What the Islamists Have Learned (How to defeat the USA in future wars)

If I were an Islamist, a terrorist, a sworn foe of democracy, here is what I think I would have learned from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is what I would write down in my hard-earned manual of instruction.

BY THE WILL OF ALLAH, in all wars to come, may it prepare our brave martyrs for combat operations!

Today, the purpose of war is sharply political, not military; psychological, not physical. The main purpose of war is to dominate the way the enemy imagines and thinks about the war. Warfare is not, these days, won on a grand field of battle. Nor is it won by the force that wins series after series of military victories. Nor is triumph assured by killing far higher numbers of the enemy. The physical side of warfare no longer holds precedence.

The main strategic aim of war today is to dominate the mind of the enemy's public, and then ultimately to dominate the mind of that public's leaders.

Let me offer three examples. At what moment did the war in Vietnam come to an end? At that precise moment when America's leaders decided that they could not resist the unrelenting storyline of the enemy, which had long prevailed in their own press. The press surrendered first, then the leaders of the nation.

Observe that the Cold War ended not in an explosion of unprecedented violence, but rather at the precise moment when the Soviet elites no longer believed their own storyline. Superior ideas cowed them, superior will, superior narratives. Quite suddenly, the invincible Soviet elites folded, accepted humiliation, allowed the Wall to come down, and watched in bitterness as hundreds of millions of formerly captive peoples chose new forms of government.

The endgame was psychological, not military. There was a military component--Star Wars--but nobody knew whether or not that would ever work. It was the idea of that weapon, and will or Reagan to proceed with it.

Yet, as always, will followed storyline. First comes narrative, then the acts that give it flesh in history.

What we have discovered in Iraq is the weakest link in the ability of the United States to sustain military operations overseas. That link is the U.S. media. They are Islamists' best friends.

Experience shows that the mainstream press of the United States is alienated from the U.S. military. In addition, the American press is extremely vulnerable to anti-U.S. propaganda. Thus, the American public will be fed nearly everything that foreign adversaries--our band of brothers--wish to feed it about the war. Therefore, I write: Maxim # 1: To defeat America, impose upon the imagination of its media your own storyline.

Even if you can muster only 10,000 soldiers over the entire countryside of Iraq, paint the narrative like this: The Americans are irresistible occupiers, and yet they cannot prevent small (even individual) acts of destruction. Daily, unrelenting acts of destruction demonstrate that chaos rules. The American strategy, and the American storyline of the war, are invalidated by continuing chaos, highly visible, every single day, on worldwide television. The new dominating story is that the Americans cannot win.

Even though our own forces (for nearly two whole years now) can no longer afford to fight in a single operation lasting longer than a few hours, our martyr-brothers cannot be prevented from committing daily acts of destruction--the more stomach-turning the better--which demonstrate a ferocious will and a determination to destroy.

In such wars, my brothers, whichever party maintains the stronger will, along the most durable storyline, always wins.

To defeat the United States, then, it suffices to demonstrate that their vaunted military, for all its awesome power and tactical bravery in the field, cannot halt daily "chaos." To achieve this victory over America, it is not even necessary to create actual "chaos," but only its appearance. This definition of chaos cannot be made on cerebral, analytic, statistical, or comparative grounds. (In October the Times of London reported, "An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France" this year, with 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services and nearly 3,000 police officers injured. We don't need comparisons like this or comparisons with traffic deaths and violent crimes in individual U.S. states.)

No, the shadowy existence of this "chaos" in Iraq is projected by a steady stream of stomach-churning, atavistic, destructive acts, staged day by day where the cameras of the U.S. press cannot resist them. Some of these acts bring orange explosions and black smoke, others consist simply of dumping dead and tortured bodies where the public cannot avoid discovering them.

We design these images to show that our fighters will go where the United States will not, that our brave martyrs have harder linings in their stomachs than anyone in the West, and that our ferocity and determination, day after day, cannot be resisted.

The aim of our terror is to induce surrender before the great battles are even fought. This is the true meaning of "asymmetric" warfare. The weaker side in military strength may demonstrate conclusively that it has a stronger stomach for relentless, unstoppable acts of terror.

