The bottom line for America is that the war against bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and their allies was and is one that we must fight. As Abdel Bari Atwan has written, “We ignore al-Qaeda at our own risk. It is not going to go away.”2
We are, however, in the entirely enviable position of being able to decide how big a war we need to fight, and we can choose, once we evacuate Iraq and Afghanistan, where we need to fight it. As I have written previously, the United States is not the main enemy of bin Laden and other Islamists, and while this reality may dent our collective sense of self-importance, it is the beginning of wisdom. America is simply in the way of Islamist forces and so prevents the attainment of their goals in the Islamic world; that is, to destroy the family-owned and U.S.-supported Muslim tyrannies that have ruled the region since 1945 and to destroy Israel. This is, of course, serious business, but it is America’s business only to the extent that Washington allows it to be, and that extent will be determined by whether or not the U.S. government maintains the status quo of its policies toward the Muslim world, energy supplies, and Israel. Since 9/11 the Bush administration, all of Congress, and the country’s bipartisan governing elite have behaved as if the threats to the Muslim tyrannies and Israel were equally threats to the United States and its citizens. What this means is that U.S. leaders have decided to forgo fighting a necessary but limited war in favor of fighting a worldwide and very likely unending war, one that holds every possibility of causing Americans to live a lifestyle shaped by war and their enemies’ actions, and not by their traditions, preferences, and aspirations.
What Is in Pandora’s Box?
To use James Madison’s metaphor, Osama bin Laden and the forces he leads and inspires have long held Pandora’s box open so U.S. leaders could examine its contents. They do not like what they see, however, because from the box are flowing woes for America that derive from the cumulative impact of thirty years of their counterproductive foreign policies. The U.S. governing elite has allowed—indeed, it has promoted—the steady development of a situation in which the energy resources upon which the U.S. economy depends are controlled by foreigners, among whom are Muslim leaders and regimes that regard our culture, political system, and dominant faith with contempt; work actively to spread a violent, anti-American brand of Islam in the United States and the societies of our European allies; and no longer believe that U.S. military power merits respect. Our immense and growing federal deficit is increasingly held by China and Saudi Arabia, the first a nation that appears headed to become America’s main economic rival, and the latter, already our energy master, a nation that funds the worldwide spread of a faith that encourages the acceptance of bin Laden’s message and therefore runs directly counter to U.S. national-security interests. In addition, our elite has put the United States in the addle-brained position of backing both sides in a vicious religious war between Israelis and Arabs, thereby making us part of an endless war in which we have nothing at stake but the emotions, religious affiliation, and divided loyalties of two small segments of our population.
Because of our governing elites’ willful blindness to this reality, the most important decision that can be made by an independent people, the decision of peace or war, is drifting ever further from American hands. Unexpected and disruptive fighting in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province or in the Niger Delta would, for example, prompt the large-scale deployment of U.S. military forces to restore reliable pumping, processing, and export in one or both locations. The U.S. president and Congress of the day would publicly go through a set of rushed “high-level deliberations,” quickly “consult with allies,” and then would roll out full-blown Cold War rhetoric and lie to Americans that “freedom is threatened” and “aggression must be crushed.” It will sound like that old-time religion and might temporarily rally Americans. But it all will be play-acting: America would be on the way to war because of Washington’s decades-old, near-criminal negligence regarding energy policy.
Likewise, U.S. participation in future Middle East wars is now virtually automatic; as the bipartisan Iraq Study Group Report recently declared: “No American administration—Democratic or Republican—will ever abandon Israel.”3 Written by a group of unelected Cold Warriors, the report thereby definitively formulated the long-unstated reality that Washington has surrendered control over the decision for war or peace in the Middle East to Israel’s government of the day or any Muslim regime that chooses to attack Israel. In sum, the U.S. governing elite’s longtime use of blithe, best-case-scenario operating assumptions—i.e., the market will ensure adequate supplies of inexpensive oil, and the Arab-Israeli peace process will succeed—has vitiated the Founders’ careful, checks-and-balances-laden delineation of the process by which the United States would go to war, a process meant to leave that decision in the hands of the elected members of the U.S. Congress, not to the president, and certainly not to foreigners seeking our wealth and military protection. But in many cases it is foreigners who will decide when the United States goes to war, and to add insult to injury, today’s political environment tends to label Americans who object to this reality as less than loyal.
