The war that is not a war

(Note: The below discussion continues in a new thread.)

Howard Sutherland writes:

Diana West hits another home run, cementing her status as the best mainstream commentator on the ills of Islam and the insanity of our engagement with it.

Every so often someone says something that in just a few words brings a situation into perfect focus. West has done it here, describing the Bush administration’s imbecilically (if that’s a word) confused policy vis-à-vis Iraq and Iran. Looking at the deployments and preoccupations of U.S. soldiers and Marines in Iraq, she says “We freely risk our men’s lives and limbs in its dangerous neighborhoods, along bomb-mined streets, past booby-trapped houses, where we seek to destroy (or arrest) hunkered-down enemy fighters—as though our men were worth less than their civilians.” (emphasis added)

And to be sure we don’t miss it, she says it again—unconditionally this time: “And in Baquba this week, where we have massed troops against 300 to 500 al Qaeda fighters dug in among civilians (because they know we value our men less than their civilians), we are attempting to tell thug from thug.” (emphasis added)

It is a fine thing to see such truth-telling breaking out in the mainstream media. I know West isn’t writing about the Bush/Kennedy/McCain Amnesty Insanity, but I think the utterly beyond the pale over-reaching and stupidity it represents, combined with President Bush’s Eveready Bunny agitation for it, has laid the Bush administration and the Congress open to unrestricted criticism on all fronts.

I can’t thank West enough. They value Iraq’s civilians more than America’s men. A better description of Bush and Rice we couldn’t ask for.

LA replies:

It’s a good article, but I don’t entirely agree with Mr. Sutherland’s high praise of it. For one thing, West, while calling for other people to be honest, covers up certain difficult truths herself.

Referring to the fact that democratic elections do not change the character of Islam, she continues:

Of course, this realization is the Big No-No, the stake through the heart of multicultural teachings that give life to platitudes that everyone—every culture, every religion, every people—is the same, or, rather, wants the same things. (How many times have we heard the president or the secretary of state talk specifically about the normalcy of theoretical “Muslim Moms and Dads” even as actual “Muslim Moms and Dads” were celebrating mass murder committed by their suicide-bomber offspring?) For most, if not all, of our leadership, civilian and military alike, this is the blow to be warded off at all costs. As in: Live multiculturally or die.

I have praised West many times at VFR, talking her up more than any other mainstream columnist. But here I disagree with her strongly. Contrary to what she says above, it is, of course, not multiculturalism which says that all cultures and peoples are the same and want the same things: it is neoconservatism which says that, it is mainstream American liberalism which says that. It is Natan Sharansky and Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter and legions of conservative and neoconservative columnists who have been saying that all people want the same things and that cultural differences don’t matter because all cultures can adopt democracy. By contrast with neoconservatism, multiculturalism says that cultures are all different and believe in different truths, yet are of equal value.

This is not the first time that West has taken the easy path of attacking “multiculturalism,” a target which costs a conservative nothing, when what she is really talking about is the liberal belief in universal human equality and sameness that the Bushites and neoconservatives all share. To blame, not the multiculturalists, but the conservatives for this false and deadly belief in human sameness—that would have cost her something.

- end of initial entry -

Tom S. writes:

It’s actually much worse than West/Sutherland know. In his book “Just and Unjust Wars” Michael Walzer openly states that the lives of soldiers should be sacrificed to save the lives of enemy civilians. Of course, this is no part of Christian Just War teaching (which states simply and reasonably that noncombatants should not be deliberately killed unless they are actively aiding the enemy war effort, and which Walzer disassociates himself from), confuses the role of soldier with that of the police, and would raise unsuperable difficulties, both moral and operational, for any commander who actually tried to follow it. Two minutes thought about the subject would make this clear to anyone.

Except of course our military academies, where Walzer’s book is used as a textbook for classes on military ethics. Really. So while Bush and Rice are certainly confused, that confusion runs much, much deeper, into institutions not normally thought of as liberal.

