Opinion

Through a glass, darkly

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

Ongoing conflict needs ongoing leadership

We're at war and we've been at war for two or three decades. At first we didn't know it. We thought we were facing criminals engaged in terroristic activity, we didn't realize we were facing a guerrilla war waged by terrorists who want to destroy our entire way of life.

Wars are not won across some table by diplomats. Oh, sure, they may be ended that way but only after both sides are truly committed to the peace process.

Think I'm joking? Look at Korea. A half century after major hostilities ended there is no peace. North Korea regularly probes the defenses of South Korea and vice-versa.

As strange as that conflict is, it is at least recognizable as a war. The Israeli and Palestinian conflict, started in 1948 and never really stopped, even though there have been no "wars" since 1973, is another situation that, because of its long duration, has come to be considered "normal". Boiled down to its most basic elements, it's simple: Israel wants peace and the Palestinians want Israel.

These two are textbook examples of low-intensity conflict. There are occasions when violence erupts but it is limited and ends within days or weeks.

There is another low-intensity conflict and we are smack in the middle of it. For years we didn't even recognize it, we considered terrorist actions a law-enforcement matter. That ended Sept. 11, 2001.

Since that time we have come to realize that there can be no peace if one side can attack the other with little chance for the victims to retaliate because the attackers aren't some country's army but are members of a hidden group of terrorists from several different countries.

Some of those who oppose the war in Iraq complain that we shouldn't have become involved in it when we haven't captured Osama bin Laden. They make a simple mistake. They are trying to understand the conflict in a linear fashion and it just doesn't work that way.

They would have the United States pursue a policy that is straightforward. From point A, to point B, to point C, etc. Such linearity is easy to understand and to explain to others. However, such a policy isn't the best or most efficient method, especially when dealing in the murky waters where terrorism lurks and motives for some actions are hidden.

Sometimes the best way to traverse the landscape is to go from point A to point D and from there to point K with no intermediate steps between the jumps. The policy worked during World War II when U.S. forces island hopped around Japanese concentrations on some islands and concentrated on those that had a strategic significance.

The Japanese on the bypassed islands were effectively rendered hors de combat, not by engaging and defeating them directly, but by ignoring them and letting their lack of supplies do the work without taking casualties ourselves.

The same is true today with Iraq being the battleground. Instead of invading other countries, that some people may feel were more likely targets, we invaded Iraq and put it out of the terrorism funding business. We did away with the regime of Saddam Hussein, which killed hundreds of thousands of innocent victims and at the same time we have rendered other countries more amenable to negotiation.

Libya's Mohamar Khadafi got the message and offered up his country's nuclear weapons program on a silver platter. He knew that if we turned our attention on his regime it would have the life-span of a snowball in summertime.

Linearity is fine, if you're drawing straight lines, but it isn't always the best tactic when dealing with people. Those who complain about attacking Iraq should remember the ultimate success of the island hopping we did during World War II. It won the war with far fewer casualties than we would have sustained had we attacked each and every Japanese outpost on the way to the home islands.

There is a reason it is called the art of war. Counter-intuitive strategies often produce better outcomes than a straightforward analysis might suggest.

I'm very skeptical of the retired majors and colonels who pop up as news analysts on talk television shows and I give very little more attention to the retired generals -- after all things change and they may not be aware of recent developments that affect results. We've got a group in charge now that have successfully taken out two regimes and curtailed several others that would like to get out of line, if they dared. Unless and until someone proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a change in leadership will be beneficial I'll stick to a known winner, you don't change horses in the middle of the stream.