The War of Terror

This will be the first in a series on postings on terrorism. I hope to provoke a lively and spirited discussion.

The first point is that I hate the term "War on Terror." War denotes a specific undertaking, and requires the harnessing of ALL instruments of national power toward the goal of winning said war. Let's face it folks, we haven't harnessed anything but our complaining power. To fight a war requires us to change our way of life, focus our industrial power to producing the material needed to fight the war and getting every man and woman in this country working toward winning the war. We would need to devote the majority of our national economic resources to achieving this goal. We haven't done any of this, including reinstating the draft (which i do not advocate).

Calling this a war is a misnomer. It gives the American people the wrong impression and leads us to use the wrong tools to combat terrorism. This is more akin to a police action of the Cold war, or more properly, and counterinsurgency, which brings me to my second point. This is not a war on terror. Terrorism is a tactic used by the enemy to counter our overwhelming conventional superiority. We don't fight tactics. It would be as if World War Two were called the war against the Blitzkrieg, instead of a struggle against Fascism. The point of this is to understand what we are fighting so that we can use the proper tools to combat the enemy and defeat them.

We are faced with a global insurgency that uses terrorism as its most prevalent tactic. Their goal is the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic state in the Middle East with them as the ruling elite. If they could develop a large, conventional military that could stand up to American military power they would, however, they can't, so they turn to time honored insurgency tactics, which include terrorist attacks. So let's call this what it is, a global, nongovernmental insurgency whose goal is to seize power throughout the Islamic states. To do that they must drive the United States, and their western allies, out of the region and end their support for the regimes currently in power throughout the region. This will allow the insurgents to topple the governments one by one, establish sharia states, and rule according to their beliefs, which are inimical to U.S. and western interests.

There is the crux of our problem. I point this out because countering an insurgency takes more than military power to win. We saw how ineffective military power was in Vietnam, even coupled with a weak political/economic program. We do need a military component in our fight against the Islamic insurgency, or whatever we call it, but military power cannot be our sole or even most important component of our struggle, and that is the topic of the next posting.