Buckley Loses His Nerve
William F. Buckley Jr. starts his most recent column with: “One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.” He then complains that the Iraqis hate us, and that the Iraqi government isn’t strong enough to hold the country together. He says that we should concede defeat and start coping with failure. His short little column isn’t much for facts, but it’s long on despair.
I’m surely not the only conservative scratching my head over this. Perhaps his health is poor. Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better.
Reading it, I’m glad that we have a man like George Bush in the White House. Because while Bush is smart, he’s no intellectual. He’s a man of willpower, of action.
If you study wars, it’s important to keep in mind that the participants didn’t know who was going to win. It’s easy to look back and say that they should have known based on X, Y, and Z. (As, for example, many did with Michelle Malkin’s book about the Japanese internment.) It’s easy, but foolish. The fact is that people in the midst of conflict are always missing vital information. They don’t know what the enemy is up to. They don’t know how their own forces will perform. They don’t know where the enemy morale is, and they don’t know the extent to which their own low morale will cause problems.
There’s a whole genre of computer wargames devoted to extreme accuracy. One of the best is Combat Mission, from Battlefront. While it warps time scales a little to put infantry, tanks, and artillery all in the same battle, it gives a good sense of what fog of war is like. To most computer gamers, “fog of war” refers to the opaque black gunk that you have to push back in a Real-Time Strategy game. But the phrase originally referred to the sense of confusion that commanders experience in battle.
Commanders often have little information about how the battle is going. They see or hear about their own casualties, and the enemy’s guns never seem to stop firing. This emotionally stressful situation often tempts commanders to project their worst fears onto the lack of information. They often assume that the enemy knows more, has suffered fewer losses, and so forth. The resulting sense of despair often produces very poor command decisions.
I’ve learned this in my own small way through years of playing human-on-human computer games where you have limited information about the other guy’s units. It requires a conscious, deliberate act to remember that the other guy has problems, too. He may be running out of men, or low on ammo, or he may have a morale problem. The machine gun that’s terrorizing your men may be the only functioning unit that he has left. In WWII simulations like Combat Mission, where you’re often shooting at an enemy who is far away, it’s isn’t unheard-of for infantry on both sides to run away, because each side assumes that the other is bristling with fresh troops.
Those games will also show you how deadly those erroneous assumptions can be. The standard tactic against a squad of low-quality troops is to pour lots of fire into their position, until you get your first kill. You usually won’t have enough ammo on hand to kill the whole squad that way, but you don’t need to. After that first kill, the squad will break cover and run, which makes it easy to mow them down.
To my knowledge, William F. Buckley, Jr. is primarily a student of politics and government, not war. So I don’t grudge him his error. But it is an error. Most struggles look hopeless before they’re won, and they always look hopeless if you think only of your own side’s problems. The solution is to remind yourself of the other guy’s problems.
Imagine that you’re the president of Iran. What are your options, exactly? How do you win this game? You surely don’t win it militarily; the US Marines can easily cut apart anything you put on a battlefield. And it might be satisfying to nuke a US or Israeli city, but only during that window of time between 1) the mushroom cloud, and 2) the US air strike that cuts your communications network to pieces in preparation for invasion.
It’s simple: The terrorists can only win if we let them win, and we will only let them win if we wallow in despair.
The complain against the Iraq War boils down to unmet expectations. It’s taking longer than we would like it to. We’ve had more casualties than we would have liked. The various factions in Iraq want to kill each other.
Well boo frickin’ hoo! In this war, have we suffered tens of thousands of casualties like they did in the Hurtgen Forest, on Okinawa, or on Iwo Jima? Have we lost 65 bombers and 600 aviators in a single day, like they did on Black Thursday? Does even the worst-case scenario with the terrorists threaten our survival as a nation?
It all comes back to the same old question: Is life worth it? In this case, is it worth it to do what we need to do to keep our country safe? Apparently there are some, even on the right, who say no. And it’s in the nature of a country that we have to love ‘em. We have to tolerate their whining and moaning and unmet expectations, even as brave men are fighting and dying on the other side of the world for us. Because—Who knows?—the fearful may yet find their courage, and any one of us might yet lose ours.
But perhaps we can say discreetly and with all respect to those on our side who are wavering: Shut up, Bill. There’s a war on.
Update: James S. Robbins has an NRO piece pointing to evidence that Osama and Al Quaeda are quite desperate.