The Islamic Way of War

As Andrew Bacevich writes in the September 11 edition of The American Conservative: "It’s time for Americans to recognize that the enterprise that some neoconservatives refer to as World War IV is unwinnable in a strictly military sense. Indeed, it’s past time to re-examine the post-Cold War assumption that military power provides the preferred antidote to any and all complaints that we have with the world beyond our borders." While I disagree with Mr. Bacevich that there is anything uniquely Islamic about the "way of war" being fought by insurgents and terrorists in the Middle East, I think his larger point is well taken. There are a number of politicians in this country--mainly self-identified "conservatives"--who believe that conventional military force can reshape that region of the world to our liking. I disagree. We certainly have the ability to destroy any number of regimes we don't like, but when it comes to the harder work of building stable, peaceful democracies in a climate of age-old ethnic and religious violence--and somehow expecting that if only the American people can toughen up and quit whining, our conventional military forces can prevail in that task--we are relatively powerless and horrifically naive. It's not that I think the president's vision of a democratic Middle East is all bad; it's that I think his strategy for realizing that vision is flawed. No amount of open-ended occupations and conventional military force alone will ever produce the results he wants, nor will they produce the results that Israel wants in Lebanon.