THE WAR WITHIN THE WAR
Posted by B. Preston
JunkYardBlog
There's a fairly important comment discussion going on at Daily Pundit, with Steven Den Beste squaring off against Bill Quick, a blogosphere clash of the titans (linked below). Both supported the Iraq campaign, but Quick is turning against it and demonstrates little if any patience for those who aren't following him. Den Beste isn't following him. Kim Du Toit isn't either. The whole discussion is worth a read.
It highlights the difference between those who understand post-modern warfare and those who don't. Quick doesn't. His blog and the arguments he deploys against Den Beste, arguments that more than occassionally descend into name-calling, demonstrate conclusively that in the end he doesn't understand the post-modern battlefield.
The post-modern battlefield is between your ears. It's your mind. The only way the caliphascists can win in Iraq or anywhere else is if we lose heart. We lose heart by allowing the constant drumbeat of negativity to destroy our morale and show internal divisions in the face of the enemy. That's the essence of Den Beste's arguments against Quick's negativity, and it's entirely right.
How else can al Qaeda in Iraq drive us out?
Can they mount up against our armor and push them back into Saudi Arabia or Kuwait? Can they establish air superiority and deny us access to the Iraqi skies? Can they launch armed satellites to jam or destroy our recon birds? Of course not. They're not even trying to do any of that.
The terrorists understand that the low-intensity combat in Iraq is not the primary arena of conflict. In that arena, incidentally, we're winning. The insurgent violence is mostly confined to the Sunni areas, areas populated by those who lost power when Saddam fell. We occassionally find groups of terrorists on the Syrian border, and we kill them there. There will be a constitution for Iraq that will have been drafted by local elected representatives. It's not a Jeffersonian pact, but it will probably be good enough to enfranchise enough Iraqis so that they'll have a stake in preserving their gains against attacks by the terrorists. It may take decades for the Sunnis to come around. That doesn't mean the process is a failure right now, this minute. It just means it isn't finished yet. But given the nature of post-modern war, success on the actual battlefield is secondary to success in the virtual battlefield. Proof: We never lost a battle on the ground in Vietnam, but lost the post-modern brain battle when we lost our nerve. We lost our nerve not once, but many times, when we stopped Operation Rolling Thunder, when we allowed the media to spin Tet from a smashing victory to a crushing defeat, and when we defunded our allies and let the Communists overrun and masscre them. So we lost the war.
Today's primary battlefield is mental. If we lose our nerve, we'll throw away the gains made in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by extension of those conflicts the gains made in Libya, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. We'll show the mullahs of Iran that we are exactly what bin Laden said we are--a paper tiger. As little as the mullahs fear the Europeans, they will fear us less. Our allies will rationally decide that they can no longer depend on us, and will attach themselves to whomever they perceive is the strong man now, most likely China. Others, such as Japan, will go it alone.
The left is either directly or intuitively aware of its role in the war, which is to act as mental shock troops against the US mainstream (thereby, for the terrorists). That's one reason they're so persistent in the face of so many facts about Iraq under Saddam and al Qaeda in general that conflict with their views. They just brush off the fact that Clinton tried to take us to war in Iraq in 1998, much like a bullet deflected by a combat helmet. They brush off the fact that al Qaeda is demonstrably evil, because the only evil they see flies the Stars and Stripes or has a Texan twang. Some are deluded. Others are dishonest with themselves, or unable to face the fact that some evils demand a violent solution. Some, such as Michael Moore, not only know what they're doing, but they're proud of it. Jimmy Carter is another proud insurgent ally. Cindy Sheehan is most likely a dupe being used to the same end by other proud allies of the enemy. Many in the media are willing accomplices. Most Democrats don't know enough about the war, and haven't bothered to learn about it for themselves, to question where Howard Dean intends to lead them. They act based on emotion rather than reason, and the hard left's over-the-top demagoguery satisfies the emotional need much more than any argument in favor of the war ever can or will. Conspiracy theories keep their minds occupied enough to filter out anything approaching truth.
So where does that leave the Den Beste vs Quick argument?
Obviously, I think Den Beste is right. This is going to be a long war requiring patience. Daily bombings in Iraq and daily political polls in the US matter very little, but next year's mid-term is crucial. As crucial as the drafting of Iraq's constitution in some ways. We can ratify the war and prod the Bush administration to get back into the post-modern war to win it, or we can vote to disentangle ourselves from Iraq and watch disaster unfold. Party labels actually won't matter much. What will matter is which issues get which candidates into office and under what mandates. Had Kerry won last year, his mandate would have been to get us out of Iraq. If the anti-war left meets with success next year, its mandate will be similar. And we'll surrender the mental battlefield on the way to losing the shooting war.
Bill Quick is knitting a white flag.
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