World's Happiest People? You Gotta Be Kidding!

Idiotic government rhetoric aside (is that redundant?), I'm not sure I agree with this: I understand your point, and why you addressed Buz in this context. However, I disagree with the contention that combating terrorism is not "war", and that terrorists generically are "criminals" rather than combatants. Admittedly, I'm coming at the question from a security policy and military history standpoint, which may lend a different perspective. I would also like to eliminate the semantically laden word "terrorist" from the lexicon. The definition of terrorism, as a friend of mine once put it, all depends on whose ox is being gored.It is certainly not war in the classical, Clauswitzian sense. There are no battle lines, no national boundaries, no fixed objectives; no flags, no uniforms, and the distinction between combatant and noncombatant blurs to meaninglessness. Tanks, infantry, and aircraft carriers - all the great panoply and pride of a modern superpower - are useless. The ability to deploy massive, overwhelming conventional force is actually a handicap - a lesson that the US didn't learn in Vietnam, and that the Israelis seem incapable of learning. The US is still apparently unable to take the lesson to heart, as Afghanistan and Iraq both eloquently demonstrate. You can't bomb a cloud.It remains, nonetheless, a war. It is a form of war that can effectively be waged, although arguably never definitively "won". In the modern world, waging this type of war requires computers, high-speed communications, comprehensive and highly sophisticated intelligence (both technical and the much-maligned and oft-neglected humint), and also well-trained, specialized military units capable of rapid deployment and precision, deadly surgical strikes. It isn't a war of pistols at thirty paces. It's a war of the knife in the dark. For one example, as the "terrorists" are not respectors of national sovreignty, and in fact have no fixed national address as it were, those nations seeking to oppose them must also - at least at times, and after very careful risk-vs-gain analysis - ignore national boundaries, territories and sovreignty. (Please note: surgical strike does not equate to carpet bombing some neighborhood in someone else's country - like the Israeli's did at Hammam Lif, Tunisia, in the late '80s.) All of which, btw, are anathema to Western and especially US mindsets. The US particularly, if I may be permitted a gross overgeneralization, has a national self-image that is ill-equipped to deal with this. We simply don't accept that kind of thing. We even have an executive order, EO 12333, that has been re-signed annually by every president since at least Richard Nixon that specifically prohibits the US from engaging in this type of activity. Which, unfortunately, means that we engage in utterly inappropriate and ultimately counterproductive actions like Afghanistan, the bombing of Libya and Sudan, and (ostensibly, at least) the invasion of Iraq."Terrorism" is merely guerrilla war writ large in a transnational or even global context. The practitioners, tactics and ideological motivations are different, but the premise is the same: a small group waging unconventional war against a larger - in this case a nation. It isn't even a new phenomenon, even though we arrogantly think so. Military historian Caleb Carr's most recent book, "The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians" (as an aside: a book given to me on my birthday last year by my wife - whose masters degree in International Security Policy lends at least SOME authority to her choices) makes a convincing albeit somewhat lacking in detail case tracing the use of this tactic back almost to the first people who picked up rocks to throw at each other. However, for a truly comprehensive look, try Robert Asprey's monumental "War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History". The parallels between both classic and "unconventional" guerrilla warfare and so-called terrorism are striking and blindingly obvious with a little study.So to wrap up my point: "terrorists" are not criminals. They are combatants, and in some cases quite sophisticated combatants, in an unconventional war. Law enforcement agencies are totally unequal to dealing with them - they have neither the training, equipment or ability. Nor, thank the powers that be, do they in most cases have the mandate to do so. The Patriot Act is scary not only for the severe erosion of civil liberties it entails, but also in that it is probably doomed to failure because it empowers the wrong organizations - law enforcement - to deal with an issue they are not organized to handle. It shows that the US has STILL not learned, in spite of government rhetoric, that we are in fact in a war in every sense of the word. Treating these guerrillas as criminals will perpetuate the error.

Thanks for your kind words, Buz. However, please don't misunderstand. I don't advocate isolationism in any way, shape or form. Historically that's one of the shortest roads to national ruin available, bar none. Sun Tzu noted around 510 BPE in the opening lines of his work that "The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected." Nothing in the history of humankind over the subsequent 2500 years has led to a refutation of this truism. Conventional force has quite important roles to play in national defense policy, especially for a superpower. These roles include power projection, SLOC control, etc, and the myriad other national interests in which direct application of force can be used. I merely pointed out that in guerrilla warfare - and especially in its modern global form - use of conventional force is generally inappropriate. "Peace through superior firepower" remains a valid military axiom when used in the proper context.Secondly, my post only discussed operational strategy and touched on tactical considerations. It didn't (nor was it intended) to describe grand strategy, wherein the use of force is secondary to a concerted effort to address the root causes, without which no resolution can be achieved. So I actually advocate something quite the opposite to the neo-isolationism preached by the New Right in the US.

Hmm, I would have put the cultural stagnation of the society further down the road - say around the time of Suleiman the Magnificent or maybe after Lepanto. Admittedly you could make the case that an expansionist culture like the early Arab/Islamic one started falling apart about the time they stopped expanding (Poitiers/Tours?), with the Great Schism. However, I submit that it wasn't until the Mongols sacked Baghdad and the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate that the Islamic golden age ended - a hundred years after Saladin. Even then, there were several localized cultural revivals - the Moors in Spain until the reconquista, the Ubayyid renaissance in Egypt, etc.I think the modern problems with Islamic states are driven by more recent history and relicts of European colonialism - not to mention the Cold War.In any event, I was thinking more of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the fall of Byzantium, or the Shogunate period in Japan - probably the single most glaring example.

I think we're in total agreement here. I misread your reference to Saladin, since that was one of the real high-water marks of Arabic Islam.Good thing, too, 'cause now I've got to deal with what Holmes wrote, and that's gonna take a bit of effort.

Hi Holmes:Great response. Gimme some time (and a different thread) to come up with a reasonable answer?