The War We Forgot to Fight

Saul Singer sostiene que esta es una guerra que no se puede ganar defensivamente:

Here is my grand unified theory of the history of the universe:

— democracies show weakness;
— dictators are emboldened and attack;
— democracies respond slowly, insufficiently, or appease;
— dictators are further emboldened and attack harder;
— war;
— democracies win;
— start over again...

This is not original stuff. Alexis de Tocqueville knew it in 1835. Winston Churchill said as much in 1933. This pattern played out most dramatically when, just a few years after the “war to end all wars” — World War I — exhausted free nations appeased Germany, leading to World War II and the Holocaust.

In the Cold War cycle of this pattern we were spared the full force of a potential World War III because the wars were fought on a proxy level (Vietnam, Afghanistan), and eventually the Soviet Union imploded.

Now we are in World War IV, as Norman Podhoretz has pointed out, between what Tony Blair aptly calls Reactionary Islam and the rest of us. The first striking thing about this war is that we’ve managed to fall asleep at a relatively late stage of it.

This war actually began before the last one was over, with the Iranian revolution and the taking hostage of the U.S. embassy staff in 1979. The rise of Soviet-backed terrorism, including by the PLO against Israelis; the drain of proxy wars, and the Iran crisis all fed each other. An American resurgence of confidence in the 1980s turned the tide in WW III and, by the way, put WW IV on hold — but all it took was for the West to rest on its laurels in the 1990s for WW IV to resume where it had left off.

During the 1990s, Osama bin Laden not only took American diplomats hostage, he blew them up. The U.S. responded mainly by turning its embassies into fortresses. This finally led to the full war phase, starting with 9/11 and continuing through the toppling of radical regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But then we stopped.

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