A Pox On All Their Houses

From The Economist, November 17-23rd Issue

This cartoon captures some of the absurdity of the current goings on between Israel and Hamas.  But what is utterly misstates is the disproportionality of the mess.  What Israel is doing is a little like dropping a 500 pound bomb on an obnoxious teenager because he shot you with a BB gun.  The pictures of the destruction wrought by Israel in Gaza are all over the place.  What is very, very hard to find is any comparable evidence -- indeed any evidence at all -- of destruction in Israel.  Given the Israeli PR adeptness, I suspect this is because there is very, very little of it.

I have no sympathy for Hamas.  What they hope to accomplish other than getting their own people killed by shooting rockets at Israel is beyond understanding.  Perhaps there is a better explanation, but the seemingly obvious answer is a culture of no-harm-goes-unavenged that would make the Hatfields and McCoys proud. 

But neither do I have any sympathy for Israel.  The idea that somehow Israel is the victim here is preposterous.  The Israeli Ambassador asked what would American do if some foreign group lobbed 8,000 rockets into America.  That begs the question, though, of what we would do if a foreign state had occupied most of the country for nearly 45 years and was relentlessly building settlements along the entire eastern seaboard.  Sporadic rocket fire from Hamas is the price Israel pays for the occupation.  And, since Israel has no intention of ever agreeing to a Palestinian state worthy of the name, they should accept that as a very small price indeed.

The Middle East has dominated American foreign policy for a quarter century now.  We need to follow through on the promise that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon.  But beyond that, it's time to give up.  We are no longer so dependent on the Middle East for our energy, and if we backed away from Israel, the terrorism threat would largely evaporate.  It's time to tell the entire Middle East: "You made this mess. Continuing it hurts no one but yourselves.  We've tried to help.  But we're done.  It's up to you to either clean it up or live with it."

The Tribal Way Of War

In a post earlier today, I bemoaned, not for the first time, both the bankrptcy of our, the Israelis', indeed the West's, current "grand strategy" for winning its struggle with militant Islam and my own (indeed anyone's) inability to articulate an alternative. Not ten minutes after posting that, I came across a WSJ review of a book by Richard H. Shultz Jr. and Andrea J. Dew entitled "Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias." I obviously haven't read the book (yet), but if the review is accurate, this book may articulate, if not an actual alternative, then at least a persepctive that may be helpful in trying to formulate one.

The review starts with a much more cogent statement of the problem than I have yet been able to muster:

While the U.S. spends billions of dollars on sophisticated defense systems, the dime-a-dozen kidnapper and suicide bomber have emerged as the most strategic weapons of war. While we tie ourselves in legal knots over war's acceptable parameters, international law has increasingly less bearing on those whom we fight. And while our commanders declare "force protection" as their highest priority, enemy commanders declare the need for more martyrs. It seems that the more advanced we become, the more at a disadvantage we are in the 21st-century battlefield.

The reviewer might well have added that, "the more we punish them, the stronger they become."

According to the review, Shultz and Dew make the case that the reason for these apparent paradoxes is that we and our adversaries have very different understandings of the purposes of war and the rules that apply to it. They argue that, if we are to prevail in these conflicts, we need, as Sun Tzu's advised 2,500 years ago, to "Know your enemy" and tailor our strategy appropriately:

Forget Karl von Clausewitz's dictum that war is a last resort and circumscribed by the methodical actions and requirements of a state and its army. Forget Hugo Grotius's notion that war should be circumscribed by a law of nations. As the authors remind us, paraphrasing the anthropologist Harry Turney-High: "Tribal and clan chieftains did not employ war as a cold-blooded and calculated policy instrument. . . . Rather, it was fought for a host of social-psychological purposes and desires, which included . . . honor, glory, revenge, vengeance, and vendetta." With such motives, torture and beheadings become part of the normal ritual of war."

