Posted on 06/05/2007 7:26:11 AM PDT by Tolik
The United States can usually win even postmodern wars abroad if it can play to its strengths — which are marshaling our enormous material, intelligence, and technological advantages to defeat the enemy before he inflicts enough casualties to convince an affluent and comfortable public at home that such losses are simply not worth the envisioned aims.
So how are we doing?
As expected, many of our traditional advantages are being nullified.
How can Americans use air superiority against an enemy that hides among civilians and dares them to destroy infrastructure essential to our friends?
We create sophisticated communications at great cost and investment; the parasitical terrorists simply bore into them and use them at no cost and sometimes with greater effect than do their inventors (e.g., Why are not jihadist websites deemed as dangerous as IEDs, but not attacked in similar fashion?).
Money and know-how can rebuild Iraq along the designs of Western material society — but that only makes it more vulnerable as a single transformer blown up or a pylon brought down can suddenly take away the newly found improved life. It’s not just that a suicide bomber with a $100 vest can destroy $1 million worth of electrical infrastructure, but in the gruesome equation cast the American engineers into the role of the incompetent or sinister by their failure to repair and rebuild faster than an illiterate can destroy.
The globalized media is an American epiphenomenon, but the narrative of the war is still the IED, not the purple finger. We apparently have no way of convincing the world that the primordial enemy commits daily something far worse than the sexual humiliation of the entire Abu Ghraib fiasco. Somehow “thousands have been killed” is never qualified as those mostly butchered and blown up by insurgents — since the loose use of the passive voice lends a general sense that somehow Americans are directly involved in, or responsible for, the killing.
Our soldiers are fighting brilliantly, and history will record they are defeating the enemy while suffering historically low casualties. But if the sacrifice of American youth is not tied — daily, hourly — to larger strategic and humanitarian goals by eloquent statesmen who believe in the mission, then cynicism follows and, with it, despair.
The establishment of consensual government in Iraq, with the concomitant defeat of jihadists, will have positive ripples that will undermine Islamism and help to cleanse the miasma in which al Qaeda thrives. But again, unless explained, most Americans will not see a connection between the ideology of the head-drillers and head-loppers we are fighting in Iraq and those who try to do even worse at Fort Dix and the Kennedy airport. The war to remove Saddam was won and is over; the subsequent and very different war in Iraq that followed is for nothing less than the future of the Middle East — and now involves everything from global terrorism and nuclear proliferation to the world’s oil supply and the future of Islam in the modern world.
We need to confess that the jihadists are not only keen students of insurgency warfare, but good observers of the American psyche. We think their kidnapping, childish infomercials, gruesome tactics, and horrific websites are primordial and counterproductive; but they are more likely horrifically simple in inciting the most basic fears and self-preservation instincts of ordinary people. Precisely because decapitation belongs to a different century makes it more gruesome now, not less. Because the al Qaedists steal many of their talking points from the Western Left does not make them unimaginative as much as eerily familiar. And because we can daily predict the serial barbarity of the jihadists makes it not so much unimaginative as savagely inevitable.
So what to do?
We can quibble and fight about tactics on the ground, manpower numbers, strategic postures toward Iran and Syria, the need to prod the Iraqis, but our problem is more existential. Either stabilizing Iraq now is felt critical to the United States and the West or it isn’t. If the Left is right that it isn’t, then we should flee; if they are wrong, and I think they are, then we must start using our vast cultural and media resources to explain what is at stake — in a strategic and humanitarian sense — and precisely what it is costing America and why it in the long run is worth it, and how we have adjusted to counter our enemies who in the last four years have not won in Iraq or anywhere else either.
By our relative inaction on these critical informational fronts, we are only raising the bar impossibly high for General Petraeus when he reports back to Congress in the autumn. For election-minded Republican senators and representatives (whose defection alone can end the war) the barometer of success unfortunately may be soon not be improvement in six months, but only an impossible demand for absolute victory in 2007.
So more explanation, less assertion; more debate with, rather than dismissal of, critics. And the final irony? The more brutal honesty, the less euphemism and generalities, the more Americans will accept the challenge
Let me know if you want in or out.
Links: FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
His website: http://victorhanson.com/
NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
Pajamasmedia: http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/
As long as our side continues to wait for a knight in shining armor, and neglects the hard work of defeating, destroying and discrediting the worldwide leftist media monopoly, we will continue to fail.
