Posted by
Meyac on Thursday, January 10, 2008 6:37:10 AM
I recently received this column from a great commander and leader of men that I once served under and still keep in contact with. If he thought that this was an outstanding explanation of current attitudes towards the War of Terror that we find our country in then I believe that it is worth sharing with anyone who chances to read it here on my blog. I hope that all who read these words of wisdom will think long and hard on their message, for that message is one that we all had better take heed and bare down not only for ourselves but for our children and grandchildren and for our country.
Subject: In War: Resolution - by Victor Davis Hanson
December 23, 2007
In War: Resolution
by Victor Davis Hanson
The Claremont Review
"Iraq," swears Al Gore, "was the single worst strategic mistake in
American history." Senate Majority leader Harry Reid agrees that the
war he voted to authorize is "the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S.
history," and indeed is already "lost." Many of our historically
minded politicians and commanders have weighed in with similar
superlatives. Retired General William Odom calls Iraq "the greatest
strategic disaster in United States history." Senator Chuck Hagel (who
voted for the war) is somewhat more cautious; he terms Iraq "the most
dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam." Jimmy
Carter takes, as usual, the loftiest view: the Iraq War, and Great
Britain's acquiescence in it, constitute "a major tragedy for the
world," and prove that the Bush Administration "has been the worst in
history."
Certainly there are legitimate questions about Iraq, as about all
wars. Why, for example, did Tommy Franks, the Centcom commander who
led American forces in a brilliant three-week victory over Saddam
Hussein, abruptly announce his retirement in late May 2003 - prompting
a disruption in command just as the successful conventional war ended
and an unexpected insurgency in Iraq gathered steam? Why were looters
allowed to ransack much of Baghdad's infrastructure following the
defeat of the Baathist army? Why "disband" the Iraqi military and
purge its officer corps of Baathists at precisely the time law and
order - not tens of thousands of unemployed youth - were needed? And
weren't there too few occupying troops in the war's aftermath, along
with too restrictive rules of engagement - but too prominent a profile
for the American proconsuls busily dictating to the Iraqis?
The queries don't stop there, alas. Why in advance weren't there
sufficient new-model body armor and armored Humvees to protect
American troops? Why did we begin to assault Fallujah in April 2004,
only to pull back for six months and then have to retake the city
after the American election in November? Why were the country's
borders left open to infiltrators and its ubiquitous ammunition dumps
kept accessible to terrorists? The catalogue of military error could
be multiplied ad nauseam. Then there are also the inevitable strategic
conundrums over the need to attack Saddam's regime in the first place,
given the nature of the terrorist threat, the ascendant Iranian
theocracy next door, and the colossal intelligence failures concerning
imagined vast depots of chemical and biological weapons.
But what is missing from the national debate over the "worst" war in
our history is any appreciation of past American military errors -
political, strategic, technological, intelligence, tactical - that
nearly cost us victory in far more important conflicts. Nor do we
accept the savage irony of war that only through errors, tragic though
they may be, do successful armies adjust in time to discover winning
strategies, tactics, and generals.
Preoccupied with the daily news from Baghdad, we seem to think our
generation is unique in experiencing the heartbreak of an
error-plagued war. We forget that victory in every war goes to the
side that commits fewer mistakes - and learns more from them in less
time - not to the side that makes no mistakes. A perfect military in a
flawless war never existed - though after Grenada and the air war over
the Balkans we apparently thought otherwise. Rather than sink into
unending recrimination over Iraq, we should reflect about comparable
blunders in America's past wars and how they were corrected. Without
such historical knowledge we are condemned to remain shrill captives
of the present.
Intelligence Failures
Take one of this war's most controversial issues, intelligence
failures. Supposedly we went to war in 2003 with little accurate
information about either Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or
its endemic religious factionalism. As a result the U.S. government
lost credibility and goodwill at home and abroad, and is now plagued
by enormous political and military problems in trying to stabilize a
constitutional government in Iraq. Have lapses of this magnitude been
unusual in past wars?
Not at all, in either a strategic or tactical context. American
intelligence officers missed the almost self-evident Pearl Harbor
attack, as an entire Japanese carrier group steamed unnoticed to
within a few hundred miles of Hawaii. After fighting for four long
years we were completely surprised by the Soviets' efforts to absorb
Eastern Europe. Almost no one had a clue about the Communist invasion
of South Korea in June 1950 - or the subsequent Chinese entrance en
masse into North Korea months later. Neither the CIA nor the State
Department had much inkling that Saddam Hussein would gobble up Kuwait
in August 1990.
