You know, as in that old axiom of futility, "Generals are always planning to fight the last war"?In the 1930s, the generals of France were preparing to fight the battles of 1914-1918. In the 1910s, they were preparing to refight the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. And when American generals squared off for the Civil War, the big shots were hooked on the doctrines of Napoleon and Jomini.
And so it goes, back to the first hominid who was counting on teeth and claws -- until his opponent picked up a rock.
America, the battle of the Shoe Bomber is over. Al-Qaeda is as likely to send over another sneaker attack as it is to buy tickets for another five Arabic-looking guys with box cutters. It's not likely to send another tender full of kaboom out to a U.S. Navy vessel in a Yemeni port, either.
Strangely enough, Japan didn't spend the rest of WWII trying to sneak up on Hawaii, either.
In fact, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 have something in common besides the obvious: Both were the opening gambits of limited-objective wars.
Japan didn't imagine it could "conquer" America, any more than Al-Qaeda imagined that 9/11 would "defeat" us. Japan's war planners hoped to sink enough of America's Pacific fleet to buy many months' grace for its occupation and fortification of oil-rich Southeast Asia. They gambled that, by the time we were ready to strike back, their position would be too strong to make war worth our while.
They gambled wrong.
Osama and company's 9/11 objective was not to conquer America -- as if! -- but to reap tremendous political profit in the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda bet that America's overkill response would galvanize anti-imperialist, anti-Western elements from Algiers to Sarawak.They bet right.
End of war.
That's right. In a limited war, the player who achieves his war aims and is alive to tell the tale is the winner. Al-Qaeda got what it wanted (i.e., a hell of a lot of publicity and recruiting momentum) and we didn't. (We didn't get Osama, we didn't get all the Taliban, we didn't get a stable Afghanistan --- hell, we didn't even get to keep our allies' sympathy.)
War is an instrument of policy, and unless you are so cynical as to believe that neocons in the Bush Administration knew of and welcomed a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil (as an answer to the prayers of the Project for a New American Century) you have to concede that the "War of 9/11" --- including the Battle of the Shoe Bomb -- is a done deal. The Bush Administration certainly thought so, as it settled for far less than Osama's head on a pike and started a brand-new war of its own.
It's worth noting that the essential strategy of terror/guerrilla warfare is to tie up maximal amounts of your enemy's manpower, wealth, resources and strength-of-morale at minimal effort and cost.
I got dizzy, waiting for my shoes to be screened, when I tried to calculate the extra hours expended by all the Americans who would have to arrive hours early and wait in airport lines that day so they could give up their toenail clippers and penknives (while the smokers among them were permitted to carry on high-tech lighters that would have made Richard Reid a successful martyr). My head swam, imagining the sky-high stack of dollars being spent on airport security measures and forces -- not to mention on Homeland Security pork projects like far-from-the-border Border Patrol stations and infrared goggles for the East Nowheresville Volunteer Fire Department -- that aren't doing a thing to protect us against the next war.
But individual Americans, I noticed, are often more flexible and foresightful than their leaders. The man in the picture, glimpsed in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, had embraced the Transportation Safety Administration's recommendation that air travelers wear slip-on footgear. Since we're forced to facilitate our own full-body frisking, why stop with shoes? Like Americans everywhere who'd happily surrender a few "rights" to score some "security," he's ready to slip out of something more comfortable...
--- HistoryBuff
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