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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Enemy not terrorism |
| 2004-05-10 |
| EFL. John Lehman speaking at the U.S. Naval Institute and Annapolis Naval History Symposium. Words from a man who understands the problem. We were not prepared intellectually. Those of us in the national security field still carried the baggage of the Cold War. We thought in concepts of coalition warfare and the Warsaw Pact. When we thought of terrorism, we thought only of state-sponsored terrorism, which is why the immediate reaction of many in our government agencies after 9/11 was: Which state did it? Saddam, it must have been Saddam. We had failed to grasp, for a variety of reasons, the new phenomenon that had emerged in the world. This was not state-sponsored terrorism. This was religious war. This was the emergence of a transnational enemy driven by religious fervor and fanaticism. Our enemy is not terrorism. Our enemy is violent, Islamic fundamentalism. None of our government institutions was set up with receptors, or even vocabulary, to deal with this. So we left ourselves completely vulnerable to a concerted attack. Many will recall with pain what we went through in the Reagan administration in 1983, when the Marine barracks were bombed in Beirut—241 Marines and Navy corpsmen were killed. We immediately got an intercept from NSA [National Security Agency], a total smoking gun from the foreign ministry of Iran, ordering the murder of our Marines. Nothing was done to retaliate. Wonder how the world would be different if we had taken action against Iran based on this provable act of war.Instead, we did exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do, which was to withdraw. Osama bin Laden has cited this as one of his dawning moments. The vaunted United States is a paper tiger; Americans are afraid of casualties; they run like cowards when attacked; and they don’t even bother to take their dead with them. This was a seminal moment for Osama. The Secretary of Defense at the time has said he never received those intercepts. That’s an example of one of the huge problems our commission has uncovered. We have allowed the intelligence community to evolve into a bureaucratic archipelago of baronies in the Defense Department, the CIA, and 95 other different intelligence units in our government. None of them talked to one another in the same computerized system. There was no systemic sharing. |
| Posted by:RWV |
| #2 Actually Luigi, there is no question. Islam is at war with us. It is comforting to finally hear that someone in charge "gets it". |
| Posted by: jawa 2004-05-10 9:46:12 PM |
| #1 This guy's got it right: This is a religious war. There is no reason why anyone should be surprised about that. Religious wars were occurring right up until modern times in Europe. The last time the Muslims were tossed out of Europe was the Siege of Vienna in 1683. That's like the day before yesterday in the great scheme of things. I will say again what I have said before: The liberal press oftem asks "Are we at war with Islam?" That is the wrong question. The right question is "Is Islam at war with us?" |
| Posted by: Luigi 2004-05-10 6:35:09 PM |