Words matter. So does their lack. Four years after 9/11, we still haven't discovered the words to tell us what kind of struggle we're in. GWOT, the global war on terror? Not hardly. Terror is a tactic, a strategy. This is no more about terror than World War II was about Blitzkrieg or Kamikazes. The battle against Islamo-fascism? No such thing: a crude, misleading analogy at best. World War III or IV? Too vague to tell us much.
The Bush administration's apparent replacement for GWOT is GSAVE: the global struggle against violent extremism? Better, but still neither precise nor inclusive enough. Nor do we seem to have to words for what we wish to accomplish. Hard Wilsonianism. Democracy dominos. A thousand other sound bites, jargonizations, shards of rhetoric, vague invocations of high-sounding clichés, talking points. Nothing quite fits. And the American people, spun to stupefaction, and, for the present, content neither to support nor oppose with much ardor, know it.
Nearly 60 years ago, in his Foreign Affairs "X" article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," George Kennan gave us the words to understand the Cold War challenge and the proper response—containment. Today, professors, policy pogues, pundits, and even occasional politicians speak of the "Kennan Prize"—the nonexistent yet highly coveted award that will go to the man or woman who does for now what Kennan did for then.
This—please pardon the chutzpah—is my bid for the Kennan Prize: the entry of a former Marine who spent much of the 90s urging serious transformation and homeland defense; who predicted an imminent attack in the summer of 2001; who supported the Afghan campaign and the Bush Doctrine. . . and who opposed the Iraq venture from spring 2002 as, at best, a costly diversion. Iraq may or may not be another Vietnam. Sometimes it seems more like another Gallipoli, a campaign that might have paid off wondrously, had it worked. It didn't work. Perhaps it could not have worked. In either case, what matters now is to speak to each other, in words of reason and respect, about what to do next. For the age now upon us, I believe, has ushered in the greatest crisis of human history. And unless and until we understand it, we cannot prevail, and may not survive. When the future of the planet is involved, words matter.
Situation
The Age of the Wars of Ideology is over. The Age of the Wars of the Ways has begun.
The Wars of Ideology lasted over two hundred years, from the American Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Union. Like the Wars of Religion before them, they were about many things; labels always limit, and eras are never exact. Still, the Wars of Ideology centered on two great collective issues. What is the proper form of political organization? And what is the proper form of economic organization? These questions have been answered. Some form of political democracy with extensive civil rights, coupled with some form of market economy and welfare state, does more good for more people than anything else yet devised. So clear was this verdict that Francis Fukuyama could posit "the end of history." The big questions had been answered. All that was left was to maintain the system and extend its benefits to the five or so billion people who hadn't quite gotten there yet. And we were all, Dr. Fukuyama suggested, going to be very bored.
But if the big collective questions have been solved, not everybody has gotten the word. Ideology still matters. So does religion. So does the rest of the human capacity for furor, vice, and folly. But the mix is different now, more subtle and more complex. I suggest that we have entered an era that might be called, at least provisionally, the Wars of the Ways. Across the planet and its increasingly irrelevant national boundaries, three sets of human beings are involved.
- Those nations, peoples, regions, groups, and movements who partake of the 21st century, its freedoms and diversities and possibilities: those whose ways are those of prosperity, tolerance, and humane aspiration.
- Those who want out of the 21st century: jihadi, political extremists, violent racial and ethnic separatists, terrorists of other ilk (animal rights, ecological, etc.), male supremacists, leftover Marxist and traditional tyrants, and the gurus and gauleiters of philosophies and movements yet to be espoused—those whose ways would bring upon us new Dark Ages of hate, intolerance, oppression, and worse.
- Those who can't get into the 21st century: the three billion of us who live on under two a day, amid conditions of overpopulation, disease, and starvation, havoc, degradation, despair; most of the women of this planet; youth with no sense of opportunity and place—in sum, all those who may choose to live by the motto, "When you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose."
The Wars of the Ways will pit those who partake, or desire to partake, of the 21st century, against those who want out, who will deliberately and cynically ally with those who can't get in, who will deliberately and cynically accept their help.
Exaggeration? Today, depending on the criteria used, between 60 and 100 wars curse this planet, to say nothing of what most of the world's governments routinely do to their own people. They're all related, and more. When we read of Saudis and Africans fighting us in Iraq; when we learn of links between jihadi and Central American drug cartels or hear of recruitment in American prisons; when bombs go off in London or Bali; when you factor in China; when you follow the money and the weapons; when the latest African genocide refuses to go away simply because we ignore it—it's all intertwined.