The point of the book, I gather, is that is that, for our current adversaires, what is seen as an appropriate causus belli as well as the rules that govern war once initiated are products of tribal culture and history and bear little relation to what has evolved into the "western way of war." For instance:

The Somali way of war--so startling to U.S. Army Rangers in Mogadishu in 1993--emerged from Somalia's late-19th-century Dervish movement, on which the country's top warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid, based his strategy. What the West viewed as fanaticism was merely the Somali proclivity for judging a man's character by his religious conviction and his physical ability to fight without limits. In the Somali worldview, our aversion to killing women and children was a weakness that could be exploited by using noncombatants as human shields.

"Cleary," the book admonishes, "the task of anticipating the enemy's tactics requires thinking that goes beyond Western moral categories."

I can't tell if the book actually proposes anything more concrete than the admonition to "know your enemy." However, even if not, that admonition coupled with some insight into particlur enemies, may be a starting point.

I have ordered the book.

"You'd Do The Same Thing. Probably Even Worse"

There has been a lot of criticism of Israel for what is characterized as its disproportionate responses to the cross-border incursions and kidnappings perpetrated by Hamas and then by Hezbollah. If you are interested, much of this criticism is catalogued in an article posted yesterday on the Zionist Organization Of America website, which, of course, considers such criticism to be evidence of the perfidy of Israel's so-called "friends."

Every one of these statements also blamed Hezbollah for starting things, condemned Iran and Syria for supporting Hezbollah and confirmed Israel's right to defend itself from such attacks. Even some of Israel's traditional enemies joined in criticizing Hezbollah as well as Israel.

Yet the opinion pieces from Israel's American supporters chose to largely ignore these facts and to portray the criticism as an attack on Israel's right to respond at all: Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal, Max Boot, James Taranto, Charles Krauthammer(again), etc.

But the disproportionality is so overwhelming that even the Israeli PR machine cannot keep it out of the news sections: Dozens more die as air strikes continue, Dazed Refugees Flood Beirut, Beirut: City Of Ruins, Large-Scale Evacuations From Lebanon Begin etc. Yes, Israelis are suffering and dying too, but some statistics reported in today's NY Times brings the relative suffering into perspective:

The asymmetry in the reported death tolls is marked and growing: some 230 Lebanese dead, most of them civilians, to 25 Israeli dead, 13 of them civilians. In Gaza, one Israel soldier has died from his own army's fire, and 103 Palestinians have been killed, 70 percent of them militants.

In addition, Israel has disabled the Lebanon's only commercial airport, blockaded its ports, and destroyed fuel tanks, power plants, gas stations, lighthouses, bridges, roads and innumerable homes and businesses in both Lebanon and Gaza. It has even bombed a Lebanese Army base -- the same army it insists should be disarming Hezbollah. Nothing even remotely similar to this is occurring in Israel.

With the disproportionality so blatant and undeniable, Israeli apologists have taken a new tack: they are defending it, arguing that other countries would do the same thing, probably even worse. As reported in the same NY Times article today:

Referring to complaints that Israel was using disproportionate force, Dan Gillerman, Israel's United Nations ambassador, said at a rally of supporters in New York this week, "You're damn right we are. If your cities were shelled the way ours were," he said, addressing critics, "you would use much more force than we are or we ever will."

In a USA Today op-ed piece, Newt Gingrich makes this argument as well:

Imagine that this morning 50 missiles were launched from Cuba and exploded in Miami. In addition to buildings and homes being destroyed, scores of Americans were being killed. Now imagine our allies responded by saying publicly that we must not be too aggressive in protecting our citizens and that America must use the utmost restraint.

Our history shows us that we, as Americans, would reject such bad advice. After all, we have never reacted to a direct attack on our soil with any restraint. Every time America has been attacked by an enemy, we set about defeating it and ending the threat.

There is considerable truth to this. One need not go back to World War II for an example; one need only consider our response to the 9/11 attacks. Far from showing restraint, we invaded and occupied two entire countries, bringing to each civilian casualties and destruction of property far in excees of what we ourselves suffered -- and far in excess of what the Israelis are inflicting on either Lebanon or Gaza.

