Forever War

I don't usually make predictions, because when I do, I'm usually wrong. This time, I think I'm hitting it right on the head.

Tomorrow, or Tuesday at the latest, Rush Limbaugh will comment on Mark Danner's article in today's New York Times Magazine "Taking stock of the forever war." I know this because today when I picked up the magazine, Osama was on the cover, and I could hear the pompous drug-addled windbag saying "Did you see the New York Times Magazine this week? Osama bin Laden is their man of the year." Call it a vision, except I heard it. Does that mean I should call it an audible?

The article itself was very well thought out and thought provoking. The author argues that we are fighting the kind of war al qaeda wanted us to fight.

Think back to 2001, a day or two before the world trade center attack, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, was killed by an al qaeda suicide team disguised as journalists. Looking back today, it seems like they expected a US invasion of Afghanistan, and expected to give us the same treatment they gave the Soviets after they invaded. Killing our obvious ally in the conflict was clearly a preparatory move.

But it didn't work. Afghanistan was overthrown and the Taliban removed from power with a few dozen special forces teams and air power supporting the Northern Alliance on the ground. The US dodged the bullet that dragged the USSR into oblivion.

Of course, these holy warriors stuck around, and with new recruits, are still harassing our troops in Afghanistan, but the hopes of a "protracted guerrilla war in which the superpower would occupy a Muslim country and kill Muslim civilians" were essentially dashed. Afghanistan was just too sparsely populated, too backward and "target-poor" to provide our enemies with the trap they wanted to spring.

After Tora Bora, the Qaeda fighters who survived regrouped in neighboring countries. "We began to converge on Iran one after the other," Saif al-Adel recalled in a recent book by an Egyptian journalist. "We began to form some groups of fighters to return to Afghanistan to carry out well-prepared missions there." It is these men, along with the reconstituted Taliban, that 16,000 American soldiers are still fighting today.

Not all the fighters would return to Afghanistan. Other targets of opportunity loomed on the horizon of the possible. "Abu Mus'ab and his Jordanian and Palestinian comrades opt ed to go to Iraq," al-Adel recalled, for, he said, an "examination of the situation indicated that the Americans would inevitably make a mistake and invade Iraq sooner or later. Such an invasion would aim at overthrowing the regime. Therefore, we should play an important role in the confrontation and resistance."

While here at home we were pretending to make war only as a last resort, our enemies were able to predict an invasion that most Americans today have a hard time explaining our reasons for undertaking.

Clearly these are not irrational men, these are not fools garbed up in religious drag trying to bomb their way into heaven. These men are cunning and cruel, but they are not mad. They are, in their planning, far more rational than the ideologically blinded neocons running our foreign policy. Where the neocons expected an easy transition for Iraq, envisioning a model state, a "shining example of democracy," a place where lassez faire economics, renamed neoliberalism, could bring prosperity to the Iraqi people and us as well, al qaeda saw a trap.

The very same trap that Carter and Brzezinski sprang on the Soviets:

"It was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul," Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser, recalled in 1998. "And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." It was a strategy of provocation, for the gambit had the effect of "drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.. . .The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the U.S.S.R. its Vietnam War."

What do we have in Iraq today? We have made every mistake we avoided in Afghanistan. We are mired in a bloody conflict that has no foreseeable end. Osama emboldened our enemies around the world. al qaeda may have been reduced to operating only in Southern Asia, but their success in New York emboldened others. People who previously saw American power as too overwhelming, now see our weaknesses.

And they have not stopped. Al qaeda is more of a method now, their best thinkers put up their strategy goals on the web, and the amateurs in Madrid and London carry out attacks.

Danner doesn't offer any solution to our dilemma, but I'll give you a place to start.

Just Stop. Just stop overreacting to the latest threat, the latest bombing. In terms of history, we are safer today than our parents and grandparents were. Our fear of terrorism is more destructive to our way of life than any attack could be.

Remember those that came before us, wars where 1,000,000 men died in a single day, bombings of entire cities, remember that we are facing a gang of criminals, with specific, self-interested designs, and their aim is to frighten us, trick us into committing a rash act, like an invasion, that gives our enemies an opportunity to expose our weaknesses.

Every attack on civilians in Iraq that we can't prevent, every electrical outage, every bombed oil pipeline, reinforces the idea that the United States is vincible, emboldening our enemies and giving them the tools to recruit new ones.