The favorite indoor outdoor sport of public intellectuals these days is of course the historical analogy. Iran is the new Germany and this is 1938. Bin Ladin is the new Saladin and this the 12th Century or whatever. A new one dawned on me yesterday. I am currently reading a book called Through German Eyes: The English on the Somme. The author has gone back and read German unit histories and intelligence reports and tried to write a history of the battle as the German’s saw it. What emerges is the whole myth of an incompetent British leadership sending lambs to slaughter is not true at all. Looked at from the German perspective, the British Army was actually very good on the Somme. They nearly broke the German Army.
The reason why this reminded me of today is that people continually refuse to understand that some fights are just hard. The British Army in 1916 was facing an industrialized well trained German Army that was occupying the better part of France and was simply not going to quit. All of the arm chair post facto strategizing in the world is not going to change the brutal reality that the English could either give up and loose the war or fight and win the war and suffer incredible casualties. There was no easy way out.
Today, we face in many ways the same situation. We face a fanatical and cunning enemy who is unafraid to blend into our society indiscriminately kill civilians, is numerous, well funded and like the Germans will not give up. There is no good way out of this. The United States is going to spend the next generation or more under the threat of terrorism. It will have to change its society and its notions of civil liberties and privacy and will probably have to invade and occupy the odd country every few years for the foreseeable future. All of the arm chair strategizing about more troops in Iraq and Special Forces and diplomacy and working with our allies is not going to change that. People just refuse to face a bad reality. A bad situation is always someone’s fault for not pursuing the easy solution. People refuse to accept that sometimes there are no easy solutions. In the same way people refused even after the war to see that the slaughter on the Somme and Ypres was unavoidable once the war started, people today refuse to see that a long protracted bloody struggle against radical Islam is inevitable. Thus we get “Bush’s incompetence” and “why do they hate us” and so fourth. It is just the same monkeys in different trees.
08 September 2006
An Excellent Point
This is an email sent to Jonah Goldberg and published in the Corner. It very nicely makes a point that we tend to forget: we are not the only actor in this war and not everything is within our power. Safety is not something we can achieve unilaterally. It is something we can only achieve through imposing our will on our enemy.
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3 comments:
(unnecessary war and carnage by leaders willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands for personal vanity)
For a persuasive depiction of a war that was far more costly in human life than it need have been, see Capt B. Liddle Hart's "The Real War."
While perhaps not for personal vanity, military leaders were often singularly incapable of taking on board the lessons of experience, punishing subordinates for being right, and disgracefully bodging up the introduction of the tank.
Which isn't to say there are any easy solutions to our current conflict (just try getting someone against the invasion of Iraq to come up with anything like an alternative that doesn't consist almost exclusively of hand-wringing) -- there aren't -- but WWI had more than its far share of folly.
Peter: I've never heard that. What he might be referring to is the "Powell Doctrine": don't get into a war unless you have public support and then go in with massive force to destroy the enemy ruthlessly, and always have an exit strategy. I have seen Rumsfeld criticized for not following the Powell Doctrine.
I have to say that I remain unconvinced by the "not enough troops" theory. In the beginning of the war, when more troops could have been useful, troops were entering the country as quickly as they could. Until we captured Baghdad's airport and put down the regular troops and Fedayeen militia, we only had one entrance into the country, through Kuwait. It takes time to move an army (look how long it took us to buildup our troops in Kuwait in the first place) and even after we could land in Baghdad it is even slower to move an army plane load by plane load.
It is too bad that we weren't allowed to go through Turkey, but we couldn't call off the war just because Turkey wouldn't cooperate. You go to war with the allies you have. In any event, the Kurdish north wasn't the problem and not too troops had to be deployed up there.
When next you hear someone argue that more troops would have avoided the looting and no looting would have avoided the insurgency (a non sequiter, as far as I'm concerned) ask them for the details as to how they would have gotten more troops to Baghdad. Which transports would they have used, diverted from which missions of less importance? Which troops from which base? Eating what?
During the insurgency, more troops just means more targets. It means more convoys that have to be protected. It means more or bigger bases to be protected. It means more non-combatants to be protected. I just don't see how more troops helps, and the people complaining that we didn't use enough troops are, ironically, the same people who thought we shouldn't go it at all.
The letter is spot on. i'd like to propose a corollary to his "war is tough" rule, and that is that war is a fact of life. War is the price of maintenance and upkeep for a civilization, nation or way of life. The modern liberal mentality can't get its mind around this notion without seeing it as willful fascism ans imperialism, but war is the norm, and the nation or culture that gets tired of waging war is the nation or culture that will become extinct. War is normal. Young men dying in combat is a historical norm. We are paying a much lower price in war dead than any nation in history thanks to our superior technology, but mostly to our superior skill in warmaking. 3000 deaths in 3 years to defeat and occupy two large nations in Asia is nothing in the historical scheme of things. For a nation of 300 million it is microscopic. We lose that many people in a month due to auto accidents.
Pacifism is a parasitic life-form. It lives off of the sacrifices of the warrior class. When pacifism multiplies its influence too far, it ends up killing it's host culture. I hope that we're not reaching that tipping point.
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