Zealots by Another Name

From the Wall Street Journal, What Islamists and ‘Wokeists’ Have in Common
“Adherents of both pursue ideological purity, refuse to engage in debate and demand submission.”
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

excerpt:

Both believe that those who refuse conversion may be harassed, or worse. Both take offense at every opportunity and seek not just apologies but concessions. Islamism inveighs against “blasphemy”; Wokeism wants to outlaw “hate speech.” Islamists use the word “Islamophobia” to silence critics; the Woke do the same with “racism.”

Islamists despise Jews; the Woke say they just hate Israel, but the anti-Semitism is pervasive. The two share a fondness for iconoclasm: statues, beware.

Both ideologies aim to tear down the existing system and replace it with utopias that always turn out to be hellish anarchies: Islamic State in Raqqa, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle. Both are collectivist: Group identity trumps the individual. Both tolerate—and often glorify—violence carried out by zealots.

This Sept. 11, then, let’s dismiss the fairy stories about the enemies of a free society. Their grievances aren’t merely economic and they won’t be satisfied with jobs or entitlements. Their motivations are ideological and they will be satisfied only with power.

Hard Truths of Modern Warfare

When the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and the Berlin Wall came down, it was a momentous time. We expected peace in our time. Without two superpowers deterred by mutually assured destruction (MAD) the threat of a nuclear holocaust became distant.

The United States was the sole modern army and no army could dare challenge us, but we soon became aware that technological superiority begat a primitive counter offense that technology could not address. Instead of politics and power wars became about “blood and faith” to borrow from Ralph Peters’ book of that name. As Peters also noted, “suicide bombers trump microchips.” This we learned on 9/11.

Commitment without power will trump power without commitment. Americans are an impatient people and we want our wars quick and cheap; yet we fight an enemy committed to win without a timeline. We learned in Viet Nam that the one thing the North Vietnamese could control in spite of inferior firepower was the duration of the war. In order for a war not to last forever we must be committed as though it will. Our impatience is our Achilles heel; and our enemies know how to exploit it.

With on the ground technology our soldiers have become adept at minimizing civilian casualties. But the concept of a humane war seemed to increase the duration of the conflict. Wars used to be fought to exhaustion, and that included the civilian population. Now we take out the combatants with relatively minimal civilian collateral damage, but the wars never end. Hamas and Palestinian radicals rise up from the very population that was spared by their humane opponents. Wars may now be measured in centuries.

Broader media coverage may also increase the ferocity of battle. Facing media outcry, a warring force may need to sacrifice humanity for speed to avoid the backlash from the media. No military leader wants to see his victory on the battlefield undermined by a global media that values headlines more than understanding. Short term ferocity is also the more humane strategy.

There is a distinct difference between violence and brutality. To win a war the forces of good must become better at violence than the forces of evil, but that does not mean that they must adapt the brutality. We cannot afford to wish and pretend that wars can be won without the ferocity and violence to defeat a brutal enemy.

We now send troops to fight without a declaration of war because we now fight forces that exists outside the realm of a national entity. We now fight to preserve the sovereign integrity of a nation like Iraq or Afghanistan or Kuwait against the cancerous maggots of an Al Qaeda, though our own national interests still dominate our actions.

Our soldiers come from all aspects of our life, and for the most part they return to the jobs of teachers, welders, truck drivers, lawyers and shop keepers when they are done. The wars we fight now are different in many ways from the wars fought by our fathers, but the soldiers still fight with virtues that previous generations of soldiers would admire. They deserve the same respect on Memorial Day.

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

While mindless mantras kept advocating that we are LESS safe as a result of Bush’s anti terror policies, some of us could not ignore the absence of terror attacks on our soil after 9/11.

One reason was a very deliberate and careful decision to engage the enemy is his own backyard. Al Qaeda did not have unlimited resources, and our military engaged and eliminated thousands of them in Afghanistan and Iraq. In spite of strategic mis-steps that are always clearer in retrospect, even a bad strategy in Iraq kept Al Qaeda more focused on surviving in the streets of Iraq and the mountains of Pakistan that formatting further terror in the malls of America.

But another reason was the increased efforts of the CIA now coming under scrutiny. While our mortal enemies were broadcasting decapitations on the internet we used enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) such as water boarding to prevent further attacks.

As reported in the Wall Street journal editorial on 8/27/09, this was not done by rogue sadists, but was done with the advice and consent from the Pentagon, the Justice Department , and with knowledge and consent of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee. Read this very important editorial, The Real CIA News here.

Some contend that these EITs were ineffective, but this belies the moral question as to whether effectiveness is even the issue. The report identified clear results such as Binyam Muhammed, who planned to detonate a dirty bomb and previously unknown Al Qaeda members planning a second in the U.S. in California.

One of the reasons we failed to prevent the attack ON 9/11 was the crippling of our intelligence forces in the previous decades. We struggle to find a way to defeat a murderous immoral enemy using the high moral standards we demand. But Holder’s effort to criminalize those who had to make very difficult decisions in the wake of 9/11, in the very arduous moral gray zone few of us have to consider, will serve only to make us more vulnerable.

You cannot win a war in a court room; you can only lose it. Denying we are at war will not change our enemies committed to defeating us.