Chicken Littles in DC: A Propaganda Victory for Al Qaeda

Bill Lind–the chief intellectual force behind the USMC’s adoption of maneuver warfare strategies in the 1980s–has an interesting analyis of the recent small plane incident in DC that led to the evacuation of the Capitol building:

The whole episode would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. As an historian, I could think of nothing other than the behavior of an earlier profile in courage, the Persian king Darius, at the battle of Issus. As the Roman historian Arrian described it,

The moment the Persian left went to pieces under Alexander’s attack and Darius, in his war chariot, saw that it was cut off, he incontinently fled—indeed, he led the race for safety … dropping his shield and stripping off his mantle even leaving his bow in the war-chariot—he leapt upon a horse and rode for his life.

Not surprisingly, Darius’s army was less than keen to fight to the death for its illustrious leader. As one British officer said, commenting on U.S. Marines’ love of running for exercise, “We prefer our officers not to run. It can discourage the troops.”

I suspect that more than a few of our soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, enjoying as they do a daily diet of IEDs, ambushes and mortarings, were less than amused at watching Washington flee from a flea. More importantly, what message does such easy panic send to the rest of the world? Osama bin Laden has whole armies trying to kill him, but as best I know he has shown no signs of fear. Here again we see the power of the moral level of war. In cultures less decadent than our own, few men are likely to identify with leaders who fill their pants at one tiny blip on a radar screen.

The episode also reveals what has become one of the main characteristics of America’s “homeland defense:” a total inability to use common sense. We have already seen that in our airport security procedures, our de facto open borders immigration policy and the idiotic “Patriot Act.” Here, it seems that no one was willing to act on the obvious, namely that if a small plane is approaching Washington, it is probably because the pilot got lost (which pilots do frequently). Why? Because to bureaucracies what is important is not external reality but covering your own backside politically. Putting on shows serves that purpose well, even if the shows make us look like both fools and cowards. . . . [c.r.: This is a good example of how the Homeland Security policies and our broader strategic goals in the War on Terror suffer from a lack of unity of command and unity of effort. One aims to show toughness and indefatigability--i.e., Bush's exhortations to carry about as normal--the other serves to avoid harm through severe risk aversion.]

As I have said many times before, what lies at the heart of Fourth Generation war is a crisis of legitimacy of the state. In America, that crisis can only be intensified by any instance where the Washington elite draws a distinction between itself and the rest of the country. When the same people who have sent our kids to die in Iraq and left our borders wide open run in panic because of a Cessna, the American people get the message: Washington is “them,” not “us.” At some point, that gap may grow wide enough to swallow the state itself. Kings who become cabbages, like Darius, end up history’s losers.

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