June 8, 2004
Columnist and former soldier David H. Hackworth is the author of The Price of Honor, and contributes weekly commentary to DefenseWatch. For more information, visit Colonel Hackworth's homepage or the DefenseWatch Website. Sign up for the free weekly Defending America column at his Website, or send mail to P.O. Box 11179, Greenwich, CT 06831.
Wake up, America — weíre at war! And weíre not talking about a limited, one-time shootout confined to Afghanistan and Iraq, where weíll hopefully wear down the guerrilla enemy and our troops will come marching home.
Weíre engaged in a global war, a long-term conflict against a stateless Islamic movement thatís been scoring hits against the USA in the name of Allah since the 1983 truck-bomb murder of 241 of our Marines and sailors in Beirut, Lebanon. The alarm sounded decades ago — not on 9/11, as so many uninformed Americans hold. We just slept through it, as well as through subsequent assaults — Beirut to Pan Am 103 to World Trade Center I to the USS Cole — that have become increasingly violent and more frequent through the years.
This is already Americaís longest war, and certainly the Judeo-Christian worldís most crucial conflict since World War II — when Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini also were determined to erase every value, every concept, every belief we hold dear. And thereís no doubt in my military mind that America and our allies will still be fighting this ruthless, relentless, radical terrorist enemy on the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I, the 20th-century conflict that was supposed to end all wars.
Thatís because international Islamic religious fanatics have the same goal as the Axis fascists — the destruction of our way of life. Their plan is to return the entire world — not just the Middle East — to the days of the caliphate and either convert all of us so-called infidels into born-again Islamic believers or kill us.
Our fumbling governmentís response since Beirut — during both Republican and Democratic administrations — has been to cut and run, or to flat ignore this growing threat, apparently hoping it would go away. Or occasionally our leaders would retaliate against a terrorist attack with a few missiles or an airstrike accompanied by the standard barrage of toothless threats.
Meanwhile, the international terrorist movement has only been getting stronger, acquiring catastrophic weapons and developing bolder tactics while its dedicated operators have become more cunning and more organized, expanding and setting up in virtually every nation in the world.
True, Bush & Company responded smartly to 9/11 by jump-starting the Department of Homeland Security, thundering into Afghanistan, blowing the Taliban out of business and sending al Qaeda scurrying to the hills. But then came the invasion of Iraq — our countryís biggest military miscalculation to date — where we virtually ignored the main military objective of destroying al-Qaeda, as well as the important socio-economic opportunity to rebuild Afghanistan into the same sort of shining example for the Muslim world that West Germany once was for the Soviet Bloc states.
Fortunately, itís still not too late to develop a comprehensive global strategy to eliminate our real enemy. This new direction might not be great for the warmongers, neoconservatives and war profiteers, but it would go a long way toward giving all of our grandkids a future the way our World War II victory gave one to my generation and my kids.
Of course, itís imperative that we stabilize Iraq and quickly reduce our armed role there. But we simultaneously need to reorganize our military forces to fight the war at hand, shed both the Cold War thinking and the structure of our active, Reserve and National Guard components — and understand who our primary enemy is and the true nature of the war in which we're engaged.
"Never underestimate the enemy," writes former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke in his brilliant book Against All Enemies. "Our current enemy is in for the long haul. They are smart and patient. Defeating them will take creativity and imagination, as well as energy. It will be the struggle of the friends of freedom and civil liberties around the world."
We citizens must drop the denial, apathy and foggy thinking that's gotten us into this mess, take charge of our government — which has irresponsibly ignored this threat to our national security for 21 years — and finally answer the wake-up call.
And weíd better get cracking immediately — before the next 9/11 blisters in and takes an even bloodier toll.
The address of Col. David Hackworth's home page is Hackworth.com. Sign in for the free weekly Defending America column at his Web site. Send mail to P.O. Box 11179, Greenwich, CT 06831. His newest book is "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts."
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