THE WAR WE CAN'T WIN
[The following was written shortly after September 11]
SAM SMITH, PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, 2001 -
The media and politicians call what happened terrorism. This is a propagandistic rather than a descriptive term and replaces the more useful traditional phrases, guerilla action or guerilla warfare. The former places a mythical shroud around the event while the latter depicts its true nature. Guerillas do not play by the rules of state organization or military tactics. This does not make them cowardly, as some have suggested, but can make them fiendishly clever. The essence of guerilla warfare is to attack at times and places unsuspected and return to places unknown. You can not invade the land of guerillas, you can not bomb them out of existence, you can not overwhelm them with your technological wonders.
This was a lesson we were supposed to have learned in Vietnam but appear to have forgotten. The journalist Bernard Fall early noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and over. Our war against "terrorism" has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over and over because, until now, we could afford to.
One of these has been to define the problem by its manifestations rather than its causes. This turns a resolvable political problem into a irresolvable technical problem, because while, for example, there are clearly solutions to the Middle East crisis, there are no other solutions to the guerilla violence that grows from the failure to end it.In other words, if you define the problem as "a struggle against terrorism" you have already admitted defeat because the guerilla will always have the upper hand against a centralized, technology-dependent society such as ours. There is one way to deal with guerilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick is to undermine the violence of the most bitter by dealing honestly with the complaints of the most rational.
As we have demonstrated in the Middle East, one need not even reach a final solution as long as incremental progress is being made. But once that ceases, as has happened, the case for freelance violence is quickly strengthened and people simply forget that peace is possible.In the present instance, we may have met our own Dien Bien Phu in our long, senseless, and self-defeating effort to subdue and control those of the Muslim states.
The answer - humiliating as it may seem over the short run but courageous as it really would be - is not to commence yet another war of empire against the Muslim world, but to end the one we have conducted for far too long.This is what France did. By 1961, with Kennedy contemplating involvement in Vietnam, General de Gaulle strongly urged him not to get involved in that "rotten country." Said de Gaulle, "I predict to you, that you will, step by step, be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire." The French had lost 55,000 troops there, almost as many as the Americans would. This was not the advice of a pacifist or a warrior gone soft, but of a hard-nosed general who understood the importance of reality in military and political strategy. A few years earlier he had become prime minister and begun not only France's extrication from but from its other colonies. In 1958 he had proposed the "peace of the brave" but within one year was supporting full Algerian self-determination. He held to this position despite an attempted coup by members of the Foreign Legion and a secret army organization determined to keep Algeria French.Among those supporting the liberation of Algeria was the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre. As Danielle Costa has written, he "argued that the violence in Algeria was the French people's collective responsibility. He felt that the initial and fundamental violence in the Algerian situation was colonialism itself. He argued that the colonial system was based on violence - first conquest, then different forms of exploitation and oppression, and then pacification. By its own violence, colonialism had taught the natives to understand only violence. By colonialism's intransigence, it forced the native to resort to violence."We have built our own colonialism using corporations rather than cavalry and with foreign trade rather than with the Foreign Legion. But the effects have been much the same.
SAM SMITH, PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, 2001 - The curable cause of the present disaster is not to be found in a cave in Afghanistan nor at a military headquarters in Palestine. Rather it is to be found in a half century of abusive American policy towards the Islamic world including a deadly, criminal embargo against Iraq; the permanent suppression of Palestinian statehood; the promotion, assassination and/or manipulation of a string of leaders against the best interests of peace and our own security; the covert employment (to our later regret) of the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein; and our repeated refusal to listen to the nearly unanimous voice of the United Nations in general assembly. We have wantonly - and at enormous damage to our creditability, safety and honor - pursued the goals of militarists, CIA adventurists, the oil industry, the Israeli lobby, and the Ivy League imperialists of the Council on Foreign Relations - all mindlessly cheered on by a servile and slanted media.We have absolutely nothing to gain by continuing to follow the self-serving, avaricious, and reckless goals of those who have caused our nation such hurt.
