The Belmont Club has posted a brilliant essay that lays out the strategy of the War on Terror from the other side of the chessboard. It's in the form of a Memo to Osama:
The fundamental problem preventing a revival of the strategy of consolidating our strength within the Islamic world is the American occupation of Iraq. It presents a dual threat. First, it serves as an object lesson to those Arab states who would shelter us. Do this and you share Saddam's fate. But second, and most important, it has given the United States possession of a great Arab state, perhaps the greatest of them all. It is not the money they care for. You know the statistics. The gross national product of all the Arab states combined do not amount to that of a single medium-sized European country. What they covet is the human resource that Iraq provides. Its Mukhabarat, its limitless pool of Arab-speaking potential traitors, its secret files whose contents not even you, O Osama, may know. What they covet is its central physical location which makes it possible to project secret teams all over the Arab world.
But as you know, our successes in Iraq have been entirely inflated by the press. Objectively speaking, we have endured an unbroken string of defeats. We could not get the UN to stop the American attack; we persuaded Turkey to withhold cooperation, but it did not matter. The country fell to the invader and although we have called every Jihadi at our disposal into the theater, with Syrian and Iranian help, we have not been able to delay the American timetable of handover by June 30 so much as a single day. But worse, it has forced us into coalition warfare. I know how sick you are, as I am, of the Persian apostate mullahs and the greedy Syrians. The Americans can kick their ally France like a dog, but we alas, must endure the humiliations of dealing with the Assads and the Ayatollahs with a smile. It must now be accepted, than even if John Kerry wins, that we will not be able to seize a state like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or even Afghanistan again within a five year horizon. The return to the crossroads is barred, at least for the foreseeable future. It is sad, but a fact.
That leaves us with this tantalizing question. Having gone so far on September 11, can we not go further? Will one more push topple the rock? The answer is yes, but only if the push is sufficient and it leaves the Left which is the spirit of suicide, in control. This latter condition is essential. The fundamental fact is that the triumph of the Jihad must be momentarily preceded by the ascendance of the Left. Only the Left will pick up the gun, put the barrel to the temple of the Western mind and pull the trigger without hesitation. But their ascendance will only be momentary, and I for one delight in imagining how we will kick them as they squeal about their rights and their sexual entitlements once there is no one left to protect them.
Some will take issue with the article's characterization of the left as "the spirit of suicide". But here is the same assessment from academic, author and blogger Norman Geras, a self-identified Marxist, discussing the left's response to Sept. 11:
It is not hard to identify the main source of the reaction of much of the left. It is a thesis about America's role in the world: the thesis that, as the hegemon of global capitalism, the US government has pursued over many decades a foreign policy of assisting anti-democratic forces and opposing progressive change, and has often done so by lethal means, including terror, for which purpose it has supported proxies of one kind and another, like the Chilean military or the Contras in Nicaragua. If one discounts a tendency amongst those propagating it to lay the entirety of the world's ills at America's door, this thesis is substantially true. But can something which is itself a truth be the source of a wrong-headed reaction to the events in question? Yes, it can. It can if it is turned into the whole or the only truth, if it so dominates people's vision that nothing else relevant to the issues can be allowed its due place. That is what happened after September 11. Every other consideration was blocked out or marginalized by the thesis concerning American imperialist power. Half the world stood aghast, but in no time at all there was a great chorus of left and liberal opinion – the Guardian in Britain a prime representative site of this – saying, 'Yes, terrible, appalling, but...'; the 'but' following so close upon the 'yes' as to squeeze out any adequate registration of either the significance or the horror of what had occurred. By contrast, the matter following the 'but' was so extensive and one-sided as to read like an apologia.
