The Long War: A self-defeating
prophecy By Michael Vlahos
Early this year the United States entered
a third stage in the war that began on September
11, 2001, as a new narrative for the conflict was
unveiled: "The Long War".
In war,
narrative is much more than just a story.
"Narrative" may sound like a fancy literary word,
but it is actually the foundation of all strategy,
upon which all else - policy, rhetoric and action
- is built. War narratives need to be identified
and critically examined on their own terms, for
they can illuminate the inner nature of the
war
itself.
War narrative does three essential
things. First, it is the organizing framework for
policy. Policy cannot exist without an
interlocking foundation of "truths" that people
easily accept because they appear to be
self-evident and undeniable. Second, this "story"
works as a framework precisely because it
represents just such an existential vision. The
"truths" that it asserts are culturally impossible
to disassemble or even criticize. Third, having
presented a war logic that is beyond dispute, the
narrative then serves practically as the anointed
rhetorical handbook for how the war is to be
argued and described.
In the Pentagon's
Quadrennial Defense Review Report, the phrase is
recurrent, with "long war", "long, global war" or
"long, irregular war" appearing 34 times,
including the title for the first chapter:
"Fighting the Long War". The banner headline on
Defenselink.mil announcing the report reads: "The
United States is a nation engaged in what will be
a long war."
The story of war, twice
transformed This war - the "global war on
terrorism", or GWOT - has had three distinct
"stories". Or perhaps it would be better to say
that the story of this war has been twice
transformed. Its initial incarnation as a "war
against terrorism" was a simple story of righteous
retribution: kill the terrorists in their mountain
lairs.
The second began with US President
George W Bush's declaration of an "axis of evil".
This represented a metamorphosis from a
"terrorist" enemy to the image of an evil league
of enemy powers, and thus the entire significance
of the war was elevated. At one rhetorical stroke
it was now possible to assert a war narrative
equal to the most protean of US struggles. The war
could now be given a commanding meaning equal to
the mythic claim of World War II itself. Thus it
instantly became a grander enterprise, where the
transformed narrative actually demanded great
efforts and even greater events.
It is the
collapse of this enterprise that has birthed yet
another story. This third incarnation is a
tortured response to the debacle in Iraq, where
messianic goals and millenarian promises went
south. Thus the "Long War", formally unveiled in
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's speech to
the National Press Club last February: "The United
States is a nation engaged in what will be a long
war."
But the image of a long war - a
dogged, "twilight struggle" - is not particularly
attractive, especially if US failure and losses in
Iraq are thus implicitly translated into a
slow-bleeding vision of forever war. Such a
picture certainly does not make the blood rush or
the pulse race. To keep this effort up for
"generations", as Bush is fond of saying, the
purpose driving this war must be great, of course.
But even more - and this is its greatest challenge
- such purpose must explain the need for
generations of pain and sacrifice.
As a
template for the narrative of the "Long War",
World War II no longer works, since the US
continues to slog past anything like a V-J
(Victory over Japan) Day endpoint. The Long War
needs, if such a thing is possible to imagine, a
story of World War II-like significance, but with
an even bigger claim on Americans. Thus in Bush's
words, this war is "the unfolding of a global
ideological struggle, our time in history".
The enemy is not only powerful, a "great
evil", it is also a "mortal danger to all
humanity", the "enemy of civilization" - as though
these men were somehow the antithesis of human
and, perhaps even, inhuman. The enemy is not only
"evil" (a word invoked like a litany), it also
wages "war on the idea of human progress itself"/
Are not the "Islamo-fascists", in Bush's words,
the successor evil to "the struggle against
communism in the last century"?
There is
the clear suggestion here that without US
intervention, the radicals would succeed, and a
caliphate would reign. This is what the official
Long War briefing says. If we explicitly fight
"Islamo-fascists" we must just as explicitly
oppose everyone who supports or even sympathizes
with Muslim resistance - and who knows how many
Muslims "sympathize" at some level: a third, the
majority? We are determined to reform and
rehabilitate the degraded Arab and Persian worlds.
Already the narrative of the Long War has
won over the faithful. FreeRepublic.com is
probably the biggest conservative community blog.
Most talk on the war there moves quickly to such
declarations as: "History shows that wars only end
with a totally defeated enemy otherwise they go on
... Either Islam or us [sic] will quit in total
destruction." Or another: "Will it take an
American Hiroshima to awaken the majority, to
mobilize our masses against the Islamic quest of
world domination?"
Moreover, pushing the
mythic card to its fullest has worked in
Washington politics. Its authority has trumped all
opposition. Woe to Democrats (or even Republicans)
who question the US mission in a great war. It has
been narrative as fiat and law, and as fiat and
law it has served the Bush administration well.
Islam's counter-narrative The
Long War - and its spectral subtext of a war of
civilizations - clearly targets the US domestic
audience. But what does it promise to achieve in
the Muslim world? It has already achieved this: it
has helped to re-create or, perhaps rather,
resurface a deeply coded Muslim counter-narrative.
This counter-narrative is also apocalyptic in
nature, going back to Islam's 7th-century origins.
Today the United States takes on the role
of great evil, of the Dajjal. By almost
unwittingly becoming the "Dark Side" threatening
Islam, the United States plays into the hands of
the takfiri cause by making us Islam's
enemy (takfiri, literally "excommunicator",
are Islamic extremists who believe that anyone who
disagrees with them is not a true Muslim). Do
Muslims think more kindly on us when AM radio
talk-show boosters of the Long War such as Dennis
Prager relentlessly insist that the US is in a
fight to the finish with only 100 million Muslims?
Moreover the Long War narrative threatens
also forever to alienate civil Islamists.
