The War Strategy

 by David Yerushalmi  

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What evidence is there that democracy, in any form, can somehow be used to tame the evils of Islam, its jihad against the West, and Arab tribalism?  By fighting the war with an ideology instead of a strategy for complete victory, the President is setting the stage for a colossal defeat and retreat.

Make no mistake about it: President Bush is right but mostly wrong. The Democrats to a man are wholly wrong. In his recent speeches and public appearances leading up to the five-year anniversary of 9-11, and especially his speech at the White House to the “9-11 families” where he discussed the terrorists held in CIA “black holes,” their transfer to Guantanamo, and the need to set up legislative ways to try these terrorists without the Supreme Court acting as the ultimate arbiter of our military strategy, the President sought not only to assure us that during these past five years great battles have been won, but also to caution us that the war is far from over.

On these counts, President Bush is mostly correct. He was right to go after the Taliban in Afghanistan and also Saddam’s regime in Iraq. The problem we face today in both countries will be the problem we will next face in Pakistan and Egypt. Iran is a different kind of problem. We will return to these in a moment. The President is also quite right to keep open his options to interrogate and even torture these terrorists in secret CIA prisons, which are outside the absurd and gross over-reaching of the Supreme Court.ⁱ

But the President wants us to accept a war plan that does not contemplate military victory. Instead, it is a war plan that is predicated upon an ideological taming of the Islamic shrew.

The Bush Administration’s current war strategy is straightforward enough to articulate quickly. It stands on two legs: The leg firmly planted in reality supports the plan that calls for militarily force used — preemptively if necessary, and as forcefully as is practical given the limitations of our military and the stomach for such things — by the constituencies of the West. It also calls for international coalitions consisting of free democracies and non-democracies, including tyrannical dictatorships, to interdict the planners, their finances, and their operatives as they move from place to place to carry out their own terrorist war plans.

The other leg to the President’s war plan is quixotic and stands in the wispy clouds of an ideology. This strategy rests on one fundamental assumption and many unanswered questions. The fundamental assumption is that man as political man requires modern liberal democracy, and indeed when all men everywhere are properly educated, mostly by the experience of such democracy, they will yearn for the freedom implicit in democracy more than anything else. Before we get into what the implications of this part of the President’s plan portends for the war effort itself, let’s understand the ideology a bit better.

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Political philosophers have discussed the best polity since the beginnings of philosophy – taught to the West by Socrates-Plato-Aristotle. The philosophical understanding, based upon classic reason (or what was termed “science”), sought to understand the world and the experience of man in the context of purpose or telos. It simply didn’t make sense to these men to speak about political systems as if they were merely statistics of stability or economic efficiencies. Rather, man as political being could not exist as man without political order (i.e., meaning the ordering or qualitative ranking of men and men’s affairs) or society. Thus, the purpose of society was to permit, even to promote, man as man, as distinct from animal. Man as virtuous man. Classical Greek philosophy has been an integral self-defining element of Western civilization.

We also have the Judeo-Christian contribution to political order which includes man bound by the Mosaic code as viewed through the Christian prism. This Judeo-Christian experience leads to the Western understanding of divinely transmitted normative values, including notably individual and societal moral responsibility, all within the context of the Divine ground of being.

With the Enlightenment beginning in the 17th century the notion of modern or scientific rationalism enters the politically relevant picture. This new “science” or reason, wholly materialistic and reduced to ratiocinations, replaces telos and Divine Providence with method (i.e., the “social compact” and voting), translating itself into what we now know as modern democracy – societies no longer founded upon virtue, either virtue simply or even the virtue of one’s own People.

In this brave new world, the Divine was replaced with History or Progress, borrowed of course from the technological progress of science, where History is just another way to say that man has now the full horizon of time available to him once only known to G-d. All this new modern man needs to do to achieve perfection is discover the proper microscope to examine and understand all that has passed before in time and devise the appropriate telescope to spy out all that will transpire in future times.

