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9/16/04 The New MAD Islamic terrorists violate every law of war that has ever been understood (although they are not the first and won't be the last to do so). Since ancient times, when state-level cultures arose, built at first around cities and towns, then around regional kingdoms, confederacies, or empires, warfare has predominantly been between states. Some portions of the citizens of, or residents in, two rival states elected or otherwise chose their leaders, who propelled them into war against each other. They chose out armies and commanders, and sent the armies against each other. Whichever army defeated the other in the field would approach cities or towns and either accept their surrender or besiege them, eventually storming and destroying them if they would not capitulate. Citizens were, by this process, held liable for the actions of their leaders, and so there was incentive for citizens to choose leaders who would either win their battles for them or would not enter wars (although the latter was ultimately not much of an option, as things usually turned out). In modern times the situation has been mostly very similar. In WWII, after most of Europe and large portions of Asia had surrendered to, and thus allied themselves with, the Axis powers, we mounted invasions, defeated armies in the field, and laid waste the cities and towns of the enemy in the attempt to force capitulation. The citizens of nations that had surrendered to our enemies were very often harmed, and the citizens of the nations that had started the war were thoroughly devastated during the course of the war (as had the defensive nations that had managed not to capitulate). Each people was held responsible for the actions of the leaders they had either put in power or had, by their passivity, allowed to take power and maintain it. Muslims lived very well within that system for a very long time. During the Middle Ages, wars between Muslim states and European states swung by-and-large in favor of Muslims, until much of Europe's western and eastern extremes lay completely under Muslim control. The tide has since turned, and Muslims the world over are mostly either citizens of weak Muslim states (like Iran), or of more powerful but mostly secular Muslim states (like Saudi Arabia), or of weak to powerful states that are not in any way fundamentally Muslim (like the Philippines, France, and the United States). The states they control are too weak to challenge their rivals, and the states they do not control are unwilling to cede control to them peacefully. There is, therefore, a new revival of an old strategy used by barbarians in the ancient world (and all the way into the century before the last), which goes by the new name of "terrorism." The old barbarians were more warlike than the settled states, and so they would periodically engage in predatory raids designed to terrorize settled populations, steal their movable property and livestock, and occasionally to occupy territory for periods of time. When confronted by superior forces, they would melt into the countryside, live off what they had stolen, and then come back in subsequent years to find the weaker areas to attack. They were mobile, difficult to track, and thus hard to defeat. These were the Gauls and Germans of Europe, the Illyrian pirates of the Mediterranean, the Huns and Mongols of Asia, the "Dog Soldiers" of North America. The tactics have been adapted somewhat to modern situations, but the basic model is the same: The fighters disguise themselves and focus their attacks on the vulnerable, fading away when confronted by forces they cannot defeat face-to-face. They declare war on women, children, babies, innocents everywhere. They aspire to kill millions at a stroke to terrorize powerful nations into capitulating to the powerless minorities they claim to represent. And on the other hand, they have no "home base", no state that is directly responsible for their actions. They are brutal "free agents" in a war without borders. I do not fault President George W. Bush for the way he is fighting the war on terror. These people do operate to some extent under the official or unofficial auspices of certain states that we can identify, attack, and dismantle. But such connections are tenuous, by design. They have learned to use political correctness, which often foolishly maintains that one innocent life is too many to lose in pursuit of just goals, as a tool against nations that otherwise they could never even hope to defeat. They can kill thousands, and when the great nation retaliates and even one innocent baby dies, the liberal world reacts as though the great nation was the aggressor in an unjustified campaign against the poor and downtrodden. Bush is at least a strong enough a leader to buck that outrageous impulse of appeasement, and fight wars he knows will be unpopular with the unwise because he believes they are essential to turning the tide against the new barbarians. For now, there may not be political will to do anything else, because what I fear will eventually be necessary to stem the tide of this new barbarism will not sit well with liberal thinkers, or with anyone else who has not thoroughly considered the options available to us and the real responsibilities that all of us bear, as citizens of the world, both for those we elect and for those we tacitly allow to speak and act on our behalf. But let me present the case for a new doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). MAD was the doctrine of the military buildup under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980's. In Reagan's view, the best way to deter anyone from starting a nuclear war was to threaten outright annihilation in response to any nuclear attack. Such a policy would be meaningless in the absence of a real commitment to carry through with the threat. It was, therefore, the official policy of the United States that all the cities in the then-Soviet Union would be utterly destroyed by U.S. ICBM's in response to any attack. Men, women, children all would have died by the millions. We made the threat in the hope and expectation that the existence of the threat would prevent us ever having to carry through with it, but with the firm conviction that we would carry through with it if it happened, because an empty threat is no deterrent. Those who were horrified by the policy were horrified at the prospect of killing babies who had no choice about the government or peace or war. But their parents did have a choice. Not much, one might say, since the Soviet regime was a brutally repressive regime. But the Communist party had a hold on the empire because there were enough members to police it and keep people in line. But it is a historical fact that, if the people don't by and large go along with a regime, the regime does not survive. And ultimately the same is true of the Islamic terrorists' regime. Although