We should remember that long before the WMD controversy, the triggers
for American wars have usually been odd affairs, characterized by poor
intelligence gathering and inept diplomacy - and thus endless
controversy and conspiracy mongering: for example, the so-called
Thornton affair that started the Mexican War; the defense and shelling
of Fort Sumter; the cry of "Remember the Maine!" that heralded the
Spanish-American War; the murky circumstances surrounding the 1915
sinking of the Lusitania that turned public opinion against the
Kaiser; the Pearl Harbor debacle; an offhand remark in January 1950 by
Secretary of State Dean Acheson that South Korea was outside our
"defense perimeter"; the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; and an American
diplomat's apparent signal of unconcern to Saddam Hussein immediately
before he invaded Kuwait.
At the battlefield level, America's intelligence failures are even
more shocking. On April 6, 1862, Union forces at Shiloh allowed a
large, noisy Confederate army under General Albert Sidney Johnston to
approach unnoticed (by both Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William
Tecumseh Sherman) to within a few thousand yards of their front with
disastrous results. Grant - still clueless as to the forces arrayed
against him - compounded his error by sending an ambiguous message for
reinforcements to General Lew Wallace, resulting in a critical delay
of aid for several hours. Hundreds of Union soldiers died in the
meantime. Following the battle Union generals knew even less
concerning the whereabouts of the retreating, defeated Confederate
forces and thus allowed them to escape in safety. The hard-won Union
victory became an object of blame-gaming for the remainder of the 19th
century.
Perhaps the two costliest intelligence lapses of World War II preceded
the Battle of the Bulge and Okinawa - both towards the end of the war,
after radical improvements in intelligence methods and technology.
Americans had no idea of the scope, timing, or aims of the massive
German surprise attack through the Ardennes in December 1944, despite
the battle-tested acumen of our two most respected generals, Dwight
Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, and British and American intercepts of
Wehrmacht messages. At Okinawa, American intelligence officers
grievously underestimated the size, position, and nature of the
Japanese deployment, and thus vastly overestimated the efficacy of
their own pre-invasion bombing attacks. Yet Okinawa was not our first
experience with island-hopping. It unfolded as the last invasion
assault in the Pacific theater of operations-supposedly after the
collective wisdom gleaned from Guadalcanal, the Marianas, Peleilu, the
Philippines, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima had been well digested. Yet this
late in the war, over 140,000 Americans were killed, wounded, or
missing in the Ardennes and on Okinawa.
Strategic and Tactical Errors
At the geostrategic level, American diplomats have had to make devil's
bargains far more morally suspect than going into Iraq. General George
Patton and others lamented that World War II had broken out over
saving the free peoples of Eastern Europe - only to end with the Yalta
accords ensuring their enslavement by an erstwhile American ally whose
military we had supplied lavishly. Today we worry whether the U.S.
should have armed some jihadists in Afghanistan in the 1980s or
whether it was moral to watch with glee as Iran and Iraq nearly
annihilated one another - each occasionally helped by U.S. arms or
intelligence. We forget that even worse choices than these have
confronted us in the past - like sending billions of dollars of aid to
Joseph Stalin, just a few years after he had slaughtered or starved to
death 20 million Soviets.
In many of our wars this country has committed strategic mistakes far
greater in number and toll than anything seen in Iraq. Perhaps the
worst was to commit thousands of American crewmen to daylight bombing
raids over occupied Europe in 1942-43. Prewar dogmas of the "bomber
always gets through" blinded the proponents of air power. Ignoring its
critics, the Army Air Corps sent hundreds of highly trained crews to
their deaths on slow, unescorted bombing runs in broad daylight, amid
thousands of German flak batteries and Luftwaffe fighters - and
achieved very little in return until early 1944. Even more
inexplicable was Admiral Ernest King's decision in 1942 not to use
American destroyers and destroyer-escorts to shepherd merchant ships
across the Atlantic to Great Britain. German U-boats had a field day,
torpedoing slow-moving cargo vessels right off our east coast - which
was lit up each night, as though to silhouette undefended American
targets at sea. King persisted despite ample evidence from World War I
that the convoy system had worked, and despite pleas from veteran
British officers that their own two-year experience in the war had
taught them the folly of sending unescorted merchant ships across the
Atlantic.
