What if World War 3 has already started and nobody has noticed it?, Richard Fernandez (Wretchard) asks:
If conflict in the 21st century takes takes the form of intelligence operations and targeted assassinations is it really war any more? Maybe it’s illegal to attack a government but if you do it slowly, quietly enough, then no red lines are crossed; no Security Council resolutions are enacted.The Daily Telegraph quotes former British Labor Environment Minister as saying his party has been infiltrated by a secret cell of Islamists who are slowly but surely taking parts of it over.
“They are acting almost as an entryist organisation, placing people within the political parties, recruiting members to those political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power, whether it’s at local government level or national level,” he said.But Islamists aren’t the only ones who’ve discovered that it’s possible to conduct war by other means. The Weekly Standard described the extraordinary extent and success of the Administration’s Drone War. Kenneth Anderson says that America is policing the lawless parts of the world from the air with robots.
The Predator drone strategy is a rare example of something that has gone really, really well for the Obama administration. Counterterrorism “on offense” has done better, ironically, under an administration that hoped it could just play counterterrorism on defense — wind down wars, wish away the threat as a bad dream from the Bush years, hope the whole business would fade away so it could focus on health care. Yet for all that, the Obama administration, through Predator strikes, is taking the fight to the enemy.Anderson bemoans the Administration’s failure to put forward a legal doctrine under which it conducts this extraordinary program of targeted assassinations. But why should it? If the press doesn’t demand it and conservatives are content to watch the perps zapped then perhaps it is better not mentioning it at all.
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America’s enemies may not have much in the way of lasers, satellites and missiles but on thing they have a lot of is a lack of scruples. And ruthlessness may be the one military commodity worth anything any more on our politically correct planet. Maybe the reason Kenneth Anderson will never get his wish is that it is so much more convenient to deny you did it rather than to ask for permission. The basic principle of 21st century warfare is that that like CS Lewis’ devil it’s main aim is to convince everyone that it does not exist. The days of uniformed armies, navies and air forces may be numbered and in their place a world where disputes are settled by assassins, robotic or otherwise, cris-crossing the continents looking for a man with a problem.
Wretchard later cites the example of Chechen-separatist-turned-Russian-loyalist Sulim B. Yamadayev, who was shot and killed in Dubai — by a Man With a Golden Gun:
The killer fired three bullets from a gold-plated gun at the victim’s chest as Sulim Yamadayev climbed from his car in the private car park beneath his luxury residence in Dubai.… The March 28 murder was the latest apparent contract-killing in an extraordinary trail of blood leading from Chechnya that already stretched to Istanbul, Moscow and Vienna. And now the bustling emirate.Yamadayev was the fifth person to be murdered in recent months seen as an opponent of Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-appointed president of Chechnya, a mainly Muslim region of Russia’s southern fringe that fought two wars with Moscow.
Western armies and intelligences agencies are held to different standards than those of the rest of the world, Wretchard says:
This means that for the foreseeable future, the use proxies will be increasingly necessary to carry out operations. Caught between the Scylla of preventing attacks on their constituents and the Charybdis of maintaining their carefully manicured images, politicians may simply opt for cut-outs to perform electorally impermissible acts at acceptable PR costs. Political correctness has made decency an operational burden. Israel is a democracy it simply can’t do for reasons of frank military necessity what Chechnya might do on a whim. America’s laws mean that terrorists who recognize no law must given the the benefit of every due process, and more so to remove every suspicion they’re not getting their “rights”. There are some things they can’t do which their opponents can.Political correctness, which has already driven open debate on subjects like race, education and healthcare underground and substituted coded speech in its place, will increasingly substitute hypocrisy for morality in international affairs without reducing the brutality of the battlefield by one whit. But perhaps its purpose is to craft an asymmetric battlefield, not reduce its savagery. The terrible struggle will continue, each side playing by a different set of behavioral rules. To even things up, a reliance on proxies and combat drones plus the increasing use of euphemism and subterfuge are likely to be used to meet the touchy-feely requirements of the 21st century. The other side, with fewer material resources, will retain the advantage of being able to operate unapologetically. Ian Fleming who created the character of James Bond, described his first mission of his fictional hero as that of discrediting an enemy agent protected by the Press by the Rube Goldberg method of bankrupting him at the Casino Royale. James Bond may have had his Bentley, wholewheat toast, Tiptree “Little Scarlet” strawberry jam and china egg cups, but he could never do anything directly; and it was always his foes who had the advantage of terror, useful in the hard places of the world. And 007 would have lost too, even at the Casino Royale simply because things had to be just so. Strangely enough, one reason why the intellectuals of the West find their enemies so attractive is that they are so brutal. It’s the audacity that bewitches them.