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August 22, 2004
Winning or Not Losing
Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.
\"\;Last week I wrote a post on how to win the war, in response to this Stephen Green post. My post got a lot of responses, of which this was somewhat typical of one particular branch of thought.
I suppose it would make some sense to clarify, now that so many people are convinced I'm a hate-filled radical right-winger. There is a difference between winning a war, and not losing it. When you win a war, the result is that you've achieved your objectives, and the enemy has been removed as a threat to you for at least the time being. When you don't lose a war, you may or may not have achieved your objectives, or removed the enemy as a threat, but you have prevented the enemy from achieving his objectives - at least those which were in conflict with yours such that you went to war in the first place.
Stephen Green's analysis was about how to not lose, as we didn't lose the Cold War. In the Cold War, we didn't lose for a long enough period of time that our enemy collapsed and we won by default. That appears to be the plan George Bush is working to now, and it is what Stephen Green was trying to formalize publicly.
I don't have a problem with not losing, under some circumstances: it is a reasonable way to minimize losses overall, and as long as you can outlast your enemy, you may win by default without a big war. Good all around, yes?
But what does not losing mean in this case? It means that we condemn millions to live in stifling oppression and poverty, with their daily life involving indoctrination to hate and kill us (second only to the Jews). "Us" in this case is not just Americans; we are only the face of the West. The jihadis want the whole West subjugated to shari'a law.
Ignoring the classically liberal argument for spreading freedom to all people, not losing also means that we risk the possibility of losing, and losing big. We have a huge military advantage over the jihadis, but that advantage is basically gone the moment that the jihadis have nuclear weapons. At that point, they have a trump card that they can use against the world: we have nuclear weapons hidden in many of your cities, and we are prepared to be totally annihilated if that's what it takes, so if you interfere with us we will kill you by the millions.
I don't want to lose, and that means that I don't want to take the risk of "not losing" turning into losing. A lot of the things I currently advocate for - such as killing imams and ayatollahs who preach the mass murder of Jews and Westerners - make me very uncomfortable. Then again, fire bombing Dresden and Tokyo would have made me very uncomfortable. But when it comes right down to it, I would rather we do these things, than find ourselves in the position of making the choice between genocide and shari'a.
It may be the case that we can not lose long enough for the seeds we planted in Iraq to mature into full-blown representative democracy in the Arab/Muslim world, that we won't have to rip militant Islamism out of the Arabs the way we ripped militant nationalism out of the Germans and Japanese. Or, it may be that, given the fervent pursuit of nuclear weapons by Iran and others, we cannot hold on long enough for the Arabs/Muslims to transform by themselves.
And then what?
Jeff,
I agree completely. It comes down to the well know phrase:
"I would rather be judged by 12 men than carried by six."
A hundred years of breast beating over what we felt forced to do is a cheap price to pay.
Posted by: Oscar on August 17, 2004 08:27 AMThe notion that we merely did not lose the Cold War and that the enemy collapsed inward is a fallacy, and a dangerous one. In fact, the Cold War lasted for 44 years precisely because from 1946, when Truman realized the danger of the Soviet Union (essentially thanks to Churchill's Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Mo.), until 1981, we sought to "not lose" instead of seeking to win.
Consider that Truman's actions against the Soviet Union were basically defensive -- he set the stage for preventing enlargement of the Soviet empire and enacted both Containment and the Truman Doctrine. By the time Eisenhower became president, the Rosenbergs had helped the Soviets procure atomic weapon technology, therefore the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction came into effect. Ike also worked WITH the Soviets to win WWII, therefore he was not as antipathetically disposed to the USSR or communism as Reagan or JFK -- his lack of reaction to the Budapest uprising in 1956 speaks volumes.
Kennedy twice stared down the Russians; once he did so effectively. He was probably the most anti-Communist president of the US before Reagan, but his assassination minimized any effect his leadership could have against the Soviets. After the Gulf of Tonkin situation in 1964, LBJ's attention was primarily on Vietnam and he embroiled the US there.
Nixon came to power after the US military position in the world had become much weaker, thus he had to realpolitik the US through the treacherous international minefields laid by China and the USSR. His opening to China strengthened the US position; but still the US did not seek to "win" the Cold War. Ford did little other than follow Nixon and Kissinger's realpolitik. Carter was an unmitigated fiasco and did not want a Cold War (although Brezhnev did).
Reagan wanted to WIN the Cold War. He boosted US defense to try to get the Soviets to overspend on their own defense -- success. He rolled back communism in Grenada and Nicaragua and thereby demonstrated the fallibility of the Brezhnev Doctrine (once a country becomes communist, it stays communist). He had intermediate range missiles placed in West Germany to tell the Soviets that their threats against Western Europe can be countered (especially with the Pershing IIs that burrowed into the ground to detonate; purpose -- attacking Soviet command centers). He had a dynamic economy and fought the war of ideas against the Soviets. And on all these issues, Reagan won.
The Cold War for 36 years was really bilateral politicking through proxy wars. Only in 1981 (and really in 1983-onward) was the Cold War actually a head-to-head engagement and the Soviets not only lost, the US won.