We often read of the tragedy of the September 1944 Arnheim campaign.
Impossible logistics, bad weather, lousy intelligence, tactical
imbecility, and much more doomed the "Market Garden" operation and led
to the infamous "A Bridge Too Far" catastrophe. Thousands of
Anglo-American troops were needlessly killed or wounded - after the
Allies had recently crushed an entire German army group in the west
(though they let 100,000 Wehrmacht troops escape at Falaise). The
foolery of Market Garden also ate up scarce resources, manpower, and
gasoline at precisely the time the American Third Army was nearing the
Rhine without much major opposition. Once Allied armies stalled for
want of supplies, they would be unable to cross the border of the
Reich for another half year. The Germans used the breathing space
after their victory in Holland to rush defenders to the so-called
Siegfried Line, which had been theretofore mostly undefended.
Had General Douglas MacArthur in late 1950 listened to both superiors
and subordinates, he would not have sent thousands of G.I.s with long
vulnerable supply lines into the far reaches of wintry North Korea -
on his gut instinct that hundreds of thousands of Chinese "volunteers"
would not cross the Yalu River and his troops would be "home for
Christmas." When Mao ordered the massive People's Army to invade, the
longest retreat in the history of U.S. forces ensued, with thousands
of American casualties.
Our tactical decisions have remained even more error-prone. Grant was
still sending ranks of soldiers against entrenched Confederate
positions for most of summer 1864, despite Sherman's angry protests
against the folly of such assaults in a rapidly changing war of massed
firepower. In World War I, despite our assurances that our
well-trained riflemen could broach enemy positions, seasoned British
and French commanders warned novice American planners of the lethality
of German rapid-firing artillery, machine guns, and poison gas.
Americans died in droves before we got it right by early 1918. For all
its surprises and mistakes D-Day was carefully planned and a brilliant
success; its immediate aftermath was a near disaster. Within a week of
the landings, Allied army groups stalled in the hedgerows for over six
weeks - we suffered tens of thousands of casualties while Americans
were flummoxed by entrenched, camouflaged German positions amid the
narrow lanes and thick hedges. Apparently no planner had thought much
about the terrain or navigability of the bocage - although Normandy
was a well-traveled area and should have been familiar to American
officers, many of them veterans of the fighting in France during World
War I.
Outgunned
How about weapons parity? America has a reputation for technological
prowess and machine-mastery. The phone and electric light bulb were
singular American innovations; the Wright Brothers invented the
airplane; Richard Gatling the first modern successful machine gun.
Nevertheless in nearly every one of our major wars American troops
initially entered combat with arms vastly inferior to their more
experienced enemies. In this regard Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War, and
the present Middle East conflicts are exceptional; these were our
first major land engagements in which American weaponry has been at
the outset superior in almost every category. We sent a million troops
to Europe between 1917 and 1918 with weapons qualitatively inferior to
both our German enemies and French and British allies. We had no tanks
- and would never produce our own in any numbers until the war was
well over. We relied for the most part on British- or French-designed
machine guns and artillery. European airplanes were far better than
American Dayton-Wright and Curtiss models. Only the American model
M1903 Springfield rifle, and later the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR),
proved fit for the rapidly changing technological conditions of the
Western Front.
Our ill-preparedness was in some sense still worse in both World War
II and Korea. The United States went to war in 1941 equipped with far
fewer aircraft carriers in the Pacific theater than the Japanese. Our
Wildcat front-line fighters were inferior to the Japanese Zero;
obsolete Brewster F2A Buffalos were rightly known as "flying coffins."
The Douglas TBD Devastator bomber was a death-trap, its pilots
essentially wiped out at the Battle of Midway trying to drop often
unreliable torpedoes. American-designed Lee, Grant, and Stuart tanks -
and even the much-heralded Shermans ("Ronson Lighters") - were
intrinsically inferior to most contemporary German models, which had
far better armor and armament. With the exception of the superb M-1
rifle, it is hard to rank any American weapons system as comparable to
those used by the Wehrmacht, at least until 1944-45. We never
developed guns quite comparable to the fast-firing, lethal German .88
artillery platform. Our anti-tank weapons of all calibers remained
substandard. Most of our machine guns and mortars were reliable - but
of World War I vintage. The American military learned immediately in
Korea that our first-generation jet fighters - F-80 Shooting Stars -
could not match Russian MiG-15s. Even improved Sherman tanks and newer
M-24 Chaffee light tanks through much of 1950 were outclassed by World
War II-vintage Russian T-34s and T-85s.
