By Steve Bolton
Now that Bin Laden is in his watery coffin, a final American military victory over Al-Qaeda seems tantalizingly close to reality. Unfortunately, prospects for a political victory are rapidly vanishing, which does not bode well for the security of America or Europe in years to come. We have won a short-term victory against a man, but may have already lost the long-term battle against the powerful but perverse ideas he championed.
On Saturday, Leon Panetta remarked that the defeat of Al-Qaeda was “within reach,” which is true in the sense that its top leaders have been steadily eradicated since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. As a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and as the current head of the Defense Department, Panetta should know that wars of the kind Bin Laden waged are fought mainly in the hearts and minds of the masses, not merely on the physical battlefield. Many American servicemen deserve our appreciation for fighting Islamic radicals aligned with Al-Qaeda so valiantly and effectively for the last decade, but their sacrifice may only be buying us a little time unless the heads of institutions like the CIA and Defense Department do something they have never done before: learn to appreciate the real dynamics behind both guerrilla warfare and Islamic radicalism.
Counterinsurgency is a concept that the American and European militaries alike have never really grasped, which is why they consistently failed to defeat the many revolutionary movements that used guerrilla tactics in the 20th Century. By guerrilla warfare, however, I do not mean mere irregular tactics of the sort the American colonists employed when they shot Redcoats from behind trees back in 1776. Beginning in the Cuban War of Independence from Spain at the close of the 19th Century, rebel groups everywhere began to develop new tactics meant to mobilize the vast masses of civilians around them against the governments they fought. Throughout the next century, brilliant strategists like Mao Tse-Tung, Regis Debray and Vo Nguyen Giap developed a formal theory of this new type of guerrilla warfare and refined it into a nearly unstoppable weapon. Guerrilla wars erupted everywhere on the planet, some of them led by leftists bent on redistribution of wealth and others led by nationalists aiming at independence for some particular ethnic group. Some 17 million people died in the various wars Third World nations fought for independence from their colonial masters, a figure that does not include many millions more who were killed in hostilities against nominally independent puppet governments, such as the “banana republics” of Central America.[1]
From “Popular War” to Unpopular Counterinsurgency
Guerrilla warfare theory is a quite complex subject that I have dealt with in depth elsewhere[2], but as Mao put it so succinctly, guerrillas can be likened to fish that swim in the sea of the civilian population. They are dependent on them for everything from food to intelligence to shelter and will ultimately fail if they do not gain sufficient allegiance from a very large majority of the general population. Most rebel groups of the last century were ultimately defeated precisely because they never earned that kind of trust or level of commitment to their ideology. Few revolutionaries ever made it out of the first of Mao’s three stages of guerrilla warfare and ended up like the Tupamaros and Montoneros of Uruguay and Argentina, just a few hundred people running for their lives in the cities and countryside, pulling off the occasional bank heist or assassination until their final defeat. Yet none of those who ever made it into Mao’s second stage, in which many thousands of guerrillas opened up large “liberated zones” in the countryside, was ever defeated on the battlefield in sufficiently populous countries. Some who reached the second stage, such as Peru’s Sendero Luminoso, were later defeated because they were led by bloodthirsty leaders who attacked the civilian population they depended upon so much. Others, like the Communist rebels of Malaya, were limited to minority ethnic groups and thus limited their own potential to attract support.
