Some Americans are agitating for war. Not a war we chose, not even a war we can afford, but maybe a war we can’t afford to avoid. It would be a war executed in our own self-defense, and in defense of the West. A war whose aim would be, to quote the French prime minister, to “annihilate” the enemy.
I only wish it were that easy.
Philosophically, I’m not against war. Sometimes there is no choice, and with the Islamic State triggering its sadistic global jihad in the short space of two weeks, this might be one of those times.
But I am against bad wars. Sometimes that means wars fought on false premises — Vietnam and Iraq both qualify. And sometimes, even when the cause is just, like this one, it means a war we really can’t win. This might be one of those, because our enemy isn’t only the Islamic State. It is its cells, its affiliates, its wannabes spreading their onerous ideology around the world. It is also still al-Qaeda, the Islamic Front, the al-Nusra Front, and literally hundreds of other odious armies that awaken with a savage smile every time any of them takes a fatal swipe against the West.
And it only gets worse, because our more potent enemy isn’t an army, it is an ideology, an evil ideology that now makes every man, woman and child in the Western world a target — whether or not they’ve ever fired a weapon in war, or dropped a bomb in war, or even set foot in a zone of war. This is the definition, the very epitome, of terrorism. Carpet-bomb Syria, carpet-bomb Iraq, put boots on the ground, assemble the biggest coalition ever seen. Fine. The raging and retributive side of me is on board. But the rational side of me says, with history as our guide, bombs and bullets won’t annihilate omnipresent evil.
At the very moment last Friday that victims started dying in Paris, I was giving a talk about terrorism to several hundred people, sponsored by the Denver-based Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab (CELL), and I told them two things about practical problems with this war on terrorism.
One is, the Islamic State doesn’t just hold sway over parts of Iraq and Syria. It has reared its ruthless head as far south as the middle of Africa, as far east as Uzbekistan, as far north as the Caucuses in Russia — and then throw in the rest of the Middle East.
The other thing is, American intelligence assets on the Islamic State’s turf are limited. And because journalists can lose their heads just for showing up, Western news organizations simply don’t anymore. The upshot is, firsthand information about the tactics, the strategies, the membership, the aspirations of these terrifying groups is next to none. That can lead to ill-informed decisions in the West and even worse outcomes.
Remember, we put as many as 140,000 troops into Afghanistan, bolstered by thousands more from allied governments. The result? Afghanistan is still a mess, the Taliban is still alive and well, al-Qaeda has safe havens in a dozen other places, and more than 2,300 Americans are dead.
Paris, Beirut, the Sinai — they are a whole new chapter in this war, probably just the start of a scary new chapter that we don’t know how to close. Since 9/11, the chilling chant of “Death to America” has basically been bloodless. But today, we hear machine guns and bombs and grenades and they are not bloodless. The whole of the Western world is now part of the war zone. With more blood, and no happy ending, in sight.
I’m not against a full-fledged attack. I just don’t know if it will cost us more than we gain. And as history also tells us, neither do the politicians, the generals, or the president.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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