Orson Scott Card's War Plan

You can find this at http://www.rhinotimes.com/story01.html. The Rhino is a local weekly conservative paper. Card is a "famous" science fiction writer and a resident here. This is pretty long but I think worth it.

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Part 1

War Can Be Won
By Orson Scott Card, Special to The Rhino Times

I am not interested in retribution. I don't think "justice" is remotely achievable. This war is not between good and evil -- we're not perfect, and many of those attacking us are sincere and, by their understanding of the moral universe, "good."
What this war is about is simple: We have to eliminate the ability of our enemies to attack us again.

This is a defensive war. We don't want to acquire anybody's territory. We don't want to rule over other nations. We just want to stop those who are murdering our people from having the ability to do so again.

I am encouraged about our chance of victory whenever I hear our leaders speak of holding the nations that sponsor terrorism as responsible as the terrorists themselves.

But I am discouraged whenever I hear someone say, "We will find the perpetrators of this crime and bring them to justice."

As Benjamin Netanyahu recently pointed out, without government sponsorship of terrorism, it would dry up almost immediately. The terrorists exist because governments want them to. Those governments are our enemies; the terrorists are merely their soldiers.

And as long as nations like Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Syria, and pseudo-states like the Palestinian Authority encourage and support terrorists operating within their territory, it will make no difference at all whether we find one particular terrorist or another.

 

Part 2

The War They Want Us to Fight

In fact, the last thing we should do is search for Osama bin Laden and try to "bring him to justice."

That would do nothing but make a hero and martyr out of him.

Furthermore, searching for individual terrorists and trying to "root them out" is precisely the kind of war our enemies want us to wage, because it will make us look as stupid, weak, and ineffectual as a man chasing his hat in a wind. Such a war can never be won, because even if we win, we lose.

The only way to win this war is to convert it into the kind of war we can win -- a war against organized governments living off the taxes paid by their hardworking, peaceful citizens.

That means that the most pointless thing to do, after searching for bin Laden himself, is to attack Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a nation only in name. No one can govern it, not its native-born "leaders" and certainly not a foreign army. The Russians found it out, and so will we. All we can ever hope to do is behead it -- but with its current government now in hiding, there is simply no point in sending a single soldier into Afghan territory ... for the time being.

Which is not to say Afghanistan should get a free ride. We need to embargo all foreign funds flowing to the Afghan government and end all international flights into and out of the country. Declaring and enforcing a no-fly zone over Afghanistan should do the job. Without foreign money and support, the Taliban government would have to deal with its many powerful rivals within Afghanistan on more equal terms. They probably won't last long in power. It wouldn't hurt for us to provide arms and money to some of those rivals, of course. If all the terrorists in Afghanistan have to reach the outside world by truck or camel, they'll soon stop operating from that haven.

But we should not drop a single bomb or fire a single missile into Afghanistan. We would only end up hurting innocent civilians who know nothing about what the government has been doing in their name. The terrorist camps have already been disbanded and the terrorists are almost certainly out of the country already.

 

Part 3

Do We Really Mean It?

Beyond Afghanistan, if we are serious about fighting terrorism, we need to fight the nations that are deeply and immediately dangerous -- nations that can be conquered and which it is in the interest of world peace to conquer. This is not because we have anything against the citizens of these nations. Even the citizens who are most rabidly anti-American feel that way because they have been consistently lied to by their leaders.

Our war is with their governments. Our purpose must be to eliminate those governments and replace them with governments that will not tolerate terrorists operating in their territory.

The most urgent targets of our military action must be Iran and Iraq. Both countries, though they hate each other, are working feverishly to develop nuclear weapons, deadly gases, biological weapons, and intercontinental missiles. If you thought the World Trade Center bombing was bad, just wait until anthrax is released in Chicago, or Los Angeles is nuked by a bomb in a van on Pico Boulevard.

But at our present state of military readiness, we must select first a more easily taken objective, just as North Africa and Sicily were invaded in World War II long before we were ready to attack Normandy on D-Day. Naturally, air strikes to neutralize the air forces of all our enemies are essential, but ground forces should only be committed where we are ready to deal with the enemy we would face.

The obvious first target for ground action is Sudan. This nation harbors and actively supports terrorists, and its government is waging vicious religious wars against its non-Muslim minorities. This means that within Sudan there are large populations that would hail us as deliverers and we would have immediate support from them. Once Sudan was under occupation, we could use it as a base of operations against other, more difficult targets.

