A Rose Defeat

A Rose Defeat

Saturday, May 5, 2007

A former British General Officer has come out of the shadows of retirement to proclaim the terrorists and insurgents in Iraq should “resist” the “invaders” of their country. The invaders that former British SAS Commander Michael Rose is talking about are the United States and the US Armed Forces specifically. This has to be the first time in history that a former Field Grade British military officer would give an interview to the media and state that an ally should be defeated by a transnational Caliphate Jihadist totalitarian terrorist force supported by hostile nation-states of the same objective.

“Consensus thinking” absent scientific evidence for claims to support those positions is becoming a real problem with special interest individuals and groups that were the products of the Cold War. The current consensus group-think that has emerged in the west does not understand fundamentalist Islam, the objectives of Caliphate Jihadism, nor the War on Terrorism. To make matters even muddier and murky, General Rose tried to compare the war against Caliphate Jihadism to the British founding of the American colonies and the subsequent American Revolution which lasted through the War of 1812.

The American Revolution was due to a number of reasons, but chief among them was the mismanagement of the American colonies by the English. American colonists were viewed as second-class citizens compared to those from the island that housed the British Crown. American colonists had struggled for decades with little to no equal representation under the law since all judges in the colonies were positions purchased from the crown directly and filled with individuals that had direct interests in Britain, either family interests or business interests. The British monarchy knew that perfect agents for the crown could be developed by men with a stake remaining in England while performing a judiciary enforcement role over the colonies. Britain invested a large sum of money in the colonies and eventually wanted to tax those colonies at levels that it was taxing other surrogates around the world.

General Rose’s analysis that General Washington’s revolutionary “struggle” with Britain as the commander of the colonialist forces is somehow to be compared with the Caliphate Jihadist struggle against the west is erroneous and is the product of sophomoric consensus thinking that may be derived from a radical leftist perspective. General Washington was at one time a Commissioned Officer of the British Army, and led soldiers in war during Britain’s war with France during the French and Indian War in 1753. Now the colonists at that time contributed many young men and resources to fight that war on behalf of the monarchy and those folks bore the brunt of retaliatory attacks by the French-led Indians all along the frontier territories of the Hudson Valley. The French and Indian War culminated in a peace arrangement between France and England and the British monarchy made diplomatic resolutions with the French to return captured territory and other resources seized during the conflict. That was the nature of monarchial rule in Europe. In order to maintain a balance of power between states, it was not uncommon for those states to restore territories and previous boundary demarcations that became blurry when nation-state actors in conflict sought conflict resolution. To the colonists that supported the war however, theirs was the greatest sacrifice, and to see all gains transferred back to the British monarchy’s greatest enemy with the stroke of a quill didn’t sit well with England’s second-class citizens.

George Washington became one of those citizens. He commanded the Colonial Army with the intent of freeing the American colonies from oppressive English governance. The war resulted in freeing the American colonies from tyranny, as American soldiers have freed 25 million Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. American soldiers are also supporting a democratically-elected government in Iraq, not a tyranny. General Rose must admit that lawful authority at the nation-state level inside Iraq comes from that democratically-elected government and not from the Caliphate Jihadist terrorist insurgents that seek to destroy it, or more accurately, the individuals and groups seeking to overthrow democracy in Iraq that he claims are justified to do so.

With one telephone call to Iraq to talk to a soldier or two, the consensus opinion that General Rose espouses is all too common in such circles of influence. Pack up and leave Iraq to the wolves is the new policy choice, and yet this same circle of vocal individuals claims there will be some “diplomacy” mixed in there as well as the west must face their defeat. Sort of makes you wonder what types of concessions will be made to our mortal enemies in exchange for “peace”, or how many freedoms we will have to dispose of in order to live in a world where the terrorists won’t kill thousands of unsuspecting people per spectacular attack.

