JUNKYARDBLOG'S DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
Those of you looking around for the latest on the Boston Globe's airing of uncensored hard-core porn that smears US troops, see the post below. For the rest, story time.
I guess I'm what National Review and others have taken to calling a "panicked hawk." Having supported the Iraq war--and continuing to support it to the utmost--I find myself of the opinion that we are playing a solid hand very badly and are in real danger of losing the war. I've gone from an optimist on the war to a near abject pessimist in the space of about 10 days, and this blog has reflected that change. I think an explanation is in order.
Around the time John Kerry became the Democrat nominee to oppose President Bush, I started working on opposition research. I announced a little campaign on this blog to get ahold of The New Soldier, Kerry's 1971 anti-war book with a mock Iwo Jima flag-raising on the cover. I'd looked in my local library and didn't find the book, and figured the JYB's readership might enjoy helping out.
Our splinter cells went to work at the Library of Congress as well as other university and local libraries around the country, and finally an intrepid operative struck paydirt. He got the book, scanned most of it and sent it to me. I haven't written up a review--yet. But I will.
For now, the short verion--The New Soldier is an awful book. No wonder Kerry has spent the last thirty years suppressing its publication. It's an embarrassment, full of photos so full of drug-addled hippies you can almost smell them across the decades. The writing is bad and cliched beatnik claptrap, and though Kerry is its nominal author, he barely makes a cameo.
While all that was activity going on, I made several trips to the library to research the larger Vietnam-era anti-war movement. I wanted to understand Kerry and his times--I was four when Saigon fell--and I wanted to understand his role in the movement and his possible role in the US defeat. It's the only time we have lost a war. I wanted to know if the man a major party was nominating for President had played a significant role in that defeat. It's a relevant question in a time of peace, and only more so in a time of war.
But during my research, Kerry almost became a sideshow. I started seeing how the anti-war movement of which Kerry was a part contributed to our defeat in Vietnam. And I started to get worried.
Vietnam was a strange war. I took a college class on Vietnam back when I was chasing my degree, and the odd thing about it was that battlefield tactics almost never came up. That was definitely not the case in the Civil War class I took--in that class, our texts and our professor went on at length about which generals succeeded and why, taking into account the terrain, weather, battlefield objectives and so forth. Nearly everything about the Civil War--Lincoln's relationship with his commanders and cabinet, Grant's rise and McClellan's fall, the North's attitude toward the war--was tied closely to battlefield success or failure.
But the Vietnam class was different. It was all about politics and sociology, with very little about the actual war on the ground. My term paper was on the Battle of Hue, one of the few urban battles of the entire war. It took place during the Tet Offensive, and was a resounding victory for the US side and a staggering defeat for the North Vietnamese. Yet they fought on, more confident than ever, while the US began to sulk and divide along ideological lines. The Vietnam War ran well over a decade, with more than 50,000 American dead by its end. Why did scholars pay so little attention to what actually happened on the battlefield?
I had that question answered when I studied the anti-war movement earlier this year. Scholars pay so little attention to actual battles in Vietnam because they didn't matter to the war's outcome. The shooting war took place in jungles on the other side of the world from America, but the real war took place on the Mall in Washington and in the streets of America. We won Vietnam in Vietnam, but lost Vietnam in America. The anti-war movement is largely responsible for this outcome.
To be sure, our politicians failed miserably to understand just how crafty the enemy was, and that failure played a role too. Nixon failed to understand that when he ran for President in 1968 on his secret plan to end the war, he telegraphed to the North Vietnamese that he would enter office believing the war was unwinnable. LBJ failed to capitalize on the successes of Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive bombing campaign that very nearly destroyed the North's ability to wage war by 1967, allowing negative press to pull his finger off the trigger when victory was in sight. But the anti-war movement made America feel guilty for the war, waved the bloody shirt for every single setback suffered or crime our troops committed in the war--real as well as imagined--and mainstreamed the most ludicrous opinions of America and our reason for entering the war in the first place.
