Strong stuff

Spencer Ackerman, filling in for Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, scores an interview with the anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism. The author — let’s call him Mr. A — believes both Afghanistan and Iraq to be complete disasters in both policymaking and the application of military force. While this no doubt warms the cockles of those who oppose the Bush administration, Mr. A’s policy prescriptions are likely to scare the ever-living crap out of those same critics. A sample:

To secure as much of our way of life as possible, we will have to use military force in the way Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden. Progress will be measured by the pace of killing … Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills–all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. … [S]uch actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows. Again, this sort of bloody-mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America’s only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world.

Needless to say, this provoked Matthew Yglesias to write an epithet I was thinking after reading that passage. Kevin Drum is similarly rattled — and Drum follows up with an e-mail missive from Ackerman confirming that what I just quoted was not taken out of context. The following is from Mr. A’s interview with Ackerman:

My argument, I think, taken from the whole book, is that we’ve left ourselves with no option but the military option, and our application of military force against our foe, whether it’s Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else, has not been particularly intimidating. They’ve ridden out two wars. They’re on the offensive at the moment. What are we left with? If we don’t use our military power, we really just sit and take it.

This kind of rhetoric makes even the most “out there” neoconservative — except perhaps for Jim Woolsey — look like a peacenik by comparison. Even the most imperial-sounding neocons don’t talk about “a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure.” I think this kind of thinking is nuts — forget whether it would actually work in the Middle East and consider the collateral damage such actions would create in every other region of the globe. If you want an actual alliance — not mere rhetoric, but actual alliances, coordination of territorial defense, and actual balancing — of every other significant power in the globe arrayed against the United States, well, Mr. A’s strategy is the way to go. Don’t worry about soft power if this strategy is implemented — worry about whether the U.S. government would have sufficient hard power resources to simultaneously ward off threats from China, Russia, India, Japan, North and South Korea, France, and Great Britain while simultaneously imposing martial law in this country following the insurrection that such a strategy would undoubtedly inspire. That said, I’m betting that this logic will resonate with a healthy fraction of Americans.