Did we teach terrorists the wrong lesson?

Great Debates
1

This is a question. I’m not saying, ‘This is what happened, and I’m going to debate you on it.’ I’m really curious. But I can see this turning into a debate so I’m posting here.

Did the U.S. teach terrorists the wrong lesson? When the hostages were taken in Iran, Carter was ineffective. His rescue operation literally went up in flames. But at least he tried. He was just not a good military commander. It seems that the message terrorists (State-sponsored and otherwise) received was that the U.S. could be held hostage with little fear of retribution. Lesson: A superpower can be held at bay with little risk.

Under Reagan U.S. Marines were sent to Lebanon as ‘peacekeepers’. When a suicide bomber killed over 200 of them, Reagan pulled us out of Lebanon. Lesson: Kill some Americans and the U.S. will go away.

Clinton had us in Somalia. It sounded like a good idea at the time. Send U.S. soldiers to provide humanitarian relief. But ‘warlords’ were getting the food and using it to control the Somali people and this changed the mission from ‘feed the starving people’ to ‘get Mohammed Adid’. Adid’s people learned how to use RPGs to shoot down our helicopters and dead Americans were dragged through the streets. Not long afterward Clinton withdrew us from Somalia. Lesson: Kill some Americans and the U.S. will go away.

In Bosnia UN peacekeepers were under strict rules that basically forced them to sit by and watch while the combatants killed each other. (U.S. airstrikes notwithstanding.) Lesson: If you want to fight, the UN isn’t much of an obstacle.

Osama bin Laden was angry that there were U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia. It seems that he looked at the ‘history lessons’ and decided that if he hurt Americans we’d go away. But the 1979 Hostage Crisis did not kill American civilians. The attacks in Lebanon and Somalia were against military forces. The 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center targeted civilians. By choosing to terrorise civilians instead of striking military targets, ObL did not frighten Americans into going home. He frightened us into attacking.

Now we’re in Iraq. While a lot of people are happy Saddam Hussein is gone, they’re angry that we’re still there. It looks like they’re usign the same tactic that worked in Somalia and Lebanon: Kill enough Americans and we’ll go away. I wonder if we had not ‘backed down’ before, if we would be in this damned fool war now? I wonder if the WTC bombing and aerial attacks would have happened?

Again, I’m seeking information; not a debate. But feel free to debate amongst yourselves so that I can gain this information.

2

Well, where Somalia is concerned, it was George H. W. Bush who sent us there. Remember that he sent troops there in 1992, right after he lost reëlection, and didn’t seem to have any idea what the endgame was. Clinton inherited a mess, and acted probably the same way Bush would have in a second term: hung around for a while and eventually pulled out of that mess. What more could you do? Lesson: don’t go to war unless you know what you’re trying to accomplish. I don’t think this was a lesson for the terrorists; it was more of a lesson for the United States.

As to Iraq: I’m sure the Iraqis would have resisted the occupation, no matter what America’s history was. Remember that you can learn lessons from other countries besides the United States. Great Britain was in Iraq for forty years and dealt with insurgents there. These are human beings, and being such, they generally don’t like having foreign occupiers. I don’t think the problem is that the United States isn’t scary enough; it’s just that we’re in Iraq with our only objectives being to force a government on people who would rather have some other government.

Look also back to the Soviets. They were big and scary and not to be fucked with, and yet they were resisted in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Afghanistan, Poland, Finland… no one could possibly argue that the Soviets ever gave the impression that they could be manipulated.

We’re having the same trouble in Iraq that we had when we invaded Vietnam in 1964, Cuba in 1850 and 1963, and the Philippines in 1898: no one wanted us to stick around, and we tended to back unpopular leaders. By 1968 the Vietnamese had certainly had enough of us. We were immediately rebuffed for both of the aforementioned Cuban invasions (though we did get away with the puppet government we set up after the 1898 invasion.) By 1903 the Filipinos were rising up in violent resistance, as well. And who can blame them? We promised them freedom but turned them into a colony, binding our sons to exile to hold on to the country.

If you stick your nose in places where it’s not welcome, the locals will resist. If we were sufficiently big and menacing, sure, we might keep some of the reisitors at bay, but on the whole, they’d want us to get the hell out. Period. South Korea was glad to have us, South Vietnam wasn’t. If we invaded Canada or Portugal, we’d be hated and resisted, too, no matter how scary we made ourselves.

