"A Strange War" by Eliot A. Cohen, in The National Interest (Thanksgiving 2001), P.O. Box 622, Shrub Oak, N.Y. 10588–0622.

The attack of September 11 was a battle in a war Americans didn’t quite know they were fighting, declares Cohen, a professor of strategic studies at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Not for him any talk of the attack as a crime to be remedied by bringing the culprits to justice. It was a political act.

The war may be or may become a "clash of civilizations," in Samuel Huntington’s famous phrase, but at the very least it is a "strange" war. "Strange" because it doesn’t fit the neat categories of military doctrine, with its "end states and exit strategies." Cohen says that the Crusades are an instructive, if politically incorrect, example. "They involved armies as the recognizable forces of states along with a welter of entrepreneurs, religious orders, and bandits. They saw strange and shifting alliances in which religious fanaticism could give way to cynical calculations of individual and state interest."

The foe in this war, in Cohen’s view, is not just Osama bin Laden but "larger movements in the Arab and Islamic worlds" that tap deep rivers of "hatred and resentment."

The war’s causes are as old as the Muslim resentment of the ascendant West that began when the Turks were driven back from Vienna in 1683, and as new as the appearance of bin Laden, a historically "decisive personality." But Cohen draws special attention to two intermediate causes.

One is the failure to destroy Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime during the Gulf War, which "encouraged others [including Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic] to see if they could find ways of outlasting or hurting the Americans enough to keep them out of their way." The other cause is the U.S. failure in recent decades to promote "the development of clean and reasonably free political institutions" as vigorously in the Middle East as it did in Europe and Asia. "A combination of clientilitis, realpolitik, and cultural condescension meant that there was no interest in (to take just one example) the courage of a Naguib Mahfouz [the Egyptian novelist] as a spokesman for values that Americans share." Washington’s willingness to "deal with a Palestinian Authority dominated by a corrupt and brutal clique" while ignoring other Palestinians is a symptom of this cynicism, Cohen thinks.

"To the extent that American leaders close their eyes to the realities of the sick and thwarted societies of the Arab and, in parts, of the larger Muslim world, they will fail to understand the essential nature of the war in which they find themselves engaged," Cohen warns. At the same time, Americans must "rediscover the civilizational values that make this country what it is.... It is at least as important to know what we are fighting for as to know what we are fighting against."