In most other cases where guerrilla groups reached the second stage, however, the armies of leading nations like Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the U.S. were dramatically defeated time and again. The germ of their defeats lay not merely in their failure to mobilize the civilian populations on their own side, but of military policies which ultimately drove everyone into the arms of the rebels. This is a topic I have addressed in more detail elsewhere, but this sort of dynamic was responsible for America’s defeat in Vietnam, as it was for France before them. Because identifying guerrillas is inherently difficult, the governments that fight them routinely make the mistake of attacking everyone indiscriminately, in a process that gradually alienates the general population and forces them to turn to the rebels for protection; the bigger the rebel groups get, the more indiscriminate and violent the reprisals become until the government in question collapses. This pattern held in every successful guerilla war, such as the Chinese, Nicaraguan and Cuban Revolutions and the Algerian and Vietnamese Wars of Independence, as well as those where fascist governments were at least forced to bargain away some of their power, as in El Salvador. Former Buenos Aires Governor Gen. Ibarico Saint-Jean summed up the rabid, murderous and ultimately self-defeating mentality behind this kind of counterinsurgency best: “First we will kill all the subversives; then we will kill their collaborators; then...their sympathizers; then...those who remain indifferent, and finally we will kill the timid."[3] Despite giving lip service to winning the war for “hearts and minds,” the U.S. lost the Vietnam War because American military leaders ultimately descended to the same style of thinking. “Hearts and minds” counterinsurgency failed there for a variety of reasons, all of which can be summed up in the fact that the ordinary Vietnamese peasants could think for themselves. As Eisenhower once admitted, Ho Chi Minh would have won any free and fair election with 80 percent of the Vietnamese vote. Simply passing out candy or building a few public works wasn’t going to shift anyone’s allegiance, because “civic action” of this kind can easily be spotted for what it boils down to: a transparent attempt to buy votes. And if the general population couldn’t be bought off that way, they surely couldn’t be swayed by the violent tactics the U.S. and South Vietnamese puppet government resorted to more and more, such as sending “Zippo Squads” to burn down entire villages or bombers to wipe out large sections of entire provinces. In the course of the war, the U.S. and its allies killed some 10 percent of the South Vietnamese population, the vast majority of them civilians. It is because of this sort of violence that we lost. The indiscriminate violence was not just a moral human rights issue, but a fatal tactical error by our top commanders.
The Soviets lost their war of occupation against the people of Afghanistan for many of the same reasons and it was in this crucible that Bin Laden and his allies were forged. He and fellow Al-Qaeda strategists like Ayman al-Zawahiri learned some important lessons about guerrilla warfare first-hand in Afghanistan and are still employing them there to this day on behalf of a less noble cause. The first of these is that a rebel group has an excellent chance of outlasting any superior foreign occupation force if it has sufficient will and support from the civilian population; all they have to do is wait for the will of the occupiers to weaken with time and the country will fall to them like a ripe plum. This is exactly why ten years after the Sept. 11 attacks there is so much talk of withdrawal from Afghanistan and so little evidence of victory against the Taliban. All Al-Qaeda’s main ally has to do now is wait for the U.S. to declare a delusional victory which is actually further away than ever before, watch them pack up and go home, then overthrow the Hamid Karzai’s unpopular puppet government.
The Phantom Menace Materializes
The difference between the Afghanistan’s rebel movement against the Soviets and the Taliban today is that the former had a limited objective in mind: they merely wanted to kick out a foreign army of occupation. Today’s rebels are closely allied with a movement that has much broader objectives: the mobilization of the entire Islamic world against the West in a war of conquest. Militarily, Al-Qaeda was always light years away from precipitating such a war. Except for the small handful of leaders at the top, it has always been a mere hodge-podge of rebel groups operating in disparate Islamic countries, lumped in together with the roughly 40,000 Afghanistan war veterans who have returned home to fight for Islam in their native lands. While the leadership of Al-Qaeda has been systematically eliminated by the U.S. and its allies, the rank-and-file veterans of the Afghanistan war are slowly being killed off in these local rebellions, thereby unraveling what little organization Al-Qaeda once had. It was never cohesive to begin with, which has made the job of disrupting it much easier. The name itself was not used much until after the Sept. 11 attacks, at which point the world needed a common term to refer to the loose agglomeration that admired some of Bin Laden’s goals: Al-Qaeda, which is just an informal term meaning “The Base.” Al-Qaeda has always had very few agents of its own to work with, which is one reason why the wave of terrorist attacks the U.S. and Europe feared after Sept. 11 never really materialized. If anything, portrayals of Al-Qaeda as a large, cohesive organization may have backfired by giving potential recruits the world over the false hope that there was an umbrella organization out there for them to join, so that they could fulfill their dreams of martyrdom. In the last ten years, Al-Qaeda has lost militarily in the sense that its leadership has been devastated, but by another measure it has grown, in the sense that Islamic radicals the world over now define themselves by whether or not they give it allegiance. In an odd way, the very umbrella organization we have always feared has grown despite our steady, successful decapitation of it.