The United States needs to emphasize diplomacy more. Standing astride the world as a colossus only earns resentment these days.
However, to use your logic on your own argument, Johnny L.A., consider this: in 1998, when Clinton fired the missiles into Afghanistan to kill Osama bin Laden, Congressional Republicans argued that he was just doing this to draw attention from the fact that he’d lied about getting a blow job. According to your logic (not mine,) wouldn’t this say that partisan politics got in the way of fighting terrorism? Wouldn’t this imply that the very nature of our government is poorly equipped to handle the fight against terrorism? Maybe it’s time to stop our elected officials from disagreeing with each other and unite under one strong leader. Elected democracies are so fractious, aren’t they? We need to suppress dissent, maybe? Elections get in the way of our leaders’ decisions, so… well, you see where I’m going with this. And that’s where I think the fundamental flaw in your reasoning is, Johnny. Nothing personal, of course; that’s just the logical end to your argument. You say you don’t want an argument, but with an initially flawed pretense like that, I don’t see any other option. You know, you could say that’s what went wrong in Iraq: the United States said they were going to come in, set the rules, and expect everyone to follow them without debating them. You’ve got to let others have a say in all phases of the process, or else no one’s going to take you seriously, and they’ll probably resent you. They sure resented the Soviets, didn’t they?

3

Personally, I don’t think military action should be used to teach lessons, but to achieve clearly-stated tactical objectives. That said, I’m inclined to to think the lessons to be learned from the examples listed by the OP are a) knee-jerk, inadequately-planned military responses to situations that are not necessarily military in nature are often rather ineffective and b) powerful countries can usually be buffaloed by small cells of lightly-armed and -financed guerilla if they stubbornly insist on responding to these unconventional situations by deploying the tools of conventional warfare.

Also, just for completeness, perhaps the OP would like to state what he thinks a better lesson-teaching method might have been. I’m not trying to be a smart-ass; I’d just like to know what specific actions, in the OP’s view, might have achieved better outcomes for the examples cited.

BTW, if not too much of a hijack, what lessons might be learned by the US specifically from the Iranian hostage crisis? After all, they were eventually released, so although I think the aborted rescue was well-intentioned effort that just went wrong, in the end it was completely unnecessary.

4

I’m not saying I’m right, so there’s no argument. I see a correlation between the events in the OP, but correlation is not necessarily causation.

I agree that we should emphasise diplomacy more, but that doesn’t answer the question. As for partisan politics, it’s part of the equation; but the question isn’t about why we did what we did. It’s whether our actions did or didn’t demonstrate to terrorist groups that terrorism is an effective tactic against us.

5

As much as I find Bush’s policies misguided and ineffective regarding Iraq, you raise an excellent point. We’ve been caught with our pants down regarding terrorists, and decades of inaction have us playing a game of catch-up. Killing and detaining terrorists is long overdue. Running and hiding and lobbing a few missiles won’t work.

I just wish we had a more effective leader in this war.

Until then, it’s good to know that we are killing, detecting, deporting, and killing again as many of these pigs as necessary.

Doing a Bush vs. Clinton ch this will devolve into, misses the point. It distracts from the true enemy.

6

I’m not expressing a view. I’m asking a question.

7

A friend of mine who was in an anti-terrorist unit said that the purpose of terrorism is to prove to the people that their government can’t protect them.

The lessons you’re talking about? We didn’t teach them these lessons. They’re teaching us.

8

I think the problem is, when you determine that you can not win, what do you do? Leave troops in country to be slaughtered, under the theory that to pull them out would show weakness?

I think one problem is that the West has not come to grips with the fact that the theories they are using (occupation, repression of populations) are from the old school days, but the specific methods are hampered by current Western sensibilities. Part of the reason why the West has had to withdraw from places, while colonial and other dominating powers have not in the centuries prior, is because the West is not longer willing to make the same response to insurgencies as they would have centuries ago.

The terrorists are not stupid; they are fully aware that they are fighting with unlimited methods (basically, kill as much as they can), that are held back only by their ability to gain recruits and weaponry, and the defensive abilites of the West. The West, on the other hand, cannot engage in summary executions of populations, and similar other means that were previously used to quell rebellions.