In political affairs this has enabled the moderns to speak of an End of History, where man’s political life has reached its end or final methodology. By capturing the Whole of man’s existence (Self-Soul, Society, G-d, and World) in the Part – human existence reduced to the material — man is capable of knowing with certainty the End because the Transcendent is now merely the Horizon of Time. Thus, instead of the classic search for the virtuous society, a society or political order which seeks to achieve its purpose or telos, the modern “end” is the society that most effectively reduces the purpose of society to method. Hence, democracy as the ultimate methodological political order. Virtue is now replaced by procedural integrity or Due Process.

If man and society are now devoid of any meaningful relationship to the Divine, where a man’s faith and religious experience are by law to be restricted to subjective uncertainty such that they should inform only his private affairs – confined to “the bedroom” so to speak – all that is left for society is the new scientific and materialistic view of man which has reduced the “philosophic” or “theological” questions to the method of voting. The actual answer arrived at by the voting is itself irrelevant unless of course it works to deny the uncertainty of human existence other than the ratiocinations of science, in which case it is immediately labeled a dangerous and ominous fascism.

In Time, or as man Progresses (i.e., man's new transcendent perch), he comes to reject all of the non-scientific, non-material “prejudices” and “social constructs” which artificially separate men from other men, men from women (and soon, men from children and even animals). Once science informs him that the only certainty is in the ratiocinations of science, man comes to understand that all truth in political matters is only method (i.e., voting) and the only scientifically valid polity would be the One World State where man no longer makes artificial non-scientific distinctions between men and between nations. Pluralism and liberalism at their best result in a political order where there is no order – meaning no ordering; no distinctions between “my fellow countrymen” and the “others.” The “otherness” of national peoples melts away into the amorphous trans-everything world state that knows no race, no ethnicity and no religion while recognizing them all as equally irrelevant.

When America was founded our Founding Fathers in many respects straddled both worlds. They certainly embraced the Enlightenment, but its deeper, yet far off but still very real implications, frightened them. The polity they constructed embraced the Enlightenment yet rejected the radicalism of its implications. These implications were embraced in actu in the revolutions that soon swept over Europe and especially the French. This explains, at least arguably, why we see Europe in a state of disintegration far more advanced than ours, even though their national histories and cultures are far more rooted than ours.

Our Founders’ rejection of these implications is visible in both the structure and the actual experience of the political system established at the founding. Thus, the Founders in establishing the “democratic” nature of the national government rejected in all but the House of Representatives direct democracy, or what has often been referred to as mobocracy or what we might term the rule of the masses. Indeed, the founding generation was as concerned about the dangers of Majoritarian rule as monarchical.

The Senate, the more austere and seriously contemplative body, would be elected not by the people but by the state legislatures (subsequently changed to direct elections by the 17th Amendment only in 1913). Similarly, the strongest branch of government, the executive, would be elected not by popular vote but by state-based representatives known as the electoral college system. And, the judicial branch was to be tenured for life and not subject to recall by the people.

This Republican system also built in requirements for extreme majorities before the U.S. Constitution could be tampered with. The Constitution’s stability and integrity of course has been destroyed by the federal courts. While the Founders gave no constitutional role to the judiciary to amend the Constitution by fiat, this has been accomplished by the Court itself through judicial fiat in Marbury v. Madison – a decision whose revolutionary implications were not fully appreciated at the time.

The actual experience of political order at America’s founding so fully rejected liberal democracy and the graver implications of the Enlightenment that only a few, extremely penetrating minds saw the danger to national existence even still. What prevented most good men from worrying about the destruction liberalism would bring to America was the Constitution’s almost obsessive protection of the autonomy of the more local and intimate state political systems and relationships — relationships fully grounded in the average American’s common religious, moral and world views. (Today, this constitutional obsessiveness has been fully “treated” and “cured” by the Courts so that very little is localized and intimate and most everything has been politicized at the national level.)

