
historian Charles Issawi, "believed that the genius of Islam would
permit a controlled modernization; from Europe one could borrow things
without needing to borrow ideas," which is why, perhaps, in 19th-century
Egypt, students were sometimes taught a European language to master a
craft, and then told to "forget" the language.
Even more potentially fatal to the Arabs than the fact that they cannot
ever win a technological duel with the West is their Manichean tendency
to perceive in wholly black or wholly white. In the Middle East the
middle ground is hardly ever occupied, and entire populations hold
volatile and extremist views. This is traceable perhaps to the
austerities of the desert and nomadic life, and is one of the great and
magnetic attractions of Islam?severity, certainty, and either decisive
action or righteous and contented abstention. In Arab-Islamic culture,
things go very strongly one way or they go very strongly the other, and,
always, a compassionate haven exists for the defeated, for martyrs, as
long as they have not strayed from the code of honor. In the West,
success is everything, but in the Arab Middle East honor is everything,
and can coexist perfectly well with failure. The Arabs have a noble
history of defeat, and are acclimatized to it. Their cultural and
religious structures, far less worldly than ours, readily accommodate
it. Though wanting victory, they are equally magnetized by defeat, for
they understand, as we used to in the West, that the defeated are the
closest to God.
The West seems not to know, George W. Bush seems not to know, and Donald
Rumsfeld seems not to know, that there can be but one effective strategy
in the war against terrorism, and that is to shift Arab-Islamic society
into the other of its two states?out of nascent 'asabiya and into
comfortable fatalism and resignation. The British have done this
repeatedly, and the United States almost did it during the Gulf War.
That the object of such an exercise is not to defeat the Arabs but to
dissuade them from making war upon us means it is more likely to succeed
now than when it was joined to religious war in the Crusades or to the
imperial expansion of Europe. Now we want only to trade with the oil
states even at scandalous expense, and not (assuming that
"nation-building" is properly allowed to atrophy) to convert, control,
or colonize. How, exactly, does one shift Arab-Islamic society into the
other of its two states?
***
If one were to calculate a fortiori the scale of military effort
involved in the 19th-century division of the Ottoman Empire and the
subsequent European domination of the Middle East, one would undoubtedly
assume that the Europeans deployed great armadas and large armies. More
than 30 years ago, a graduate student asked the late and eminent Oxford
historian Albert Hourani what numbers the Europeans did, in fact,
deploy. He said he would look into it, and a week later reported that,
to his astonishment, the only European military presence within the
periphery of the Ottoman Empire that he could discover, from Napoleon
until the latter part of the 19th century, were 1,500 British and 500
Austrian troops in 1840, and 6,000 French in 1860. Thus can minuscule
expeditions conquer vast empires, Aztec, Inca, or Ottoman. But not
today, or at least that would seem to be a reasonable conclusion. For in
the last century the Arabs have organized into separate and
self-stabilizing states; they have raised large military establishments,
so that now Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and (non-Arab) Iran have
1.5 million regulars under arms; they have bought and sometimes
successfully absorbed huge inventories of modern weapons; they have
fought wars of independence and revolution, civil wars, against Israel
six times, and against the great powers; and from T. E. Lawrence, Mao,
and Ho Chi Minh they have learned at least the rudiments of asymmetrical
warfare.
Nevertheless, the fundamental relation has not been altered, and it is
still possible to maneuver the Middle East into quiescence vis-à-vis the
West. It is a matter mainly of proportion. The unprecedented military
and economic potential of even the United States alone, thus far so
imperfectly utilized, is the appropriate instrument. Adjusting military
spending to the level of the peacetime years of the past half-century
would raise outlays from approximately $370 billion to approximately
$650 billion. If the United States had the will, it could, excessively,
field 20 million men, build 200 aircraft carriers, or almost instantly
turn every Arab capital into molten glass, and the Arabs know this. No
matter what the advances in regional power, the position of the Arab
Middle East relative to that of the United States is no less
disadvantageous than was that of the Arab Middle East to the
19th-century European powers. But, given the changes listed in the
previous paragraph, the signal strength necessary to convey an effective
message is now far greater.
