Victor Davis Hanson Interview (2006): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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How does the military maintain control to achieve these goals in a context of the asymmetric war that's being fought? Because what I'm hearing from you is that [there are] good things that we can do as Americans, and are doing -- clearly, we don't see enough of that in the press -- [but] one device goes off on a road and leads to all this carnage. What is that game like and how can it be managed by the military?
It's very difficult. Your word "asymmetrical" works in so many ways. If you blow up an American vehicle, it may be that right before that happened, a helicopter gunship, American Marines, have killed twenty or thirty jihadists, but in this asymmetrical narrative somebody with a $250,000 Bachelor's degree from West Point, from a wealthy suburb, if he's killed in that IED device, it doesn't matter if you kill forty [jihadists], because in that way of thinking the Iraqis think poverty is endemic, death and tragedy is an everyday occurrence and awaits not for an American. So, the Americans realize that they have to attack the enemy but they can't lose anybody in the process, there's a finite number of people after which the American public will not tolerate that. That's asymmetrical.
The second thing is that if somebody is riding in a Abrams tank and a Humvee, and they see a carcass that looks like a dead dog, and it's stuffed full of explosive devices, and there's a wire going through there, and there's an eight-year-old boy who's been paid or threatened to push that button as you go by, you can't touch that boy even though he's going to kill you. You probably can't touch his family because they're going to say they were forced to do it. You're going to find nobody that's culpable for that. How do you fight that? Well, the only way you fight that is you create a political, economic, social environment where people think that they have more to lose by pushing that button and a lot more to gain not to do it. And that requires almost daily sensitivity to Islam, Iraqi culture, Arabic language, public opinion back home, the European Court at The Hague, the EU, Amnesty International, the Red Cross. It's a multifaceted group of forces that the American military have to deal with.
In the old days, we would have gone in like Sherman or Caesar, killed so many of the enemy, and that's the law of war, and humiliated and defeated the insurrection so badly that nobody would have dared think of something. We look back at Japan and Germany, or Italy, as examples of reconstruction, but we forget the other side of the equation. They're exemplars of reconstruction partly because the enemy knew they were defeated. And the enemy knew they were defeated because the American people were willing to inflict that amount of punishment and suffering and death on them.
My query -- and I don't have the answer -- is are those laws of human nature, that whether we like it or not, the Iraqis and us both understand in our dark hearts that they exist, and that Iraqi won't push that button and blow up a humvee if he's scared to death that an American will blow up his house? We are not operating on that premise. This is what's very strange about this post-enlightenment, post-modern war. We'll see if we get an exemption from these age-old, primordial rules. I'm not sure we are.
[Barnes]
But you're introduced here now, also, real time. You've got to wait three years
for the young man to grow up to make the decision that he's not going to
push the button because of all the advantages. We don't have that kind
of time to wait. Do we?
We don't have that time. When I was in Iraq it was the clear understanding of almost every military officer with responsibility beyond his own men, who had some political sense back from Washington, there was a clock ticking, and that clock ticking was the daily media account of the losses and cost to Americans. It was going to end very soon and they were in a frenzied -- I can't underestimate that -- frenzied rush to train, train, train before their mandate [expired]. Everybody talks about Iraq, securing the Middle East, bringing democracy, war against terror, but one element that we don't talk about is the pride and the feeling of the success of the American military. The American military believes that if they go into Iraq and they take Saddam out in three weeks, and they establish a democratic alternative, they've been successful. If they come home early and Iraq ends like Lebanon, they feel that people will ultimately blame them and it will have the same injurious effect as Vietnam. And they're constantly talking about that.
[Barnes]
And they're right.
I think they're right.
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