The war on terror, as it is presently constituted, will fail. Not because of a lack of military might or strategy, but rather because we're forgetting the one great weapon that has won all previous wars we've been involved in: our culture.
A lot has been said about the Muslim outrage over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, and why not? It's a great storyline. It has an us-versus-them quality. It has a "free speech" element, which always fires people up. It even involves a righteous boycott of the Danish dairy industry, collateral damage if ever there was.
Nevertheless, the deeper meaning of the whole situation is really none of the above. Rather, the episode is a window into how we win wars - and how we could lose this one.
The war on terror, as it is presently constituted, will fail. The failure will not be from a lack of military might or strategy - that part of the war is actually going well enough, though you wouldn't know it from watching the television news. (For some, even one American casualty is too many.)
The breakdown of the war will not even be economic or political. Rather, the pending failure lies in the fact that we have not employed the one great weapon that has sealed the success of nearly every war in our past: our culture.
What we're really seeing from the recent Muslim outrage is our own nation being dragged into a religious war. We can pretend to analyze our way out of it, but if the Islamic community feels that we're fighting against each and every one of them, we'll soon find ourselves doing so - like it or not. And that's a bad thing. A really bad thing. Religious wars never end, and no one ever wins them.
Any student of basic world history could easily begin to draw a line- one I believe we are approaching quickly- where this war on terror devolves into the same religious war that has been going on among Christians, Muslims and Jews for millennia. Throughout American history, we've done a good job of not fighting that war. And for good reason: That war generally topples empires. This time around, however, we're foolishly being tempted into it.
You obviously need two sides to a religious war. America and the Western World are not a religion, right? That technically may be true, but the dilemma lies in the fact that we're beginning to fight the war on terror as a war of principle.
Religion and principle are really the same thing. When the administration speaks of "armies of compassion," "a God-given right to democracy" and the rest of the amorphous rhetoric that seems to be the entirety of the endgame strategy, its base reasoning is no different than fighting a war "because God told you to."
Speeches during World Wars I and II, as well the Cold War, were laden with similar rhetoric, but the rhetoric was merely window dressing on a real plan. These wars were a success because our enemies' nations rebuilt themselves on a framework of our own capitalist, secular culture. Neither Presidents Kennedy nor Reagan inspired the fall of communism among the populace as much as blue jeans and rock music did. The atomic bomb didn't prevent Japan from regrouping and continuing on as our enemy; the allure of corporate capitalism did.
