Screeds
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Can They Bury Us?
March 15, 2004
The recent train bombing in Madrid, so quickly followed by the replacement of Spain’s Popular Party government with the Socialists, has a lot of people wondering about al-Qaeda’s targeting intentions and the future of Europe. In particular, many are now asking whether a series of terrorist attacks on Europe, so little defended and so open to penetration by the Islamist horde, might produce more effective pressure on Washington than attempts to pierce America’s imperfect-but-formidable shields.
This is the sort of question one asks about American responses. One would never ask it about the Europeans. To get a sound sense of the forces involved, let’s have a look at an episode four decades behind us.
At Stalin’s death in 1953, Georgi Malenkov became Soviet Premier and General Secretary of the Communist Party. Malenkov was the first Soviet potentate to suggest to the Politburo that the USSR need not emphasize military development at the expense of living standards. He favored a conciliatory foreign policy and a program of internal economic development, rather than further expansion of the military and the satellite empire. It is widely believed that those pronouncements, along with a longstanding antipathy toward Malenkov’s ally, NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria, were what got Malenkov deposed and replaced by the harder-line Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev.
Khrushchev appreciated the sources of his support: the military and imperialist factions within the Politburo and the Communist Party generally. He took care to tailor his public statements and perceptible attitudes toward the preferences of those groups, lest he lose their favor. At our distance in time, most memorable among his public acts was the famous United Nations shoe-pounding incident, accompanied by his cries of “We will bury you!” at the American delegation.
This was verifiably stage fury, nothing more. The proof is that, though Khrushchev reached under the table for a shoe with which to pound, photographs of the incident show that both his feet were still shod. He’d brought a third “for pounding only” shoe with him.
When the Kennedy Administration pusillanimously pulled the air cover off the Bay of Pigs invasion force, dooming it to defeat and destruction, Khrushchev was emboldened to press what he saw as his advantage in resolve. Among other things, foreign-relations successes seemed to be the best way to solidify his bases of support in the Kremlin. This brought us the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Khrushchev’s failure to win the day over the nuclear-armed IRBMs he’d stationed in Cuba greatly weakened him, both in his own eyes and in the eyes of his backers in the Soviet oligarchy. The conviction grew among them that he didn’t have the savvy or the resolve to match his public bluster. This diagnosis was supported by Khrushchev’s subsequent attempt to back away from his “we will bury you” tirade:
“I once said, ‘We will bury you,’ and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.” [from an address given in Split, Yugoslavia, August 24, 1963]
In 1964, the Politburo stripped Khrushchev of his offices and powers and retired him to a dacha outside Moscow. That’s what happens to a tyrant when he engages in a contest of wills with his principal competitor and comes off second-best. He can’t keep his power and perquisites once his backers have deserted him; he might as well try to fight off his rivals with a whip and a chair.
Al-Qaeda is in a comparable position. Millions of dollars and thousands of recruits have flowed into it because militant Muslims have perceived it as the spearpoint of their contest with the liberal democratic West. The celebrations captured by journalists when news of the Black Tuesday strikes reached the Middle East were an expression of approbation for the forces those peoples had chosen to back. To militant Muslims, the strikes were confirmation that they had bet on the “strong horse.”
But one swallow, as the saying goes, doth not a summer make. The American response to the atrocities was swift, decisive, and irresistible. Though they didn’t reduce al-Qaeda to impotence, as the Madrid bombing plainly shows, Operation Enduring Freedom and our program of non-military anti-terrorism provisions weakened the organization tremendously. The leadership cadre of al-Qaeda had to have been worried, in the aftermath of the Afghani War, that Osama bin Laden’s “strong horse” would appear to be a spavined, swaybacked creature, rather than a war stallion the Islamists could ride through the opposing lines.
Given the correlation of forces as it currently stands, al-Qaeda had to go looking for a terrorism target that would:
- Be soft enough to be penetrable, but not so soft as to appear trivial,
- Capture the attention of the world and hold it for a protracted interval,
- Give rise to consequences that would have baleful implications for the American-led coalition against terrorism.
This was necessary to regain the allegiance of the world’s active supporters of Islamist terrorism: their money, their volunteers, and their protection. Inasmuch as the Madrid bombing appears to have toppled Spain’s existing, pro-American, pro-coalition government and caused it to be replaced by a much more appeasement-minded administration, al-Qaeda seems to have picked its shot well.
Sun Tzu has told us that perfection in war involves sapping the enemy’s will so completely that he surrenders without fighting. Terrorism is a tactical implementation of this strategy. Al-Qaeda’s terrorists are incapable of defeating America’s military, or the military of any Western nation-state, in open combat. Therefore, they must undermine our will to win. Since numbers are a source of confidence, they must first detach our allies, one by one, and leave us standing alone.
The peoples and governments of even our most resolute allies are less capable of resisting this sort of campaign than we are. Spain was one of the most stalwart. The others will fall more readily—unless we bolster them proactively, so that their chances of thwarting such an atrocity rise to equal our own.
Perhaps this should be NATO’s mission for the Twenty-First Century.
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