Defense Secretary Gate's Landon Lecture at K-State.
At Argghhh!!! The Home of two of Jonah's Military Guys
This speech is potentially a historic address, if Secretary Gates can put in motion a plan that the next administration will be able to carry forward. He's couching it in terms that a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton could take this concept and move with it, embrace it, and make it their own.
The SecDef is actually calling for a huge reorientation of the Federal Government to blend that Canadian concept of "soft power" with the "hard power" of military power. Not as two separate concepts, but as a unifying theme and construct.
He's calling to take the concept embodied in Provincial Reconstruction Teams and Human Terrain Teams and greatly expand their scope and ability - to include a deployability matching that of combat forces and essentially the institutionalization of the skill set in the US Gov, and not necessarily in the State Department, but perhaps in a different organization - making American foreign policy "joint" in the ways that the US military is becoming (cuz' it's an on-going process) Joint.
Video at this link
"Near Enemy" and "Far Enemy"
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Rank amateur
That's the message. If you join Al Qeada, you'll blow up Muslims. The message is already working. We just need to help spread it.
I agree with this statement; however, convincing them not to kill the "near enemy" is only half the battle. We then need to convince them not to kill the "far enemy". If I remember correctly, this is the split that UBL had with Azzam. UBL was willing to take the fight to his fellow Muslims and Azzam was not. Azzam was only willing to fight non-Muslims, and UBL had him killed for his different point of view, at least this is the speculation.
The bottom line is that we need to continue, as you suggest, to convince them to stop killing fellow Muslims, and this will help us in Iraq. However, we still have that global Islamic insurgency to deal with, which will require the same kind of IO campaign that we are seeing in Iraq!