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Our enemy needs a face

by Steve Dupree

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
—Theodore Roosevelt

Imagine that you are going to be in a street fight. You tell your friends you’re going to neutralize the other guy’s right cross, and then you focus it. This guy is fighting you, and he’s using headbutts, kicks, elbows, karate chops, a knife, a stick, biting and lots of bad language. You, on the other hand, are only worried about that right cross. You’re getting your ass kicked, and everyone watching thinks you are an idiot.

Too vague? Let’s take a football analogy: UT football coach Phil Fulmer decides that in the upcoming game with LSU, he will not allow an end-around run. Every defensive play, regardless of the offensive set, is arranged to stuff the end-around. LSU sends it up the gut, runs the quarterback sneak, works the tackle-eligible and the fumble-rooski, and generally passes us silly. But all UT worries about defending is the end-around. You would call for Phil’s head, right?

That’s because the end-around is a tactic—only one of many—and the very idea of declaring war on a tactic indicates a basic misunderstanding of strategy, and inability to identify one’s enemy.

For instance, the entity using a tactic against you is your immediate or tactical enemy (the LSU football team). The entity controlling your tactical enemy is your strategic enemy (Nick Saban, LSU football coach). Your ultimate enemy is whoever convinced the strategic enemy that there was something to be gained by your discomfort (the LSU AD who told Nick that if he beat you two years in a row he would get a big raise). If we could get opposing ADs to forfeit every game, we could always go unbeaten.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why a “war on terror” is such a stupid concept. Terror is a tactic. It is but one weapon in the warriors’ arsenal, and it may be used or its use merely threatened. To declare war on a single tactic out of all the military tactics that are available bespeaks an embarrassing lack of understanding of things military. Or at the very least, it’s an insulting effort to dumb down descriptions of what we’re really doing so the public can understand—which would seem to indicate that those in charge believe they are somehow smarter than the rest of us. Given that one of the basic foundations for democracy, and the free market concept, is that the many are smarter than the few, this looks bad for anyone promoting a war on terror. Either they are idiots, or they are opposed to democracy. Either case governing, they should be denied positions of leadership.

We have yet to convincingly identify our strategic or ultimate enemy in our the current conflicts. Tactically, we know we are fighting Islamic radicals of a variety of nationalities. What we either do not know, or have so far refused to publicize, is what entity convinced them that they could profit from our discomfort. That region, like so many others, has a history of infighting that predates Islam, yet below the national level they are nearly unified in their belief that we are their ultimate enemy. Why?

We have a right to know who our enemy is. As citizens of this nation, it is our responsibility to supervise our government and to review its actions. This is required for the military to comfortably follow the directives of the civilian leadership. The Nuremberg war crimes trials happened because the German people failed to supervise their government and their military paid a high price for that. Demand to know who the strategic and ultimate enemies are! Demand it loudly, demand it constantly. It is your right and your responsibility to know. Do not accept inane platitudes or vague protestations of secrecy issues. If you demand it, the men in charge will be forced to at least think about it. I suspect that would be a novel condition.

Terror needs to have a face if there are to be actions taken against it. This will always be the case. Iraq was, unfairly in my opinion, and apparently that of the 9/11 commission, presented as the face of terror before we had completed actions against the Taliban of Afghanistan. With the action in Iraq growing ever more unpopular, I expect that there is an active search for a credible successor to be the next boogeyman. What I don’t expect is that whatever entity is next presented will actually be our strategic or ultimate enemy. Given the incredible profiteering going on by multinational corporations like Haliburton and The Carlyle Group, I am ever more suspicious that Pogo was more right than anyone could have known. We have met the enemy, and he is us.

August 12, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 33 © 2004 Metro Pulse