This Week’s Timely Lesson from Iraq

“The Christian missionaries came to Papua New Guinea two hundred years ago,” said an anthropologist to my wife and me over cocktails one night in Alotau, Papua New Guinea. “The missionaries had an abundance of bibles, and the local indigenous people had all the land. A century and a half later, the local people had all the bibles and the missionaries had all the land.”

I was reminded of this during the last two days. On Tuesday (August 24th) the last of the American combat troops left Iraq, and the following day the insurgents (or al-Qaeda, or the Taliban, or whatever the hell we call the bad guys this week) unleashed a torrent of terror across Iraq, killing at least 60 people in a dozen or more coordinated locations, just to prove that they still had real power. When the United States unlawfully invaded Iraq seven years ago, Iraq had dysfunctional and internationally distasteful leadership and America had an abundance of deadly munitions. Seven years later, Iraq has an abundance of deadly munitions, and the United States has dysfunctional and internationally distasteful leadership (mostly at the congressional level).

From Vietnam to Cambodia to Somalia to Lebanon to Iraq to Afghanistan, the lesson is the same— when the U.S. comes into your land to bring liberty and democracy, it’s a death sentence for your innocent people.

I Can Let You Look At It, But You Can’t Touch It

A group of radical, dark-skinned, fundamentalist Muslims plans to bomb an American law enforcement target, and they are labeled as “Islamic terrorists.” Nine whacked-out, white, fundamentalist Christians plan to bomb an American law enforcement target, and they are labeled as “Hutaree militia.”

Islamic madrassas whip dark-skinned Muslims into a frenzy of anger at the U.S. government, and they are creating “radicalized terrorists.” Tea Party assemblies whip white Christians into a frenzy of anger at the U.S. government, and they are creating “patriotic activists.” Frankly, other than calculated semantics, I don’t see any difference.

At last week’s Conference on World Affairs, one of the discussions dealt with “Modern Crusaders, religion in the military.” Ike Wilson, a professor of modern warfare tactics at West Point, expounded on the influence of fundamentalist Christianity in the conduct of our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The indoctrination starts early. Each Sunday morning, freshly enlisted Marine Corps trainees at boot camp are given the choice between cleaning latrines or attending a fundamentalist Christian worship service. And then, once they are deployed to a war zone, they shoot their bullets through gun barrels that are engraved with Old Testament bible verses right next to the weapon serial number. Troops are supplied with small Christian bibles that have been translated into the local Islamic, Middle-Eastern language, and they are expected to leave these bibles behind in houses where they conduct “searches,” although Pentagon rules prevent them from personally handing the bibles to local Muslim citizens. This nuanced religious conversion policy is typical of a pervasive Pentagon schizophrenia that reminds me of the high school girl who tells her boyfriend, “I can let you look at it, but you must promise not to touch it.”

If al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters find one of the small Christian bibles in a private home, they routinely murder all the residents of that house. One Pentagon estimate puts the number of these “religiously motivated” murders at a level equal to the number of civilians accidentally killed by misguided American bombs and gunfire. If these murders are reported at all, they’re typically dismissed as “sectarian conflict.” It’s easy to say that fundamentalist, radicalized Islam is insane, but then how can we not say the same for fundamentalist Christianity? We can’t condemn one and embrace the other without sacrificing our intellectual integrity. Personally, I don’t see how we can have it both ways.

A Brief History of World War III... 9-11 Was Worse Than We Thought

The essence of naiveté is the failure to imagine. We had always assumed that our enemies were distant and compartmentalized. We assumed that our sophisticated and undetectable surveillance watched them, and distantly tracked their movements and accessed their authenticity while wielding our own unimaginable authority, endeavoring all the while to verify predicted tropisms that had been perfectly foreseen in our war game planning.

Looking back now, the surprising thing about 9-11 is that, at the time, it came as such a surprise. Pearl Harbor had also come as a complete surprise, but that attack had come from a distant island with a small population of only 75 million who plotted against us from across the largest ocean on earth. But in the half century since Pearl Harbor, the number of human beings on the planet had tripled, and modern air travel had put every spot on earth within a day’s travel time. We felt safe because we spent more on our military-industrial machine than the entire rest of the world was spending on their combined armaments. We had a military presence in 130 foreign countries. These were supposed to be sovereign nations, but we figured that was okay with everyone because we were the good guys. We had perfectly positioned ourselves to prevent another Pearl Harbor. Problem is, we lacked imagination. The 9-11 attackers were able to conceive, plan, organize, orchestrate, implement, and execute something that our superstar Generals in the Pentagon could not even imagine. By thinking at least five steps ahead of us, they had finally learned how to fight us, but it took them 48 years to do it.

