“So they’ve killed our Osama”, said the Mullah from the Waziristan region in north Pakistan to the al Qaeda chieftain, as the two of them contemplated candidates for new leadership to continue forging ahead toward the 12th Caliphate, bin Laden having made such great progress toward that ultimate goal.
This hypothetical conversation is adapted from Jaroslav Haschek’s satirical classic, “The Good Soldier Schvejk” in which he refers to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by the Serb, Gavrilo Princip, an event that triggered WWI. Could the assassination of Osama bin Laden trigger WWIII?
I think not.....for two reasons. One is the power of our superior military, and the second is the power of our founding principles.
Haschek’s "Schvejk” epitomized those who were dragooned into service by the Austro-Hungarians to be front-line infantry forced into battle against overwhelming odds with little chance of survival…..in other words, “cannon fodder”. Use of soldiers conscripted by force to die en masse has been one of the traditional ways of fighting wars for centuries. WWI was the last such war in its entirety, however, though the Soviet Union conscripted troops from throughout the vast USSR and often compelled them to be cannon fodder in much of WWII. One might argue that the Vietnamese often used their troops as cannon fodder during the Vietnam war, and certainly the child soldiers in African civil wars in the past few decades have been used as cannon fodder.
As weaponry and tactics advanced, and especially where democratic governments were engaged in battle, forcing people into battles as cannon fodder has all but disappeared. The major new form of war that has emerged involves battles in which one side, the ultimate loser, has an apparent lopsided advantage over the other by using superior intelligence, weapons and tactics to destroy large numbers of enemy forces and resources; the other side, by comparison, has very few combatants, total secrecy, and expends little by way of resources. Bin Laden’s pre-emptive attack on 9/11 was the most successful and dramatic example in history of what is now referred to as “asymmetric warfare”. President Jimmy Carter’s failed attempt to rescue US hostages in Iran in 1980 was one of the worst.
Bin Laden’s “costs” to bring about this horrific attack on an unwitting “enemy” cost half a million dollars plus 19 jihadists willing to commit kamikaze by flying planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The immediate and long term costs to the United States were more than three thousand innocent civilians dead, with costs, over time, approaching a trillion dollars. The ratio of damage inflicted divided by the costs to the terrorists is nearly infinite. Scenes of Palestinians dancing in the streets for joy in celebration of the attack have left unforgettable images of an enemy of which the vast majority of Americans were completely unaware.
Russ Deane has written an important article for this blog on the topic of our own new form of war which he calls “Hunters and Killers”. Putting bin Laden away was the result of the best American intelligence (hunters) and special operations forces (killers). Emphasis to enhance and modernize both capabilities has evolved because of excellent national security leadership over the past decade.
There was a fourth plane hijacked by suicidal Islamic extremists on 9/11, United Airlines Flight 93. This plane was headed for either the US Capitol or the White House, but instead it crashed into an empty field in Pennsylvania. It crashed because a group of courageous, but otherwise ordinary, untrained civilian Americans stormed the front of the plane in the face of certain death no matter what happened. For intelligence, they had only their cell phones whereby they learned of the World Trade Center and Pentagon crashes. They analyzed this data quickly and made a plan. Their code was, “Let’s Roll”. With only their bodies as weapons, they stormed the cockpit and crashed the plane into an empty field. 37 passengers, a crew of 7 and 4 hijackers died in this Boeing 757-222 instead of the planned slaughter of many in our Congress or our President and many of his staff. This time, the form of warfare, the counter-punch, was in the form of citizen patriots willing to die for their country.
Our modern technology is critical to our long term survival as a nation. The last Caliphate was terminated in 1924 by Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk and the idea remained effectively dormant until Osama bin Laden came along. His quest to establish the 12th caliphate will not be taken up by others because of two American forms of counter-terrorism: the first, quite new and always being modernized, is the “Hunter – Killer” ability of the best trained and best led military force on the planet; the second form of counter-terrorism, requiring no funding or pre-planning or uniforms or leaders, and as old as the country itself, is plain old Americans who, when presented with the necessity, will die for Liberty.
