The theater widens Austin Bay links to Mark Steyn and Christopher Hitchens ' view of events sweeping across the Middle East: Iraq, Leb...
The theater widens
Austin
Bay links to
Mark Steyn and
Christopher
Hitchens' view of events sweeping across the Middle East: Iraq, Lebanon,
Palestine, Egypt and possibly Syria. It is a reminder of why Iraq was commanded
through CENTCOM. During the days when the overt action was centered on Iraq, it
was easy to forget that it was one battlefield within a theater. Now the theater
itself has come to the fore and the atmosphere is one of 'breakout and pursuit'.
The breakout creates a new set of
opportunities and problems. These can be described as 'emergent
phenomenon', -- the result of interactions between individual
elements within the Middle East and Southwest Asian theater that are now
bouncing off each other. Worse -- or more
exciting -- is that these recent developments now have linkages into Europe and Russia.
France and the EU, for example, are getting engaged in Lebanon while going in the other direction, Russia has declared interest in supplying technology to Iran. Just as it was important to
recall that Iraq was part of the Middle East theater, the Middle East itself is
part of action spanning the globe. In retrospect, events as disparate as the
dismantling of of the Libyan nuclear program and the exposure of the AQ Khan
atomic weapons mart played their part in leading up to current developments. As
historical drama the GWOT's scope is staggering and may prove to be bigger in
certain respects than that old yardstick, the Second World War.
'Militant' groups have often attempted to stabilize the front whenever
events threatened to take a direction which they could not control. This usually
took the form of a spoiling terrorist attack to re-mire things in blood, chaos
and hatred as often happened during negotiations between the Palestinian
Authority and Israel. It would not be surprising if the terror masters fell back
on this old repertoire by staging attacks directed not only at Middle Eastern
targets but at the United States to throw back the threatening psychological
wave. The problem is that there is no longer any widespread confidence, even in
the places like Lebanon, that terror tactics will prevail. To that extent even
the most heinous attacks, like the carbomb which recently killed more than 100
in Iraq, have lost their bite. Psychologically speaking, the greatest
contribution of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns is that they have shattered
terrorism's myth of invincibility. The terrorists embarked on a maximum effort
to dislodge the US from Iraq, employing every weapon of violence, political
maneuver and propaganda they could muster and came up much the worse for wear.
This lesson has not been lost to public perception and has emboldened dissidents
all across the region.
The real challenge will be to find ways to respond to the campaign of
spoiling terror which may be forthcoming. Unlike Iraq, where US forces can
respond directly to challenge, the problem will be the ability of the US to
affect events over the wider region in clandestine or indirect ways. Tempo is
America's friend, but the enemy is even now looking for a place to stem the rot.
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