WAR THOUGHTS

Two years, nearly to the day, since the war began in earnest. Or rather, re-began in earnest.

This war we're in isn't new. Its roots go back to Berlin, to a willful man with a funny mustache who murdered millions. We need reminding, two years past 9-11, of that. The Ba'athists, al Qaeda, Arafat--our present enemies--draw much of their inspiration from our old enemies, the Nazis. As Robert Wistrich writes:

The dream of [Mohammed] Atta and many other Islamists was to create a Muslim theocracy from the Nile to the Euphrates, "liberated" from any Jewish presence. To achieve this goal, the Al-Qaida fanatics based in Hamburg struck at New York City, the "center of world Jewry" and the "Jewish-controlled" international financial system. In this ideological sense, they showed themselves to be direct heirs of Hitler and his genocidal mind-set. The failure of so many people, including Americans, Jews and Israelis, to grasp this crucial fact about the motivations for 9/11 is a stunning example of how little has been learned from history.

Yasser Arafat claims the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem as his chief mentor and teacher. The Grand Mufti was Hitler's tool throughout the war. The Ba'ath Parties of Saddam and Assad are the last of the viable Nazi offshoots, formed with Vichy French assistance as a bulwark against Allied moves in the Middle East. They survived the war that killed their mentors; if they survive this one, we may not. Those are the stakes in this war.

I watched the President speak to the nation last night. It's a pity he can't bring a live studio audience into the White House Cabinet Room. He connects with people when he shares the same space with them, but often fails to connect if his only immediate audience is a studio camera. On substance the speech was fine, a long overdue reminder that Iraq is in fact the locus of the war on terror, a long overdue statement that he has learned the lessons of Beirut, Somalia and years of nonresistance to terrorism, and a call therefore to keep up the fight. All fine and necessary, in fact we need to hear it more often. But I thought the connection lagged.

Disappointments? He never mentioned the ongoing hazards in Iran, in Syria, in North Korea. He still hasn't spelled out a remedy for the Saudi regime that continues to pour money into Wahhabi efforts to spread terror around the world. He never connected 9-11's economic impact to the just-passed recession. He never mentioned just how unhelpful the domestic opposition is in prosecuting the war, never took on their assaults to his legitimacy as President, never really marshalled the bully pulpit.

Supposing we succeed in this war, it may go down as a reversal of a long historic trend. From the mid-19th Century through the 20th, the concept of total war reigned. Prior to the onset of total war, armies engaged one another on the field of battle but rarely attacked civilians as part of the path to victory. Total war changed that thinking, bringing civilians into war as part of an overall strategy to break an enemy's will. It reached its height in World War II, when the Germans lobbed missiles at London, the allies firebombed Dresden, the Japanese raped Nanking and enslaved Korea, and the US nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Total war was driven only in part by the need to break the enemy's will though--it was also driven by technology. With long range bombers and aircraft carriers and stealthy submarines, war fighters could strike on a near global basis, but the technology was still crude in terms of targeting and in the damage it inflicted. There were no smart bombs--even the Nazi V2 rocket, which flew from bases in Germany to the British Isles, had only elementary flight control.

Now our bombs are smart, and we need only target the armies we fight once again. We can spare civilians, and we go to every length to do so. We no longer destroy villages in order to save them. In fact, we see civilian deaths as entirely counterproductive. We hope to rob the enemy of his support by stealing his people's hearts away from him; killing them indiscriminately makes that impossible. If we win, this war may be seen as the last gasp of total war--the losing side targeting both civilians and military targets, while the winning side targets only the enemy's field combatants, winning over the enemy's civilian populace through post-war charity. If that turns out to be the case, the better angels of our nature, and improved technology, will have won.