Readers of this site will know that I posted an earlier defense of Lieutenant General W.G. 'Jerry' Boykin. In my ever-ongoing search for controversy, I went and asked a practicing Muslim what their read on Boykin's comments was. The answer came quickly, and it had several angles, two of which are listed below:

1. A negative effect on non-Christian servicemen.
2. The effect when he deals with Islamic counterparts in rest of world.

1. My conversational companion suggested Boykin's remarks tended to indicate that we had a 'Christian army', when this was obviously not the case. It was specifically mentioned that we had Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, et cetera, and (more generally) that it had a negative effect on those troops who don't show up for Sunday school.

I saw the point, but I'm not convinced. Maybe servicemen in the audience could weigh in on this; I'm not a soldier so I'm not entirely aware of the "world" in which the soldier lives and fights.

That point didn't sway me so much as the next one, and even then, the sway only came because I like to think of myself as looking at foreign policy and so forth through a cold-eyed realpolitik lense in the model of Richard M. Nixon and Dr. Henry A. Kissinger. (There is, of course, also present what one of my college professors noted as a 'Reaganistic idealism about the world that you seem to have woven with hard-nosed realism'. He was decidedly neither Republican nor conservative, so I'm not sure that it came as a compliment. However, I chose to take it as one.) Anyways, on to the next point:

2. I don't want to sound like I'm waffling on this subject, but we're in a new kind of war, one that isn't just us versus the Germans or us versus the Russians and whoever they could rope together. We're in a war with an enemy whose potential population base, if you will, could be upwards of a billion people scattered all over the globe and into our own country. Any one of those individuals who seeks to 'enlist' in the army of al-Qaeda doesn't have to make his way to the capital of al-Qaeda, 'jine the cavalry', and take up arms in a foreign land and fight on foreign soil. With the click of a mouse or a call on a phone, a man could serve al-Qaeda without ever leaving the comforts of home. This is a problem.

In the past, we had clearly identified nation-state actors to peg as the aggressors. Now, we face a nebulous foe with no centralized capital, no infrastructure of its own to pulverize with an air campaign, and no traditional formations to engage with our own superb conventional weapons.

Rather, we face a shadowy foe who strikes at his discretion and melts away into various corners of the world. Previously, if we wanted the U-boats to stop torpedoing American ships in the North Atlantic, we crushed Germany. That's a great model, but it doesn't help much against a supranational movement that reaches around the world.

To apply the previous model, one would literally have to invade every nation that harbored these al-Qaeda fanatics, and probably wind up garrisoning the bloody planet. That isn't going to work, for a variety of reasons. One of the largest problems is that these guys aren't clearly state-sponsored. If they were, rhe sponsor would probably suffer the fate of Afghanistan. Phrased differently, if there was for example, "Osamaland", we would have wiped it out and come home some time in December 2001, confident in the success of our mission.

Instead, the more economical, more practical, and more viable method is to work with the country that is "infected" with al-Qaeda members to purge the victim country, through legal, political, or military means. This means close coordination of American forces and assets with other-national assets, namely the victim country's security service, intelligence service, and perhaps the armed forces. That requires the American coordinator to be someone who can "do business" with whoever his (and I mean a man; I doubt a lot of these countries where a major al-Qaeda presence is going to take root would welcome the sight of a female general officer) counterpart is on the ground in the country.

If it's an Islamic country and Jerry Boykin goes there, the guy on the ground is probably not going to be as eager to cooperate with America in general or Boykin in particular. The al-Qaeda boys will be darned sure to get the message out that America has sent a man who hates Islam (the usual...) and is a crusader who's managed to survive the past nine hundred years and still marches under the banner of Richard the Lion-Hearted. Unfortunately, we cannot afford giving al-Qaeda the opportunity to say that---we can't give them any extra advantages that they don't already have.

Therefore, it is with considerable irritation and regret that I have to reverse an earlier position and suggest that General Boykin be reassigned in a manner that would get him out of the position he's in now, solely to deny al-Qaeda the opportunity to use him against the country I, and I am certain he, loves. I absolutely don't want the guy punished---just a 'tsk tsk, Jerry' and make sure his career survives, because the read on him that I've gotten is that this nation owes him a debt of thanks for many risky and dangerous missions.

Posted by: Country Pundit at 10:40 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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