The Western Way of - WHOOPS!
Andrew Bacevich has a useful if summary article on “The Islamic Way of War” in the latest American Conservative. In synopsis, Bacevich says that after a few decades of futilely trying to play the machine-age big military game, Muslim countries and sub- and transnational movements have given it up as a bad job. Bacevich’s thesis will raise hackles:
So it turns out that Arabs—or more broadly Muslims—can fight after all. We may surmise that they now realize that fighting effectively requires that they do so on their own terms rather than mimicking the West. They don’t need and don’t want tanks and fighter-bombers. What many Westerners dismiss as “terrorism,” whether directed against Israelis, Americans, or others in the West, ought to be seen as a panoply of techniques employed to undercut the apparent advantages of high-tech conventional forces. The methods em-ployed do include terrorism—violence targeting civilians for purposes of intimidation—but they also incorporate propaganda, subversion, popular agitation, economic warfare, and hit-and-run attacks on regular forces, either to induce an overreaction or to wear them down. The common theme of those techniques, none of which are new, is this: avoid the enemy’s strengths; exploit enemy vulnerabilities.
Normatively speaking, much of what Bacevich calls “the Islamic way of war” involves war crimes, especially perfidy and reprisals. At least some indignant Western complaint about “human shields” is special pleading coming from countries that station military bases in populated areas, but not all of it.
The other objection people would raise is that the Islamic Way only works because - Jimmy Johnson Rule violation coming! the West is too nice. The counter-objection is that Bacevich’s first example is the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, a war in which nobody accused the Soviets of being “too nice.”
Now for Bacevich’s all-important conclusion:
What are the implications of this new Islamic Way of War? While substantial, they fall well short of being apocalyptic. As Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has correctly—if perhaps a trifle defensively—observed, “Our enemy knows they cannot defeat us in battle.” Neither the Muslim world nor certainly the Arab world poses what some like to refer to as “an existential threat” to the United States. Despite overheated claims that the so-called Islamic fascists pose a danger greater than Hitler ever did, the United States is not going to be overrun, even should the forces of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraqi insurgents, and Shi’ite militias along with Syria and Iran all combine into a unified anti-Crusader coalition. Although Israelis for historical reasons are inclined to believe otherwise, the proximate threat to Israel itself is only marginally greater. Although neither Israel nor the United States can guarantee its citizens “perfect security”—what nation can?—both enjoy ample capabilities for self-defense.
What the Islamic Way of War does mean to both Israel and to the United States is this: the Arabs now possess—and know that they possess—the capacity to deny us victory, especially in any altercation that occurs on their own turf and among their own people. To put it another way, neither Israel nor the United States today possesses anything like the military muscle needed to impose its will on the various governments, nation-states, factions, and political movements that comprise our list of enemies. For politicians in Jerusalem or Washington to persist in pretending otherwise is the sheerest folly.
Much of the rhetoric about “dhimmitude” confuses, out of cowardice or ambition, the inability to impose Western will on Muslim territories with the inability to resist Muslim aggression. Take the recently concluded (or paused, if you’re a pessimist) Israel-Hezbollah War. Actually, take the 1982-1990 Israel-Hezbollah War. In 1982 Israel went into Lebanon intending to impose a particular order in the country’s South. Hezbollah was able to frustrate that aim and, a couple of decades later, compel Israel to quit the country entirely. What it has always been unable to do, and remains unable to do, is to take and hold even an inch of Israeli territory for so much as a day.
The rocket arsenal it built up since 2000 hasn’t changed that fact. It was useful in building pressure for a ceasefire. Hezbollah’s guerrilla force was, once again, effective at defending Lebanese territory against the Israeli Army. But Hezbollah as configured for the “Islamic Way of War” is not only incapable of destroying Israel, it can’t even conquer the disputed Shebaa Farms region.
There have been dreamers among the Palestinians who believed that if they could sustain a suicide terror campaign against Israel long enough that a critical mass of Israeli Jews would decide the Holy Land wasn’t worth the bother and would emigrate, with demography doing the rest. What the Palestinians have actually been able to achieve with the 1980s and 2000s intifadas is much narrower: Make the Palestinian territories ungovernable by Israel while sharply dividing Israel politically on what to do about it.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, the post-Baathist Sunni-based resistance has thwarted various announced US plans for the country, as have the Sadrists. Note that Iraq is largely ungovernable too.
The further outside the Arab/Muslim “homeland” you get, the less useful TIWOW is. Muslim forces can mount occasional attacks in Western countries. The 3/11 atrocities in Spain were ambiguously successful in convincing Spain to quit Iraq, though not Afghanistan. In a twisted and roundabout way, the enormities of September 11, 2001, did inspire the US to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia, but not in the ways most anti-American Muslims would have hoped.The attacks and near-attacks in Britain haven’t even (yet) driven Britain from Iraq.
