http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_09_11/cover.html

September 11, 2006 Issue

The American Conservative

The Islamic Way of War ..


Muslims have stopped fighting on Western terms—and have started
winning.


by Andrew J. Bacevich


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? How is it that the seemingly weak and
primitive are able to frustrate modern armies only recently viewed as
all but invincible? What do the parallel tribulations—and
embarrassments—of the United States and Israel have to tell us about
war and politics in the 21st century? In short, what's going on
here?

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. In Baghdad and in
Anbar Province as at various points on Israel's troubled perimeter,
the message is clear: methods that once could be counted on to
deliver swift decision no longer work.

For centuries, Western military might underpinned Western political
dominion everywhere from Asia to Africa to the New World. It was not
virtue that created the overseas empires of Great Britain, France,
Spain, and the other European colonizers; it was firepower,
technology, and discipline.

Through much of the last century, nowhere was this Western military
pre-eminence more in evidence than in the Middle East. During World
War I, superior power enabled the British and French to topple the
Ottomans, carve up the region to suit their own interests, and then
rule it like a fiefdom. Until 1945, European machine guns kept
restive Arabs under control in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.

The end of World War II found the Europeans without the will to
operate the machine guns and short on the money to pay for them. In
the Middle East, Arabs no longer willing to follow instructions
issued by London or Paris demanded independence. Eager to claim
prestige and respect, these nationalists, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser
foremost among them, saw in the creation of large machine-age armies
a shortcut to achieving their goals.

Placing an order for Soviet-bloc armaments in 1955, Nasser began an
ill-fated Arab flirtation with Western-style military technique that
did not fully end until Saddam Hussein's army collapsed on the
outskirts of Baghdad nearly a half-century later. Throughout the
1960s and 1970s, Arab leaders invested in fleets of tanks, field
artillery, and other heavy armaments, which they organized into
massive formations supported by costly air forces equipped with
supersonic jets. On the ground, bigger meant better; in the air,
speed was thought to signify superiority.

All of these pricy exertions yielded only humiliation and indignity.
Israel—a Western implant in the Muslim world—also adopted
Western-style military methods but with far greater success,
subjecting the Arabs to repeated drubbings. Designed on the Soviet
model, the new Arab armies turned out to be ponderous and predictable
but with little of the Red Army's capacity to absorb punishment and
keep fighting. Taking the best of the German military tradition, the
Israel Defense Forces placed a premium on daring, dash, and
decentralization as they demonstrated to great effect in 1956, 1967,
and 1973.

What was it that made the IDF in its heyday look so good? According
to the punch line of an old joke: because they always fought Arabs.
In 1991, the Americans finally had their own chance to fight Arabs,
and they too looked good, making mincemeat of Saddam Hussein's
legions in Operation Desert Storm. In the spring of 2003, the
Americans looked good once again, dispatching the remnant of Saddam's
army in a short and seemingly decisive campaign. In Washington many
concluded that an unstoppable U.S. military machine could provide the
leverage necessary to transform the entire region.

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.

Well before Saddam's final defeat, others, less stupid, began to
develop alternative means of what they called "resistance." This new
Islamic Way of War evolved over a period of decades not only in the
Arab world but beyond.

In Afghanistan during the 1980s, the Mujahadeen got things started by
bringing to its knees a Soviet army equipped with an arsenal of modern
equipment. During the so-called First Intifada, which began in 1987,
stone-throwing and Molotov-cocktail-wielding Palestinians gave the
IDF conniptions. In 1993, an angry Somali rabble—not an army at
all—sent the United States packing. In 2000, the collapse of the Camp
David talks produced a Second Intifada, this one persuading the
government of Ariel Sharon that Israeli occupation of Gaza and the
West Bank was becoming unsustainable. Most spectacularly, in
September 2001, al-Qaeda engineered a successful assault on the
American homeland, the culmination of a series of attacks that had
begun a decade earlier.

First in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, the United States seemed
briefly to turn the tables: Western military methods overthrew the
Taliban and then made short shrift of Saddam. After the briefest of
intervals, however, victory in both places gave way to renewed and
protracted fighting. Most recently, in southern Lebanon an
intervention that began with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
vowing to destroy Hezbollah has run aground and looks increasingly
like an Israeli defeat.

So it turns out that Arabs—or more broadly Muslims—can fight after
all. We may surmise that they now realize that fighting effectively
requires that they do so on their own terms rather than mimicking the
West. They don't need and don't want tanks and fighter-bombers. What
many Westerners dismiss as "terrorism," whether directed against
Israelis, Americans, or others in the West, ought to be seen as a
panoply of techniques employed to undercut the apparent advantages of
high-tech conventional forces. The methods em-ployed do include
terrorism—violence targeting civilians for purposes of
intimidation—but they also incorporate propaganda, subversion,
popular agitation, economic warfare, and hit-and-run attacks on
regular forces, either to induce an overreaction or to wear them
down. The common theme of those techniques, none of which are new, is
this: avoid the enemy's strengths; exploit enemy vulnerabilities.

What are the implications of this new Islamic Way of War? While
substantial, they fall well short of being apocalyptic. As Gen. Peter
Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has correctly—if perhaps
a trifle defensively—observed, "Our enemy knows they cannot defeat us
in battle." Neither the Muslim world nor certainly the Arab world
poses what some like to refer to as "an existential threat" to the
United States. Despite overheated claims that the so-called Islamic
fascists pose a danger greater than Hitler ever did, the United
States is not going to be overrun, even should the forces of
al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraqi insurgents, and Shi'ite militias
along with Syria and Iran all combine into a unified anti-Crusader
coalition. Although Israelis for historical reasons are inclined to
believe otherwise, the proximate threat to Israel itself is only
marginally greater. Although neither Israel nor the United States can
guarantee its citizens "perfect security"—what nation can?—both enjoy
ample capabilities for self-defense.

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.

In the Middle East and more broadly in our relations with the Islamic
world, we face difficult and dangerous problems, more than a few of
them problems to which we ourselves have contributed. Those problems
will become more daunting still, for us and for Israel, should a
nation like Iran succeed in acquiring nuclear weapons. But as events
in Iraq and now in southern Lebanon make clear, reliance on the sword
alone will not provide a solution to those problems. We must be strong
and we must be vigilant. But we also need to be smart, and getting
smart means ending our infatuation with war and rediscovering the
possibilities of politics.

_________________________________________

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international
relations at Boston University. His most recent book, The New
American Militarism, is just out in paperback from Oxford University
Press.


September 11, 2006 Issue


www.safsaf.org