The Battle of Orlando

America has been attacked again, in its homeland, by a foreign power.  The foreign power is not a state (though certain parts of the enemy get support from certain states); it is a transnational network, or networks, of religious extremists who have declared war against the United States. 

The enemy is operationalizing that war by fighting with armies on the ground in the Middle East, Africa, and southern Asia, and by deliberately planting radical Muslims, and deliberately radicalizing Muslims, in Western countries so that they carry out attacks like the ones in Paris and San Bernardino and Orlando. Those were acts of war and part of a global war, and while the Western democracies are not the only targets in that war, they are prime targets.  The enemy wants to destroy us and is consciously pursuing a strategy to achieve that end. That is not going to change unless and until the enemy is himself destroyed. That’s the first thing to get into our heads. 

The second thing is that the enemy is, on balance, winning; he is arguably losing ground in one theater of the war – in Iraq and perhaps Syria – but  is spreading and gaining strength in other places.

What I have said is an oversimplification, but not an inaccurate one, and right now simplicity is important because Americans need to make a basic decision. How badly do we want to win? 

Now, obviously, everyone in this country would like the attacks, here and abroad, to end. To the extent Americans today are capable of consensus about anything, there is a consensus that we would all prefer it if the enemy stopped killing people. But a priority is not just something you would like to see happen in an ideal world. It is something you desire enough that you are willing to sacrifice other things of importance to achieve it in the real world.

I’ll use an example we can all relate to. If a family makes education a priority, it means more than that the parents, all other things being equal, would rather that their kids get an education. It means that the family, as a whole, is willing to sacrifice time and money, and perhaps some of its preconceived assumptions and traditional ways of parenting, so that their children succeed at school.

It is time for us to be honest about our priorities where this war is concerned.  The United States has more than enough power to win, but we reduce the chance of victory whenever we forego an effective tactic because it threatens some interest, or challenges some assumption, that is important to some part of the American political spectrum.   

Here are examples of the decisions before us:

Consistently good intelligence will assist us in discovering the enemy and his intentions and defeating his attacks. Should we therefore make it a priority to collect information, even if it means reconsidering the existing limits on intelligence collection, interrogation techniques, and operations at Gitmo? 

The enemy’s strategy is to establish new bases of operation in weak or failing states. We can counter that by building the capacity of those states to defend themselves. But that requires partnering with regimes and peoples which also want to defeat the enemy but whose values we do not otherwise share. It also requires a lot of soldiers on the ground in many places at the same time, which in turn means more soldiers than we have now, more money than we are now spending, and more money than the existing budget caps allow us to spend. 

The soldiers will mostly be engaged in combat support and training of allied forces, but there will be places where direct ground combat would give us an advantage. That will mean taking casualties, and causing casualties, including, sometimes, civilian casualties. Should we engage in such missions?   

The enemy is trying to infiltrate Islamic radicals in our midst. Should we prioritize stopping that infiltration, even if it means pausing or restricting immigration from some or all Muslim countries?

The enemy uses his version of Islam to recruit and inspire his soldiers. It would advance the war effort to attack his narrative. But that means abandoning the precepts of multiculturalism, at least for these purposes, and asserting the superiority of Western thought. It means believing, and vigorously asserting, that our way of life is better than the enemy’s.  Are we prepared to do that, consistently and with unity over time?

My concern is not that we are answering some of these questions in the negative. My concern is that many of our leaders, and especially the president, are dismissing the questions altogether; they are instead downsizing the enemy and the risk he presents in their minds, dismissing promising options that challenge their world view, and responding to each crisis by defaulting to their ideological and political comfort zones.

Hence the effort to direct the outrage over Orlando towards condemning gun ownership. Turning the NRA into the enemy, and arguing that gun control is the key to victory, is a way of avoiding the real choices.

America lost a battle in Orlando last Saturday night. We suffered 50 dead and 53 wounded. The enemy lost one soldier, and he may well recruit a thousand more because of this victory.

Yet it could have been even worse. There are asymmetric weapons — dirty bombs, biological agents, nuclear devices, and cyberweapons — which can maim or kill a city. The longer America staggers along on the edge of reality, the greater the risk that the enemy will acquire such a weapon. God willing, we will confront the choices before us and destroy him before he does.