The notion that the Islamic Way of War could achieve grandiose objectives, like imposing the much-feared “dhimmitude,” is just laughable. Forget for a moment that, if push comes to shove, we still have enormous stocks of conventional and nuclear weapons. There’s nothing inherently “Islamic” about TIWOW. Simply put, we could do it too if we had to.
Better for everyone if we didn’t and nobody else did either. Not only is the Islamic Way of War useless as a way of conquering foreign territory, it’s not even very effective at consolidating control and exerting monopolistic authority on your own turf. It’s an area-denial weapon that leaves you, the wielder, inconveniently still in the area. Our best hope, pipe dreams aside, is probably a future in which everyone regards TIWOW as a kind of slow-motion WMD that everyone possesses and avoids deploying, a future of universal inter-group deterrence. It will be very far from a utopia. It will be livable if we make it so.
Comment by abb1 —
August 29, 2006 @ 4:48 am
I hear ya, man.
But remember, this is the struggle to institute the New World Order, characterized by Bush 1 as ‘What We Say Goes’. Talk about ‘grandiose objectives’ and dhimmitude…
Comment by thoreau —
August 29, 2006 @ 7:46 am
I agree that they have a model to deny us control of their territory. I don’t really see that as a bad thing. As long as we can hit the people who hit us first, whether they’re in terrorist training camps, caves, military bases, whatever, to me it doesn’t matter whether we can subsequently sustain an occupation of the territory.
Deterrence comes not from the threat that we’ll occupy a city for the long term, but rather from the threat that we’ll show up and kill whoever sponsors an attack on us.
Sadly, this model of denying control of a territory probably works so well because too many people reject the rational response (leave) as a sign of weakness. The more stubborn we are, the longer we stay, the more we bleed. More importantly, the longer we stay and the longer we bleed, the more people can see that we aren’t able to control territory.
Comment by Hesiod —
August 29, 2006 @ 7:54 am
Back in the day, they used to call this stuff “Fabian tactics.”
Or “Fabian strategy” depending on your preference.
Comment by Hesiod —
August 29, 2006 @ 7:57 am
What the Islamic Way of War does mean to both Israel and to the United States is this: the Arabs now possess—and know that they possess—the capacity to deny us victory, especially in any altercation that occurs on their own turf and among their own people. To put it another way, neither Israel nor the United States today possesses anything like the military muscle needed to impose its will on the various governments, nation-states, factions, and political movements that comprise our list of enemies. For politicians in Jerusalem or Washington to persist in pretending otherwise is the sheerest folly.
Ummmm…no. If we adopt the tactics and strategy os a totalitarian empire, we could “pacify” these regions for decades.
But that would included adopting Saddam Hussein’s methods of control over the population. And while Bush probably would do that if he could get away with it (seeing as how he’s a psychopath or a sociopath), I’m guessing that even the bulk of the Republican party would part company with him on that eventually.
Comment by Johnathan Pearce —
August 29, 2006 @ 8:12 am
Terrific analysis Jim.
Comment by CharleyCarp —
August 29, 2006 @ 8:29 am
Comment 4 gets it exactly right. I would add that I think Palestinians can reasonably hope that Israelis will conclude that continued occupation of Gaza and the West Bank isn’t worth it. One down and one to go, in this view.
I’m also not sure the line dividing the Western from Islamic ways of war is that bright. In our lifetimes, the US has resorted, from time to time, to various elements of the IWOW, when they seemed the most likely to succeed. We still consider them illegal, and sometimes sanction the people who engage in them (although, as a society, we’re divided on this — you can find people ready, today, to nuke Teheran, if you look. Or people who justify our torturing captives because the other guys behead theirs.). We mostly don’t need these tactics, of course, because (a) we have the ability to engage head-on and (b) because we’re not trying to drive out an occupying force.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
August 29, 2006 @ 9:23 am
Gawd, we’re such pussies. Nice post, Jim. What is truly sad is that once upon a time, our government knew all of this. We’re led by idiots. Worse yet, they’re twice-elected idiots, which we means that absent some plague laying waste to Southern Republicans, we’ll be dealing with the problem of their underlying voters for the whole of my life.
Comment by Monte Davis —
August 29, 2006 @ 11:34 am
And that should pop a red flag at every new sighting of “pitiful, helpless giant” rhetoric, e.g. Gerard Baker recently:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2317980,00.html
An instant classic.
Comment by Dave Allan —
August 29, 2006 @ 12:01 pm
The counter-counter-objection is the Mongol conquest of the Khwarezmian Empire, persued with even less niceness than employed by the Soviets.
