Public policy, social issues, gender politics, religion, civitas, and other taboo topics fall under the hammer of Shava's iconoclasmic force of natural philosophy.
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The thin red, white and blue line
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
12:11 AM
In the late 1700's, a superpower in global trade was brought to failure by a small force of colonialists, under-armed and hardly trained, who had ideas. The power of these ideas were mostly about setting aside the conventional ideas of an old order. Some of these ideas were about freedom -- but some were about warfare.
Warfare in Europe was still run by the conventions that pre-dated the gun. The idea of the "thin red line" -- the broad advance of infantry, even into the face of artillery and small arms fire -- had never been completely overthrown in tactics. But the colonists had learned a new sort of warfare from the natives of the new world. They had learned guerilla warfare -- to hide in cover and fire from cover, to evade and run and then strike again. To know the territory better than the invader. To strike at ungentlemanly times, unannounced and in raids rather than battles.
There were many reasons for the defeat of the British -- long supply lines, instability at home, whatever -- but one of the major reasons for the high cost of the war to the British crown was the humiliating defeats suffered at the hands of inferior forces due to a new way of fighting a war.
The new nation of the United States reaped the whirlwind in less than a century in their own civil war.
But today, the US is facing an inferior power. Like George III (no, not W, third after his father and Washington, but the King of England) we are laughing at the prospects of this under-equipped lesser force resisting us.
But like the British Crown, we may be falsely underestimating a canny foe.
We've advanced to Baghdad. Tonight I hear we are 80 clicks from the city.
Saddam is a clever man, and ruthless. He sounds confident. He has allowed the coalition forces to over-run his homeland. How could he expect to succeed?
There are, I believe, only two things that could allow him to win. One is controlling the sympathy of the largest possible sphere of influence. The other is to lean on the terrorism we accuse him of fostering, the weapons of mass destruction.
What if the new detente is that we must abandon Iraq or face the release of WMD on our own cities? We've already proven that we can not totally secure our borders. What if we can't find Saddam's weapons of mass destruction -- because they are here?
So, what happens then? We advance on Baghdad. We cause enough damage against the Iraqis' minor -- but brave -- resistance so as to garner sympathy for the Iraqis in the Arab world, in the middle east and central Asia, in all the places where Americans are less well loved such as Malaysia or perhaps any of the dozens of other countries we've bombed in the last century...
And Saddam tells us that if we go any further, he releases another whirlwind on us. How would we test it? How would we disprove it? How, strategically, or tactically, could we possibly react?
If we destroy Baghdad, we don't disarm the weapons in our own cities. If we withdraw, at what consequence to international politics? To me, this seems like the hugest problem to speculate on. What would we do? What are the contingencies? How likely is this nightmare scenario?
We say that after 9/11, everything changed, and yet we are heading into war with the same old strategy and tactics. Why could Saddam be so confident, and why might he not be a fool?
He would be insane to try this -- but what else could he realistically do, to fend us off? We've already called him a dictator, a madman, and a terrorist. What has he to lose? And how could anyone really, really blame him? To threaten us with harm to our far away noncoms, when he faces us down in his capital full of civilians?
In another recent essay (not published here) I described the necessaries of maintaining civil society:
o everyone must have something to gain
o everyone must have something to lose
o there must be reliable mechanisms which at least appear to support this economy of gains and losses
The threat of American Hegemony appears to destabilize this equation. If we believe that today's world is truly a global society, then to survive it must be a truly global civil society, or we all stand to lose.
We call it the War on Terrorism, yet we may not be fully embracing the risks.
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