Give War a Chance

Years from now, the old hard-line Busheviks are going to be saying the same thing the old Bolsheviks always said -- it would have worked, but no one gave it a chance. The latest governmental body to perform a bit of "push-back" to the administration on the Iraq war is Rand, which has now come out and said that there are better ways of dealing with terrorism and terrorists than overwhelming, raw, brute force. "But hey!" -- we can hear the neocons cry -- "We _like_ overwhelming, raw, brute force. Anything else is 'appeasement'". And of course, one might add that if it were _really_ overwhelming we would have won by now. As it is, fighting terrorists on their home turf is a lot like fighting the Viet Cong... which is a lot like walking into a room full of mosquitos with a machine gun. You can fire the machine gun for two hours, and the room will still be full of mosquitos. But in any case, Rand is counseling against anyone getting too fixated on the notion of the struggle with terrorism being a "war" in the traditional military sense (as if anyone with any brains hadn't already figured that out). In fact, they even recommend no longer calling it a "war on terror". Well, in the government tradition of word magic, this could, of course, be changed overnight, although it would necessitate recycling a few thousand tons of letterhead paper. But it's been done before, and it can be done again. No government agency or large military unit changes its "motto" any less often than once per year; one must keep up with the times, you know (which means -- with the latest media-generated buzzwords). But then the Rand people come up with something else: "Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors." Well, it seems like that's what we're already doing -- I mean, we do try them as criminals, not in ecclesiastical courts, right? But as usual, our choice of terminology serves to both highlight and perpetuate our ignorance, and hence increase our chances of failure. The thing is, _they_ perceive themselves as holy warriors, and their entire program, their propaganda, their strategy and tactics, are contingent on that fact. To not understand and acknowledge this is not unlike our failure, during the Cold War, to understand the true nature of communism -- as Whittaker Chambers pointed out in "Witness". If I could inscribe one more thing on the side of any building in Washington, it would be "know thine enemy" -- because this is where we seem to slip up most often. Because an enemy "shouldn't" be thinking in a certain way -- let's say about the military implications of their religious creed -- then we take it that they _aren't_ thinking in that way, and go on about our business assuming that either they want the same things we want -- you know, sex, power, money, and so on -- or that they're insane. The hardest thing to accept is that an enemy -- or an alleged one -- is just as intelligent as we are, and no less sane -- but that they simply have wildly different priorities and that is what motivates them. And further, that those priorities may well involve -- heaven forbid! -- religious ideas and values, which, as we all know because we've been taught this from the cradle, should _never_ constitute a reason for violence. And yet, for much of the world today, they do that very thing. So we always come off looking intentionally and stubbornly clueless.

But -- not to worry. The administration won't listen to the Rand folks anyway. Rand has a many-decades-long history of being the most highly-paid, and most ignored, of any "think tank" on the planet. It's not their fault, really. It's because the few politicians who occasionally fancy that they actually want objective analysis, when they see the result, they decide they didn't want it that badly after all. (This is often manifested by a statement along the lines of, "You people don't know what you're talking about." Or, "You people are full of crap." Or some other typically enlightened, open-minded response.) The fact is, ignoring good advice is the stock in trade of politicians, especially in the foreign policy area. These guys want what they want when they want it, and damn the consequences. And no, they never learn. Now that you know that, we call all relax. Right?