Circa 2000: You've joined one of the groups that align with the network calling itself Al Qaeda. You're incensed over many past wrongs, what you perceive as injustices and atrocities going back a long time, but the most immediate, galling, and unacceptable indignity has been the lingering presence of Western military powers in Muslim lands, particularly the Middle East (to use that colonial British term). You'd like to rid these lands of Western influences, but that really means challenging U.S. domination in the region, along with their allies and surrogates. In your wildest geo-strategic fantasy, you'd love to humiliate, if not destroy the United States.
But there's a big problem with that ambitious goal: Al Qaeda has no standing army. You have no tanks. No jet fighters. No submarines. No ICBMs. You have neither the manpower nor the material with which to fight the United States on military terms, and you certainly have no way to subdue the American population were you somehow, miraculously, to prevail in a conventional battlefield showdown.
There's no way you can accomplish your goals in the short term -- thus you have to calibrate your strategy for the long haul. You need to prepare for warfare spanning not just several years, but rather a protracted, potentially intergenerational struggle that could last decades or even centuries. Bleed the enemy to death through a thousand cuts over time rather than one big blow. It worked with the Soviet Union. Get them bogged down in Afghanistan, until they were brought to their knees. That former superpower, by the way, is no more. Remember that your advantage is a potentially limitless supply of jihadist recruits willing to commit the ultimate personal sacrifice via suicide. But to take full advantage of that comparative advantage, you can't fight them "over there"; you need to fight them "over here."
How, then, do you draw the United States into an eventually intractable military quagmire in the Middle East? First hit them with a big sucker punch. Blow up a couple of their national icons. You won't cripple them irreparably that way, but you might just infuriate them until they decide that they must attack you at the source, as it were. They will come over with guns blazing. They will predict easy victory. They might declare early victory. But now they are trapped -- or rather, they have trapped themselves for you. Fearing humiliation, they will attempt to overwhelm the mujahideen with their superior military might. But an angry swarm of wasps can't be destroyed with bazookas. The Americans will become increasingly frustrated, and yet will dig in even further. They will escalate and even try to expand the fight into other nearby territories.
All the while, their occupation will galvanize wider Muslim support even as they alienate their own allies. Wear them down. Their weaknesses, however, are not lack of resolve and strength, but rather, arrogance and myopia. They will not cut their losses should one battle go awry, so that they could re-adapt and re-deploy, ready to fight another day, another place. Instead, they will redouble their efforts on lost causes. They are stubborn. They are too stupid to fight a long-term asymmetrical war, precisely because they can't admit to and adjust for their weaknesses. So the key is to get them where we want them -- over here, not over there. Once they are here, watch them do exactly the opposite of what they should be doing. They will be fighting on our terms, and they are too bull-headed to admit it. Sun Tzu says that warriors must know their enemies and know themselves, and if they know neither, they will be imperiled in every single battle they fight -- such will be the plight for the Americans.
PNAC is the clue to it all,read some interesting points,
www.newamericancentury.org
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/nc-pilger.html
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/weiner6.html
your future awaits
Osama was once quoted as saying "for every dollar I spend fighting you, you will spend a million fighting us." From day one Osama knew that the only way to defeat us was to bankrupt us. He is well on his way.
I just wonder why this was not understood by our leaders...
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes...
He goes on to state that these Republicans (neocons)have sacrificed the American worker on the alter of free trade and made the Republicans the party of big government that sells its soul to the highest bidder.
"The final Ottoman drive into Europe came in the east, ending in a second siege of Vienna. On September 11, 1683, the Hapsburg imperial capital was rescued by King John Sobiesk." of Poland. Wrote an Ottoman chronicler of the time: 'This was a calamitous defeat, so great that there never has been its like since the first appearance of the Ottoman state..."
"Turkish power now began its long retreat from Europe." Buchanan, op cit.
"People are coming out of the closet on the word 'empire'" -Charles Krauthammer
"We are an attractive empire, the one everyone wants to join." -Max Boot
"The truth is that the benevolent hegemony exercised by the U.S. is good for a vast portion of the world's population." -Robert Kagan
"Often clever, never wise." -Russell Kirk, referring to the "Fireman's War" morphing into a war for American hegemony which threatens to bankrupt the Republic and isolate America.
