April 18, 2005

Why The Question of Terrorism Will Eventually be Moot (Part 3 in a Series of 3 Articles)

This is part three in a series of three articles. Part one of the series is here.

Earlier today I speculated:

...by 2105 the world may change again so much as to make the whole current question of terrorism utterly irrelevant. I even think that it’s likely to change so much.

Currently we face a potentially deadly threat from terrorists who want to destroy our country and our way of life. Until about 40 years ago, any people in history with the power to do so would have responded by devastating the nation or nations from which such a threat originated. But we forbear to do so. In democracies there have always been appeasers and those reluctant to go to war, but this is different. When America was attacked at Pearl Harbor, we quickly united. In today’s case, the country has been similarly attacked, but did not fully unite to defend the safety of this nation and remove the ability of the attackers to do further harm.

Certainly mainstream media has a great responsibility for this, by suppressing so much of the news that supports Conservative views.

But I will speculate that there’s a bigger reason. Specifically, that Western nations are trying to evolve so as to be part of a world that is free of warfare. “War is wrong,” goes the Liberal refrain. And in that pursuit we are risking destruction by the people who haven’t signed onto the “war is wrong” program.

We’re in a very unusual situation in the history of the human race, in which a society is directly attacked, tremendous damage is done, and yet many members of that very society oppose removing the enemy’s ability to do further harm.

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Modern Western man is faced with this awful dilemma, from which he recoils: real peace and successful reconstruction are in direct proportion to the degree that an enemy is humiliatingly defeated and so acknowledges it—the aim being that he will come to feel that he cannot go on being what he has been. To that end, absolute victory may encompass everything from Hiroshima to bombing downtown Belgrade as the price for tranquillity and a democratic and humane postbellum Japan and the Balkans. Not finishing off a defeated Republican Guard in 1991 or sparing looters in April 2003 or breaking off the siege of Fallujah in April 2004 only ensures that more corpses will pile up later. President Bush’s so-called Axis of Evil in 2002—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—all had in common unfinished business with the U.S. military that had led to a bellum interruptum of sorts. In contrast, the Grenada communists, Noriega, Milošević , and the Taliban were all defeated, and only after that were their societies rebuilt—and thus Grenada, Panama, Serbia, and Afghanistan now do not belong to the axis of anything. Perhaps for all the debate over how to fight irregular wars in an age of global terrorism, we would do best to recall the realistic, if inelegant, words of the owner of the Oakland Raiders, the infamous Al Davis: “Just win, baby.”

In terms of human history, we’re in a rare circumstance, in which many in our society would rather risk continued attacks, rather than to respond decisively so as to remove the enemy’s ability to do more harm. I believe this is an anomaly, a bubble, that will not last. I have no doubt that in 100 years, and probably far sooner, society will reach a consensus that war is wrong, except when the alternative to war is far worse—in which case some devastation of those who are trying to kill you, goes a long way.

Terrorists depend on the current willingness of Western nations to respond with great restraint. But as Victor Davis Hanson notes, in some cases some lack of such restraint is just what is needed to protect society.

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