The short version of that is that we entered the war when the North Vietnamese Communist forces crushed French forces fighting on the side of the South, forcing a pullout. We stepped in to fill the gap the French were leaving behind, believing that a Communist Vietnam would influence other states in the region to flip red. Our reasons were noble--defend a poorly armed and defended (and led) populace from a Stalinist menace. Vietnam was a very hot period of the Cold War. Those who fatuously say today that we defeated Communism without firing a shot would do well to visit the black wall in Washington, which lists our dead from Vietnam. Those men and women died in a losing battle that was part of a war we ultimately won.
The war dragged on past Truman and Eisenhower through Kennedy and Johnson to Nixon. Republicans and Democrats, a very bipartisan war. In 1971, when Kerry came on to the scene, the anti-war movement was in full swing but still a fringe movement. It needed a mainstream spokesman, someone who could de-hippify the movement and make it palatable in Peoria, and Kerry stepped into that role like he'd been born for it. He took all the wild tales of American atrocities, mostly made up by KGB operatives across Europe, and put them into the mouth of a decorated Vietnam war hero. He--John Forbes Kerry, Ivy Leaguer, recipient of the Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts--called American troops baby killers, rapists and the rest. Every indication I've come across indicates he knew he was lying. He knew, as his VVAW friends attest, that he was being used by the anti-war movement to put a reasonable face on their radicalism, and they knew he was using them for a future in politics. He met with Communist representatives in Paris, and used their talking points on how to end the war. For Kerry it was partly belief and partly business, a kind of finishing school for the leftist politician, training ground for a new soldier.
But as I said several hundred words ago, Kerry became a sideshow in my research. The anti-war movement, simply put, was the single most important factor in our defeat in Vietnam. I've written a couple of posts about this that go into more detail, but the Communist North figured out two essential truths in the mid-60s, and those truths changed the war. First, they discovered that no matter what they did, they would not defeat us on the battlefield. Even at its worst, the Vietnam-era US military was far superior to its foe. It was better led, better trained and better equipped, and hailed from a country with nearly unlimited resources. It would not be defeated in battle, period, at least not in the long run. This truth held up throughout the war--US forces never lost a battle. But essential truth #2 was the kicker. The North discovered that it could win the war while losing every single battle, by altering the political landscape for US presidents here at home.
It was General Vo Nguyen Giap, commander of North Vietnames forces, who figured it out. He'd led the defeat of the French in 1954 and would later lead Vietnam in defeating China in 1979, in both cases employing novel tactics designed to exploit his enemies' greatest weaknesses. By about 1966 or 67, Giap had figured out our Achilles Heel: We are political hemophiliacs. Prick us in the right spot, and we bleed to death thanks to a hardened anti-American core on our political left and our inability to shout it down. He just had to figure out what that spot was, and he did, and won.
Fast forward to our war today, a war that bears almost no resemblance to Vietnam, save one fact: Like then, today we have a hardened and determined anti-war movement and a hostile press that will not fail to spread any lie if it undermines the war effort. From my studies it made sense to me that anyone opposing the US today would study the tactics of the one General who had been able to defeat us, and would try to adapt what he had done to present circumstances. So I started watching for signs that a) al Qaeda had gone to school on us using Giap as its guide, and b) that today's anti-war movement could succeed over the long run in mainstreaming anti-Americanism, rhetoric, etc.
Al Qaeda is barely an organization, more like a criminal gang than an army. But its leadership isn't stupid. It came up with 9-11 precisely because it had studied us and determined our vulnerabilities. It designed the attacks to achieve maximum exposure and, it believed, would inflict maximum damage on our economy and our national psyche. 9-11 was a masterpiece of asymmetrical warfare, using $3 box cutters to kill thousands and do trillions of dollars in damage. Though 9-11 did significant damage, it did not force economic collapse and did not make us cower in fear. It made us angry, and we determined to wipe al Qaeda from the face of the earth.
I believe that Osama bin Laden underestimated our both response and our effectiveness. He didn't believe we would actually invade Afghanistan, or that we could topple the Taliban once we had. He believed we might send a few missiles his way, perhaps a carrier group to bombard his camps, but no boots on the ground. He'd watched our 1990s conflicts in Kosovo and Iraq, and he'd forced our pullout of Somalia. He believed we were too soft to fight. He had no clue that we would also invade Iraq.
