Sunday, September 26, 2004
Friday, September 24, 2004
Hot Flash
By Mario Loyola
Echoes of Austerlitz
Previous Columns
09/21 - Kerrynomics and small business
09/20 - Diana Kerry's warning
09/17 - Typically French films
09/16 - Kelly Jane Torrance on books
Click here to access the archives.
One book John Kerry clearly has not read is The Campaigns of Napoleon. Of course, reading a single book can’t turn anyone into a political genius--or a military one, for that matter. But Kerry might have avoided making the same blunders that led Napoleon’s enemies into one drubbing after another. Alas, John Kerry is their very type: Predictable in strategy and clumsy in tactics when on the offensive, Kerry is prone to indecision and panic on defense. Such qualities make winning elections needlessly difficult. But for commanders-in-chief fighting real wars, they spell calamity.
In the months after the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, there was a lot of head-scratching among the generals of Austria and Russia. They had been defeated by a general from the future, and never really understood what hit them. But they could draw some important lessons from their own mistakes, lessons as valuable on the campaign trail of today as they were on the battlefields of Europe two centuries ago:
Don't waste time debating your strategy. Debate is the enemy of strategy.
On the eve of the Battle Austerlitz, Napoleon knew that he was badly outnumbered and even more badly outgunned. He had been unable to destroy the Austrian army before it linked up with a huge Russian force. Now, from atop the Pratzen Heights near the town of Austerlitz, the enemy generals looked down upon the bedraggled, exhausted French with contempt, confident that the next day would bring victory. They convened a grand council of war to discuss the broad outlines of their attack. The meeting resembled nothing so much as a dinner-party, and until three o' clock in the morning, the generals debated.
Meanwhile, in Napoleon's campaign tent, there was no debate. The newly-crowned Emperor of France was on his hands and knees on a huge map of the battlefield, quietly shifting small-unit figurines back and forth, devising the trap that was to become the historical masterpiece of his career. As night fell, 193 tactical movement orders issued from Napoleon's headquarters. When the Austrians and Russians awoke the next morning, they thought they were looking at the same battlefield. But unbeknownst to them, the battlefield had become Napoleon's deadly spider web.
Kerry has taken a key page out of the Austro-Russian playbook. According to Democratic strategists, the Kerry campaign has been paralyzed for weeks by a high-level debate over the candidate's message. Even now, at three o' clock in the morning on the day of the battle, they are still debating their strategy. And if that were not bad enough, Kerry recently enlarged the dinner-party by brining several Clinton operatives on board—opinionated and forceful debaters all. The Democrat has had great difficulty coming up with any strategy, and has reacted only by compounding the problem.
Avoid the doing the obvious. What is obvious to you is also obvious to your enemy.
The trap Napoleon had devised rested on a single lure: his poorly defended right flank. He had strung a few weak infantry regiments along the marshes down the gentle slope that extends south from the Pratzen Heights. Exactly as he hoped, that was where the enemy attacked. When the lead elements of the assault force made contact, Napoleon at first let his position there fall back, inviting the Austro-Russian force to roll up the flank. They accepted the invitation, and for several hours, the French observed regiment after regiment of the enemy, in column formation, rolling to the right across the crest of the Pratzen Heights, headed for what looked to be an easy victory. But the enemy had done the one thing they could not afford to do: the obvious.
Kerry invariably does the same. When the time came to choose a Vice Presidential candidate, after endless debate and careful consideration of the most outlandish options, Kerry did . . . the obvious. He picked the trial lawyer-backed Senator John Edwards: his closest competitor in the primary, and the clear favorite of both the party leadership and the liberal media. Months later, voters have seen little of the young, photogenic Edwards, leaving Kerry without a substantial running-mate on an already weak ticket. Instead of pitching the Bush campaign a nasty curve-ball, Kerry chose the one pitch they were sure to be expecting—and sure to be prepared for.
Tactical execution is king. Napoleon was fond of saying: “I may lose a battle, but I shall never lose a minute.”
When the Austrians and Russians decided to attack Napoleon's exposed flank, exactly as he hoped, they committed the key strategic mistake of the battle. Next, Napoleon needed his enemy to make a major tactical blunder--almost any would do. They did not take long to oblige.
The Austro-Russian force was performing a complex series of evolutions: The successive columns had to approach the crest of the Pratzen from reserve positions and then hinge south towards Napoleon's "collapsing" flank. At about 11 in the morning, one Russian column got delayed in its evolution, and became "unhinged" from the one in front of it, exposing a gap of about 200 yards at the Prazten's highest point--the very center of the front.
Napoleon reacted instantly. "How long will it take you take you to reach the top of the Pratzen?" he asked the commanders of his two central divisions. "20 minutes, sire," they responded. "Attack," said Napoleon.
The Russians and Austrians were stunned as they watched two huge columns of French infantry scaling the steepest part of the Pratzen Heights. Why was Napoleon attacking with two divisions against 20, up a steep hill at the very center of the front, when his own right flank was collapsing? Confusion led to indecision, and during the small window they had for an effective counter-attack, they fatally did nothing.
