Simply Black& White

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On Recent Wars

 

Things Not Figured Out

 

by Fred Reed

 

May 17, 2006

 

People ask how we got into our splendid mess in Iraq

and why we can’t get out. The question is a subset of

a larger question: Why, since WWII, have so many

first-world armies gotten into drawn-out guerrilla

wars in bush-world countries, and lost?

Examples

abound: France in Vietnam, America in Vietnam, France

in Algeria, Russia in Afghanistan, Israel in Lebanon,

etc. Why don’t they learn?

 

The answer I think is that militaries are influenced

by a kind of man—call him the Warrior—who by nature is

unsuited for modern wars. He doesn’t understand them,

can’t adapt to them.

 

The Warrior is emotionally suited to pitched,

Pattonesque battles of moral clarity and simple

intent. I don’t mean that he is stupid. Among fighter

pilots and in the Special Forces for example it is not

uncommon to find men with IQs of 145.

Yet emotionally

the Warrior has the uncomplicated instincts of a pit

bull. Intensely loyal to friends and intensely hostile

to the enemy, he doesn’t want any confusion as to

which is which.

His tolerance for ambiguity is very

low. He wants to close with the enemy and destroy him.

 

This works in wars like WWII. (Note that the American

military is an advanced version of the military that

beat Germany and Japan.) It does not work when winning

requires the support of the population.

The Warrior,

unable to see things through the eyes of the enemy, or

of the local population, whom he quickly comes to

hate, wants to blow hell out of things. He detests all

that therapeutic crap, that touchy-feely leftist stuff

about respect the population, especially the women.

Having the empathy of an engine block, he regards

mention of mutilated children as intensely annoying at

best, and communist propaganda at worst.

 

On the net these men sometimes speak approvingly to

each other of the massacre at My Lai. Hey, they were

all Cong. If they weren’t, they knew who the Cong were

and didn’t tell us. Calley did the right thing, taught

them a lesson.

There is an admiration of Calley for

having avoided bureaucratic rules of engagement

probably dreamed up by civilians.

War is war. You kill people. Deal with it.

 

If you point out that collateral damage (dead

children, for example) makes the survivors into

murderously angry Viet Cong, the Warrior thinks that

you are a lefty tree-hugger.

 

Today, the battlefield as understood by the enemy, but

seldom by the Warrior, extends far beyond the physical

battlefield, and the chief targets are political. In

this kind of war, if America can get the local

population to support it,

the insurgents are out of

business; if the insurgents can get the American

public to stop supporting the war, the American

military is out of business.

This is what counts. It

is what works. The Warrior, all oooh-rah and jump

wings, doesn’t get it. Vo Nguyen Giap got it.

Ho Chi Minh got it.

 

Thus the furious, embittered insistence of Warriors

that “We won Tet of ’68. We slaughtered them! We won,

dammit! Militarily, we absolutely won!†Swell, but

politically they lost. It was a catastrophe on the

order of Kursk or Dien Bien Phu. But they can’t figure

it out.

 

The warrior doesn’t understand what “victory†means

because he thinks in terms of firefights, courage,

weaponry, and valor. His approach is emotional, not

rational. Though not stupid, he is regularly

out-thought. Why?

 

It’s not mysterious. An intelligent enemy knows that

America cannot be beaten at industrial war. So he

thinks, “What then are America’s weaknesses?â€

The

first and crucial one is that the American government

enters into distant wars in which the public has no

stake. Do you want your son to die for—get

this—democracy in Iraq? You diapered him, got him

through school-yard fist fights, his first prom,

graduation from boot camp, and he comes home in a

box—for democracy in Iraq?

 

The thing to do, then (continues thinking the

intelligent enemy) is to make the Americans grow sick

of the war. How? Not by winning battles, which is

difficult against the Americans.

You win otherwise.

First, don’t give them point targets, since these are

easily destroyed by big guns and advanced technology.

Second, keep the level of combat high enough to

maintain the war in the forefront of American

consciousness, and to keep the monetary expense high.

(Inflation and gasoline prices are weapons as much as

rifles, another idea that the Warrior just doesn’t

get. Bin Laden does.)

Third, keep the body bags

flowing. Sooner or later the Americans will weary of

losing their sons for something that doesn’t really

interest them.

 

However, the Warrior does not grant the public the

right to grow weary.

For him, America exists to

support the military, not the other way around. Are

two hundred dead a week coming back from Asia? The

Warrior believes that small-town America

(which is where the coffins usually go) should grit its teeth,

bear down, and make the sacrifice for the country.

Sacrifice for what? It doesn’t matter. We’re at war,

dammit. Rally ‘round. What are you, a commy?

 

To the Warrior, to doubt the war is treason, aiding

and supporting, liberalism, cowardice, back-stabbing,

and so on. He uses these phrases unrelentingly. We

must fight, and fight, and fight, and never yield, and

sacrifice and spend. We must never ask why, or

whether, or what for, or do we want to.

 

The public of course doesn’t see it that way. In 1964

I graduated from a rural high school in Virginia with

a senior class of, I think, sixty.

Doug took a 12.7

through the head, Sonny spent time at Walter Reed with

neck wounds, Studley I hear is a paraplegic, another

kid got mostly blinded for life, and several, whom I

won’t name, tough country kids as I knew them, came

back as apparently irredeemable drunks.

(These were

kids I knew, not all in my class.) It was a lot of

dead and crippled for a small place. For what?

 

Cowardice? I was on campus in 1966 on a small, very

Republican, very patriotic, very conservative, very

Southern campus. The students, and their girlfriends,

were all violently against the war. So, I gather, were

their parents. Why? Were they the traitors of the

Warrior’s imagination? No. They didn’t want to die for

something that they didn’t care about.

 

This eludes the Warrior. Always, he blames The Press

for the waning of martial enthusiasm, for his

misunderstanding of the kind of war we are fighting.

Did the press make Studley a paraplegic?

Or kill the

guy with all the tubes who died in the stretcher above

me on the Medevac 141 back from Danang?

Did Walter

Cronkite make my buddy Cagle blind when the rifle

grenade exploded on the end of his fourteen? Do the

Warriors think that people don’t notice when their

kids come back forever in wheelchairs?

 

They don’t get it.

 

©Fred Reed

www.FredOnEverything.net