Comparisons with the Revolutionary War and Vietnam in terms of what will happen if the United States and Great Britain leave Iraq do not logically apply in the War on Terrorism. The Vietnamese did not follow America home after the Vietnam War because the Vietnamese were Stalinists who wanted to form a Marxist-Stalinist nation-state system that did not desire to move outside its own borders. The Vietnamese communists were satisfied with their own totalitarian police state and weren’t looking for any new worlds to conquer. The same can be said for the American colonists, but in a different context. The American colonists were seeking to free themselves from the tyranny of the English monarchy and had no intentions to invade England once the colonists freed themselves from English rule.

Caliphate Jihadism is a completely different animal, and Cold War era thinking won’t solve this problem. Caliphate Jihadism finds it unnatural to allow other human beings to live outside Sharia Law. In fact, any countries whose people live outside Sharia Law (totalitarianism) are apostate mechanisms that must be destroyed by Dar al Hab, the Caliphate Jihadist house of war. In Chechnya, for example, even with the complete liquidation of Chechen insurgent commanders, Dar al Hab calls transnational terrorists to fight there. The Russian Army continuously encounters Caliphate Jihadists from all over the world in Chechnya, which means that Caliphate Jihadism is a transnational problem that is not going away as long as the roots remain. We are talking about an unflagged army of suicidal martyrs that has transnational access and permissions and traveling to all Caliphate Jihadist conflict centers. It is a global war with global objectives and wishful thinking derived from “consensus” media sound bites isn’t going to make it go away, as retreating from Iraq will not make it go away.

The communist Vietnamese did not fly commercial civilian passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon, but Caliphate Jihadists did. The Caliphate Jihadists conducted this unsuspecting terrorist attack that killed thousands of innocent Americans even though on September 10, 2001, the United States was the largest contributor of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. The United States was also the primary mover in stopping the Genocide in Bosnia Herzegovina, when Northern Europe closed its borders and refused to allow Muslim refugees in that were the targets of genocide. Like other regions of the world, Europe is not immune to its own intolerant applications of diplomacy and racism, and Southern Europe has its own conflict-purposes in European intellectual circles amongst European elites. The same can be said for the refusal of the EU to admit Turkey into the organization. This is occurring because European centers of power think less of Muslim populations than they do their own, and war and conflict in Southern Europe, to the European intellectual, is the place to sort all that out, but when America defends itself from terrorism, the European intellectual must demand nothing but support for the Caliphate Jihadists and nothing short of defeat for the United States.

General Rose’s intellectual construct has but one critical flaw, as based upon his comments to the leftist media. He is thinking that Caliphate Jihadism isn’t a problem, and the Cold War era powers will resolve it through diplomacy. Now what the General needs to do is read up on nation-state building and revolutionary theory. Caliphate Jihadists are no longer going to allow themselves to be treated as agents of communism or capitalism, for that matter. They want to emplace a global system of governance according to instructions given to them by deity that are non-negotiable by humans outside their system. The Caliphate Jihadist system is totalitarian and it creeps over its subjected populations like a spider web until the police state mechanism of total control is formed. It is hostile to anything foreign to its own system and doesn’t tolerate criticisms, freedom of speech and thought, and freedom of religion.

In General Rose’s recommendation of retreat from the global War on Terrorism, he doesn’t explain how the application of diplomacy is going to turn the Caliphate Jihadist war off against the west. Surely that cannot mean complete surrender of the west to jihadists and the hostile nation-states that form them, as well as retreat and surrender in Iraq?

We keep hearing the word “diplomacy” in consensus thinker media articles. The problem can be solved with “diplomacy”. If that were true, what would be the foundation of such diplomacy? What do the Caliphate Jihadists want outside of remaking the global order, the establishment of global Sharia Law and a theocratic global Caliphate system of worship that will be mandatory for all human beings in the international community?

General Rose didn’t explain the nature of the diplomacy that is to be initiated to resolve the War on Terrorism, but I suspect he thinks that is the best option (and really the last option in retreat and surrender) considering the nature of the war the west faces in Caliphate Jihadism.

Or could the General be advocating “acceptance of terms” from the terrorists? When a nation-state surrenders in war and accepts defeat that is what the nation-state does. It accepts “terms” from the victor. That nation-state is told what to do by its enemy.

That is not “diplomacy”. That is surrender.

Christopher Farmer

MS, National Security

To comment about this article, please use our forum!