Most North Americans think of war as an aberration which occurs occasionally and disrupts normally peaceful living. People in most other parts of the world have had an entirely different experience and look on war quite differently.
In 1984 a group of Norwegian researchers counted more than 14,000 wars that had occurred during the last 5600 years. In general those battles did not cover as much territory as did the marauding of Alexander the Great or of Genghis Khan or as did World War II but to the people who were killed, maimed or otherwise damaged during them they were just as deadly.
One of those wars has been continuing for 1000 years. The United States Government (USG) has been involved in that war for nearly 200 years. What follows explains how it came about and continues to this day.
At the beginning of the period Moslems controlled the Holy Land. Pope Sylvester II did not like that. He began developing plans to enable Christians to replace the Moslems. When two European emperors attacked Moslems in what is modern day Turkey he applauded that activity. Later that activity began to develop into the Crusades. The Crusaders plundered and killed all the way to the Holy Land. Once they reached the Holy Land they killed tens of thousands of Moslems and completely destroyed whole cities.
Later the Crusades morphed into the Inquisition. Both Moslems and Jews were attacked mercilessly for many years. Napoleon finally stopped the Inquisition in the year 1808. That did not end the conflicts.
Soon the USG joined and replaced the Europeans in the battles. The people who were driven out of Europe and managed to escape being killed settled in northern Africa, along the stretch of land called the Ivory Coast. Moslems had claimed that territory since the Middle Ages. Since they considered the Gulf of Sidra, which bordered the Ivory Coast, to be their waters they began collecting tolls from ships that passed through those waters.
Merchantmen persuaded the USG and European governments to pay the tolls. In 1801 the USG found itself unable to continue to pay the tolls. At that point US merchant ships were captured and the members of their crews taken into custody. The Europeans took this opportunity to rid themselves of the expense as well. They labeled the Moslems “pirates” and managed to lure the USG into sending its navy and Marines to attack the Moslems at Tripoli. (“….to the shores of Tripoli,” says the Marine hymn.)
Thus the Barbary Wars became an extension of the Crusades and the Inquisition, with the USG replacing the Europeans as the enemies of the Moslems. The USG had entered a war that was begun near the year 1000 by Europeans. Yes, it was the same war. Westerners tend to view each skirmish as a separate battle. People in the Mideast see them as episodes within the same war. Further, they see it as a religious war.
The US Perspective
Generally people in the United States consider the Crusades to be past history. Moslems have neither forgotten nor forgiven. The Crusades are as real to them as something that happened last week is to people in the West. In addition, they have reminders not just memories. Europeans built fortresses in the Holy Land that still stand today.
It should be noted that most Moslems are not by nature any more warlike than are you or your neighbors. But some of them have been driven to desperation during years and centuries past. The people of the Mideast have also been attacked and oppressed by their own governments. The region is populated by hundreds, possibly thousands, of tribes. Over the years they fought for dominance over each other. The entities that we see as countries on modern maps were not created by the people who live there.
When Europeans began inserting themselves into the Mideast they would select what they perceived to be the strongest, meanest tribe in the area and give it whatever military or financial aid that it needed to subdue everyone else. In this manner the governments of Libya, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait and others were established by various European governments.
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are particularly extreme examples. In each case the tribe that gained power, with European help, named the area after itself. For example, Saudi Arabia was previously Arabia. A large portion of the people who live there are not Saudis. They are Arabians. We insult them when we refer to them as Saudis. Most of the people who live in those countries hate their governments and that hate extends to western governments, especially the USG, that supported, and still support, the Mideastern governments.
Western governments became even more involved when oil was discovered in the Mideast. They gave whatever support they deemed necessary to maintain in power the tribes whom they aided to attain power. This created extremes of wealth and poverty. A small portion of the population lives in extreme luxury. Most people live in abject poverty. The poor hate both the local rich and the western governments which created the situation.