“Asymmetrical warfare” is asymetrical not because of ability, but because of the West’s self-restrain. Clearly, if the West wanted, it would not need to be asymetrical. I’m pretty confident we could “take the war to the enemies’ peoples” much more effectively than Osama can if we wanted to do it.

Even the Soviets were restrained by some measure of international standards. Furthermore, Western countries (as I think was your point) do not really “lose” in asymmetrical warfare exchangs as much as they decide that they cannot tolerate losses that are much smaller in absolute and relative terms than the other side takes. It is interesting to note the U.S. reaction to various things; the number of U.S. deaths in Iraq climbing toward 2,000 (after a couple of years?) which is shocking to the populace, but is roughly what, .01% of what the Soviets lost in WWII?

9

OK, I’ll try again.

IIRC, many more Iraqis have been killed by terrorist bombs in Iraq than have US troops, and many if not most such acts have targeted civilians or perceived collaborators specifically. It would appear, therefore, that the objective is more like “cause enough general chaos and perhaps the Americans will go away; if not, well, at least we killed us some Americans”.

Rightly or wrongly, it would appear that a number of people think the US will never go away from Iraq unless they are pushed in some way to do so. The options available to these people are few: they are relatively small in number, they have relatively few resources, they cannot successfully mount large military-style assaults or pitched battles against superior US armor and weaponry, and Gandhi-style non-violent resistance seems to be scorned as weak and unmanly, or at least, ineffective, behavior. There also seem to be little doubt that at least some of this internal resistance is made up of persons who have been fighting what they perceive as US imperialism for a long time, in other countries.

I thus believe what is going on in Iraq would have occurred regardless of whether the US had somehow been more forceful, or had continued its foreign military occupations for longer, in the OP’s examples.

We are in Iraq today because the Bush administration, for reasons that remain unclear, but do not seem to have included the specific threat of state-sponsored terrorism, felt it was essential to invade that country. Our previous history in the region, as cited by the OP, seems to have had little or nothing to do with the decision.

I believe they would have, and perhaps others as well. The WTC bombing and aerial attacks were symbolic acts intended to cause shock and pain to what some perceive as an evil empire. The more heavy-handed the actions of that empire, the greater the likelyhood of indiscriminate acts of violence by persons opposed and lacking other viable means of expression.

10

The only way we’d not be in this damn fool war is if we hadn’t have started it.

11

I think you’re not quite getting at what the idea of asymmetric war is supposed to capture. One of the prototypical examples is Napoleonic France vs. the Spanish partisans, and it’s difficult to see how one could describe French actions in Spain as “restrained”. The fundamental aspect of asymmetric warfare is that the one side has a military force designed to fight other military forces in open war, while the other side is free to exploit whatever vulnerabilities are inherent in the design constraints required for such a military force. In this day and age, ability to face off against other military forces entails things like armored forces, highly mechanized infantry, etc. This results in a force that is vulnerable to roadside IEDs. The Iraqi insurgents, on the other hand, are not vulnerable to roadside IEDs, and moreover their irregular organization makes it difficult to actually get into a real fight (where one could bring to bear one’s overwhelming advantage in firepower) with them. That’s what’s asymmetric. One side has all the firepower, the other side has all the ability to choose where the battlefield will be. It has nothing to do with which side is restrained. Romans vs. Judean zealots? Asymmetric war, and only a complete loony would call the Roman response to the Jewish uprisings restrained. USSR vs. Afghan warlords? Asymmetric, and it’d be a rare person who expounded at length on the Red Army’s respect for civilian wellbeing.

12

It’s another phrase for, “We cannot fight you at your level, so we use the smaller level means that are available to us.” I think the entire term is somewhat of a joke, as what people are really describing is attacking the opponent’s weaknesses. It just so happens that the Red Army did not have many “conventional” weaknesses to the Afghanis, which is when you come up with the term “asymmetrical warfare” to describe constant pinprick actions because that is all one can do. I also think we start getting confused about what really happened in history; how were the Afghans going to do without U.S. Stinger missiles? Did Napoleon every actually focus French might, for any significant period of time, on Spain? By the time it occured, he was quite tied up and busy elsewhere. Even then, Spanish partisans did not free Spain, the British army did through Portugal.

But I actually do believe that the Red Army had respect for civilian well being, just less than the U.S., but far more than most in history. The Mongol army was an army that did not have respect for civilian wellbeing.