But the analogy contains its own rebuttal: as we ourselves have proved, such disproportionality just . . . does . . . not . . . work in these types of struggles. Yes, it did work in WW II, the "lessons" of which continue to cloud our thinking about today's world. But with regard to the Muslim world, I know of no instance where the application of "overwhelming force" has produced anything other than more, and more barbaric, violence. To the contrary, the Russian experience in Afghanistan and Chechnya, our own experience in Afghanistan and Iraq and -- most of all -- Israel's experience in its 40 year struggle with the Palestinians, demonstrate, I think conclusively, that in these kinds of struggles overwhelming force is not just doomed to failure, it is like trying to douse a fire with gasoline.

The human suffering that Israel is inflciting on the Lebanese is offensive, but what makes it offensive has less to do with issues of proportionality than it does with the fact that it is gratuitous. We can accept disproportionate violence and casulaties and the suffering and deaths of innocents if (and so long as) we believe that something worthwhile will result in the end. We Americans still have some hope that our own acts of disproportional violence in Iraq and Afghanistan may yet prove to have been "worth it;" at least, we did not know in that our actions would only make matters worse. That cannot be said for the Israelis. After 40 years of fighting, nothing in their experience provides them with even the smallest inkling of belief that the suffering they are imposing on others will dampen the ardor or blunt the effectiveness of their enemies. As such, the violence is not really a calculated step taken reluctantly in the hope of a better future. It is simply an act of rage born of frustration.

So what is the alternative? I don't know. That's the problem. No one seems to know, so we and the Israelis and the Russians and everyone else caught up in the struggles with the Muslim world keep doing the same things over, and over and over again. With the same sorry results. I don't know what the answer is, but I do know this: We have to, we must, find some better way of dealing with these types of adversaries. "Overwhelming force" is not the answer.

Supporting The Troops: Is It Possible To Do Too Much?

During my "hiatus" I had set aside a few things things that I thought might eventually be worthy of comment. Most of those seem a bit dated by now, overcome by further developments. But one exception is an op-ed piece by Max Boot of the LA Times entitled Our Enemies Aren't Drinking Lattes.

Returning from Iraq and elsewhere, Boot was surprised, impressed and a bit disturbed by the creature comforts available to our soldiers:

In the past few months, I have traveled across U.S. Central Command's area of operations — a vast domain stretching from the deserts of Arabia to the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Everywhere, I have found massive bases fortified with endless rows of concrete barriers and stocked with every convenience known to 21st century Americans.

Some front-line units continue to operate out of spartan outposts where a hot meal is a luxury and flush toilets unknown. But growing numbers of troops live on giant installations complete with Wal-Mart-style post exchanges, movie theaters, swimming pools, gyms, fast-food eateries (Subway, Burger King, Cinnabon) and vast chow halls offering fresh-baked pies and multiple flavors of ice cream. Troops increasingly live in dorm-style quarters (called "chews," for "containerized housing units") complete with TVs, mini-refrigerators, air conditioning/heating units and other luxuries unimaginable to previous generations of GIs.

Boot is obviously torn by this, as am I. After all, what sort of venal, unpatriotic, scrooge could possibly object to providing our men and women in harm's way with anything that that might mitigate even somewhat the hardship, dangers and loneliness they are enduring on our behalf?

But there are costs involved in supporting our troops in this way (and to this extent) that are enough to give anyone pause.

The first of these is the threat isolation and relative privilege poses to the mission itself. "Successful counterinsurgency operations require troops to go out among the people, gathering intelligence and building goodwill. But few Iraqis are allowed on these bases, and few Americans are allowed out — and then only in forbidding armored convoys." The fact that our troops can and do spend most of their time in bases that provide security and creature comforts unimaginable to most Iraqis seems at least as likely to build resentment and jealously as it does gratitude among those we are trying to help. It also serves to reinforce the essential "alieness" of Americans. We say we are "in it with them," but in fact we are not. To the extent this envy and alieness hampers our ability to fight the insurgency, it at least extends the time over which our commitment must be maintained and may well doom that effort entirely.

