argus

I can already envision the head-shaking when this post is read. “I thought for sure ol’ Morris would’ve posted some cheery Christmasesque piece. But oh no…” Etc.

…but I have to. I have to make (yet another) political/newsie post. Hours of sitting around with family led to the inevitable (albeit in passing) discussions about “what has gone wrong in Iraq” and the like. And the lack of knowledge and historical perspective displayed was …saddening. Because, as Victor Davis Hanson writes (in a piece discussing the latest buzz about canning Rumsfeld), we — we, the American public — are to blame for the difficulties in this war. As we were to blame for Viet Nam.

Yes, you heard me right: the American people lost Viet Nam, not the American military (the inevitable mistakes made by the military command in Viet Nam were made orders of magnitude worse by the lack of understanding (and therefore support) of the American public).

And the bottom line is “history”. Understanding the history of a region, of a nation, of one country’s relationship to another, is absolutely critically indispensably vital. Vital, that is, if a person is going to offer meaningful commentary on current events — like the Iraq war, or the Afghan war, or Viet Nam, or North Korea. The North Vietnamese understood that they could never defeat the American military on the conventional battlefield …and here the public-schooled American (like me, before my post-secondary reality education began) will tell you that that’s why the NVA fought a guerilla war, financed and supplied by the USSR. But that’s only half of the story: the NVA and the KGB understood that to defeat a democratic Western country, you had to defeat the will of their citizens to continue the war. So all the NVA had to do was hang on and retain the capability to kill lots of American troops so that the news could splash images of weeping moms and widows coast to coast. Capturing real, physical objectives and holding them — the measure of success in conventional war, like the two World Wars — was never a real goal for the NVA against the USA, unless it furthered the larger goal of killing GIs.

In military strategic parlance, this new approach to conflict is called “fourth generational warfare” — a new epoch in how nation-states butt heads, a campaign of perspective against the willpower of the citizens of a country. And Viet Nam was truly the first time this was employed successfully: the NVA’s Tet Offensive was a massively catastrophic loss in terms of men and materials (and NVA generals are on record saying so after the war). But that didn’t matter, as capturing objectives wasn’t a strategic goal in defeating America. America merely had to be made to “go home”, then the next final, real phase of the war could begin and end: the takeover of South Vietnam. The body count began to rise, the American military command felt hobbled back home by rapidly deteriorating support — or even tolerance — for the war, and therefore didn’t take any more strategically meaningful offensive directions. Which, while a gamble, would have resulted in clear gains and successes that could have been pointed to for the benefit of the story-hungry media around the world and tipped the psychological balance back in favor of the U.S. As this effect snowballed, the politics dictated that only halfway measures be taken since the support of the people was drying up at an ever-increasing rate — and failure became simply a matter of time.

We are beginning to see the same thing in Iraq today.

The myth of the inability of the religious radicals in Iraq to work with Baathist secularists pervades the nightly news — when history clearly shows otherwise (Baathist thugs going to Arafat’s Hezbollah training camps as far back as the 70s, for example). But those who will do anything to prevent a democratic society from becoming in Iraq (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia) not only know better, but also know that most of us — “us” being average, Joe Blow American citizens — don’t know better, being spoon-fed on the liberal-flavored news doled out by the NBC-ABC-CBS trifecta, and therefore will continue to do things that steer us in the wrong direction and weaken our stomachs for the long haul or broadening of the fronts that might be required to do things right here in World War IV. So look for continued attacks on Shia mosques, prominent neighborhoods, and regional leaders in an attempt to trigger a Shia retaliation, even a small scale one, so as to create the impression of an aborning civil war in Iraq. Such an impression would lead the mass media right where the Iran-Syria-Saudi axis wants them to go: to decry the Iraqi democratic experiment a “massive failure” and “mistake”, vilify Bush, and throw the appeasement street into a frothing second act. Weaken Bush’s support base in the people weakens his support base in Congress, divides the political leadership and ultimately leaves the American military — the most deadly fighting force in the history of the planet — crippled in the desert.

All this points to a larger issue with our public’s perception of events in Iraq: this is a regional war. Elections in Iraq are make-no-mistake important, strategically and psychologically, but there is much that needs to be done. Iran should be next for military action, even before Iraq is “finished” — but of a radically different sort of military action than was used in Iraq: a blockade perhaps, coupled with sanctions (ideally UN-backed, but really, who cares?) would fuel the massive unrest in that country and very likely lead to an overthrow of the Islamic theocracy there by the people (much as our State Dept hoped would happen in Iraq in the early 90s). If all else fails, do it the old fashioned way …but with the new-fashioned way blended in: work with local resistance groups that are already in place, have contacts, and know the area. Next, Syria — or even simultaneously — with a similar attack plan: sanctions plus a show of force to encourage nascent pro-democratic movements to make their move.

Bottom line: our public-school pop-culture-brainwashed populace is fast becoming the frighteningly uninformed herd of cattle portrayed in Mr. Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. And the sensational, warped prime time news stories that we nod vigorously at and hem-and-haw over are directly fed by our lack of perspective: by continuing to “go along” with the shovelfuls of tripe, we give them substance, life, weight. The most frightening aspect of this slow fall off of the cliff: we, like the characters in the novel, are embracing our ignorance. It feels good; “it allows me to be happy”; “I just don’t want to think about that”; “I don’t have time”. We have a duty, as voting citizens in the most powerful country in the history of Earth, to be informed as best as we possibly can be about what is going on in the world around us. The Internet, for the first time in history, makes that truly possible.

The rest is up to us.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 27th, 2004 at 6:26:33 pm and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.