Noam Chomsky - Who Rules the World? (pt 2)

"Polk cites a treatise on warfare by Henry Jomini, influenced by Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of Spanish guerrillas, that became a textbook for generations of cadets at the West Point military academy. Jomini observed that such interventions by major powers typically result in 'wars of opinion,' and nearly always 'national wars,' if not at first then becoming so in the course of the struggle, by the dynamics that Polk describes. Jomini concludes that 'commanders of regular armies are ill-advised to engage in such wars because they will lose them,' and even apparent successes will prove short-lived.

Careful studies of al-Qaeda and ISIS have shown that the United States and its allies are following their game plan with some precision. Their goal is to 'draw the West as deeply and actively as possible into the quagmire' and 'to perpetually engage and enervate the United States and the West in a series of prolonged overseas ventures' in which they will undermine their own societies, expend their resources, and increase the level of violence, setting off the dynamic that Polk reviews.

Scott Atran, one of the most insightful researchers on jihadi movements, calculates that 'the 9/11 attacks cost between $400,000 and $500,000 to execute, whereas the military and security response by the U.S. and its allies is in the order of 10 million times that figure. On a strictly cost-benefit basis, this violent movement has been wildly successful, beyond even Bin Laden’s original imagination, and is increasingly so. Herein lies the full measure of jujitsu-style asymmetric warfare. After all, who could claim that we are better off than before, or that the overall danger is declining?'

And if we continue to wield the sledgehammer, tacitly following the jihadi script, the likely effect is even more violent jihadism with broader appeal. The record, Atran advises, 'should inspire a radical change in our counter-strategies.'"

Link here.