Pipes: Op-Eds vs. Bullets

Daniel Pipes has written an editorial that just barely misses greatness. Its title? "Op Eds Now More Central in War than Bullets". Its strength is that it does a good job of pointing out that the current war is, more than anything else, a battle of ideas. Its weakness is that it does not go nearly far enough.

To understand what I mean, one need only ask a simple question after each of his first few paragraphs.

That question would be, "Why?"

Most notably, Pipes outlines "two premises [to earlier conflicts like World War II] so basic, they went nearly unnoticed." These were, (1) "Conventional armed forces engage in an all-out fight for victory." and (2) "Each side's population loyally backs its national leadership." The questions of why these premises used to go unnoticed and why they "are now defunct in the West" are interrelated and precisely what will need to be addressed before any meaningful progress is made in this war.

What Pipes does admirably is to observe these truths about the West as it currently is and make the following observation:

With loyalties now in play, wars are decided more on the Op Ed pages and less on the battlefield.

Good arguments, eloquent rhetoric, subtle spin-doctoring, and strong poll numbers count more than taking a hill or crossing a river. Solidarity, morale, loyalty, and understanding are the new steel, rubber, oil, and ammunition. Opinion leaders are the new flag and general officers. Therefore, as I wrote in August, Western governments "need to see public relations as part of their strategy."

Even in a case like the Iranian regime's acquisition of atomic weaponry, Western public opinion is the key, not its arsenal. If united, Europeans and Americans will likely dissuade Iranians from going ahead with nuclear weapons. If disunited, Iranians will be emboldened to plunge ahead.

As far as this goes, Pipes is right. (Except that insofar as "spin-doctoring" implies dishonesty, our side, insofar as it values its lives, doesn't need it.) The West is governed by the will of its people and they must be convinced that it is worthwhile to fight a war. We may have the armies and the munitions, but we won't use them if we are not convinced that doing so is necessary. This is precisely why the Moslems have any hope for their continued existence, let alone eventual victory. The Moslems know this, and Pipes is trying to get us to understand this dimension of the conflict.

Unfortunately, Pipes does not go far enough with this theme. He takes it for granted, for example, that, "As in crime-fighting, the side enjoying a vast superiority in power operates under a dense array of constraints, while the weaker party freely breaks any law and taboo in its ruthless pursuit of power."

Worse than apparently taking this state of affairs as a given (Would there even be terrorist cells if we turned a state sponsor or two into glass?), Pipes fails to consider why is this true. In World War II, the United States possessed the momentum in the war as well as atom bombs when it dropped not one, but two on Japan. Americans only a couple of generations ago had no problem being ruthless, but they do now. Why?

Part of the answer can be found in the fact that on top of taking "war-as-crime-fighting" for granted, Pipes gives such a shallow reason for the loyalty that citizens used to feel generally for their countries: "Traditionally, a person was assumed faithful to his natal community. A Spaniard or Swede was loyal to his monarch, a Frenchman to his republic, an American to his constitution."

Has Pipes forgotten that the loyalty of the American -- the citizen of the first country in human history to have scientifically contrived its own form of government -- differs in kind from that of his distant European forebears? Apparently so. Perhaps he should have noted a withering-away of the ideal of liberty (i.e., individual rights) among Westerners in general and the American people in particular while he was at it.

The American Revolution occurred long before World War II and the current war with the Fascists of Islam. Where were the loyalties of the American colonists then? They were predominantly, but not uniformly in favor of independence (while those in what would become Canada remained loyal to the Crown). Culturally, they understood the value of liberty to their ability to live good lives well enough to fight for it, which they did.

The American Revolution was no less a war of ideas than the current one. One need only consider Thomas Paine to see the need for and value of presenting intellectual arguments to the public leading up to a war. (And this need is not peculiar to war. Consider the fact that the Federalist Papers were another effort to present arguments to the public pertinent to a major undertaking, the ratification of the Constitution.) In both that war and in the current one, the most basic issue is the same: Why should we fight? And its answer, that we must be free to live lives proper to man is also the same.

So Pipes is right that the public in the West needs to be convinced that it should wage a war, but he is wrong not to wonder why it needs so much convincing and why it will not take the gloves off and decimate its pathetic enemy once and for all. If, as I agree, it was moral to drop the bomb on Japan in World War II, why do our policymakers (and many of our citizenry) now babble incessantly about "restraint" and "proportionality" on the part of their own side in this war?

It is because the irrational intellectual enemies of the West long ago laid the groundwork for a war of this kind by undermining our respect for reason, our appreciation for liberty, and our civilizational confidence. This is why we seem oblivious to the need to fight, confused about the propriety of fighting ruthlessly, and unsure of the justice of our cause. In short, our half-hearted prosecution of this war -- including the notion held even by hawks that we must show "restraint" -- is a direct result of ideas held by our citizens, ideas that are rendering them less-than-effective at waging war.

The fact that so many bad ideas are so widely accepted in the West is because corrupt intellectuals have been spreading them for so long. Ayn Rand long ago explained the vast power of ideas over historical events in this way:

The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher. The intellectual carries the application of philosophical principles to every field of human endeavor. He sets a society's course by transmitting ideas from the "ivory tower" of the philosopher to the university professor -- to the writer -- to the artist -- to the newspaperman -- to the politician -- to the movie maker -- to the night club singer -- to the man in the street. The intellectual's specific professions are in the field of the sciences that study man, the so-called "humanities", but for that very reason his influence extends to all other professions. Those who deal with the sciences studying nature have to rely on the intellectual for philosophical guidance and information: for moral values, for social theories, for political premises, for psychological tenets and, above all, for the principles of epistemology, that crucial branch of knowledge that makes all other sciences possible. The intellectual is the eyes, ears, and voice of a free society: it is his job to observe the events of the world, to evaluate their meaning and to inform the men in all other fields. [For the New Intellectual, p. 27]

America's intellectuals have largely failed or betrayed her for quite some time now. Our current sluggishness in this war is a direct result of this, and it will take more than op-eds or a single generation to undo the damage. We are damned lucky our enemy is so weak: We will need the time this buys us.

Yes, Pipes is right that those opinion makers who want us to win this war are vitally important. He just doesn't know how right he is.

-- CAV