Brumar is just learning the ropes to. Have you noticed he is adopting the military style of dehumanizing his perceived enemy before he imagines he condemns them to hell. Not very Christian of the boy.
On dehumanizing the enemy in war and the nature of victory
By TigerHawk at 5/16/2007 11:24:00 AM
A couple of days ago Richard Fernandez of The Belmont Club linked to a bunch of old news reel clips that reported on the brutal means by which the "greatest generation" fought and won World War II. One quickly realizes that our fathers and grandfathers were tough men who did what was necessary to win. More tellingly, the military chose to release these reels to the public. The mothers and children and Democrats back home must have been quite different than they are today. We should not forget that when we ask ourselves whether we really support the troops.
The change really has been dramatic. Fernandez:
While people may not want to return to the methods of World War 2, it is dishonest to pretend, as it is now fashionable to do, that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill conducted war according to some high moral standard that the Bush administration has somehow betrayed. The current rules of engagement of Bush-Hitler would be unrecognizable compared to that waged by the Greatest Generation, and more to point, compared to warfare conducted by any other country in the world today. World War 2 was the era of unrestricted submarine warfare, unlimited attacks on enemy cities, the development of weapons of mass destruction to counter threats which turned out were nonexistent and the internment of thousands of Japanese-American civilians. One may or may not like the facts, but they are the facts.
Of course, our parents and grandparents were not heartless, amoral people. The government -- with the loyal support of the media -- conditioned them quite consciously to accept that brutal tactics were necessary because our enemies were far more brutal. This is why even in countries that were neutral during the war, fascism is now thought to be orders of magnitude worse than Communism. (See, for example, this article about the historical ignorance of young Swedes.) We had to dehumanize fascists in order to justify the violence necessary to beat them, and the effects still show.
In the years following World War II the West renounced dehumanization in war. We did this unilaterally and alone. Notwithstanding a theoretical commitment to the post-war amendments to the Geneva Conventions (which in the hands of hostile NGOs and media bedeviled Israel in last summer's war) non-western countries and stateless armies still dehumanize their enemies as a matter of policy, but Western countries do not. The press supports them in this, by holding Western governments to entirely different standards than non-Western governments. If that was not already painfully obvious in the coverage of Afghanistan and Iraq, it became so in the Israel -Hezbollah war.
Apart from some tussles in the 1950s while the old soldiers were still adjusting to the new rules, the West has not really won a war since we decided that our enemies were people too (especially if you believe, as I do, that the Gulf War of 1991 was a victory in a battle in a war that ended before the defeat of the enemy). Is this a historical accident, or has the West decided to adhere to rules in war -- and peace, for that matter -- that have fatally handicapped our ability to win wars? Is it possible to win a real war without dehumanizing the enemy?
Excluding wars that are purposefully genocidal (in which one combatant has the objective of exterminating the other), victory in war amounts to forcing your enemy to do what you want, or to stop doing something you oppose. What does it take to achieve that victory? Well, since your enemy has already given up everything that is good in life to take up arms, live in wretched conditions, see his own friends and family die, and sacrifice his life, if necessary, it is very difficult to persuade him to do what you want. At that point, reason has departed the premises, so he will only stop fighting if he has no choice.
There are only a few ways to deprive your enemy of the choice to continue fighting. Of course, you can kill or cripple him. Unfortunately, unless your enemy has no population on which to draw, he will recruit more soldiers. In theory, you can disarm him. In practice, that is virtually impossible to do. The Germans occupied Norway with more than 600,000 soldiers -- one German for every five Norwegians, and not a one hamstrung by "rules of engagement" -- and still the resistance was able to manufacture Sten guns in makeshift factories in the woods.
You can also win by outlasting the enemy. Soldiers grow old, and if they make no progress they will not be able to inspire replacements. Most insurgencies do not "lose" so much as fade away. But it can take decades. To win this way one side needs more will to fight than the other side. The United States certainly has the capacity, both in soldiers and money, to keep doing what we are doing in Iraq indefinitely, and certainly longer than our enemy. However, there is considerable evidence that at least in the case of Iraq we are unable to sustain our will, and are therefore unlikely to outlast the enemy. This is the principle basis for the argument that negative press coverage hurts the American war effort. Of course, an unbelievably inarticulate president and an opposition that does not support the objectives of the war also sap our will (Lincoln faced the latter, but he was not the former, and that made all the difference).
If we do not want to kill an entire population, and if it is essentially impossible to disarm the enemy, and if we know we do not have the national stamina of a genuinely imperial power (our weak stomach for foreign occupation is perhaps the greatest proof that the United States is not motivated by imperial ambition), then we can only win by accelerating the collapse of the enemy's will to conform to our schedule.
There are only two ways to do this, and one of them won't work.
