The risks of not winning decisiviely

Victor Davis Hanson:

The nature of American military power in our age is defined by how it is constrained—through nuclear deterrence, political realities, and cost/benefit analysis. How does the United States employ its overwhelming military superiority to achieve political aims, especially when even friends and neutrals often wish us to stumble—if for no other reason than to see the world’s sole superpower occasionally humbled?

Our nuclear arsenal deters enemy states from using like weapons of mass destruction against us. In the rare cases of lunatic regimes that appear suicidal and are immune to the protocols of mutually assured destruction—or at least, like North Korea and perhaps Iran, pose as such—we try to ensure they don’t get the bomb, and, when they do, rely on future missile defense.

The more rational among our enemies know that they would lose either a nuclear or a no-holds-barred conventional struggle against the United States, so they seek to wage asymmetrical warfare. All such initiatives are based on the premise that America, in its wealth and leisure, is more concerned about suffering than inflicting losses, more worried about what others think of it than what it thinks of others.

In the past, we have dealt with this through punitive bombing. When terrorists attacked Americans or general U.S. interests abroad, we launched air attacks—the four-day bombing of Iraq in 1998; the bombing campaign against Milosevic, also in 1998; sending cruise missiles into Afghanistan. The Clinton administration dubbed this sort of occasional missile shooting and GPS bombing as "keeping [the enemy] in his box."

The upside to these campaigns is that there is usually only a monetary rather than a human cost. The window of political support is considerable since Americans rarely perish on television. Indeed, a hostile media is often neutralized. Devastation that we inflict is rarely filmed on the ground in a targeted police state, especially given the possible proximity of reporters to falling American bombs. Journalists who do go to a Baghdad or Belgrade under attack either don’t get free access, or, if they do, come under suspicion that their full coverage is censored.

There are a few limits to punitive bombing. First, we avoid nuclear states such as North Korea or Pakistan, because we don’t want to risk a dangerous response. Second, we try to prevent a long war that finally results in images of carnage broadcast back to the United States. And, third, planes are not to be shot down.

Even when things are said to have gone well, the drawback, as we saw throughout the 1990s, is that the results are by definition mostly punitive, since we have no presence on the ground to affect political events in a more constructive fashion. And even the degree to which stand-off bombing is successful in temporarily deterring a Saddam, Khadafi, or the Taliban from supporting terrorists depends on the accuracy of American bombs, the nature of the press coverage, and whether a population is restive and blames its pain on its own autocracy (e.g. Serbia) or rather on the American perpetrator (Iraq). Such wars can be relatively short (e.g., Libya, Operation Desert Fox) or go on for months (Serbia) or even years (the no-fly zones).

A riskier proposition is to employ American ground troops to change the political situation—that is, to flip a hostile government on the theory the people are desirous of freedom and would welcome liberation. Invasions are easy in a small Panama or Grenada, less so in large countries in the Middle East or Asia with well-entrenched political or religious movements that can pose as nationalists.

And once America enters such a risky landscape, the clock ticks. The question of victory or quagmire is decided by whether we can defeat the insurgents and set up a local government before the enemy can erode U.S. public opinion—either by killing enough Americans on the evening news to make us doubt the cost is worth the gambit, or, by suggesting that the vaunted values of Western bourgeois society have become sullied in the conflict at places like My Lai or Abu Ghraib. The key in any such effort is mostly political: Can indigenous forces, with American aid and the promise of democratic government, take the lead in the fight, ensuring fewer American losses, while offering something better than the past that resonates with sympathetic Westerners?

That an odious enemy beheads or tortures helps us little. Indeed, in such asymmetrical warfare it is to the advantage of the terrorists to embrace barbarity—either to terrify suburban America or at least to galvanize anti-war opposition by opening a Pandora’s box of horrors that inevitably “follow” from America “aggression.”

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There is much more. We are already seeing the product of not decisively defating the terrorist in Iraq. Iran and Venezuela to name just two potential adversaries are making war plans bsed on the enemy's plan in Iraq. Nevermind, that both of them would suffer immediate defeat and lose power. They hope to deter by making a US victory against them one that will not be pleasant after they fall. This is all the more reason why we should make every effort to defeat the enemy decesively in Iraq and Afghanistan. That will deter the Irans and the Venezuelas more than anything we do directly to those countries.