A Wise Man Said...SFBert; Military Historian

SFBert is a friend of mine. He is a former Special Forces type and served in Vietnam and other places. On a post at my Townhall blog, he left this comment:

SFBert writes: Friday, July, 20, 2007 7:34 PM
War & Politics

War is politics by another means as noted by a German practitioner of both. In his whole statement Petreaus is drawing a distinction between the application of violence (military solution) and having the resources to apply it (political such as a political body that has the support of most of the people in order to apply force.)

On consideration, I believe it is foolish to believe that the Iraqi government can be expected to stand up and tackle those issues we have issued a timeline on when our own Congress and Senate cannot tackle a simple issue such as border security. So I am in favor of giving them a longer time to deal with the issues they must deal with in order to form a real state.

I have come to the conclusion that all the debate about Iraq is meaningless though. It is being debated by folks who have had little exposure to real violence. It doesn't take many people capable and willing to ruthlessly apply violence to turn the population their way if there is not an equal counterforce that the people can turn to for protection. This axiom makes Western powers uniquely unsuited to conduct the type and duration of operations that it will take to win this war. If one is to choose to be our friend, they must believe we are to be their friend for the duration of the threat. Otherwise, it is better to reconcile with the barbarians because they will be the winners. Three recent examples come in mind.

One -- The Soviets vs. Germany. The Nazis killed by far more Soviets than the Soviets killed Germans. In the end, it was the Soviet will to win that overcame casualties and material deficiencies to prevail. The Soviets did not fold in the face of casualties as did the WWI Russian aristocracy. They folded then in hopes of preserving their privileges which they did for only a short time till the Germans put Lenin on that train and he prevailed.

Two -- Vietnam. We inflicted by far greater casualties on all comers -- the Viet Cong, the NVA, the Pathet Lao, and the Kmer Rouge than they ever thought of inflicting on us. But they had the will to continue and we did not. In Vietnam we lost honor, but no territory. But in losing that honor, we also taught our future enemies that we lack the necessary will to win if they can just manage to draw the fight out for a little while.

This is all lost on people who are so arrogant as to assume that diplomacy will solve all. If they study the success of diplomacy, it all falls back on the fact that if it fails, one side or the other will apply sanctions at first and ultimately can and will apply force. An example is a year's discussion in Paris about the shape of the table the US and the North Vietnamese were going to sit at to negotiate at. Nothing was being done but discuss the shape of the table. Until Nixon's Christmas bombing campaign against targets in Hanoi and Haiphong got the NV's attention. These are lessons lost on our current crop of diplomats and other assorted leftists because their teachers, the press and academics do not care to teach these divergences from their world view.

And to conclude, attrition as LTC Peters points out, is a strategy. If our enemy forces us into a war where that is their strategy, there is little that we can do as civilized people other than to engage in it to. My lesson on this goes back to the age of Genghis Khan. He understood this very well and so avoided getting caught in wars of attrition by inhumanely sacking cities and killing whole populations. He gave simple choices to his enemies --earth and water or they and their families were put the sword.

So in short, we must either adapt to being barbarians or we must engage in attrition. No other choices. Occam's razor applies.

Trackposted to Maggie's Notebook