What followed the 'but' was that the assault on New York and Washington had to be seen as a response to US imperialist policy and its effects: to America's wars; its support for despots; the distribution of global wealth and power; 'social conditions' for which America was to blame; injustices likewise; Palestine; Iraq. The notion was of a comeuppance. However, except if you indulge the world-view of those who were responsible for the assault, there is an unacceptable slippage here. For it was not American imperialism or the US government that they struck at. It was a large number of (mostly) American citizens. It is no more a response to imperialism and its effects to massacre thousands of civilians at random than it would be a response to bad conditions in some inner-city for a person aggrieved about them to rape the child of a wealthy family or kill a few passers-by. It is an elementary principle, not merely of just war, but of ordinary morality, that the murder of the innocent is a crime. But to explain (it was said by some of those insisting on the need for context in this matter) is not to excuse or justify. The defence is not available just so, without more ado. To explain is not necessarily to excuse or justify. Yet it can be precisely that. It depends on the quality and substance of the purported explanation.
In the days immediately following Sept. 11, I was deeply disappointed, but not entirely surprised, by the left's desire to cast American imperialism as the central cause of the Sept. 11 attacks, and to sympathize with the urge to "strike back" at US hegemony. The people who should have most resoundingly declared their opposition to al-Qaeda's brutal, theocratic ideology and stood in defense of Western liberal democracy decided that this was yet another opportunity to drive home US culpability for all that is wrong in the world, either through its actions or inactions, and to identify with "oppressed people".
To be sure, during the Cold War the US pursued a ruthless policy of realpolitik that resulted in backing dictators if they supported our military aims, and rejecting popular democratic movements if they were socialist in nature. But those who push this perspective minimize the ruthlessness of the Soviet Union and the aims of Communism, which was to establish its own hegemony throughout the globe.
Today, the left casts Bush as the new Hitler and styles the US as a fascist state bent on world domination. These arguments are sympathetically received by those angry about the 2000 election, and who see the War in Iraq as being about oil, Halliburton, Israel...in short everything but what it is: a military campaign that toppled the Middle East's most dangerous dictator and in his stead is planting the seeds of a democratic movement. The aim: to create for the people of that region an alternative to rule by either despots or religious theocrats.
An honest and moral left would ditch the Bush/Hitler comparisons and focus on justice and human rights around the world. It would spend as much time denouncing genocide, gender apartheid, religious persecution and ethnic cleansing in Africa, Asia and the Middle East as it does globalization and corporate greed. It would care as much about slavery in Sudan as it does about prisoners in Guantanamo. It would condemn slaughter of Arabs by Arabs, as well as by Israelis. It would condemn terrorist organizations who hide in populated areas, use ambulances to conceal and transport killers, and recruit children and teenagers as suicide bombers. It would foreswear anti-semitism and not turn a blind eye when it appears within its own ranks. It would harshly denounce Cuba's oppression of free speech and jailing of journalists, even as it praises its health care system. And it would applaud democratic impulses wherever they occurred, even if midwifed by the "imperialist" United States.
If the left could apply its high moral standards consistently and with forthrightness and resolve, I do not doubt its critique of American hyprocrisy would come to dominate political discourse, not only in the parlors of Europe but in the US heartland as well. But since it will do none of these things, the left appears only to be suited for the role that Belmont Club's hypothetical letter-writer-to-Osama identifies for it: weakening the resolve of the West against an absolutist ideology that wants to extinguish the freedom of expression and thought which the left professes to champion. That the left, which used to identify with liberation movements all over the world, appears to have blinded itself to this dynamic is one of the major ironies of our age.
UPDATE: This essay, and my subsequent commentary, has generated a lot of interesting discussion in the comments area. I feel constrained to point out that this is not a conspiracy theory piece, but a flight of fancy. Most of the Belmont Club's essays are much more technical and historical in nature; this one is more literary in character. In fact, the author "Wretchard" identifies C.S. Lewis' classic The Screwtape Letters as the inspiration for his fictional memos.
Now The Belmont Club has published two follow-up pieces: Memo to Osama 2 and Disclaimer to the Memo, in which the thinking behind the memo is made explicit. If you found the original essay intriguing, you will definitely want to read the additional ones. If you found it patently absurd (as several of my commenters below did), you may still want to further indulge your taste for absurd ideas.
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