We all know what happened. But bin Laden had gone to school on us. He knew about our political hemophilia. Given time, and a wound in just the right place, we would bleed ourselves to death.
That's why I got worried. I suspected that al Qaeda knew what such a wound could do to us, and was either planning to inflict that wound or hoping we would inflict it on ourselves since it seemed that al Qaeda could no longer mount an attack us US soil. He knew that either way, he could count on US political forces arrayed against the Bush administration to do his heavy lifting once the wound had been inflicted.
Abu Ghraib is that wound, or threatens to be. It will lead to exposure of other "atrocities," real and imagined. It will draw a line from a prison in Iraq to prisons here in America, and will lead to an airing of our worst side in the middle of a war in which our moral authority is indispensible to victory. The world already hates and fears us; seeing us as a truly abusive power, in living color, will dash whatever sympathy the world may have still held for us. Abu Ghraib will also paint us into a corner in which we will no longer be able to use serious methods to interrogate dangerous terrorists who may have information on future attacks. It will give a hostile press and our political opposition something to exploit, and will give the anti-war movement renewed energy. As the war has heated up, fringe leftist rhetoric has gone mainstream, with Democrats spouting "Bush knew!" and accusing him of plotting the war for purely political purposes. There is even a returned US soldier from Iraq playing Kerry's latter day mini-me. The Vietnam-era anti-war movement is back in force, ready to turn America once again from sure victory to catastrophic defeat.
What we have witnessed in the past week or so has been the bleeding from the Abu Ghraib wound. Al Qaeda got very lucky, because otherwise the war in Iraq was going fairly well for us. Violence had flared up in Iraq, but so had local elections--in which mullahs ran for office and lost to businessmen and doctors. A militia had sprung up to oppose us, but another militia had sprung up to oppose the first militia. We were showing patience and restraint, and applying force properly for the most part and avoiding civilian casualties. The Zarqawi memo told a story of inevitable allied victory and terrorist defeat.
And then Abu Ghraib. And our political opposition thinks it has a "silver bullet," our Senate all but handcuffs our intel operatives, the press goes wild with stories about US "atrocities" even while terrorists saw an innocent American's head off with a machete, and we flagellate ourselves into a stupor from which we may not recover.
So I'm worried. I'm not panicked by any means, but I'm a pessimist now. I think we have taken a very strong hand and played it extremely poorly, thanks mostly to internal bickering, recrimination and anti-Americanism on the left and in the press. I'd love to be wrong, but I don't think I am. If we stay on the path we're on, no matter who wins in November, we will lose this war. Due to the war's increasing unpopularity we will pull out of Iraq prematurely, it will descend into chaos as the Iranians and al Qaeda and Syria vie for control from without while the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds battle within. We will have painted ourselves into a corner from which we will be unable, for political reasons, to use force. We will repeal the Patriot Act, which has probably been the single biggest reason we haven't had a major attack on our soil since 9-11. We will sit back on our heels while Iran and North Korea continue their nuclear programs, and we will pay dearly for it.
Imagine, for a second, the terrorists on that Islamicist snuff film--the ones who sawed Nicholas Berg's head off while he screamed in agony--armed with a nuclear device. Do you doubt for a second that they would use it to destroy an American city? If you do, you're a fool. But as I've been repeating lately, experience is a dear teacher, and a fool will learn by no other.
I pray that we don't have to learn via that experience or something similar. But I'm not optimistic anymore. We're about to let the fools run the show, and we'll pay for it.
MORE: I think people need to read this post a couple of times to understand what I am saying and what I am not saying. I am not saying the war is already lost. I am saying we should not take for granted that it is already won, either. We have been doing that for too long, and should stop. We're on a knife's edge right now, with victory and defeat as viable possibilities.
I am also not saying Iraq=Vietnam. The war we fight today is very, very different from Vietnam, but there is a striking similarity. In the same way that the Civil War was the first truly modern war, with "total war," mass casualties, modernizing weaponry and so forth, Vietnam was the first post-modern war, and the global war on terrorism is the second.