In 1948 when Saudi Arabia started shipping oil abroad, and the true extent of the Saudi oil deposits could be calculated, the motive was there for eventually going to war. The founding of the country of Israel gave us a kind of forward operating base, and our policy of propping-up the so-called democratic regimes in Egypt and Lebanon was intended to give us allies in the area. As each of these things came into being, we thought that they were stabilizing forces working to our benefit. For the Muslims and Arabs in the area, however, our efforts in the Middle East only intensified their suspicion and distrust of the U.S.A.

Then in 1953, the CIA clandestinely deposed the rightful ruler of Iran and installed the Shah. To the extent that you can trace the origin of 9-11 to a single event, that was probably the one, and the average American didn't even notice. We were too busy watching Senator Joe McCarthy on TV and worrying about whether our neighbor might be a Communist, because we thought the Communists would be our adversary in the next war. Little did we know that war was already underway and the real enemy was totally off our radar. We would stay clueless until September 11, 2001.

The enemy that would eventually become al-Qaeda received a huge boost in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution in Tehran. This was the catalyst for the spawning of a radical fundamentalist faction within the Islamic religion, and that radicalized minority might have stayed bottled up in Iran if it had not been for the emergence and growth of the Internet. With the Internet, the means finally existed for hard core Muslim fundamentalist radicals to link up with each other from anywhere on earth. The result was al-Qaeda, and the result of al-Qaeda was 9-11.

Looking forward we know three things, none of them positive for the United States. Thanks to the success of the 9-11 attack, al-Qaeda now knows that even a small amount of destruction will be magnified a thousand fold by disruption in the complexities of our culture. Secondly, al-Qaeda has learned to franchise itself so that future attacks can come from any location and any culture on earth. And lastly, al-Qaeda has seen that the American intelligence apparatus is vulnerable because it lacks the ability to connect the dots.

Human events don’t happen in the isolation of a vacuum, and 9-11 was no exception to that rule.

Afghanistan— Prolonging the Inevitable

Let your mind drift back to 1776, and ask yourself, “How long would The King’s red-clad dragoons have stayed around if the Continental soldiers had been armed with automatic assault weapons and RPGs?” To understand that scenario is to understand present-day Afghanistan, a country that contains three guns for every inhabitant. And the bad news for American foreign policy doesn’t stop there.

Warfare (the waging of war) is devilishly complex, but war itself is actually quite simple. War is merely two sides that kill each other until one side can’t stand to be killed any longer. Throughout history, war was never any more complicated than that. In World War II, the Japanese Kamikaze attacks showed America that Japan had a greater willingness to die than we did, and it took two atomic bombs to break that Japanese will. Vietnam was simply a tragedy that came about because Lyndon Johnson thought that Ho Chi Minh thought like he did, and eventually the American public decided that this petty difference of opinion was not worth dying for. Which brings us to Afghanistan where the enemy not only has the will to die, but actually has the aspiration to die. Faced with that kind of cultural mind set, America has two choices. We can either sign a formal declaration of surrender and leave with our tail between our legs, or we can just leave. Either way, we will lose that war, not because we lack military power, but because we lack suicidal tendencies.

The Taliban, or al-Qaeda, or the insurgents, or the Afghan nationals (hell, we can’t even agree on what to call them) is an enemy like none other in our long history of enemies. They have no industrial infrastructure behind them, no munitions manufacturing capability, no heavy transportation, no armored vehicles, no air power, no spy satellites, no electronic eavesdropping equipment, no forts, and certainly no central headquarters like the Pentagon. Nevertheless, they defeated England at the height of the British Empire’s power, and they defeated the Soviet Union at the height of Soviet power. As one U.S. Congressman recently stated, “We are facing a 14th-century enemy with our 21st-century military force, and we are fighting with 18th-century military tactics.” Bluntly stated, they are defeating the United States at the height of American power simply because they welcome the chance to die.

Liberals and Conservatives seldom agree on anything, so when Liberal Vice President, Joe Biden, and Conservative writer and intellectual, George Will, both say the same thing, that has some significance. Both of them essentially are saying, “Leave Afghanistan immediately before any more American troops die needlessly.” We should listen to them.