Tactical inefficiency--and the mistakes that inevitably follow--have been a problem at Kerry campaign headquarters. Here, too, the problem is profound. As some on his own staff privately admit, the campaign's internal operations are simply not focused enough. They have a singular inability to stay "on message," and have only reinforced the Bush campaign's charge that Kerry is a flip-flopper. Even Kerry's rapid-response team is bafflingly slow. They spend valuable time and energy on complex and ultimately pointless maneuvers, such as that farcical chart showing a "connection" between Bush and the Swift-Boat Veterans for Truth. And the last-minute recruitment of Clinton operatives is likely to further blur chains of command, allocations of responsibility, and clarity of message. Look for more time and energy wasted--and more tactical blunders.
Respond to the unexpected deliberately and quickly--and never, ever panic.
As Napoleon's sprint up the Pratzen developed into a major assault, the Austro-Russian force, half of which was oriented to the right--away from the point of attack--became paralyzed as it tried to adjust its formations and reorient itself. As Napoleon's cavalry and reserve followed the attackers, pouring through center of the front, the 200-yard gap the enemy had created for Napoleon widened dramatically. When he then succeeded in pushing one half of the enemy force back onto a frozen lake on his extreme right flank, the jaws of the trap slammed shut.
Using a few thousand men to pin down the rest of the enemy, Napoleon took advantage of his local (and fleeting) superiority of force to overwhelm the trapped divisions from three sides.
In the enemy camp, indecision turned to panic. The trapped half of the Austro-Russian force began to flee across the frozen lake, every man for himself. Napoleon watched for a few minutes from atop his horse, and then ordered several batteries of cannon to bombard the ice--until further notice. He then turned to the scene of the other battle with the bulk of his forces, leaving thousands upon thousands of Austrians and Russians to drown in the frigid waters. The Austro-Russians' easy victory had turned into a fearsome slaughter.
Kerry's reactions to the unexpected are almost always pitifully slow—except when he panics. For example, by the time Kerry responded personally to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, it was two weeks too late. Just as the media was starting to lose interest in the story, Kerry's defense put the entire controversy right back on the front page. Even worse, by accusing the President of backing the Swift Boat Vets, Kerry gave Bush an opportunity to laud his opponent's Vietnam record and come off like a class act. Kerry compounded the disaster after the Democratic convention by attacking strongly-defended positions. A few weeks later, by the time of his midnight "offensive" after Bush's convention speech, Kerry was becoming visibly desperate.
Desperation has unfortunately been John Kerry's most visible trait throughout this whole campaign. He won the Iowa caucus by firing his campaign manager, mortgaging his house, and sinking $7 million into a last-minute grass-roots effort. It was a political Hail Mary pass for the history books. More recently, polls putting him well behind Bush for the first time instantly led to an embarrassingly public search for yet another team of advisors. Bad news is not necessarily embarrassing, but panicking in public is.
* * *
The depth of the Kerry campaign’s incompetence mesmerizes even Republican strategists. A front page New York Times article on Bill Clinton's recent hospital-bed chat with Kerry ("Kerry Enlisting Clinton Aides in Effort to Refocus Campaign") almost defied all rational explanation. Clinton's advice was bland enough: Focus on the economy, health-care, and other bread-and-butter issues. The fascinating thing about the story was that it was on the front page of the New York Times at all. There were no indications of a leak. The writers appear to have been officially briefed. Now, why would the Kerry campaign intentionally begin the week's news cycle with a story about how incompetent they are? Republicans were as baffled as they were delighted.
The New York Times story sounds an early warning of the dangers of a Kerry Presidency: His news coverage is rarely the product of his own strategy--and when it is, it hurts him anyway.
Democrats who are worried about this performance should consider that John Kerry would almost certainly run the White House exactly as he has run this campaign. That would be a disaster for all of us, but for Democrats most of all. They're still struggling to repair the damage Jimmy Carter inflicted on their party. And they had early warnings of Carter's weaknesses. Gerald Ford left the GOP Convention of 1976 fatally weakened by the Nixon pardon and the nearly successful primary challenge of Ronald Reagan. Carter nonetheless took only two months to blow a 30-point lead, and barely squeaked into the White House. The bizarre mistakes Carter made during that campaign (such as a Playboy interview that scandalized his Southern conservative base) and his inability to answer simple questions were clear omens of a Presidency most Democrats would rather forget.
In the middle of the War on Terror, making John Kerry commander-in-chief could well prove calamitous. Will there be a strategy, or endless debate? Will his tactics be deft and imaginative enough to keep the enemy on the run, or will he keep to his pattern of predictable and clumsy execution? Will America start to give off the same smell of fear, indecision, and desperation that John Kerry has exuded for months? Kerry's management of his own campaign contains many warnings about the kind of President he would make. Recent polls suggest that Americans are beginning to take heed.
