America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

by Mark Steyn

  So I ordered the mixed grill, which turned out to be not that mixed. Just a tough old stringy chicken. My tie would have been easier to chew. The locals watched me—a few obviously surly and resentful, the rest somewhere between wary and amused. Or so it appeared. But in cultures that are as foreign to one as a just-liberated Arab dictatorship it’s hard to say for sure. Even facial expressions don’t always mean what they seem: at times my fellow diners appeared to be grinning in another language. Still, I’ve had worse welcomes in Berkeley, so I chewed on, and, washed down with a pitcher of coliform bacteria, the unmixed grill wasn’t bad. As a parodic courtesy, mein host switched the flickering black-and-white TV from an Arabic station to the BBC, which as usual was full of doom and gloom about the quagmire.

  And I gave no further thought to Fallujah until a year later, when four American contractors working in Iraq—Scott Helvenston, Wesley Batalona, Jerry Zovko, and Michael Teague—were ambushed while driving through town. They were dragged from their vehicles, shot, burned, mutilated, and what was left was dangled from a bridge over the Euphrates while the natives danced in the streets. The “insurgents” were pleased as punch, made a video of the attack, and distributed it around the world.

  There’s not a lot to be said for the oh-my-God-that-could-have-been-me routine. But, watching the scenes on TV, I did think back to my lunch eleven months earlier, and wondered about some of those inscrutable toothy grins at the adjoining tables. Would those fellows have liked to kill me? Well, I’ll bet one or two would have enjoyed giving it a go. And if they had, I’ll bet three or four more would have enthusiastically beaten my corpse with their shoes. And five or six would have had no particular feelings about me one way or the other but would have been generally supportive of the decision to kill me after the fact. And the rest might have had a few qualms but they would have kept quiet.

  So why didn’t they kill me? I’m not brave, and certainly not suicidally brave. And, if I’d known the Sunni Triangle was the most dangerous place on Earth, I wouldn’t have been there driving around on my own in some beat-up rented Nissan.

  But, of course, Fallujah wasn’t dangerous in those days. Why? Because, as Osama gloated after September 11, when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they go with the strong horse. And in May 2003, four weeks after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition forces were indisputably the strong horse. They’d removed Saddam Hussein—the self-declared new Saladin—in nothing flat. And so, even when a dainty little trotting gelding of a touring writer comes through the door, they figure he’s with the strong-horse crowd and act accordingly.

  What happened within the next year was that America ceased to be perceived as a strong horse. It was a range of factors, from the West’s defeatist media to the Bush administration’s wish to be seen as, so to speak, a compassionate crusader. Nice idea. But to the Arab mindset there’s no such thing. So the compassion got read by the locals not as cultural respect but as weakness. And the quagmiritis diagnosed by the media from Day One suggested that a hyperpower of historically unprecedented dominance didn’t have the stomach for a body count that in the course of a year added up to little more than a quiet week’s internal policing for Saddam. By comparison, some four million people died in the Congo in the couple of years either side of the turn of the century—and how many books or TV investigations have you seen on that subject?

  Before I got to Fallujah, on the deserted highway between the Jordanian border and the town of Rutba, I came across my first burnt-out tank. You’d see them periodically—a charred wreck blocking the lane or shoved over to the shoulder. With that first one I stopped, walked around it, and pondered the fate of the men inside. Sobering. Yet as the great strategist of armored warfare Basil Liddell Hart wrote: “The destruction of the enemy’s armed forces is but a means—and not necessarily an inevitable or infallible one—to the attainment of the real objective.”

  The object of war is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks but to destroy his will. As Liddell Hart put it: “Our goal in war can only be attained by the subjugation of the opposing will…. All such acts as defeat in the field, propaganda, blockade, diplomacy, or attack on the centres of government and population are seen to be but means to that end.”

  America is extremely good at destroying tanks. If you make the mistake of luring the United States into a hot war—i.e., tanks, bombers, ships, etc.—you’ll lose very quickly. The Taliban did, and so did Saddam Hussein. That’s why my lunch in Fallujah required no personal courage on my part: just about the safest time to visit anywhere in the Muslim world is in the month after the United States has toppled its dictator.

  But an enemy folds when he knows he’s finished. In Iraq, despite the swift fall of the Saddamites, it’s not clear the enemy did know. Even during the combat phase we were playing the compassionate crusader. The Western peaceniks’ prewar “human shields” operation proved to be completely superfluous, mainly because the Anglo-American forces decided to treat not just Iraqi civilians and not just Iraqi conscripts but virtually everyone other than Saddam, Uday, and Qusay as a de facto human shield. Washington made a conscious choice to give every Iraqi the benefit of the doubt, including the fake surrenderers who ambushed the U.S. Marines at Nasiriyah. The main victims of Western squeamishness in those few weeks in the spring of 2003 turned out to be not American or coalition troops but the Iraqi civilians who two years later were providing the principal target for “insurgents.” It would have been better for them had more Baathists been killed in the initial invasion. It would have been preferable, too, if the swarm of foreign jihadi from neighboring countries had occasionally been met with the “accidental” bombing of certain targets on the Syrian side of the border. Wars fought under absurd degrees of self-imposed etiquette are the most difficult to win—see Korea and Vietnam—and one lesson of Germany and Japan is that it’s easier to rebuild totalitarian states if they’ve first been completely smashed. Colin Powell famously framed Iraq in Pottery Barn terms: you break it, you own it. But Saddam’s Baathist apparatus and other parties concluded the opposite: we didn’t have the guts to break it; therefore, we didn’t own it.