13

Whoa … dude! When the hostages the Iranians were holding were released,
minutes after Reagan was sworn in, it was a complete surprise to us. Talks
had gone nowhere and we had no signs that the hostage situation would end soon! No one knew at the time that Ruhollah Khomeini, who verbally supported
the student hostage takers, had already decided that holding the hostages longer
was useless and that Iran was suffering too much from the embargoes. Why they waited for Carter’s Presidency to end before relasing them … who knows?
Maybe other people hear at SD have some insights on that!

Obviously the rescue effort was poorly planned to say the least. But to not even try! Come on,I suppose you don’t want people to try and rescue your butt if need be.

14

You are missing the point. The point is that the asymmetry in ‘asymmetric warfare’ is not an asymmetry in how far the various combatants are willing to go. In Spain, French troops routinely looted and pillaged, burned entire villages to the ground, and executed large numbers of civilians on the pretext of them being rebels. The partisans, on the other hand, only attacked French military targets (because those were the only French targets in Spain). The asymmetry, as I said, lies in the fact that one side has all the firepower, and the other side has all the ability to choose when and where to fight. What Napoleon might have accomplished in Spain had he sent in 700k troops doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter what the partisans might have accomplished in the absence of Sir Arthur Wellesley’s expedition. My point is simply that the relevant asymmetry has nothing to do with one side exercising self-restraint.

15

I’m not missing the point, you’re missing my point, in part because of my poor explanation. My point was not intended to be about the meaning of asymmetrical warfare; it’s about the mystique it has held in the last 30-40 years as some type of “winning strategy” in its own right. It is not necessarily a winning strategy because of the nature of the beast (in fact, it exists in part because the side using partisan-like activity is so weak), it wins because of the attitude of the West toward casualties and the West’s unwillingness to inflict them in return. And again, France in Spain has nowhere near the military power as the U.S. in Iraq, for example. I think it is a poor example. Spain was subduded, and would not have successfully thrown off the shackles but for Great Britain. That is what is relevant to my intended point.

16

I thought it was done to hurt Carter. I guess they were angry at him for the rescue mission. As I remember hearing it, the Iranian government started negotiating with Reagan after he won the election and released them within minutes of the inauguration.

As far as the OP: I know some people feel that Bin Laden didn’t expect the kind of retaliation for September 11th that the US gave. That may be true. I don’t know that these people would have done anything different if not for past US responses. It’s not as if they were suddenly going to turn to the political process.

17

The Iranians did not start negotiating with Reagan after he won. That would be illeagl for Mr. Reagan to do so.

After the embassy was taken, President Carter, streaching presidential powers to the limit, froze all Iranian assets in US Banks. So Iran was broke and trying to fight off Sadam Hussain.

The release of the hostages was a deal, brokered by President Carter and his adminstration, to exchane the people for the money. Each time a bank transfer went through, the hostages were moved. IIRC there were banks from five different nations involved that basically were trusted by the US on one end and trusted by the Iranians on the other. But when the hostages got to be inside the plane that would take them out of Iran, they were forced to sit on the tarmac till Reagan took the oath of office. Just to spite Carter. Carter flew to Germany and greated the hostaged as they arrived there at the army hospitable.

Ronald Reagan had absoultly NOTHING to do with the release of the hostages, except for maybe delaying it by virture of being elected.
As far as the OP goes it was not Carter being a bad military commander. The Army planned the raid and Carter approved of their plan. A sandstorm ruined the plan and President Carter stood up and took responsibility for the failure. That was btw, the last time any president took responsibility for something that went wrong.

It is easy to sit back now and say, we didn’t respond strong enough back then but in reality we don’t know what the reaction to a stronger response would have been.

Oh, and you left out our rather successful response to Bosnia. Which was also an attempt to create an Arab Fundie nation.

18

Ah, I did indeed misunderstand you. Your point has some merit. However, I have to question some of your assumptions.

For example, at the time the population of Spain was some 11.5 million. (cite) The French had upwards of 200k troops in Spain throughout the war, usually significantly more, and at times this number climbed as high as 350k. By contrast, Iraq has a population of 26 million, and the US has, what, about 150k troops there? There were far more French troops per capita occupying Spain than the US has in Iraq, though the disparity isn’t as great when we note that 1/3 of the French troops were occupied with the Anglo-Portuguese army. As to whether the French would have been driven out absent Wellington, I would say unlikely, but the Spanish partisans would almost certainly have outlasted the French occupation force, assuming that Napoleon didn’t achieve hegemonic control over the rest of the continent so that he could stick a million troops in Spain, free from worrying about Austria, Prussia, Russia, et al. I think Spain is a fine illustration.