Now Add Three Other Factors
First, maybe half the world's 200 nations including dozens that fall into the categories "failed" and "failing" states, have borders that don't make ethnic, economic, political, or ecological sense. These offer those who want out of the 21st century, those who (to borrow from Milton) would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven, all the hell they can handle.
Second, the global revolution of rising expectations, fueled by everything from the Internet to pirated "Baywatch" videos, means that the poor and oppressed grow ever more restive. Some thrill to our Declaration of Independence. Others covet our porn. Many want the good things without understanding how to make or protect them. Weapons of mass destruction are available.
And finally, the virtual certainty that the next few decades will bring serious, perhaps catastrophic climate change, new diseases and pandemics, and an ever more costly competition for resources, especially oil and water. Human struggles will play out amid accelerating environmental havoc, and few will heed that old Klingon proverb: "Only a fool fights in a burning house." Welcome to the Wars of the Ways.
Mission
It should be the American purpose to serve as a guardian of the 21st century, protecting those who cherish and partake of its ways, opposing those who would destroy them, and doing everything in our power to aid those who want in. This will require a national commitment, a stern and reasoned national commitment, at least as steadfast as the Cold War consensus. But it will also require new ways of thinking. John Maynard Keynes once remarked that, in the end, even the most practical businessman is the slave of some defunct economist. For too long we have been the slaves of too many (living and dead) social scientists, pundits, and prognosticators, military and civilian. It's time to zero-base our thinking and, in accordance with the motto of a certain ersatz Australian steak house chain, adopt as our interim guide: "No Rules. Just Right."
First to go: the entire "world's only superpower" cant. Not only does it encourage hubris, it positively mandates irrelevance. Next on the list: the notion that balance of power must be essentially bipolar or, if you prefer, manic-depressive. We've entered an era, similar in some ways to Europe from Westphalia to Napoleon although far more complex, of fluid and shifting arrangements. We have a few friends. Beyond that, we have relationships of various degrees of permanence. Beyond that: hook-ups. Best we remember which is which. Also time to deep-six the whole "If you're not with us, you're against us" mentality. It sounds tough. But it's also worth remembering that the rest of the planet has concerns of its own, and sometimes even your friends wouldn't mind seeing you taken down a peg or two. In any case, a nation that grows ever more deeply indebted to the world, while willfully destroying its own economic capabilities, should not expect its "superpower" or any other status to last forever.
Finally, we need to rid ourselves, once and for all, of the belief that the planet's highest aspiration is, or should be, to be like us—along with the notion that we can force people to be free. As the story goes, a young psychoanalyst, ardent with his profession's redemptive possibilities, once sought out Sigmund Freud for advice. The master listened quietly, then replied, "Don't try to save people. They don't want to be saved." To be the guardian of an era is not to be its savior. Or, for that matter, its therapist, its cop, or its nanny.
Concept
To guard this era requires, obviously, military, economic, and various forms of so-called "soft" power. It also requires clarity about their uses and their limits. Kennan understood that victory over the Soviet Union required containment until they changed from within, not an impossible military conquest. So it is today, when the enemies of this era are diffuse and, in their way, even less vulnerable to military conquest. Our fundamental strategy should be to minimize the need for major commitments of force by working through and with regional associations of nations, non-governmental organizations, the private sector, and the myriad organizations of civil society. In practice, this means four things.
First, let regions take care of their own problems, including war and national break-ups, whenever possible. As for the United Nations: We should listen respectfully to any delegation whose members pay their parking tickets.
Second, help the Islamic and African worlds create the civil societies without which constitutions are mere machinery to be taken over and civil rights weapons in the hands of those who would destroy them. Civil society requires, above all else, citizens. To the Greeks, a citizen was a man who was empowered to participate in the public world by virtue of education, material sufficiency, and arms. We must reaffirm this "enabling civic triad"—adequate education, remunerative work, and the bearing of arms for all citizens, male and female.
Third, adopt humane and rational policies on everything from environmental protection to the strict regulation of child labor and the abolition of all forms of human trafficking. An old Rudy Vallee song holds that, "You're Going to Do It Someday So Why Not Do It Now?" Let's do it now.
Finally, remember the Politiques. These were the men who ended the French Wars of Religion by deciding that, whatever their beliefs, they weren't going to kill each other over them anymore. Today, the more Politiques, the better. Especially among the young.
All very fine. But what about the hard fact that this guardianship also entails, and in some ways requires, war?
The Military Dimension
It is not necessary, for this readership, to review the current condition of America's armed forces, save perhaps to note that we may well be approaching a situation described as "Defenseless on a Trillion Dollars a Year." At best, we're imploding: the Army, Marines, and National Guard because of Iraq, the Navy and Air Force because of the obscene cost of new ships and planes. To reverse this situation, it's vital to rediscover one great truth. America's military must be structured and used primarily for those things that only the military can do, most specifically, win wars decisively.