Howard Sutherland writes:

In response to Tom S’s comment in the same thread:

Whether or not Diana West knows how truly bad the situation is (she strikes me as pretty aware), I do know how bad it is. I’m a former Marine infantry officer, who was trained at one time to lead rifle platoons and companies in combat—although I confess I didn’t see combat as a Marine. When I went through officer training in 1980, the Marine Corps wasn’t emphasizing urban warfare, even though my regiment, the Fifth Marines, had spent a month fighting a bitter urban battle in Hue only 12 years before, February 1968 during the Tet Offensive. It is hard to tell from so far away while no longer in the service, but my impression is neither the Army nor the Marine Corps is very well trained for the kind of guerrilla urban war they are in in Iraq, even though we have been at it for over four years now.

Walzer’s book has reached the niche it has in the service academies because of the total lack of coherent thought, both among the civilian political leadership and the senior uniformed leadership, about just what the armed forces of the United States are for and how they should fight. There are two mutually exclusive models at work, and over and over one can see conflicting aspects of each in how our armed forces operate. (I think what follows applied to our Vietnam experience as well, if to a lesser degree, so we still haven’t learned that war’s lessons.) One is violent suppression of those who attack the United States and Americans. The other is the deployment of soldiers and Marines as a sort of armed Peace Corps, out to win hearts and minds, bring the delights of democracy and feed the natives… Both elements are present in Iraq, and I imagine it makes it very difficult for the troops to know how they are expected to act in any given situation. Being too discriminating in engaging targets means one risks getting killed. Being slightly less discriminating means one runs the risk of court-martial for harming civilians. As West acknowledges in her column, the life of a grunt soldier or Marine in Iraq is a constant Catch-22, a constant dangerous involvement in nasty local situations that in truth should be utterly irrelevant to any American. The immediate solution in Iraq, however, is simple: leave the fighting natives to their own devices, and use air and sea power to intervene from offshore when necessary.

Tom S. is right. The confusion runs far deeper than Bush and Rice. The confusion is liberalism. Adherence to liberalism is the prerequisite to occupying any position of power in the federal government today. It’s just as true for generals and admirals as it is for civil servants. Even when a little non-liberalism still survives in a general or admiral (and I suspect there are few left who are not fully liberalized, in the sense we talk about at VFR), he knows very well that his civilian masters have drunk the Kool-Aid to the last drop, and he’s not going to cross them. It wouldn’t do any good if he did; he would just end his career for nothing and lose a shot at those board seats and consultancies that are supposed to sweeten his retirement. Today’s military culture reflects that of the federal government, of which it is a part. Counterintuitive though it may seem, the U.S. armed forces are absolutely marinated in the sort of cloying political correctness we have come to know and despise. No officer who wants to stay employed is going to question (other than under his breath in a quiet corner of the officers’ club after several beers) the rampant affirmative action for underqualified minorities or—especially—the services’ new highest dogma: Women-in-Combat.

I just pray the armed forces as they are today never have to fight an enemy like the Communist Chinese! HRS

Simon N. writes:

This is a standard counter-insurgency tactic, born of the recognition that in an insurgency war dead civilians mean more enemy recruits. It has nothing to do with neoconservatism or multiculturalism; the British military was applying it vs the IRA in Northern Ireland nearly forty years ago. It doesn’t mean the U.S. military really attaches more moral weight to Iraqi civilian lives than to U.S. soldiers’ lives, it is simply good tactics in winning the war for hearts and minds (obviously other factors may make that war unwinnable at this point).

It can be frustrating, but the only viable alternative is the Hama Solution—a swift and brutal destruction of both the enemy and the enemy civilian population. Splitting the difference with occasional killings of civilians merely guarantees failure.

For a good discussion of this see the current “4th generation warfare” manual on d-n-i.net

LA replies:

Yes, good point.

However, this is part of a larger situation, involving not just refraining from killing Iraqi civilians, but, from the start, avoiding taking any decisive action to gain real control over the country, and an attitude of yielding to the other side, all of which stems from the ambiguous nature of the “war”—that we were not fighting to defeat an enemy country, but “fighting” to establish democracy. That contradiction has perplexed and paralyzed us from the start.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 22, 2007 09:56 AM | Send