Kerry likes to present himself as a good "campaign closer," most effective when he is behind. That might have been a virtue against someone other than Bush. But Bush has an abundance of the one quality Napoleon thought most valuable in a commander: l'audace, toujours l'audace. In the face of defeat, nothing matters more. Sadly for John Kerry, desperation is not the same thing.
Mario Loyola is a writer in Washington, D.C.
By Mario Loyola
Echoes of Austerlitz
Previous Columns
09/21 - Kerrynomics and small business
09/20 - Diana Kerry's warning
09/17 - Typically French films
09/16 - Kelly Jane Torrance on books
Click here to access the archives.
One book John Kerry clearly has not read is The Campaigns of Napoleon. Of course, reading a single book can’t turn anyone into a political genius--or a military one, for that matter. But Kerry might have avoided making the same blunders that led Napoleon’s enemies into one drubbing after another. Alas, John Kerry is their very type: Predictable in strategy and clumsy in tactics when on the offensive, Kerry is prone to indecision and panic on defense. Such qualities make winning elections needlessly difficult. But for commanders-in-chief fighting real wars, they spell calamity.
In the months after the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, there was a lot of head-scratching among the generals of Austria and Russia. They had been defeated by a general from the future, and never really understood what hit them. But they could draw some important lessons from their own mistakes, lessons as valuable on the campaign trail of today as they were on the battlefields of Europe two centuries ago:
Don't waste time debating your strategy. Debate is the enemy of strategy.
On the eve of the Battle Austerlitz, Napoleon knew that he was badly outnumbered and even more badly outgunned. He had been unable to destroy the Austrian army before it linked up with a huge Russian force. Now, from atop the Pratzen Heights near the town of Austerlitz, the enemy generals looked down upon the bedraggled, exhausted French with contempt, confident that the next day would bring victory. They convened a grand council of war to discuss the broad outlines of their attack. The meeting resembled nothing so much as a dinner-party, and until three o' clock in the morning, the generals debated.
Meanwhile, in Napoleon's campaign tent, there was no debate. The newly-crowned Emperor of France was on his hands and knees on a huge map of the battlefield, quietly shifting small-unit figurines back and forth, devising the trap that was to become the historical masterpiece of his career. As night fell, 193 tactical movement orders issued from Napoleon's headquarters. When the Austrians and Russians awoke the next morning, they thought they were looking at the same battlefield. But unbeknownst to them, the battlefield had become Napoleon's deadly spider web.
Kerry has taken a key page out of the Austro-Russian playbook. According to Democratic strategists, the Kerry campaign has been paralyzed for weeks by a high-level debate over the candidate's message. Even now, at three o' clock in the morning on the day of the battle, they are still debating their strategy. And if that were not bad enough, Kerry recently enlarged the dinner-party by brining several Clinton operatives on board—opinionated and forceful debaters all. The Democrat has had great difficulty coming up with any strategy, and has reacted only by compounding the problem.
Avoid the doing the obvious. What is obvious to you is also obvious to your enemy.
The trap Napoleon had devised rested on a single lure: his poorly defended right flank. He had strung a few weak infantry regiments along the marshes down the gentle slope that extends south from the Pratzen Heights. Exactly as he hoped, that was where the enemy attacked. When the lead elements of the assault force made contact, Napoleon at first let his position there fall back, inviting the Austro-Russian force to roll up the flank. They accepted the invitation, and for several hours, the French observed regiment after regiment of the enemy, in column formation, rolling to the right across the crest of the Pratzen Heights, headed for what looked to be an easy victory. But the enemy had done the one thing they could not afford to do: the obvious.
Kerry invariably does the same. When the time came to choose a Vice Presidential candidate, after endless debate and careful consideration of the most outlandish options, Kerry did . . . the obvious. He picked the trial lawyer-backed Senator John Edwards: his closest competitor in the primary, and the clear favorite of both the party leadership and the liberal media. Months later, voters have seen little of the young, photogenic Edwards, leaving Kerry without a substantial running-mate on an already weak ticket. Instead of pitching the Bush campaign a nasty curve-ball, Kerry chose the one pitch they were sure to be expecting—and sure to be prepared for.
Tactical execution is king. Napoleon was fond of saying: “I may lose a battle, but I shall never lose a minute.”
When the Austrians and Russians decided to attack Napoleon's exposed flank, exactly as he hoped, they committed the key strategic mistake of the battle. Next, Napoleon needed his enemy to make a major tactical blunder--almost any would do. They did not take long to oblige.
The Austro-Russian force was performing a complex series of evolutions: The successive columns had to approach the crest of the Pratzen from reserve positions and then hinge south towards Napoleon's "collapsing" flank. At about 11 in the morning, one Russian column got delayed in its evolution, and became "unhinged" from the one in front of it, exposing a gap of about 200 yards at the Prazten's highest point--the very center of the front.
