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In the Hands of Fools Philip V. Brennan We are now in the hands of fools. With a new year upon us we are entering into a new phase of our involvement in the war against a determined, brutal, and dangerous enemy and our new national congressional leadership shows signs of not having the vaguest idea of what we are really facing or how to deal with it. In modern parlance, it ain't pretty and unless we get our act together the future of the United States and the Western world will be just plain ugly. There's nothing new about this. We've been floundering around, fighting a faceless enemy and trying to apply the strategies and tactics that worked in the past but are completely futile in the struggle in which we are now involved. To put it bluntly, we are trying to fight a war without having any real understanding of the nature of this war, nor of the enemy. We have violated one of the principal rules of warfare as laid down by Sun Tsu: know your enemy. "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles," he counseled. "If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself you will succumb in every battle." Story Continues Below
From the very beginning of this struggle we have acted under the misconception that although the enemy is not a state but a force, they will act from motives we would deem to be rational. Warfare in all our past experience has meant a struggle for specific but limited goals such as territory or advantages in trade and commerce — goals that to us made sense. Once the goals were achieved the struggle ended. This enemy has goals far more grandiose. They involve absolute and total domination of the entire world. Moreover, they are content to wage war for as long as it takes to achieve world conquest. In their form of warfare there are no standing armies, and thus no decisive face-offs between such forces. They fight a war of attrition, only attacking their foes at their weakest and most vulnerable points, and then fading away into the countryside or city streets. They recognize no rules of warfare — everything goes. In their astoundingly precise study of today's kind of warfare as practiced by the enemy, what they call The Warriors of Contemporary Combat, "Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias,"(Columbia University Press) Richard H. Schultz and Andrea J. Dew explain how the jihadists scorn the rules of war as laid down by Karl von Clausewitz and Hugo Grotius. They note that Clausewitz defined a modern armed force as having "a clear organization chain of command and a doctrine of combat for fighting war. The more formally structured the army the more effectively it would be able to fight." Moreover, "the style of fighting was based on doctrine, a set of rules for employing military power." Hugo Grotius, a Dutchman and humanitarian, wrote in his book "The Rights of War and Peace" that war must be subject to rules — and his were the guiding principles the lay behind the Geneva and Hague conventions. Today's jihadists subscribe to neither doctrine. Wrote the authors, the form of warfare practiced for example by the Somali warriors of Blackhawk Down infamy, who to the din of dozens of cheering dancing Somalis, dragged the body of a U.S. soldier through the streets of Mogadishu, "had little in common with the principles set down by the founding fathers of modern Western warfare or international law." In this incredible work of research and analysis the authors probe into the tribal cultures of the jihadists that embrace warfare as a natural condition and exalts warriors above all others. In that culture, all men are seen as warriors, bred to give no quarter in combat and obliged to never stop fighting until they are either dead or victorious. They provide exhaustive case studies of the struggles in Somalia, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Iraq, carefully examining the impact of Islam on both the histories of these three areas and how their tribal customs and traditions determine their ways of fighting. This book, which every single person charged with any part of fighting the war against Islamoterroirism should be forced to study, paints a grim picture of the kind of warfare the West continues to face. The authors write of Afghanistan, for example, that "for hundreds of years these traditional organizations had demonstrated time and again that they had no fear of combat. "They had developed and passed down from generation to another, ways of fighting under the most extreme conditions." They note that their ability to endure the worst hardships that have caused modern armies to quit and go home, is among their greatest martial strengths. In one chilling example of the iron determination exhibited by Afghani tribesmen in the war against the Soviets, the authors write that the tribal warriors who for untold generations have embraced the need for vengeance noted the markings on the Soviet helicopters attacking them so they could trace the copter pilots or even their families back home and sooner or later exact vengeance upon them. Facing this kind of enemy who will willingly endure protracted conflict one should reflect on Sun Tsu's admonition against prolonged warfare and its consequence. It should be familiar to the modern Western mind contemplating the struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan. "When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. "Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue. Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays." He ends with this dire warning: "There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare." In Iraq we have allowed ourselves to be drawn into a quagmire simply because we have been reluctant to do what must be done to bring the struggle to conclusion before "our weapons are dulled" and "our ardor dampened." In Iraq the root of our present difficulties lies in the inability of the Iraqi government to quell the increasing sectarian violence which is being fed by the Jihadists from both within and without Iraq and our reluctance to impose our will in this regard. Until that violence is stopped dead in its tracks and the insurgents hiding among the civilian population rooted out and killed, victory remains impossible. New York Post columnist Col. Ralph Peters explained in a recent column what must be done, advising that the U.S. must move in and occupy those areas in Baghdad and apply the tactics employed by Rudy Giulianni and his police commissioner Robert K. Bratten in then crime-ridden New York. They adopted a "no tolerance policy," punishing even the most minor of infractions and they kept enforcing it until all crime was drastically reduced. This strategy requires patience — Col Peters guesses it would take as long as two years, and then recommends repeating the process in Anbar province now all but out of control. In the past such occupations have succeeded, but as soon as the occupying forces were withdrawn the insurgents came back. Patience is the virtue needed if we are not to be driven out of Iraq, which will result in our being driven out of the Middle East, the collapse of non-jihadist regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Jordon, and Egypt, the end of our main oil supply and the resultant utter destruction of our economy. The war will come home to America. We lack patience; our enemy never runs out if it. I don't know what steps President Bush plans to take. I suggest before he does anything else he take the time to read "Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias," and order all his subordinates, military, and civilian to follow suit. It is imperative that we know the enemy and know everything there is to know about how they fight. Finally, the fools now in charge of the Congress who demand nothing less than surrender and threaten to force our immediate withdrawal from Iraq must be prevented from exposing the nation and the West to the catastrophic consequences of their policy of cut and run. The American people must make it clear that they are unwilling to throw in the towel in a struggle the outcome of which will determine the futures of our children and grandchildren and generations to come. Unable to understand anyone's absolute dedication even to the death to a principle or a faith, the materialist Democrat leadership in Congress cannot understand the unquenchable thirst for victory of the jihadists and their determination to win, no matter how many lives it costs, or how long it takes. In his "Tale of Two Cities," Charles Dickens wrote about an era that sounds familiar: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all doing direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association For Intelligence Officers. He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.
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