By admitting that these policies have been wrong, we have nothing to lose but decades of bad advice and the shame that has accompanied it.These policies have not been American policies in any indigenous sense; rather they have been the work of greedy corporations, arrogant intellectuals in search of machismo, violent militarists, and a stunningly uncritical press. Nowhere is the defense of Israeli aggression mentioned in the Constitution. Patrick Henry did not say, "Give me a pipeline or give me death." Nathan Hale did not declared, "I regret have but one life to give for hegemony in Eurasia."In fact, no policy by any president has been more alien to American ideals than that now being pursued by George W. Bush. He is destroying our Constitution, bringing disgrace to our history, and endangering the entire planet.Many say there is no other course, but this is absolutely false. One reason it doesn't seem so is because the media refuses to give time or space to other than apostles of violence and revenge. The voices of calm, reason, and rational resolution have been blacklisted by almost all the major media - including those supported by tax dollars and public contribution. . .
We can still stop the madness. All we need is enough humility to admit that our country has been wrong, enough rationality to understand that one does not eradicate evil by compounding it, and enough courage to oppose the evisceration of our liberties and values by those whose words do not reflect patriotism but blasphemy.Or, on the other hand, we can condemn ourselves and our children to lives of fear, anger, and confusion - and perhaps even worse - all because our leaders were unwilling to act with the honor, decency, and sense of fair play that were once the hallmark of an American.
ARE WE SAFER NOW?PROGRESS REPORT - By objective measures, the problem of international terrorism is worse now than it was in 2001. According to State Department data, the number of international terrorist attacks tripled to 650 in 2004. (The number of international terrorist attacks in 2003, 175, was a 20-year high.) This week, the National Counterterrorism Center – which is a government agency – revealed that those numbers dramatically understate the scope of the problem. Broadening the definition to include attacks that "deliberately hit civilians or non-combatants" the NCTC found that 3,192 incidents of international terrorism occurred last year, resulting in the "deaths, injury or kidnapping of almost 28,500 people." For more information, check out the NCTC's new website, the Terrorism Knowledge Base.President Bush unequivocally asserts that "we are winning the war on terror." But in a leaked October 2003 memo, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the key question was: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than . . . the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" Asked on Meet the Press two weeks ago if we were succeeding, Rumsfeld said, "I don't know the answer to the question." Evidence from the CIA suggests the number of terrorists is increasing. If we don't know we are reducing the pool of terrorists, how can the president tell the American people we are winning the war on terror?
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=124597
SAM SMITH, PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, 2001 -
The media and politicians call what happened terrorism. This is a propagandistic rather than a descriptive term and replaces the more useful traditional phrases, guerilla action or guerilla warfare. The former places a mythical shroud around the event while the latter depicts its true nature. Guerillas do not play by the rules of state organization or military tactics. This does not make them cowardly, as some have suggested, but can make them fiendishly clever. The essence of guerilla warfare is to attack at times and places unsuspected and return to places unknown. You can not invade the land of guerillas, you can not bomb them out of existence, you can not overwhelm them with your technological wonders.
This was a lesson we were supposed to have learned in Vietnam but appear to have forgotten. The journalist Bernard Fall early noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and over. Our war against "terrorism" has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over and over because, until now, we could afford to.
One of these has been to define the problem by its manifestations rather than its causes. This turns a resolvable political problem into a irresolvable technical problem, because while, for example, there are clearly solutions to the Middle East crisis, there are no other solutions to the guerilla violence that grows from the failure to end it.In other words, if you define the problem as "a struggle against terrorism" you have already admitted defeat because the guerilla will always have the upper hand against a centralized, technology-dependent society such as ours. There is one way to deal with guerilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick is to undermine the violence of the most bitter by dealing honestly with the complaints of the most rational.
As we have demonstrated in the Middle East, one need not even reach a final solution as long as incremental progress is being made. But once that ceases, as has happened, the case for freelance violence is quickly strengthened and people simply forget that peace is possible.In the present instance, we may have met our own Dien Bien Phu in our long, senseless, and self-defeating effort to subdue and control those of the Muslim states.
