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How to Win the War, Part 2
In the first installment of this series, I explained that there is a formula for accessing an enemy’s threat to us, and for identifying how to defeat them. The formula looks like this: Intentions + Will/Motivation + Capabilities = Threat.
I explained that in order to eliminate the threat posed by your enemy you must permanently destroy just one of these three elements, and I examined each of these elements as it pertains to Islamic terrorists.Â
However, today I would like to do what is called “self-scouting.â€Â Self-scouting is a method used by football teams and others to identify how an opposing team will try to defeat them. The idea is that this process will reveal your own weaknesses and allow you an opportunity to guard those soft spots or harden them if you have the time and ability to do so. So, let’s take a look at U.S. Intentions, Will/Motivation and Capability in this war against Jihadists and see what weaknesses they will try to exploit.
Our obvious strengths are our capabilities. We have a fighting force that is intelligent, highly trained and equipped like no other force in the history of mankind. It is overpowering yet precise in battle. But what makes our military so undefeatable is that it is full of adaptable, quick-thinking and multi-talented decision makers who can succeed in the most difficult environments. Whether our soldiers are asked to rebuild critical infrastructure, mediate conflicts between different ethnic or religious factions, train Iraqi security forces or neutralize bad guys, they have proven themselves formidable, despite having little formalized training in nation building. The Jihadists know that they are no match for our soldiers on the battlefield, and confronting us in a symmetrical manner would be fruitless. Their only hope for defeating us lies elsewhere in the formula.
Our intentions and will are so closely interrelated that they are practically one element combined. The view of U.S. intentions held by the Islamic Jihadists is the same view that is held by a large portion of the liberals in this country. (Hmmm, isn’t that interesting). Their view is that America is a wicked country that wishes to occupy portions of the Middle East so that we can loot it of its rich oil reserves and subjugate its people.
This position was expressed by Bin Laden in his 1996 Fatwa as he railed against our military presence in Saudi Arabia long after the first Gulf war was over, and was repeated by the extreme left during our buildup to the second war with Iraq. The idea is that America is greedy, and that George W. Bush is an evil, election-stealing, big-oil man just like his daddy and Dick Cheney, and the biggest reason we went to Iraq was so we could commandeer cheap oil for our oil companies and our economy. This idea doesn’t hold up to even the slightest amount of scrutiny, but I wouldn’t waste my time trying to explain that to any Jihadists. They would probably just saw off your head before you spoke a word.
I will however take a moment to critique that idea with our own American left in mind: If our intention was to rape the land, why didn’t we stay in Kuwait after we liberated that country in 1991? Why did we leave a less dangerous and more oil rich Saudi Arabia in 2003 after deposing Saddam Hussein? Why have we spent so much effort in bringing security to the Iraqi people instead of the Iraqi oil fields? Why is Iraqi oil production so low while the price of oil in the U.S. is so high, and we have the military force available to secure and confiscate additional production? The answer that is obvious to anyone who isn’t willfully naïve is that our intentions lie elsewhere..
Quite simply our intentions are to secure the blessings of liberty, for ourselves and for our children, and for the generations that follow. We seek these blessings not at anyone else’s expense. On the contrary, we believe that liberty is God’s gift to all of humanity and no regime or ideology has the right to usurp that gift. Not that we are a perfect country, by any stretch of the imagination.  We have been frequently slow to confront evil when it is knocking on our neighbor’s door, but I believe that no other nation has shed more of its own blood in the pursuit of liberty for other peoples, than ours.
We have fought tyrannical regimes in the past and are fighting Islamic Jihadists now in order to secure the blessings of liberty from an enemy that seeks to impose an unjust Sharia law on the entire world, and kill its disobedient citizens in the process. No, there is nothing impure about our true intentions, despite our imperfect execution. In fact our true intentions are one of our greatest strengths. However, the fact that America is divided as to what our intentions are, creates an opportunity for the Jihadists. And that leads us to the third element in our discussion, and our biggest weakness at present, our will.
The Jihadists know that the only way they can win this war is for us to lose our will to fight, and quit. Furthermore, they have witnessed enough of our recent history to know that they have a good chance of being successful. Here are some brief illustrations from Bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa that underscore how the Jihadists think of us: When Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry said that the explosion at Khobar towers “had taught him not to withdrawal when attacked by coward terrorists.â€Â Bin Laden joked that “his talk can induce a grieving mother to laughter.â€Â Bin Laden also asked, “Where was this false courage of yours when the explosion in Beirut took place in 1983? You were turned into scattered bits and pieces.â€
Furthermore, Bin Laden noted that “your most disgraceful case was in Somalia…when tens of your soldiers were killed in minor battles and one American Pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you. Clinton appeared in front of the whole world threatening and promising revenge, but these threats were merely a preparation for withdrawal.â€Â Now if you were coaching a football team, and the opposing team couldn’t stop a full-back trap, what would you do? You would run a full-back trap at them until you hung 60 points on them or they learned how to stop it. What we need to understand in order to win this fight, is that every single action that the Jihadists take has the ultimate purpose of destroying our will, because that is our soft spot.
The Jihadist’s confidence that we will eventually retreat and they will eventually win is bolstered by the willingness of the Democratic Party and the American main stream media (msm) to help them in their effort to defeat us in Iraq. Remember, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Democrats and the msm share the same agenda of returning political power to the Democrats. If they can ensure Bush’s humiliation in Iraq, they believe they can convince enough Americans to give them an opportunity at managing the country’s affairs. On the other hand, if Bush’s policies end up being successful and his ideas are proven right, it would be a serious blow to their quest for power. Therefore, the Democrats and MSM will do everything possible to get us to quit in Iraq before it becomes clear that we can win. 
There are numerous examples of how the Jihadists coordinate their purpose of destroying our will, with the agenda of the Democrats and the msm. Each time they are trying to convince more Americans to question this effort in the following ways: Are we really the good guys?  Is the high cost of our blood and money worth it? Is this war winnable? Aren’t we just making matters worse by creating more terrorists? Shouldn’t we be looking for Bin Laden in Afghanistan?
It’s all a bunch of drivel, but they know that many people will grow to believe their propaganda if they just repeat it over and over again. That’s why we had non-stop coverage of Abu Ghraib, even though the Defense department had already investigated the incident, detained the perpetrators and confessed our wrong doing to the world months before the scandal “broke†with the calculated release of the photos. It’s why we hear the American death toll every day without proper context. We are never reminded that our losses are incredibly small for an operation that has been so big and lasted so long. It’s why we are hearing the same old stories about car bombs at a time that the U.S. military is killing scores of Al Qaeda across the country and disrupting their operations (The Surge).
The classic example of this coordination took place when three hardened Jihadists detained at Guantanamo Bay simultaneously committed suicide. Many Democrats and the main stream media rushed to explain their actions as the desperate act of people who have been victimized by the evil American government. Meanwhile, the camp commander accurately explained the event for what it was, “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.â€Â  Â
If the Jihadists can undermine the will of our populace by successfully implanting this false self-image in our conscience, it is only a matter of time before our elected officials feel the heat of their electorate and force our military’s withdrawal from an offensive position on the war against Jihadists, and demand a pull back to a defensive (and defenseless) position. From there it would only be a matter of time before a Jihadist cell developed an attack on the U.S. that would make 9/11 look like a walk in the park. I hope it doesn’t take such a devastating event to wake us up to the true nature of the conflict we are in.
In my final installment I will discuss how we can use all of this information to prevent this catastrophe and eventually emerge victorious in the war against Islamic Jihadists.