  I’m not worried about Iraq. Its political class has behaved with both amazing restraint and impressive resolve: the country won’t be New Hampshire or Singapore, but it will be good enough and (even if it dissolves into three separate states) better governed than any of its neighbors. That’s fine if you live in Mosul or Basra, where the Iraq question is a question about Iraq. But, for the rest of the world, what’s at issue in the Iraq war is not the future of Iraq but the future of America. Can the world’s leading nation still lead, or is John Kerry’s Vietnam Syndrome “seared” (as he’d say) into its bones? If so, how likely is it that America can stick out the “long war”? Especially if it’s fought not in sudden swift total devastating military campaigns but in arenas where our military and technological advantage is peripheral and other factors come into play. Facing a foe who has nothing but will and manpower, do we have the strength to (in Liddell Hart’s phrase) subjugate that will? The enemy was certainly impressed by the speed with which U.S. forces raced to Baghdad. But the invasion becomes a liberation and the liberation becomes a policing operation and the further you get from that first month of hard power the more constrained the hyperpower becomes, the less willing to use any but a tiny proportion of his awesome might until in the end he’s Gulliver ensnared by more motivated Lilliputians.

  Do you remember when that statue of Saddam came down? It proved to be hollow. The Islamists think Western Civilization’s like that: tough exterior, but empty inside; protected by a layer of hard steel—the U.S. military—there’s nothing underneath.

  Why would they get that idea? Well, from a million and one little things—itsy-bitsy foot-of-page-thirty-seven news items, none too important in itself but cumulatively an avalanche. Take one trivial example: just before Christmas 2003, Muslim community leaders in California applauded the decision of the Catholic high school in S
an Juan Capistrano to change the name of its football team from the Crusaders to the less culturally insensitive Lions.

  Meanwhile, twenty miles up the road in Irvine, the schedule for the Muslim Football League’s New Year tournament promised to bring together some of the most exciting Muslim football teams in Orange County: the Intifada, the Mujahideen, the Saracens, and the Sword of Allah.

  That’s the spirit. I can’t wait for the California sporting calendar circa 2015: the San Diego Jihadi vs. the Oakland Culturally Sensitives, the Malibu Hezbollah vs. the Santa Monica Inoffensives, the Pasadena Sword of the Infidel Slayer vs. the Bakersfield Self-Deprecators, the San Jose Decapitators vs. the Berkeley Mutually Respectfuls.

  I suppose the rationale, conscious or not, behind such trivial concessions as school sports team names is that a big powerful wealthy culture can afford to be generous to a weaker culture. Unfortunately, magnanimity is often seen as weakness by those on the receiving end. It’s easy to be sensitive, tolerant, and multicultural—it’s the default mode of the age—yet, when you persist in being sensitive to the insensitive, tolerant of the intolerant, and impeccably multicultural about the avowedly unicultural, don’t be surprised if they take it for weakness.

  If this is a “long war,” then in the long run, which is the real battlefield? The sands of Araby? Or the football fields of Orange County and a thousand others? When it chose to expose the U.S. Treasury program for tracking terrorist finances, the New York Times was heavily criticized for damaging national security and responded that, au contraire, it took its responsibilities very seriously and would never reveal “troop movements.” But this isn’t a “troop movement” war: in asymmetrical warfare, the troop movements are the wire transfers—getting the money from Saudi Arabia to America not just to pull off September 11 but to advance its cause in all manner of slyer ways. We know the jihad hasn’t got anything to match the Third Infantry Division. But what about the other fronts?

  If you go to war colleges or strategic studies institutes in almost any country, they teach the importance of looking at all elements of national power. For example, from the 2004 U.S. Department of Defense Strategic Deterrence Joint Operating Concept: “Strategic deterrence requires a national deterrence strategy that integrates and brings to bear all elements of national power: diplomatic, informational, military, and economic.”

  Nothing unusual about that. I’d add a fifth element: judicial power, law enforcement. The difference between military power and the others is obvious: with military power, you give the orders and somewhere at the other end someone carries them out. With the other elements of national power, the chain of command isn’t that direct. So let’s consider how they’re going:

  Military Power

  The United States has the most powerful armed forces on the planet. The fact that Washington’s responsible for 40 percent of the planet’s military spending pales in comparison to the really critical statistic: it’s responsible for almost 80 percent of military research-and-development spending, which means the capability gap between it and everyone else widens every day. In Afghanistan, a handful of prototype robots assisted in the cave-by-cave search for al Qaeda nutters. If these innovations have certain snot-nosed Brit toffs pining for the dash and élan of old-school imperialism, America’s enemies project their own prejudices onto them, too: the Great Satan prefers antiseptic technological warfare because he can’t stomach a three-figure death toll. Therefore, the trick is not to provoke him into walloping you with daisy cutters and bunker busters but to gnaw away at him incrementally, with one or two casualties per evening news bulletin.

