Sunday, September 24, 2006

The Islamic Way of War

Quite an extraordinary, pessimistic, and eye-opening analysis by Andrew Bacevich in the September, 11, 2006 The American Conservative called The Islamic Way Of War.

Something terrifying is happening. The European peoples wherever they live - including America, are in retreat and the day may come when we will be killed by people who hate us. Of course we are being outbred - that has been going on for a generation. But something more is happening - we are not able to win wars or to defend ourselves anymore. Muslims are taking our land, our culture, and our progeny - and we seem unable to stop them. The reason for this is because Muslims have stopped trying to emulate our way of fighting and begun to engage us in the Islamic Way Of War. Their god is powerful and we will not easily be able to stop them.

Andrew Bracevich's brilliant analysis is not something you will see in the maintream media because it does not promote the liberal notion that we are all alike under the skin.


"In Iraq, the world’s only superpower finds itself mired in a conflict that it cannot win. History’s mightiest military has been unable to defeat an enemy force of perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 insurgents equipped with post-World War II vintage assault rifles and anti-tank weapons.

In Gaza and southern Lebanon, the Middle East’s mightiest military also finds itself locked in combat with adversaries that it cannot defeat. Despite weeks of bitter fighting, the IDF’s Merkava tanks, F-16 fighter-bombers, and missile-launching unmanned aerial vehicles failed to suppress, much less eliminate, the armed resistance of Hamas and Hezbollah.

What are we to make of this? ...

The answer to that question is dismayingly simple: the sun has set on the age of unquestioned Western military dominance. Bluntly, the East has solved the riddle of the Western Way of War. "

"The truth is that U.S. forces and the IDF looked good fighting Arabs only as long as Arab political leaders insisted on fighting on Western terms. As long as they persisted in pitting tank against tank or fighter plane against fighter plane, Arabs were never going to get the better of either the Americans or the Israelis. His stupidity perhaps matched only by his ruthlessness, Saddam may well have been the last Arab leader to figure this out."

"What the Islamic Way of War does mean to both Israel and to the United States is this: the Arabs now possess—and know that they possess—the capacity to deny us victory, especially in any altercation that occurs on their own turf and among their own people. To put it another way, neither Israel nor the United States today possesses anything like the military muscle needed to impose its will on the various governments, nation-states, factions, and political movements that comprise our list of enemies. For politicians in Jerusalem or Washington to persist in pretending otherwise is the sheerest folly.

It’s time for Americans to recognize that the enterprise that some neoconservatives refer to as World War IV is unwinnable in a strictly military sense. Indeed, it’s past time to re-examine the post-Cold War assumption that military power provides the preferred antidote to any and all complaints that we have with the world beyond our borders."

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