America is not winning the war

By Onkar Ghate
web posted September 2, 2002

As we pause on September 11 to remember the stockbrokers,
policemen, firefighters and many other fallen Americans, it is vital
also to reflect on the progress of the war. For it was precisely to
prevent future September 11ths that America responded with
force. How goes the war?
 
Tragically, not well.

To wage a war in self-defense you must know who your enemy
is. But our enemy remains unidentified and, therefore, untargeted.
Ours is a war against "terrorism"--a form of violence, not an
ideological opponent intent on killing us. Our enemies, however,
are dedicated to a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, which
extols faith, mindless obedience, sacrifice to state and God,
primitivism, theocracy. This is why they are at war with the
"Great Satan," America, the foremost embodiment of the
opposite values: reason, individualism, the selfish pursuit of
happiness, secularism, capitalism. Bin Laden understands this:
"Hostility toward America," he declares, "is a religious duty."
But our politicians, schooled in pragmatism and range-of-the-
moment non-thinking, cannot conceive of an ideologically
motivated conflict. An individual terrorist brandishing a bomb,
like bin Laden, may still be real to them, but the movement for
which he fights, Islamic fundamentalism, is not. Thus we try to kill
a few terrorists--but leave untouched the main militant Islamic
states breeding the terrorists. We have no long-term plan to
achieve victory in the war because we cannot identify the enemy
that must be incapacitated. Ask yourself: Would America have
been victorious in WWII if our goal had been to destroy
"kamikaze-ism," not Japanese totalitarianism?

Worse, to the extent that our policy makers glimpse the mystical
ideology operative in the Middle East, they consider it a positive
force. As pragmatists, they are intellectually blind to the historical
evidence of centuries of religious wars and are led, instead, by
their own religious feelings. They can grasp no connection
between faith taken seriously as the ruling principle of every
aspect of man's life--and the attempt to physically force such
dogma on nonbelievers. The terrorists, on this approach, are
inexplicable aberrations, deluded interpreters of true faith, who,
mysteriously, try to spread their mystical doctrines by appeal not
to a rational argument but to a gun. We therefore treat as allies
such enemies of reason as Saudi Arabia, which spawns Islamic
fundamentalists and finances their suicide bombers, and Pakistan,
which trained the Taliban and punishes blasphemy with death.
Our government even courts Iran, the spearhead of militant
Islamic fundamentalism, and works with Iranian officials to foster
"religious values" at U.N. conferences.

Predictably, the administration's actions, guided as they are not
by reason but by emotion (including emotions of outrage), are
chaotic and contradictory. No one knows what--if anything--
America will do next in the war because we ourselves don't
know what we'll do or why. Bush pays lip service to the correct
idea that you are either for America's ideals or against them, but
undermines our strongest ally in the war, Israel. He even
promises the Palestinians a provisional state, thereby teaching
every would-be killer that to the terrorist go the spoils. In
typically empty rhetoric Bush declares that there is an axis of evil
in the world, but allows Syria to head the U.N. Security Council
and pursues dialogue with axis-of-evil-members North Korea
and Iran--all terrorist states according to his own government.

Without actual principles, where will such a mentality turn for
moral guidance?  The answer is: to others and their moral views.
So Bush--programmed by feelings formed from millennia of
assertions that it is evil to uphold one's own interests, that the
strong must sacrifice to the weak, that the meek shall inherit the
earth--undercuts any genuine action taken in America's self-
defense.  In Afghanistan, for instance, morally unsure of his right
to safeguard American lives, Bush feared world disapproval over
civilian casualties.  He would neither commit the number of
American ground troops required to capture the enemy nor
authorize the kind of massive bombing necessary to kill the
enemy before it fled. The result: hundreds of Taliban and al
Qaeda escaped to plot further American destruction. In the
Middle East, uncertain of America's right unilaterally to defend its
interests, the administration obsesses with "coalition-building"
(which includes shunning Israel and courting Saudi Arabia) and
refuses to proclaim the superiority of America's ideals over those
of medieval barbarism.

Lacking the moral conviction to uphold its values abroad,
America increasingly and self-destructively turns inward, shifting
its focus to such relatively trivial questions as whether airline
pilots should be armed or government bureaucracies reshuffled.
Because of our inaction on foreign soil, we resign ourselves to
more terrorist attacks like that of September 11.

How then goes the war? An objective answer must be: badly.
But our cause is not yet lost. We lack not the wealth nor the
skilled military necessary to defeat the enemy, only the ideas and
the will. If we articulate and practice a rational foreign policy,
one actually premised on America's self-interest, we will prevail.
Nothing more is needed to achieve victory than to replace the
pragmatism and self-sacrifice now dictating America's actions
with the principles of reason and rational self-interest; nothing
less will do.

Onkar Ghate, Ph.D. in philosophy, is a resident fellow at the Ayn
Rand Institute. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn
Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Send
comments to reaction@aynrand.org. For more editorials on
America's war on terrorism go to:
http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/actofwar.html

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