The Art of Making Enemies

This week the people of the US were given a new reminder that there are organized groups out there aiming to attack the US and its allies in manners as horrid as the events of 9/11, and worse. As someone who just took an American Airlines flight out of Heathrow two weeks ago, the reminder was not lost on me.

In the midst of that, US Vice-President Dick Cheney offered a little Bush Administration insight about the nature of combat. Battles are fought on two fronts. One is conquering an opponent by force and the other, Cheney noted, is undermining your opponent’s will to fight. In Cheney’s case he tried to argue that the victory of an anti-Iraq War candidate in Connecticut was fearful evidence that anti-US terrorists are "betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task."

It’s too bad Cheney and Bush only see that argument in one direction.

I think there is a consensus that countries threatened by terrorist attack ought to do reasonable things to protect themselves, and we can have a debate about what is reasonable. Flying without a water bottle is reasonable, as is trying to break up attack conspiracies. Jailing people at Guantanamo for two years without the burden of evidence probably isn’t.

But what is the US doing to undermine the hatred that so many people have toward the US and the will of terrorist groups to plan unimaginable attacks? Occupying a Middle Eastern nation with US troops for a period with no clear end – not a recipe for relieving hatred. US soldiers raping a 14 year old Iraqi girl and killing her family – not an effective way to discourage people from becoming suicide bombers. Sending signals down the chain of command that opened the door for setting attack dogs on naked prisoners in front of a camera lens – not a strong strategy for undermining an opponent’s will.

In fact, if one were going to cook up a recipe for making a lot of already angry people really angry at the US, the War Without End in Iraq would be about as on the mark as you could design.

A close friend of mine who once became the object of obsession by a lunatic neighbor in his Los Angeles apartment complex once gave me this advice. Try to avoid becoming the object of obsession by anyone who is crazy. Not bad advice. And to be clear, Cheney and Bush would argue, in different language – okay, but if you do become their object of obsession, kick their ass. Or, as the Administration has done in the absence of finding Al Qaeda, kick someone else’s ass and hope it scares the people you can’t find.

As the dead in Bali, Madrid, London and elsewhere might tell you if they could, the kicking someone’s ass strategy isn’t working so good as a deterrent.

It is a lesson US policy makers have a hard time grasping. Why is it that, despite oodles of US earthquake aid in the most populous Muslim nation on Earth, Indonesia, the US is still toxic in the Islamic world? Why is it that after financing everything from computers to health clinics in Bolivia, so many Bolivians still focus on that annoying US “war on drugs” and the thousands of innocents jailed in its name?

It’s human nature. If I hand you a ripe apple with one hand and punch you in the face with the other hand, it isn’t too hard to figure out which one you’ll remember most vividly and which will define your long-term opinion.

Cheney is right, in any battle, be it political jousting or combat, a part of the strategy has to be about weakening an opponent’s will to fight and to not embolden it. As long as the US remains an occupying force in Iraq, piling up Iraqi dead and igniting new horror tales of US human rights abuses – more and more young men are going to figure out ways to bring some deadly surprise onto a fleet of jumbo jets and sooner or later James Bond and Company won’t figure it out in time.