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Waiting for the enemy to stop
A couple of months ago, a tv reporter in Iraq said, “Our generals are now saying, ‘The question is, how long can the insurgents keep this up?’” Instead of our generals talking about what our side was doing to beat the other side, they were pathetically wondering when the other side would stop. This says it all. All along, we had no strategy to win. We had the hope that somehow—because of the Iraqi people’s support for democratization and the new government, because of demoralization and attrition among the terrorists, the insurgency would simply run out of gas. We thought that we were creating general conditions in Iraq that would, somehow, make them run out of gas. But we were never actually engaged in the process of defeating and destroying them as a fighting force, apart from targeted operations here and there to clean out especially troublesome concentrations of them—often, it seems, from areas where they had previously been ejected but then had returned.
In any case, it’s been a new kind of war, a war in which our strategy for victory is that we do certain things that we think and hope will make the enemy stop fighting, and then we wait for him to stop fighting, and are surprised and disappointed if he doesn’t. In fact it’s not a new kind of war at all. There was Vietnam, where Gen. Westmorland sent out all those infantry missions in circles through the jungle toting up enemy body counts, and President Johnson personally ran the exquisitely managed escalation of the bombing of North Vietnam, a bombing interspersed with many pauses while we, uh, waited for the enemy to stop fighting. Email entry |