The US isn't losing anything. Only a retard would say otherwise. Iraq is only a battleground in this war. Our military—especially the Army and Marine Corps—felt betrayed by our national leadership over Vietnam. It didn’t end there. President Reagan evacuated Beirut shortly after the bombing of our Marine barracks on the city’s outskirts, beginning a long series of bipartisan retreats in the face of terror that ultimately led to 9/11. We hit a low point in Mogadishu, when Army Rangers and line troops delivered a devastating blow against General Aideed’s irregulars only to have President Clinton declare defeat by pulling out when adherents of Al-Queda ambushed some. One may argue about the rationale for our presence in Somalia and about the dangers of mission creep, but once we’re in a fight, we need to win it and remain on the battlefield long enough to convince our enemies they’ve lost on every count.
Things began to change less than two weeks into our campaign in Afghanistan. At first, there was caution…would the new President run as soon as we suffered casualties? Then, as it dawned on our commanders that this Administration would stand behind our forces, we saw one of the most innovative campaigns in military history unfold with stunning speed, though many were not even aware. Operation Iraqi Freedom, one of the most successful military campaigns in history, was intended to be a new kind of war of maneuver, in which aerial weapons would “shock and awe” a humbled opponent into surrender while ground forces did a little light dusting in the house of war. But instead of being decided by maneuvered technologies, the three-week war was fought and won, triumphantly, by soldiers and Marines employing both aggressive operational maneuvers and devastating tactical firepower.
Far from entering an age of pure maneuver (shock and awe to certain and immediate defeat), we have entered a new age of attrition warfare in two kinds: First, the war against religious terrorism is unquestionably a war of attrition - if one of your enemies is left alive or unimprisoned, he will continue trying to kill you and destroy your civilization. Second, Operation Iraqi Freedom, for all its dashing maneuvers, provided a new example of a postmodern war of attrition—one in which the casualties are overwhelmingly on one side. The largely ignored U.S. military have been warning of this certain inevitable future since the Reagan era.
Our enemies in the “War on Terror” are men who believe, literally, that they are on a mission from God to destroy your civilization and, who regard death as a promotion, are not impressed by our morals and restrictions to remain civil. We must find them; no matter how long it takes, and then kill them. If they surrender, we must accord them their rights under the laws of war and international conventions. But, as we have learned so painfully from all the mindless, left-wing nonsense spouted about the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, we are much better off killing them before they have a chance to surrender.
It isn’t a question of whether or not we want to fight a war of attrition against religion-fueled terrorists. We’re in a war of attrition with them and they are determined to wage it upon us. We have no realistic choice. Indeed, our enemies are, in some respects, better suited to both global and local wars of maneuver than we are. They have a world in which to hide, and the world is full of targets for them. They do not heed laws or boundaries. They make and observe no treaties. They do not expect the approval of the United Nations Security Council. They do not face election cycles. And their weapons are largely provided by our own societies.
We have the technical capabilities to deploy globally, but, for now, we are forced to watch as Pakistani forces fumble efforts to surround and destroy concentrations of terrorists; we cannot enter any country (except, temporarily, Iraq) without the permission of its government. We have many tools - military, diplomatic, economic, cultural, law enforcement, and so on - but we have less freedom of maneuver than our enemies. But we do have superior killing power, once our enemies have been located. Faced with implacable enemies who would kill every man, woman, and child in our country and call the killing good (the ultimate war of attrition), we must be willing to use that power wisely, but remorselessly.
We are, militarily and nationally, in a transition phase. Even after 9/11, so many do not fully appreciate the cruelty and determination of our enemies. We will learn our lesson, painfully, because the terrorists will not quit. The only solution is to kill them and keep on killing them: a war of attrition. But a war of attrition fought on our terms, not theirs. Of course, pacifist and our self appointed voices of conscience global left will make no end of fatuous arguments to the effect that we can’t kill our way out of the problem. Well, until a better methodology is discovered, killing every terrorist we can find is a good interim solution. The truth is that even if you can’t kill yourself out of the problem, you can make the problem a great deal smaller by effective targeting and make no mistake - this is exactly what we are doing.
So many say that killing terrorists only creates more terrorists. This is utterly wrong and complete nonsense. The surest way to swell the ranks of terror is to follow the approach we did in the decade before 9/11 and do nothing of substance. Success breeds success. Everybody loves a winner. The cliches exist because they’re true. Al-Qaeda and related terrorist groups separated because they were viewed in the Muslim world as standing up to the West successfully and handing the Great Satan America embarrassing defeats with impunity. Some fanatics will flock to the standard of terror, no matter what we do. But it’s far easier for Islamic societies to purge themselves of terrorists if the terrorists are on the losing end of the global struggle than if they’re allowed to become triumphant heroes to every jobless, unstable teenager in the Middle East and beyond.
Far worse than fighting such a war of attrition aggressively is to pretend you’re not in one while your enemy keeps on killing you. It is not a matter of whether attrition is good or bad. It’s necessary.