Poor Leadership
Have there ever been lapses in military leadership like the ones that
purportedly mar our Iraq effort? The so-called "Revolt of the
Generals" against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was nothing
compared to the "Revolt of the Admirals" that led to Secretary of
Defense Louis Johnson's forced resignation in the midst of the bitter
first year of the Korean War. Johnson himself had come to office
following the removal (or resignation), and then probable suicide, of
Secretary James Forestall, whose last note included a lengthy
quotation from Sophocles' Ajax. Johnson's successor, the venerable
General George Marshall, lasted less than a year - hounded out by
Joseph McCarthy, and an object of furor in the wartime 1952 election
that brought in Eisenhower (who did not defend his former superior
from McCarthy's slanders). The result was that four different
secretaries of defense - Forestall, Johnson, Marshall, and Robert
Lovett - served between 1949 and 1951.
Critics of the Iraq war wonder how a workmanlike Lieutenant General
Ricardo Sanchez, on whose watch Abu Ghraib occurred, had obtained
command of all coalition ground forces in the first place, and later
why General George Casey persisted in tactics that were aimed more at
downsizing our forces than going after the enemy and fighting a
vigorous war of counterinsurgency. But surely these armchair critics
can acknowledge that such controversies over personnel pale in
comparison to past storms. Lincoln serially fired, ignored, or
bypassed mediocrities like Generals Burnside, Halleck, Hooker,
McClellan, McDowell, Meade, Pope, and Rosecrans before finding Grant,
George Thomas, Sherman, and Philip Sheridan - all of whom at one time
or another were under severe criticism and nearly dismissed.
World War II was little better. By all accounts General John C.H. Lee
set up an enormous logistical fiefdom in Paris that thrived on perks
and privilege while American armies at the front were short on
manpower, materials, and fuel. To this day military historians cannot
quite fathom how and why Major General Lloyd Fredendall was ever given
an entire corps in the North Africa campaign. His uninspired
generalship led to the disaster at the Kasserine Pass and his own
immediate removal. Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, a
competent officer, was bewildered by the unexpected Japanese
resistance on Okinawa, and unimaginatively plowed head-on through
fortified enemy positions - until killed in action on the island, the
most senior-ranking officer to die by enemy fire in World War II. The
generalship of Mark Clark in Italy was often disastrous.
The story of the U.S. army at war is one of sacking, sidetracking, or
ostracizing its highest and best-known commanders in the field - Grant
after Shiloh, Douglas MacArthur in Korea, Patton in Sicily, or William
Westmoreland in Vietnam - for both good and bad reasons. Iraq and
Afghanistan are peculiar in that there have been so few personnel
changes, much less a general consensus about perceived military
incompetence. In comparison to past conflicts, the wonder is not that
a gifted officer like David Petraeus came into real prominence
relatively late in the present war, but that his unique talents were
recognized quickly enough to allow him the command and latitude to
alter the entire tactical approach to the war in Iraq.
Live and Learn, Learn and Live
What can we learn from the wartime blunders and controversies that
together cost hundreds of thousands of American lives but usually did
not endanger eventual victories? First, remember that such failings
usually were aired in a long tradition of investigative, hard-hitting
exposés and columns. Long before Seymour Hersh and Peter Arnett,
Thomas Knox, Edward Crapsey, Drew Pearson, and Walter Winchell wrote
scathing critiques of American military performance. In reaction, the
most vehement attack on the wartime press came not from Richard Nixon,
but from William Tecumseh Sherman. "If I had my choice I would kill
every reporter in the world," he sighed, "but I am sure we would be
getting reports from hell before breakfast."
Yet until the defeat in Vietnam, there was a sort of tragic acceptance
of military error as inherent in war. Ours was once a largely rural
population, inured to natural disaster and resigned to human
shortcoming. Though Presidents Lincoln and Truman were both reviled,
Americans still felt that ultimately the American system of
transparency and self-criticism would correct wartime mistakes.