The inaccurate image of a strong, united, powerful Al-Qaeda with sleeper agents by the thousands backfired in another way by provoking us into making other military moves that have played right into Bin Laden’s hands. His objective was to bring about exactly the situation we have now, where America and its allies are running themselves ragged on numerous fronts, fighting Al-Qaeda sympathizers all over the Muslim world, in such widely separated places as Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq. The destabilization of North Africa in this year’s so-called “Arab Spring” means that politics in countries like Libya, Tunisia and Egypt will revolve there around the role of Islam within a matter of years and potentially open even more fronts. Our current battles in Afghanistan, Somalia and western Pakistan have been thrust upon us by unprovoked attacks, but in the case of Iraq, the U.S. shot itself in the foot by handing Al-Qaeda an opportunity to open up an entirely new front. The invasion to oust Saddam Hussein in 2003 was a textbook case of counterinsurgents overreacting and indiscriminately attacking uninvolved third parties, thereby creating the very problem it was designed to solve. By 2008, estimates of the costs of that war ranged from $600 billion to $4 trillion, all to remove one tyrant who was the sole obstacle to Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq.[4] Despite outright lies of the Bush Administration to the contrary, there never were any ties between Hussein and Al-Qaeda, who had nothing in common but hatred for each other. Within months after the vacuum opened up by the war, however, Al-Qaeda began terrorist operations in Iraq and rapidly grew to become the leading military opposition to the U.S. occupation force. In essence, America’s leadership panicked and ended up wasting up to $4 trillion to bring about the very nightmare scenario it wanted to avoid. On the day we invaded Iraq, we handed Bin Laden his greatest victory to date.
Bin Laden’s Devious Vision
Every day since Sept. 11 that we have refrained from invading Pakistan, we have avoided falling into a similar trap. Bin Laden’s wildest dream after knocking down the World Trade Center may have come true if Pakistan had refused to allow us transit to invade Afghanistan. Since Pakistan and Iran provided the only reasonable routes into landlocked Afghanistan from the sea, where we can project naval and air power and set up supply lines to the coast (the secondary route through Uzbekistan has always been of minimal utility), a refusal by both would have meant a stark either-or-choice between allowing Bin Laden and the Taliban to escape unpunished, or the certainty of provoking a wider war. Fighting Iran, a populous, determined enemy that could count on several million fanatical defenders and a formidable array of domestically produced weapons, would require a commitment of several million American soldiers against an enemy that was not suspected of any guilt in those particular terrorist attacks. Pakistan then had a population about half the size of the U.S., armed with nuclear weapons and a large conventional army, which could have counted on the zealous support of the hundreds of thousands of members of various Islamic radicals groups. Since Pakistan is politically fractious, partly coopted by the West and its spy agency, the ISI, was partly responsible for creating the Taliban, it would have been a more logical option than an attack on Iran. To succeed, however, we may have needed several million troops and in all likelihood, they would have had to come from Pakistan’s arch-enemy, India. Any invasion by India, however, would almost certainly have been countered by military action by China on its northeast frontier. China and India fought a border war in 1962 and have been locked in a cold war ever since; moreover, Pakistan has always been China’s staunchest ally, so Beijing would never let a rival like India eliminate such a strategic asset. The only thing preventing Bin Laden’s dream (i.e. the world’s nightmare) was the mind of Pakistan’s dictator, Pervez Musharraf. There is still a quite tangible possibility of the world’s two greatest powers becoming entangled in a conflict like this, with increasingly powerful nations like Pakistan, Iran and India being caught up in the mix. Any one of these nations now possesses power approaching that of Britain, France or Germany, although they cannot project it very far beyond their home regions at this time. This power equation may be the chief reason why we simply haven’t declared war against Pakistan since the recent revelation that the ISI was quite obviously harboring Bin Laden for much of his time on the run. America would certainly be within its rights to demand a complete dismantling of the ISI, and would be doing the Pakistani people a favor by removing the corrupt system of government we helped install there a generation ago. We might have had the financial resources and political will to carry out such a war ten years ago, but it is a measure of how well Bin Laden’s tactics have succeeded that we can neither afford it nor want to think about committing several million men to another distant war. By harboring Bin Laden, the Islamic fundamentalist faction within the ISI (a monster which the CIA, by the way, helped build with your tax dollars) is committing an act of war that has put us in a no-win situation. A lack of response merely emboldens our enemies and allows the fundamentalist cancer within Pakistan’s government and society to spread further. Responding with a full-scale war will only guarantee the mobilization of ordinary Pakistanis around the very people we want to eliminate, while draining what’s left of our resources and potentially destabilizing relations between the great powers for generations to come. This Catch-22 is similar to the same dilemma many governments found themselves in during the last century’s revolutionary wars, when failure to act meant a slow defeat, while attacking rebels mixed in with general population only served to radicalize previously neutral people. Bin Laden and Zawahiri have essentially benefitted from the same dynamic, except on an international scale across an entire group of countries, rather than just within one nation.