In the Gulf War, the overwhelming forces marshaled by the coalition
might have sufficed as such a signal but for the fact that they were
halted prematurely and withdrawn precipitously, gratuitously leaving
both Saudi Arabia and Iraq an inexplicable freedom of action that
probably left them stunned by their good luck.
Before the Iraq War, high officials were seriously considering an
invasion force of 500 backed by air power. The numbers climbed steadily:
5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 25,000, 40,000, 50,000, 60,000, and so on, with
the supposedly retrograde "heavy army" prevailing finally, and 300,000
troops in the theater. When offered vehement advice to go into Iraq with
massive force and many times overkill, a brilliant and responsible
senior official responded, almost with incredulity, "Why would we need
the force that you recommend, when in the Gulf War we used only 10
percent of what we had?" In the Gulf War, we did not occupy a country of
23 million.
As of this writing, the army reportedly has 23 combat brigades, 18 of
which are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, three of which are in refit,
one in Kosovo, and two in Korea, leaving nine brigades, or about 45,000
men, to pick up the slack anywhere and everywhere else. Though
independent echelons and the Marines increase this figure many fold,
they do not have sufficient lift and logistics, and even if they did it
would not be enough. This is as much the result of the Bush
Administration's failure to increase defense spending appreciably and
rebuild the military before (and even after) September 11, as the lack
of real shock and awe was the result of the administration's desire to
go to war according to a sort of just-in-time-inventory paradigm.
Managers rather than strategists, they did not understand the essence of
their task, which was not merely to win in Iraq but to stun the Arab
World. Although it is possible, with just enough force, to win, it is
not possible, with just enough force, to stun. The war in Iraq should
have been an expedition originating in the secure base of Saudi Arabia,
from the safety of which the United States could with immense, husbanded
force easily reach anywhere in the region. The eastern section of the
country, far from Mecca and Medina, fronting the sea, with high
infrastructure and large spaces for maneuver, basing, and an air-tight
defense, is ideal. Had the Saudis not offered this to us, we might have
taken it, which probably would have been unnecessary, given that our
expressed determination would likely have elicited an invitation. As it
was, we were willing to alienate the entire world so as to thrust
ourselves into a difficult situation in Iraq, but unwilling to achieve a
commanding position in Saudi Arabia for fear of alienating the House of
Saud. One might kindly call this, in that it is about as sensible as
wearing one's clothes backwards, "strategic hip hop."
It was, in any case, some kind of deliberate minimalism. Sufficiency was
the watchword. The secretary of defense wanted to show that his new
transformational force could do the job without recourse to mass. The
president wanted no more than sufficiency, because he had not advanced
and had no plans to advance the military establishment beyond the levels
established by his predecessor. With the magic of transformation, he
would rebuild it at glacial pace and little cost lest he imperil his own
and Republican fortunes by embarking on a Reagan-style restoration after
an election decided by as many voters as would fit in a large Starbucks,
and that he won by leaning, un-Reagan-like, to the center.
The war in Iraq was a war of sufficiency when what was needed was a war
of surplus, for the proper objective should have been not merely to
drive to Baghdad but to engage and impress the imagination of the Arab
and Islamic worlds on the scale of the thousand-year war that is to
them, if not to us, still ongoing. Had the United States delivered a
coup de main soon after September 11 and, on an appropriate scale, had
the president asked Congress on the 12th for a declaration of war and
all he needed to wage war, and had this country risen to the occasion as
it has done so often, the war on terrorism would now be largely over.
But the country did not rise to the occasion, and our enemies know that
we fought them on the cheap. They know that we did not, would not, and
will not tolerate the disruption of our normal way of life. They know
that they did not seize our full attention. They know that we have
hardly stirred. And as long as they have these things to know, they will
neither stand down nor shrink back, and, for us, the sorrows that will
come will be greater than the sorrows that have been.
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