IT TAKES TWO SIDES TO BATTLE:

Give Us Battle (Paul J. Cella III, 24 Jan 2007, Tech Central Station)

[I] say that one of our strategies in this war should be to maneuver our enemies into a real battle, or series of them. [...]

(1) How can we provoke the enemy to recklessness? How can we make him lose his reason? How can we drive him en masse into the field of battle, and keep him there? Once this is done, I think our military forces will be eminently capable of delivering him savage repulses, and pursuing these to resounding victories against him.

(2) How can we insure that this battle will be fought on his soil and not ours? Or, more precisely perhaps, how can we insure that any such battle, while being fought elsewhere, will not have terrorist repercussions on our shores? It cannot fail to be part of our calculation that the enemy is here, amongst us; that not merely his fanatics and planners, his mercenaries and saboteurs, but also his propagandists and subversives, are prepared to leverage our domestic vulnerabilities, which are considerable, for the advance of the Jihad. But the purpose of securing a favorable ground for combat operations is an excellent one. And here, again, I think we come in contact with a piece of reasoning -- again poorly articulated -- behind the Iraq war. I'm not here entering into a discussion of that conflict, except to say (a) it hasn't worked out as planned and (b) at any rate it hasn't been accompanied by real vigilance domestically. Similarly, a lot people are now talking -- as they should be -- about what to do about Iran. Do they ever think about what Iran might be capable of in America? We cannot neglect an estimate of what sort of resources of mayhem, sedition and intimidation the Persian Jihadists might have here in the United States. We know, for instance, that Hezbollah is active. This is a problem no patriot can ignore.

(3) How can we get a better handle on the enemy's inherent mental vulnerabilities? How can we discover his points of psychological pressure, the advantages he presents to us by virtue of his own character? The means of answering this is obvious enough: let us recur to history. That sounds like a platitude, but it is an eminently practical measure. So far in this war, it has been for the most part philosophers and strategists (broadly-defined) that have counseled us. It was a philosophical argument that led us to the Democracy Project, for instance. But history is what we really need. We need speeches delivered from the Oval Office and the floors of the houses of Congress; lectures in classrooms of the military academies; and a general climate of historical curiosity in the public square -- all concerning the character and antiquity of the Jihad. We must educate ourselves, and come to better know our enemy. To do this effectively, we will also need another aspect of that measure of defiance mentioned above. The people of this republic must find in themselves a real fortitude in the teeth of the dreary orthodoxies of Tolerance and Secularism. We face a cruel, cunning and patient enemy; resisting him we require more mental toughness than we have thus far shown.

The problem, as Friend Cella very nearly grasps, is that we face an enemy so weak and marginal that he can not hope to gather in any considerable number, never mind face us on a battlefield. Indeed, the rhetoric we need at this time is the same Ronald Reagan used at the end of the Cold War, which dismissed Communism as a failure on its own terms and anticipated its imminent collapse because so flawed as to be unworkable. The reality is that the Salafists are a nuisance, not a military threat.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 10, 2007 10:14 AM