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| Six months of war |
| 2002-03-11 |
A half a year's a reasonable point to stop and have a look at what we've accomplished since the attacks, and at where we have to go. Sen. Daschle might even want to read some of this. What've we done? Well, we - and the Northern Alliance - have liberated Afghanistan, for startsies. We identified the perpetrators of the attacks on our soil and went after them. We killed a lot of them, captured more, took a minimum of casualties ourselves, and inflicted a minimum of casualties on the innocent bystanders. It was just about 62 days from the time the al-Qaeda Air Force struck New York until Kabul fell. Pretty impressive. Besides Afghanistan, we've reached agreements with the Philippines, Georgia, and Yemen to hunt down the Bad Guys. Sudan's signed an agreement with its Christian/Animist minority. If there was a government in Somalia, we'd have reached an agreement with them, too. Despite bitching, moaning and backbiting by the Learned Elders of Journalism, the Euros have been fairly diligent about rounding up al-Qaeda thugs and jugging them. That could be because some of the other targets they had in mind have turned out to be Strasbourg, the Eiffel Tower, downtown London, and even Sydney. Brit and Aussie SAS are in there slugging it out next to our guys, along with forces from other, less expected places like Norway and Denmark and Germany. Polish troops are on their way to Kabul, and Czech chemical troops are going to Kuwait. The Euros, despite all their vaporings, are taking the fight seriously. The other thing we've done is defined - at least in outline - who the enemy is. We viewed Osama bin Laden as our enemy on September 11th; he was the prime suspect in the attacks from the start. But we didn't have a feel for the actual structure of the enemy we were facing. We've found that Binny isn't the only enemy; he was just the most visible. Other parallel groups have come to light - Jamaah Islamiya in southeast Asia, the Khattab group in Chechnya, little groups allied with al-Qaeda such as Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Jund al Islam in Kurdistan, and Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya in Somalia. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have assumed increased importance in the scheme of things, PFLP and similar politically-based groups correspondingly less. Behind all the gunny groups we catch hazy glimpses of the intertwined money and ideology networks. We keep coming across the Saudis and their checkbooks - in the madrassahs of Pakistan, in "charitable" organizations in Bosnia cranking out phony IDs, "cultural" centers recruiting jihadis in Britain. We see Pakistan and its ISI involved in running the training camps that provide the snuffies that fan out all over the world to kill and maim. We see the two come together in the confluence of Wahhabism and the debased Deobandi clerics of Pakistan. And floating behind it all we see even rarer glimpses of the Muslim Brotherhood in Chechnya and Dagestan, and the Saudi clerics who are the real drivers showing up in Binny's home videos. And what's next? The Bush administration has been admirable in its pursuit of the war. It hasn't become bogged down in meaningless talks that are conceived to go nowhere. It's found the enemy and attacked him. Here's hoping the next six months see more of the same. That doesn't mean they've always been right. We've made mistakes, especially in the amount of reliance we've put on our Euroallies and the amount of trust we've put in all of them. Live and learn, and don't bother listening when they complain about our "unilateralism." Probably the biggest mistake Bush has made has been in the area of priorities. The Axis of Evil speech laid out three mortal enemies of the US. While the Europress affects to scratch its collective head and ask what they have in common the answer is pretty clear: all hate our guts, and all are in the process of developing or trying to develop nuclear weapons. But at the same time, they're not the ones who attacked us in September. As a matter of guaranteeing our national existence, it'll be necessary to deal with them at some point, whether militarily, diplomatically or politically doesn't matter. But the Islamonazis are at this moment more dangerous than they are, even though they appear to be on the run. We can't let up on them, not for a moment, because they're driven by pure hatred. The other mistake the administration has made has been not to back Russia, India and Israel, our natural allies in the fight, as though they were us. Both have to pursue their fights against terrorism with the same thoroughness we do. But we back off in our support for Israel against the bloody Arafat regime as soon as the bodies start to pile up. We defer to the Learned Elders of Journalism in regarding the Chechen "rebels" as something other than bloodthirsty killers. We tell the Indians to negotiate with the same Pakistani government that was running terrorist camps in Afghanistan when Pakistani thugs attack their Parliament building. Finally, we have to worry about our own people. They started out hungry for the blood of the killers. But the USA has a notoriously short attention span, which is what the people behind this war are counting on. They expect us to tire of it, they expect us to become bored with it. They also expect our grandchildren to wear turbans and to pray toward Mecca five times a day. Today instead of terrorist attacks on TV, we watched New York's new mayor give a lugubrious address in which he dwelt upon the victims of the attacks. After six months I'm afraid that the nation is lapsing into a victim mode. It's easier to be a victim than it is to be vengeful; all you have to do is look pathetic and hurt. Being vengeful takes effort. You have to look at what was done and feel the same rage over and over again, and rage is an exhausting emotion. One good thing that has also happened, which is rare in war, is that the US military has rapidly reorganized to confront its new matrix of challenges. Usually that only occurs after a defeat or some lengthy period of time. But today the prospect of actually getting the Quadrennial Review acted upon are fairly high. At the end of Bush's first term, there is a high probability that the military will be in better shape to project US power than it was in 2000's end. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |