Sucker Punched

          7 Dec 1941                                                                                            11 Sep 2001

Wednesday, on Facebook, friend and fellow Air Force veteran Ron asked me this -

Chris, you are a historical Uberexpert. How many successful countries in history have acted so ineffectively against a 9-11 style attack as we have?

While I don't claim to be an "Uberexpert," like Tyrion Lannister, I drink and I know things. Paid attention back when history, as opposed to Leftist propaganda, was taught in the schools, I did. Years later and multiple history books under my belt later, I can put two and two together and often arrive at an answer of four. Not always, but usually.

Before I attempt to answer Ron's very good question, I'd like to offer up a little background.

War has changed radically in the last 100 years or so. Once upon a time you could identify your enemy with a certain clarity. If the uniform being worn by the other fellow was a different color, odds are he was the enemy. (And in the "old days" the enemy was invariably a male.) Now this wasn't always the case, French troops in the Iberian Peninsula from 1808 to 1812 could never tell if the peasants they saw during the day, minding their own business (or trying to), would be the guerrillas that would cut their throats later in the night.

Once civilians became involved, normally in response to an invader, all bets were off. Reprisals were taken to convince the population to "go along to get along" which almost never worked. Brutality and bloodshed followed and over the decades escalated.

The Germans with their Schrecklichkeit* in Belgium in 1914 to their Einsatzgruppen** in Russia in 1941. The French and the mujaheddin in Algeria, the Russians and the mujaheddin in Afghanistan (and now the United States), the Viet Cong in Vietnam (and sadly a number of American and Korean units), and many other instances of a civilian population taking up arms and being suppressed, often brutally, by uniformed units of an enemy power.

World War II saw, in my reckoning, the first large scale, deliberate targeting of civilians as an objective or war. (No doubt many a Southerner would bring up Shermans' March to the Sea at some point, I might tend to agree with them. It's the scale of the thing which makes a difference, no doubt to a dead civilian in Atlanta, or a dead civilian in Dresden, the "scale" has no bearing whatsoever.)

World War II saw the last instance (for now) of nearly literally the entire world at war. Casualties were in the millions, military and civilian, cities across vast swathes of the globe were laid in ruins, their inhabitants dead or made homeless. The first time some external force "sucker punched" the United States, in this case Imperial Japan, two nations were ground down, their armies butchered, their civilians slaughtered until only one stood in defiance of the Allied powers. The very nation which had thrown that first punch. That nation faced this...

Trinity

The first man-made nuclear explosion,

16 July 1945.

The Japanese refused to surrender, so the United States employed two nuclear weapons to end the war. The first at Hiroshima, the second at Nagasaki. The war ended. While in truth the world was in shock over the events from 1939 to 1945, the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki left many even on the winning side in shock. That sort of devastation from a single bomb was unprecedented.

Albert Einstein is said to have stated -

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

The implication being, of course, that another world war would undoubtedly lead to the employment of nuclear weapons which would cause the death and destruction of World War II to pale in comparison.**** There may not be enough humans left after such a conflagration to have a fourth world war!

So, the United States was sucker punched in 1941, then again in 2001. The second time was by a group of non-state actors, they probably did have assistance from one or more nations, I think we all know which ones without stating the obvious.

Who do we go after? Their was no nation to go after, Afghanistan and Iraq were simply there. Yes, the Taliban are bad, yes, Saddam Hussein was bad, did they bear any direct responsibility for the 9/11 attacks? Probably not, terrorist training camps in Afghanistan predate the 9/11 attacks, as to Iraq? I simply can't say. Though using an incident such as attacks on civilians as a pretext to solve a totally different problem have long been a tool in international Machtpolitik, for better or worse.

Now back to Ron's question -

Chris, you are a historical Uberexpert. How many successful countries in history have acted so ineffectively against a 9-11 style attack as we have?

I cannot think of another instance in history of any country suffering a 9/11 attack, to wit, an attack by non-state religious fanatics launching a deliberate attack meant to kill thousands of civilians. Yes, Israel experiences these kind of attacks, on a much smaller scale, nearly every day. Israel's response is to target those responsible, as much as possible, and try to interdict future attacks by attacking the terrorists in their home territories.

The enemy in Israel is often plain to see, they dress differently, they speak a different language, their culture is different, and they are right next door. Hard to miss.

With 9/11 who should we have attacked? Their was no nation state to point at and demand that the culprits be surrendered to American justice.

I would make the argument that no country in history, successful or otherwise, has ever suffered a 9/11 style attack like we saw in this country 18 years ago. That attack in its suddenness and its scale was unprecedented.

The only effective approach to such an attack involves covert warriors acting behind the scenes, acting with sudden shocking brutality to kill those behind the attack and those who supported the attack. Due to the classic politician's need to show the populace, "look, we're doing something," we got the wars we are still fighting today.

Could we have done what the KGB allegedly did in Lebanon back in the '80s?

Background:

On September 30, 1985, a group of gunmen seized four Soviet diplomats and embassy workers (Arkady Katkov, Valery Myrikov, Oleg Spirin, and Nikolai Svirsky) in Beirut. During the kidnapping right outside the embassy, Katkov was wounded in the leg.

Alleged KGB Action:

[T]he KGB kidnapped a man they knew to be a close relative of a prominent Hezbollah leader. They then castrated him and sent the severed organs to the Hezbollah official, before dispatching the unfortunate kinsman with a bullet in the brain.

In addition to presenting him with this grisly proof of their seriousness, the KGB operatives also advised the Hezbollah leader that they knew the identities of other close relatives of his, and that he could expect more such packages if the three Soviet diplomats were not freed immediately. (Source)

Apocryphal or not, that's one way to deal with non-state actors. Do we have the military and covert skill to do such a thing? Do we have the men and women who can and would take such action? Of course we do, on both counts.

Do we have the political leadership with the cojones to do such a thing, without announcing it to the world? No, we do not.

Would the American people understand and tolerate such actions taken in their name? I know many who would, but I also fear that most wouldn't understand and that whatever happened our media would lie about it.

A tough question Ron, there are no simple answers.



* Schrecklichkeit, terror or frightfulness, using deliberate atrocities to try and frighten the populace into submission.
** Einsatzgruppen, Special Action Groups, groups of uniformed thugs behind the lines whose job was to murder intellectuals, Jews, and other "undesirables."
*** The Chinese involvement with their would-be Japanese conquerors was rather longer, at least from 1937, some argue earlier than that. China alone lost millions, mostly civilians.
**** It is worth noting that the Soviet military did not consider the use of nuclear weapons in quite the same vein we did. They viewed them as simply a more devastating type of artillery or air launched weapon.