Important and even strident political differences at America’s founding most assuredly existed, but these were mostly debated and resolved in the personal, more fraternal environment of local politics. That six of the 13 original states had state-sanctioned churches at the founding and for years thereafter; that religious tests were imposed for local and state political offices; and that even religious taxes were collected for the maintenance of Christian denominations, speaks volumes about how the typical American viewed his participation in the political order of his new nation. States and localities enacted Sunday Blue Laws, which prevented commerce and the sale of liquor on the Christian Sabbath, passed laws prohibiting lewd and lascivious sexual relationships, established monogamy as a core value together with the sanctity of marriage backed by laws criminalizing adultery, and codified the anti-vagrancy common law of England meant to establish the principle that every man must be responsible for his well-being and belong to some local community and religious brotherhood, which presumably would tend to him if he fell on hard times.

* * * 

What we have learned from this digression, albeit an instructive one, is that there is no evidence from the American founding experience that the liberal democracy we see today, devoid of religious content if not hostile to it, and the concomitant trend to nationalize and democratize the political system, are (a) an intended consequence of our constitutional republic as originally constructed, (b) a good thing for America, or (c) a universal good to be transplanted to otherwise hostile and violent people who, although highly factional and tribal, embrace a priori a world state ideology lacking any real commitment to national existence.

But it is precisely liberal democracy as an ideology that President Bush wishes to use to counter Islam. But this universalizing of American and Western traditions, even with the apparent success in the Far East in Japan and South Korea following the Second World War, appears to ignore some very fundamental queries that remain unanswered, even assuming one embraces the Enlightenment’s reduction of man and political order to methodology.

Is a democracy the best polity for all people at all times? Even if democracy is good for a people bent on a world state (i.e., the citizenry would vote overwhelmingly for Islam and Islamic law as the core value of its political system), and even assuming this would lead to enormous political stability for that people, would it be good for the West? Is a democratic Islamic state necessarily peaceful and cooperative? Would it abandon the call for an Islamic world state? What evidence is there that democracy, in any form, can somehow be used to tame the evils of Islam, its jihad against the West, and Arab tribalism? What is the effect of democracy on a people who embrace a religious ideology built on dominating the world in the here and now? (For the evils of Islam, see, “Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror.”)

What if democracy is not a good in and of itself? In other words, if democracy is not tamed by republicanism and a civic, religious and philosophic tradition of national purpose, civility, charity, and cooperation, is it rational to suppose that democracy will be put to good use or evil? Were the democratic elections in the Palestine Territories bringing Hamas to power somehow not democratic because known terrorists were chosen? Are all peoples equally mature and civilized to put democratic or representative rule to good use? While we recognize that children ought not to be raised upon principles of democracy and freedom — their liberty must be earned through careful and deliberate aging carried out by good and sensible parents — can we assume so blithely that peoples and cultures are equally mature and capable of exercising freedom responsibly? Are the tribal clans of the Arab world capable of developing a peaceful and cooperative civilization without some severe authoritative political system?

To take this query further, to the edge of PC, are the peoples of the African continent or of the Middle East and their cultures and religions of the same order as the West’s? Had America been founded by the African or by the Arab and not by the white Christian European, would America be what it is today? Would it have achieved its greatness? The same question of course could be asked of the Mexican?

These questions, once answered, would lead us to question the President’s war strategy yet further. Would the Germans, Italians, and Japanese have acquiesced to their defeat and to the imposition of democratic regimes friendly to the Allied powers had they not been defeated and crushed by the Allied powers with a viciousness and single-minded focus on victory? Would these Germans, Italians, and Japanese have accepted the outcome of the war if they had worshipped and lived within a religious ideological worldview that understood there to be but one legitimate people in one legitimate polity worldwide? How would Islam’s view of an Islamic world state have affected the “democratization” of a post-war Europe had the Axis powers been Islamic and had the Allies worked to keep Islam intact?