Besides, brothers, there seems to be a psychological tic in the minds of American journalists, which prevents them from understanding that our terror is ultimately aimed at them. Today, yes, they think it is aimed at their government, and will cripple their political opponents within that government. Without qualm or fear, therefore, they do our bidding day after day. Willingly, gleefully, with much self-congratulation, they pump our storyline into the bloodstream of the Western public.

This is far easier than anyone ever taught us. This is our new discovery, our contribution to the history of warfare. Before our very eyes, the West grows fainter and weaker every day.

Maxim # 2: Take heart, then, my terrorist brothers! Bin Laden is even more correct than we knew before the last two years. The West does not have the will to resist. Those elites among them who do have the stomach to fight back, inexorably, day after day, are being undermined by their own media.

Now and in the future, the media will do our work. All we need are martyrs sufficient in number to keep a steady stream of orange flames and black smoke before their cameras, and to dump before them bodies that are stone-cold dead, and bear all over them the unmistakable blue marks of power drills and other disfigurements.

Of such martyrs, we need each day only a handful. In 365 successive days, we need fewer than one thousand.

This small band of brothers can defeat the most powerful army in human history. The path, my brothers, is to come to dominate the minds of their public, which they must suppose is supporting them, and in reality turns quite quickly into our best ally.

This is not so huge a task, my brothers! In the long run of glorious history, the time required is like the blinking of an eye.

Michael Novak is George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

He's right.

1. The military cannot win a war overseas without winning public opinion at home.

2. Without press censorship the military will lose the battle of public opinion every time.

3. No American president is going to call for press censorship.

Therefore, it becomes obvious that the military can no longer win wars overseas.

And therefore, we must no longer commit American military forces to any foreign conflict.

I'm afraid Patrick Buchanan was right, albeit for the wrong reasons. We should not send our forces to fight in foreign wars ever again -- not because doing so is immoral or against the national interest, but because thanks to all-pervasive propaganda the American people will no longer support such wars.

***

Those of you who support democracy and/or republicanism, behold the ultimate fruit of popular rule: the Will of the People, captured by the skill of demagogues. THIS is why nose-counting as a means of determining national policy ultimately fails. THIS is why representative government eventually destroys that which it is meant to preserve. Just as an oceangoing convoy is only as fast as its slowest ship, a nation where the government is run by the consent of the governed is in the end only as smart as its most gullible voter. The republic our founding fathers designed has not failed; it works only too well. We the people have failed. We have failed to be good, honest, moral people, people with beliefs and ideas strong enough to resist even the most insidious propaganda.

I include myself among this unhappy number. I trusted the Bush administration to take our country to war. Instead, we got -- well, I don't know what we got. Some kind of quasi-war, a half-ass "global war on terrorism" that our leaders never intended to win.

And we got it by voting.

***

As a monarchist, I am often asked "What happens if you end up with an evil or incompetent king?" My reply is "What happens in a republic if you end up with an evil or incompetent people?" In each case the result is chaos, dissoluton, and ultimately anarchy. In a monarchy the solution is at least wihin human reach. After all, an evil or incompetent king is only one man, with a head that can conceivably be chopped off. But how does one chop off the head of The Sovereign People?

The answer, of course, is with leadership -- REAL leadership. In the case of a bad king, a leader arises from the aristocracy, a man with a natural charisma so strong that his troops follow him out of love, not for money or on the basis of some political ideology. This leader gains the backing of his fellow nobles and the imprimatur of the Church, rallies the Army to his side, deposes King Wicked, and assumes the throne himself. That is how an evil or incompetent body politic is properly killed.

In the case of democracy or republicanism, however, there is no source of leadership. We have no aristocracy, no nobility, no class of people trained from birth in the sacrament of noblesse oblige, no one destined by their natural proclivities to rule. (And we no longer care what the Church has to say.) We republicans and democrats have only the People -- capitalists (the rich), shopkeepers and artisans (the middle class), proles (the working class), and criminals. All of these groups are too busy to rule themselves; capitalism, shopkeeping, art, labor, and crime occupy them completely. None of these people have the education, the training, or the inclination for the task of government; therefore, they choose "representatives" to govern them, choosing these on the basis of whichever candidate's propaganda is sweetest to their itching ears. None of these groups has the capability of raising up a true leader; the best that can be expected from them are robber barons (capitalists), con artists (shopkeepers and artisans), grifters (the working class) and tribal warlords (criminals). From where will come the Leader to save the Republic from its own people?

