AMEN, MR. FRUM
By Bryan Preston
August 23, 2005 11:43 AM
The war we are fighting, the one that includes Iraq as a theatre of combat but encompasses a second theatre in Afghanistan and many smaller ones in Africa, the Philippines and elsewhere, is a post-modern war. That is this war's one striking similarity to the Cold War, of which Vietnam was a theatre we happened to lose without losing a single battle. How did we lose that theatre without losing any battles? Can the same thing happen again today?
We lost Vietnam because it was the first post-modern war theatre, and we failed to appreciate that. One man did appreciate it, though, but unfortunately for us he commanded the other side. His name was General Vo Nguyen Giap, and he commanded the North Vietnamese army from the 1950s through the 1970s. In that time he defeated in succession France (at that time a world power), the United States (a superpower) and China (a rising regional power). The latter is especially interesting--Giap studied infowar under Mao Zedong in the 1930s. He used Mao's own tactics, improved by Giap's brilliance and extensive experience against us, against Mao's own creation, Communist China. Giap managed to defeat three nations whose military capabilities were vastly superior to his own. He may have been the 20th Century's most intelligent general.
How did Giap do it? In short, he discovered how to make his own troops expendable proxies, while he waged the actual war in the mind of his opponent. With the US, he discovered that we are unbeatable in combat but we are political hemophiliacs. Prick us in just the right spot, and we will bleed ourselves to death. The facts on the battlefield become secondary to the facts as we perceive them, whether those perceptions are accurate or not. The Tet Offensive was Giap's greatest show of post-modern warfare. It was an unmitigated disaster for his own troops, who were slaughtered all across Vietnam during that uprising. But it crystallized in the US political mind as a defeat for us that presaged inevitable defeat in the war itself, thanks mostly to the way the anti-war movement and the media portrayed Tet. Giap went on to lose Tet and every other battle after it, but he won the war. He won with a post-modern war strategy, the only type of strategy that can defeat us.
Principally, he played to the US anti-war movement, using it as a psychological nuclear weapon to devastate our will to fight. Giap had discovered by the mid-1960s that the US anti-war movement was the key to his own success or failure, far more relevant to the war than anything actually going on in Vietnam itself. He began to court that movement, to cry common cause with it, as a way to divide the US public on the war. Absent a coherent counter message coming from our own leadership at the time, through the Johnson and Nixon administrations, Giap's message prevailed. The left turned irrevocably against the war, Jane Fonda and her cohorts supplied the high-level pro-North propaganda, and we eventually retreated. We won every battle but the one that mattered most--the one that took place in the American mind.
It can happen again today. We premised this war not so much on a nation's right of self-defense as on our moral superiority over the enemy. We do happen to be morally superior to Osama bin Laden and his head-chopping henchmen, but our war premise had the effect of leaving us vulnerable to any flimsy charge either the caliphascist enemy or the anti-American agitators in the West could throw at us, and they have managed to throw quite a lot at us: Abu Ghraib, false allegations of mistreatment at Gitmo, old charges of US crimes in the MidEast, our support for Israel, whatever small offense or canard our enemies could come up with. Once our moral superiority is punctured, our rationale for war loses much of its steam. And absent a coherent and consistent counter message from our own leadership, the enemy's narrative begins to take hold: We're bogged down in a fruitless war in Iraq, we should never have invaded in the first place, our leaders are liars, etc.
We're not getting that coherent and consistent message from the Bush administration. The facts are available, but we're getting a muddle of same-old same-old and platitudes instead of a sustained morale-building information campaign. David Frum is sounding the alarm that we're in trouble in the post-modern aspects of the war, and I hope the White House gets the message. If they don't, the caliphascist message most prominently expressed in Fahrenheit 9-11 and the media will take hold, and irrespective of how things are going in the war on the other side of the world--where things are going pretty well, mostly--we will lose heart right here. And then we will lose Iraq to the caliphascists, just like we lost Vietnam to General Giap.
MORE: I came across Gen. Giap's central role in Vietnam a little over a year ago while researching John Kerry and the Vietnam Veterans against the War. That research led to several posts on the subject back on the JYB. Here are the three that probably tell the story best:
The Practical Effect of Anti-War Movements, then Part II and Part III (links below).
In case you're wondering whether I'm just making all of this up or may actually have some idea of what I'm talking about...
michellemalkin.com
frum.nationalreview.com
junkyardblog.net
junkyardblog.net
junkyardblog.net |