Napoleon reacted instantly. "How long will it take you take you to reach the top of the Pratzen?" he asked the commanders of his two central divisions. "20 minutes, sire," they responded. "Attack," said Napoleon.
The Russians and Austrians were stunned as they watched two huge columns of French infantry scaling the steepest part of the Pratzen Heights. Why was Napoleon attacking with two divisions against 20, up a steep hill at the very center of the front, when his own right flank was collapsing? Confusion led to indecision, and during the small window they had for an effective counter-attack, they fatally did nothing.
Tactical inefficiency--and the mistakes that inevitably follow--have been a problem at Kerry campaign headquarters. Here, too, the problem is profound. As some on his own staff privately admit, the campaign's internal operations are simply not focused enough. They have a singular inability to stay "on message," and have only reinforced the Bush campaign's charge that Kerry is a flip-flopper. Even Kerry's rapid-response team is bafflingly slow. They spend valuable time and energy on complex and ultimately pointless maneuvers, such as that farcical chart showing a "connection" between Bush and the Swift-Boat Veterans for Truth. And the last-minute recruitment of Clinton operatives is likely to further blur chains of command, allocations of responsibility, and clarity of message. Look for more time and energy wasted--and more tactical blunders.
Respond to the unexpected deliberately and quickly--and never, ever panic.
As Napoleon's sprint up the Pratzen developed into a major assault, the Austro-Russian force, half of which was oriented to the right--away from the point of attack--became paralyzed as it tried to adjust its formations and reorient itself. As Napoleon's cavalry and reserve followed the attackers, pouring through center of the front, the 200-yard gap the enemy had created for Napoleon widened dramatically. When he then succeeded in pushing one half of the enemy force back onto a frozen lake on his extreme right flank, the jaws of the trap slammed shut.
Using a few thousand men to pin down the rest of the enemy, Napoleon took advantage of his local (and fleeting) superiority of force to overwhelm the trapped divisions from three sides.
In the enemy camp, indecision turned to panic. The trapped half of the Austro-Russian force began to flee across the frozen lake, every man for himself. Napoleon watched for a few minutes from atop his horse, and then ordered several batteries of cannon to bombard the ice--until further notice. He then turned to the scene of the other battle with the bulk of his forces, leaving thousands upon thousands of Austrians and Russians to drown in the frigid waters. The Austro-Russians' easy victory had turned into a fearsome slaughter.
Kerry's reactions to the unexpected are almost always pitifully slow—except when he panics. For example, by the time Kerry responded personally to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, it was two weeks too late. Just as the media was starting to lose interest in the story, Kerry's defense put the entire controversy right back on the front page. Even worse, by accusing the President of backing the Swift Boat Vets, Kerry gave Bush an opportunity to laud his opponent's Vietnam record and come off like a class act. Kerry compounded the disaster after the Democratic convention by attacking strongly-defended positions. A few weeks later, by the time of his midnight "offensive" after Bush's convention speech, Kerry was becoming visibly desperate.
Desperation has unfortunately been John Kerry's most visible trait throughout this whole campaign. He won the Iowa caucus by firing his campaign manager, mortgaging his house, and sinking $7 million into a last-minute grass-roots effort. It was a political Hail Mary pass for the history books. More recently, polls putting him well behind Bush for the first time instantly led to an embarrassingly public search for yet another team of advisors. Bad news is not necessarily embarrassing, but panicking in public is.
* * *
The depth of the Kerry campaign’s incompetence mesmerizes even Republican strategists. A front page New York Times article on Bill Clinton's recent hospital-bed chat with Kerry ("Kerry Enlisting Clinton Aides in Effort to Refocus Campaign") almost defied all rational explanation. Clinton's advice was bland enough: Focus on the economy, health-care, and other bread-and-butter issues. The fascinating thing about the story was that it was on the front page of the New York Times at all. There were no indications of a leak. The writers appear to have been officially briefed. Now, why would the Kerry campaign intentionally begin the week's news cycle with a story about how incompetent they are? Republicans were as baffled as they were delighted.
The New York Times story sounds an early warning of the dangers of a Kerry Presidency: His news coverage is rarely the product of his own strategy--and when it is, it hurts him anyway.
Democrats who are worried about this performance should consider that John Kerry would almost certainly run the White House exactly as he has run this campaign. That would be a disaster for all of us, but for Democrats most of all. They're still struggling to repair the damage Jimmy Carter inflicted on their party. And they had early warnings of Carter's weaknesses. Gerald Ford left the GOP Convention of 1976 fatally weakened by the Nixon pardon and the nearly successful primary challenge of Ronald Reagan. Carter nonetheless took only two months to blow a 30-point lead, and barely squeaked into the White House. The bizarre mistakes Carter made during that campaign (such as a Playboy interview that scandalized his Southern conservative base) and his inability to answer simple questions were clear omens of a Presidency most Democrats would rather forget.
