La guerre est toujours le premier vœu d’un gouvernement puissant qui veut devenir plus puissant encore.
War is always the first wish of a powerful government that wants to become even more powerful.
Maximilien de Robespierre
The war on terror is lost. That’s why the phrase is no longer in use and we’re all withdrawing from Afghanistan.
This is a point I have articulated in a new article at ClubOfINFO by the title of “ISIS: the Envy of NATO”. I am not here arguing that the ISIS organization is a true state or legitimate government, nor that it represents Islam. I am using the fact that we can’t compete with it, to illustrate just how weak our governments and armed forces are. The entire combined might of the West’s armies cannot defeat a terrorist organization, and it indicates not the strength of ISIS but the utter weakness and inevitable collapse of our own state machinery, beginning with the ultimate failure of our countries’ armed forces to suppress a single organization in Iraq:
We have lost our way. The liberal democratic model of state, which we are hugging tighter to in our misguided sense of security that we are better than the Islamic State, is militarily and morally stunted and will never overpower the Islamic State. While France could barely muster fifty combatants to fight the Islamic State in Iraq, the Islamic State recruited well over a thousand soldiers from France’s own so-called nation.
Our governments cannot save us from the Islamic State because they have lost the ability to wage war, or even conduct politics adequately. Other than occasional air strikes aiming to “influence” or “tip” the outcome of conflicts that are nothing to do with us, the armed forces of so-called Western democracies are now completely emasculated and will never carry out a successful ground war again.
A large part of this is the “ageing” or “greying” of Europe and North America, as our populations are reduced to isolated, frustrated, delusional Daily Mail readers whose future has long since been lost to the growing migrant populations now inhabiting Europe and North America. These migrant populations, who are an integral part of the so-called nation, do not and cannot share the old-fashioned nation-state allegiances that our governments relied on to survive. This is why there is so little will to war, such poor armed forces recruitment levels in Britain and other so-called nations, and now ever more impressive numbers from our own population flocking to join the Islamic State.
What has happened to us? What has happened to the so-called West (the liberal democratic countries and their armed forces), that makes more of our “people” travel to Iraq to work for the so-called Islamic State (IS, also ISIL, ISIS and Daesh) than are willing to travel there to fight that menace? Mine is obviously not the case for more “boots on the ground”, as many senile conservative pundits want. The public is rightly disillusioned with dated concepts of military conquest that proved to be so devastatingly ineffective in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The events in Iraq today have erased every notion of American military power and have negated the sacrifice of thousands of American soldiers, rendering their bravery worthless and unavailing, as is the entire so-called war on terror that they were made to fight in.
Decades of the combined armed strength of NATO have proven futile, impotent to curtail the growth and legitimization of the latter-day caliphate that al Qaeda and its affiliates intended to build in the Middle East. We must retreat from the Middle East region, and our governments must give up their maniacal and impossible goals to protect Israel in the region. If we do not, the brave armed forces of Britain, America, France and the other allies will only be further humiliated and demoralized when the day finally arrives that we must admit to squandering billions of dollars, decades of talking and fighting, and hundreds of thousands of civilian and military lives, for nothing.
#ISIS has buried @NATO in terms of quantity, political will of armies summoned from Europe. NATO brings 38 #French troops, ISIS brings 1400.
— Harry J. Bentham (@hjbentham) January 12, 2015
We won’t see another “boots on the ground” war waged by our weak governments and their NATO alliance again.
The demographic collapses of our countries and the growing half-loyalties of the youth (including me, for my experiences make me more sympathetic to the Internet than I am to my “country”) makes it hard to convince people to sacrifice for their so-called nation. This is one of the reasons we see such a deterioration in military recruitment levels in countries such as Britain. The people who would have enlisted are now just too old to actually be of any use to the state. The youth doesn’t believe in the nation. It is a hemorrhage of loyalty that the government cannot survive.
I have only been conveying what I already know from sociological theories that inform my writing. The fact is that our governments will continue to fail to attract volunteers to their causes, steadily losing their ability to incite wars or enforce laws until this degradation starts to undermine their capacity to protect themselves on their own territory. This has already started to happen in the United States, where officials are increasingly seen as arbitrary and cruel, and they are not believed to be in the business of protecting or serving but of fearing the people. As terrorists and mafias are likely to fill the vacuums left by collapsing states around the world, the international system is due to go through “hell on earth”, escalating through the coming decades. It would have happened anyway, but the failed wars waged by the United States are making it happen faster and with a much more humiliating character.
Loss of “stateness” (military and policing legitimacy) is part of the crisis of the world-system.
Delegitimization of states will continue. I don’t know what it will look like in the end, or whether we can survive it when the consequences get too heavy. Whatever happens, our nation-states will not survive the transition in their current form. At the very best, what is left of them will end up living in “Green Zones” in their own capital cities, hiding from the the vast majority of the people they have designated as “potential threats”, “terrorists” and “traitors”. The government is becoming allergic to the people.
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