Making War Against a Tribal Culture

In the season of Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn we appreciate that primitive man was not a noble savage but a savage killer. Now the excellent Mark Steyn has read Wade and written

that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people."

That sort of information is useful when you are thinking about the tribal mores of the Islamist terrorists. Robert D. Kaplan has read Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias by Richard H. Shultz Jr. and Andrea J. Dew and the Islamist way of war seems very like the way described by Wade.

While the U.S. spends billions of dollars on sophisticated defense systems, the dime-a-dozen kidnapper and suicide bomber have emerged as the most strategic weapons of war.

And that gets back to Lee Harris and his western team vs. the “eternal gang of ruthless men.”

The symmetry of “asymmetric war” is that the ruthlessness of the terrorists fits the reluctance of the west to target civilians. And so the terrorists hide behind civilians and assassinate civilians and terrorize civilians.

Eventually, of course, the west will tire of its forebearance. It is the nature of war that what seems unthinkable at the beginning is committed without a qualm by the end. The British were outraged by German bombing in 1940 but leveled Hamburg with firebombing in 1944.

No doubt that is how the War on Terror will end up. The terrorists use terror because it is their only weapon. But it is terrible only so long as it is discrete enough to make the cable TV news. In a general war, terror loses its power to terrorize.