http://www.cliffordmay.org/23766/foreign-enemies-fear-united-states
“There are two ways to fight the United States militarily: asymmetrically and stupid.”
Few would quarrel with this observation by retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, formerly President Trump’s national security adviser, currently chairman of the board of advisers to Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD)’s Center on Military and Political Power.
But that raises a question: Why have we failed to develop a strategy to defeat enemies fighting us asymmetrically? In other words, why is there still a smart way to kill Americans?
In this space last week, I offered one reason: Many members of the commentariat on both the left and the right think in outdated, binary terms. In their minds, either we’re at peace or we’re at war. They naturally prefer the former and fret that forcefully responding to assaults by our enemies puts us “on the brink” of the latter. But any time our enemies hit us and get away with it, they win and are encouraged to keep going.
The seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, the bombing of the American embassies in Beirut and Kuwait in 1983, the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 — we responded to these acts of war as though they were one-offs, committed by common criminals. Other attacks followed, for example in 1996, 1998, 2000 and, of course, 2001.