But the even more compelling problem is that people are dying -- literally -- in the effort to ensure that Joe and Jane GI have lattes and Hagen Daz in Iraq. Boot cites some stunning statistics:

According to Centcom, there are 20,000 combat service support troops in its area of operations and another 80,000 contracted civilians. . . . U.S. troops in those countries consume 882,000 liters of water and 2.4 million gallons of fuel every day, plus tons of other supplies that have to be transported across dangerous war zones. Centcom has more than 3,000 trucks delivering supplies and another 2,400 moving fuel — each one a target that has to be protected.

. As Boot enthused about the latte he had just finished, a Marine captain brought him back to earth with this question: "I wonder how many men had to die to get those coffee beans to Baqubah?" And I wonder how much comfort it provides to the parents/spouses/children of soldiers killed to know that their sons/daughters/husbands/wives/fathers/mothers died in the effort to get cherry pie filling to the troops at the front.

Boot ends with an interesting observation:

How to explain this seemingly counterproductive behavior? My theory is that any organization prefers to focus on what it does well. In the case of the Pentagon, that's logistics. Our ability to move supplies is unparalleled in military history. Fighting guerrillas, on the other hand, has never been a mission that has found much favor with the armed forces.

A Pox On All Your Houses

As if the news from Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia (to say nothing of Iran and Korea) weren't bad enough, now the Israelis and Palestinians are back at it. It's the Hatflieds and McCoys played out on an international scale.

What are the Israelis thinking? I sometimes think that way down deep they want -- maybe even need -- this constant conflict. Someone kidnaps one of their soldiers, they invade, bomb power plants and homes, terrorize the resident population and (surprise, surprise) what do they get in return? Another group kidnaps two more soldiers. So what do they do? Invade that country bombing away as if that would accomplish something.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. You'd think that, after 60 years, they would have figured out that massive retaliation just makes things worse. But it is like they are afraid to try anything else.

If the only thing at risk in all of this were Israslis and Palestinians, I'd say "Go for it you idiots. Kill each other to your hearts' content." But that is not all that is at stake. How can we continue to support a regime that kills 20 for every casualty they suffer? What sort of hypnotic hold does Israel have over us that leads us to keep defending them despite the obvious-to-anyone fact that their actions and reactions pare a threat to our own security?

I just don't get it. Why do we care about them?

Fighting The Last War II

I learned a new word today:"lawfare." Actually , I'm not sure it is a new word, and it is sufficiently opaque in terms of what it refers to that it may never become a word. But I am informed by an Op-Ed piece in today's WSJ that "the advent of modern media coverage--coupled with a growing and valid concern among democracies about humanitarian norms during warfare--has provided [Al Queda and its confederates with] a new tactical innovation, increasingly known as 'lawfare.' "

Al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgents thus routinely claim that American forces systematically violate the laws of war by targeting civilians and abusing prisoners. These claims are not targeted at the Iraqi people . . . but at public and, especially, elite opinion in the U.S. and other democracies. With Vietnam as its model, the Iraqi insurgency well understands that it can win only by undermining America's political will to win, and the center of gravity in this conflict lies in Washington, not Baghdad or the Sunni Triangle.

Sound familiar? In a post last Friday, I observed that one of the main differences between this war and WWII is that the "center of gravity" in the conflict -- for both sides -- is the will to win. I also acknowledged that the opposition in this war had a significant advantage over the US in this regard, not because the American public is supine or weak or decadent or unwilling to make sacrifices, but because we are (admirably) an essentially peaceful people.

