Dan Drezner and Kevin Drum both post today on the comparison of the current state of the Iraq war and the Tet offensive during the Vietnam war, which was brought up recently by Thomas Friedman, and President Bush's statement that Friedman might be right.
What strikes me about all this is this quote from Cheney (h/t Dan):
The other thing that I'd mention, too, not really in response to your question: I'm struck by the fact that what's being attempted here is to break our will. [New York Times columnist Thomas] Friedman has got an interesting piece today on it, talking about the extent to which the enemy in this stage in Iraq aim very much at the American people... [they] use the media to gain access through technical means that are available now on the Internet and everything else to create as much violence as possible, as much bloodshed as possible and get that broadcast back into the United States as a way to try to shape opinion and influence the outcome of our debate here at home. And I think some of that is going on, too.
What is extraordinary here is that he says "in this stage in Iraq" and "some of that is going on." As if the purposive combination of violent acts and media spectacle has not been the fundamental tactic of the insurgency from the very beginning. Let's remember this summary of 4th generation warfare , based on Thomas X. Hammes, author of The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century, that I posted last year:
1) the paramountcy of the political goal; 2) the use of all means - military, political,economic, media - to influence the adversary's will regarding the paramount political goal; 3) the reliance of flexible, small scale, politically targeted military tactics; 4) patience in realizing that political goals are not secured only in battlefield victories (indeed, battlefield losses can become political victories) but evolve over the course of many years.
Hammes argues that this has become the predominant form of warfare since at least the Vietnam war (he traces its roots back to Mao's guerrilla strategy). It is how war is done. Why didn't Cheney and company expect this, and prepare for it from day one of the occupation (oh, that's right, we were not allowed to use the words "occupation" and "insurgency" after the initial invasion because they were thought to be unpatriotic...)? What WWII fantasy world have Cheney and Rumsfeld and Bush been living in?
In this sense, the Iraq War has been the Tet Offensive from the very start. The insurgency has always had political goals (though I think the Osama bin Laden side of al-Qaeda wants to US to stay in Iraq because it makes for good incitement and recruitment, while the indigenous Sunni insurgents, initially at least, wanted us out) in mind. They have always tried to create massively violent spectacles that will fill the airways with images of Americans fighting Muslims or, conversely, Americans being killed by Muslims. The internet is filled with video clips of IEDs blowing up Humvees. The political fight is never only about battlefield victories and losses, which should be the most fundamental lesson of Tet. The Viet Cong lost militarily but the US lost politically.
It is appalling to think that only now, three and a half years into a horrendous failure, Cheney might be open to the idea that the enemy is using violence to craft political messages to influence US perceptions and politics.
It also might tell us why the US is losing in Iraq. Sun Tzu tells us: "what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy." But, of course, we cannot do this if we do not understand the enemy's strategy. Maybe Cheney should read Hammes.
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