Since Sunday, I’ve been meaning to call your attention to this piece that was in the NYT‘s Week in Review section. OK, all the folks on the right wing of the blog community can now spend 10 seconds doing the customary hyperventilating about what an unreliable, biased source the Times is … 3, 2, 1. Time’s up. Let’s get on with the topic now.
If you can’t get access, here’s the essence:
United States officials worry that they’re not prepared, either, for Hezbollah’s style of warfare — a kind that pits finders against hiders and favors the hiders.
Certain that other terrorists are learning from Hezbollah’s successes, the United States is studying the conflict closely for lessons to apply to its own wars. Military planners suggest that the Pentagon take a page out of Hezbollah’s book about small-unit, agile operations as it battles insurgents and cells in Iraq and Afghanistan and plans for countering more cells and their state sponsors across the Middle East and in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America.
The United States and Israel have each fought conventional armies of nation-states and shadowy terror organizations. But Hezbollah, with the sophistication of a national army (it almost sank an Israeli warship with a cruise missile) and the lethal invisibility of a guerrilla army, is a hybrid. Old labels, and old planning, do not apply. Certainly its style of 21st-century combat is known — on paper. The style even has its own labels, including network warfare, or net war, and fourth-generation warfare, although many in the military don’t care for such titles. But the battlefields of south Lebanon prove that it is here, and sooner than expected. And the American national security establishment is struggling to adapt.
Two things come to mind as I read this piece and others:
- We’re going to be at war with Iran sooner or later — sooner, if we act in the best interests of our own country and civilization as a whole. We can wait until the dark cloud out of Mordor assumes mushroom shape and consumes a few of our cities, courtesy of Hezbollah Delivery Service, or sooner. Our standard modus operandi has been to act later. You may say that Iraq represents a departure from that wait-until-they-hit-us-first mode, but rhetoric aside, it really doesn’t. Basically, we acted after 12 years of dithering. The cause may not have been proximate, but there was a cause.
- Most hand-wringing pieces (and this one is no exception) about how helpless the United States, or a regional superpower such as Israel, is against skilled practitioners of asymmetric warfare ignore a salient fact: That we tie our own hands, and the bad guys rely upon us to do that.
An elaboration on that last: There are many, many examples of the way people who would destroy us use the very decency that they assume us to have against us. One is particularly vivid. It’s from Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down — on page 46 of the Penguin paperback version, not in the original newspaper series:
… They both ran for better cover.
They found it behind a burned-out car. Peering out from underneath toward the north now, Nelson saw a Somali with a gun lying prone on the street beneath two kneeling women. The shooter had the barrel of his weapon between the women’s legs, and there were four children actually sitting on him. He was completely shielded in noncombatants, taking full cynical advantage of the Americans’ decency.
"Check this out, John," he told Waddell, who scooted over for a look.
"What do you want to do?" Waddell asked.
"I can’t get to that guy through those people."
So Nelson threw a flashbang, and the group fled so fast the man left his gun in the dirt.
What do you do about someone who is evil enough, craven enough, hateful enough to do something like that? I’ve come to the conclusion — and it’s a difficult one for me — that the only solution is to kill him — and every one of his fellows. I don’t even like the way that sounds. I gain no satisfaction from saying it. But think about it. Few people consider World War II to have been an unjust war from the Allied perspective. But the average Wehrmacht soldier was much less deserving of death than the individual who will so directly and literally use noncombatants as a shield. And yet WE killed thousands — actually, hundreds of thousands — of civilians to get at them.
We’re too enlightened, and too technologically advanced, to resort to carpet bombing today. We flatter ourselves that we can put a smart bomb into a certain window of a certain building, and this constrains us — if we can be so discriminating and particular in our targeting, then we must be. Well, no bomb is that smart.
I accept the morality of that logic, and the logic of such an ethic. But really, what do we do in such a situation as those we face today?
I’ll tell you what we do: We lose. People hold up Vietnam as an example of the futility of using American force to shape the world. Such people don’t understand military realities. The truth is that our ability to achieve military aims is limited mainly by the limits we place upon ourselves.
We "lost" the Vietnam conflict because we chose to. No, this is not a tirade against those politicians in Washington tying the hands of the military. We were simply not prepared as a nation to go on the offensive against the North Vietnamese — I mean, "on the offensive" in a strategic sense. Why didn’t we just take Hanoi the way we did Baghdad, or the way we did Berlin or Tokyo before? Because we never tried to. We went in to defend, not attack. You can’t win a defensive war.
By March 2003, there had been a change in the American attitude, caused by Sept. 11. We were ready to go on the offensive. So we did — in a concerted, yet restrained, way. Yes, there were many civilian deaths. But the firebombing of Dresden it was not. We still try to kill the enemy without killing noncombatants to the extent that is practical. And it often is not practical. For instance, how many more people would al-Zarqawi have killed if we had not killed him with a bomb that also killed innocents?
So what do we do, if we are to remain the kind of "good guys" we want to be? Seldom are we able to resolve such situations by tossing a flashbang. I firmly believe it is profoundly wrong to harm noncombatants, particularly women and children. So what do we do about enemies who hide among them, whether in southern Lebanon, Baghdad, Tikrit or Mogadishu? We’d better figure it out soon, because our problem isn’t the likes of Hezbollah. It’s the states that support and egg it on.
Iran will be a much tougher problem for us than Iraq — diplomatically, politically, morally and militarily. And we still haven’t figured out how to deal with Iraq.
I don’t know the answer. I’m just trying to clarify the question. Do we wait while Iran a) develops nukes and b) gets ever-more-effective at what it’s been doing for several decades — sponsoring terrorism across the greater Mideast?
Or do we go ahead and act? And if so, how, and where? And, given the way we have overextended the military that Rumsfeld has insisted doesn’t need to expand, with what?
Thoughts?
