Winning Battles, Losing Wars
In light of some of the discussions around these parts in recent days, it’s interesting to read the expressed views of a senior serving US military official on what’s going on in Iraq these days, from today’s must-read piece in the Washington Post (free registration required):
Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who spent much of the year in western Iraq, said he believes that at the tactical level at which fighting occurs, the U.S. military is still winning. But when asked whether he believes the United States is losing, he said, "I think strategically, we are."
Army Col. Paul Hughes, who last year was the first director of strategic planning for the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad, said he agrees with that view and noted that a pattern of winning battles while losing a war characterized the U.S. failure in Vietnam. "Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically," he said in an interview Friday. [emphasis added]
Whenever you suggest that America is losing a war, you are drifting into dangerous territory. It takes a certain emotional detachment and secure confidence in the validity of objective reality over personal wishes to acknowledge that one’s own side is losing, and moreover, may have been wrong in the first place. You don’t see it happen much in world history, and there’s a good reason for it. For many people, the need for social affiliation and identification with the group – whose priorities are unquestioningly defined by the Leader – outweighs the cold discomfort of facts on the ground.
Offenses against the Group Will are not excused because they might happen to be true. The need for group solidarity is pre-rational, and people whose emotional needs are gratified by affiliation with group objectives – characterized by faith, patriotism, loyalty, and blind idealism – react with instinctive violence when the group mission is called into question. Democracy, which assumes the ability of citizens to rationally weigh choices and evaluate leaders on the basis of how well they objectively serve the larger interests of the community, begins to break when pre-rational tendencies toward group solidarity erupt into the public debate. It’s the indulgence of these pre-rational tendencies that leads to undemocratic government and the rule of violence, whether by Right Wing fascist or Left Wing totalitarian collectivist means. It’s no surprise that these types of governments take power primarily during times of war or severe economic distress, since that’s when people are most inclined to abandon the hard work of self-questioning for the comforts of collective certainty.
America is fortunate in having the formal apparatus of government biased in favor of deliberation. The system of checks and balances and Constitutional rights was formulated explicitly to insulate the government from the passions of the moment, because our founders had a very shrewd understanding of the pre-rational tendencies of mobs. But you can’t entirely contain the natural appeal of GroupThink in crisis situations, no matter how much institutional weight you provide toward dissent. For those people who believe that there is a point where you stop questioning and fall into line for the good of the group, persistent second-guessing and predictions of failure, however well-grounded in reality, will be greeted only with hostility, and often with violence.
Here, no issue is as inflammatory as war. When you oppose a war that your country is involved in, or predict its failure, there is no way to avoid confrontation with a certain portion of the population. It doesn’t matter if you are a decorated veteran or a serving member of the military with first-hand experience in the conflict, a respected official with subject-matter expertise, a devout person making appeals to religious teaching, or a scholar offering a closely-reasoned case. It doesn’t matter if your critique is rooted in sincere concern for the long-term good of the group, or from profoundly moral considerations. The very act of questioning is disloyal. There can be no excuse for it, and the criticism must be rejected – if not by reason, then by rhetorical violence (“shut up you Pinko bastard!”), sophistry (“who is to say what is torture, and what is merely abuse?”), arguments from ignorance (“with a little bit more commitment, we can win this war!”), ad homonym attacks (“who can believe that guy when it’s clear he just wants to sell his book”) and the entire arsenal of inflammatory discourse visible in all its glory on Fox and right-wing talk radio. That this kind of fake debate gains any traction among average Americans is a testament to the failure of our educational system, which appears not be equipping citizens with the basic intellectual tools to discern truth from propaganda.
In the end, I have faith that the majority of Americans have the capacity to look objectively at our national policy – in Vietnam, in Iraq, with the economy, whatever – and transcend the instinct of pre-rational tribalism that is being mobilized, quite deliberately, on behalf of some very questionable policies. The great insight of democracy is that it is possible to question the actions of government without the presumption of disloyalty. Some people can never accept that, not because of their political ideology or affiliation, but because of their temperament.
I’m not fool enough to think these folks can be changed by indoctrination into “politically correct” ways of thinking, or intimidated by tactics favored by draconian social engineers. Still, the survival of America as a civil society demands that they be outnumbered, rejected and evicted from their self-styled perch as the “legitimate” custodians of our public interest and national safety. Everything depends on the sensible center showing the strength to resist calls to mindless tribalism and listen closely to the critics, because events are showing that the critics are right. True patriotism demands no less.
12:29:24 PM 
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