Like many others, I've spent the last two evening watching ABC's path to 9-11 and the President's speech, so I've been thinking about where we on in the war and where we soon could be. I'm starting the feel that the situation is rather bleak.
There's really no excuse if we fail in Iraq. We have competent, adaptive people on the ground and a country that wants to be secure. I'm personally aggravated because we only hear about Iraq when US personnel die or when there are significant civilian casualties. We rarely hear about their political system, development of education, development of government and social institutions, and anti-terror raids. It's not a balanced picture, and it's sapping our will to fight. And that's just the thing. We can win. But in the final analysis, we may lose anyways because we're pussies compared to the fundamentalist extremists. We bitch and moan about high gas prices, health care, and the occasional casualty for a war many of us don't even understand, while our enemies completely dedicate themselves to the cause, forsaking their careers, family, safety... risking their lives, and in some cases, voluntarily giving their lives, to that cause. If these people only understood the futility of using force over beliefs and the value of religious and intellectual tolerance, they would be heroic. But we can't be bothered by the reality that we're in a war that's bigger than a regional flare-up; we just want to get on with our normal lives and be happy.
America may well be in military decline, and not just unconventionally. We have allowed eastern antiship missile technology to exceed ours. We have allowed eastern air to air missile technology to equal ours. We are allowing petty environmentalists to endanger our capability to defend against subsurface threats. The day may very well be coming when our forces are denied access to areas of the world where we need to maintain a presence to secure our economic interests. But as the world's only superpower, we don't care because we don't see a new Russia emerging. That's a big mistake, and it may cost us far more than proliferation of nuclear weapons to new states (although probably not as much as proliferation to terrorist groups). Again, this state of affairs isn't because we're not better than them. It's because we're allowing them to beat us. It's a question of will and priority. Our missile priorities have turned sharply to the strike role, despite the proven ineffectiveness of the LAM against terrorist targets (due to them getting the hell out of dodge) and a reasonable appraisal of their effectiveness against conventional targets (will be shot down by air defenses before reaching them). What really matters in a conventional battle isn't stand-off LAMs, but air supremacy. But, in our arrogance, we have assumed that we will have air supremacy by default and have spent our money on programs that exploit this assumed condition. With Russian and Chinese equipment and expertise being sold around the globe, that assumption will likely prove not to be true.
Security is not a fixed status. One does not attain it and then not worry about it anymore. America feels that it has done just that. We feel safe because we are the only superpower and because terrorists seem unable to strike targets outside of the mideast at present. And because of that, we feel we can just go on our merry way and not have to worry. We're wrong about that, and if we don't wake up we are going to lose our position in the world. And considering just how badly our ideological enemies and developing rivals want it and how far they are willing to go to get it, I'm not sure we deserve the top spot with our current attitude.
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