11 September 2014 –

Thirteen years ago today. 

11 September 2001, Incirlik Air Base, Turkey.  I was the Director of Intelligence for Operation NORTHERN WATCH.  We flew combat missions to enforce the military no-fly zone over Northern Iraq, a hold-over operation from Operation DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM more than ten years before.  Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq, but we restricted what he could do militarily against opponents in his country and the region. 

Our mission was straightforward, our working conditions and quarters were good, Turkish food was magnificent, and the Brits and Turks we worked with were competent and professional.  In fact, we invited them all to our July 4^th festivities.  In return, the Brits invited us to a Benedict Arnold birthday party.   We flew our mission as was expected of the best air forces in the world.

 

Then, in one day, the world turned upside down. 

I was in the senior staff’s weekly security brief when a sergeant ran into the room, turned on the TV, and yelled that we had to see something.   We watched the airliner fly into the second World Trade Tower.  Everyone in the room went stiff and silent.  Our commander then calmly conducted a contingency planning meeting for what could be our new mission.

The death and destruction in New York, the Pentagon, and the field in Pennsylvania were horrible; we American Airmen in Turkey didn’t dwell on it.  We immediately got to work to begin again serving our country in a crisis.  We quickly went from patrolling Iraqi airspace to facilitating the movement of thousands of men and women, and billions of dollars of equipment, weapons, and supplies through Turkey to Central Asia in preparation for combat operations in Afghanistan.  We knew who and where the enemy was, and we were fixin’ to kill’em.    

The forces of Operation ENDURING FREEDOM, many of whom flowed through Turkey, quickly crushed the Taliban’s and Al-Queda’s ability to export terrorism out of Afghanistan.  In doing so, we lost fewer than thirty Americans in Afghanistan from November 2001 to February 2002.  Flush with success, the Bush administration thought it could also use our military to nation-build on a fault line between civilizations that has never yielded to being a cohesive nation.  Another 530 Americans were killed from March 2002 to the end of 2008 in the Bush administration’s pursuit of an unrealizable goal. 

Since then, in an even more tragic waste of life, the present administration has doubled down in fruitless nation-building.  Since 2009, nearly 1,700 more Americans have been killed in a “country” that looks and acts the way it did in 2001.  All this under the wrong strategy for the wrong place at the wrong time, and using the wrong instruments of national power.    

The administrations’ strategies in Iraq have been a faulty and tragic waste of American lives.  We didn’t have to invade Iraq and topple the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003.  Not because Saddam Hussein was a good guy; no, he truly deserved to die.  But, shouldering the inevitable responsibility for nation-building in a state with artificial borders and intractable cultural and religious divides would be next to impossible with the military forces allocated.  Correctly, our leaders in 2007 bet that a surge of additional forces would establish enough stability in the country’s critical regions and within its governing mechanisms to create potential for future nation-building.  Sadly, that lengthy process cost over 4,200 American military lives and more than 3,400 American civilian contractors’ lives. 

After 2009, the present administration abandoned its responsibilities in Iraq and wasted another 500 American military lives.  Its rejection of prior commitments, inattention, and deficiency in leadership showed the world that it could not be trusted. This has led directly to the burgeoning war with ISIL.   

 A lot has changed since the first 9-11, thirteen years ago.  But as I have mentioned, the more things change, the more they stay the same.  The world is still a bad place.  We still have implacable enemies who kill Americans in horrifying ways.  But, our military men and women still know who the enemy is and know how to kill him.  They continue to stiffen their resolve, train and plan, and then show the moral and physical courage to rise to any occasion. 

Our leaders must display that same decisiveness and courage that they ask of the Americans who execute their plans.  Only then will these “leaders” prove themselves worthy to visit the graves of the fallen.  

8 September 2014 -

1300 years of jihad

History should teach us about the present.  As a ten-year-old, I was mesmerized by the accounts of Lewis and Clark’s 1804-06 expedition back and forth across Montana.  The rest of their epic journey across the continent was largely irrelevant to a boy who viewed Montana alone as God’s country, the center of the universe.  As I grew, I learned that differing historical beliefs, cultures, and geography greatly influenced movements of peoples and civilizations.  I realized I needed to catch up.   