Fault-finding and partisan grandstanding there were aplenty, but the
common desire for victory usually overcame perpetual finger-pointing
and serial despair. Pearl Harbor and its attendant conspiracy theories
may have set the Greatest Generation back, but such losses,
humiliation, and suspicion were hardly considered tantamount to
American defeat.
So we plowed on, accepting that in war choices are typically between
the bad and worse. It was foolhardy not to escort convoys in early
World War II; but Admiral King - always suspicious of British motives
- erred because he believed that such a commitment would divert
precious assets from the Pacific War, where the U.S., largely alone,
had to face the Japanese fleet - far larger and more formidable than
Hitler's. The Sherman tank trapped and incinerated thousands of
Americans when torched by Panthers and Tigers. But Patton himself saw
that its dependability, speed, and sheer numbers offered
countervailing advantages in racing toward the Rhine.
By the same token, for every purported blunder in Iraq, there is at
least an understandable reason why errors occurred in the context of
human imperfection, emotion, and fear. Such considerations do not
mitigate the enormity of military mistakes, but they should foster
understanding of how and why they occur. Such recognition might lend
humility to critics and wisdom to the perpetrators - and prepare us to
accept and deal with similar human fallibility in the future. So shoot
looters - and CNN immediately would have libeled the occupation forces
as recycled Saddamites. Level Fallujah - and Iraqis would have
compared us to the Soviets in Afghanistan. Had we kept together the
Republican Guard - if that were even possible - charges of
perpetuating the agents of Saddam's genocidal regime would have
followed, with unfavorable contrasts to our successful de-Nazification
program after World War II. Granted, there were not enough American
troops to close borders, monitor ammunition depots, and maintain
order. But as a result, there were enough deployed elsewhere to
discourage trouble in the Korean peninsula, reassure Europe and Japan
of our material commitment to their security, fight the Taliban in
Afghanistan, help keep order in the Balkans, and man dozens of bases
worldwide.
When MiG-15s surprisingly proved superior to American F-80s, our
Korean War planners took a pass on blaming each other and instead
deployed with blinding speed the superb F-86 Sabrejet, which surpassed
its Russian counterparts. Once a General Hooker or Fredendall was
found incompetent, Americans expected that someone like Grant or
Patton would eventually step forward from a formerly peacetime army; a
General Sherman or General Petraeus doesn't emerge on the first day of
a war. Only the lethal experience during 1942 and 1943 in the skies
above Germany ensured that improved bombers, tactics, and escort
fighters would arise to devastate the Third Reich by late 1944 and
1945, forcing the Germans to divert untold resources to counter the
American air assault. We are relieved that recent emphasis on
counterinsurgency under General Petraeus has brought radical
improvement in Iraq in a way that previous counterterrorism tactics
did not - but much of our current wisdom nevertheless accrued from the
hard years of fighting between 2003 and 2006 when Americans severely
weakened both al Qaeda and the Sunni insurgents. Again, what loses
wars are not the inevitable mistakes, but the failure to correct them
in time and the defeatism and depression (because errors occurred at
all) that we allow to paralyze us.
The quagmire in the hedgerows led to thousands of American deaths, but
also to innovations and new tactics, whether specially equipped
"Rhino" Sherman tanks or B-17s used tactically to blow holes in the
German lines (and kill and wound hundreds of Americans in "friendly
fire" blunders). Likewise, we may have started in Iraq with the naïve
belief that thin-skinned Humvees were simply updated Jeeps good enough
to transport personnel behind the lines. But we quickly learned that
in a war with no lines they became underarmored coffins - prompting a
challenge and response cycle between the enemy's Improvised Explosive
Devices and our armor. Frenzied development efforts produced
up-armored kits, factory-designed models with superior protection, and
entirely new vehicles like the Strykers, MRAPs (mine resistant, ambush
protected), and Rhinos.
The Home Front
The home front once accepted that our adversaries faced the same
obstacles and challenges of war. Moreover Americans assumed that the
enemy, being less introspective and self-critical, was even more prone
to military error than we - and less likely to innovate and correct.