Like the WSJ article that provided part of the impetus for the previous post, today's WSJ piece appears to imply (without ever really saying it) that the way to respond to this "lawfare" is for Western media and elites to reduce the amount of attention paid to such events as Haditha. (The subhead for the article is "The administration's domestic opponents play into the enemy's hands"). After all, we are apprised,

it is worth noting that abuses and violations of the laws of war have occurred in every armed conflict in human history, regardless of how well-led or disciplined were the troops involved. Indeed, by the standards of past conflicts, U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have behaved in exemplary fashion, using force in combat with unprecedented precision, minimizing collateral damage and civilian deaths--often at risk to themselves and to their mission. In Iraq, this has been the case even though American forces are fighting in the toughest possible urban insurgency environment.

Let's ignore the fact that the authors cite no support for these assertions regarding the restraint America's armed forces have exhibited in these wars. Let's also ignore the fact that there is much in the news that leads one to wonder how "precise" our use of force actually is and how rare things like Abu Grahib and Haditha actually are. I, for one, will take it on faith that 99.9% of our service men and women and the people ordering them into action are behaving exactly as the authors claim.

So what? The fact is that even one such incident is one too many. Yet, as all seem to agree, such incidents are an inevitable consequence of war.

It is here that I diverge from the mainstream. I agree that such incidents probably are an inevitable consequence of putting soldiers into the type of situation our soldiers are in today in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I disagree that the answer to that is for the American (or world) media to downplay such events (as if that were possible) or to shrug it off as just another inevitable consequence of war.

The difficulty is that the armed services are the wrong tool for the job, yet they keep getting used for such jobs because they are the only tool we have. And, when the few f@#* up, as we all agree they inevitably will when they are used for such jobs, it undermines our "will" to continue the fight.

The authors of the WSJ article see this as an issue of tactics:

Ultimately, the Haditha incident must remind American policy makers--and the American people--of the challenges of modern warfare. Although the individual actions of U.S. forces on that day may have been exceptional, the surrounding circumstances are not--and our enemies will look more and more to such irregular tactics.

I, on the other had, see this as an issue of strategy -- perhaps even grand strategy. We are, unquestionably, faced with a new kind of war and we can expect this new kind of war to predominate for the foreseeable future. To rely on an armed force that is built, organized, armed, equipped and trained for fighting a war that differs from WWII only in scale is to doom ourselves to failure in what, in the end, is a war not of materiel, but of will. We need -- must -- begin to think seriously about how to fight this new kind of war; about how to go after the enemy's will to fight while buttressing, or at least not undermining, or own.

Fighting The Last War

[Ed .Note: In violation of my pledge to "lighten things up," the following is a long and rambling post that was motivated by an effort to articulate what I think is the real cause of events like Haditha. It could sorely use a good editor, but, while it may take some patience to find, I think there is something important buried in the verbiage.]

Over the last two days, I have read several op-ed pieces and editorials that attempt to assign blame for Haditha. The first was an essay by Dan Henninger in yesterday's WSJ. Henninger argues, in effect, that such incidents are an inevitable consequence of war and that the only thing that distinguishes Haditha and similar events during the Viet Nam war from those that occurred in other wars is relentless (and Henninger implies irresponsible, perhaps even disloyal) press coverage. Excerpts:

You knew it had to happen. Haditha, an "incident" involving American troops in Iraq, is now part of the erosion of support for the war in Iraq. The Iraq Syndrome has finally arrived. . . Haditha is indeed the new Abu Ghraib. What this most importantly means is that any U.S. military action overseas now, no matter its level of justification, can be taken down by the significance assigned to events by the modern machinery of publicity. . . One suspects that U.S. troops were party to some awful events in the Pacific and European theaters of World War II, all gone in the mists of history and the enemy's defeat. Not now.

Not surpisingly, Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd have different perspectives. (Unfortunately you can't read these perspectives unless you pay for a subscription that gives you access to "Times Select," so you will have to trust my elisions).

