Iraq's Future - and Ours
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IV
NOT ALL of our problems are problems of perception, but at least a few are. What would have been the reaction of the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books had the coalition forces shot 500 looters to restore order and save the infrastructure of an entire people, or had we kept the Iraqi army intact to curb lawlessness, or had a no-nonsense provisional government of exiles ensured that the trains were to be running on time?
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Instead of hearing now about chaos and quagmire, we would
be reading about poor families whose innocent teenage sons
had been caught in crossfire, or about Baathists with dark
pasts entrenched in the new military, or about the
counterproductive American obsession with order rather
than with pluralist democracy.
The reflexively critical gaze of the press operates all
the way down to the tactical level, submitting every
aspect of our military behavior to instantaneous and often
hostile review. Partly in response to the biases of
critics — but also in line with widespread utopian notions
of leniency — we seek to mitigate the damage and death we
inflict, thus inadvertently helping once again to render
peace more deadly than war. Army interrogators who push or
intimidate prisoners face court-martial or discharge, even
though many of those prisoners have freely killed—and will
again kill — hundreds of the weak and innocent. In the
last days of combat, a few of our satellite-guided bombs
were ingeniously laden with cement rather than explosives,
in order admirably to curtail collateral damage.
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But the more we seek to refine war by curbing the unpredictable and frightening nature of the violence that is the essence of that amoral enterprise, the more those inured to ferocity see our restraint not as magnanimity but as weakness or, worse still, a sort of decadence. (Our unwillingness to shoot looters was probably seen by most Iraqis not as a necessary indulgence but as fear of bloody confrontation — or as part of some farfetched conspiracy to induce Iraqis to run amok.) We have not lost confidence in our ability to conduct asymmetrical or unconventional warfare, but the task we have imposed on ourselves is no longer one of routing and eliminating terrorists and murderers; it is one of therapy. Confused by these mixed directives, our military is never quite sure whether it should be destroying or building; whether it should kill, be killed, or save; whether it should frown or smile. This can redound to the advantage of an armed and determined adversary with no such humanitarian obligations.
Post-bellum Iraq reminds us how much we are geared not to taking but rather to preserving lives — including, quite naturally, our own. Expensive communications, body armor, and redundancies in operational procedure are designed to protect soldiers from those who would blow themselves up to kill us. But the more money, time, and spiritual capital we quite properly invest in each of our soldiers, and the more precious each of them becomes to us, the more altered is the age-old and terrible calculus of the battlefield. One dead American causes far greater distress, not just among the American public but in the military itself, than the satisfaction prompted by the knowledge that dozens of Baathist murderers were killed in return.
No longer is our success in battle seen in a 10-to-1 kill ratio over the enemy, as at bloody Okinawa; or a 25-to-1 ratio, as during the 1968 Tet offensive; or the stunning 250-to-1 imbalance of the recent Afghan and Iraqi offensives, when perhaps as many as 10,000 Taliban and Iraqi soldiers in total were killed to our 450 or so combat deaths. Indeed, our military has rarely talked about the numbers of enemies killed or captured in Iraq, figuring, rightly or wrongly, that the public would either recoil from Vietnam-era nomenclature ("body counts") or yawn because its sole concern was that we not lose any of our own. As the size of our military continues to shrink, with fewer soldiers piloting fewer and ever more expensive planes and tanks, these trends will only continue.
Finally, as our government seeks — often successfully — to wage war with as little upheaval at home as possible, it never troubles to tap the inner reserves of the American people, who might well rise to the challenge of a long and difficult struggle against those who seek to kill us all. We are thus caught in yet another paradox: the more lethal and adroit an ever smaller number of American soldiers become, the more detached an ever greater number of Americans can be from the wars waged in their names. Our very prowess at arms has blinded us to what may yet be demanded of us by our current situation, namely, the need truly to mobilize ourselves as a nation in a deadly war.