In the middle of the War on Terror, making John Kerry commander-in-chief could well prove calamitous. Will there be a strategy, or endless debate? Will his tactics be deft and imaginative enough to keep the enemy on the run, or will he keep to his pattern of predictable and clumsy execution? Will America start to give off the same smell of fear, indecision, and desperation that John Kerry has exuded for months? Kerry's management of his own campaign contains many warnings about the kind of President he would make. Recent polls suggest that Americans are beginning to take heed.
Kerry likes to present himself as a good "campaign closer," most effective when he is behind. That might have been a virtue against someone other than Bush. But Bush has an abundance of the one quality Napoleon thought most valuable in a commander: l'audace, toujours l'audace. In the face of defeat, nothing matters more. Sadly for John Kerry, desperation is not the same thing.
Mario Loyola is a writer in Washington, D.C.
Saturday, September 11, 2004
Call The Enemy By Its Name “Allahu akhbar!” the disease of radical Islam speads…
CaliforniaRepublic.org ^ | 9/10/04 | Bruce Thornton
Posted on 09/11/2004 1:48:19 AM PDT by ParsifalCA
The brutal slaughter of children in Russia is yet another wake-up call we are not heeding. We keep hearing that we are at war, but no one wants to identify the real enemy--an Islamic civilization that sanctions such murder as the justified means for establishing the religious and political dominance of Islam in fulfillment of the will of God.
Nor are those actively killing in the service of this vision some sort of neurotic deformers of Islam created by conditions peculiar to the 20th century. From its birth in the seventh century Islam spread by fire and sword, creating converts as a byproduct of conquest. Remember how much of the modern Middle East had for centuries been Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, that is, Western, before the rise of Islam: Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, western Syria, northern Egypt, northern Africa, western Iraq-- all were transformed into the "House of Allah" by violent conquest.
Remember too that Moslems occupied half of Spain for seven centuries and that as late as the 17th century the Turks were at the gates of Vienna. The current propaganda about Islam as the "religion of peace" belies fourteen centuries of aggressive war against those considered "infidels" to be brought under submission to Islam.
The difference today is that the political and cultural dysfunctions of Islam, laid bare by modernity, mean that this traditional imperative to dominate the infidel cannot be realized by military means. The cultural dynamism of the West--created by science, free market capitalism, individual rights and freedom, and the separation of religion and state--shifted the advantage to the West and ultimately led to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the imposition of Europe's political will on a civilization that for centuries had looked down on Europeans as barbarian infidels. This dismemberment of the Islamic empire after WWI-not the creation of Israel-- is the true "catastrophe" Bin Laden has referred to and that his terrorism seeks to reverse.
Now that military conquest of the West is out of the question--as tiny Israel has proven on three occasions--terrorism has emerged as the tactic that will exploit what the Islamists see as the West's weaknesses: its addiction to material comfort and pleasure as the highest goods, and its lack of passionate belief in any values worth dying and killing for. And for decades we in the West seemed bent on proving this estimation correct: the response of Europe and at times America as well to first Palestinian terrorism and then other terrorist attacks on our citizens was marked by appeasement and indifference. The smoke-screen of Palestinian nationalism and postcolonial grievances was eagerly accepted by those in the West who either needed an excuse for avoiding unpleasant, costly action, or were indifferent to the spectacle of Jews dying--the latter phenomenon, after all, one that Europe was all too familiar with anyway.
This interpretation is vehemently rejected by many, including some of the strongest supporters of the administration's policies. They respond that the foregoing analysis is true only of a minority who are misinterpreting Islam and attempting to undo history because they have been shut out of the boons of modernity--economic development or political freedom. Evidence suggests, however, that it is not just a minority but rather a critical mass, even perhaps a majority, of Moslems who, even if they would never themselves kill, sanction and rationalize terrorism and thus give it moral and frequently material support. The popularity of Bin Laden throughout the Moslem world, the frequent public celebrations of terrorist attacks, Iran's continuing support of terrorism, the lack of unequivocal condemnations of terrorist murder from Islamic governments, the Nazi-style anti-Semitic drivel published in the state-run presses of many Middle East nations, all suggest that Islamism is not so much of a fringe movement as we are led to believe.
And who are we to say that an interpretation of Islam endorsed by millions is a deformation of its true nature? I'm inclined to believe that those millions cheering on Bin Laden are better judges of the true character of Islam than are Western apologists. As well as being patronizing, this dismissal of many Moslems' understanding of their own religion is ethnocentric to boot, reducing all motives to the material causes the West has privileged, and brushing away spiritual motives as evidence of mere psychological dysfunction. We seem incapable of believing that people will murder others to serve a vision of ultimate reality rather than to acquire material prosperity or political freedom or to vent their neuroses.
Accepting that we are indeed engaged in a struggle of competing fundamental values rather than a battle against a fringe minority means recognizing a grim, sad reality. For history shows that all such struggles are resolved through violence. Deeply held principles and visions of spiritual reality and ultimate value are not bargained or negotiated away. They are given up only when the price of maintaining them is shown to be horrific. In fact, to the true believer his opponent's willingness to negotiate, bargain, or show respectful tolerance is deemed a sign of weak belief in core principles, and so is an encouragement to press on with the fight.
