Not to put tooo fine a point on things here.. but I believe that we are already involved in a civil war of global proportions.
It's the way it's always been Shannon. I couldn't agree more that when tactics and strategy suggest that an alliance of those in favor of good or right or whatever it might be called can more easily give battle to an opposition it ought to be done. But only rarely has it ever been done that way.
Instead those we'd see as "our side" have to wait and be blooded. And they have to do it again. Lingerers will fall to malingerers and fewer will stand alone before great enough action is eventually taken. It's not just sad, it's not just wrong, in real ways it's also just dumb. But it may be a "dumb-ness" we have to endure.
Israel didn't wait to protect itself in its many wars until a time came when political realities said it could not afford to be seen to strike first. That war 30 years and change ago cost them more in blood and treasure than would have been spent had it not waited.
Still the responses deemed necessary are "measured," "requisite," or "reciprocal" among other colloquialisms for anything less than victory. We're now paying the price for somehow believing that a country and a people can be occupied that weren't thoroughly defeated first. The perception of that continuing battle gives rise to more reaction elsewhere. And all for a pinprick.
I'm not intending to any way belittle the cost borne by the victims of 9/11. But it wasn't a strategic attack and it was of little tactical consequence. It was, as terror attacks almost often are, an attack of perception.
The economy wasn't damaged greatly. The number killed were surprisingly fewer than most believed would be the case when the towers fell. And barring a few indignities at airports or borders and a few legislative and executive overreaches that the Supreme Court will eventually distill in calmer days the day to day lives of the average citizen didn't change much.
The attacks did put the U.S. at war. In many ways unfortunately, however, I say it did not put the nation at war. Only the armed forces. The nation out of uniform continued on much the same. Which is part of the reason the response has been as restrained as it has. A nation at war behaves much differently than does an Army under orders at war abroad.
Yes, the US response has been restrained. Years of continued low intensity COIN warfare is restrained relative to what an American nation under draft and fully engaged might demand. Counter insurgency ops worried about damaging prayer sites as much as capturing insurgents is restrained.
In some cases, as against the example of Rome cited above, that type of restraint is laudatory. In other cases, however, it's just dumb. It's also sanctimonious and hypocritical for those of us at home to judge the effects of the efforts too harshly when efforts of the magnitude generally practiced are the limits of how angry we really got.
Just think what we'd be demanding and how different the response might have been if our enemies had put a thousand only moderately trained souls to task running loose around the country setting fires in movie theaters full of children in rural small towns, opening fire randomly in restaurants, rigging boats to explode by vacationers in civilian lakes and rivers and all the other soft target indiscriminate attacks against you and me and our children the mind could conjure.
Such things could go on for a long time. We'd be all watching the other. We'd be demanding greater response at home and abroad from national and local authority. Instead we fight the fight we do because our enemy didn't understand and employed flawed tactics on 9/11.
Thank goodness for an enemy as flawed as it is. With the restrictions we place on ourselves those flaws hurt him less than they should though. But none of it is as simple as saying we "should" do more or we "could" win this yesterday if it weren't just for things done or not done.
Shannon is absolutely right. It is a "civil" war of global proportion that is in our future. In the most literal of meanings. "Civil" and social rationales (and irrationalities) are the drivers. Such will, eventually, take something more than a measured and professional military response. At least it better. Because if a professional military response is loosed to defeat that kind of enemy the battlefield is vacant, cleared and sterile when the battle is done. No one and nothing is left. That's what Rome tried.
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