the people do not vote them in or out of power, it is the direct or indirect support of people and governments that allows them to exist. The young men would not do what they do if they did not think martyrdom was theirs. If the women and children derided them and called them fools for fighting a battle, they would not have the will to fight it. In other words, the fuel for martyrdom is the implicit lionization of the martyr. These martyrs die for the goal of advancing Islam and increasing the reach of Islamic law. Therefore, anything we do to fight them that does not prevent the spread of Islam and Islamic law does nothing to deter men who are already willing to die in that cause. They die to liberate Muslims and make more room for them by destroying infidels. Unless their deaths manifestly do harm to the goal of liberation (as they define it) for Muslims, we will not remove the incentive for them to die and in the process kill and maim women and children. Therefore, in order to deter these fanatics, we must do two things: ensure that their martyrdom harms the spread of Islam and shrinks the reach of Islamic law, and that far from liberating Muslims, it actually strips from them things they currently have. Of course, we cannot do this indiscriminately by attacking the religion or all Muslims. What we must do is create an understanding that attacks on our civilians will be met both with attacks directed at the very attackers, the new barbarians themselves, and also with proportionately greater attacks on selected areas of the Muslim world that are identified ahead of time as being involved in the terrorist movement. We must use our intelligence to identify appropriate targets and announce them to the world. We must create objective criteria for including cities or areas on the target list, and for removing them. Some criteria for being added to or retained on the list:
To be removed from the list:
The list should be published frequently so the terrorists and the potential victims of reprisals for attacks they may make will be clear and obvious (and the targets should carefully be weighted to prevent the concentration of targets rich in certain sects or ethnic groups, so the new barbarians cannot cherry-pick and use us to help them cleanse groups of which they may want to be rid). People would be free to leave any of the potential targets should they anticipate that an attack by a barbarian group was imminent, putting them at risk. On one level, detractors will argue, this would increase the negative opinion of the United States in the Muslim world. Perhaps; but since their opinion is already negative enough that they are nurturing barbarians who will willingly and without compunction murder our children, I do not find this a compelling reason to reject the policy. If the people of Damascus are already so universally sympathetic to the new barbarians that the threat of the city being destroyed if the barbarians kill millions of Americans with dirty bombs would make them support the barbarians in their attempt to kill Americans, then the people of Damascus are our enemies and we have the right to kill them. If the people of Damascus are primarily concerned with survival, they will not support the barbarians and either their government will change to reflect that, or the terrorists will find themselves being reported by their neighbors and the attacks will not happen. The one thing I cannot imagine is the people of Damascus being apathetic when they find out that their city is at the top of a list of cities to be destroyed utterly if the barbarians ever successfully kill millions of Americans. This will force them to take sides and make a decision, something that none of the existing policies really requires. There isn't much controversy in Damascus today, because anyone who doesn't support the terrorists has nothing to lose by keeping quiet and everything to lose by making noise. Being marked out as a hostage to the actions of the terrorists levels the playing field: keeping quiet is at least as dangerous as speaking out to stop the terror. The only other serious objection I can anticipate is that we are "sinking to the level" of the new barbarians by holding the "innocent" people of various Middle-Eastern cities hostage. I think the more apt proverb is that "turnabout is fair play." The new barbarians are holding our children--my children--hostage to their megalomaniacal ambitions. It is eminently fair to hold their families and children hostage to a much higher ambition: to deter them from murdering our children. The truth is, we probably cannot stop the terrorists indefinitely from murdering many of our innocent children. And they cannot stop us from retaliating and destroying their children. That is Mutually Assured Destruction. We have to throw down the gauntlet and make it clear to them that killing our children is sowing the wind, and that they will reap the whirlwind if they do. If they choose to make their unjustified attacks to kill our children, then we do no wrong by carrying through with the threat that should have deterred them if they cared about their own, and that should have motivated their own to reject them, to root them out, to expose them and hand them over to us to be destroyed to save their own children from destruction. As it is now, they can laugh at us when we make threats, because they don't fear death for themselves and they know we are powerless to harm their interests while we keep our hands tied behind our backs. But if they have to picture their homes smoking rubble, their families corpses, they cannot laugh. They can hate us more, and wish more fervently that they could kill us all without putting their dreams and aspirations to death, but they cannot prevent us from destroying their dreams utterly if they foolishly pursue the goals our policy will have rendered flatly unattainable. We can take away their power over us by asserting our power over everything they hold dear, and only by doing so. And the best hope of this policy will be that it will deter those barbarians and at the same time enlist the fabled "Arab street" to our cause, encouraging them to root out the barbarians because that is the only way to guarantee that there will still be a street anywhere in those nations that would otherwise never have fully joined our cause. It might take one or two more atrocities like 9/11, or worse, before the population of this nation is sufficiently outraged to make such a stark policy politically viable. Or perhaps an extended debate would make it politically viable right now, if the idea can make it past the liberal media that already finds it hard to label these new barbarians accurately for fear of offending someone. But eventually, one way or the other, the bloodthirsty murderers will reap the whirlwind for their chosen people, if they persist in pursuing their evil aims. Modified: 09/20/2004 |
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