From the Army, of course.

It was true in Spain. It was true in Chile, it was true in France. It was most famously true in ancient Rome: after the Democracy, the Dictator. Democracy springs from Republicanism like sprouts from manure, and Dictatorship follows Democracy like a flower from the bud. Later, after Franco or Napoleon or Pinochet or Gaius Julius Caesar has hanged the traitors, purged the politicians, regulated the capitalists, made the streets safe for shopkeepers and artisans, ensured that the proles eat every day, and killed off or enslaved the criminals, comes the Empire -- where law, order, and justice are restored, kept safe from demagogues, propagandists, and the people by the Crown.

Will America follow this path? It's happened to other superpowers. I'm not smart enough to know what's possible in our own country's future. But I do know this: voting isn't going to fix the problem. Voting is at the root of the problem. And that's true no matter which bunch of demagogues you vote for.

And I know one more thing: it's going to get worse before it gets better. The rot is too deep. No amount of politicking is going to save us now. Our best stretegy as the tottering republics fall is to assume the role of the abbeys: pray, husband our resources, pray, preserve our culture, pray, build our knowledge, pray, perfect our skills, pray, protect our own, and pray. As conservatives, it is our duty to keep the flame of civilization alive until Charlemagne comes around at last. This has nothing to do with digging a bunker or building an arsenal; it means to concentrate your time, treasure, and talent on protecting and caring for your family, your neighbors, and your community. We need less street protests, campaign PACs, and TV ads -- instead we need more rosaries, more friends helping each other through tough times with interest-free loans, more prison visits, more people giving sandwiches to bums, more kids learning beekeeping or shoemaking, more writers of heroic adventures (especially science fiction and fantasy!), more Bible and Torah experts, more hometown baseball, more backyard barbecues, more foreign-language lovers, more dreamers, more rabbis, bricklayers, priests, wipers of asses, nuns, stay-at-home parents, deacons, gleefully violent kids cartoons, cantors, slapstick comedians, altar boys, astronauts, war heroes and cartoonists -- in short, we need FEWER ideologues, politicians, and other self-worshipers and more good people from every walk of life.

I love America. I vote, serve on juries, pay taxes, and am a military veteran. But I still have a few functioning marbles left, and one thing I've learned from forty-one years attendance at the University of Real Life is that politics, ideology, and government do not make a country good. Good people make a country good. Therfore, the best, most patriotic thing we can do for our country is to pay as little attention to politics as possible and concentrate instead on becoming better human beings. By loving God and our neighbors we can do more for America than any ideologym platform, or political party could ever do.

You are so right...unfortunately, we are saddled with a system where we cannot vote for who we "want" to represent us...we have to choose from who is running.....those who are aggorant and self centered enough to think that they know what is good for all of us.

I have no powerful person representing me right now. My Congressman is Jeb Henserling, a good man, and a conservative, but he is only one of a hand full of good conservatives. The rest are sometimes conservatives, rinos, or outright socalists. Our President seems to be an open borders, one world "moderate" at best.

I wanted, and urged the President on many occasions via letters and e-mail to wage a proper war in Iraq. I mean devistate the country, demoralize the population, and rebuild later when the dadgum war is over and WON, for crying out loud. It is not a new idea, to actually win a war...we did it before.

I am kind of disheartened at this point. If the U.S. can at least maintain the status in Iraq for a while...until the next elections....and if America at that time does elect some fire-breathing warriors who will actually take a real, non-PC war to Iran, Syria and the Norks, we will be O.K. If not, and we elect more of the same as we have now, then we are in deep doo doo because of a PC government.

If the latter happens, then "we the people"...who are willing....will have to think long and hard about what to do next.

Maybe "nothing" will be decision.....everyone then will then have to begin dusting off their burka measuring tapes.

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