SORTA, KINDA WAR ON TERROR? VD HANSON
Our Sorta, Kinda War on Terror
President Obama has not signed up for a serious effort against radical Islam.
By Victor Davis Hanson
After Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Great Britain and France sorta, kinda declared war on Germany. The formal declaration of war was real enough, but the allies’ initial responses were laughable.
Two days after Germany started to slaughter the Poles, Britain began conducting “truth raids,†which were to drop 6 million leaflets over Germany. These milk runs were supposedly aimed at “showing†the Germans that Britain someday might be able to bomb them, “enlightening†them about the sins of the then widely popular and victorious Adolf Hitler, and demonstrating the Brits’ desire for peace and quiet rather than another Somme or Verdun.
For much of that autumn of 1939 and the winter of 1940, the enormous French army stayed put — except occasionally to “push†a mile or two into German territory, and then retreat back, all to prove the country’s supposed fighting ability. Somehow during the nine-month-long “phony war,†the pre-Churchillian allies managed to convey a sense of weakness and timidity, while being bellicose sounding enough to offend their enemies.
Hitler, in contrast, smiled and pressed on, invading Denmark and Norway, launching unrestricted submarine attacks, rounding up Jews in the east, bombing Britain, and preparing for a massive invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France.
We are back in a such a sorta, kinda war against radical Islam — whose name we almost never reference. We send more troops into Afghanistan, but only on the condition that we announce deadlines when they will start leaving. We damn the now-successful Iraq War as ill-conceived and not worth the effort, even as we stay in Iraq and consider the present calm and enduring democracy a (quiet) success.
The president has libeled tribunals, renditions, the Patriot Act, Predator attacks, wiretaps, and intercepts as either shredding the Constitution or unfairly persecuting Muslims — only to keep all these protocols intact. Obama loudly promised the whiny Europeans and the angry Islamic world that he would close the supposed gulag at Guantanamo within a year — and then found he could not do without its apparent utility.
Deadlines are a favorite of our president. But does anyone believe that Guantanamo will be closed on January 21? Iran was to desist from its efforts to obtain the bomb before the U.N. summit in New York, and then before the G-20 summit, and then before the face-to-face negotiations in October, and then by the first of the year.
Sometimes we “reach out†to the unhinged Ahmadinejad and ignore his brave opponents who are risking their lives in the streets; at other times, we lecture the theocracy about its bad behavior in sponsoring terror and violating nuclear non-proliferation agreements. We both damn and praise Israel for its “settlements†— appointing its enemies to the Obama administration, while assuring its friends that U.S. policy remains unchanged.
When Mr. Abdulmutallab tried to blow himself up, along with 300 other passengers, Obama’s initial, though belated, reactions were that the terrorist had “allegedly†tried to commit mass murder, and that he was an “isolated extremist,†despite clear ties to Yemeni terrorists. Our Homeland Security head proclaimed that the system had “worked†— for about 24 hours, until she was politely disabused of that lunatic notion. Abdulmutallab was promised a civilian trial, apparently on the grounds that this non-uniformed enemy combatant was caught on American soil — although his intent was instead to float down upon it as human ash.
CIA agents are to be tried for supposedly being too rough on the architect of 9/11, who in turn, despite past bragging about his role in killing 3,000 Americans, will now as another non-uniformed terrorist be given a public trial in New York.
The 19th-century discipline of philology argued that words were the key to understanding the past — if something in the past had existed, there surely was a proper recoverable word for it. And in turn, how a culture used vocabulary was a window into its very values. So when Barack Obama had his administration scrap the Manichean “war on terror†for “overseas contingency operations†aimed against “man-made disasters,†we understood that he had not signed up for a serious effort against radical Islam.
Instead, Obama apparently felt the war was due mostly to misunderstanding and was only exacerbated by President Bush’s crude Texanisms, rather than being due to the multifaceted pathologies of the radical Muslim world.
Obama by his nomenclature, race, and self-referenced unique life experiences would co-opt and confuse the terrorists and their sponsors rather than have to confront them with force in Neanderthal fashion. Indeed, if one were to go back and count the times Obama has trashed his predecessor, and then collate that list with a list of his comparable slurs and slights against radical Islam, one would conclude that our present federal animus is directed against George Bush rather than Dr. Zawahiri and his cohort.
All this is not lost on the enemy.
The problem is that despite all the appeasement rhetoric and the finger-pointing at prior federal officials, we are still sorta, kinda at war. The Nobel peace laureate Obama has ordered far more judge/jury/executioner Predator raids than did “smoke ’em out†Bush. That is, we regret waterboarding self-confessed mass murderers, but not executing suspected terrorists by remote control in Waziristan — along with anyone unfortunate enough to be sitting in the suspected terrorist’s living room. Americans are bravely fighting radical Muslims in Afghanistan, and are on guard in Iraq — while their commander-in-chief promises to leave the former theater, and shows regret for even being in the latter.
Rendition is said to be the product of Dick Cheney’s dark mind, but Barack Obama is now employing that tactic to its fullest extent. And while Obama continued to blow up Muslims in Afghanistan and simultaneously claimed that Bush had gone overboard in his war against terrorists, there were more foiled terrorist plots in his inaugural year of 2009 than during any other year since 2001.
In other words, we are in very dangerous territory. Barack Obama is doing just enough to infuriate our enemies, while at the same time trying to deny that we are in an existential war against them. He has caricatured the notion of victory as archaic and perhaps surreal in our complex postmodern world, as if the enemy agrees. Obama does not seem to understand that while we conduct a seminar on the meaning of victory, the Islamists believe that its antithesis, our defeat, is both very real and achievable.
While Obama offers false historical analogies, apologies for his country, and exaggerated accounts of Muslim achievement, he nevertheless tries to now follow/now deny the hated Bush anti-terrorism protocols and the Bush/Petraeus plans for Afghanistan and Iraq. Nothing is more dangerous in war than fighting an enemy while trying to beg peace from him at the same time. Ask Neville Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier, Lyndon Johnson, or Jimmy Carter.
So, like the British and French in 1939, LBJ in the 1960s, and Jimmy Carter, the Great Satan of 1979, we are sleepwalking through a real war, mixing therapy and tragedy, peace and war, appeasement and violence, outreach and Predators.
Soon the enemy will take our sad measure, reenergize and escalate, and make us choose either to fight or to desist — as we pray that another Churchill or Reagan rides in over the horizon.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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