Lehman on the "War on Terror"

[unixronin]

Former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman addressed the 130th Annual Meeting of the U.S. Naval Institute and Annapolis Naval History Symposium on March 31, 2004.  This, in part, is what he had to say:

We are at a juncture today that really is more of a threshold, even more of a watershed, than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in 1941.  We are currently in a war, but it is not a war on terrorism.  In fact, that has been a great confusion, and the sooner we drop that term, the better.  This would be like President Franklin Roosevelt saying in World War II, 'We are engaged in a war against kamikazes and blitzkrieg.'  Like them, terrorism is a method, a tool, a weapon that has been used against us.  And part of the reason we suffered such a horrific attack is that we were not prepared.

[...]

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.

[...]

I’d like to say we have fixed these problems, but we haven’t.  We have very real vulnerabilities.  We have not diminished in any way the fervor and ideology of our enemy.  [...]  Today, probably 50 or more states have schools that are teaching jihad, preaching, recruiting, and training.  We have absolutely no successful programs even begun to remediate against those efforts.  [...]  Nobody paid attention.  Presidents in four administrations put their arms around Saudi ambassadors, ignored the Wahhabi jihadism, and said these are our eternal friends.

Sobering, and accurate, observations.  As has been said before, you can't fight a war against terror.  It's like trying to fight a war against windy nights, or against the color blue.  The true enemy is, indeed, Wahhabism, and one of our largest obstacles to being able to fight it realistically and effectively is the delusion that we have any true friends in Saudi Arabia who will remain our friends once we stop buying their oil and selling them weapons.  The Saudis take our money and shake our hands, then they turn around and pass large amounts of that very same money to Wahhabis who use it to make war on us.

And now we have a President who apparently thinks that the proper response to that war is to bow and apologize...

(Further:  The Wikiquotes page citing this goes on to mention that Lehman also spoke of an NSA communications intercept, in the wake of the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing, that was "a total smoking gun" showing that the attack had been directly ordered by the Iranian Foreign Ministry.  Yet, inexplicably, the US did nothing in response.  This was almost certainly a mistake.  On the strength of that intercept and the attack, we should have immediately declared the bombing an act of war and that a state of war now existed between the United States and Iran.)

Comments

[glitch25]

Seems like a fine line, though, between playing the cowboy with the attitude of kicking ass and taking names, and realizing that if any states or religious groups truly made a concerted effort to take down the United States, it would be all kinds of messy and highly successful. Reminds me of the depictions we see of the American Revolutionary War where the British stood in long lines in bright red coats waiting for the Americans to pick them off. Nice and neat. And here we are standing in a line waving our arms in our nice shiny red coats, sipping tea, saying how barbaric jihadism is. :-)

Granted, keeping the peace is done with fake smiles, but not making the effort in some fashion will guarantee state-backed efforts to bring jihadism to our doorsteps. I think the thought that we'd ever have somebody covering our back is an illusion.

[robhansen]

If our opponents were to make a concerted (which is to say, centralized, command-and-controlled) effort, they would in essence be state actors. Our military is highly optimized for turning state actors into thin red paste. They set up a new Caliphate in Qum and unite the entire Ummah under its banner? No problem: we’ve carpetbombed cities before, we know how to do that, we’re good with that.

The number one constraint on the American military ever since World War Two has not been a lack of capability: it has been a lack of political support. In World War Two, when we firebombed Dresden and Tokyo and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we did so with the tacit consent of the governed. Today our destructive capabilities are orders of magnitude more frightening — and our willingness to use those measures orders of magnitude less.

If we were to see a concerted, centralized campaign against us, I think the people of the United States would very quickly say, “we don’t care about the ‘intrinsic human rights of oppressed peoples’ anymore and we don’t care about the ‘injustice of the imperialist West,’ just make the Goddamned murders stop!”

And at that point, we would unleash such hell on the universe that even the Israelis would be backing away slowly and telling us, “dude, you really need to calm down.”

[hugh_mannity]

While that's certainly true, it conveniently forgets the part that post-WWII US foreign policy has played in sewing the seeds of extremism and Arab nationalism (in so far as there is any).

The US's continued support of Israel and support of a lot of fairly rotten behaviour on the part of oil companies and othe US big business, has caused a lot of strife in the area. As has the deposition of legitimate governments and the support of oppressive regimes in their place: Iran's democratically elected government that was replaced by the Shah; the initial support of Saddam Hussein.

The Saudi royal family has a very tenuous hold on power. They depend (as did the Shah) on their various secret and not so secret police forces and control of the media to stay put. They are funding fundamentalist groups all over the Middle East, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, because they believe that focusing the huge depth of discontent and downright anger of the general population of the area on the US will keep them safe from an internal revolution. It's a pretty dodgy strategy and one that's come close to backfiring on them several times. Especially over things like the deployment of US troops (including women) in Saudia.

There is a likelihood that (the probably late) Osama bin Laden was actually a Saudi government agitator paid to foment discontent against the US in order to deflect heat from the Al-Saud family.