A war for you great grand children to finish
Bill Gertz:
The American people need to prepare for a long-duration war against radical Muslims who are set to fight for 50 to 100 years to create an Islamist state in the region, a top Pentagon strategist in the war on terror says.This will sound like Quagmire City to the anti war left, but the diffusion of the enemy in a sea of nearly two billion Muslims will make for a long war. We are fighting an enemy that has no regard for the rules of war or the Geneva Conventions and we must do a better job of fighting him in the media battle space. Right now the media in the west and in this country in particularly has done a very poor job. Too often it has followed the enemy script and blamed the US for not stopping the wicked acts of the terrorist, rather than focus on the wickedness. By following the enemy script the media is encouraging the murders of non combatants, which are being done just to get media attention since they are militarily insignificant.
Air Force Brig. Gen. Mark O. Schissler said in an interview that the current strategy for fighting Islamists includes both military and ideological components that make it similar to the 40-year Cold War against communism.
"We're in a generational war. You can try and fight the enemy where they are and where they're attacking you, or prevent them and defend your own homeland," said Gen. Schissler, deputy director for the war on terrorism within the strategic plans office of the Pentagon's Joint Staff.
"But that's not enough to stop it. We've got to break the chain, and that's ... the ideology. We really need to show the errors in Islamist extremist thinking."
Gen. Schissler said he is concerned that Washington politics is weakening the will of the nation.
"I don't care about the politics. I care about people understanding the facts of what's our enemy is thinking about, what's our strategy to defeat them, and for [Americans] to understand that it will take a long fight, mostly because our enemy is committed to the long fight," he said. "They're absolutely committed to the 50-, 100-year plan."
"One of my concerns is how to maintain the American will, the public will over that duration," he said.
America's past wars lasted three to four years and sustaining support for longer wars "is very difficult," he said.
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I for one am glad Americans won't go for a 100-year plan. If it's really expected to be a three-generation war, then why don't we appropriate the oil fields in the Middle East and glass over the rest of it right now? Who are my children and grandchildren supposed to be suffering for, three generations of strangers in Baghdad whose mysticism is their allegiance to the Dark Ages? It is interesting when Schissler says "I don't care about politics," because the 100-year plan is exactly the product of political pragmatism -- conservative pragmatism rather than liberal, but that's still what it is. The Japanese and the Germans had ideology too, it certainly does not have to take three generations of war to neutralize an evil and popular ideology. I'd rather expect that a 100-year plan is not a plan that can achieve victory at all, it's a plan for fighting the enemy fringes while not touching their "moderate" base of support.
ReplyDeleteThe Ku Klux Klan was not foreign, it was composed of American citizens, that's the biggest problem with this analogy. The Islamic totalitarians are foreigners with huge national bases of support, they can be destroyed without targeting our own citizens and property.