V
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WHAT THEN are the lessons of this peace? We have been
making major progress in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but
both of these campaigns are better appreciated in the
context of the wider war that started on September 11 —
the worst attack on American shores in our history. That
worldwide conflict is far from over.
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Events in Iraq do not occur in isolation. In Afghanistan, Israel, Turkey, Bali, Pakistan, Morocco, and elsewhere, an identifiable enemy is killing Westerners or their supporters through shared methods of assassination and suicide bombings. These Islamic fascists eat, sleep, and use their ATM cards in real nation-states ruled and inhabited by real people, whose attitudes and activities either enhance or retard the killers in their midsts. A series of polls confirms that millions of these people, especially in the Middle East, were not all that unhappy about September 11, 2001. Dolls glorify Osama bin Laden; plastic Twin Towers with planes crashing into them are sold as toys in the West Bank. Roadside bombs take the lives of American civilians seeking to interview Palestinians as potential Fulbright fellows — and a gleeful populace stones the Americans’ would-be rescuers. The Cairo papers print venom straight out of the mind of Joseph Goebbels. Our Saudi allies disseminate a more virulent hatred of America than do Iranians or Syrians.
All of this unmistakable enmity lends implicit support to the Baathist diehards who are now mining and shooting Americans in Iraq. And what message are we as a nation sending in return? That we give billions of dollars in aid to Jordanians, Egyptians, and Palestinians, that we have saved Muslims in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Somalia, Kosovo, and Bosnia, that we invite thousands of Muslims to emigrate to our shores to practice and proselytize their religion?
Yes, that is our message and our undeniable record. But the extremists and their passive supporters are already aware that the United States aids and saves millions of Muslims. They also grasp that we fear the bothersome mess of their terror and nihilism, and that historically our friendship has taken on the aspect of forbearance and then appeasement. While we publicly blame ourselves for our lack of sensitivity, they privately scoff that we are too sensitive. We talk of winning hearts and minds; they seethe not that Saddam was removed but that it was we who removed him.
If we are to be of service to the thousands of Americans whom we have asked to risk their lives in the alleys of Tikrit and on the peaks of Afghanistan, there is another, more deterrent message we might contemplate sending. It is that we ourselves are a bit unpredictable and now at last extremely angry, that without apology we can just as easily withdraw aid as extend it, expel visitors as welcome them, and become even worse enemies than we are good friends.
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Until we make clear to our adversaries the real
consequences of their hatred, we will not be serving but
subverting the accomplishments of our own soldiers.
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What else might we do? To encourage triangulators like the Saudis and Yemenis to hunt down terrorists — as they have only recently begun to do, two years after September 11 — we should remind them that America is not a neutral power, and not necessarily an ally. During the cold war, we accepted that so long as all of Eastern Europe lay under the thrall of Communism, the possibility of free trade, easy travel, or large-scale immigration was precluded. Similarly, so long as there is not yet a single democracy in the Arab Middle East, so long as many governments there pander to a virulent and hateful ideology of anti-Americanism, and so long as millions either ignore or abet the killers of Americans and Jews, why should our relations with these countries not lie under threat of severance by a new iron curtain?
In such a policy, everything would be on the table — all foreign aid, travel, commerce, immigration. Our ties with a great number of Middle Eastern regimes should be contingent precisely on their efforts to stop the implicit or explicit help they give to our enemies. With Syria and Iran, in particular, we are already in a death race to put an end to their murderous autocracies faster than they can prevent consensual government from emerging in Iraq. That country will never be truly free as long as there are thousands of terrorists in nearby Damascus and Tehran—something that President Assad and the mullahs seem to grasp far better than we.
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Above and beyond this, we must acknowledge the nature of
the wider war against terrorism, and of the dark times we
are in. We of the postmodern age will lose many more of
our own in this struggle, and must kill far more of our
premodern enemies to achieve victory. The alternative to
that depressing prospect is not a brokered peace but
abject defeat, punctuated by more September 11’s.
