Newt Gingrich and WW IV
Gingrich has a long and fascinating post entitled "What If? An Alternative History of the War since 9/11" up on his web site. I recommend reading through the entire thing as it is very good and consolidates several important ideas into a coherent vision of the Islamic problem facing the U.S. and the rest of the free world.
Newt says:
Six years after the attack of 9/11/2001, the difference between the debate we ought to be having and the debate we are having is staggering.
The gap between where we are and where we should be is so large that it seems almost impossible to explain why the Petraeus Report, while important, will be a wholly inadequate explanation as to what is required to defeat our enemies and secure America and her allies.
Instead it seems more effective to describe this dramatic gap today by imagining how things might have turned out differently had we made different decisions for our national security starting the night of September 11, 2001. What if we had begun a great national dialogue about the nature of our enemies, the seriousness of their intent, the scale of their capabilities, and the requirements of victory over them? What might then have happened?
Good questions. Gringrich goes on to answer those questions in too much detail to recount it all here. Read it.
More:
Beyond the Petraeus Report, we need a report on the larger war with the Irreconcilable Wing of Islam. This enemy is irreconcilable with the modern civilized world because its values would block any woman from being in this room, having a job, voting, being educated. It is irreconcilable because it cannot tolerate other religions or other life styles. It represents what some have called an Islamo-fascist approach to imposing its views on others and as such it is a mortal threat to our way of life, to freedom, and to the rule of law.
…
[CIA Director] General Hayden summarizes the fight at hand with these words:
We who study and target the enemy see a danger more real than anything our citizens at home have confronted since our Civil War….
This war is different. In a very real sense, anybody who lives or works in a major city is just as much a potential target as the victims of 9/11, or the London subway bombings, or the strikes in Madrid, or any of the other operations we’ve seen in Morocco, Jordan, Indonesia, Algeria, Pakistan, Kenya, and elsewhere.
Our very survival as a free people is challenged by a large threat and defeating it on a worldwide basis is inherently going to involve a large effort. That is why Norman Podhoretz has called it World War Four to compare its scale with World Wars One and Two and with the 44 year long Cold War which he calls World War Three.
…
At the end of the day are free people celebrating because the American people have sustained freedom against evil. Or, are violent, evil enemies of freedom celebrating because the Americans have been defeated?
Life would be easier if there was a more modulated answer. There is not.
There is much, much more. Read it. (Is the horse dead yet?)
At the conclusion of his post Gingrich says this:
The problem is not with the American people.
The problem is with our politicians, our news media and our bureaucratic elites.
They are afraid to tell the American people the truth.
They are afraid to explain the scale of the threat and the inevitable scale of the needed response.
Unfortunately this is not entirely correct. Yes, our politicians have failed us by avoiding the real issues, making a questionable decision about invading Iraq, and generally concentrating on their own petty power squabbles instead of doing what needs to be done.
But we know that they’re doing it and we don’t care. Why? Because acknowledging the reality of Hayden’s world is simply too frightening an act for many (most?) Americans to undertake. I mean, we’ve got 200 channels on DirecTV and all of them are more fun than trudging off to war in Iran or Syria and we don’t want to be inconvenienced by the necessity of dealing with these people.
In short, Americans are in the same place as the Brits were in the 1930s, appeasing a radical, violent ideological enemy that has no interest in compromise and no ability to conceive of their own wrong-headedness. Naturally Gingrich does not miss this obvious parallel. Nor should we.
Cross-posted at Black Shards.
Natch a good one on Gingrich, definitely. He’s absolutely right, methinks.
However, I am in some dispute as to the level of arbitration set by politicians and the media. I am aware of the tendency of a self-serving class of politicians/aristocrats/well-to-dos/other power-having people, not reflective of the wishes and conditions of the people, to coalesce and act.
But with the effects of power, democracy, the market etc. to take into consideration, can we not blame some of the unseriousness and lack of reality-based debate post-9/11 on the US population or US culture in general/at the time?
The US population can get what it wants at any time, and while there are manifold and rigid movements to the left and right impeding them and keeping them complacent, unaware of reality and distracted, I still feel a lot of the complaining about politicians (see all identical editorial cartoons about John Q being all fatigued about attack ads and the political season) is a substitute for actions that require change on a plebeian level.
I should have said “I am also in dispute”.
Xel: I thought that was Marc’s point in the penultimate paragraph.
I think the part about the public’s willingness to embrace the dangers is quite true. Much easier to put one’s head in the sand.
But I think Gingrich is right to blame the politicians who don’t clearly send the message that this isn’t wise. Americans will prefer to go about business as usual, unless given good reason to make changes in their lives.