That confidence ensured that the public saw mistakes not just in
absolute but also in relative terms. World War I saw one million
ill-equipped Doughboys deployed against the most experienced and
deadly modern army the world had yet seen. But the mass drafting of
one million soldiers, equipped and sent across the Atlantic in a mere
year, was acknowledged on all sides as a feat even beyond the ability
of the Kaiser's general staff. In World War II, lapses in our convoy
system were hardly as damaging to us as Germany's repeated mistakes at
sea were to the Nazi cause - faulty torpedoes, poor air support for
submarine operations, and abject security breaches that lent the
Allies almost instantaneous knowledge of the Kriegsmarine's
operations. There is no need to document the stupendous strategic and
tactical blunders that led to Saddam's ignominious defeat. But in his
wake (and after his demise), the supposedly sophisticated jihadists
have made just as many mistakes. In a self-proclaimed war of Islamic
liberation, al-Qaeda in Iraq has mutilated, butchered, and terrorized
a once largely sympathetic population. As a result they have nearly
pulled off the impossible: a formerly receptive Sunni tribal community
has turned against Sunni Muslim jihadists, and joined with American
infidels, sometimes alongside the troops of a Shiite-led government.
In past wars there was recognition of factors beyond human control -
the weather; the fickleness of human nature; the role of chance, the
irrational, and the inexplicable - that lent a humility to our efforts
and tolerance for unintended consequences. "Wars begin when you will,"
Machiavelli reminds us, "but they do not end when you please." The
star-crossed and disastrous Dieppe raid of August 1942 did not mean
that D-Day two years later had to fail. When in March 1945 maverick
General Curtis LeMay sent high-altitude precision B-29 bombers
carrying napalm in low over Tokyo, with little if any armament, the
expected American bloodbath did not follow - thanks to a ferocious jet
stream and dark nights that meant the huge planes came in much faster
and with better cover. "To a good general," wrote the Roman historian
Livy, "luck is important." By contrast the American media went into
near hysterics during the so-called "pause" in the three-week victory
over Saddam, when an unforeseen sandstorm temporarily stalled our
advance. Only later was it revealed that air operations with precision
weapons had continued all along to decimate Saddam's static forces.
WMDs were not found in Iraq, it is true. Yet an earlier American
generation might have consoled itself with the notion that at last we
had proved (as previous intelligence had not) that Saddam no longer
posed a threat, and ensured that Iraq would not again translate oil
wealth into the deadly forces with which it had attacked four of its
neighbors. Our ancestors might have added that the war had effectively
raised our standard of proof from "We must prove that you have WMDs"
to "You must prove that you don't." Libya, for example, had more WMDs
than Saddam did - and may well have given them up to avoid the
latter's fate.
Has War Changed, or Have We?
Victory does not require achieving all of your objectives, but
achieving more of yours than your enemy does of his. Patient
Northerners realized almost too late that victory required not merely
warding off or defeating Confederate armies, but also invading and
occupying an area as large as Western Europe in order to render an
entire people incapable of waging war. Blunders were seen as
inevitable once an unarmed U.S. decided to fight Germany, Italy, and
Japan all at once in a war to be conducted far away across wide
oceans, against enemies that had a long head start in rearmament. We
had disastrous intelligence failures in World War II, but we also
broke most of the German and Japanese codes in a fashion our enemies
could neither fathom nor emulate. Somehow we forget that going into
the heart of the ancient caliphate, taking out a dictator in three
weeks, and then staying on to foster a constitutional republic amid a
sea of enemies like Iran and Syria and duplicitous friends like Jordan
and Saudi Arabia - and losing less than 4,000 Americans in the
five-year enterprise - was beyond the ability of any of our friends or
enemies, and perhaps past generations of Americans as well.
But more likely the American public, not the timeless nature of war,
has changed. We no longer easily accept human imperfections. We care
less about correcting problems than assessing blame - in postmodern
America it is defeat that has a thousand fathers, while the notion of
victory is an orphan. We fail to assume that the enemy makes as many
mistakes but addresses them less skillfully. We do not acknowledge the
role of fate and chance in war, which sometimes upsets our best
endeavors. Most importantly we are not fixed on victory as the only
acceptable outcome.