The second project must be to cease our ridiculous pressure on Israel to be "nice" to the Palestinians. While the Palestinian people have legitimate grievances -- many of which are actually caused by other Arab governments -- it is wrong of us to insist that Israel try to negotiate with, and tolerate within such close proximity, a "nation" that is headed by the most committed group of terrorists in the world.

In order to try to keep Americans fooled, Arafat's thugs threaten reporters with death if they broadcast pictures of Palestinians cheering and demonstrating their support for bin Laden. But the fact is that Arafat and his cronies routinely kill their political enemies within Palestine, making Palestine the equivalent of the first state governed by the mafia, while they actively and publicly support the suicide bombers who have been doing to Israel, admittedly on a smaller scale, precisely what was just done to us.

We won't tolerate it, and we should stop asking Israel to tolerate it.

 

Part 4

Some Governments Can't Be Tolerated

Any nation that insists on being led by terrorists and has no respect for the rights of other countries has no right to have a national government at all. The Palestinians may long for a state, but they cannot be allowed to have one until they show that they reject the murder of civilians of other countries as an instrument of state policy.

Right now, the only outcome the Palestinians will accept is the complete destruction of the state of Israel and the slaughter of all Jews who do not flee their native land. And no matter what Arafat has said to the West, within the Arab community he has never changed this goal and neither have his supporters.

And if I am wrong, and Arafat actually deplores terrorism, the only possible conclusion we can reach is that he is helpless to control the terrorists within his borders, which means that his Palestinian Authority is not a legitimate government and still not worth negotiating with.

In either case, the Palestinian Authority has kept none of the promises it made in the Oslo agreement. It waits for Israel to comply with some part of the treaty and then immediately demands more concessions before it will begin to hold up its own end of the bargain.

Israel can no longer be expected to deal with such a "government." While we are eliminating the genocidal terrorist government of Sudan, Israel should be allowed to reassert control over the West Bank and Gaza, and arrest the Palestinian leaders while they investigate to sort out which of them, if any, are innocent of involvement with terrorism and thuggery.

Israel will be under great pressure, as it was during the Gulf War, not to do such a thing, as it would provoke moderate Arab nations. But the fact is that those "moderate" Arab nations have no power to stop those who routinely slaughter Israeli citizens peacefully going about their business.

And as for the suffering Palestinians, it would be interesting to have the statistics on just how many of the Palestinians killed by Israelis were actively engaged in terrorism or in assaulting Israeli troops. Murder of innocent civilians has never been Israeli government policy; it has always been the policy of the Palestinian Authority. I think the difference is clear and should guide our policy.

The more lenient Israel has been with the Palestinians, the more Israelis have died. You do the math

 

Part 5

Attack the Governments, Not the People

Regardless of what is done vis-a-vis Palestine and Israel, however, we must never lose sight of the fact that as long as Iraq and Iran continue with their present governments, which are committed to building weapons that will allow them to slaughter far more Americans than died on Sept. 11, our war will never be over.

In World War II, we knew that no negotiated peace was acceptable. Having entered into the war, we knew that the complete conquest of Germany and Japan was required in order to eliminate the possibility of the war reviving after a brief recovery period.

Likewise, if our goal is to eliminate terrorism from the worldwide terrorism network, our only acceptable goal is the complete removal from power of all the governments that support terrorism.

That means that Saudi Arabia must stop paying its ransom-like contributions to terror organizations or terror-supporting governments. It means that Iraq must be conquered -- and, remember, there are populations there that would welcome us as deliverers, though after the Gulf War they will be skeptical about trusting us to help them till they see American troops on the ground.

It also means that Iran must be conquered, or its present government overthrown. It is always possible in any of the terrorist nations that, seeing what happens to Sudan and others (like Libya) as we proceed step by step to eliminate the governments sponsoring terror, either their governments will radically change policy and eliminate the terrorists from their midst, or the people or the military will eliminate the government that has provoked American intervention.

But if there is no such revolution -- and we can hardly count on it -- we will have to invade Iran. Iran is not Iraq. The terrain is far more difficult. The enemy is far smarter (Iraq, after all, had the crippling problem of being led by a truly stupid man; Iran does not have that curse, though it has the perhaps worse curse of being led by committee).

