President Bush asserts forcefully that the United States will prevail in the war against radical Islamists. He may be right. We pray he is right. However, it is also important to understand the strength of the forces arrayed against us.
There are at least five reasons why we may lose the war against radical Islam -- which is in fact, a war for the Free World as we know it.
- First, the extraordinary advances in military technology we command are not necessarily advantages in an insurgency struggle...
- Second, the United States is far more vulnerable to asymmetric warfare than are our enemies. We have rich targets all over the world, while our foes are shadowy and without a national fingerprint...
- Third, the enemy has more discretionary funding than we do. With the price of oil somewhere between $60 to $75 a barrel, funds are readily available for propaganda and recruitment in madrassas and mosques around the world...
- Fourth, radical Islam has instilled fear in the West and among moderate Muslims, which is manifested in the effort at appeasement...
- Fifth, arguably the most significant point, is that Islamists are united, notwithstanding the well-publicized differences between Sunnis and Shi'ites. Islamists believe the West has been weakened by cultural degradation. They also believe their goal of caliphates from Madrid to Jakarta is an inevitability. By contrast, the United States itself and its allies are divided on strategy and on the marshaling of resources to fight the enemy...
For most Europeans and about half of Americans, there is denial that we are in anything like an existential conflict. In an existential conflict, losing can be very costly. Benjamin Franklin famously said the American Revolutionaries had to hang together lest they hang separately. Hanging was not an abstraction to Franklin. He, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington and many other patriots would, likely, have been hanged if the Revolution had not succeeded.
Hanging together should not be an abstraction to Americans today. The onslaught of media and political criticism of the Bush war effort makes it obvious to our adversaries that we are not hanging together. In this environment, they expect to defeat us eventually, just as we were defeated in suffered a loss in Vietnam. Only this time we have no safe haven for retreat.
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