Well said. Bin Laden and co have been playing Bush and his Likudist neo-con "advisors" like a violin. If memory serves, he invested about one $million in 9/11 and thus far we have wasted nearly a $trillion in an entirely inappropriate and stupid self-defeating response. Instead of seeing 9/11 for what it was, i.e., an act of international criminality, Bush (as I'm certain Bin Laden and his gang predicted) used it to provide a pretext to invade the Arab/Muslim world. We can also be certain that Bin Laden had read the PNAC document prepared by Richard Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith et al. (all fanatically pro-Israel) and knew what the Bushites would do. "Welcome to my web said the spider to the fly."
Perhaps Powell did not think Bush would understand the word "strategic".
Bin Laden knows us better than we know ourselves. He is winning because his strategy and tactics are vastly more sustainable, read cheaper. And he is still alive only because, politically, W needs him to be alive. Where would the party of fear be without someone to terrorize us with?
Osama doesn't need a nuclear weapon, he has George W. Bush and Fox.
Bin Laden would hardly have launched such attacks against the US as early as 1991 without having read the PNAC literature disseminated by foreign policy experts beginning in 1997. Wolfowitz and AIPAC were demanding the destruction of Iraq in 1992 in his Defense Planning Guidelines paper on 1992.
The 9-11 attacks hit symbolic targets of US military and economic domination of the Arab World on a day that was the anniversary of an historic loss to Western Civilization's forces in Europe.
In 2000 PNAC announced its Rebuilding America's Defenses position paper and admitted that they needed a new Pearl Harbor to invade Iraq, a role that 9-11 fulfilled perfectly. PNAC wanted permanent bases in Iraq. PNAC was a shadow government but certainly nobody could ignore their repeated written petitions to President Clinton accusing him of not agreeing to massive military spending in 2000.
PNAC telegraphed their punches and got sucker punched on 9-11, a result not entirely unwelcome to some traitors and conspirators. History will unravel who benefited and who knew what and when, and, above all, why.
Grover Norquist:“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can . . . drown it in the bathtub.” google more if you need to.
Unfortunately, that's just not what happened.
This country has been scheming against the rich oil resources of Persia for a very long time. Much longer than since late 2001: if you recall, George Bush was "installed into" the White House many months earlier.
Although without a doubt there are people in that region who are taking advantage of the present situation for their own tribal ambitions, they didn't "sucker punch" the US. There are =plenty= of questions of exactly what did happen on 9/11, all of which I will defer. The key problem with your hypothesis is that "what a terrorist would do" is a huge, flamboyant, military-style strike.
Throughout this whole episode, including the Iran episode that (if Bush would have it) is just about to begin, we see the same thing repeated: pretenses, excuses, then a pre-emptive attack. Bush had it in for Iraq from the day he took office.
but 'they' have also played into this administration's hands, since this shadowy, amorphous enemy 'terrorism' has conveniently given them exactly the opening they were waiting for to carry out their agenda. which is why there is no end in sight.
could it be this is a self-sustaining proposition, since everyone seems to be getting what they wanted...?
The jihadis are not fighting a new struggle. They are continuing a struggle that has been continuously waged for the last thousand years, ever since European knights and priests and soldiers invaded what they called the Holy Land in a silly adventure that we call "The Crusades."
The occupation of Arab lands today is seen as simply the latest chapter in this continuing campaign to extract the wealth of the Middle East by force. It has been this way for a thousand years, since the days of the Kurdish general the Europeans called Salladin.
Look at the statements of bin Ladin and the other jihadis, who call us the Crusader Army.
Yes, everything you said is accurate. Only more so.
And it just emphasizes the fact that, if all we do is shoot people, we lose.
in a culture in which our attention span is at best around the 30 seconds it takes to sell us something on the television, the idea that anyone has a patient, long term strategy the end result of which they know (often quite literally) they will never see in their lifetimes, is incomprehensible to most of us. it's also incomprehensible for most americans that we may have been committed offenses that could mobilize such numbers with such deadly resolve.
we truly do not understand them, and we certainly fail to see our own weaknesses. but they see them. we took a big swat at those hornets and exposed the weakness in our armor. we've been seriously outplayed.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
Please,
Could you re-write this? I'm genuinely interested in what you say, but I'm easily confused.
Please consider breaking the last sentence into two. I really think that will help.
Thanks, friend.