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Even apart from the toll in Israel and Iraq, all of the deadly terrorism since 9/11 — against the synagogue in Tunisia, against French naval personnel in Pakistan, Americans in Karachi, tourists in Bali, Israelis in Kenya, Russians in both Moscow and Chechnya, and foreigners in Saudi Arabia, the suicide car bombings in Morocco, the Marriott bombing in Indonesia, the mass murder in Bombay, the killings in Turkey, and so forth — has been perpetrated by Islamic fanatics and directed at Westerners, Christians, Hindus, Jews. In this respect, our efforts are better seen in comparison to World War II than by analogy to Panama or Serbia. Over 400 dead is a shocking figure if we are fighting a Noriega-type adversary; in a war to rid the world of the contemporary avatars of Nazism and Japanese militarism, it is proof of our competence so far but also, alas, only a down payment.
AS FOR the Iraqis, it needs to be made clear to them that the country is theirs, but so is the responsibility to keep it theirs, and free. If, in years to come, they wish to avoid the embargos, no-fly zones, and periodic bombings of the past, then they must step forward now to establish a government that will preclude the emergence of a new Saddam Hussein or of Iranian-style mullahs.
How best to help them do this? In a perfect world, it might not be desirable, for example, to arm Shiites and Kurds to pacify the Sunni Triangle, but then many things in war are not desirable. Such militias might at least remind recalcitrant Baathists that thousands of Iraqis are angrier at them for what they did to their country than happy about what they are now trying to do to us.
It is another paradox, but inescapably true, that the more overwhelming our conventional battlefield superiority, the greater the need in the postwar period for different strategies to deal with killers and terrorists who recede when we bomb and blast only to reappear when we stop. Much of the hard military work that must be done in Afghanistan and Iraq should now pass from conventional soldiers to counter-insurgency units and Special Forces—numbering, let us hope, in the thousands rather than the hundreds. These, by means of intelligence-gathering and the creation of friendly cadres, are far better-equipped to perform the unenviable task of hunting down Taliban and Baathists, and to accomplish that task to the satisfaction rather than the chagrin of the local population.
This is not to deny the vital importance of maintaining daytime compounds from which American soldiers wearing Ray-Ban glasses, camouflage, and big boots can issue forth to exhibit strength and provide a bulwark for Iraqi police and militia. It is rather to recognize that there is necessarily something static and wholly against the American character in attempting to fight a defensive police action against paramilitary terrorists from fixed positions. The victory of last April will be largely preserved at night, by ingenious types who alone know how to win the hearts of local Iraqis as they kill the killers in their midst.
Contrary to myth, Americans can take casualties — but only if they know they are exacting a far greater toll on the enemy, and that they are on the offensive and on the way to overwhelming victory. This utter defeat of the Baathists and their terrorist supporters inside and outside the country is the task at hand. For good or ill, the peace in Iraq has been temporarily sidetracked from the political challenge of building a consensual society that will create the conditions inimical to both the ideology of political and religious extremism and its methodology of terror. But defeating Baathist diehards is no mere detour, and our efforts in that realm transcend the need to demonstrate to extremists and fanatics that they are in a war that they can only lose.
In an era of the greatest affluence and security in the history of civilization, the real question before us remains whether the United States—indeed, whether any Western democracy — still possesses the moral clarity to identify evil as evil, and then the uncontested will to marshal every available resource to fight and eradicate it. In that sense, our willingness to use unremitting force to eliminate vast cadres of proven killers, in Iraq and elsewhere, is a referendum on modern democracy itself.
—December 8, 2003
Copyright 2003 Commentary Magazine
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON teaches classics at California State University in Fresno and is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Among his recent books are Mexifornia, Ripples of Battle, and the forthcoming collection, Between War and Peace (Random House), which includes a number of articles originally published in COMMENTARY. His "Lessons of the War" appeared in our June 2003 issue.
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