And when you look at the actions of Democrats, it strikes me that much of the intel must be confirming the Bush administration’s world view on GWOT- otherwise why would the Dems be ’spineless’ in opposing him? When the GOP controlled Congress, you could chalk up their agreement with Bush to partisanship, but obviously that’s not the case now. With the hard left pushing for more opposition on issues like Gitmo, wiretapping, and Iraq, why would the Dems not act more vigorously- unless they actually also see the need for these policies?
It seems to me that the politicians of both parties do see the dangers but they choose to act in ways that support their own self interests, while simultaneously supporting policies that seem to contradict what they say in their rhetoric. Bush and the GOP pursue a very aggressive national security policy without a simultaneous call for the civilian population to adjust their lifestyles, as though a global war on terror should be without cost. And then the Dems choose to use rhetoric which sounds as though they oppose the aggressive foreign policy, when in actuality few of them are proposing anything substantially different.
Oh please, we haven’t signed any treaties with bin Laden giving away Czechoslovakia.
And the whole concept of this being WW IV is grossly exaggerated; we’re not going to see bin Laden’s tank divisions driving across France any time soon. We’re far more powerful than our opponents, there’s no way they can conquer or destroy America, unless for some reason we let them. And in spite of having 200 cable channels, I don’t think Americans are at the point of surrender yet, whatever the war hawks may say.
In terms of hard military power, you are absolutely right, Tom. The trouble is that the current enemies of the US understand that as well and so they’ve realized that there are other ways to beat us rather than in a straight military matchup. They’ve seen that we don’t handle insurgency warfare well and that when it comes to prolonged conflicts, Americans tend to waver and question our involvement rather than have a steeled resolve to fight to the finish. Al Qaeda is masterful at exploiting these weaknesses.
You’re right, but in the end, what of it? America isn’t going to fall from superpower status because Osama and company set off bombs and participate in guerilla wars. Hell, AQI isn’t nearly as important an actor in Iraq as the Sunni insurgents or the Shiite militias.
I agree, we don’t handle insurgencies well, but I would argue that insurgencies represent the desires and disagreements between groups within countries, not part of some global Al Qaeda campaign.
In addition, I would question how much insurgencies affect the US, unless they’re happening here.
Tom, what would a Vietnam-like withdrawal from Iraq be but another parallel to Nazi appeasement?
Newt has some good ideas, but he sounds like a general still fighting the last war.
The problem IS, and will always be with the American people. They elect the phonies, they unquestioningly go along with the media, they do not say, when WMDs were not found, ‘Hey, let’s get the hell out of this alley with rabid dogs, and the Am people still complacently shop w/o any real savings, as mortgages and outsourced industrialized jobs slip away.
They also let themselves be bamboozled by phonies like Newt or Lieberman or Gore- or Hillary, Rudy, etc., then toss up their hands and whine.
More than anything, Americans love to whine- on blogs, in questionnaires, about abortions, schools, stem cells, global warming.
What they don’t like is REAL action. Those who would do things are ‘radicals’ or ‘dangerous.’
The comparison to the Fascists in the 1930s is fallow and callow. There are many reasons, but by far the biggest is that the Islamists are no threat to the world. A smart policy and stepped up security would isolate and shrink their numbers rather easily. Hitler had the greatest war machine in world history in the late 30s. The red Army was the largest in terms of manpower ever assembled. They were threats. A few thousand psychotic sheepherders with fantasies of afterlife virgins simply are not as menacing.
A far greater danger lies, longterm, not from terrorists, but from organized crime syndicates. Since 9/11, org crime has come back with a vengeance after all the successes in the 90s. They are bigger, more diverse, and more Americans die as a result of their actions than all those from 9/11 and the 2 wars. Yet not one peep from the media, nor the public.
It’s the electorate, stupid!
Tom,
My point about insurgencies is that Iraq is being exploited by al Qaeda because they are well aware that we haven’t understood counter-insurgency warfare well. All al Qaeda had to do in Iraq was find the fault lines between the sectarian groups and leverage them to their advantage. Al Qaeda does not need to present a military challenge to the US, it simply creates the kind of military challenge that we aren’t good at handling and then sits back and watches the show.
To which you could reply, “well, then we obviously shouldn’t have taken the bait and gotten into Iraq”, but if we hadn’t walked into this trap then they’d have gotten to us in other ways. They discovered that Afghanistan was the USSR’s achilles heel, and they’d already gotten to us in a minor (but tragic) skirmish in Mogadishu. And if this tactic didn’t work, they had others in their arsenal, like the attacks on embassies and the Cole, and of course the coup de grace on 9/11.
