Why The "War On Terror" Isn't – And Shouldn't Have Been Called – A "War"

(An early 2004 letter in response to PoliSciProf's terror-war assessment, which called upon "terror war" analysis from Strategic Forecasting, a hawkish intelligence consulting firm on K St. in D.C.. PoliSci and the Stratfor people were positing that the Iraq invasion was a brilliant anti-terror move that would project American power throughout the Middle East.

--- HistoryBuff)

In fighting Al-Qaeda terror, a "war" model is self-defeating.
To speak of Al-Qaeda attacks (e.g., WTC,Spain) in terms of "offensives," "counterattacks" and other conventional military terms is useless. Their non-war is a pure advertising campaign -- a war of criminal publicity stunts; of information, some of it conveyed in the bodies of dead civilians. To say that they were or are "losing" because no Mideast nation has yet gone up in fundamentalisty smoke or declared war on us is ridiculous: Al-Qaeda, being religiously/ideologically motivated, has no timetable. As long as they stay in biz, they can proclaim the eventual triumph of their God/creed without contradiction. (And if they go down fighting, there'll be plenty of successors to make the same claim.) And the way we're blowing it, we may prove them right sooner rather than later.
We, being politically/economically motivated, are in a big hurry. So long as we insist on thinking of this as a "war," we'll have all kinds of all-but-impossible goals demanding speedy achievement: pacified territory, dead bodies of enemies, political victory -- and, above all, control of oil. The hardball tactics we use to achieve any of these goals are more than likely to make our work even harder.
To reiterate: In the "war" model, they succeed by staying alive, just by walking, talking. and occasionally smuggling out a tape or blowing up a building. We lose so long as they exist, lose more any time they achieve anything at all, and every minute we fail to achieve our own all-but-impossible goals.
If we'd refused to use the "war" model -- if we'd treated them from the beginning as criminal publicity-seekers, marginalized them as extremists to whom no reasonable Muslim could relate -- and gone after them (post-Afghanistan) with every bit of the world's unstinting support for an international police manhunt, we could not possibly be worse off then we are now, and would probably be stronger and safer in every imaginable way.
Treating them as criminals would have dissed them, not dignified them. We would have honored ourselves. Instead, we have shamed ourselves before the world by acting on the "war" model.


A "War" Label's Bad Enough -- Actually Invading Iraq Is Disastrous


To think that we can finish off -- or even hamper -- Al-Qaeda by dominating the Middle East from Baghdad is even more absurd than thinking we could defeat the Viet Cong, the Pathet Lao and the Khmer Rouge by dominating Southeast Asia from Saigon.
Al-Qaeda doesn't need Syria. It doesn't need Iraq or Libya or Saudi Arabia. It doesn't really need huge training camps, etc., and will always be able to find individual sponsors and tiny hidey-holes -- essentially, pockets of negative opinion created by our bad policy and worse behavior.
As long as a bunch of AQ operatives can stay out of sight in a place like America or Spain -- or even Pakistan or Indonesia -- and now and then pull off a bombing, they're in business. Nations can only stop that stuff with improved domestic security.
But if we insist on being in Iraq, we make scoring (for them) as easy as smuggling an operative into an all-but bordlerless state, where he can easily pick up one of the countless weapons of ordinary destruction that we left lying around and pull a trigger in our general direction. We'll NEVER stop that, except by cutting off AQ's supply of recruits -- and we're Osama's best recruiters. (Is this a good time to mention that even if we could keep all foreign fighters out of Iraq, we've pissed off enough Iraqi minutemen to keep us under fire for decades to come? Or that a plenty-big-enough-to-cause-terror-trouble percentage of the world Muslim population is going to hate us, not only for as long as we're in Iraq, but so long as we continue unconditional support for Israel's slow morph into a sickening parody of the Nazi regime?)


Fighting Every Guy In The World Who Has A Beef And A Bomb


In sum, when we call this a "war," we lose. We cannot win, for all the tactical and strategic reasons suggested above, and most importantly because the "war" model, once acted upon, turns us into enemies of Islam.
Sure, we want to make it clear that we just want to obliterate "Islamists," but occupying Iraq has made us behave like monsters to both Sunni and Shia. What's that look like to Muslims everywhere? The "war" model of anti-terror strategy has put us at war with, what? A quarter of the world? Smart move.
Besides, Bush says we're at war not just with "Islamists," but with "terrorists" everywhere, which is like saying we're at war with everybody who has a beef and a bomb.
It would be nice to think that the declaration of such an obviously insatiable objective was merely stupid -- and it is, in the ultimately self-defeating way that Joe McCarthy's ever-widening witch hunts were stupid, or that Hitler's declaration of war on World Jewry was stupid. But such Orwellian, keep-the-people-frightened-of-a-perpetual-enemy tactics tend to work like hell in the short run -- and the short run is all Bush needs to make some blunders from which we may never stop suffering.
Bush is the world's first completely inarticulate demagogue, and his handlers intend to keep us scared of the shadowy towelhead conspiracy for as long as it takes to grab the oil, roll back the New Deal, pare down those overrated rights to dissent, etc.. Yes, a crackdown on social spending and the Bill of Rights is concomitant with the "Bush Doctrine"'s unprecedented belligerence. You can't fund endless discretionary war without squeezing the poor and middle class, and without stifling dissent. We're not going to get control of Mideast oil much more cheaply, in terms of individual civil liberties, than Rome got control of Egypt's corn. To think otherwise is naive.
And by the by, I'm not paranoiacally positing that the Bushies are clearly imagining and planning every step of this process. Almost no one involved in transforming Rome from a republic to an empire wanted it to happen: It was the inevitable result of OTHER things that they wanted to happen, like control of the corn supply, a little more power for Caesar and his big-money friends, a defensive reaction by their rivals, etc., etc. Everyone was improvising in the overall sense, but, because they did not question their particular notions and selfish aims, no compromise could preserve the republic.