Post-modern war? What does that mean?
Post-modern war is about asymmetry and information management as opposed to battlefield tactics. Don't get me wrong; if we lose on the battlefield we'll lose the war. But because the conflict is asymmetrical, our enemy doesn't have to win on the battlefield to defeat us. He only has to win politically, and all he really has to do to accomplish that is demoralize us. We can win every single battle in the current war and still lose, just like Vietnam. Fortunately in that earlier war, what we were fighting was really a campaign in the larger Cold War, so losing it didn't translate into losing the war. Reagan eventually applied a bit of asymmetry to the larger war, outspending the Soviets instead of outfighting them while threatening to obliterate them if they went too far, and we won. I believe failure in Iraq stands a good chance of leading to loss in the war generally, because it's likely to demoralize us and there is no larger enemy to outspend and thus recover victory.
Demoralization was one of the key Soviet Cold War strategies, and they invented and spread anti-American propaganda to accomplish that end. The Vietnam-era talking points, the nuclear freeze movement, and anti-American political organizations spread throughout the country were created for the express purpose of demoralizing us and convincing us that we weren't a force for good in the world. The Soviets are on the ash heap of history now, but their machines live on like a watching ticking on a dead man's wrist. Nuke freeze, International ANSWER, and so forth are still here, recruiting new volunteers but mostly relying on their grizzled anti-war veterans to keep up the fight. Their talking points have gotten mainstreamed by the hard left of the Democrats to the point that you can find somewhere between 10 and 40 percent of the country believing some level of the lie about us--that we're imperialists, that we only fight for oil, that we're the symbol of oppression in the world, etc.
That leads to a lack of self-confidence on our part, and thus soft support for the war as it extended past Afghanistan. We went into Iraq with about 65% support, but it was soft and predicated on the WMD threat, not the larger anti-terrorism strategic framework. That recipe meant that the war support numbers could only go down, not up, no matter what happened on the battlefield.
We won the actual war in Iraq handily but WMDs didn't materialize, or when they did the press hasn't taken up the story with any gusto. I believe this has led to a paralysis in our government at the highest levels. Put yourself in the President's shoes. You don't have time to sift through information sources on your own everyday, and so you rely on your staffers and cabinet officers to tell you what's going on. From State, you hear one thing about WMDs and the war, from the Pentagon you hear something else, from NSC you hear something else, and so forth. As the released PDBs show, the state of our intel services is shockingly bad, and no one part of the government has all or even most of the facts. The war over the war--the war within State and among State and the Pentagon, with CIA siding mostly with State--is filling the Oval Office with smoke. The President relies on his top officers for information, and they're all telling him different things. Whom does he trust? He has been burned in the past by officials resigning and writing damaging tell-alls that the press spins into "proof" that either Bush isn't up to the job or that he led us to war on fraudulent arguments. He probably has current officials threatening to do the same if he acts on something that this official disagrees with. If Bush makes a big deal out of the Jordan WMD attack, for example, CIA will leak to the New York Times that there are problems with Jordan's methods of interrogations, or with some weak spot in the evidence, etc. At critical junctures throughout the war, we have seen damaging leaks designed to force the administration's hand on the issue of the moment. This must surely have made the President gun-shy about making strong public arguments or proposing initiatives related to the war. He has just been burned by his subordinates too many times, and doesn't know which subordinate will burn him next. Hint: Anyone who was there when you showed up in 2001 is likely to burn you. Clinton holdovers have proven to be a major thorn in the President's side.
We're engaged in a post-modern war, and our government is dysfunctional in its approach to it. Our opposition party does not subscribe to the war, thanks mostly to its old associations on the hard left and its heir apparent, a man who was part of the anti-American machine during the last post-modern war. In fact, most of those at the top of the Democrat party today played some role in the old anti-war movement or sympathized with it. Our majority party has a spine of jelly and won't confront the radicals to defeat them.
So we're in more trouble than I think most of us realize. We haven't lost, but we may be on the road to losing.