Mr Romney and Congressman Ryan are fond of tossing around slogans that are cloaked in a 50’s era bravado like: “peace through strength.” But no one seems willing to ask the all important follow up question to that bumper sticker pronouncement; What does that mean?
Since it is safe to assume that no clear answer would be forthcoming from Messieurs Romney and Ryan (because there have never been any clear answers forthcoming from either of them about anything else…) we must assume that a literal understanding of that slogan means that presumably our enemies won’t attack us under the leadership of a Romney/Ryan administration because they fear us, or more specifically, they fear what we would do to them in retaliation for their attack on us. This supposition has its philosophical roots in the concept of “MAD” or Mutually Assured Destruction which was the keystone dynamic of the entire Cold War; the premise that if you shoot your nukes at us, we will shoot our nukes at you and everyone ends up dead. Nobody wins.
Well, that strategy worked well enough then. But here’s the problem with employing that strategy now; How do you sell it to someone that is willing to strap on a bomb vest and blow himself up in order to kill anyone. The terrorist mindset, indeed the fundamental operational theory underlying terrorism as a battle tactic, is that the scenario of “everyone ends up dead” is, in their view, a winning strategy. It is, in fact, the entire point.
So, given this new paradigm of conflict, how does a “peace through strength” foreign policy strategy play out in our favor? There is only one way that it can; and that is to kill all of the terrorists before they kill us and themselves. Thus convincing whoever is left alive to live a peaceful and productive life. Wow! Great idea. Except that in order to kill all of the terrorists you would need to first know who they are and then when and where they are going to strike before they act. The dynamic of a “peace through strength” policy within the paradigm of a terrorist “let’s all die” mindset must, if it is to be successful, be entirely “preemptive.” There is in fact, no other way for such a strategy to function.
You, clever person that you are, have probably asked yourself by this point “Well if it is entirely “preemptive” and we are killing thousands of “civilians” in the process, how can we ever achieve our objective (that objective being Peace, in case you got a little confused back there…)?
Right. So how do you do that? Perhaps, more importantly, how do you do that without actually killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people from whom we cannot accurately distinguish the terrorists?
Or doesn’t that matter?
The simple truth is that war in the 21st century is asymmetrical. There are no enemy lines, there are no meaningful borders, there are no “troops” and there are no conventions that dictate how, where, or when a terrorist attacks us. So how do you successfully prosecute a policy of “peace through strength” if the primary battle tactic of your enemy is to kill you and everyone around you, by first killing himself?
The simple truth is that you can’t successfully prosecute a war on tactics, which is what our war on terror actually represents. How else can it possibly be characterized? We are not fighting this war the way that wars have been fought throughout the centuries; We are not fighting this war to gain territory or mineral rights or access to maritime shipping lanes. We are not fighting this war against a specific and stated ideology. Not really. I mean there is a kind of laundry list of cultural differences that we can list in trying to create a narrative that would describe our enemy. But that construct is nebulous and generic at best (which is why, I believe, that many people have taken the fall back position of just hating Muslims in general, even though Muslims have been a part of our society for decades without incident or trouble…). Yes, there are religious zealots and extremists that do subscribe to a particularly convoluted, strident and insidious form of the Islamic faith. But the vast majority of Muslims will tell you that the narrow, myopic version of Islam that these strange people cling to is utterly and completely foreign to them. They will tell you ( if you will listen with an open mind…) that those people represent some sort of cult-like subset of regressive Islamic “literalists” that conscript their legions through lies and intimidation. They prey on the fear and hopelessness of poor, ignorant peasants. They are in fact a mystery to them and they do not understand them or their motivations any more than the rest of us.
We are told over and over by each administration that enters office; that “we will not negotiate with terrorists.” That is a true statement and a sound philosophy. Another true statement would also be that “We could not negotiate with terrorists even if we were willing to do so…”
I mean, think about it for a minute; How could you possibly have anything to offer someone that has already strapped on a vest full of explosives, or has set himself on some equally self destructive course ( such as flying airplanes into buildings ). Forget about it. That’s like trying to negotiate with stage four cancer. The fundamental concept is quite simply nonsensical.
But if we allow ourselves to continue that metaphor a little further; To defeat cancer before it spreads, we must first recognize it for what it is ( and also what it is not…) and then we must take steps to eliminate it before it reaches a stage that makes its removal a practical impossibility. Our doctors tell us over and over that prevention is the best cure.
I think that we can all agree that this advice is good for all aspects of living a long and productive life. I mean, no one would ever say that the best way to fight cancer is to pretend that it isn’t there and then, when it is about to kill us, attack it with irrevocable overwhelming force, killing most of the healthy tissue along with the cancer in the process. Wait a minute… You know, now that I think about it, that is the way that many people deal with cancer.
I think we all know how that story ends…