Friedman agrees that incidents such as Haditha were inevitable but blames that inevitablity not on war itself, but on the mistakes of the Bush Administration:

The report that U.S. marines were involved in a massacre of Iraqis in Haditha — which the Pentagon needs to clarify fast — is a tragic reminder that a foreign occupation by U.S. forces can't go on for years. Most U.S. soldiers in Iraq have done heroic work, but occupations that drag on inevitably lead to Hadithas.

Right now we are paying for all the Bush team's missteps in Iraq: allowing looting after the fall of Baghdad, disbanding the Iraqi Army without an alternative security force or enough U.S. troops in place, fostering a culture of torture at Abu Ghraib and then letting the politics in Iraq drift for months without any outcome.

Maureen Dowd also blames the Bush administration, but does not think such events are inevitable. Rather, after acknowledging that the "troops are under spectacular emotional pressure" as a result of the "neocon con" of pretending that the troops would be met with gratitude rather than an insurgency, she goes on to argue that Haditha was also the result of some moral deficiency in the troops themselves, or at least a few of them:

There's no way to teach someone not to shoot an unarmed woman or child. If somebody doesn't already know why they shouldn't murder a baby, it's not clear that a refresher course will help.

The problem with brushing up on core values is that if you don't know them by a certain point you can't learn them. The problem with brushing up on core values is that if you don't know them by a certain point you can't learn them. You can't teach remedial decency . . . .

As Norman Schwarzkopf said, in a quote that is part of the military's slide show on core warrior values: "The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it."

She also argues that these moral failures are themselves the result of, or at least a reflection of, the moral bankruptcy of the Bush administration, but I will spare you that feverish manifestation of her obsession. If a meteor hit New York, Dowd would write an article from the grave blaming Dick Cheney.

Apart from that, there is some truth in all of these analyses. Henninger grossly exaggerates the power of the press to shape public opinion. In matters such as these, the press is a follower of public sentiment, not a leader. Witness the fawning press coverage of the lead-up to and early days of the Iraq. It was not until the war turned unpopular that the press started its feeding frenzy. The difference between the press coverage of Iraq (and Viet Nam before it) and that of WWII has less to do with the press than it has to do with differences in public support for the wars.

But still, Henninger is doubtless right that incidents like Haditha have happened in all wars, and Friedman and Dowd are right that the terrible emotional stress imposed on troops by a long occupation of another country doubtless contributes to this inevitability. And Friedman and Dowd are also right that errors in the planning and execution of this war contributed to that emotional stress.

But, I think all three miss an even deeper failure that underlies all of this: the failure of the American National Security appartus not just of this administration but of all administrations since at least Viet Nam to recognize that a military built and armed around what worked in World War II is incapable of winning the kinds of wars that militray has been and will be asked to fight in the last quarter of the 20th Century and beyond.

It is almost trite to observe that victorious countries are always ready to re-fight the last war but rarely ready to fight the next one. The French, victors in the static meat grinder of WWI, built the the static Maginot Line and were overrun in less than a month by a new form of war characterized by mobility and maneuver. The United States, victors in WWII built the most mobile military machine the world has ever seen. Yet that machine has been thwarted again and again -- in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia and now Iraq and Afghanistan -- by a new sort of war that does not, at bottom, involve armies at all.

Military thinkers from Lao Tzu to Liddell Hart point out that the key to victory in any war is to sieze or destroy the enemy's "center of gravity:" the thing the enemy cannot lose if it is to have any hope of winning. In WWI (and indeed all wars prior to that time), the center of gravity was considered to be the enemy's armies. Over time, though, technological advances (artillery, machine guns, planes, etc.) and improvements in defensive strategy rendered any two armies of even remotely equal capabilities essentially invulnerable to each other. Moroever, systems of alliances among modern nation states assured that, when war came, the armies involved would have essentially equal capabilities. That process culminated in WWI. While WWI failed to be the "war to end all war" it certainly was the war that ended wars in which people other than soldiers were in harm's way.