The answer - humiliating as it may seem over the short run but courageous as it really would be - is not to commence yet another war of empire against the Muslim world, but to end the one we have conducted for far too long.This is what France did. By 1961, with Kennedy contemplating involvement in Vietnam, General de Gaulle strongly urged him not to get involved in that "rotten country." Said de Gaulle, "I predict to you, that you will, step by step, be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire." The French had lost 55,000 troops there, almost as many as the Americans would. This was not the advice of a pacifist or a warrior gone soft, but of a hard-nosed general who understood the importance of reality in military and political strategy. A few years earlier he had become prime minister and begun not only France's extrication from but from its other colonies. In 1958 he had proposed the "peace of the brave" but within one year was supporting full Algerian self-determination. He held to this position despite an attempted coup by members of the Foreign Legion and a secret army organization determined to keep Algeria French.Among those supporting the liberation of Algeria was the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre. As Danielle Costa has written, he "argued that the violence in Algeria was the French people's collective responsibility. He felt that the initial and fundamental violence in the Algerian situation was colonialism itself. He argued that the colonial system was based on violence - first conquest, then different forms of exploitation and oppression, and then pacification. By its own violence, colonialism had taught the natives to understand only violence. By colonialism's intransigence, it forced the native to resort to violence."We have built our own colonialism using corporations rather than cavalry and with foreign trade rather than with the Foreign Legion. But the effects have been much the same.
SAM SMITH, PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, 2001 - The curable cause of the present disaster is not to be found in a cave in Afghanistan nor at a military headquarters in Palestine. Rather it is to be found in a half century of abusive American policy towards the Islamic world including a deadly, criminal embargo against Iraq; the permanent suppression of Palestinian statehood; the promotion, assassination and/or manipulation of a string of leaders against the best interests of peace and our own security; the covert employment (to our later regret) of the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein; and our repeated refusal to listen to the nearly unanimous voice of the United Nations in general assembly. We have wantonly - and at enormous damage to our creditability, safety and honor - pursued the goals of militarists, CIA adventurists, the oil industry, the Israeli lobby, and the Ivy League imperialists of the Council on Foreign Relations - all mindlessly cheered on by a servile and slanted media.We have absolutely nothing to gain by continuing to follow the self-serving, avaricious, and reckless goals of those who have caused our nation such hurt.
By admitting that these policies have been wrong, we have nothing to lose but decades of bad advice and the shame that has accompanied it.These policies have not been American policies in any indigenous sense; rather they have been the work of greedy corporations, arrogant intellectuals in search of machismo, violent militarists, and a stunningly uncritical press. Nowhere is the defense of Israeli aggression mentioned in the Constitution. Patrick Henry did not say, "Give me a pipeline or give me death." Nathan Hale did not declared, "I regret have but one life to give for hegemony in Eurasia."In fact, no policy by any president has been more alien to American ideals than that now being pursued by George W. Bush. He is destroying our Constitution, bringing disgrace to our history, and endangering the entire planet.Many say there is no other course, but this is absolutely false. One reason it doesn't seem so is because the media refuses to give time or space to other than apostles of violence and revenge. The voices of calm, reason, and rational resolution have been blacklisted by almost all the major media - including those supported by tax dollars and public contribution. . .
We can still stop the madness. All we need is enough humility to admit that our country has been wrong, enough rationality to understand that one does not eradicate evil by compounding it, and enough courage to oppose the evisceration of our liberties and values by those whose words do not reflect patriotism but blasphemy.Or, on the other hand, we can condemn ourselves and our children to lives of fear, anger, and confusion - and perhaps even worse - all because our leaders were unwilling to act with the honor, decency, and sense of fair play that were once the hallmark of an American.
ARE WE SAFER NOW?PROGRESS REPORT - By objective measures, the problem of international terrorism is worse now than it was in 2001. According to State Department data, the number of international terrorist attacks tripled to 650 in 2004. (The number of international terrorist attacks in 2003, 175, was a 20-year high.) This week, the National Counterterrorism Center – which is a government agency – revealed that those numbers dramatically understate the scope of the problem. Broadening the definition to include attacks that "deliberately hit civilians or non-combatants" the NCTC found that 3,192 incidents of international terrorism occurred last year, resulting in the "deaths, injury or kidnapping of almost 28,500 people." For more information, check out the NCTC's new website, the Terrorism Knowledge Base.President Bush unequivocally asserts that "we are winning the war on terror." But in a leaked October 2003 memo, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the key question was: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than . . . the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" Asked on Meet the Press two weeks ago if we were succeeding, Rumsfeld said, "I don't know the answer to the question." Evidence from the CIA suggests the number of terrorists is increasing. If we don't know we are reducing the pool of terrorists, how can the president tell the American people we are winning the war on terror?
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=124597
posted by T. Scott Brineman at 9:03 AM
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