From The GOP of Old by William Kristol in The Weekly Standard,

Excerpt:

It was (well-deserved) war weariness after World War II that led to a precipitous drawdown in Europe that in turn helped make possible Stalin’s subjugation of Eastern Europe. It was understandable war weariness after Vietnam that produced the shameful abandonment of Vietnam and Cambodia and the subsequent disastrous weakness of the Carter administration. It was (somewhat inexplicable) war weariness after the Cold War that led to a conviction in the 1990s, as Haley Barbour put it just last week, trying to accommodate the Paulistas, that “We’re not the policeman of the world.”

And thus we had the failure to finish the job in Iraq in 1991, the retreat under fire from Somalia in late 1993, inaction in Rwanda in 1994, years of dithering before confronting Milosevic in the Balkans, passivity in the face of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and weak responses to al Qaeda’s attacks on U.S. embassies in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000. That decade of not policing the world ended with 9/11.

Now we’re weary again. And there are many politicians all too willing to seek power and popularity by encouraging weariness rather than point out its perils. Foremost among those politicians is our current president. It’s hard to blame the American people for some degree of war weariness when their president downplays threats and is eager to shirk international responsibilities. The rot of war weariness begins at the top. One can’t, for example, be surprised at the ebbing support of the American public for the war in Afghanistan years after the president stopped trying to mobilize their support, stopped heralding the successes of the troops he’d sent there, and stopped explaining the importance of their mission.

It fell to a freshman congressman, speaking at CPAC on the same day as Rand Paul, to tell some hard truths. “I know there is war weariness among the American people, just like there is war weariness among conservatives, and in this audience, no doubt,” said Tom Cotton from Yell County, Arkansas. “It’s no surprise, though, that the American people are war weary when their commander in chief is the weariest of them all.”

But, Cotton reminded his audience, “We’re fighting .  .  . a war against radical Islam and jihad.” He continued, “Our president often says 10 years of war are ending. Wars are not movies. They do not end. They are won or they are lost. The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.” And Cotton pointed out the obvious: “We have the manpower to win the war. We have the matériel to win the war. The question is, do we have the most essential element to combat power? Do we have the will to win the war? Our enemies certainly have that will. They question now whether we do.”

HKO

Americans are impatient and we like our wars on the cheap.  While we should be slow to engage our troops in combat and we must be clear what the purpose is, we do great damage to our ability to prevent wars when we quit short of a measurable victory.  Our enemy knows our Achilles heal and they wield that to their maximum advantage.

Daniel Greenfield writes Terrorism Without End in Frontpagemag.com , 2/25/13:

Excerpt:

 Terrorism can never be defeated by fighting terrorists. Combine massive wealth in some parts of the Middle East with staggering poverty in other parts and the supply of mercenaries is nearly endless. Syrian Jihadists are being paid $150 a month by Qatar; a good salary for an unskilled laborer in a region where life is cheap and every family has plenty of surplus sons and mouths to feed. A barrel of oil can buy the services of a killer for a month and Qatar pumps out millions of barrels a day.

Terrorism is cheap for the sponsors, profitable for the participants and hideously expensive for the targets. A soldier in a First World nation can cost six figures. For that same amount, a backward oil tyranny can field a hundred men. When those hundred men kill a soldier, then his nation will be heartbroken and question the costs of war. When those hundred men die, their mothers will ceremonially wail and cry out for more martyrs to avenge them. And the terror will go on.

Terrorism has no “off switch” because it’s too profitable. There is no down side for its sponsors who can inflict significant amounts of harm and collect enormous profits for a few million here and there. Their power to temporarily turn off the terror makes them even more powerful and influential.

Muslims have gone from nonentities in the Western political sphere to huge power players not through oil, but through the terror that they bought with that oil. Americans paid little attention to Muslims until September 11. Since then Muslims have been flattered and promoted, their political interests have been pandered to and their leaders have gained an enormous amount of influence. Not only has all this pandering failed to stop terrorism, it has instead provided a compelling motive for more terrorism.

HKO

Alan Dershowitz noted that terrorism exists because it pays.  Since 9/11 it has delivered a better political return on investment than oil.

Economics is far easier to measure if you are successful. The interest rate, unemployment rate, growth in GDP, distribution of income, national debt, inflation rate, and a host of other measurements that keep economists gainfully employed can paint a relatively clear picture of our economic health.

Economics has a sociological dimension and a mathematical and logical dimension.  While ideology may color the perspectives of economic analysis, there are some areas that are relatively easy to understand.  We know that raising marginal tax rates may decrease economic activity.  We know that a weak dollar may encourage exports.