The "genius" of the German general staff at the outset of WWII was to recognize that the "true" center of gravity was not the armies themselves but the supply lines and communications that supported them. As a result, the German tactics were not to attack armies directly but go after their lines of supply and communication.Once those were captured, rolling up the armies was, with rare exceptions (Staligrad stands out), not much harder than herding sheep into a pen.

The Allies, in defeating Germany, went them one better, realizing that the armies were also dependent on the economies of the countries supporting them. Previously, naval blockades had been used for this purpose, but there had been no way to directly reach a country's means of production without defeating the enemy's armies first. The airplane changed that, and the Allies won WWII first by adopting the German's own tactics of surrounding rather than attacking opposing armies, and second by using a massive advantage in air power to directly strike at the German and Japanes economies and population centers.

In the years since WWII, The United States has focused its military preparedness around a conviction that the key to victory in all future wars would be exactly what it was in WWII: the ability to sieze and hold or destroy the enemy's supply lines, communications and means of production. In pursuit of this conviction, the US has built the most mobile military machine the world has ever known and it has coupled that with an unprecendented strategic bombing capability. The result is an ability to take down not just armies but entire countries in amazingly short periods of time.

The problem, though, is that taking down armies and countries no longer enough to assure victory. Indeed the theory on which the WWiI victory was based -- that lines of supply and communications, means of production, and control of territory represneted the "center of gravity" in war -- is flawed. The true center of gravity is none of these things. The true center of gravity and the thing that must be destroyed if you are to win a war is the enemy's will to fight; its will and willingness to keep fighting no matter what and -- equally importnat -- to bear the consequences of doing so. It in this battle of wills that America lags significantly behind many of the countries in which they now finds itself fighting.

Dan Henninger cames closest to recognizing this when he says "it's the phenomenon of the so-very-public 0.01%--at Abu Ghraib, on an Afghan street, at Haditha--that is breaking America's will this time." But his assumption that the loss of will is caused by press coverage of the realities of war is wrong, and his solution -- don't tell them about those realities -- is just silly.

But he is right in his sense that, at least in a democracy, even a stupefyingly overhwelming military superiority counts for little absent a public will to fight.

Unlike many (Henninger included I suspect), I do not bemoan this "deficeit of will" as a defect in the American character or as a symptom of a decadent, declining civilzation. To the contrary, it is a reflection of something I admire. The will to fight requires, first and foremost, something the fighters believe is worth killing and dying for. For Anericans there are very few of those causes. Americans will readily go to war to avenge an attack on this country and, if they believe the threat is real enough, to prevent such an an attack. But you will never convince Americans that they should go to or stay in a war to spread an ideology, much less to secure oil or territory. That is actually pretty rare in world history.

In most of the wars we have fought since WWII a "cause" sufficient to motivate Americans to fight and keep fighting has not existed. Initially at least, the public believed we had a such cause in Afghanistan and Iraq (correctly in the first case and incorrectly in the second). "But, hey!" they say,"we won those wars! We crushed their armies and occupied their countries. We've won! Why are our solldiers still dying? Why can't those guys just accept the fact that they lost and re-make themsleves in our image? I'll send them money, but if nation-building requires lives, we're outta here!"

Americans, in short, are as much victims of the WWII mindset as their leaders have been. War today is different. Military victory, even total victory, is not enough to win the kinds of war we are being called upon to fight today. Once we have achieved such a victory, we lose the will to fight on, since anything after that is unrelated to any clear and present danger to ourselves or our country. We revert to our essentially peaceful norm. What we have not internalized yet is that, unlike WWII, total victory does not end the adversary's will to fight. In fact, it may actually strengthen that will. As a result, our adversaries still have a cause that they believe to be worth the price. However silly, even evil, those causes may seem to us, the fact remains that in the new wars our adversaies are (and can expected to continue to be) willing to fight and die and keep on fighting an dying in it's name.