While the USG has played a significant part in creating this problem most of its citizens are unaware of it. They only know that “terrorists” have been engaging in one small attack after another against us for several decades and they are angry. They are unaware that the attacks are really retaliation, rather than unprovoked.
USG and Soviet Activity Since World War II
During the years after World War II Russia forced several Moslem groups into the newly forming Soviet Union. Both the Soviets and the USG pressured still other countries to join their respective camps. The USG supported a number of cutthroat dictators because they claimed to be against the Soviets. Soviet rulers played the same game.
The “balance of power” began to break down after about thirty years. In Iran the Shah was overthrown by rebels who said that they did not want anything to do with either power block. Afghanistan split off from the Soviets. Later several Islamic states broke off from the Soviet Union and the Soviets were afraid to stop the secession. When the Chechens tried to break away from Russia (no longer the Soviet Union) Russia tried to hold onto them but was unsuccessful.
Until that time the USG had remained steadfastly opposed to the Soviets and then to Russia, after the breakup of the Soviet Empire. But by the late 1990s the USG began to give substantial aid to try to prop up Russia.
In recent years the Islamic governments and some independent Moslem groups have played the US and Russian governments against each other. Most ordinary Moslems have at least until recently, tried to stay on the sidelines but that has become increasingly difficult for them to do.
The leaders may temporarily align themselves with one of the two opposing blocks to gain advantage only to later declare neutrality or to switch sides. Egypt had earlier aligned with the Soviets but found that it could obtain more financial aid from the USG and switched.
Note the frequent references to Moslems and Islamic governments. This is a religious conflict, even if we do not generally recognize it as such. Likewise, the USG denies that it has entered a guerilla war. In a guerilla war it is impossible to determine who is the enemy.
A Different Kind of War
Guerillas often work at various jobs during the daytime and become independent fighters at night. Guerillas fight by themselves or in small groups. They have a real advantage because they are defending their own territory. Now that they have high-tech weapons available that advantage is multiplied.
When guerillas are captured or killed there is no way to stop the remainder from continuing the resistance since there is no higher command with whom to negotiate. Even if someone claims to be in charge the independent fighters will continue to do as they see fit.
Since guerillas are fighting on their own turf, if you are fighting guerillas you are the invader. The financial cost of killing a guerilla is enormous. It takes dozens, even hundreds, of invading troops to overcome each guerilla. The only way to win against guerillas is to kill the entire population, innocents as well as fighters. This was done from time to time before the development of modern communications. In those days people away from the area could not see what was taking place. The USG killed 220,000 innocent civilians in the Philippines during the late 1800s. European colonizers butchered hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of resisters. The reason for the apparent calm in most colonies was that the resisters had been killed.
Murder and torture of civilians and prisoners have been common in virtually every past war. Some current military personnel in Iraq apparently did not understand that what had been commonplace in past wars would now be exposed to the world so they continued to engage in it. It may even be that they considered it acceptable and did not realize that many people in the general population would be horrified by it.
Guerilla wars cannot be won by conventional means, except by mass murder. Since that is not generally acceptable to the populations of the United States and Western Europe they are doomed to drag on indefinitely, until the invaders finally leave.
Ignoring Warnings
How did we reach the present state of affairs?
Every time Moslems tried to call the attention of the general population to what the USG was doing we simply got angry. We considered their small attacks to be individual incidents. They did not have our military might so we just looked on each call to attention to be a separate terrorist incident. They understood that they were fighting battles in a continuing war. They were telling us to get out of their territory
For centuries there has hardly been a five-year period when there were not European or, more recently, USG military forces on Moslem territory. During the 1990s about two-dozen USG ships patrolled the Persian Gulf.
It has not been since the early Middle Ages that Moslems have invaded Europe and they have never invaded the USA. How would we look upon them if they patrolled some of our waters? How did we feel when they leveled the Twin Towers in New York City and flew into the Pentagon? Yet we had been bombing Iraq three times per week for the past ten years and bombed, or otherwise attacked, Somalia, the Balkans and elsewhere and feeling righteous about it.
