I am doing a lot of thinking about how we entered into the strategy of preventive war and once there, why did we botch it so badly? There are many things to be angry about when it comes to the Iraq war. The fact that we went in, the fact that we had poor WMD intelligence, our hubris and our treatment of prisoners to name a few. But, the question still remains: How did we go from a Country that believed war was our last option to a Country which now believes that it is a primary option and sometimes our first option?
To help answer this, I have finished reading Thomas Rick's fascinating book "Fiasco" and am almost complete with Andrew J. Bacevich's book, "The New American Militarism". Both books provide insight into answering this question but it is Bacevich's theories which made me stop, think and now write.
A little history: He cites three major players from the RAND corporation in the development of our strategic thought regarding the use of military force after WWII and especially Vietnam. Bernard Brodie developed the idea that the main purpose of forces and military stratety is to avert war, not fight and win the war. He was on the belief that the utter destructiveness of war meant we had to figure out a way to not fight them.
After that, a person by the name of Albert Wohlstetter came along and his belief was that precise weaponry no longer required us to think about how to avoid war, but rather, it allowed us to think about how to fight it in a very precise manner. Despite him believing that we let the Iraqis get away after Desert Storm, he believed that this venture proved the fact that this type of weaponry meant we could fight "clean" information type wars and avoid the wholescale killing that had been a trademark of previous conventional wars.
Finally, Andrew Marshall of the Pentagon, in the mid '90's, took this to a whole other level with his Revolution in Military Affairs. This RMA as he called it, was all about moving war into the "information age". It was about ensuring you had "information superiority". It was clean and, by no crazy circumstance, also coincided with the "irrational exuberance" of the .com bubble. Rumsfeld, when he first took office, called on Marshall, despite the fact that Marshall was in his eighties, to help with the idea of "transformation". As Bacevich states, we went from a blunt instrument of war, to a scalpel to laser surgery.
So, that is the brief history that Bacevich provides us. What does it mean? What it means to me is two-fold. First, we believed our own press that we had successfully made war a "clean" occupation. We could win without death and destruction. It would play out much like a video game behind computers. All of this delusional thinking led us to the idea that peventive war was an acceptable alternative. We were wrong.
Second, both the strategy of preventive war and the strategies outlined by Marshall, Wohlstetter and the like assumed that once you take off the head of the enemy, the war ends. For all their smarts, their basic premise was that war was nothing more than an adult verion of "Capture the Flag". What they found was that our enemy is far too sophisticated for that. We took off the head (now literally) and the war continues on. Precise weaponry and information warfare does not help when you are going house to house in hand to hand combat.
So, much like the "new economy" fizzled and the old rules that you learned in Economics 101 triumphed, I think we are seeing that the idea of a clean war is fizzling and the rules of war being a disgusting and dirty game are winning out. And, once again, there is a reason to AVOID war, not fight it.
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