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Sept 16, 2003 A very wise man, in my opinion, gave me a very profound piece of wisdom a week ago. This quotation that I perused at the personal web page of Thomas Sowell reinforces my belief in that an understanding of history is critical to understanding modern politics and current events despite my being a chemist instead of a historian. The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. --Paul Johnson Iraq is a perfect example of this principle. Today, many a mouthpiece is screaming for the importation of manpower to Iraq. To these individuals it seems as if there were some critical number that once reached success, more importantly a quick success, were guaranteed. At the number of 400 thousand troops Iraq would be secure, and it would cease to be a Vietnam-esque quagmire, as it is perceived by the mouthpieces. So where does the Paul Johnson quote come in to play? It is quite simple really; if one has spent time to look at the history of conflict and nation building. This concept has been put forward before, in a situation much like this one today, and it was a miserable failure then as would be today. Some readers would believe themselves clever by thinking to themselves that the Half- Literate Barbarian is on a Vietnam rant again, but they would only be half clever. T.S. Lawrence, yes, that Lawrence, understood what the Iraqi resistance is doing far better than the war hero John Kerry and all the other big mouths put together. It makes sense considering that he sort of wrote the book on irregular warfare in the Arabian Peninsula. Lawrence devised a strategy that kept the Turks at a strategic disadvantage while also causing far greater than annoying casualties. He did this by disrupting the lines of communication/supply to an important port city named Addis Ababa, and then turning invisible in the desert. The Turks felt that they could not let the city become isolated and so poured men and equipment into the region; and those endeavors reaped them only graves. Despite Turkish overwhelming numerical superiority they lost not only Addis Ababa and thousands of men, but also any chance of locking Great Britain into a never-ending campaign like that which existed on the Western Front. By chasing shadows the Turks lost Arabia to the British, and if we followed the McNamara-Westmorelandian, attrition based, thinking put forward by Sen. Kerry and et. al. we will find ourselves in the same situation as the Turks of WW1 and ourselves in Vietnam were: a useless numerical superiority that does nothing for mission success. While it is true that no mission ever failed because of having to many troops committed it is also true that missions do fail despite overwhelming commitment of troops due to improper use or the stupidity of the leadership. So, should no new troops, beyond replacements for inured/killed soldiers, be sent? Maybe. As said above, no mission has ever failed for having too many men. But, sending in more men to chase shadows and be blown to hell and gone without advancing toward mission goals is not only moronic but criminal, and all the armchair generaling by the mouthpieces has called largely for that (increases in troops in the Sunni Triangle without mention of having forces do things like interdiction of incoming combatants and supplies which would end the siege faster, again, history). What is required is rather simple. Americans must realize that this is not gong to be a quick thing. History, modern history at that, has shown that leaving before a period of five years has passed trends toward civil wars, tribal conflict, and genocide. Where did I come up with that? Look at Africa of the last fifty years gentle reader. European powers have staged intervention after intervention on that continent trying to establish a democracy or stable government, but left after a year or two had passed. The result has generally been that once the Europeans left the internecine factionalism that lead to bloodshed in the first place just resurfaced. The Slavic states of Eastern Europe also bear out that analysis of late. Nation building, nation building that works, is a long, tempestuous, draining affair, and is something that should not be entered into without determination to see it through. We broke it. We will fix it, but the fixing cannot be the super gluing that the mouthpieces indicate that they believe in, like Mother with a broken toy, or we will be committing the same atrocities as our European counterparts. ------------ Email Ryan Patrick Parsons: c6h5x@aol.com Comment on this column in the forum. ------------ |
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