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February 27, 2005

We Must Not be Squeamish in the Fight Against Terrorists

VDH describes how we must be willing to take harsh actions in the present so as to save lives—both of the enemy’s people and of our own—in the future:

It would have been extremely messy to have shot the first 400 looters who began a cascading riot that ruined $13 billion in Iraqi infrastructure. Storming rather than pulling back from Fallujah in April 2004 would have offended the press, the professors, and the Europeans. Arresting or killing Moqtada al-Sadr in June 2003 might have angered the Arab world and invited parlor debate among the mandarins back home, but such measures also would have shown ironclad American resolve and eventually would have impressed even our enemies.

The key in irregular, as in conventional, war remains the will to win.

...Victory always sways the heart even of the most ardent pacifist, just as defeat and humiliation erode the will of the most zealous hawk—although it is hard to confess that most humans still think with the most primitive part of their brains. Amid all the glitter of contemporary culture and technology, the will to fight for victory remains crucial to battlefield success, an odious thought for us postmodern children of the Enlightenment, who feel we should be exempt—as too wealthy, educated, or sophisticated—ever to have to descend to the primeval swamp to destroy bin Ladin and his ilk to ensure our survival. But *bin Ladin’s October infomercial mentioned truces and respites, not out of tender concern for the West, but because bin Ladin is beginning to feel, like al-Sadr, that he is going to lose.

Modern Western man is faced with this awful dilemma, from which he recoils: real peace and successful reconstruction are in direct proportion to the degree that an enemy is humiliatingly defeated and so acknowledges it—the aim being that he will come to feel that he cannot go on being what he has been. To that end, absolute victory may encompass everything from Hiroshima to bombing downtown Belgrade as the price for tranquillity and a democratic and humane postbellum Japan and the Balkans. Not finishing off a defeated Republican Guard in 1991 or sparing looters in April 2003 or breaking off the siege of Fallujah in April 2004 only ensures that more corpses will pile up later. President Bush’s so-called Axis of Evil in 2002—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—all had in common unfinished business with the U.S. military that had led to a bellum interruptum of sorts. In contrast, the Grenada communists, Noriega, Milošević , and the Taliban were all defeated, and only after that were their societies rebuilt—and thus Grenada, Panama, Serbia, and Afghanistan now do not belong to the axis of anything. Perhaps for all the debate over how to fight irregular wars in an age of global terrorism, we would do best to recall the realistic, if inelegant, words of the owner of the Oakland Raiders, the infamous Al Davis: “Just win, baby.”

You can just imagine the outrage here at home if those first 400 looters in Iraq had just been shot. The awareness of the likelihood of such a reaction here at home is, of course, why they weren’t shot. But the price of such squeamishness is not less such outrage, but unending such outrage, as the rebuilding of Iraq is dragged out due to the absence of such harsh measures, and the carping and complaining of those who want to see the rebuilding of Iraq successfully completed, goes on and on.

VDH is right. It is an error to be so squeamish about enemy casualties and civilian casualties when inflicting sudden and conclusive defeat on the opponent can bring a speedier end to hostilities, ultimately saving lives of the opponent’s people and of our own people. Avoiding such harsh but brief measures only drags out the conflict.

Some on the Left, of course, want to drag out the conflict. Some on the Left want us to take as much damage as possible, as much loss of American lives as possible, so that we are slow to become involved in additional fights. The key phrase here of course is, “want us to take as much … loss of American lives as possible.” No views are an acceptable reason for the U.S. to take actions which ultimately increase loss of American lives.