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07/03/2007: "Suffering “The Worst of Both Worlds”"

by Charlie Bodenstab


Back in the days of the Viet Nam conflict I began to develop a belief that has become stronger with time and has solidified with the current war in Iraq. Specifically: “A modern nation, no matter how technologically advanced or superior in weaponry cannot force its will on a nation, or other population, who do not value their own lives or the lives of their own people.”

When the enemy co-mingles with the civilian population with total disregard for consequences, they totally negate the technological advantage of the other party. In the current case, our troops are fighting in a nightmarish environment where the odds are stacked against them despite our facade of superiority.



This situation makes the suicide bomber, the hidden RPG launcher, or sniper firing from an occupied home, an impossible target to eliminate or destroy on a consistent basis. There is no concentration of combatants to fire upon, no central government to capture, no meaningful territory to occupy - all the things for which our weaponry and our ideological view of warfare are designed.

During World War II, when the allied and axis forces were well-defined, conquest of an island or a beachhead signaled a cause for celebration despite the horrible human tragedy left in the wake of battle. In what our leaders often refer to now as “this new kind of warfare,” our enemies endure and even promote significant collateral damage among those traditionally exempt from direct roles in warfare – noncombatants and civilians.

Massive collateral casualties are no longer tolerable to our society however, for a variety of reasons. Like it or not, our country no longer accepts countless civilian deaths in the attempt to destroy far fewer combatants. Some people believe that this attitude will change if there is another disaster on the scale of 9/11, but I seriously doubt it.

The current “surge” in Iraq is operating on a house-by-house basis with our troops constantly exposed to the effective deadly techniques common to an enemy who is unconcerned about his death or others. Putting aside the very important morality issue, what is theoretically needed is the freedom to bring our firepower to bear on an area of a few thousand inhabitants thereby assuring that the imbedded combatants are destroyed and if 80% of the innocent inhabitants are killed or seriously wounded in the process, so be it. If that were repeated over and over, I suspect that eventually we would prevail over the enemy. It isn’t about to happen however. Regardless of how we feel abut the ethics involved, no matter what the provocation, that strategy will not be tolerated by the American public.

Sadly, we are suffering the “worst of both worlds” in the current Iraq war. Even though we are not pursuing a policy of harsh pursuit of the enemy with total disregard of collateral damage, there is still a certain inevitable amount taking place and we are getting the “bad press” and loss of moral ground that goes with it - all without achieving our objectives. Additionally, we are grinding down our military machine and our internal economic capital.

Holding this conviction that our technological superiority is negated, I believe that we should rapidly withdraw our ground troops from these kind of hostile areas and be vigilant in not recommitting them to similar situations. This is not a conservative vs. liberal stance. It’s a simple matter of preserving physical and precious human resources based on an awareness of certain realities. There will be no “victory” in Iraq. Whatever illusion of progress is made will disappear very shortly thereafter. If there is no “head” to decapitate, the body will not die, and be assured that there is no head to this monster. This is not an enemy directed by an emperor or dictator within clear geographical boundaries, but rather a scattered and amorphous collection of people bonded by ancient and contemporary grudges. We simply do not have the “tools” to achieve the oft-stated objectives for Iraq and the remainder of the Middle East.

I’m sure that there would be chaos and turmoil following such an action but the inevitable “adjustment” is going to happen soon or later. There is an old saying, “A people get the government they deserve”. The people in the Middle East must take back their government and personal future. We can help, but only marginally. They have to do it, as have other cultures. The information explosion will accelerate the process, but the fundamental desire must come from within.

So, what do we as a nation do? We are still faced with a massive terrorist threat from a radicalized Islamic society. If we can’t “root out” the terrorists in their lairs we have to insure that they are thwarted in their efforts to inflict damage to our nation and people. At the risk of sounding “isolationist” we have to batten down the hatches of our own country. We have to stop squandering our resources in senseless battles that have no chance of achieving anything and reallocate those resources to make our country secure. Time and again we hear that insufficient funds prevent adequate security at ports, terminals, vulnerable installations, etc. A fraction of the funds being spent in Iraq would achieve wonders at home.

These same reduction in combat expenditures would also insure that we do not create our own internal downfall by under funding education, infrastructure, and security organizations. And finally, we have to get a handle on who is in our country with the intent to do us harm.

We have a mish mash of identity systems all of which can be copied by a moderately competent forger. In the process we have lost our so-called privacy many times over due to a failure deal with the information age in which we live. Conversely, we have failed to marshal the new information technology to our advantage. Here again, we are suffering the “worst of both worlds”, but in a different sense. Our identity systems aren’t secure while we fail to take advantage of the technology that could help us immensely.

In my next essay I will offer a proposed solution to this issue under the heading of, “An Idea Whose Time Has Arrived”.