Their aim is to destabilize the entire planet, because that is the only way to radicalize the Islamic world and thereby mobilize millions of men on their side. They are aiming at something much more diabolical than mere terrorist attacks: a fully conscious redirection of the planet towards World War III. They dream of men like themselves leading hordes of radical Muslims to victory in that final war, then forcibly converting the entire planet, which amounts to global genocide. It is a madman’s dream, but the dream looks a little less ridiculous with each passing year. Bin Laden and Zawahiri never aimed at merely knocking down a couple of skyscrapers; they want to knock them all down. Picture every city in Europe and America reduced to the same rubble left at Ground Zero and you capture the essence of what they want to achieve. Pundits have speculated for a decade now on the consequences if a group like Al-Qaeda got its hands on a nuclear weapon, but they still miss the depth of vision that made Bin Laden and Zawahiri so dangerous. A single nuclear weapon might kill a million people in a single city, but that leaves billions more living in hundreds of other large cities; what they want is the power to bring all of those cities beneath the green boot of Islamic radicalism. Waging that kind of war would require Al-Qaeda sympathizers to take over not just one small Third World country like Afghanistan, but to unite the entire Islamic civilization from Morocco to Indonesia behind a single banner, controlling one-sixth of the world’s population and much of its oil. Whether or not their vision was feasible and rational is a matter of debate; whether or not it is their dream is beyond question. Thankfully, it would be extremely difficult and time-consuming to weld such an enormous and disparate bloc together, one that we may be generations away from, but that is precisely the course wer’re on. Before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the concurrent Iranian Revolution, there were no Islamic guerrilla movements anywhere on the planet, but everyone said at the time the appeal of both movements wouldn’t get very far. Ten years later, Islamic radicals had taken over additional countries like Sudan and had become the major opposition force in many of the rest; roughly another decade later, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban felt strong enough to launch the Sept. 11 attacks; now a decade after that, the U.S. and its allies face a mobile, floating army of radicals that lack organization but share the same goals. Al-Qaeda has already been decapitated with the death of most of its leaders, with the death or capture of men like Zawahiri sure to come, but it is has nevertheless left a dangerous legacy: a widespread yearning for an organization like Al-Qaeda, where none has yet existed. Al-Qaeda was never the coherent, widespread engine of destruction that it was painted to be, but it has set Islamic radicals everywhere to thinking: how can we build such a monster? Whether you’re talking about Mullah Omar, the leader of Afghanistan’s Taliban, or the remnants of Algeria’s particularly violent terrorist group the GIA, or the Al-Shabaab rebels of Somalia, they all want the same thing: the establishment of a new Islamic caliphate, followed by the subjugation of the entire planet. They have begun with unconventional warfare because at present, they are weak, isolated and divided in some of the poorest corners of the planet, but they are thinking in terms of conventional warfare a generation or two from now.
Bin Laden and Zawahiri were master tacticians with the vision to put this yearning for a much broader, global Islamic revolution into the minds of a whole generation of killers, as well as the patience to wait for it. What makes men like them doubly dangerous is that they know full well that they will perish long before their mission is carried out, but are still willing to die to put their drop in the bucket for their cause. Just as familial loyalty and the code of omerta made the Italian mafia stronger than the rest of the world’s criminal groups in the last century, the willingness of radicals like Bin Laden and Zawahiri to make real personal sacrifices for a vision beyond their own gratification makes them much more deadly than anyone suspects. Just because they were brilliant visionaries with the patience of crouching tigers doesn’t mean there is any virtue at all in the idea they represent; some of the rebel groups of the last century had at least some good in their aims, such as political independence or economic equality, even if their morality of their means varied. Both the means and the aims of men like Bin Laden are purely evil and must be resisted, but the means by which America and Europe have resisted them so far are inadequate to fix the problem. By no means do I intend to criticize the sacrifices that our security agencies and armed forces have made in countering Al-Qaeda, which have been amazingly successful so far in preventing terrorist attacks. We ought to celebrate the fact that our bold raid into Pakistan finally dissipated the mystique Bin Laden gained by evading capture for so long. Unfortunately, that raid is going to have to be repeated a hundred times over against the young men willing to take his place in the next generation of Islamic radicals, because we are steadily losing the war for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world.