Second, I don’t think the unwillingness to inflict casualties has anything to do with it, unless you’re going to go to Assyrian levels of brutality and kill substantial portions of the populace. As noted the French occupation of Spain was extremely brutal, and the French didn’t hesitate to destroy villages or execute anyone they thought had any chance of being a partisan. The “problem” is that you can’t get the damned guerillas to actually fight you when and where you can bring your military advantage to bear. They just run into the metaphorical hills and hide. This problem doesn’t go away just because you start killing more people who aren’t partisans. All that does is create more incentive to become a partisan, which is precisely what you don’t want to do. Unless, as I said, you go to extremes and kill everyone.

I would agree that guerilla activity isn’t a winning strategy in its own right. Or perhaps I should say isn’t a winning tactic. Strategically it fares reasonably well, even though it’s usually incapable of doing any really significant damage to the opposing superior military force. It poses a nasty dilemma. History teaches us that the only way to defeat a popular insurgency by means of force is to to use horrific levels of brutality. The Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the resulting Diaspora of Jews is a case in point. I submit that this alternative is quite rightly not on the table. This leaves two options. You can “stay the course”, where that means morale-destroying low-intensity fighting for years on end with little to show for it whilst attempting to achieve victory by political means, said political attempts being constantly undermined by the inevitable unhappiness caused by occupying forces impinging on the lives of the occupied civilians. Or you can concede that you fucked up, and bugger off, a la the French in Algeria, the Soviets in Afghanistan, or the US in Vietnam.

The only way to truly beat a popular insurgency without brutality on a vast scale is to turn it into an unpopular insurgency. This is truly difficult, however, because the level of popular support an insurgency needs is really pretty low. If even 10% of a population is sympathetic to an insurgency, then so long as the other 90% aren’t really actively hostile to it, it’s popular enough. And when your occupying troops inevitably kill a few civilians here and there, that alone is likely to be enough to piss off enough people to keep the insurgency popular.

The best way to avoid getting beat by guerillas is to avoid getting into fights with them. The other ways are all either unpalatable or next to impossible.

As to sending messages to terrorists, well, it sucks to do anything they’ll take as a victory, but if you truly want peace you have to operate within the realm of the possible. And it’s not possible to achieve lasting peace while you’ve got your boot on the necks of a people to the extent that the Israelis have theirs on the Palestians (not without some justification). Unless you go all Assyrian on their asses. But as I said, I think that option is quite rightly not on the table.

19

I don’t think it’s the terrorists who need teaching. The West hasn’t learned that it can’t use conventional military tactics to defeat terrorism. The two sides are not fighting the same war- the West hasn’t the stomach to deliberately slaughter the innocent and the terrorists don’t have the means to fight a conventional war. Since the two sides aren’t even playing the same game, it isn’t surprising that no conclusion has been reached. I think you need to approach terrorism as the criminal activity that it is- treat it like the Mafia on steroids. Go after the money, use intelligence to round up the leaders and interfere with their operations as much as you can. Not that it isn’t being done already, it’s just going to be an ongoing effort. You’ll never end it entirely, all you can do is hope to contain it.

20

I think the other possibility is to outlast the insurgency. It may not be possible, but that is effectively what colonization did for hundreds of years. The problem is either: (a) we are not killing and butchering enough people (which the West will not do, so it will not be changed) to put down the insurgency; or (b) insurgency is especially effective against the West, because we can lose 1/10 as many soldiers as the insurgents lose, have population that is 10 times that of the insurgent country (thus making those 1/10 losses even less substantial), and still be “defeated” and go home. In other words, we are fortunate enough in the West to be weak, and go pale at the sight of body counts that would not make people in Iraq (or probably even our grandparents, and certainly not the Soviets) bat an eye.

So perhaps in other words, asymmetrical warfare really is not very successful, unless the “stronger” force you are fighting has no intention of taking any casualties or staying for the long haul in the first place. Making it uniquely effective against Western democracies, who can be counted on to change their course of action with the popular mindset every four years or so.