Oh, Yeah: It's Still About The Texas Tea

I mentioned oil back there. Let's not fuck around: The only reason we care more about Iraq than about sub-Saharan Africa is oil. The only reason we care more about Qatar than about Afghanistan (which we totally ignored post-Soviet-war and are all but ignoring now, post-Osama) is oil.
As Spain is not transformed by train bombings, we were NOT transformed by 9/11, except insofar as our leaders led us to believe we were. And they led us to think that, stoked our 9/11 panic and overreaction in every possible way, because they wanted to take us to war for oil.
The reason the Bush Administration failed to articulate the dominate-the-Mideast-to-squeeze-out-terrorism strategy attributed to it by the authors of the Stratfor paper is because that's not the administration's strategy.
The Bushies had no trouble articulating lots of false reasons for war: They could have articulated a real one, if they'd thought we wanted to hear it. They did not, and it wasn't because they thought we wouldn't embrace an Iraq-is-the-way-to-Osama rationale. They actually floated that one, and America LOVED it. But the Bushies -- "former" oil company execs, consultants, etc., almost to a man ((and woman -- Condi has a tanker named after her)) gave it no more weight than the other bits of chaff they were throwing out. They (quite rightly) didn't think we wanted to hear their real reason: to secure oil access.
Why not level with us? Heck, fighting terrorist towelheads for oil isn't too crass for most Republicans, so long as you can convince 'em it'll be a short and glorious war. But Americans will expect to own that oil, to enjoy empire by paying less at the pump. The Bushies don't want to have to explain that our army is securing the oil fields for the benefit of their lifelong friends in the multinational oil companies, who treat the US oil consumer with the same grateful deference the major drug companies give to the US sick old guy.
As it turns out, Iraqi resistance and other factors are turning the shiv too soon for Big Oil's -- and the administration's -- liking. Controlling a major Mideast oil producer the old-fashioned, gunboat way hasn't turned out to be the cakewalk Rumsfeld planned for. Prince Bandar had promised to keep the price of oil down until after the 2004 election, but even the Saudis have been unable to make the Bush clique's mistakes disappear, vis a vis pennies per barrel.
If the election were held any further into the heating oil season, the Bushies would have terrible touble disassociating themselves from price hikes that will make Enron's rape of California look like charity.


Terror, WMDs, Democracy And Other Fairy Tales


This isn't paranoia; this is just the obvious, albeit unpleasant, lesson of the history of discretionary wars. Did the American people end up owning and reaping the profit from the banana plantations, banks, railroads and other interests we rescued for corporate interests over the last century's Latin American interventions?
People who profess pragmatism should get honest: What will historians of 200 years from now say this Iraq invasion was about? Saying it's about terror and 9/11 and democracy will be like saying the Spanish-American War was about the Maine and upholding the ideals of Jose Marti. Yeah, right. That war was about investments (sugar and railroads in particular) and empire – coaling stations, the transoceanic canal, and other infrastructural facts of being a world naval power, circa 1900. And this one is about oil. The rest is the fascinating, endlessly debatable but ultimately nonessential window-dressing of history.
The Bushies' only effective planning for the invasion reveals their true focus: They didn't expend a moment's thought on ANY of the aspects of post-war Iraq that would be essential to securing WMDs, promoting democracy or -- in Stratfor's theory -- moving on to other ops, leaving one's rear clear.
They didn't think about protecting ministries or schools or hospitals or borders or the "WMD" sites or armories or banks or telecommunications hubs... nada. They had planned to send troops only to the oil facilities. Period. (Oh, OK: They'd take a few presidential palaces, for office space, and of course they'd build a bunch of bases, to protect the oil.) They figured if they took Saddam's crude, they'd have everything worth having, and the rest would take care of itself.
Oh, sure, they heard from neoncon thinkers about this regional domination thing, and it certainly seemed that having a mess of troops in the region ought to calm the natives down, chill the Syrians, maybe make life easier for the Israelis -- but the Bushies clearly weren't focused on that aspect.
They are people of perhaps high raw smarts but exceedingly limited political, moral, historic and strategic imagination. Anyone with a long-range mind assessing this invasion -- whether as the neocon's regional-domination gambit, as a grab for oil, or even, God help us, as a bold blow for democracy in the war against terror -- would have asked, "Once we're there, what's to keep a thousand local guys with AKs and RPGs from dominating us?"
And that doesn't mean beating us on the battlefield. It means making us behave like British redcoats in America, like the Gestapo in France, like Tiger Force in the Central Highlands of Vietnam -- like all occupying armies getting hurt by enemies indistinguishable from the resentful local civilians. Start acting that way, and you've already lost, no matter how long it takes for defeat to come.
And however you define "victory" in the "terror war" -- as killing and jailing terrorists faster than Al-Qaeda and friends can train 'em, or as winning Muslim hearts and minds -- Abu Ghraib means we've already lost Iraq.
And Guantanamo means we've already lost the world.

--- HistoryBuff