   

As an Air Force intelligence officer, I analyzed the relationships among world events and peoples, their geography, religions, languages, ethnicities, cultures, economies, historical successes and failures, and immediate aspirations.  After thirty-five years of analytic effort, I came to agree with the truism: “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” 

 

The “progressive” belief that modern nations will abandon allegiance to the factors above and embrace a one-world view is fantasy.  Modern civilization has given us vaccines, flush toilets, and a way to check e-mail in a fast-food restaurant in Singapore.  But, it has not changed the way most people identify with something greater than themselves, pray, or sacrifice for family and community.  And, modern “progressive” thought has had little success at all in resolving strife among peoples. 

A 1,300-year war is being waged between Christian and Islamic civilizations.  Since the 8^th century, the history of the Middle East and South Asia, almost all of Europe, and much of Africa, has played itself out in battles between these two sets of ideology.  Of course, within each civilization there have also been wars among different nations, peoples, and religious sects.  And, even in recent times, those intra-civilization struggles have been heavily influenced by the potential intrusion of other civilizations. 

The current fighting in Iraq and Syria is a skirmish in the latest jihadi terrorists’ offensive in this centuries-old war.  A resurgent Islam, modernized and enabled by petrodollars, has taken the initiative in this war between civilizations by paying for the creation of western-based jihadist networks that are attacking the Christian West.  The new twist now is that many of those who align themselves with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Levant (ISIL) jihadists will return to the western countries they came from, prepared to attack their countrymen in the name of radical Islam. 

The pool of potential killers is large.  Local unrest in, and the withdrawal of European colonizers from, Islamic regions have created significant Moslem minorities within the bulwarks of western civilized nations such as Britain, France, Germany, Canada, and the United States.  It is within these communities that many of the ISIL radicals are being trained, are operating, and will continue to operate.  ISIL is the vanguard of a radical Islamic enemy spreading to other-than Muslim countries, an enemy that is controlling the events of today’s war.  Western leaders must now try to blunt this latest enemy campaign originating in jihadist madrasas and training camps in their own cities.  

   

It is no surprise that we in the West have no solid allies in the Islamic civilization who will help us regain the initiative in this war.   Saudi Arabia, for example, is asking the U.S. to help them squelch the latest version of jihad in Iraq; at the same time it continues to fund the creation of radical jihadists in its worldwide network of fundamental Wahabbist Islam schools.  Iran is allowed to flit in and out of nuclear negotiations with the U.S., at the same time never denying that it wants to destroy the United States and Israel, dominate the region, and establish Shia Islam as the ruling force wherever Moslems live.  Even Turkey, a long-neglected U.S. ally, is fomenting radical Islam.  Turks, Arabs, Persians, and Kurds may all distrust and try to dominate each other, but they all certainly distrust and often hate the West more.  Our strategic enemy is not ISIL; it is the intolerant civilization that spawns and nurtures violent religious movements within itself and then selectively launches these movements against the West in the larger war.    

 

Our leaders must admit that their vision of a let’s-hold-hands-and-sing-kumbaya world ain’t gonna happen.  The world’s religious and cultural history clearly warns otherwise.  Instead, our leaders need to rally western civilizations around an unambiguous message and a well-defined strategy that will protect traditional western interests. 

The message—the vision—is one of protecting individual freedom, religious tolerance, the sanctity of the lives and property of citizens, and the sovereignty of borders. 

The strategy is first to destroy ISIL, Al-Queda, and their fellow henchmen with certainty and decisiveness.  The weapons used and the timing and tempo of the war are operational concerns and do not need to be made public.   Then, our leaders must coerce—militarily, economically, and diplomatically–radical Islamic leaders into stopping their expansionist campaigns. 

Our leaders must regain the initiative in this centuries-old war, a war that will continue long after they are gone from the scene.  They owe that much to the future of our civilization and the people they are part of.