This is the eighth in a series. The bulleted points below are culled from many sources. They are compiled to show how much information on an issue is available to those who are seeking it.
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When we signed up to over-throw Saddam, we also signed up to…
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disarm Iraqi battalions,
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bury the dead,
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cork public passions,
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generate electricity,
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pump potable water,
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bring law out of embittering lawlessness,
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empty jails of political prisoners,
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pack jails with criminals,
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turn armed partisans into peaceful citizens,
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re-arm local cops who were once enemy infantry,
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shoot terrorists,
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thwart chiselers, carpetbaggers and black-marketeers,
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fix sewers,
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feed refugees,
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patch potholes,
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get trash trucks rolling,
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and accomplish all this under the constant gaze of the news media and Al-Jazeera.
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The above list isn’t easy to accomplish. Especially when America fights limited wars. We no longer carpet bomb civilian populations as we did during World War II. In these messy modern fights, Western nations can’t, for both practical and moral reasons, use the full advantages of overwhelming arms against terrorists that hide among civilians.
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True, in our occasional despair over the bad times in Iraq, we should remember that ultimately the United States defeated the Philippine insurrectionists (1899–1913), the British won in the Malaysia uprising (1948–60), and, by 1971, the Americans had finally, after nine years, gotten counterinsurgency right in Vietnam before funds were cut off.
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So what factors in the 21st century now determine whether a Western nation can still succeed in wars not to their liking?
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First, there is the degree to which terrorists can obtain weapons sophisticated enough to kill well-protected soldiers of a far more affluent society. That requisite need not mean parity with the arsenal of the more advanced nation, but rather only the ability to nullify much of its technological superiority.
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The terrorist always scores points when his cheap, workmanlike weapons triumph over high-tech gadgetry — think of simple rocket-propelled grenade rounds blowing apart a $2 million Blackhawk helicopter, or simple, imported roadside bombs still immune to the countermeasures dreamed up by a Pentagon task force.
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In the past, the ability of insurrectionists to get their hands on Western weaponry required physical proximity to Westerners. But now, in a globalized marketplace where profit trumps ideology and distance has collapsed, successful killers in the Middle East may need only a petro-rich patron, a mail-order catalog, and an overnight-shipping account. The Israelis learned that lesson well enough in the recent Lebanon conflict when they encountered Hezbollah militiamen wearing jeans but also outfitted with sophisticated, off-the-shelf night-vision goggles, body armor, hand-held rockets, and computer-tracking software.
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Second is the enemy’s desire and ability to kill a certain number of Westerners in sufficiently savage fashion — hanging their corpses on a bridge or executing them and showing it on the internet — to cause large-scale demoralization on the home front. Savagery is a force multiplier: the more horrific the carnage on the suburban televisions of America, the better.
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Losses, and the nature of how they are inflicted, are more critical even than the duration or financial cost of these new wars. Few worry that we have had American troops in the Balkans for nearly a decade — simply because they are not dying or being tortured with the video of it then shown on the internet.
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Nihilism is likewise a terrorist plus. Traditional doctrine insists that blowing up Muslims at an Islamic funeral or beheading innocents will eventually turn the populace against such nightmarish terrorists. Perhaps. But in the short term, such grotesqueries may sooner turn off a refined Western public whose support is critical for the continuation of the war. The more likely response is no longer, “We must defeat such savage bullies,” but rather, “Why would we want anything to do with a society that produces such monsters?”
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Third, there is the problem of new global communications — another advantage for insurgents who want to exhaust the West. It is often said that had the weeks in the hedgerows after D-Day (June to late July 1944) or the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944 to January 1945) been televised each hour on CNN or Fox — with real-time email and cell phone communications with beleaguered soldiers in the field — we would never have won either battle. Both victories saw horrific casualties as a result of intelligence failures and sheer incompetence, but our culpable generals counted on enough of a window of public ignorance to rectify their mistakes and continue the battle.
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None of these developments means that we won’t win in Iraq, stabilize the nascent democracy there, and help bring prosperity to the heart of the Middle East. But we should accept that in a world of increasing Western material comfort, it is becoming far harder for postmodern societies like the United States and Europe to fight pre-modern foes.
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That we have not secured the country may be due to the limitations put on our soldiers rather than their number; and to our preference for conventional rather than counter-insurgency fighting.
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The frenzy of the 24-hour news cycle is viewed everywhere, and we are lectured that our victories over the Taliban and Saddam Hussein have caused as many problems as they solved.
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But in war aren’t choices usually between the bad and the far worse? So often victory leads not to utopia, but only something better. Take our past ambiguous successes.
