[BlackGriffen]

Most here are familiar with the story of Heracles' battle with the Hydra, right? For those who aren't, I'll summarize. One of the twelve tasks of Heracles was to slay the multi-headed beast, Hydra. Every time he cut off a head, two new heads would grow out to take the place of the severed head. In order to win, Heracles had to use a flame to cauterize the wounds before they could regenerate into new heads.

Frankly, I see a parallel between this old myth and the current "War" on Terror. The question, then, is how do we "cauterize the wound" to prevent two new terrorists from springing up for every one we take out of commission?

One thought that I had is that we should use public trials wherever possible, certainly more than we are now. The idea behind this is that a trail should at least mitigate the motivation of family members to seek revenge.

There is also an interesting global perspective WoT here, reproduced below (emphasis added to paragraphs of interest):

AN AGITPROPERTIES EXCLUSIVE: We are honored to present our new column, A TROOPER SPEAKS, to provide our readers with some fresh insight into the military situation overseas from someone uniquely qualified...and we mean really uniquely qualified.

"Anonymous" is an Army intelligence officer who has served several years on active duty and as a reservist, in various units from airborne infantry to strategic level. He is currently on reserve status - "one weekend a month my ass", he says - after nearly two years participating in Operations Noble Eagle, Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom in both Afghanistan and Iraq.


"Anonymous" can be reached at this e-mail address.


On one of its internal media networks, the U.S. Army has a collection of video clips and images that comprise what might be called the “Taliban Greatest Hits” compilation. Gleaned from various sources, they are a gruesome, graphic depiction of life under the Taliban regime.

As an intelligence analyst working in Afghanistan, the collection was required viewing - “know your enemy” and all that…

There is one video that haunts me still. It records for posterity one of the many horrific orgies of execution that the Taliban engaged in. In the video, Afghan opponents of the Taliban are bound and laying face up on the ground. Their grinning executioners come into view, pull their victim’s heads back, and begin cutting their victim’s throats with hacksaws. Their necks open up in rivers of blood, and their laughing executioners continue until their heads are sawed off completely. Their mouths are not gagged, and their faces contort into screams as the saws complete their grim work. Thankfully, there was no sound on the video, but I could well imagine.

As an intelligence type you are trained and paid to imagine many things. Your job is to get inside your opponents’ head and figure out what he’s going to do next. What motivates him? What keeps him going or make him quit? What will make him side with you or turn against you?

It takes imagination to understand life under the sound of American guns, jets streaking overhead, unsure of and fearful of what the future holds. It takes imagination to guess what would motivate someone to laughingly hacksaw someone’s head off in the name of their god. It takes imagination to chart your way through the troubled times in which we live.

Unfortunately, imagination is the one thing our President lacks.

G.W. Bush prides himself in his black and white view of the universe. Someone ought to invent a new drinking game. Take a shot every time Bush says “evildoer” in one of his speeches. You’ll get so drunk you fall out of your chair.

Our President espouses a simplistic worldview in strict terms of good versus evil _ “we’re good, they’re bad”. You are either with us or against us, and if you’re against us, “bring it on”. This leaves no room for subtlety or nuance in foreign policy. Of course you probably already believe this or you wouldn’t be reading this article.

It is Bush’s lack of imagination that will lose the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and ultimately leave the Middle East in control of Islamic extremists. He is playing into the hands of the Bin Ladens of the world and is too dumb to understand why.

Military doctrine teaches you to attack the center of gravity. Clausewitz (that famous dead German that military officers like to quote) defined the center of gravity as “the hub of all power and movement on which everything depends.” Attack the center of gravity, and you destroy your enemy’s ability to wage a synchronized fight. It takes an imaginative analyst to identify and target the enemy’s true center of gravity.

Our terrorist enemies have done this. They understand that it is nearly impossible to win any kind of meaningful victory on a conventional battlefield. They understand that America’s center of gravity is public support for military action. Erode their public support, and the infidel occupiers will leave. “Blackhawk Down” is the military paradigm for them. If the lead story every night in the U.S. media is another dead soldier without progress of any kind in Iraq or Afghanistan, eventually our politicians will feel compelled to urge withdrawal or demand that the military take action to reduce casualties. Demands for a reduction in casualties will result in a “bunker” mentality or overly aggressive raids and strikes that will inevitably sway more people to join the “insurgents”. Either way is a “win-win” situation for the enemy.

Our enemy’s center of gravity is not that much different from our own. His ideology is that from which everything else flows. The hacksaw executioners cannot be cubby-holed into “evildoers”, bombed, and then forgotten. Something motivated them to do this. They believed that what they were doing was right and they held a country hostage to their ideals. Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda believe that they are right. They are doing the work for their religion, their culture and their race - and many, many people in the world believe their cause is just.

Victory in the war on terror cannot be merely defined in terms of body counts, numbers of detainees, and bank accounts seized. If people believe in the ideology, there will always be more “holy warriors”, more money and more violence. The real metric (to quote one of Donald Rumsfeld’s favorite terms) to measure our success in the war on terror is by assessing how other nations and cultures view America and our actions in the world. If America is seen as a benevolent force for good and progress in the world, then their ideology does not hold sway. If America is seen as a brutish thug hell-bent on more destruction, then the ideology-meter gets pegged in the red, and the secret training camps and bank accounts grow ever fuller. Can you guess where we’re at right now?

How can we attack the ideology? Maybe attack isn’t the right word. Erode? Change? First and foremost, we have to disconnect ourselves from believing that the GWOT is solely a military conflict. It is not. I was an enthusiastic participant in Operation Enduring Freedom. I believed that our cause was right and just and that the Afghani people deserved better than the Taliban. I hoped that the hacksaw squad was rotting in a bomb crater somewhere.

Instead, I looked on as Operation Iraqi Freedom stripped away assets, attention, and focus from Afghanistan so that the “coalition of the billing” could have their payday in Iraq. I watched as the Taliban used this ideological boost to fuel their summer offensive, and looked on helplessly as the casualty reports brought me news of more dead friends in our misguided adventure along the Tigris.

As the recent elevation in the terror alert shows, for all the bombs dropped and blood spilled over the last two years, we aren’t really any safer. We haven’t impacted our enemy’s ability to wage his war. We haven’t impacted the ideology.

How do we do it? I think there are several bold solutions that this nation could take to change how we are viewed in the world. Here are just a few:

[End of article removed due to post length limit]

Yes, I know, the source is biased. Let try not to throw out the baby with the bath water, shall we? The man has good points, and shooting the messenger because you don't like his politics is myopic at best.

So, we all know how to cut the heads off the Hydra, but how is Heracles, the US, to cauterize the wound?

BlackGriffen

P.S. Private prediction - in spite of my best intentions, this thread will degenerate in to a flame war of the usual suspects within 10 posts, if it even gets that far.

[AKcrab]

Originally posted by BlackGriffen:
So, we all know how to cut the heads off the Hydra, but how is Heracles, the US, to cauterize the wound?

With our new "mini nukes"...
Oh wait, you meant it figuratively...

I think it is way too late. We've already made so many heads that cauterization is moot.

[DeathToWindows]

Apply bush in liberal amounts to stop bleeding and cellular regeneration.