By Mark M Green (sciencefromaway.com)
What follows is adapted from a column in this series, directed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, written in the fall of 2005.
Increasingly, more and more Americans are seeing what people outside of the United States, and many within the country, saw early on, the absence of wisdom in the people who run the government, people who make decisions that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Are Americans almost ready to believe, is it possible to believe, that the events of September 11 were used to advance a hidden agenda by our enemies? Are Americans beginning to realize that their leaders’ decisions arise out of incompetence—defined as the absence of foresight in a leader? In fact, the absence of foresight appears to be playing a big role. Is it possible that our leaders, as school children, never spent their Saturday afternoons at the movies? Yes, movies. There’s a source of wisdom, of foresight. Remember the old cowboy and Indian movies? The cowboys and the troops were in their fort with high wooden walls, which were manned with lookout posts. A small war party of Indians attacked the fort with flaming arrows. The large heavy wooden doors swung open and with flags waving and bugles blaring the troops rode out of the fort chasing the invaders onto the open plains, and finally into a narrow valley when the musical overture to the story suddenly took an ominous tone as the surrounding hills filled with—well you know the rest, don’t you. This was, it is now clear, Osama-bin-Laden’s strategy. And he has been successful in drawing America into a fight on his grounds, bringing America’s soldiers, it’s young, to that part of the world where Bin-Laden could muster his forces to maximum effect. The strategy of the terrorists who attacked first overseas and then in the United States was based on the assumption that American conviction of its power would guarantee the response they wanted. The great powerful doors would open and America would march forth to meet him in battle on his terms where he is strongest, although one doubts that bin-Laden expected his great luck in that the hubris of America’s leaders would lead to an attack on Iraq, a country where he and his forces had been widely rejected and held at bay by the secular dictator in power. It would have taken a wise leader in the United States to have seen bin-Laden’s strategy ahead of time and realized the outcome the United States in now facing in Iraq and increasingly will face in Afghanistan. It would have taken foresight.
And now we move forward about ten years and are faced with increasingly outrageous cruelty and attacks, most recently on Paris. What could be the motive of such actions by ISIS? Does Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi believe that the world will respond by bowing to his claimed divine status, to convert to his “religion” and to live by the rules of sharia law—doubtful. What is more likely is to goad us, his enemies, into responding to his beheadings and his massacres by opening the powerful doors of our forts and marching forth into his lands thereby giving him credibility in his opposition to our power and without question increasing his own.