So my opinion is that Iraq could have gone much differently if we’d have anticipated the trap; we could have been much more successful if we’d have continued the provisional govt for a longer period (and more effectively and less corruptly) rather than worrying about international opinion that we were imperialists. And if we’d not rushed into the elections and had not started drawing down troops in 05 (bowing to domestic political pressure), we’d have been more able to prevent or respond effectively to the Samarra bombing. We underestimated gravely the ability of al Qaeda to exploit the sectarian tensions in Iraq.
Damn Wordpress didn’t record my comment!
Well anyway, here’s the shorter version of what I originally wrote:
Marc–
Iraq is not Europe of the 1930’s. We aren’t facing a conventional war against a major industrialized nation, we haven’t signed or a likely to sign any peace treaties with Al Qaeda, and we aren’t going to be invaded by Osama and company should we withdraw from Iraq. Hell, Vietnam isn’t Europe of the 1930’s either. It was a guerilla war by people unhappy with their corrupt government. And North Vietnam was no military threat to us (we won the Cold War, after all).
Christine–Perhaps Al Qaeda would have “gotten us in some other way, but it isn’t right to compare the bombing of the USS Cole with the insurgency in Iraq. I’d take the occasional bombing overseas to the daily insurgent attacks in Iraq any day. I don’t think anything would have worked in Iraq, but that’s debate for another day.
And all in all, I’d like to object to this “WW IV” meme that I’ve been hearing from the Right. I might make things more exciting (”A battle for survival between two opposed forces!”), and it would be nice to bring back some of the WWII unity. BUT, this isn’t that sort of conflict. Hell, a few dozen FBI agents could have easily stopped 9/11, the worst terrorist attack ever in the US.
I’m sorry, but they’re not the Nazis, and this isn’t a World War.
Tom:
I couple of airport screeners like we have today could have stopped 9/11.
The whole WW4- I guess the Cold war is WW3- meme is silly because no one really takes them seriously because they are not a serious threat. All they are is a political opportunity. Has any politician EVER benefited more from a war or the 9/11 attacks the way W has?
The real q is- will the idiotic Am electorate go for more of the same old same old, and elect any Republican or Hillary, or will they go with Obama, Edwards, or possibly Bloomberg?
I say the former, for the blogosphere must be fed.
Tom,
I don’t agree with the WWIV meme either, mainly for the reasons you’ve already mentioned. It’s simply not the same kind of conflict, at all.
But I don’t think you have to call it a world war to take it seriously, and I don’t see what I’d consider the appropriate level of seriousness in your remark:
It was precisely because we did agree to “take the occasional bombing overseas” that we got 9/11. You and Dan can argue that the FBI or airport screeners could have prevented that, but they didn’t- because we didn’t take the threat seriously enough to have that kind of vigilance.
CS-
There is a difference between letting the roaches have free run of the house, and nuking it- which only produces super-roaches like we have now.
Org’s like terrorists are houses of cards- like org. crime. One does not defeat them by nuking a family, cuz the next family moves in. You beat them by getting them to turn on one another, while you watch.
Bush has acted when he shd not, has acted like a bull in the vchina shop when he shd have soft-shoed, and has shown he not only does not know the difference, but he has no idea what the metaphors mean.
Question: Does anyone reading this really feel that The War On terror will be any more successful than The War On Drugs?
Dan, I do think that the so-called WoT would be better prosecuted in the example of the Cold War rather than invading countries with insufficient forces.
But I don’t think you’re giving sufficient respect to the amount of damage terrorist-style operations can do to European and American societies.
No, they do not have the numbers or equipment to defeat us right now. But as you said, it’s not a conventional war and they’re not going to try to slug it out toe-to-toe with us. If they have their way it’s going to be death by 1000 cuts, undermining our economy and confidence and restricting the reach of our businesses.
But they’re not going to quit until someone makes them and I don’t see anyone but the U.S. admitting it’s a real problem.
The Bolsheviks were a joke too, don’t forget.
Marc: If you defeat the ways they can terrorize- w stepped up security, the 1000 slashes won’t produce a 1000 cuts. It’ll leave them w a dull blade, and an increased lack to keep slashing.
The best analogy is to org crime because that’s exactly what terrorists are. Their motive is not profit, but their methods are much the same- against each other and polite society.
But again, the Red Army or Rommel’s war machine they are not. Overreactions like Iraq only help them, while measured surgical attacks can decimate them physically, as well as their will. Bushco simoply lacks the smarts and patience.