This situation also highlights what today may be the most important and potentially destructive class division existing in U.S. society. U.S. politicians, the media, and our governing elite generally spend a great deal of time, talk, and ink describing black-vs.-white, rich-vs.-poor, educated-vs.-less-educated, old-vs.-young, and English-speaking-vs.-non-English-speaking divisions in American society. Such divisions undeniably exist and need focused, consistent, and sustained remedial attention, especially in the current environment in which Washington’s refusal to enforce federal immigration and border-control laws sharpens many of the just-noted societal divisions. But the greatest and most dangerous divide in American society is between our governing elites—political, economic, military, and media—and the great bulk of workaday Americans on the issues of foreign policy and war. Nonelite Americans are slowly coming to confront a reality in which those who govern them are eager to be “citizens of the world” and are more concerned with affairs outside the United States then they are with fixing such daunting domestic problems as illegal immigration and funding for Social Security. Even leading private-sector Americans do not seem immune from this aspiration. With so much to do in furthering equity, health care, and basic infrastructure rehabilitation, our leading and richest citizens prefer to donate their excess funds to foreign endeavors. Bill Gates, Ted Turner, Warren Buffett, and others have adopted an America-second attitude and are engaged in large, high-profile, and Davos-pleasing donations outside the country that nurtures, protects, and awards them breathtaking tax deductions. And now Bill Clinton, the ultimate European-wannabe ringmaster for this circus of aspiring world citizens, is strutting about the world seeking donations for humanitarian activities outside America. Even President Bush’s multibillion-dollar plan to combat HIV-AIDS in Africa seems an oddly ranked priority when the District of Columbia has an AIDS problem worse than some countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
The most dangerous aspect of the division between the domestic focus of Americans and the international fixation of their elite, however, lies in the elite’s easy willingness to sacrifice the lives of the former’s sons and daughters in wars meant to install freedom and democracy in the Islamic world. These men and women have consciously made the decision that they will steadily spend the lives of our children to bring democracy, women’s rights, parliamentary government, human rights, and secularism to those who want no part of any of them in the Westernized form that is offered. And even if they did want them, it is no part of the U.S. government’s responsibility or constitutional writ to spend the lives and treasure of Americans to satisfy the desires of foreigners.
What we are seeing today in Afghanistan is a perfect example of the willingness of U.S. leaders to spend the lives of America’s young for patently unobtainable goals, and why it is our elite—and not the Islamists—who can be accurately ch
aracterized as Madison’s disguised serpent creeping into our paradise in North America. The U.S. mission in Afghanistan was to kill Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and as many of their lieutenants, foot soldiers, and Mullah Omar’s Taliban as possible. Our mission was strictly military in nature, accomplishable given the immense power of the U.S. military, and needing to be done quickly and in a way that would leave behind enough smoldering physical wreckage and high enough piles of corpses to (a) make future Afghan regimes think twice about hosting America’s enemies and (b) leave the clear idea in the minds of all Muslims that they can think and say what they will of the United States, but the cost of actually killing or helping to kill Americans is horrendous.
This limited and doable task was never given a thought, however, as our bipartisan governing elite blithely ignored the absolute need for a thorough, north-to-south military flaying of our Islamist enemies in Afghanistan and instead undertook a project to build an America-like democracy in the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the deserts of Khandahar. Instead of our soldiers and Marines fighting, being maimed, and dying to eliminate the threat to America, they are doing so to make sure Afghans can vote—whether they want to or not, or even understand what they are doing—and so that a defined portion of the Afghan parliament is reserved for female Afghan parliamentarians. In other words, the lives of our military-children are being sacrificed so that U.S. leaders can bleat and preen in international conferences about the pride they take in bringing democracy and freedom to Afghanistan’s unwashed Muslim masses. In the era of the all-volunteer military, of course, precious few U.S. leaders have any children serving in the military. It is at least a point of curiosity to wonder how today’s gold-star mothers can bear to have lost a son or daughter to sate the democracy-mongering of the U.S. governing elite. Knowing, in years past, that a son or daughter perished to help protect America from the genuine national security threats posed by Nazism, Japanese barbarism, or Bolshevism would have been difficult enough. It would take an odd mindset indeed for any parent to be able to take comfort in knowing their child was killed so Mrs. Muhammad can vote, vamp, and abort.
Iraq is another case of the U.S. governing elite embarking on a look-how-great-we-are exercise designed to bring secular democracy to Muslims, the blood-and-treasure bill to be paid, as always, by Americans whose leaders care not a whit about protecting them or their children. As noted in Chapter 4, Saddam Hussein and Bashir al-Assad were strong, ruthless, and reliable de facto U.S. allies in the war against Sunni Islamist militancy. They were the cork in the bottle’s neck that prevented the easy westward flow of Islamist fighters from South Asia to the Levant, Turkey, Europe, and the Arabian Peninsula. Neither regime needed convincing, arms, or funding from the United States to resist and persecute the Islamists; as is almost always the case, regimes that are scared to death for their survival—as were those of Saddam and al-Assad—make the best allies. Faced with the chance to use this cost-free bulwark, the Bush administration and Congress destroyed it in the name of trying to outdo Woodrow Wilson, a human scourge who is not often enough ranked with the twentieth century’s top bloodletters. Unsatisfied with simply annihilating al-Qaeda, the one foe who could attack in the United States, the Bush team embarked on a second, democracy-crusading mission that showed them to be ignorant not only of the Muslim world but of how long it has taken to develop a functioning, equitable republican society in their own country. They scored what may well be a singular historical achievement: they were strangers in a strange land both at home and abroad. And now the American people are paying for it, and their children face a decade or more of fighting the current and, most assuredly, future wars that the Bush administration and Congress are destined to leave behind.