Bin Laden Beyond the Grave
Bin Laden lost in three ways, but none of them matter much in the grand scheme of things. First, the Taliban lost control of Afghanistan back in 2001 just when they were on the verge of conquering the entire country, following the assassination of the main opposition warlord a few a days before Sept. 11. Now they are bound to get it back, if they just wait long enough for America to pack up and leave. Secondly, Bin Laden was killed before ever realizing his dream of a grand jihad against the West, but this he probably expected. He also lost in another sense, but in a way he never expected, one that our newspapers and television stations will never talk about: he’s in Hell now, facing the wrath of an entirely different God than the one he expected. It is because such talk is taboo in our media, around our office water coolers, in our board rooms and at our private parties that Bin Laden’s devilish philosophy will be carried on, since we have nothing to oppose it with. Wars take place first in the hearts and minds of the people long before they are acted out on the battlefield, in the form of ideas, all of which take on the cast of a religion when strongly held. The religion of Western civilization today is not Christianity of any kind, or the insane worship of an ethnic group, like Nazism, or of an unworkable philosophy like Communism, but something much weaker: the worship of wealth itself. Jesus himself specifically warned against this, calling it “a very great evil,” but it is not dangerous merely just to the soul. Out of all of the evil philosophies to adopt, the love of money is the most flaccid one of them all, to the point of being a danger to national security, for the simple fact that it is impossible to make any personal sacrifices for it. At the most blunt extreme, spending wealth means avoiding death, but fighting for a higher cause means risking death. Consumption always means thinking in the short term, for success in this life as soon as possible, which is why it can’t succeed in the long run against any idea, no matter how flawed or evil, that thinks in the long term, especially if it aims towards eventual paradise in the next. We have no powerful idea of our own to either offer the Islamic world as a substitute for Bin Laden’s vision or even to rally around in self-defense, which is why we are at real risk of losing this war in the long term. We do have plenty of money though, which is why we can put off a reckoning for a while. More money can buy more military equipment; it can buy off more Third World governments or be paid as hush money to keep mullahs quiet for a time, but it is just putting off the moment when our society has to muster up the courage to make real sacrifices. This whole approach of throwing money at the problem betrays the weakness at the core of our civilization, as do many of our other actions. Because we belong to the most commercialized civilization in world history, the concept of evil geniuses in a distant country deliberately dreaming up ways to bring about a global catastrophe is completely alien to us. The idea that someone would put our planet’s prosperity at risk is unthinkable. So is the belief that they may have been acting out of selfless motives contrary to their financial health; Bin Laden and Zawahiri must have secretly been living in luxury or piling up billions in foreign bank accounts like typical dictators, rather than expending their millions, we suspect. The fact they are willing to think generations ahead, or even in terms of eternal reward in the next life, are simply outlandish; their real willingness to die for a bad cause seems ridiculous. That is why many political analysts assume that the millions across the Muslim world who support their cause do so merely out of economic deprivation. They are like the proverbial generals fighting the last war again, because this was true a generation ago in the Cold War when revolutionary movements arose in places like Latin America to redress real socioeconomic imbalances. What we are facing now is something completely different: a cultural and religious war. Political scientist Samuel Huntington has coined a name for the new conflict that has arisen since the end of the Cold War: The Clash of Civilizations. Anyone looking for complete closure on the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks or ready to declare victory over the enemies who masterminded them are bound to be disappointed, because this conflict may have barely just begun. It will be much closer to Sept. 11, 2101 before it ends than Sept. 11, 2011.