  As for America’s “friends,” there’s another paradox of the non-imperial hyperpower: the United State garrisons not remote ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest allies, thereby freeing them to spend their tax revenues on luxuriant welfare programs rather than on tanks and aircraft carriers and thus further exacerbating the differences between America and the rest of the free world. Like any other form of welfare, defense welfare is a hard habit to break and damaging to the recipient. The peculiarly obnoxious character of modern Europe is a logical consequence of America’s willingness to absolve it of responsibility for its own security. In 1796 George Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton: “The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

  That neatly sums up the Euro-American relationship: the United States has become a slave to its habitual if largely misplaced fondness for Europe, while Europe has become a slave to its habitual if entirely irrational hatred for America. There’s a line conservatives are fond of when they’re discussing welfare: what’s better for a man—to give him a fish or to teach him to fish for himself? That goes double for defense welfare.

  So, just as the only guy in town with a tennis racket isn’t going to be playing a lot of matches, the logic of America’s military dominance is that both its allies and enemies have every interest to find some other form of battlefield, whether (for France) the international talking shops or (for Islamist clerics) the suburban mosques of North America, just to name two venues where the hyperpower is far less confident.

  Judicial Power

  What about law enforcement as an element of national power? Well, in the words of the so-called “twentieth hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui, upon being sentenced to life imprisonment: “America, you lose.”

  Hard to disagree. On the day Mr. Moussaoui was led out of court to begin his sentence, some pompous member of the ghastly 9-11 Commission turned up on one of the cable shows to declare proudly that jihadists around the world were marveling at the fairness of the U.S. justice system. The leisurely legal process Mr. Moussaoui enjoyed had lasted longer than America’s participation in World War Two. Around the world, everybody was having a grand old laugh at the U.S. justice system.

  Except for Saddam Hussein, who must be regretting he had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Iraqi justice system. Nine out of twelve U.S. jurors agreed that the “emotional abuse” Mr. Moussaoui suffered as a child should be a mitigating factor. Saddam could claim the same but his jury wasn’t operating on the legal principles of the Oprahfonic Code. Criminal prosecution gives terrorists all the rights of criminals, including the “Gee, Officer Krupke” defense: I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived.

  It’s a very worn cliché to say America is over-lawyered but the extent of that truism only becomes clear when you realize how overwhelming is our culture’s reflex to cover war as just another potential miscarriage-of-justice story. In the Moussaoui case, the first instinct of the news shows to the verdict was to book some relative of the September 11 families and ask whether they were satisfied with the result, as if the prosecution of the war on terror is some kind of national-security Megan’s Law on which they have inviolable proprietary rights. Sorry, but that’s not what happened that Tuesday morning. The thousands who died were not targeted as individuals: they were killed because they were American, not because somebody in a cave far away decided to murder Mrs. Smith. Their families have a unique claim to our sympathy and a grief we can never truly share, but they’re not plaintiffs and war isn’t a suit. It’s not about “closure” for the victims; it’s about victory for the nation.

  Agreeing to fight the jihad with subpoenas is a declaration that you’re willing to plea bargain. Instead of a Churchillian “We will never surrender!” it’s more of a “Well, the judge has thrown out the mass murder charges, but the D.A. says we can still nail him on mail fraud.” And even that may prove increasingly difficult. In 2005, the British authorities finally moved against the most famous of the country’s many incendiary imams. Abu Hamza is a household name in the United Kingdom thanks to the tabloids anointing him as “Hooky”—he lost his hands in an, er, “accident” in Afghanistan in 1991. On trial in London for nine counts of soliciting to murd
er plus various other charges, he retained the services of a prestigious Queen’s Counsel, who certainly came up with an ingenious legal strategy: “Edward Fitzgerald, QC, for the defence, said that Abu Hamza’s interpretation of the Koran was that it imposed an obligation on Muslims to do jihad and fight in the defence of their religion. He said that the Crown case against the former imam of Finsbury Park Mosque was ‘simplistic in the extreme.’ He added: ‘It is said he was preaching murder, but he was actually preaching from the Koran itself.’”

  If the Koran permit, you must acquit? Brilliant. To convict would be multiculturally disrespectful: if the holy book of the religion of peace recommends killing infidels, who are we to judge? SIAC, the United Kingdom’s anti-terrorist court, found in 2003 that a thirty-five-year-old Algerian male had “actively assisted terrorists who have links to al Qaeda.” But he was released from Belmarsh Prison the following year because jail causes him to suffer a “depressive illness.”

  By Western standards, every Islamic terrorist is “depressive”—for a start, as suicide bombers, they’re suicidal. What’s impressive about these “unassimilated” Islamists is the way they pick up on our weaknesses so quickly—the legalisms, the ethnic squeamishness, the bureaucratic inertia. The courtroom evens the playing field to the enemy’s advantage.

  Diplomatic Power