Victor Davis Hanson: The Burdens of General Petraeus
[Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University , a professor emeritus at California University , Fresno , and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.]
Several governments have defeated Islamic insurgencies, but usually only after about ten years, and adopting policies of summary executions and carpet bombing or shelling.
The Algerians in the 1990s finally stopped the so-called Islamic Salvation Army. The Russians decimated Chechnyan separatists. Syria’s Hafez al-Assad brutally exterminated several groups loosely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, most infamously by the thousands at the town of Hama.
But so far, no recent military has succeeded in defeating a radical Muslim terrorist insurgency, while subject to a constitutional government and an absolutely free media. In this regard, the United States — given its position as the world’s only superpower and recognized as the most sensitive of all countries to easy criticism — is especially at a military disadvantage.
Witness Guantanamo Bay that is demonized worldwide as the new Stalag or Gulag, when, in fact, it is the most humane detention center of jailed Muslim terrorists in the world.
Abu Ghraib was reprehensible for its sexual roguery and gratuitous humiliation, but the real military problem of that prison has been the serial release, not American mistreatment, of Islamic murderers. In Iraq, then, the question arises — can a liberal Western government defeat a barbarous Islamist terrorist insurgency while under constant audit — and remaining true to its own democratic principles?
Gen. Petraeus must cope with the reality that should a half-dozen, or perhaps even one, of his some 160,000 soldiers, in the heat of combat, shoot a wounded terrorist, the damage done could rival losing an entire battle — a fact well known to a religiously zealous enemy that feels no such humanitarian constraints. Radical Islamists may be the enemy, but American forces in the field must downplay, not accentuate religious differences, if they are to keep on their side Muslim forces loyal to an elected government....
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Several governments have defeated Islamic insurgencies, but usually only after about ten years, and adopting policies of summary executions and carpet bombing or shelling.
The Algerians in the 1990s finally stopped the so-called Islamic Salvation Army. The Russians decimated Chechnyan separatists. Syria’s Hafez al-Assad brutally exterminated several groups loosely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, most infamously by the thousands at the town of Hama.
But so far, no recent military has succeeded in defeating a radical Muslim terrorist insurgency, while subject to a constitutional government and an absolutely free media. In this regard, the United States — given its position as the world’s only superpower and recognized as the most sensitive of all countries to easy criticism — is especially at a military disadvantage.
Witness Guantanamo Bay that is demonized worldwide as the new Stalag or Gulag, when, in fact, it is the most humane detention center of jailed Muslim terrorists in the world.
Abu Ghraib was reprehensible for its sexual roguery and gratuitous humiliation, but the real military problem of that prison has been the serial release, not American mistreatment, of Islamic murderers. In Iraq, then, the question arises — can a liberal Western government defeat a barbarous Islamist terrorist insurgency while under constant audit — and remaining true to its own democratic principles?
Gen. Petraeus must cope with the reality that should a half-dozen, or perhaps even one, of his some 160,000 soldiers, in the heat of combat, shoot a wounded terrorist, the damage done could rival losing an entire battle — a fact well known to a religiously zealous enemy that feels no such humanitarian constraints. Radical Islamists may be the enemy, but American forces in the field must downplay, not accentuate religious differences, if they are to keep on their side Muslim forces loyal to an elected government....