COMMENTARY The smart answer to the
Iraqi problem By Alexander Casella
Close to 30 years after the end of the Vietnam
War, the specter of the Vietnam quagmire has returned to
haunt the United States. With the security situation in
Iraq deteriorating daily and no political solution even
remotely in sight, even the mirage of an early and
honorable exit has vanished from the visible horizon.
Granted, all has not failed under the US
occupation. Schools, by and large, function. Utilities
are available, albeit irregularly. The currency exchange
has gone smoothly, there are no major food shortages and
in large tracts of the country everyday life is not
excessively perturbed. Conversely, what is lacking is
the one single irreplaceable component without which
there can be neither political stability nor economic
development: security.
While the security
situation is serious, it is now conceded even in
Washington that it is getting worse, not better, and
that the US faces what is generally recognized as an
insurgency.
Echoes of Vietnam? The slow drift of
the US into the Vietnam War was based on two sets of
arguments, one moral, one geopolitical. The moral case
was eloquently spelled out by Cardinal Francis Spellman,
archbishop of New York and one of the more active
promoters of the US intervention in Vietnam, when he
proclaimed during a visit to Saigon on December 25,
1966, "This war in Vietnam is a war for civilization."
He was echoed by Cardinal Richard Cushing, archbishop of
Boston, who labeled the Viet Cong "evil men".
Considering the major role played by the Roman
Catholic hierarchy in the US in both bringing Ngo Dinh
Diem to power and anchoring the South Vietnamese regime
to the security concerns of the US, these words were
more than just moral pronouncements. The stage was
therefore set for a moral crusade that, if it were to
be lost, would entail, in the words of then vice
president Richard Nixon, that "the right of free speech
will be extinguished throughout the world".
A
perceived clear and present security risk echoed these
moral concerns. In 1965, senator Thomas Dodd stated that
"if we fail to draw the line in Vietnam we may find
ourselves compelled to draw a defense line as far as
Seattle and Alaska". Thus it was a global threat that
Vietnam represented, and failure would entail that, in
the words of assistant secretary of state for the Far
East William Bundy, "if South Vietnam falls, India and
even Australia will be threatened".
Thus the
enemy - "the other" - assumed a double dimension.
Geopolitically, he was part of a global threat. Morally,
he was the embodiment of "evil"; hence any compromise
would have carried the stigma of an ethical failure.
Having raised the stakes in Vietnam to
astronomic proportions, the US charged into the great
unknown to confront the "foreign other".
First,
he was communist, reared in the Soviet mold and hence by
nature conservative, cautious and not prone to
adventurism. Second, he was Confucian, and hence
respectful of social order, tradition and authority and
wary of any potential for anarchy. Kidnapping,
hostage-taking or acts of indiscriminate terrorism were
not part of his modus operandi. Thus, throughout
the entire war, most cities were basically "safe" in the
sense that individual Americans were not targeted, and
when urban attacks did occur, they were aimed at
specific, well-identified installations.
On the
ground, the US had the benefit of a local ally who,
however inefficient he may have been, had a functioning
police and intelligence structure. While this security
apparatus never operated at its full potential, were it
only because in more than one case it sought
accommodation with the enemy rather than confrontation,
it did exist and provided a significant measure of
protection against lawlessness.
The
confrontation that developed was between the world's
richest and technically most advanced country and a
people in the lower 5% of the world poverty range, fired
by nationalism, cemented by a system of social ethics
and cultural behavior inherited from a century-old
civilization. What emerged was an asymmetrical
confrontation in which each side fought its own war.
The Vietnamese war aimed at controlling
or winning over people rather than occupying territory.
It was in essence a political confrontation
supported locally by a small regular force embedded in a
wider circle of guerrilla forces, which was in turn backed
by the North Vietnamese regular army, the whole
controlled by a pervasive political infrastructure. The
Americans, in contrast, fought a conventional war that sought,
through overwhelming force, to impose on the enemy a
casualty rate that would break his will to fight.
Thus the war became a contest
between US firepower and Vietnamese demography. Fighting a war
with no front lines and lacking any understanding
of the nature of the "foreign other" and thus of
the conditions required to achieve not so much a US victory
but a Vietnamese defeat, Washington created a mirage.
By attributing to the enemy the same terms of reference
by which it operated, it could now address the terms of
an equation that had until now been part of the realm
of the intangible.
