In November of last year, the iconoclastic military historian Martin van Creveld, peering through a glass darkly, foresaw this spectre of defeat in an essay called Why Iraq Will End as Vietnam Did.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/crevald1.html
"[He] who fights against the weak - and the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed - and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force however rich, however powerful, however, advanced, and however well motivated is immune to this dilemma. The end result is always disintegration and defeat; if U.S troops in Iraq have not yet started fragging their officers, the suicide rate among them is already exceptionally high. That is why the present adventure will almost certainly end as the previous one did. Namely, with the last US troops fleeing the country while hanging on to their helicopters' skids."
What would the ramifications of such a defeat mean back here, apart from making Ralph Peters' head pop like a blister?
William S. Lind, the salty theorist of Fourth Generation warfare who has shared van Creveld's misgivings from the outset of Gulf War II, argues that the U.S. will undergo its own internal convulsions, a true crisis of the state:
"Fourth Generation war is asymmetrical, but it is asymmetrical on a much broader scale than simply the pitting of a conventional army against guerrillas. The larger asymmetry is political. Fourth Generation war pits a state, or alliance of states, against a shifting mass of opponents of wildly varying motives and goals. Among the problems that presents is that the state has no one to talk to about making peace. Who does Mr. Kissinger sit down with in Paris this time?
"Nor does Fourth Generation war have as its objective the mind of the leader on the other side. Rather, what it does is pull its enemy apart on the moral level, fracturing his society."
Lind quotes perceptive comments from journalist Georgie Anne Geyer (once a regular on PBS, she has been largely invisible on the airwaves since becoming an outspoken critic of Imperial America) and former ambassador Charles W. Freeman. Quoting Geyer--"More telling was the lack of debate even in Congress over the war: 'This is not,' [Freeman] averred strongly, "just a political problem; it is a systemic breakdown in America"--Lind hammers the point home:
"That is just what Fourth Generation opponents strive for, a systemic breakdown in their state adversary. The danger sign in America is not a hot national debate over the war in Iraq and its course, but precisely the absence of such a debate - which, as former Senator Gary Hart has pointed out, is largely due to a lack of courage on the part of the Democrats. Far from ensuring a united nation, what such a lack of debate and absence of alternatives makes probable is a bitter fracturing of the American body politic once the loss of the war becomes evident to the public. The public will feel itself betrayed, not merely by one political party, but by the whole political system.
"The primum mobile of Fourth Generation war is a crisis of legitimacy of the state. If the absence of a loyal opposition and alternative courses of action further delegitimizes the American state in the eye of the public, the forces of the Fourth Generation will have won a victory of far greater proportions than anything that could happen on the ground in Iraq. The Soviet Union's defeat in Afghanistan played a central role in the collapse of the Soviet state. Could the American defeat in Iraq have similar consequences here? The chance is far greater than Washington elites can imagine."
The absence of debate is undeniably a sign of shame and cowardice, yet I can't blame high-profile Democrats from absenting themselves from yesterday's antiwar demo and march in DC. Steve Gilliard confessed that he watched about an hour of the rally and was so p.o.'d that he wanted to do an Elvis to his TV screen. I'm a less patient hothead than Steve. I only lasted about ten minutes watching the rally on C-SPAN, which made Stepford Wives selling Christmas kitsch on QVC--no fooling, at QVC the "Christmas Countdown" has already begun--must-see viewing by comparison. Here are the problems with mass rallies and marches on TV.
1) They all look alike. They're interchangeable pedestrian jams. If you didn't know what year it was, you wouldn't have known whether this demo was taking place in 2003 or 2004 or spring of 2005, because apart from Cindy Sheehan and a few others, it was the same cast of characters you always get at these protest smorgasbords, which remind me of WBAI at its most doctrinaire PC, where every faction and caucus has to be represented and heard no matter how boring or splintery or tangential to the event they are. What you get is an event that seems to have been exhumed from a time capsule buried in some aging ponytailed radical's back yard. As Steve writes:
"I mean some of the speakers were in fantasyland. The slogans were from the 1970's.
"Nader, Galloway, even the ANSWER people don't bother me. But Mexicanos Sin Fronteras? Lynne Stewart? Uh, she was convicted of aiding a terrorist. She may be innocent in the end, but isn't she a distraction now?
"A lot of people want to downplay their role, or ignore it, but the reality is, that every minute of CSPAN devoted to them and their message is going to dilute the anti-war message."
The right never makes that mistake. They enforce a message discipline.
"Think about this: do you have a school prayer protest at an anti-abortion rally?
"**** no. One message is clear, Fifteen are not."
2) The scale is all wrong for TV.
To be heard before thousands of gatherers, speakers feel they have to shout into the mike and every every phrase sound STENTORIAN. But for the larger audience at home, it's like being harangued, and who wants to be harangued, especially by speakers pounding you with played-out slogans? And no matter how large the crowd, on TV it looks like congested clutter, a sea of tiny, ugly billboards. It really doesn't help that so many of the signs are homemade and hackneyed. As the camera panned over the crowd yesterday, I saw placards featuring Mumia and Malcolm X, and I thought, What have they got to do with what's happening now in Iraq? The placards looked as dated as punk Mohawks in the East Village, and watching protesters wave them around as if they were in the studio audience trying to get Monty Hall's attention on Let's Make a Deal didn't help.
With her vigil near the Crawford ranch, Cindy Sheehan carved out an original protest space. The magnitude of yesterday's protest miniaturized her. It was as if she was swallowed up inside a whale aslosh with flotsam. I don't know what the answer is to the lack of adversarial energy against this accursed war, but what I do know is that yesterday's flea circus wasn't it.
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