Remember, though, that our goal is to eliminate their ability to hurt us, and if we drive the fanatical Persian leadership into the poverty-stricken hills and take control of the urbanized areas of Iran, we have achieved our objective. Once we have defeated their regular armies and allowed the vast majority of Iranians, who loathe this repressive regime after having suffered under it for 21 years, to regain control of their own country, we can withdraw and merely support them as they deal with their own guerrilla war against the remnants of their former murderous government.

If the mountains of Afghanistan and the hills of Iran were the only place where terrorists could find safe harbor and funding, the world at large would be safe from terrorism.

It is Arab oil money and nations like Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and the urbanized parts of Iran that make terrorism possible and ever more dangerous.

And those sources of support can be removed by removing the governments that now lead them. There may even, in some distant century, be a Muslim somewhere who thanks us for breaking the back of the fanatical Muslim terror movements which, after all, terrify the relatively rational and civilized governments of nations like Egypt and Jordan, Morocco and Algeria

 

Part 6

War Is Not Free

On our side, the sacrifices will be enormous. In the first place, oil rationing would have to begin immediately, for even if some Arab countries wanted to continue to supply us with oil, the first act of our terrorist enemies would be to shut down our oil supply from the Middle East. If we spend all our resources protecting oil, we'll lose. We have to carry the war to the enemy and supply our own oil for the war and for our domestic economy. Get used to the idea right now -- part of our war effort will be building urban rail systems powered by coal-, wind-, water-, and solar-generated electricity. We will have to walk more.

We will quickly get rid of some of our fantasies, too, like co-ed basic training for our soldiers. An effective army has to have soldiers who are all at their physical peak. Squads can only move as fast as their slowest member. Only the rare women who can physically keep up with average but well-trained men can even be considered for combat, and even then, our innate chivalry will make women a liability as soldiers are unable to move on and take objectives or retreat under fire because they cannot -- it's built into the species -- let a woman undergo the same risks or pains as they can tolerate allowing a male comrade to suffer.

And young American men will die.

But since they're dying anyway in our airplanes and skyscrapers and streets, along with old men and women and children, the choice is whether to ask them to run the risk of dying where they can fight back and achieve safety for their nation, for their families. I know of few who would not prefer to fight the war on enemy soil, since the enemy is determined to make us fight it.

 

Part 7

The Cheap Way Out

There is another choice. We can, right now, have peace. All we have to do is join in the denunciation of Israel, remove all support from Israel, and declare that the only help we'll give Israel is to provide as much shipping as possible to help them evacuate all their citizens from the Middle East and bring them to America to start a new life.

Why, we could probably make such a course of action seem downright noble.

And when Israel rejects that course of action and fights it out in a bloody holocaust in which the streets of Israel run with Jewish blood as, eventually, the sheer numbers of their enemies wear them down, we can say, "Tut-tut, it was their own choice, we offered them the chance to get away."

We can win our peace with their blood, their loss of nationhood. If that's the kind of people we are.

Or we can win it with our own sacrifices as we carry out the destruction of our enemies' ability to attack us.

What kind of nation would we be if we let the Jews once again suffer at the hands of the would-be Hitlers whose tender mercy we have already seen on Sept. 11 in four airplanes, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and on other days with the USS Cole, the US embassies in East Africa, and the countless terrorist bombings and murders in Israel?


Part 8
Islam Is a Victim of These Terrorists, Too

Most Arabs and Muslims are decent, good people -- at least as good, on average, as we Americans are. They have an ancient civilization to which we owe an enormous debt, and they have great potential to be once again major contributors to the worldwide civilization of today.

Our war is only with the governments that oppress them, lie to them, and use the taxes extracted from them to try to murder innocent people in foreign lands.

We can win this war, if we understand what real victory would consist of and work and fight relentlessly to achieve that victory.

In my view, the last thing we want to do is arrest and execute Osama bin Laden. I want him to remain alive and free right to the end of the war, until his own people are so filled with hatred of him for what he has brought down upon their heads that they punish him themselves.

It is the hatred of his own people that is the only "justice" bin Laden will understand.

It is the utter and permanent failure of all his goals that will bring peace.

Anything short of that, and we will soon think back on Sept. 11 as only the beginning of our sorrows, and far from being the worst of them.

 

Card is Mormon; I don't know any implications of that.