The New Warfare

We arrived at the steps of the 21st century with our superior air power, our missiles, our artillery, our highly trained professional fighting units and found the new warfare was muddle headed youth with virtually no training, little aptitude, and satchels of plastic explosives. Are we ready for the fight?

For at least two generations what we have heard every four years is re-heated rhetoric about how we need to have a strong military--the best equipped, the most advanced, and the most expensive. The new warfare makes large fighting forces virtually irrelevant. Morally disfigured psychopaths carry boxcutters and sacks of drywall screws wrapped around Semtex and, while certainly failing to defeat our armed forces, they bring chaos and fear to our cities, our workplaces, and our commutes. The very fear our immense defense apparatus is designed to be a bulwark against has slipped through its perimeter. We are infected with it like disease.

I trust that we will inoculate each other to defeat terrorism and its spawning ideologies of hate through shared will. The new battlefield is everywhere and nowhere it seems. It would be swell if armies could maneuver the scourge of terrorism into a kill zone and demand surrender, but no army can.

We can.

The barbarism that posits ideological or theological precepts above human life and the mundane rhythm of work and family will be defeated house to house and city to city by a determined resistance to zealotry in any of its most naked and venal forms. As citizens, we are in solidarity with the dead and maimed of London, the maimed of Baghdad, the strafed Palestinians in Gaza, the bombed and burnt of Israel, the starved and broken of Darfur. Wherever power entrenches and insists on ideological purity there is a menace to be stamped out. Whenever religious leaders or political leaders amplify their distorted hatred and desire to employ everyday people in the defense of some so-called sacred principal, we have the obligation to instead deem them profane and a blasphemy to the human spirit.

While it may be that no army of any size and shape can defeat a vacant and soul-dead enemy wishing to blow themselves up in our midst, once we refute the expectation that such violent demagoguery can in any way influence our daily lives, the terrorists days are numbered. We should seek to broadly define what and who represents terrorism (e.g., anybody who kills for ideological principal or to prove a point) and defeat them through our shared contempt. "Ism's" are not defeated by standing armies, they are defeated by shifts of consciousness. Religious clerics and politicians, dependent on the favor of the masses, readily acquiesce to the new way of thinking.

In the new century, warfare has forever changed. Or maybe it changed gradually in Guernica, in Dresden, in Tokyo, in My Lai, in Belfast, and wherever civilian populations were targeted during military campaigns. We can defeat terrorism by whenever the Imam, or the potentate, or the populists gets on the loudspeaker to enjoin us in nationalistic fervor we, wiser, simply stare down at the ground and walk away.