This is certain for a few overwhelming reasons that aren’t likely to change anytime soon. First, as long as we remain a civilization that revolves around the worship of the Almighty Dollar, then we can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas. There is a real possibility that we could hold off further pain from the Clash of Civilizations in the short term by corrupting an Islamic revolutionary leader here or there by tempting them with money (which will be sugar-coated with neutral terms like “foreign investment” and “aid” and “community of nations”) so that their governments no longer act as “rogue nations,” but there is a limit to that. One of our most effective strategies may be to let them self-destruct by attacking and alienating their own populations, as they are bound to do sooner or later, given the bloodthirsty madness and hunger for violence at the heart of their philosophy. Then they will lose the battle for hearts and minds, as they lost it in Iraq thanks to all of the random carnage unleashed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s technique of car-bombing everyone indiscriminately. We will not win the hearts and minds of the 1 billion people in the Muslim world until they understand that this kind of senseless carnage is exactly what Al-Qaeda and its affiliates stand for. Unfortunately, we cannot even grasp the ideological roots of the problem ourselves, because debate about the true nature of Islam is now considered taboo in the Western world. This too is a symptom of our love of the Almighty Dollar, the true faith of our civilization, which does not tolerate debate about religion; the verifiably false notion that all of the world’s religions really say the same thing springs from this need to make social peace not for the sake of peace itself, but so that commerce is not disrupted. We are forbidden not only to hold a creed of our own sufficiently strong to counter Islam, but to debate the faults of our opponents, either publicly or privately, without severe social reprisals. In America and Europe, freedom of religion has become freedom from religion, which essentially boils down to the persecution of all religions; in practice it means everyone is free to practice their faith, as long as they restrict it only to the private, ceremonial aspects, thereby emasculating it of any power. Our commercial civilization is up against another that thinks entirely differently, to the extent that in most Muslim countries, conversion away from Islam is punishable by death. We are not allowed to wake up to that fact for a second reason, because it is not what we want to hear. Bad news is entirely contrary to the Power of Positive Thinking that our ruling class of effete businessmen subscribes to, as well as their whole attitude of boosterism and putting a pretty face on everything ugly. The stark reality is that we have won a few short-term battles but are losing the war against Bin Laden. One frightening fact ought to make this clear: despite seeing this murderer kill three thousand of our people on live TV, the second most popular name for newborn babies in the Muslim world is now Osama, after Mohammed. In another dozen years or so, that new generation will be ready to fight and die for the same evil spirit that motivated him. Somewhere among them are “great men” wise enough to understand his strategy and evil enough to carry it out till completion. Against them, we had better not repeat the same mistakes, such as attacking neutral countries like Iraq. Another mistake was the air of total panic that gripped the country after Sept. 11, which prompted our leaders to do stupid things that made us look weak – such as cancelling a week of NFL games, in the belief that there was a terrorist under every tree. Very few people have been killed by Al-Qaeda since 2001 in part because they were much fewer in number than we assumed and in part because our security forces have been so effective in taking them down, but that’s not going to be true after the next generation of numberless Osamas grow up. If we don’t change our strategies, then there may well be a terrorist under every tree a generation from now. This is what Bin Laden wanted but didn’t live to see. In a sense, he won because he made progress towards every one of his strategic goals – including deflating the false sense of omnipotence America enjoyed after the first Persian Gulf War. Our Teflon coating has been scratched. This chapter of the story ended with Bin Laden’s blood in the water, so there is room for some celebration. But it began when Osama put our blood in the water, and it has attracted sharks, looking for vulnerabilities. The greatest of them all is the commercial philosophy that all of Western civilization now subscribes to, which has no hope of competing against Islam in the long run. We have no will to fight them because we don’t have a religion that gives us an incentive to, just pocketbooks deep enough to buy bigger guns. Once that money runs out, then the sharks will begin to bite.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to psychology to economics since age 9.
[1] p. 251, Mueller, John, 1988, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War. Basic Books, Inc.: New York.
[2] See Chapter 7 of The Retreat of the West, the massive sleeping pill of a history book I wrote back in the 1990s. I intended it to be my dissertation back then and will eventually post it online in .pdf format for free.
[3] . Ibarico Saint-Jean made this comment in 1976, at the height of the guerrilla war in Argentina. p. 250, Gillespie, Richard, 1982, Soldiers of Peron: Argentina's Montoneros. Clarendon Press: Oxford.
[4] Figures in this range are widely attributed to the Congressional Budget Office, with some sources including the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan in this these figures and others omitting them.
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