I do not mean to make out that this is simple: it isn’t.  Like the hard sciences, many economic theorems are assumed in a vacuum- sometimes a moral vacuum.  But we know that such a vacuum does not exist.  There is more of an art to understanding how economic principles will react in a different environment than they were in the last time they were tried.

But there are very few absolutes in foreign policy, and success is much harder to define.

When we began to analyze the cause of 9/11 we had to stretch back decades.  The marine barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1984 under Reagan showed bin Laden how quickly we would retreat.  Who could have known that our withdrawal after that bombing would lead to an attack on New York City?

In foreign affairs success is not just hard to measure , it is hard to recognize, but failure is easy to find.  It is as if every decision has several solutions and none of them are good.  Good foreign policy is most often recognized as the absence of problems.

If Neville Chamberlin had fought  Hitler in 1939 instead of proclaiming “peace in our time” after allowing the Germans to occupy Czechoslovakia, he may have prevented WW II, but he never would have been recognized for that success because WWII would have never been.  He may have in fact been deemed a war monger.

Foreign affairs lack the clearly recognized repeatable principles of economics.  Every country and every culture brings a different dynamic.  Power is a reluctant but required commodity.

Blustering about proposed reactions to foreign threats ahead of time is often a useless exercise: reality in foreign affairs is often far less clear and rigid.  Recognizing and apologizing for past mistakes may be a noble gesture but it may not do anything to resolve current problems.

An ally to serve a purpose in 1960 may become an enemy in 1990.  Insurgent rebels armed to defeat an occupying force may turn those weapons on the providers when the rebels become rulers.  A ruler may be a tyrant by our standards but a stabilizing force by the standards of the region he is in.

Still, we need to recognize and identify our enemies and allies.  A weak foreign policy is one where your allies can not depend on you and your enemies do not fear or respect you.  Such positions may cause some short term problems such as when the Arab world boycotted oil sales to the US because fo their aid to Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

The results of our diplomatic efforts today is much harder to predict than the results of our economic policy.

“You should have shot that fella a long time ago. Now he’s too rich to kill.”

Seems to sum up our Middle East Policy of the last 100 years.

Foreign affairs is the most difficult area of government policy.  To be effective it requires a continuity and consistency that transcends presidential terms.  Impatience serves us well as an entrepreneurial economic growth engine, but it is our Achilles heel in foreign policy.

We err when we assume that other nations and cultures will adhere to the same values we cherish, that they can be persuaded with the same logic, or that the principles which seem to work so well for us will work as well for them.

We also err when we assume that a leader with charisma and charm will achieve the peace that his ‘ignorant’ predecessors thought required  military force.

Jimmy Carter felt betrayed when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.  The rage of the Muslims in Iran may have been ignited by our misguided overthrow of Mosedegh in 1953 and our support of the hated Shah well before Carter’s term, but it could not be reversed by conciliatory gestures or weak policy.

Neither Obama nor Romney will be able to charm violent tribal extremists into a free peace loving people.  Whatever we may have done in the past that would in anyway justify their animosity is irrelevant.  No apology, however merited, will bring peace.

Bush made the error of believing that democratic institutions would bring peace even if the social and cultural structures critical to democracy were absent.  The result is Gaza with an elected Hamas slinging rockets into Israel.

Obama made a similar error believing that overthrowing a dictator would give way to a more tolerant and democratic country.  Instead we have the Muslim Brotherhood, continuous violence,  less tolerance and less democracy.  Throughout history revolution has most often simply replaced one tyrant for another.  Our own revolution was a notable exception, but we too often believe it will be the rule.

It is  misguided to believe that the roots of terrorism are economic or political. Because we prioritize economics and political power far ahead of our religious institutions we refuse to acknowledge the religious and tribal priorities of our foes.  Our highest virtues are deemed satanic and unworthy of the respect needed to reach a negotiated peace.

This is not to say we have not made serious blunders in the past, but like most errors they are only clear in hindsight.  But nothing will pacify a hatred rooted in religious zealotry.  This not about unemployment and poverty.  There are many other poor countries who do not dispatch terrorists to destroy innocents.

It was naive to think that killing Osama bin Laden would reverse the rise of violent tribalism.  The reluctance to face the reality that terrorism will proliferate if we do not secure our hard won gains in Iraq and Afghanistan leads one to discount continuous organized terrorism and believe instead in the power of second rate YouTube videos.

Terrorism and tribalism are very real and it will not go away if we remove our troops, set pull out dates, or lead from behind. And as we well learned, and seemingly quickly forgot, this problem will not remain isolated in the Middle East.