Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [194]
This is the time in a book when I get to remove my careful-observer cap and take a few minutes to make a personal observation—on this war and the current business of special operations. And this strictly as I see it. The U.S. Army and the U.S. Army Special Operations Command have monitored me pretty closely during this effort. There was never a hint of censorship regarding my work, but they were engaged and read the text carefully. When they made a suggestion, it was just that, and usually in the interest of accuracy or specific information they would like to see omitted in the interest of training future Green Berets. For the most part, I honored those suggestions. So let me now say, for the record, that the following is my take on the current fight, the role of special operations in this fight, and, by extension, our current force structure. These are strictly my opinions.
Semantics and words seem to play a big role in this conflict. First, the global war on terror, and the acronym GWOT that we see everywhere. It’s very misleading. Terror, or terrorism, is a tactic, and just one of the tactics used by al-Qaeda and their allies in this war. Given that we’re the good guys, the bad guys in this fight are the insurgents. So perhaps the global war on insurgency (or insurgents) would be a better phrase. And yet, while insurgency is a better word, it’s still a tactic. We may not be fighting terror per se, but we’re certainly up to our armpits in an insurgency. And is it really global? Sure, they attacked us in Washington and New York, and continue these attacks in western Europe, but their homeland is the Islamic world. Due to the nature of our open society, the insurgents can move about and even operate in our world, but because they’ve skillfully packaged their cause in an Islamic wrapper, the Islamic world is their base. If we can find a way to beat them there, then we’ll win. And just who are “they”—these insurgents who use terrorism and promote insurgency? I’ve used the term “Islamists” and even “fundamentalists.” Extremists, in the context of Islam, is a far better word. I wouldn’t like to think that all of Islam is our enemy, but I do believe we are fighting Islamic extremists, and the prize in this conflict is the leadership of the Islamic world—oh, yes, and control of all those oil and natural gas reserves that happen to be in the Islamic world. We think it should come to a vote—some form of political/economic/universal consent of the people. This means a secular approach to governance, and some form of government with the consent of the governed. They, the extremists, think it should be their version of God’s law, with themselves and their extreme clerics in charge. Unfortunately, because their tactics are terror and information, they’ve made this fight come across as a Crusaders-and-Arabs issue, painting coalition forces in a role of the invader/occupier. And that’s why we have a whole lot of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines on combat deployment.
There are various layers of reality in this struggle. There is the reality of what is taking place on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq—the “ground truth,” as the Army likes to call it; there is the war as portrayed by the Western media; and there is the war as an element or chess piece in our political process. Regarding the American media, it is through their eyes that most of us perceive this war. I wish they would be as helpful to us in our fight as Al Jazeera is to the other side, but that’s not how a free press operates, nor should it be. Does the media have a liberal bias? Possibly—even probably. But the driving force of our media coverage, which is dominated by television, is viewership—the ratings. We are a nation that has a fascination with violence, graphic video footage, and what might broadly be called, I’m sorry to say, dysfunction. We consume the stuff, and