March 25, 2003

This is good news. There is nothing better in war than to be underestimated my one's adversary. Just look at the profound inferiority complex evidenced by the remark that fewer than a dozen American casualties, achieved by the loss of hundreds from their side, constitutes a "victory."

Hopefully, remarks like Arafat's will give Bush the reason and backbone to renege on his offer of statehood for these genocidal criminals. He's right about one thing, though. Iraq is much better experienced at defeat in warfare than the Americans. They seem to crave defeat almost as much as they crave death. If so, they are about to get more of what it is that they crave.

Be not overly sure, Michael. We're not invulnerable. The North Vietnamese proved that we could be had politically, by inflicting losses on us that the home front found unacceptable, even though we kicked their asses every time they engaged us in the field.

As a result of the first Gulf War and the desire of the Administration to keep the public relatively calm about this action, we may have been "oversold" on the idea that we can win with very little loss of life. Sensible people know that war means death, often the deaths of heroes. But the public is not composed entirely of sensible people.

I want to have confidence that we'll see this thing through, but every now and then, I find myself wondering if our national stomach would hold up through, say, worldwide broadcasts of the torture of American prisoners by Saddam's interrogators. Or what about a coerced human-wave attack by unarmed civilians, of the kind Iran used to send against Iraq, simply to force us to kill the innocent in large numbers? There would be a cruel irony in that.

For further thoughts, please see The Evolution Of Victory

Pray for a quick victory, and the safety of our men at arms.

Francis,
I read your thoughts in The Evolution of Victory, and found them very lucid and persuasive. It seems to me, though, that moral constraints only go so far. After all, each of us possess the psychological capacity for savagery. Our morality constrains most of us most of the time. However, when sufficiently provoked we are all quite capable of shedding our civilized restraint. I think our desire to limit killing of civilians is a fine guiding principle. However, I don't believe it is a suicide pact with our enemies. When the crunch comes, we'll draw on our own capacity for vengeance and destructiveness. Hopefully before it's too late. Unlike Vietnam, we were attacked directly and at home. We remember September 11 and the innocents who jumped from the WTC. I hope I'm right. If not, then multicultural political correctness will mean the death of the West.

Oh, you're right, Stephen, and no doubt of it. But I think the threshold for pulling us loose from our moral constraints has gotten pretty high. It would take another September 11-magnitude attack on American soil -- this one directly traceable to Iraq -- to get us to contemplate using nukes on Baghdad, for example.

We're the good guys, and we want to remain the good guys, even in the eyes of those nations that hate us. Even in the eyes of nations with which we're at war! That does carry costs and hazards, but it also brings a unique power -- the power to mobilize ourselves when we know our cause is just.

I agree. It will be interesting to see what we do in Baghdad--if Saddam makes his last stand amidst the civilians, in hospitals, mosques, etc.

Francis, I'm not sure that you are drawing the right conclusions from Viet Nam, yes we lost that one on the political front.
We have an entirely different set of politicos guiding this war. There's no LBJ bragging that 'they can't bomb an outhouse without my approval'. There's no Robert Strange MacNamara and his 'best and brightest' giving us a war plan tailored to hurt them 'just a little'.
We are going for the throat this time.

I hope you're entirely correct, Peter. My fear is that, by precipitating the slaughter of his own people, Saddam Hussein might cause us to lose heart before the finale. There are some indications that he's thinking along those lines, for instance the dispersion of his crack divisions into tiny units that are nestled in densely populated civilian areas. That sacrifices the power of divisional formations for the "human shield" effect of having platoon and company-sized units surrounded by non-combatants... but the troops so deployed are going to be firing at us.

Keep all your spare fingers crossed as we enter Baghdad. If there's a heavy toll of blood, the Old Media will play it for all it's worth. Look what they've already done with the few dozen casualties we've suffered, and the paltry number of Iraqi civilians who've died from our fire. Ending this politically incorrect war short of an American victory, by nauseating us with the death toll on either side, would leave the Iraqis enslaved and cripple the Bush Administration's effort to gain a pro-American beachhead in the Muslim Middle East. That would give their friends on the Left a great big warm fuzzy.

Francis,
I am increasingly concerned by the determined political correctness of the spokesmen for our military. They keep insisting that we are caring and empathic warriors. There have been some complaints by infantry that we are not using airpower to support them because of our concern for Iraqi civilians.

I can believe it easily, Stephen. That's the sort of thing that really spikes my fears of defeat at our own hands.

I appreciate the public relations imperatives of war in our time, but when PR starts costing lives -- the lives of one's own men at arms -- it's been awarded way too much priority.

Is it possible that the various "humanitarian missions" the Army has been used for this past decade might have corrupted the thinking of the men at the highest levels?

The way I see it is we need to save Iraqi civilian lives, not for their own sake, but for our sake.

We will win this war, even with the constraints we have placed on ourselves. But, if we are responsible for anywhere near the Iraqi deaths the first war caused, then we will have lost the strategic aim of this war, democracy and peace in the Middle East.

Our soldiers are dying so we don't have to fight an even bigger and uglier war later on. They are dying so our civilians can live without the threat of dying by some misguided Islamic.

Don't look at their deaths as an unnecessary side effect of our being too civil. I thank them for their sacrifice and know that each one who dies will probably save thousands if not hundreds of thousands, though it's no comfort for the dead or their families.