While mentioning the Balkans, we might observe that religious wars had been taking place there for centuries before we involved ourselves. Three major religions come together there, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Moslem. They have long been “at each others' throats.” The USG involved us in a religious war when it went into that region.
Failure to Understand the Mideast
War is not waged by the same rules or in same way in the Mideast as it is in the West. One example is that in the Mideast it is usual to arrange for someone else to be blamed for an attack. If a bombing or other action is taken against an enemy arrangements will often be made for another party to be blamed for doing it. When the subject of the attack retaliates against the wrong party it will create still more enemies for the object of the attack.
Also, Western governments often rely on interrogation of prisoners for information. What they do not understand is that in the Mideast it is common for those who are captured to give false information, mixed within enough truth so that it is believed, as a means of causing more attacks on innocents so as to create more enemies of their enemy. On occasion they will even allow themselves to be captured so as to be able to do this.
On a large scale it might be arranged so that an act against the USG was wrongly blamed on Russia. When the USG acted against Russia serious confrontation could develop. Along these lines, the “9/11 Commission” reported that one Moslem group had planned to take over a Russian nuclear site and to force the Russian scientists to shoot a missile toward the USA to produce a war between those two of its enemies. Fortunately, that plan was caught in time.
On a small scale, it is possible that many suspects arrested and held by the USG have been picked up because of intentionally misleading information that has been planted. The purpose is to anger both those who are detained and their friends and relatives. In the long run it tends to reflect on the competence of those in charge of the arrests and incarcerations in the eyes of their own people. A government loses support when it loses credibility just as it does when it is made the butt of jokes.
High-Tech Guerillas
During most of the fight against invasions of their territory by the West Moslems had to depend primarily on primitive weapons such as daggers and other small, close encounter arms. The recent availability of various high-tech items has changed the equation. Weapons of mass destruction have been referred to widely in the news in recent times. Those weapons are chemical, biological and radiological in nature, what were referred to as CBR warfare when I was in the army many years ago. There are other high-tech things as well. One of the most difficult to deal with is plastic explosives. Plastic can be molded into the shape of many innocent looking objects and smuggled into various targeted areas.
On September 11, 2001 we also saw how our own materials and equipment can sometimes be turned against us. The panic that this has caused in the USG has led to quite a few silly, almost childish reactions. It also enables the allies of the perpetrators of that attack to now plant rumors that cause major disruptions of our economy. By planting rumors they can cause severe damage without having to engage in another physical attack. However, when we become complacent we can then expect another physical attack.
In my opinion, another attack on airliners is unlikely. The power grid and the financial system are the most likely targets. We've already seen what can result from one section of the power grid going down. I'm told that a barrage of computer viruses could take down the entire system. If it is all taken down it would be extremely difficult to get it up and operating again.
During the 1970s, at the time the Canal was turned over to Panama, quite a large part of the international banking that had been carried on in New York City was transferred to Panama where security is much less adequate today than it is in the USA. A few years later much of the remainder of the banking activity was transferred across the river to New Jersey. Dirty bombs hitting those two locations, Panama and New Jersey, could take down the nation's banking system. Approximately five percent of the money supply is in the form of coins and paper bills. Imagine what would happen if the other 95 percent of the money supply were vaporized.
Mideasterners are not just a bunch of camel jockeys. Many of them have been trained in universities of First World countries in a variety of technical fields. Further, with the breakdown of the Soviet Empire they can now often obtain high-tech weapons and materials.
Guerilla warfare has taken on an entirely new dimension.
It is frightening to think about just one of the repercussions of the USG's meddling in nations around the world. Either the gigantic cost or the growing hostility toward the USG worldwide alone is bad enough. Considering them both together is almost overwhelming. Since, as this article demonstrated, the war is unwinnable, one wonders whether the purpose might be just the use of power.
This is the truth about war.
August 30, 2004
