Weak is Strong, Strong is Weak

The rinky-dink weapons of guerillas and terrorists–50 year old assault rifle and shaped-charge rocket launchers–make the truth hard to swallow: western tactics, western ideas, western political constraints, and western military culture make it exceedingly difficult for these groups to be defeated decisively by western armies. This difficultly is magnified when military force is used in a way that does not direct the enemy to a political and peaceful exit.

From America’s problems in Iraq to the inconclusive Israeli intervention in Lebanon, it’s clear that the Arab and Muslim world has learned that its best strategic bet is to employ guerilla resistance to any western armies that come their way. If we can’t win guerilla wars with Arab and Muslim nations, and if we must fight such wars from time to time to effect our current strategy of democratization and cultural transformation, what is the solution? Andrew Bacevich says that the we should begin by accepting the limits of military power, especially when the enemy is an elusive and disorganized trans-national entity like al Qaeda:

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.

It’s time for Americans to recognize that the enterprise that some neoconservatives refer to as World War IV is unwinnable in a strictly military sense. Indeed, it’s past time to re-examine the post-Cold War assumption that military power provides the preferred antidote to any and all complaints that we have with the world beyond our borders.

In the Middle East and more broadly in our relations with the Islamic world, we face difficult and dangerous problems, more than a few of them problems to which we ourselves have contributed. Those problems will become more daunting still, for us and for Israel, should a nation like Iran succeed in acquiring nuclear weapons. But as events in Iraq and now in southern Lebanon make clear, reliance on the sword alone will not provide a solution to those problems. We must be strong and we must be vigilant. But we also need to be smart, and getting smart means ending our infatuation with war and rediscovering the possibilities of politics.

Sadly, the one Big Idea American item for sale in both Iraq and the Middle East was democracy. Now as a grand marketing strategies go, this was ill-advised for several reasons. It assumed our way was compatible with the Islamic world. It ignored strong feelings of nationalism and religiosity in the Arab world. It abstracted from the totality of our way of life and repackaged it as a formulaic “creed.” And, worst of all, the whole operation was done on the cheap, making disorder and violence synonymous with democracy in the eyes of the intended audience, because every day that’s the dominant image coming out of our center-piece democratic experiment in Iraq. I don’t know what concept would sell at this point to divert the Arab and Muslim people from the allure of terrorism. Maybe something simple: leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone. But so long as we insist on the current course, we’ll hop from ill-conceived political strategies based on the falsehoods of liberal political theory towards ill-conceived and haphazard uses of conventional military power based on the falsehoods and confusion of our strategy of intervention and political transformation.

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