I was listening to democracy now the other day, listening to (another) rather demoralizing debate between Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali. Hitchens seems difficult to debate. He’s very smart, he’s careful not to fall into the traps that various conservatives fall into, and he deliberately tells outright lies and makes outrageous statements interspersed with intelligent analysis. It’s very confusing and disconcerting. Tariq’s response seems to be to say what he was going to say anyway, which is not a bad way to go. At any rate, Hitchens’s opening shot was that “the United States is not going to be militarily defeated in Iraq. You can draw whatever conclusions that can be drawn from that and you should. Military superiority is something that has to be seen and felt to be really understood, and the US is not going to be defeated.”
He then inferred from this that since the US isn’t going to be defeated, the insurgency is going to be defeated — forgetting the lesson of the great villain of one of his books, Kissinger, who said “a guerrilla army wins if it doesn’t lose”. He also believes, like all the other tough guys, that the US has to stay until the insurgency is defeated.
Problem is, that word, defeat, like victory, doesn’t mean very much in this war between the US and the population of Iraq. The US can destroy the whole place, or any given place, or population for that matter, but it can’t control it. The insurgenc(ies) can prevent the US from controlling it but any social or political control it wins over any parts of Iraq is subject to physical destruction by the US.
In this context, the refusal of a group of US soldiers in Iraq to follow orders over a dangerous resupply mission is a potentially important development.
US power depends, and has always depended, on its economic power (by which it punished Vietnam for example after withdrawal), its cultural appeal (which meant until recently that everybody in the whole world loved Americans and America despite its foreign policy), and of course its military power. But military power itself rests on support in the society for militarism (of which there is plenty) and the willingness of the military to do what it’s told. In long, costly wars this support can begin to wear down — American planners called it the “Vietnam Syndrome”. The lesson they took from this was that they have to win quickly and easily without many casualties.
As invincible as the US might seem (ask Hitchens) the whole equation of power is more complicated and more delicate than it seems. US militarists will still have tremendous support. But this refusal by the reservists is a crack in that. They will be attacked as traitors who are betraying other soldiers, cowards; they will be smeared on the talk radio shows and television and spit on by the very people who traffic in myths about leftists spitting on Vietnam veterans. But it’s unlikely that they took this decision lightly, and the way they are being treated in the army is already no picnic. A quote from one of them who called home: “We had broken down trucks, non-armored vehicles and, um, we were carrying contaminated fuel. They are holding us against our will. We are now prisoners.”
Repression within the military itself is very tricky business. It was a breakdown in the military more than anything else that led to “defeat” in Vietnam (I don’t like talking about Vietnam as a “defeat” for the US, as people who follow this blog know. The Vietnamese suffered a holocaust to “defeat” the US). If the military does start to break down, it will be amazing how fast liberals stop talking about a “quagmire” that it is very hard to get out of and start talking about withdrawal in earnest, since the US military itself will be at stake and all the “difficulties” and phony concern for Iraqis that are part of the “quagmire” analysis will seem to melt away at that point.