Comment by jlw —
August 29, 2006 @ 12:30 pm
I sometimes wonder what our cultural/political/military response would be if some hyper-tech Atlantis rose from the ocean and began dominating the globe. And if that Atlantis could project its power effortlessly while neutralizing our present-day arsenal and tactics. And if that Atlantis had some cultural practises that we found repulsive, but they found the essence of human interaction and wanted to protect and promote.
How would we respond? How qualitatively different would it be from the IWOW?
Comment by Mr. Obscura —
August 29, 2006 @ 12:44 pm
There’s nothing inherently “Islamic” about TIWOW. Simply put, we could do it too if we had to.
In the recent alternative history book Settling Accounts: Drive to the East, Harry Turtledove explores the issues of suicide bombers in his alternative USA/CSA. He describes it rightly as the only weapon the weak can use against the strong. Terrorism, even the modern variety, is only that. They strike at us the only way they can.
Your wish for a world where we all can do this but choose not to is a rare (for you) foray into Utopian thinking. It requires the strong to forgo attempting to impose their will on the weak. Right after they beat their swords into plowshares.
Or, I guess, the weak choosing not to resist the strong.
Comment by just sayin' —
August 29, 2006 @ 1:11 pm
What the Palestinians have actually been able to achieve with the 1980s and 2000s intifadas is much narrower: Make the Palestinian territories ungovernable by Israel …
The South African example has shown that after a generation or so of this, the territory is likely to become ungovernable by either internal or external authority. Whether the formerly occupied find that such an outcome is preferable to occupation/oppression would be an interesting subject for study.
The U.S. was exceptionally fortunate that the historic circumstances and personalities around the end of its Revolution combined to give it such a favorable outcome. It’s tragedy may be that so many Americans in the centuries since have mistaken that good luck for the result of inherent virtue.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 29, 2006 @ 1:16 pm
My only problem is this - isn’t there a difference between guerrilla warfare and terrorism (if you ignore the annoying rhetoric of classifying every attack on US troops as terrorism)? Or is terrorism inextricable from guerrilla warfare?
Comment by asteele —
August 29, 2006 @ 2:11 pm
Really doesn’t this just boil down to “conquering industrial countries, and subjucating their people is hard.”
Comment by Leonard —
August 29, 2006 @ 2:11 pm
Eric, I think the things are separable at least in theory. However there’s always going to be a huge gulf between the way an occupied people look at a particular event, as versus the occupiers.
It boils down to legitimacy. Me and my three good buddies hold a democratic vote, scrupulously informing you ahead of time, and allowing you to vote. The issue is: take Eric’s money and spend it on us all? The vote passes! Now I come to collect, and you shoot me. But my actions were democratically legitimate - the people had spoken! Is the shooting “resistance” or “terror”? The answer is different depending on whether or not you believe in democracy - to a democrat, it’s “terror”; to a libertarian, it’s “resistance”.
Comment by sean —
August 29, 2006 @ 2:49 pm
In response to no. 9, I hope we would deploy tactics closer to Gandhi’s or Martin Luther King’s than to Bin Laden’s or Hezbollah’s. Happily, it does not appear that we will ever need to find out the answer to this question.
Comment by Mona —
August 29, 2006 @ 11:06 pm
Jim, that is a simply outstanding post. I’ve been asking folks hither and yon who insist on this “existnetial threat” nonsense, to explain how the Islamic terrorists, or even nation-states friendly to and breeding them, could possibly constitute that. One answer was that a dirty bomb would destroy Manhattan and render it uninhabitable for decades.
Ok, assuming that is existential (as opposed to merely heinous), how is that scenario not a police and intelligence problem? What military action is going to stop a few dozen British Muslims from attempting, or god forbid, effectuating that?
Again, simply tremendous job on that post.
Comment by jlw —
August 30, 2006 @ 9:12 am
I am sitting in Manhattan at this very moment, and I’d like to say that while a radiation or thermonuclear attack on the city would be an existential threat to me, it’s utter folly to suggest that it would threaten the continuation of the Republic.*
Yes, New York City has an outsized economic and cultural place in the United States, and I’d be hard pressed personally to choose between a United States without the Five Boroughs and a New York City without the U.S. But, you know, it’s just one city. And if the system is so fragile that it can’t stand the loss of one city, even the most important one, then there’s a lot more wrong with the system than Islamic terror.
If we can muddle through the loss of New Orleans, Manhattan (and me . . . and mine) can be vaporized without destroying the Republic.
*Unless some use that attack as the pretext to toss aside republican virtues and institutions. That’s what I fear about the next attack. And I fear that’s what gives so many others a hard on for it.