How are we doing in Iraq

Victor Davis Hanson:

The United States can usually win even postmodern wars abroad if it can play to its strengths — which are marshaling our enormous material, intelligence, and technological advantages to defeat the enemy before he inflicts enough casualties to convince an affluent and comfortable public at home that such losses are simply not worth the envisioned aims.

So how are we doing?

As expected, many of our traditional advantages are being nullified.

How can Americans use air superiority against an enemy that hides among civilians and dares them to destroy infrastructure essential to our friends?

We create sophisticated communications at great cost and investment; the parasitical terrorists simply bore into them and use them at no cost and sometimes with greater effect than do their inventors (e.g., Why are not jihadist websites deemed as dangerous as IEDs, but not attacked in similar fashion?).

Money and know-how can rebuild Iraq along the designs of Western material society — but that only makes it more vulnerable as a single transformer blown up or a pylon brought down can suddenly take away the newly found improved life. It’s not just that a suicide bomber with a $100 vest can destroy $1 million worth of electrical infrastructure, but in the gruesome equation cast the American engineers into the role of the incompetent or sinister by their failure to repair and rebuild faster than an illiterate can destroy.

The globalized media is an American epiphenomenon, but the narrative of the war is still the IED, not the purple finger. We apparently have no way of convincing the world that the primordial enemy commits daily something far worse than the sexual humiliation of the entire Abu Ghraib fiasco. Somehow “thousands have been killed” is never qualified as those mostly butchered and blown up by insurgents — since the loose use of the passive voice lends a general sense that somehow Americans are directly involved in, or responsible for, the killing.

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We need to confess that the jihadists are not only keen students of insurgency warfare, but good observers of the American psyche. We think their kidnapping, childish infomercials, gruesome tactics, and horrific websites are primordial and counterproductive; but they are more likely horrifically simple in inciting the most basic fears and self-preservation instincts of ordinary people. Precisely because decapitation belongs to a different century makes it more gruesome now, not less. Because the al Qaedists steal many of their talking points from the Western Left does not make them unimaginative as much as eerily familiar. And because we can daily predict the serial barbarity of the jihadists makes it not so much unimaginative as savagely inevitable.

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It is in the media battle space that we are losing the war and not on the ground. We are losing because we are really not engaged in the battle in this space. There is no war room similar to that in political campaigns to counter the enemy's spin. Until we see the political aspects of this war and treat them like a political campaign, we are going to continue to be behind in teh media battle space no matter what our success is on the battle fields.