Comments on blogs do several things. At their worst, they amount to name calling and degenerate into flame wars but when they work, they have the ability to move the discussion forward. My last couple of posts addressed some worries I have that our prosecution of the war has been, and continues to be, compromised by our own best impulses (to be fair and ethical) being held to an impossibly high standard of perfection, as well as the tendency of important parts of our society to be always ready to believe the worst of our side.
In Skepticism and "News" I suggested that accusations of misconduct against our troops should be investigated, but our default position should be that such accusations are enemy propaganda until proven otherwise. This is entirely consistent with our legal system's presumption of innocence.
In Lessons from Vietnam, Iraq, and Palestine I expressed my concern that if we lose this war because of our domestic politics, the eventual outcome will be markedly worse, and worried that our inability to wage this war until victory would compromise our objectives in ways which would make our political loss more likely. I further suggested that by not waging Total War we made failure more likely.
Luckily, a number of commenters took me to task for some of my conclusions.
TDE quite correctly pointed out that if we are at war (something he doubts) then we are not very mobilized as a country; further, he wondered what Total War means in the context of the GWOT.
While I think he misunderstood my point (that I was not advocating Total War or mass murder, but that I feared waging a war not to lose would eventually make later Total War much more likely) his question was to the point. He quoted my post and asked the relevant question in another comment:
"Our country has no stomach for doing the kinds of things that could win this war."
Like what kinds of things?
Luckily, I have some very erudite commenters and I waited long enough to respond so that they did my work for me. Jimmy J made an excellent argument for why the current international conflicts and the specific Iraq and Afghanistan fronts can reasonably be called part of a larger war; he also suggested some of the things that are necessary to win the war, and expressed his concern that we have the will to do what is necessary.
That is where the discussion got particularly interesting. A guy in pajamas took me (and Vanderleun) to task for our comments. He believes that Bush a has a clear and winnable strategy in place for Iraq and that we are winning:
Finally, unless my nation is truly, profoundly threatened, I could not morally condone the level of atrocity that total war calls for. Total war is atrocity; you kill enough of the enemy's wives and kids and grandparents to break his will to fight. Nothing in this war calls for that.
I fully support the war on terrorism and the campaign in Iraq, but total war is entirely the wrong strategy. Bush has outlined his strategy, it is being vigorously prosecuted, and it is working well. Counterinsurgency wars are won not by mass atrocity, but by patient, intelligent, vigorous operations, which is exactly what we are doing.
TDE and AGIP are both correct that a Total War, scorched earth, Sherman to the Sea, approach will not win the war in Afghanistan or Iraq; further, I do not think this country would or should support such an approach in the absence of an existential threat.
[At the moment one of the key questions we need to grapple with is whether a nuclear armed Iran represents an existential threat or not; this is a question which is at the core of much of our discourse, often in derivative form, but evokes a constant trickle of anxiety in the zeitgeist.]
It was at this point in the comments that Expat jumped in to put things into perspective:
agip,
I agree on your comments about total war in the sense of military action. But we need total war in the sense of total commitment, in the sense of standing up for our principles, in the sense of exposing the pathology of the jihadis and showing we are not taken in by their propaganda tricks. OBL attacked because he thought we were weak. Our message must be that absense of brutality is not weakness. The jihadis should be put on the spot to show that their brutality will lead to a better society. Unfortunately, and to my mind immorally, the press and the loony left have have been on the opposite side in this second type of total war. They should be highlighting things like the soccer ban in Somalia, the falafel prohibitions in Bagdad, etc. under a huge headline: BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR.
The light bulb went on!
Our organs of perception around the world are the MSM. We rely on them to show us what is occurring in places out of our eye witness view. We rely on The Opposition Political Party to offer alternative perspectives on what we see. In both these areas, not only are our MSM and TOPP failing us, but there is evidence that they have been failing us for the last 40 years! The MSM and TOPP do not act as if they believe the West is under assault and they do not act as if they have a stake in safe guarding our civilization.
A non-biased approach to the news would be as eager to show us the atrocities of our enemies as they are to show the faux atrocities of our side. No one has ever doubted that abu Graib was abusive and the perpetrators deserved punishment, but the lack of images of much greater atrocities from the other side diminishes the vast distinction between what they want and what we want; it facilitates the moral equivalency that is so fashionable among people who are unable and unwilling to make moral distinctions.
It is not at all clear that we could have won the war in Vietnam considering all the factors that went into that conflict. However, the moral fallacy of the time, which suggested the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong communists were more pure, tolerant, and freedom loving than us, was an important source of the moral legitimacy of the anti-war opposition. When John Kerry tarred our servicemen as rapists, torturers, and murderers, and our MSM conveniently left out the much greater atrocities of the Communists (a habit that began with people like Walter Duranty who covered up the horrific crimes of the Stalinists in the pages of the New York Times, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his perfidy) a false picture of the war was created and helped facilitate our failure.
Rev. Paul W. McNellis, S.J, at Democracy Project, has put together a chilling post, Hitchens, Haditha, and My Lai, on how the press's distortion by omission has undermined a past war and is threatening to undermine our present war.
Between the distortion by omission of our MSM, and the political opportunism of TOPP, we are being very poorly served by two important legs that support our culture and their efforts, even when inadvertent and unintended, are making our war efforts more difficult and the outcome more problematic.
Just as I was ready to post this, I noticed that Jimmy J has been thinking along the same lines; as a bonus he offered a link well worth following. I also noticed that Bruce Kesler at Democracy Project posted a letter from a Marine who reports, from the ground in Iraq, exactly how the activities of our MSM have a direct harmful effect upon our war effort.
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