Osama bin Farah has put out another of his maddeningly vague articles describing how we are to achieve victory in the war on terror.
Like much of what he has written before regarding the Middle East, [I'll explain this later if you don't understand what I am referring to] what he actually wants is written between the lines (is that why he calls his column "between the lines," because that is how he expects people to read it).
He hides behind terms such as "no more appeasement" and "destroy the bad guys" but tends to avoid discussing exactly what type of policy that ought to entail.
What he seems to be suggesting is that we are coddling the enemy, and being more forgiving to those who attack us than we ought to be. Farah encourages us to forgo this attitude, recalling (surprise, surprise) World War II:
It didn't seem preposterous, cruel, barbaric and uncivilized when we were fighting for our lives against the Nazis and imperial Japan to do whatever it required to win. And it is no more preposterous, cruel, barbaric and uncivilized to destroy evil people and evil regimes now.
I say this as an American of Arabic heritage and a journalist who has covered this part of the world for 25 years. It's time to stop pussyfooting around and destroy the enemy. Yes, in the short run, it will mean more lives lost. In the long run, it is our only chance for peace and freedom and the preservation of many more innocent lives.
Shorter Farah: we are trying to be nice to the terrorists. That is our problem, that we are not trying to kill them.
Poppycock. The problem to solve in any anti-terrorism, counterinsurgency or anti-guerilla campaign is not how to kill the bad guys but how to find them, and only them. It's the sort of problem that occurs in probability classes, known as type A and type B errors, aka false negatives and false positives. The more cautious you are about determining when and how to target someone, the fewer terrorists you kill, but the fewer civilians die as well (and presumably, the smalle the proportion of the dead who are civilians). The more cautious you are about not letting the enemy get away, the more civilians you will kill, and in all likelihood the greater the proportion of those you kill will be civilians. Say there are 100 insurgents in a population of 1000. You kill or capture anyone you suspect of being an insurgent. If you use stringent criteria (A), you get 50 insurgents and 20 civilians. You use (B), you get 90 insurgents and 200 civilians.
There is another problem, and that is that even if you know who the terrorists are, the safest way (from our perspective) to kill them is also the way with the most collateral damage. If we bomb them from overhead, we will destroy a lot of buildings and in all likelihood a lot of inccoents. On the otehr hand, if we take pains to minimize colalteral damage, we will need to use more dangerous techniques such as searching door-to-door, which put our troops in harm's way.
A third factor is that the larger the footprint we leave, the more people we alienate and the more people will want to join the insurgency. So being "tougher," while it may result in more bad guys killed and may intimidate some people away from becoming bad guys, also has the perverse effect of angering some people into becoming bad guys or at least into sympathizing with them. Which means that any attempt to be tougher has to be tough enough to scare the people more than it angers them and to kill not only the current bad guys, but those most liable to become bad guys with prodding.
Comparing what we need to do in this war to whatwe needed to do to win World War II is ludicrous, because they are entirely different sorts of wars. World War II was a straight-up nation-to-nation terrirtory-taking war, where the goal was to destroy and demoralize the other side's army and to capture them, and to drive them out of areas they had conquered. You won by taking territory and by killing and capturing soldiers in a finite and well-defined army. In such a war, it is usually easy to tell who is the enemy and who isn't and to act accordingly. It is also clear when you are winning, because the enemy loses territory and the size and/or quality of its army is reduced (initially, dead soldiers are easy to replace, but the replacements tend to be lower quality because the highest-quality soldiers are already taken).
This would be comparable to the war we fought to conquer Iraq initially. But after we took Iraq, we shifted into occupation mode. This is a totally different sort of war, and getting tougher inevitable means treating the civilians as if they were soldiers.
So if you read between the lines, what Mr. Farah is saying, regarding Iraq at least, is that we need to go in and slaughter the populace. Or at least whatever sections (ethnic or geographic) of the populace the insurgency is most likely to come from. He has advocated this before, of course.
He also appears to be advocating that we expand the war. He specifically mentions Iran, but he has in the past suggested that we invade Syria. But his recent articles on Syria and Iran have both suffered from is unwillingness to propose any specific policies towards "getting tough" with them, claiming that he "doesn't know our strategic options," which is another way of saying that (1)if we invade and it goes south, he can deny any responsibility by simply claiming that we handled it in the "wrong way," (2) that he can shield himself from any accountability if the way that the U.S. decides to handle Syria results in devastation (that is, he can always claim, e.g. "well, we could've just supported the Syrian people surreptiously in their obvious desire to overthrow the regime themselves a la Michael Ledeen, and/or (3) his actual plan involves mass slaughter of Syrians, and he is too cowardly to say so.
Well, what about it, Joey? Care to say how you really feel?
That is all.
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