Non-violent - or even armed but non-takfiri
Muslim revolutionaries - are the ummah's
essential change agents. But the Long War posits a
black-and-white choice between secular (or at
least "moderate") Muslims on one hand and pure
"Islamo-fascists" on the other. In this choice
there is no place for non-takfiri, more
community-based Islamists in the US camp.
The great, lost opportunity of US hopes
for reform in the Arab world was with non-violent
Islamists. That opportunity has now been fully
squandered. In societies ruled by tyrants,
quietist Islamists had come to represent an
alternative hope for their communities. But in its
chosen Iraqi showcase the US set about, perhaps
unwittingly, to alienate the very Islamists on
whom its successful rule relied.
Now they
identify themselves as resisters of US occupation.
They have become a model of Muslim political
resistance - but these are not takfiri
fighters; rather they are honest, committed Muslim
authority. Such Islamist fighters represent a
range of community resistance: from carefully
quietist, such as Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, to
civil militias, such as the Shi'ites in Iraq and
Hezbollah in Lebanon. They even extend to groups
at the margins of governance, such as Hamas or the
Somali Courts Union.
Through this
alienation we also move a traditionally more
passive majority - who are not necessarily
takfiri enthusiasts - closer in sympathy
with resistance. In Muslim places currently under
foreign occupation, popular support for resistance
runs very high. Such resistance begins to develop
a civic dimension, as in the popularly elected
Hamas, or the various community-based militias of
Iraq and even Somalia. Thus resistance goes beyond
takfiri action and is moving into the realm
of legitimate civic action.
At the same
time, liberals in the Islamic world are now at
risk of looking like collaborators. Since the US
has so strongly championed liberal Muslim
reformers, it has equally put them at risk of
being seen as US agents in helping to subvert
Islam. The US codified a nascent "collaborator"
model through its extravagant and extra-official
electoral support for Iyad Allawi - efforts that
were rewarded by the minuscule vote he received.
The "Cedar Revolution" is a media-backfire case in
point, morphing as it did into an extended
political coming-out party for Hezbollah.
When the US has sought to empower liberal
politics in Iraq, it instantly also signified that
they were anointed agents of the American Design.
Like the "mayor of Kabul", also known as the
president of Afghanistan, they must scramble
desperately to show their Islamist bona
fides, all the while guarded by blond American
(or South African) praetorians. Meanwhile, the
entire Islamic world has seen to what extent the
United States is truly interested in the "triumph
of democracy".
Where is all the democratic
reform among America's "friends and allies in the
region"? In Egypt, where a 20-year emergency law
was arbitrarily extended? The all-powerful
Egyptian state now has 15,000 uncharged prisoners
in the tender mercy of its jails. If magistrates
protest, they too are thrown into prison. The 88
Muslim Brothers now in parliament are becoming
Egypt's only democratic alternative. Throughout it
all the US government has almost nothing to say;
but for more than 30 years it has had something to
give: more than US$2 billion every year to the
modern Pharaoh's regime.
In Bahrain, the
2001 "Dawn of Democracy" has turned out to be a
false dawn. Its prince's fear of Iran - thanks to
what has been happening in Iraq - has led to a
betrayal of reform. The reform fiction is
emblazoned in gerrymandering so flagrant that a
two-thirds Shi'ite majority is legislatively
disempowered. And in Saudi Arabia, reforms are
going nowhere fast, and cannot be usefully
encouraged by the United States, except at the
ethereal margins of "public diplomacy". The
much-heralded shura council is just so much
eye candy for US consumption.
So, in the
end, America's dark narrative prevents it from
distinguishing reform and resistance movements it
can live with from groups it absolutely must
destroy. The Long War narrative cannot conceive of
legitimate Muslim resistance against tyranny
(unless, of course, as in Lebanon or Iran, the US
is in favor of it first). Thus authentic
resistance is automatically lumped with takfiri
evil.
Shining as true
apostates And if the current Long War
narrative is invoked in event of a war or armed
clash with Iran, what may result? A Persian-US war
could potentially elevate Iran's standing even
among a majority Sunni ummah. Even now
Muslims view Iran as the only nation-state that
stands up to US power. A conflict with Iran would
fully consolidate Muslim hostility and the
perception that the United Stats represents the
evil force in the world - the Dajjal - directly
threatening Islam's very survival.
Thus
even Shi'ite Iran might - in this exceptional
situation - represent itself as the leader of
Muslim resistance against the dark force. Thus one
of the consequences of a Persian-US war would be
to divide the Muslim world between those who
resist evil and those who collaborate with it.
This means that the rulers of Egypt, Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia and Jordan and the Persian Gulf
princelings - US "friends and allies" all - would
now shine as true apostate traitors to Islam. They
would be under enormous pressure: either to
renounce their relationship with the Americans or
risk internal collapse (from coup, civil war,
insurgency). Either way the US loses.
The
Long War is a failed narrative because it does not
describe actual reality. Reality tells a story of
a United States delivering change to the Muslim
world, a force of creative destruction. If
anything, this US-created reality only fires up
the long-standing Muslim grand narrative of
deliverance and restoration. Moreover, the Long
War perversely elevates the takfiri
narrative by telling Muslims that the US is the
dark force that must be resisted.
The Long
War is thus more than a failed narrative. It is a
self-defeating narrative. It has prospered only
because it speaks to a highly motivated domestic
audience, the conservative Republican base that
remains the passionate heart of the Bush
administration's war policy.
There was an
old theater in Montmartre that specialized in
sensational and horrifying dramatic
entertainments. It was called the Grand Guignol
("Big Puppet"). It is a fitting name for the
strategy-trumping, domestic political theater of
America's imperial court.
Michael
Vlahos is principal professional staff at the
National Security Analysis Department of the Johns
Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
