Note the striking similarity between slimey Israel-interest based,neocon propagandist David Ignatius's propaganda piece promoting "our" strategy in the "Long War" and the Bush statements in the Post interview. Also notice that the "enemy leaders" as described, are identical, interchangeable, with Bush, the neocons, and "Bush's base":
On the trail with Gen. Abizaid: No easy victory in the 'Long War'
By David Ignatius
Commentary by
Monday, January 03, 2005General John Abizaid probably commands the most potent military force in history. The troops of his Central Command are arrayed across the jagged crescent of the Middle East, from Egypt to Pakistan, in an overwhelming projection of U.S. power. He travels with his own mini-government: a top State Department officer to manage diplomacy; a senior CIA officer to oversee intelligence; a retinue of generals and admirals to supervise operations and logistics. If there is a modern Imperium Americanum, Abizaid is its field general.
I traveled recently with Abizaid as he visited Iraq and other areas of his command. Over several days, I heard him discuss his
strategy for what he calls the "Long War" to contain Islamic extremism in Centcom's turbulent theater of operations. We talked about the current front in Iraq, and the
longer-term process of change in the Middle East, which Abizaid views as the ultimate strategic challenge.
"We control the air, the sea and the ground militarily," Abizaid told an audience, and in conventional terms he's unquestionably right. From its headquarters near the huge new U.S. airbase in Qatar, Centcom's military reach stretches in every direction: To the west, the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet has its base in Bahrain; to the north, the aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman and its task force are steaming on patrol in the Persian Gulf; to the east, more than 17,000 troops are working to stabilize postwar Afghanistan; to the south, about 1,000 troops are keeping a lid on the Horn of Africa. And to the northwest lies the bloody battlefield of Iraq, where nearly 150,000 of Abizaid's soldiers are fighting a determined insurgency.
For all of America's military might,
the Long War that has begun in the Middle East poses some tough strategic questions.....It was a week that focused attention on gut-level issues, reminiscent of the Vietnam War more than 30 years ago: Why are we in Iraq? What kind of conflict is the United States fighting there? How can we win it?
Abizaid offers the best answers to these questions I've heard from any official in the U.S. government. In addition to being the military's top commander in the Middle East,
he has an intellectual and emotional feel for the region. He is of Arab ancestry - his forebears came to the United States from Lebanon in the 1870's - and he learned to speak Arabic during a stint in Jordan 25 years ago. Like many of the best U.S. Army officers, he's a well-read man who analyzes contemporary issues against the background of history.
Abizaid believes that the Long War is only in its early stages. Victory will be hard to measure, he says, because the enemy won't wave a white flag and surrender one day.
Success will instead be an incremental process of modernization of the Islamic world, which will gradually find its own accommodation with the global economy and open political systems.
America's enemies in this Long War, he argues, are what he calls
"Salafist jihadists." That's
his term for the Muslim fundamentalists who use violent tactics to try to recreate what they imagine was the pure and perfect Islamic government of the era of the prophet Muhammad, who is sometimes called the "Salaf." Osama bin Laden is the best known of the Salafist extremists, but Abizaid argues that the movement is much broader and more diffuse than Al-Qaeda. It's a loose network of like-minded individuals who use 21st-century technology to spread their vision of a 7th-century paradise.
Salafist preachers see themselves as part of a vanguard whose mission is to radicalize other Muslims to overthrow their leaders. Abizaid likens them to Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders. During a gathering of foreign-policy experts in Washington last October, he posed a haunting question:
What would you have done in 1890 if you had known the ruin this Bolshevik vanguard would bring? At another point, he urged the audience to think of today's Islamic world, wracked by waves of violence, as
akin to Europe in the revolutionary year of 1848. The Arab world's spasms of anarchy and terror, like those in Europe 150 years ago, are part of a process of social change - in which
an old order is crumbling and a new one is struggling to be born.
Abizaid's historical analogies are helpful because they stretch our thinking.[Note the very slimey neocon propagandist Ignatius tries to co-opt “us” by making his audience a “we”. Who is this “we”, white man?] People tend to see current problems as unique and overwhelming, and that has been especially true for America in the traumatic years since September 11, 2001. But
through the long lens of history, contemporary problems come into better focus. [History which the neocons re-write to suit their agenda, with outrageous historical analogies, such as that which Ignatius is touting] The wealthy Saudi jihadist bin Laden begins to seem a bit like 19th-century anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin, who similarly wanted to use revolutionary violence to purge what he viewed as a corrupt order. On this broad canvas of historical change, the time horizon isn't years, but decades. [An historical mark of imperialists: armchair history for armchair warriors]
Abizaid didn't draw for me any specific lessons from this history, but
several conclusions seem obvious: If the
United States is fighting an ideological vanguard similar to the Bolsheviks [Saddam was Hitler, the insurgents are the Bolsheviks] - whose leaders will never surrender or negotiate - then it will
have to capture or kill them. [Thus, the Death Squads] That suggests a dirty, drawn-out conflict in which each side tests the other's will and staying power. It's not the sort of war that democracies are usually good at fighting, but
among Abizaid's team of advisers, you hear the same phrase repeated over and over:
"A lot of bad guys are going to have to die." Yet because the battlefield is society itself, the United States cannot think of the struggle in purely military terms. Centcom's 1,000 troops, who are digging wells and performing other reconstruction tasks in the Horn of Africa, may be a better model for success than the 150,000 soldiers hunkered down in Iraq. And
because it is a war of transformation, comparable to Europe's 100-year process of modernization in the 19th century,
the United States must above all be patient. Abizaid argues that this enemy is especially dangerous because it has fused an
atavistic Salafist ideology with the most modern tools of technology. [So similar to Israel: An atavistic state,: one based on religious heritage] "The enemy has a virtual connectivity we haven't seen before with guerrilla groups," he says. "They use the Internet to pass along techniques, tactics, procedures, advice." He believes the jihadists have been clever in using the global media - both to spread their message among followers and to intimidate adversaries. Indeed, the media are their best weapon.
The
Salafist vanguard seeks victory through what Abizaid calls "weapons of mass effect" - the Sept. 11 attacks, the suicide bombings in Baghdad, the gruesome beheadings in Fallujah - which seek to destabilize the United States and its allies through the media. "We have nothing to fear from this enemy other than its ability to create panic," he argues. "This enemy is like water - it seeks an unguarded path. They'll go for the place they can use a weapon of mass effect - and gain a media victory."
Given the importance of the media front, Abizaid is frustrated that Arab journalists haven't provided a more critical picture of life in places where Islamic insurgents have gained control, such as Fallujah. He's convinced that if ordinary Arabs could see the cruelty and repression of these Taleban-style jihadists, they would reject them. Indeed, at several stops during our trip, he urged his listeners to push Arab media to report more about the insurgents' brutal tactics.
"They are the most despicable enemy I've ever seen," he told European and Arab leaders who gathered in Bahrain to talk about Persian Gulf security. "They operate from mosques, they behead people, they have killed far more Muslims than non-Muslims."
("Our" strategy for "modernizing" this vast region follows)
