ComingAnarchy has a fascinating post up analyzing how first the Palestinians and now Al-Qaeda have bungled their respective wars after initial successes. Read!
The $64 is why? Let’s assume they’re not stupid and I’ll toss out a few possibilities.
First, I’m reminded of an old story about the Israeli general, Moshe Dayan. When asked for the secret of his success he replied “Fight Arabs”. Frankly, I don’t believe this. There’s nothing in Arab DNA which ensures lousy generalship. Our own generals of Arab descent are doing fine. Something in the cultural DNA? Possibly but I still doubt it.
Is it something we or the Israelis have done differently? I don’t believe this, either. The poor decisions by the Palestinians and the Al-Qaeda leadership are their own darned fault.
Another possible answer lies with the nature of warfare: offense is harder than defense and to wage offensive war you must attack. As more targets are hardened there’s a temptation to look farther afield. Attacking the soft targets had the results we’ve observed.
It may just be too early to tell.
Lately I’ve been wondering if it’s not war at all. My understanding is that few of the Palestinians or Al-Qaeda leadership have actual modern military training. Could this be marketing by other means?  Is what’s going on a higher intensity marketing campaign within a narrower market segment? If they’re getting better success within that segment, they may decide they’re winning.
Hi,
Perhaps I can provide food for thought on this.
For one thing, there are major differences between the Western military tradition and the Arab one..fro one thing, free men with something to lose almost always fight better than those who have little to lose. I suggest Victor Davis Hansen’s `Carnage and Culture’ as a decent and erudite read on this subject.
In the case of the Israelis, it’s called `having no choice’. They are fighting for their homes and to avoid being driven into the sea. They have seen, up close the incredible savagery and lack of what you and I would call even normal human regard for life on the part of the Palestinians. Women, Children, prisoners,old people..they’re all fair game.
J am convinced that this attitude – this lack of regard for the `other’ – comes in part from Islam.
Most Americans unfortunately have no clue.
Not to get overly histrionic, but to see grown men weeping while they pick up body parts of what used to be human beings while hearing the `Palestinians’ ululating and celebrating at the same time is a veru elightening experience.
We saw some of that in the Arab world after 9/11, even here in America, but we’ve forgotten.
In the case of al Qaeda, they are not really waging war against the US military at this point. What they are doing is waging a war against predominantly `soft’ targets to keep Iraq from being secure, and counting on American public opinion to win the war for them.
That doesn’t take military genius…it merely takes the ability to blow oneself up and take some innocent people with you.
My personal take on this is that al Qaeda has mostly left Iraq in its ally Iran’s hands and will now concentrate on destabilizing Egypt, and Jordan through Hezbollah, Hamas and the al Qaeda cells in Sinai.
Appreciate the link. Don’t forget to read The Sling and the Stone where much of this is from. We are fighting a war with Al Qaeda, don’t get confused, but it takes a very different form than what we are used to. To use Hammes’ phrase, Al Qaeda has been acting like “venture capitalists” who simply fund projects all over the world giving only a little to those who are unlikely to succeed and more to those who have better chances. Today, it has morphed into a worldwide movement where you essentially have independent franchises all over the world with little to no real connection to Al Qaeda, only in terms of ideology and if they’re lucky maybe some cash.
We’re simply fighting a worldwide counterinsurgency.
I’m familiar with the ideas in The Sling and the Stone. I probably should read the book. I think it’s an interesting way of analyzing and deconstructing war. I’m skeptical, maybe even hostile, to the generational metaphor for different devices used in war since I believe that war is unitary. Some of the stuff being characterized as Fourth Generation was used when Ugga Bugga fought Ogh wearing skins and using rocks.
When the Romans (for example) used ballistae to propel the heads of slain enemies into besieged cities they were “trying to get into the decision process†of their enemies. Just as modern technology has made the other “generations†of war more efficient it’s made the methods, ideas, and approaches used in 4GW more effective, too. But it’s nothing new.
My speculations are more basic. I wonder whether it’s war at all. In Clausewitz’s phrase warfare is “politics by other meansâ€. I wonder if the terrorist attacks against the United States, Jordan, Israel, Iraq and everywhere else aren’t “marketing by other meansâ€.
We aren’t exactly fighting al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is mostly dead except in name. We’re trying to fight an idea.
Structurally it’s like european monarchies trying to fight democracy. Every time a nation turned democratic it had a chance to send out revolutionaries to spread the evil ideas. (Ambassador Jefferson intervened to keep the french from hanging Thomas Paine, who went there to spread sedition. (It’s more complicated than that, but this is part of it.) Democratic countries didn’t want to spend much to spread democracy, but they were still a place where democrats could hide and regroup — they provided bases and safe havens. Naturally monarchists wanted to stamp out all the democratic countries. And their failure to do so was ultimately damning. Monarchy is dead, there are hardly any monarchs that manage to pass their countries to their sons — syria is the major example I can think of off hand, and they don’t even call themselves a monarchy. They’ve only suspended the Constitution until the current emergency is over.
Clearly, if we’re fighting an idea, what we need is to make the idea unappealing. That will probably be easier after they get a nation. It sure worked that way for communism. If there had never been a communist nation a whole lot of idealists would still maintain communist ideals. After they saw how it really worked they got a lot less enthusiastic.
So is islamism more like democracy or more like communism? It looks to me more like communism and people will get tired of it. But democracy keeps spreading across the world even whlle it slips away here in America.