Does anyone really believe, for example, that America's "respect" for the Shrine of Ali in Najaf-- a presumably holy space the Madi Army desecrated by using it as an arms depot and launch pad for mortars--cut any ice with those opposed to the Iraqis and Americans who are trying to create a functioning modern society?
Or is this "restraint" interpreted as a sign of weakness, an indication that we will not pay the price to do what we know is right? Yes, the shrine was evacuated, but who knows how many insurgents escaped with their weapons, and who knows how many Iraqis and American soldiers will die later because those insurgents are still around. No wonder Sadr is trumpeting the evacuation as a victory.
Recognizing the true nature of the struggle against Islamism would have several consequences. First, we would drop the propaganda that asserts there is some widespread "moderate" Moslem constituency eager to usher their societies into the modern world and accept the core cargo of successful modernity-liberal democracy and free-market economies. We would tell those presumed moderates to put up or shut up: we will no longer credit their crocodile tears after a terrorist attack but demand concrete action against the terrorists in their midst. For example, Syria would be put on notice that the offices of Hamas and Hesbollah in Damascus will be shut down, either by the Syrian government or American cruise missiles. Enough with wrist-slapping sanctions and blustering orations before a corrupt and indifferent U.N.
Wouldn't this mean civil war in Islamic nations? Exactly. If those nations truly want to become modern and lift their societies out of the backwardness, illiteracy, and poverty in which they stagnate, then they must solve the problem of Islamist extremism, and that means civil wars. We must stop our enabling the inaction of so-called moderates, which we do by crediting the excuses of Israel or globalization or post-colonial grievances. We must make it clear that the old smokescreens--nationalist aspirations, for example--no longer will fly. After all, the battle cry of the bearded and veiled terrorists who murdered Russian schoolchildren was not "Long live Chechnya" but "Allahu akhbar."
No, all such issues are off the table until terrorism stops. No more of our Western therapeutic excuses and two-bit psychologizing, as though we were dealing with wayward teenagers "acting out" because of low self-esteem. Give our enemies credit for having their own values and motives that cause them to act, rather than reducing all their behavior to mere reactions to what we do. We don't create terrorists, they and their beliefs create themselves no matter what we do. It didn't matter in the least that we rescued Kuwaitis and Bosnians and Iraqis from genocidal maniacs and so kept hundreds of thousands of Moslems alive who otherwise would've been dead. The only action of ours that can make a difference in their behavior is overwhelming destructive force.
The starkest way we could signal our new resolve would be to change our approach to the Israeli-Palestinian war. This would require sweeping from the table all the camouflaging grievances of checkpoints and walls and "Palestinian homeland" and "right of return." We would indicate that we now know the War on Terror began not on 9/11 but when the first Jew returning to Israel was murdered simply because he was a Jew returning to his ancestral homeland. That is, Israel is what Virginia was in the Civil War-- the "cockpit of war," the space where the centuries-old clash is being fought most intensely and brutally.
This change in approach would make it clear that now we know Israel's fight has always been our fight. It is a damning indictment of Western moral corruption that so many in the West ignored or rationalized or even abetted what has been an assault on the West and its values. For that is Israel's greatest sin--being free and dynamic and materially prosperous--that is, Western-- while its Arab neighbors, flush with oil wealth, are mired in backwardness and poverty and political oppression. Israel is a stark reminder of just how superior the West now is, and only Israel's destruction can prove otherwise, just as the destruction of the medieval Crusader kingdoms reasserted Islamic superiority.
For those who think such an approach would be "simplistic" or incite more violence, remember that we already have tried for decades the road of "nuance," moral equivalency, appeasement and negotiation, and we have gotten nowhere. Israeli children are still being blown up, and Palestinians are farther from a state than ever. It's time to recognize that based on their actions rather than their words, a significant number of Palestinians don't want a state as much as they want Israel to disappear. If this were not so, Arafat would've been kicked out of office when he turned down the best chance at a state the Palestinians are likely to get. Instead there was the second intifada. Once more, we must be blunt: get rid of the terrorists who hide among and so endanger your women and children in order to kill Jews. Make up your minds which way you want your society to go: the road to political freedom and economic prosperity, or the road to some fantasy of Islamic dominance that leads in the end only to further suffering and stagnation.
If we fail to see accurately the nature of this struggle, we won't collapse overnight or be overrun. The stakes are not as immediately grim as they were for the Viennese who met the Turks or for the Franks at Poitiers. Rather, the destruction will be slow and insidious, fueled as much by demography as violence. But violence there will be, as eventually terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction and there will perhaps be a catastrophe that makes 9/11 look like a bad traffic accident. We will evolve into a garrison state, with consequences for our civil liberties and way of life we can only imagine. And there will be backlashes, fueled by xenophobia and nationalism, that very well may return us to the savagery of fascism, especially in Europe.