What are the causes of this radically different attitude toward
military culpability? An affluent, leisured society has adopted a
therapeutic and managerial rather than tragic view of human experience
- as if war should be controllable through proper counseling or a
sound business plan. We take for granted our ability to talk on cell
phones to someone in Cameroon or select from 500 cable channels; so
too we expect Saddam instantly gone, Jeffersonian democracy up and
running reliably, and the Iraqi economy growing like Dubai's in a few
seasons. If not, then someone must be blamed for ignorance,
malfeasance, or inhumanity. It is as though we expect contemporary war
to be waged in accordance with warranties, law suits, and product
recalls, and adjudicated by judges and lawyers in stale courtrooms
rather than won or lost by often emotional youth in the filth,
confusion, and barbarity of the battlefield
Vietnam's legacy was to insist that if American aims and conduct were
less than perfect, then they could not be good at all, as if a
Stalinist police state in the North were comparable - or superior - to
a flawed democracy in the South with the potential to evolve in the
manner of a South Korea. The Vietnam War was not only the first modern
American defeat, but also the last, and so its evocation turns
hysterical precisely because its outcome was so unusual. Later
victories in Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, and the Balkans persuaded
Americans that war could be redefined, at the end of history, as
something in which the use of force ends quickly, is welcomed by
locals, costs little, and easily thwarts tyranny. When all that proved
less than true in Iraq, the public was ill-equipped to accept both
that recent walk-over victories were military history's exceptions
rather than its rule, and that temporary setbacks in Iraq hardly
equated to Vietnam-like quagmires.
We also live in an age of instant communications increasingly
contingent upon genre and ideology. The New York Times, CBS News,
National Public Radio, and Reuters - the so-called mainstream media
skeptical of America's morality and its ability to enact change abroad
- instill national despair by conveying graphic scenes of destruction
in Iraq without, however, providing much context or explaining how
such information is gathered and selected for release. In turn, Fox
News, the bloggers, and talk radio hear from their own sources that we
are not doing nearly so badly, and try to offer real-time correctives
to conventional newspapers and studios. The result is that the war is
fought and refought in 24-hour news cycles among diverse audiences, in
which sensationalism brings in ad revenues or enhances individual
careers. Rarely is there any sober, reasoned analysis that examines
American conduct over periods of six months or a year - not when the
"shocking" stories of Jessica Lynch or Abu Ghraib or Scott Beauchamp
make and sell better copy. Sensationalism was always the stuff of war
reporting, but today it is with us in real time, 24/7, offered up by
often anonymous sources, and filtered in a matter of hours or minutes
by nameless editors and producers. Those relentless news alerts -
tucked in between apparently more important exposés about Paris Hilton
and Anna Nicole Smith - ultimately impart a sense of confusion and
bewilderment about what war is. The result is a strange schizophrenia
in which the American public is too insecure to believe that we can
rectify our mistakes, but too arrogant to admit that our generation
might make any in the first place.
What can be done about our impatience, historical amnesia, and utopian
demands for perfection? American statesmen need to provide constant
explanations to a public not well versed in history - not mere
assertions - of what misfortunes to expect when they take the nation
to war. The more a president evokes history's tragic lessons, the
better, reminding the public that our forefathers usually endured and
overcame far worse. Americans should be told at the start of every
conflict that the generals who begin the fighting may not finish it;
that what is reported in the first 24 hours may not be true after a
week's retrospection, and that the alternative to the bad choice is
rarely the good one, but usually only the far worse. They should be
apprised that our morale is as important as our material advantages -
and that our will power is predicated on inevitable mistakes being
learned from and rectified far more competently and quickly than the
enemy will learn from his.
Only that way can we reestablish our national wartime objective as
victory, a goal that brings with it the acceptance of tragic errors as
well as appreciation of heroic and brilliant conduct. The Iraq war and
the larger struggle against the anti-American jihadists can still be
won - and won with a resulting positive assessment of our overall
efforts by future historians who will be far less harsh on us than we
are now on ourselves. Yet if as a nation we instead believe that we
cannot abide error, or that we cannot win due to necessary military,
moral, humanitarian, financial, or geopolitical constraints, then we
should not ask our young soldiers to continue to try. As in Vietnam
where we wallowed in rather than learned from our shortcomings, we
should simply accept defeat and with it the ensuing humiliating
consequences. But it would be far preferable for Americans undertaking
a war to remember these words from Churchill, in his 1930 memoir:
"Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that
anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and
hurricanes he will encounter."