Thus was born technowar. The
prerequisites of technowar were two. First, the war had
to be quantifiable. The "art" of war became an exercise
in management. Body counts, quantities of ordnance
dispensed, number of missions flown, of leaflets
dropped, of prisoners taken, of villages pacified, and
of enemy supplies destroyed, became the benchmarks for
progress. Second, superior technology became an end
rather than a means and its possession a guarantee of
success.
When the Vietnam
War started in the early 1960s, the US military machine
was up to date, while the "foreign other" was
using a technology that was at least 15 years old. When the
war ended in 1975, the "enemy" was using the technology
of the mid-1950s. Its basic infantry weapon, the
AK-47, was conceived in the late 1940s. The mortars it
used, both light and heavy, were ageless, and the
standard tank, the 54, was obsolete. Anti-aircraft defense was
based on equally ageless standard anti-aircraft
guns, complemented by SAM-2 missiles, skillfully used but also
basically obsolescent. Man-portable heat-seeking anti-aircraft
missiles, which would have raised havoc with
helicopters, had not yet appeared on the scene.
For the Americans, the Vietnam War years saw
a quantum jump in weapons technology. Under the
auspices of ARPA (advanced research project agency), the
Pentagon was able to introduce a completely new range of
weapons systems. Chemical and vibration-sensitive
sensors, precision-guided ammunition, night-vision devices,
remote-controlled mines, cluster bomb units combined
with the radically new use of helicopters and tactical
carpet bombings became the new tools of technowar.
With one side at a technological standstill and
the other in full gear, the technological gap, at the
end of the war, was of such proportions that it could no
longer be quantified.
The
result was that, on the US side, weapons systems
including aircraft worth tens of millions of dollars armed with
the most advanced precision-guided ammunition were
being used, and lost, destroying targets worth tens of
dollars. Thus technowar became increasingly cost-deficient because
it ultimately was targeting an enemy that only existed
in the imagination of the techno-warriors. The two
potential weaknesses of the "foreign other", his will to
fight and his supply lines, were never successfully
targeted, thus rendering the technological gap
irrelevant.
"The North Vietnamese," commented an
American official at the time, "definitely lost the war.
The problem is that they don't know it."
Some 30
years later, the syndrome of technowar has re-emerged to
bedevil the US in Iraq. The first stage was the
demonization of the enemy and the magnification of the
threat he represented. Not only was overthrowing Saddam
Hussein presented as part of the "war against terror",
but his possession of weapons of mass destruction
represented a clear and present danger that demanded
immediate action. The stage was thus set for
intervention, and intervention, in turn, became the
triumph of technology.
While the hapless
Iraqi army did not stand a chance confronted with US
technology, the first shortcomings of technowar became
noticeable. Even before the fall of Baghdad, while all
the attempts to kill Saddam Hussein using
precision-guided ammunition were successful in the sense
that the aimed-for locations were hit, they all missed
the mark because the Iraqi leader was not in the
targeted location. Thus intelligence did not keep pace
with technology.
While the fall of Baghdad
can be defined as a victory in the technobattle,
the aftermath saw a repetition of the failings of
technowar. The enemy, "the foreign other", failed to behave
in conformity with the terms of reference that had
arbitrarily been attributed to him. Technowar implied an
act of faith, hence of ideology. Iraq would be a
"democracy" and there would be "no room in the new Iraq
for former members of the Ba'ath Party". Thus the
country would be cleansed from its former evil and set
off on the road of righteousness. Instead it took the
path of insurgency.
Thirty years after the end of the Vietnam War, the
techno-gap between the techno-warriors and the "foreign
other" has remained substantively the same. The basic
weapon of the insurgents is still the
ubiquitous AK-47, complemented this time by the rocket launcher,
the man-portable heat-seeking anti-aircraft missile, the
suicide driver and the remote-controlled roadside bomb.
While the techno-warrior has greatly improved his armor
defense and his sensor capacity, he is now in the stage
of developing the ultimate in cost-ineffectiveness:
a multimillion-dollar sniper-bullet tracing system that
will permit return fire in a matter of seconds from an
armored vehicle.
Ultimately, the main weapon of
the "foreign other" is in his nature. And when that
nature has no single identifiable authority but is a
constellation of interlocking and contradictory
interests, there is only one key to the unquantifiable:
intelligence. But intelligence means understanding, and
understanding is inherently a human, unquantifiable
value. A value for which technowar makes no allowance.
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