But these effects will take place over decades, while the cost of preventing them will have to be borne today. That's why it is seductive to pretend the struggle is otherwise, to put the cost off for future generations, to make the mistake Europe made in the thirties. But whether now or later, the bill will have to be paid. CRO
copyright 2004 Bruce S. Thornton Bruce Thornton is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author of Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age and author of Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter Books). His most recent book is Searching for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter Books).
________________________________________
CaliforniaRepublic.org ^ | 9/10/04 | Bruce Thornton
Posted on 09/11/2004 1:48:19 AM PDT by ParsifalCA
The brutal slaughter of children in Russia is yet another wake-up call we are not heeding. We keep hearing that we are at war, but no one wants to identify the real enemy--an Islamic civilization that sanctions such murder as the justified means for establishing the religious and political dominance of Islam in fulfillment of the will of God.
Nor are those actively killing in the service of this vision some sort of neurotic deformers of Islam created by conditions peculiar to the 20th century. From its birth in the seventh century Islam spread by fire and sword, creating converts as a byproduct of conquest. Remember how much of the modern Middle East had for centuries been Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, that is, Western, before the rise of Islam: Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, western Syria, northern Egypt, northern Africa, western Iraq-- all were transformed into the "House of Allah" by violent conquest.
Remember too that Moslems occupied half of Spain for seven centuries and that as late as the 17th century the Turks were at the gates of Vienna. The current propaganda about Islam as the "religion of peace" belies fourteen centuries of aggressive war against those considered "infidels" to be brought under submission to Islam.
The difference today is that the political and cultural dysfunctions of Islam, laid bare by modernity, mean that this traditional imperative to dominate the infidel cannot be realized by military means. The cultural dynamism of the West--created by science, free market capitalism, individual rights and freedom, and the separation of religion and state--shifted the advantage to the West and ultimately led to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the imposition of Europe's political will on a civilization that for centuries had looked down on Europeans as barbarian infidels. This dismemberment of the Islamic empire after WWI-not the creation of Israel-- is the true "catastrophe" Bin Laden has referred to and that his terrorism seeks to reverse.
Now that military conquest of the West is out of the question--as tiny Israel has proven on three occasions--terrorism has emerged as the tactic that will exploit what the Islamists see as the West's weaknesses: its addiction to material comfort and pleasure as the highest goods, and its lack of passionate belief in any values worth dying and killing for. And for decades we in the West seemed bent on proving this estimation correct: the response of Europe and at times America as well to first Palestinian terrorism and then other terrorist attacks on our citizens was marked by appeasement and indifference. The smoke-screen of Palestinian nationalism and postcolonial grievances was eagerly accepted by those in the West who either needed an excuse for avoiding unpleasant, costly action, or were indifferent to the spectacle of Jews dying--the latter phenomenon, after all, one that Europe was all too familiar with anyway.
This interpretation is vehemently rejected by many, including some of the strongest supporters of the administration's policies. They respond that the foregoing analysis is true only of a minority who are misinterpreting Islam and attempting to undo history because they have been shut out of the boons of modernity--economic development or political freedom. Evidence suggests, however, that it is not just a minority but rather a critical mass, even perhaps a majority, of Moslems who, even if they would never themselves kill, sanction and rationalize terrorism and thus give it moral and frequently material support. The popularity of Bin Laden throughout the Moslem world, the frequent public celebrations of terrorist attacks, Iran's continuing support of terrorism, the lack of unequivocal condemnations of terrorist murder from Islamic governments, the Nazi-style anti-Semitic drivel published in the state-run presses of many Middle East nations, all suggest that Islamism is not so much of a fringe movement as we are led to believe.
And who are we to say that an interpretation of Islam endorsed by millions is a deformation of its true nature? I'm inclined to believe that those millions cheering on Bin Laden are better judges of the true character of Islam than are Western apologists. As well as being patronizing, this dismissal of many Moslems' understanding of their own religion is ethnocentric to boot, reducing all motives to the material causes the West has privileged, and brushing away spiritual motives as evidence of mere psychological dysfunction. We seem incapable of believing that people will murder others to serve a vision of ultimate reality rather than to acquire material prosperity or political freedom or to vent their neuroses.
Accepting that we are indeed engaged in a struggle of competing fundamental values rather than a battle against a fringe minority means recognizing a grim, sad reality. For history shows that all such struggles are resolved through violence. Deeply held principles and visions of spiritual reality and ultimate value are not bargained or negotiated away. They are given up only when the price of maintaining them is shown to be horrific. In fact, to the true believer his opponent's willingness to negotiate, bargain, or show respectful tolerance is deemed a sign of weak belief in core principles, and so is an encouragement to press on with the fight.
Does anyone really believe, for example, that America's "respect" for the Shrine of Ali in Najaf-- a presumably holy space the Madi Army desecrated by using it as an arms depot and launch pad for mortars--cut any ice with those opposed to the Iraqis and Americans who are trying to create a functioning modern society?