- Recall that the outcome of America’s horrific, but successful, Civil War that ended slavery led not to racial harmony. Instead followed over a decade of failed Reconstruction and another century of Jim Crow apartheid in the South.
- We saved a reeling Britain and France in World War I. But an isolationist United States did not occupy a defeated Germany. So we fought a resurgent Hitler little more than twenty years later.
- The outcome of World War II was not perpetual peace or even the freedom of Eastern Europe, but rather its enslavement and a Cold War for a half-century.
- The United States prevailed in saving South Korea. Yet it still bequeathed a lunatic nuclear communist state to our grandchildren.
- Gulf War I was a smashing success. But it was followed by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Shiites and Kurds, twelve years of no-fly zones, and yet another war against Saddam.
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Almost every controversy in this present war also proves to be a rehash of the past. Poorly armored Humvees? Thousands, not hundreds, of Americans perished, in thin-skinned Sherman tanks (“Ronson lighters”) that never were up-armored even at the end of World War II.
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Too few troops? In late July 1944 as Gen. George Patton raced eastward through France, the topic never came up. But by autumn as several under-strength American armies suddenly stalled on the distant Rhine, national recrimination replaced the earlier euphoria. What fool planner had advocated a broad-front advance into Germany with far too few soldiers?
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Did removing Saddam empower Iran? No more so than ending Nazism gave more opportunity for our “ally” Stalin to enslave Eastern Europe.
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Why was our Iraqi intelligence so poor in assessing the potential for postwar insurgency? The same was asked how some surprised American divisions near the end of World War II were nearly annihilated by Germans in the Bulge and by the Japanese on Okinawa?
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Won’t Iraq require years of occupation? We hope not. But years after our victories, American troops are still residing in Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Kuwait, and the Balkans.
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The point of these historical comparisons is not to excuse our present mistakes by citing worse ones from the past — or to suggest that all wars are always the same. Much less should history’s examples be used to stifle necessary contemporary criticism that alone leads to remedy.
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Rather knowledge of the capricious nature of wars of the past can restore a little humility to our national psyche.
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We need it. Ours is the first generation of Americans that thinks it can demand perfection in war. Our present leisure, wealth, and high technology fool us into thinking that we are demi-gods always able to trump both human and natural disasters. Accordingly, we become frustrated that we cannot master every wartime obstacle, as we seem otherwise to be able to do with computers or cosmetic surgery. Then, without any benchmarks of comparison from the past, we despair that our actions are failed because they are not perfect.
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A confident and strong United States has dealt with far more serious enemies in the past with its accustomed wisdom and resolve.
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Once the U.S. successfully captured Saddam Hussein, shouldn’t the U.S. have focused on getting bin Laden, rather than trying to force democracy on a society that doesn’t want it? The war in Iraq is a different type of struggle than the hunt for bin Laden. It requires different resources and a different strategy. Both can be conducted simultaneously—it is not an either-or proposition. The U.S. has been focused on capturing or killing Osama bin Laden since 9/11. That has not changed.
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Some opponents of the war in Iraq argue that focusing on Iraq diverted attention from the hunt for bin Laden. But bin Laden had already gone underground, hunkering down on the Afghan–Pakistan border 18 months before the Iraq war. There is no reason to believe that bin Laden would have been caught if there had been no war in Iraq. It is also wrong to conclude that Iraqis oppose democracy. Most Iraqis want democracy, and increasing numbers have voted in each new round of elections.
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Why should U.S. soldiers lose their lives waging another country’s civil war? Our enemy, al-Qaeda, seeks to provoke a civil war by bombing Shiite mosques and shrines. If we stand back and allow al-Qaeda’s terrorists to succeed, they will turn Iraq into a base for attacking us, just as they turned Afghanistan into a base for attacking us. The Clinton Administration decided that the U.S. had no stake in the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Only after the Taliban allowed al-Qaeda to operate from its territory did we discover—too late—that we did have a stake there. A Talibanized Iraq would be like Afghanistan on steroids, fueled by Iraqi oil revenues. The U.S. cannot permit this.
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Iraq’s path has been made difficult by the saboteurs and the terrorists who target the infrastructure and the people, but Iraqis have persevered, even though progress has been obscured by the scenes of death and destruction.
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The conflict has been fueled by regional powers that have reached into Iraq’s affairs. Iraq itself is eager to build decent relations with its neighbors. They don’t wish to enter into regional entanglements, but their principle concern is to heal their country. Iraq has reached out to those of its neighbors who are worried about the success and example of its democratic experiment, and to others who seem interested in enhancing their regional influence.