The preferred method -- which unfortunately is the one that history tells us will not work in Iraq -- is to make life so good for the population that it will no longer supply the enemy with materiel and replacement soldiers. The "good life" strategy will not work because the main source of enemy soldiers -- Iraqi and foreign Sunni Arabs -- cannot fathom a "good life" under the majority Shiites. They will not give up, and there are too many of them to exterminate.
The unpopular method -- which might work -- is drive the enemy population to the point of despair. During World War II, we did this with strategic bombing against civilian populations, blockades to starve civilian populations, and nuclear weapons against civilian populations. We also sent millions of young and then older German and Japanese soldiers home in body bags. We were able to do this because we decided that the fascists and the people who permitted them to come to power did not deserve to live. When we occupied their countries they did not resist because we had crushed their will.
Ralph Peters thinks that these tactics can work in Iraq.
The strategic errors of the administration, the pernicious effect of the media and factional hatred within Iraq all played their part. Corruption and al Qaeda's remorseless bloodlust made everything worse. Poor leadership plagued Iraqis and Americans alike.
But the subject presidents, pundits and professors all avoid is what it would take to win militarily. Because the answer's ugly. We prefer to sidestep reality in favor of comfy fantasies that negotiations will persuade blood-drunk murderers to all just get along....
Our best shot is to keep them on the run, to keep them off balance. But crippling their freedom of action requires that our troops seem to be everywhere at unexpected times. That takes raw numbers.
If, on the other hand, you let the terrorists and insurgents set the tempo, you lose both the support of the population and the war.
Executing such a policy also demands far better intelligence than we've produced in the past - our tactical intelligence has improved notably under the stress of war, but we still have a long way to go.
Above all, we have to maintain a strength of will equal to that of our opponents. War demands consistency, and we're the most fickle great power in history. We must focus on defeating our enemies, brushing aside all other considerations.
At present, we let those other considerations rule our behavior: We overreact to media sensationalism (which our enemies exploit brilliantly); we torment ourselves over the least mistakes our troops make; we delude ourselves that mass murderers have rights; we take prisoners knowing they'll be freed to kill more Americans - and the politicians and Green Zone generals alike pretend that "it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game."
That's the biggest lie ever told by a human being who wasn't a member of Congress.
Winning is everything. Fighting ruthlessly may not please the safe-at-home moralists, but it's losing that's immoral.
More of the same here.
Whether or not Peters is specifically right that unrestrained brutality can bring victory in Iraq -- I, for one, am increasingly unsure which enemy we should brutalize first -- the core point that he makes relentlessly is true: we can be patient, or we can be brutal, but if we are neither than we will surely lose every war we fight.
So what are the implications of all of this? If winning non-genocidal wars is primarily a contest of will, what does this mean for warfighting in the post-modern West? I have several propositions that I believe flow from this argument, and offer them in numbered paragraphs below. If you are inclined to comment you can refer to the paragraphs by their numbers.
1. If war requires our soldiers to do brutal things in our name, and if we must support them in that, perhaps we need to reconsider our modern reluctance to dehumanize our enemy. This does not have to amount to racism, but it will require forging a national contempt for the enemy. We need to be comfortable taking joy in the deaths of these miserable bastards. In this regard, precision-guided slurs might actually be weapons of war.
2. If virtually all wars are contests of will, and if it requires an extraordinary national commitment to sustain the national will, is it wrong to expect that "allies" will fight effectively along side when they share a different perception of the threat and therefore a less intense will to fight? If that is true, is it counterproductive to expect or require the military participation of less-interested allies in our wars (whether or not we have international approval or passive assistance, which is a different matter)? Should we expect to fight our most important wars alone, or with only those allies that are similarly in peril? Should we build our military accordingly?
3. Clearly, there are military operations that have legitimate objectives short of defeat of the enemy. The Falklands War was one, and the Gulf War was another. In both cases, the West sought only the removal of a conventional military force from a specific bit of real estate. Wars that require the crushing of the enemy's will to fight require a much greater commitment, because we must either be very brutal or very patient. The commitment necessary to win would appear to demand relentless reinforcement from the government and the elites who shape public opinion. There is obviously no such commitment in the case of Iraq, which may mean that we will have to withdraw whether we ought to or not. In the case of the wider struggle against Islamic extremism, are Americans sufficiently committed? I think we are not. The center-left elites are totally divided on the extent and nature of the threat and the means by which we must combat it, and the right is unwilling to make any sacrifice that might hurt economic growth (such as a serious program to reduce our consumption of imported oil, which comes at great strategic cost).
4. Were the post-war amendments to the Geneva Conventions a mistake? Recall the arcane discussion last summer over whether Israel's response to Hezbollah's attack was "proportional". We have gone from limiting the basis for war to constraining the conduct of war to the point where no law-abiding nation can be brutal within the terms of international law. If law-abiding nations cannot be brutal, will only unlawful nations succeed in breaking the enemy's will to fight? |