Or is this "restraint" interpreted as a sign of weakness, an indication that we will not pay the price to do what we know is right? Yes, the shrine was evacuated, but who knows how many insurgents escaped with their weapons, and who knows how many Iraqis and American soldiers will die later because those insurgents are still around. No wonder Sadr is trumpeting the evacuation as a victory.
Recognizing the true nature of the struggle against Islamism would have several consequences. First, we would drop the propaganda that asserts there is some widespread "moderate" Moslem constituency eager to usher their societies into the modern world and accept the core cargo of successful modernity-liberal democracy and free-market economies. We would tell those presumed moderates to put up or shut up: we will no longer credit their crocodile tears after a terrorist attack but demand concrete action against the terrorists in their midst. For example, Syria would be put on notice that the offices of Hamas and Hesbollah in Damascus will be shut down, either by the Syrian government or American cruise missiles. Enough with wrist-slapping sanctions and blustering orations before a corrupt and indifferent U.N.
Wouldn't this mean civil war in Islamic nations? Exactly. If those nations truly want to become modern and lift their societies out of the backwardness, illiteracy, and poverty in which they stagnate, then they must solve the problem of Islamist extremism, and that means civil wars. We must stop our enabling the inaction of so-called moderates, which we do by crediting the excuses of Israel or globalization or post-colonial grievances. We must make it clear that the old smokescreens--nationalist aspirations, for example--no longer will fly. After all, the battle cry of the bearded and veiled terrorists who murdered Russian schoolchildren was not "Long live Chechnya" but "Allahu akhbar."
No, all such issues are off the table until terrorism stops. No more of our Western therapeutic excuses and two-bit psychologizing, as though we were dealing with wayward teenagers "acting out" because of low self-esteem. Give our enemies credit for having their own values and motives that cause them to act, rather than reducing all their behavior to mere reactions to what we do. We don't create terrorists, they and their beliefs create themselves no matter what we do. It didn't matter in the least that we rescued Kuwaitis and Bosnians and Iraqis from genocidal maniacs and so kept hundreds of thousands of Moslems alive who otherwise would've been dead. The only action of ours that can make a difference in their behavior is overwhelming destructive force.
The starkest way we could signal our new resolve would be to change our approach to the Israeli-Palestinian war. This would require sweeping from the table all the camouflaging grievances of checkpoints and walls and "Palestinian homeland" and "right of return." We would indicate that we now know the War on Terror began not on 9/11 but when the first Jew returning to Israel was murdered simply because he was a Jew returning to his ancestral homeland. That is, Israel is what Virginia was in the Civil War-- the "cockpit of war," the space where the centuries-old clash is being fought most intensely and brutally.
This change in approach would make it clear that now we know Israel's fight has always been our fight. It is a damning indictment of Western moral corruption that so many in the West ignored or rationalized or even abetted what has been an assault on the West and its values. For that is Israel's greatest sin--being free and dynamic and materially prosperous--that is, Western-- while its Arab neighbors, flush with oil wealth, are mired in backwardness and poverty and political oppression. Israel is a stark reminder of just how superior the West now is, and only Israel's destruction can prove otherwise, just as the destruction of the medieval Crusader kingdoms reasserted Islamic superiority.
For those who think such an approach would be "simplistic" or incite more violence, remember that we already have tried for decades the road of "nuance," moral equivalency, appeasement and negotiation, and we have gotten nowhere. Israeli children are still being blown up, and Palestinians are farther from a state than ever. It's time to recognize that based on their actions rather than their words, a significant number of Palestinians don't want a state as much as they want Israel to disappear. If this were not so, Arafat would've been kicked out of office when he turned down the best chance at a state the Palestinians are likely to get. Instead there was the second intifada. Once more, we must be blunt: get rid of the terrorists who hide among and so endanger your women and children in order to kill Jews. Make up your minds which way you want your society to go: the road to political freedom and economic prosperity, or the road to some fantasy of Islamic dominance that leads in the end only to further suffering and stagnation.
If we fail to see accurately the nature of this struggle, we won't collapse overnight or be overrun. The stakes are not as immediately grim as they were for the Viennese who met the Turks or for the Franks at Poitiers. Rather, the destruction will be slow and insidious, fueled as much by demography as violence. But violence there will be, as eventually terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction and there will perhaps be a catastrophe that makes 9/11 look like a bad traffic accident. We will evolve into a garrison state, with consequences for our civil liberties and way of life we can only imagine. And there will be backlashes, fueled by xenophobia and nationalism, that very well may return us to the savagery of fascism, especially in Europe.
But these effects will take place over decades, while the cost of preventing them will have to be borne today. That's why it is seductive to pretend the struggle is otherwise, to put the cost off for future generations, to make the mistake Europe made in the thirties. But whether now or later, the bill will have to be paid. CRO
copyright 2004 Bruce S. Thornton Bruce Thornton is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author of Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age and author of Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter Books). His most recent book is Searching for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter Books).
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