This means that our great comparative advantages, aerospace and naval power, must be maintained and enhanced, and that most of our land forces should remain oriented toward such eventualities. Counter-insurgency and operations other than war are best handled by the Marines, enhanced special operations forces, and (please pardon the non-PC allusion) modern variants of "colonial infantry" within the Army.
Which brings us to the fundamental question du jour: Should the United States be in the business of occupying other nations in order to redeem them?
Iraq
The Wars of Ideology were about how to organize polities and economies. Certainly, these still matter greatly. But the fundamental questions of the Wars of the Ways are more personal. What does it mean to be human? And what does it mean to be more fully human? These questions already dominate American and European politics. From issues such as abortion and euthanasia to whom we fight and how, from civil rights to human rights and the status of women and minorities to immigration policies, western civilization more and more holds that there are certain things you may not do to human beings because they are human, and there are certain things you must do to make them more fully human. The furor over Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo may be in some ways naive and in some ways hypocritical, but it is also an accurate reflection of the fundamental concern of this era. So the Wars of the Ways are not simply about the freedoms conferred by democracy and markets. They are about what we do with our freedom.
What have the people of Iraq done with their freedom?
The United States, historian Loren Baritz once wrote, "goes forth not to pillage but to instruct." Inevitably, we instruct according to our own sense of what matters, which is to say, what is comprehensible to us. In Iraq, we have emphasized elections, constitutions, national armies, and police forces. We have emphasized metrics, from insurgent body counts and police academy photo-op graduations to numbers of soccer balls and Frisbees passed out. We have proclaimed, indeed flaunted, our belief that Baghdad must become a democratic "city on a hill," and that the light of Iraqi freedom will somehow light the world. What we have not done, indeed have assiduously avoided, is testing the Iraqi commitment to freedom in the only way that such commitment can be tested.
The people of Iraq are armed, indeed, have greater de facto Second Amendment rights than we do. In that part of the world weapons are easier to come by than fast food calories in America. They have the means and the knowledge to root out the insurgents, effectively and with finality. But that would involve forming local militias, which are illegal and might well lead to civil war. According to public reports, some militias have formed; we just don't call them militias. Some have co-operated with American forces and done good work; we just don't call it outsourcing the struggle. But the vast majority of Iraqis have remained, at best, passive.
This could change, and there are certainly exceptions. But the preponderance of evidence indicates that, opinion polls and press releases and the last election notwithstanding, the Iraqi people—shall we speak plainly?—just don't care. They may want many things for themselves and for their country; they may have many reasons for what Erich Fromm once called "escape from freedom." But as our Founding Fathers well understood, any people that will not fight, as a people, for their freedom won't keep it.
I suggest here that it does not matter how long we stay, or how many insurgents we kill, or how many constitutions and elections we honcho. I suggest also that the time is coming when we should say to the people of Iraq:
"We liberated you from a hideous tyrant. We gave you years to think about what you wanted. We poured in billions of dollars to protect you, to help you rebuild. We sacrificed thousands of our finest young men and women, now dead, maimed, and hurting in body and spirit. We proclaimed you a lesson to the world. But now it is you who must teach that lesson. We've other work to attend to. Let's see what you do with your freedom. Your success may well inspire others. Your failure will teach lessons, too."
American Purpose after Iraq
It would be tragic were failure in Iraq to occasion a replay of 1970s-style cheap cynicism and willful disregard of peril. It would be no less tragic were eventual success, however modest, to delude us into believing that Iraq provides a template for future uses of American power. I opposed the Iraq war not because I considered the total threat so unimportant, but because I took it so seriously. I remain convinced that the best thing we can do now, as a guardian of the 21st century, is to turn our attention to the rest of the struggle.
George Kennan concluded his "X" article with a peroration thanking Providence for a challenge that required the intelligence, patience, and unity of the American people once again. Today, even the most non-PC among us might find such gratitude a bit of a stretch. So perhaps it would be best to end with a suggestion:
Perhaps, as we ponder what the Iraqi and other peoples of the world are doing with their freedom, we might also consider what we're doing with our own. Starting with our willingness as a people to defend it. Or our lack thereof.
Dr. Gold holds a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University. He has spent 35 years in the national security field, first as a Marine officer, then as a defense analyst, university professor, journalist, and author. He has published five books and over 800 articles. This is adapted from his book in progress, To Guard an Era: American Purpose After Iraq.