So, I do not bemoan America's "lack of will." To the contrary I admire the aspect of our national ethos that underlies it. What I do bemoan, though, is the failure of our political and military leadership to anticipate the shape of the new wars and the disadvanatges we would have in them, and to shape their stratregic and tactical planning around those realities. This failure goes back at least to Viet Nam and it is no less serious (and no les obvious in hindsight) than the French failure to anticipate the effect that planes, tanks and moltorized infantry would have on the Maginot line.

Partly -- perhaps mainly -- this has been a failure of political leadership. Bedazzled by our military capabilities, our leadership has all too often led us into war for causes that Americans simply do not believe are worth the cost. Such public value judgments cannot be changed, at least not for long, by flag-waving, rhetoric, appeals to patriotism or challeneges to theloyalty of those who disagree. For Americans to send its young men and women off to war for any appreciable time and to accept many of them back in caskets or on crutches requires a cause that sells itself: a clear and present danger to ourselves and our way of life.

But there is also a failure of military planning. For military planners, the reasons for a war are irrelevant. Their task is to figure out how to win it. To an extent that should now be clear, the focus of American military planners since WWII has been to confined to assuring that US could do those things it did in WWII better than any other country in the world. They have succeeded spectacularly in that regard. But they failed to adequately apppreciate was that some of the new wars they would be asked to fight would be fundamentally different from WWII and that creating an asymetry, even a massive one, in conventional military might would not be enough.

Even today, we can't quite believe that. But the proof can be found everywhere. To win wars such as those the Israelis have been fighting in Palestine, that the French fought in Algeria, that the British fought in Ireland, that we fought in Viet Nam, that the Russians fought in Afghanistan and that we are now fighting in both Afghanistan and Iraq, it is not enough, perhaps not even necessary, perhaps, in fact, even counter-productive, to do the things that brought us victory in World War II.

The only way for a conventional armed force to attack a committed people's will to fight is to inflct such horrendous casulaties that the populace simply gives up. As the Battle of Britian and all the wars listed above illustrate, killing people in small or even relatively large numbers over a long period of time actually increases the will of the survivors to fight. To be effective is sapping a people's willingness to fight, the caualities have to be truly massive, sudden and utterly unexpected: Hiroshima and Nagasaki are examples. Short of something like this, the military machine we have built is utterly incapable of winning the one battle that ultimately matters in the types of wars we are invoved in today: the battle of wills.

Friedman comes close to capturing this point when he says:

We are not losing Iraq to the Iraqi Vietcong — traditional nationalists. Iraq has a freely elected nationalist government. No, we are losing in Iraq to sectarian theocrats, Islamo-fascists and local and regional tyrants, who have only one thing in common: the belief that America and its Iraqi allies must fail, that neither modernity nor democracy must be allowed to take root in Iraq.

It will be a global tragedy if they succeed, but it is hard to fight an enemy whose only concern is that you lose, not what happens after. . . . We can't keep asking Americans to sacrifice their children for people who hate each other more than they love their own children.

The distinction Friedman draws between the Viet Cong and the Iraqi insurgents is true but irrelevant. Yes, the Viet Cong were motivated by nationalism where the Iraqis and Afghan Taliban are motivated by sectarianism. But when it comes to winning a war against these groups, that is a distinction without a difference. What unites all three of these groups and what makes them all so difficult to defeat is a passionate belief in a cause for which they are willing to fight on and die for, even in the face of overwhelming military superiorty.

Yes, it is hard to fight such people and it is especially hard when we ourselves are not similarly motivated. But that is the situation we are faced with, and our only alternative to hoping they will just go away or losing is to find a way to win the war of wills.

I do not have any idea how to do that. But one thing does seem clear: we need to get by the idea that we can win these types of wars by doing what we did in WWII. In this context, our faith in our military might is as delusional as the French faith was in the Maginot line.

It's a different world, and the evolutionary maxim continues to apply: adapt or die.