Few remember that events in the Middle East, despite the seeming chaos, are going according to plan. Unfortunately, that plan is the one ascribed to Osama bin Laden and it remains in effect regardless of whether the first great bogeyman of the 21st century is still alive or not.
Americans have seemingly forgotten that according to bin Laden, the primary purpose of the September 11 attacks was to lure America into an engagement with the forces of the Dar al-Islam that would ultimately cause the USA to abandon its involvement in the Middle East. This plan would appear to have gone horribly awry, of course, following the lightning-like conquests of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent military occupations.
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However, I was recently re-reading an old favorite, Sir Charles Oman's ''A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, Volume One, 378 to 1278 AD'' and a chapter on the grand strategy of the Crusades caught my attention. It contained a pertinent passage in which the historian laments the failure of Christendom's crusaders to avail themselves of the lessons learned by the Byzantine generals and criticizes them for ignoring the instructions recorded for fighting Muslim armies by the Emperor Leo in his classic "Tactica."
'Most notable of all is the evident inability of the Franks to learn from the unhappy experiences of their predecessors. The thousands of veterans who drifted back from the East did not succeed in teaching their successors the precautions appropriate to Turkish warfare. Fifty years after the first Crusade, Conrad III and Louise VII committed exactly the same mistakes as the contemporaries of Godfrey and Bohemund... It seemed that the art of learning by experience hardly existed in the military circles of the West. The description of the faults of the Frank as a soldier which Maurice wrote in 580, and Leo the Wise repeated in 900 might still be utilised almost word for word in describing the Crusaders of 1150.
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Now, this would be an unfair criticism of the U.S. military's tactics in the Middle East as no doubt every West Pointer at the Pentagon has read both Leo and Oman. Certainly the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan possess more accurate knowledge of the ground than Sir Charles would have believed possible thanks to GPS systems and air supremacy; they make the most sophisticated use of combined arms ever known to Man, they do not abandon their strong points without caution and they are always kept well-supplied with provisions.
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And yet, there is a close and defining relationship between a culture's preferred tactics and its strategies. As Victor Davis Hanson pointed out in ''Culture and Carnage,'' the extreme lethality of Western tactics stems at least in part from the intrinsic desire of Western strategists to engage the enemy and bring matters to a speedy and decisive close. The Eastern way of warfare, by contrast, revolves around deception, false retreats and constant attempts to entrap the enemy into making fatal blunders through overconfidence. It is a much more patient concept designed to painstakingly wear down an enemy over time instead of seeking to destroy him through a single, crushing blow.
Thus, it seems oddly familiar to read complaints of how the insurgents will not fight fair, how they pop up to fire their rocket-propelled grenades and disappear in much the same way Turkish horse-archers once similarly – and just as harmlessly – annoyed the mailed Frankish knights against whom they could not stand in close combat. The ubiquitous placement of IEDs is remniscent of the old practice of burning the grasslands in order to deny forage for the Crusaders' horses and making troop movements more dangerous.
And it is striking to see how American troops have been forced to remain inside fortress-like defensive positions in Baghdad's Green Zone and the other coalition bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, from which they only emerge on heavily armed patrols. Indeed, it would seem morbidly fitting to name these bases after Acre, Antioch, Montferrand, Krak and Akkar, the great castles that allowed the ill-fated Kingdom of Jerusalem and the three other Crusading principalities to survive much longer than might have otherwise been expected.
It is important to remember that America is not the first nation to occupy territory in the Middle East. The Russians controlled more of Afghanistan than we currently do, and yet they were forced to withdraw after only a decade. The Crusaders held Acre, the key to the Holy Lands, from 1104 to 1291, (except for a four-year interlude from 1187 to 1191), but as Christendom's will gradually failed, even this strong point fell in the end. As the following passage from Ludolf of Suchem shows, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
As the Mongol armies began their advance into the Near East, there was for a time some hope that they might cooperate with the Christian powers of the Near East against the Muslim armies of that area. St. Louis, in fact, continued to cherish the hope – not entirely without foundation – that the Mongols might in time become Christian converts. ... The battle of Ain Jalud was of major importance, for it demonstrated both the prowess of the Egyptians and the vincibility of the Mongols. ... The hope of joint Latin-Mongol cooperation in Palestine had failed.
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Egyptian campaigns against the Latin kingdom came thick and fast. In 1265 Caesarea, Haifa and Arsuf all fell to the Sultan. The following year saw the loss of all the important Latin holdings in Galilee. In 1268 Antioch was taken. ... Pope Gregory X (1271-1276) labored valiantly to excite some general enthusiasm for another great Crusade, but he labored in vain. The failure of his appeal was variously ascribed by the pope's advisers to the laziness and vice of the European nobility and to clerical corruption. Though each of these factors may have been in part to blame, a more basic reason for the failure seems to have been the debasement of the ideal of the Crusade itself.
It is possible that the democratized Muslims of Iraq and Afghanistan will prove more helpful to the West's cause than the Mongols of yore, but given that public enthusiasm for the neocons' World Democratic Revolution has never approached a crusading zeal and is flagging already, a similar retreat is surely in the cards. Reclaiming the initiative and striking out at Iran may look appealing to the neocons' nervous strategists, but then, King Guy was of the opinion that pushing on to Tiberias was a good idea too.