Time to Play Rough
Recommendations for how to conduct the U.S. struggle against the Islamist threat have ranged, as we saw at the start of this section, from the Cold War standard (America must intervene abroad so “that democratic civil society can be built or rebuilt”4) to the simply insipid (America must “isolate the terrorists and inoculate their potential recruits from them”5). Is there a doctor in the house? Clearly, such thinking lines each side of the road to perdition. But give the devil his due—to resurrect the durable manliness that Churchill claimed brought us safely through the travail of centuries will not be easy. Everything that needs to be done at home and abroad is hard, painful, and fraught with danger, but thanks to God—as our Islamist enemies would say—all that needs doing is in our own hands to do. We need no other country’s indulgence or resources to rectify the dilemmas of our own manufacturing, but we do need what we have sorely lacked for the last three presidencies, leaders with courage, determination, common sense, bloodymindedness, and a fiercely America-first orientation. When these leaders emerge, and American history gives us hope they can, they must make the home front job one. Until the continental United States is secured to the greatest extent possible in the three areas discussed below, it can do nothing overseas beyond the current and bloody attempt to avoid defeats that are too obvious.
At a moment when the United States is fighting two losing wars and also supporting other peoples’ wars, it seems counterintuitive to claim that U.S. defense priorities should be at home. But that is the case. Indeed, there is no better advice for Americans and their leaders, in conducting their necessary war against al-Qaeda–led Islamist forces, than that which is dispensed to each airline passenger before every takeoff: in the event of losing air pressure in the cabin, be sure to put on your own oxygen mask first before trying to help others. Washington’s failure to heed this advice is most apparent in the areas of immigration and border control, securing the Former Soviet Union’s (FSU) nuclear arsenal, and energy policy.
Since the United States figuratively lost cabin pressure on 9/11, Washington has been gadding about the world trying to put oxygen masks on foreigners. Our military results to date show the validity of the airlines’ advice against creating a lose-lose situation: we have not affixed the foreigners’ masks and so are losing overseas, while at home we are gasping because we have not put the needed flow of oxygen and common sense to the design of domestic security. Why in the world are U.S. leaders and elites so border-challenged? In Afghanistan, Washington refused to close the border with Pakistan, and as we are seeing today, the Taliban and al-Qaeda escaped to regroup, rearm, train, and fight another day. In Iraq, the president did not order the U.S. military to close the borders, and so the country’s Islamist insurgents, Sunni and Shia, have had a constant and reliable flow of fighters, ordnance, and funding, provided by the private and public sectors of neighboring countries, with which to kill U.S. service personnel. In the continental United States, the majority of U.S. politicians, academics, new-age Christian do-gooders, and antinational organizations—be they human rights, refugee rights, or women’s rights groups—have prevented the lawful and effective control of U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada.
A pox on all of them. In America’s war with Islamists the only place to start is with the physical security of the United States. Because our bipartisan elite has refused to control either our borders or illegal immigration, law enforcement agencies at all levels of government—local, state, and federal—have been left without even a fighting chance to defeat our U.S.-based Islamist enemies or those who are coming in from abroad. As long as the immigration-and-borders status quo remains, police agencies will be working against an undocumented pool of aliens that grows by the hour. In this context, the billions of dollars that Washington has spent to install electronic-and biodetection gear at official border crossings, ports, and airports is of use only if the Islamists are stupid enough to walk through an official entry point—whether at Tijuana or Detroit-Windsor—wearing I-love-Osama T-shirts and carrying AK-47s, explosives, al-Qaeda identification cards, or WMD components. Unfortunately for America, al-Qaeda’s fighters have proven to be anything but stupid, and they are most unlikely to help us defend the United States by exposing t
hemselves to the world’s most sophisticated detection equipment. In essence, we have, since 2001, spent untold billions beefing up security at official border-crossing points—which still allowed more than 21,000 illegal aliens to enter America since October 2005—and are now equipped to reliably interdict only the unimaginably careless or certifiably idiotic Islamist fighters. This failure also undercuts the unavoidably limited impact of the many admirable tactical victories that U.S. military and intelligence personnel have scored overseas. These men and women are executing Washington’s clearly inadequate policy of killing or arresting the Islamist fighters “one man at a time”—which has minimal negative impact on an extremely numerous enemy—only to find that their leaders have done nothing to prevent the fighters they do not apprehend or kill from getting into the United States and scoring a strategic victory.
How to proceed? Well, the best answer would be to deploy the U.S. Army and Marines along U.S. land borders to prevent the entry of illegals until an effective network of fences, trenches, watch towers, radars, and—if necessary—minefields can be built in a crash program along the Canadian and Mexican borders. But the world’s best and most expensive military is fully deployed overseas in losing Wilsonian wars meant to install the secular democracies that Muslims are resisting to the death. And even if U.S. forces were not stretched so thin, those elected to run the federal government have, for decades, failed completely, knowingly, and deliberately to ensure the physical security of U.S. borders. On this issue, Americans today find themselves in what Thomas Paine described as the “intolerable state” of being “exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government.”6
Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) Page 33