The “press” rules the world, rules the world’s pols, determines wars, and writes our history, gives, spikes, spins, emphasizes, deemphasizes, what info it chooses to, makes or breaks reputations, careers, elections, it’s power is immense.
It is they who have ruled that blowing up innocents in a marketplace, on buses, in restaurants, is somehow "winning", just as they have done in Israel for decades.
VDH wonderfully clarifies and describes what's at stake and what should be done, but I wonder if he fully realizes that the "cultural and media resources" he wants to marshall are almost totally controlled by the left.
Bump for later.
...We need to confess that the jihadists are not only keen students of insurgency warfare, but good observers of the American psyche. We think their kidnapping, childish infomercials, gruesome tactics, and horrific websites are primordial and counterproductive; but they are more likely horrifically simple in inciting the most basic fears and self-preservation instincts of ordinary people. Precisely because decapitation belongs to a different century makes it more gruesome now, not less. Because the al Qaedists steal many of their talking points from the Western Left does not make them unimaginative as much as eerily familiar. And because we can daily predict the serial barbarity of the jihadists makes it not so much unimaginative as savagely inevitable.
So what to do?
We can quibble and fight about tactics on the ground, manpower numbers, strategic postures toward Iran and Syria, the need to prod the Iraqis, but our problem is more existential. Either stabilizing Iraq now is felt critical to the United States and the West or it isn’t. If the Left is right that it isn’t, then we should flee; if they are wrong, and I think they are, then we must start using our vast cultural and media resources to explain what is at stake — in a strategic and humanitarian sense — and precisely what it is costing America and why it in the long run is worth it, and how we have adjusted to counter our enemies who in the last four years have not won in Iraq or anywhere else either.
To win the larger war we need to win the infowar.
later.
Or close readers of the US media, anyway. The NYT tells gives good guidance as to what will make the Administration look bad and erode public support for the war.
In Israel Jihadists at least blowing up their enemies - Jews (regardless of age, etc). In Iraq they went a step further - they are blowing up other Iraqis. It is totally surreal that the Worlds MSM consider this monstrosity as America’s fault. Nobody would consider it normal if in retaliation to your real or imagines offence I’d kill my relatives. I’d be rightfully called crazy and put away one way or another. But its all America’s or Jooos fault over there.
But, after saying all this I don’t think that all people who do repeat this crap are hopeless. We (meaning the sane part of the West) are guilty of not counteracting this brainwashing. We will ultimately lose the larger war, unless we win the info-war or the crazies attack us so painfully that it will cut through brainwashing on the personal level. I fear that the second scenario will come to life, because the right minded people talking over the Internet is not going to be enough.
I think we’ve lost that one. Even people I know who hate Islam and Jihad think it’s all about oil and Halliburton. The only people who see the whole thing as anything other than America establishing and/or maintaining an Empire will probably be able to post on this thread without pushing it into another page. I mean VDH is totally right, but not only did As Quaida learn from Vietnam, so did the MSM. The only people who can defeat America are...Americans (term used loosely when referring to the MSM).
It would be crazy if a bunch of rag tag terrorists — and you’ve all seen their training tapes — defeat the powerful US with its star war weaponry. Every single Democrat leader calling for cut and run should be singled out for shaming this nation. Especially Edwards who wants his hair blow dried a thousand times, this way and that, for that glossy dapper Dan effect, before he gets down to real serious business.
Note tagline. The Left is in overdrive working to destroy America from within. If enough Americans comply, it will succeed.
FYI.
VDH bump
Let’s have FOX or CNN cover some military footage showing the capture of Bin Laden or his body. Let’s trump up some stuff in the world to get these guys to expose themselves. Let’s “leak” to the world news media that America currently has 37 covert infiltrators working withing the terrorists ranks and watch them run to the media to prove otherwise. Let’s have a leak to the international media that suggests “secret” bombs have been placed in Iran’s nuclear production facilities and are ready to be detonated if needed. I liked the whole “America is planning a war with Iran” stuff. Keep the enemy guessing and put them on media defense for a change.
Later, declassify the strategic lies as a tool in our military arsenal. We have used propaganda and deceit in every war and it’s effectiveness should not be taken lightly.
VDH bump
Long ago (it seems) I figured we'd see another 20,000 murders before we actually got behind the WOT *as a nation*. I only hope those 20,000 are from the Left, not out of animosity, but rather because maybe they would actually take all this seriously. (Probably not even then.)
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