Is the War on Terrorism like World War III or Cold War II?

William Safire has up an interesting piece on Townhall.Com which raises the question of just how seriously we are taking the war in Iraq. He cites a piece from a prominent sociologist who notes that we are spending less on our military - as a percentage of GNP - than we did in the year 2000, when we were at peace. He goes on to question whether we can really hope to win this war on the cheap, when in World War II we were spending upwards of 30% of our GNP on the military. Essentially, he makes the argument that we need to dig in for a World War II-style conflict, where we use all of our resources to combat terrorism everywhere and anywhere.



The problem in my mind is that the War on Terrorism looks a whole lot more like the Cold War to me. We are fighting an ideological enemy who only really cares about territorial gains insofar as they deprive the enemy of further support. And like the Cold War, flare-ups are most likely to be found on other than the home soil of either side (i.e. Afghanistan and Iraq, rather than USA and Saudi Arabia). This kind of war is not fought like World War II - with a complete military mobilization of the populace - because success is as much defined by economic strength and the appearance of normalcy as anything else. Diverting 1/3 of the economy to the military wing of the conflict would be like diverting all of the personnel in the FBI to field work. It'd get a lot of criminals busted, but none of them convicted. We are better off learning from the lessons of the Cold War:

1. Peace Thru Strength: Mutually assured destruction actually did work in the Cold War. The Cuban missile crisis was resolved without significant bloodshed, because both sides knew the horror of nuclear action. If the terrorists know pushing us too far could result in a nuke in Tehran or Tora Bora, they will likely keep their battles off of our soil. They will fight and they will kill, but they will do so from safety.


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2. Free Press Is Essential: While both the Right and Left may complain about an unrestrained press's excesses, it is absolutely essential to the dissemination of ideas and the presentation of truth. While we lost the Vietnam War, we won the battle of ideas with Communism because we were beaming our messages across borders by radio and the Soviet press could not hide every American advantage. Without a free press even in such hard places as Iraq - which includes such opposition press as Al-Jazeera and Al-Aribia - we can not win.



3. Victory of Ideas Is Demonstrated, Not Enforced from Without: The Soviet Union fell because (a) their economy could not keep up with ours, and (b) their people knew that things were better in the West. The Soviet Union spent millions indoctrinating children from their first breath into the ideals of Communism and the Motherland. Their program of education is certainly superior to that taught in the Madrassahs of Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, and yet ultimately it failed to convince because every contact with the West showed the superiority of outcome. The terrorist philosophy is a cancerous one which kills societies. Just see the Palestinian territories for evidence of this. We don't need to go to war with every Islamic or Arab nation to prove our superiority. Just put the information out there, and let the people decide which society they'd rather have.



4. Proxy Wars Are Not Evil: The domino theory has been much maligned as leading us into the "quagmire" of Vietnam. But by fighting our violent wars in places far from home, we allowed the home front to remain strong while letting off the pressure of political anger that naturally built up over time. Better a hundred small wars over time, than one nuclear/biological/chemical war that wipes out millions. Let the enemy waste their resources fighting battles for patches of desert, while we keep the economy and our freedoms strong here.

I am sure there are other important lessons from the Cold War, but those are probably the most critical ones for the moment. Let's remember that the Cold War was still a real war, and our victory there no less sweet for it having come without any declared war between the U.S. and the S.U. Let's use these lessons on Cold War II, and come to a similar victory.