President Bush has built an entire war strategy on two legs, neither of which alone is sufficient to support victory. One leg stands for war, but only a limited war. A war to defeat “terrorism” and “Islamofascism” while preserving traditional and historical Islam with its full ideological panoply intact. It is a war that stops short of devastatingly destroying the enemy because the war planners are convinced that they can hurriedly rebuild a viable democracy on the back of a vibrant and fully respected Islam. But if traditional, historical Islam is anti-Western at its core, is this strategy viable? Does the evidence in Afghanistan or Iraq or the Palestine Territories suggest otherwise? Is there today such a thing as a western-friendly Islamic state?

Moreover, because the President embraces the democracy ideology, he is logically and strategically constrained from warring until the enemy is defeated because he refuses to identify the enemy. The Bush Administration’s war strategy to build democracy on a base of some mythical if not simply fictional peaceful Islam becomes the very factor that prevents victory. Unlike the war effort during World War II, when we warred against Germany and Germans and against Japan and the Japanese, President Bush wants to war against the tactic of terror or against only Islamic terrorists once they have already attacked or planned to attack.

In World War II, and properly so, there was no effort to artificially confine the war to Nazism and fascism or to Bushidoism and tokko (or suicide missions). Nor did the Allied Powers only seek to kill the Germans and the Japanese who took up arms. To end that war and to destroy the ideologies that drove those nations to conquer the West, the US and its allies made its goal victory and conquest through the complete and utter defeat and destruction of the enemy societies and their ideologies of world domination. Period.

The President’s second term is in its waning stages. The contenders lining up for that most important office look weak and pallid by comparison. If the President’s strategy is wrong and dangerous, the strategy that will come to replace his will most certainly be more so. By fighting the war with an ideology instead of a strategy for complete victory, the President is setting the stage for a colossal defeat and retreat.

At best, the US will find itself with warring Islamic democracies hell bent on our destruction. At worst, a nuclear Iran with its sphere of influence stretching through a Shia-dominated Iraq and a Lebanon held hostage to a Shia-centered Hezbollah, will combine with a Sunni-dominated al Qaeda to begin a domino effect. In the Middle- and Near-East, there are two major powers standing precariously on the shoulders of two military tyrants.

One is Egypt with Mubarak only two years away from his 80th birthday with no real successor in place. Mubarak of course has been ridiculously criticized by the West for failing to democratize. But every time he allows even the slightest “liberal democratic” reform, the Islamic factions of the Brotherhood, another of the many jihadist organizations in the region, gain enormous power and popular support. Mubarak knows full well that he is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. He is grooming his son, Gamal, to stand in his shoes but most observers doubt if a newly anointed progeny will be able to hold back the Islamic forces rushing the gates. The question will be how well the Egyptian military responds to the Islamic threat when Mubarak dies.

The other of course is Pakistan with its nuclear arsenal protected only by strongman President-General Pervez Musharraf. But Musharraf knows that he rules over a population very supportive of bin Laden and al Qaeda. His most recent treaty with the tribal leaders in North Waziristan has been widely viewed as a wholesale capitulation to the fact that the Taliban and al Qaeda have been granted safe haven in the northwest mountainous regions of his country.

Once Egypt and Pakistan are in play, the whole of the Middle East, and indeed the Near East, including India, are at risk.

Are we really prepared to rely on an ideological panacea? Put simply, is democracy the answer to Islam?

Footnotes

i. The technical-legal reasons for this – that these men are terrorists (i.e., “enemy combatants”) who neither wear uniforms, which is required by the international law of war to acquire the protected status of “prisoner of war,” nor accept the authority of international law, and are otherwise non-US citizens captured during war, held on foreign soil, and interrogated by non-military intelligence agents (i.e., the CIA is not bound by the same restrictions as the military interrogators who must follow the military code enacted by Congress with additional regulations and rules promulgated by the Pentagon and Executive Order) – are less important than the important facts that these “tough” interrogation methods work to save American lives; that these are sworn enemies trying to destroy us; and that we are in a war with an enemy that has almost limitless reserves in waiting, has operations and clandestine operatives in just about every country in the world, and has a resolve to destroy us far superior to our resolve to defeat them.

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