Sonsowey
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RE: Why We Are Always Moving Left, And Not Likely To Stop
Why we always lose our wars when we clearly have the strongest military:
Quote:The goal of all counterinsurgency warfare is to capture and retain the support of the population. Counterinsurgency warfare can be seen as a sort of sedentary slave raid on a Wagnerian scale. The normal relationship between sovereign and subject, which applies in every stable country regardless of its formalities of government, is that the latter complies with all demands of the former and does not support or condone violence against it. In other words, whatever nice words you want to cloak it in, the relationship between government and citizen is the relationship between master and slave. Again, this is just the definition of government.
When this relationship breaks down, there are only two approaches to restoring sovereignty: massacre or deport the population, or recapture it. Stalin was a big fan of the former, and carried it out with impressive effect. However, as a sovereign, your subjects are your capital, and abusing them wantonly is seldom the best way to generate positive return on investment.
So. as Trinquier puts it:
We know that the sine qua non of victory in modern [ie, guerrilla] warfare is the unconditional support of a population. According to Mao Tse-tung, it is as essential to the combatant as water to the fish.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Everyone believes this. In today's Pentagon circles, the task of gaining popular support is generally known as winning hearts and minds.
But look at what Trinquier says next:
Such support may be spontaneous, although that is quite rare and probably a temporary condition. If it doesn't exist, it must be secured by every possible means, the most effective of which is terrorism.
Yikes! Note, however, that Trinquier's definition of terrorism is a little different from 2007's. Please allow me to translate.
What Trinquier is saying is that winning hearts ("spontaneous" or emotional support) is really a secondary objective. The critical task of counterinsurgency is winning minds, ie, persuading the population that it is in their rational interest to support you, rather than the enemy. As in any war, any technique that will lead to victory is effective.
Since reading Trinquier, I have been noticing this little phrase, winning hearts and minds. Almost every time I hear it, it turns out to be in the context of winning hearts.
What a contemptuous view of the natives this implies! The winning-hearts approach treats them like six-year-olds, for whom affection is everything and rational decisions are impossible. Whereas if you or I were civilians caught in a war zone, who would we support? Whoever was most likely to win, and least likely to kill us in the process.
Now, you might think that the Trinquierian approach, while possibly more effective than "winning hearts," is less moral. Of course, we cannot derive "ought" from "is," and if you truly believe it is immoral for a government to handle its subjects using procedures that are not compatible with the US Bill of Rights, nothing I can say can change your mind.
When I think about morality, however, I think not about one alternative, but two. Suppose, for example, that the Pentagon had preemptively applied a Luttwakian or Trinquierian approach in Iraq, not in 2007 but in 2003. If Luttwak and Trinquier are right about their field of work - and I suspect few of my readers have the expertise to disagree - this would have saved thousands of lives and eliminated all kinds of mayhem. On the other hand, Iraqis would have been issued ID cards, organized in a pyramidal structure which reported to the Pentagon, and subjected in general to a system of fascist totalitarian control. And some, some of whom were probably innocent, would even have received electrical shocks to the nipples. Better, or worse, than massacre, mayhem and war? Only you, dear reader, can make the call.
But we have a further puzzle to unravel. After all, if I, whose closest connection to the Pentagon is that I get my car insurance from USAA, can understand these things, how can they be lost on the Pentagon itself? Wasn't that Trinquier book hosted on a Pentagon site?
The answer is that the Pentagon is tactically right to do everything it can to avoid collateral damage. Moreover, its enemies are tactically right to do everything they can to try to trick the Pentagon into causing collateral damage (ie, via the use of human shields).
But the reason that human shields work has nothing to do with winning hearts. In fact, the very existence of human shields completely negates the winning-hearts hypothesis, because it's obvious that anyone hurt while serving (by definition, involuntarily) as a human shield will blame whoever put him in the way of the bomb, not whoever dropped it.
In fact, winning hearts is crack, pure and simple. As Trinquier points out, every successful "liberation movement" in the 20th century has terrorized the population into submission. Even Pentagon attacks on civilians in South Vietnam - with far more liberal rules of engagement than apply today in Iraq - were generally accidental and uncoordinated, whereas massacring their civilian opponents was standard operating procedure for the VC.
Explaining that Americans need to win hearts because they are white imperialists, whereas Taliban or Viet Cong or FLN guerrillas can cut them out and eat them because they are swarthy indigenous peoples, requires falling back on hoary nationalist cliches that really shouldn't require an answer. I'm sorry, people - if you genuinely believe it is unnatural and impossible for a foreign military occupation to become a stable government and eventually an ethnically-distinct ruling caste, you know no more about human history than a cat knows about tennis. Go read about, say, India, sometime.
So the puzzle remains: why worry about civilian casualties? Isn't collateral damage just the Air Force's way of telling you not to hang out within the blast radius of insurgents? Didn't we do a lot of collateral damage to Germany and Japan? And where are their insurgents?
The answer, which Trinquier would certainly have understood, although it would have appalled him and struck him as disastrous, is that the Pentagon does suffer as a result of civilian casualties, because any such event strengthens the Pentagon's true enemies. Who tend to live not in Kabul, but in Bethesda or Silver Spring or maybe Manhattan.
Furthermore, all of the Pentagon's adversaries in recent years have understood that their most effective strategy is to defeat the Pentagon politically, not militarily. Clausewitz would be proud, because of course the two are the same thing.
And finally, the ugliest trope of all is that everyone on the battlefield - Pentagon soldiers, their native adversaries, journalists, and even the local civilians whose support is so crucial - understands this perfectly. It's war, after all. If you're involved in war, you understand it.
The result is that even local civilians see civilian casualties as a point scored for the insurgents. So human-shield tactics, which cannot possibly do anything to win hearts, are winners nonetheless. Every time a human shield gets fragged and the fact gets to the press, the Pentagon's chances of winning decrease. Every time the Pentagon's chances of winning decrease, the insurgents' chances of winning increase. Every time the insurgents' chances of winning increase, rational civilians have more motivation to join the insurgency.
I assure you that although this seems complicated to you, it is not at all complicated to those in a war zone. Moreover, human instincts for collective action are deeply rooted (even chimpanzees have tribes which fight wars), and the human ability to construct a moral rationale for the decision to side with the strong horse is always impressive. In other words, martyrs are martyrs, even if someone forced them to be martyrs. As long as martyrdom is a militarily effective strategy, we will continue to see more of it.
One way to see this is to look at insurgent or terrorist movements which have no possibility of gaining the support of Western human-rights activists. A good example is the OAS in Algeria, founded by colleagues of Trinquier who knew exactly how to run an insurgency, and had a substantial local support base. It went nowhere, because it only alienated its supporters in France. The fate of the AWB in South Africa is even more pathetic - it had no foreign sponsors at all. Insurgency simply does not work without political protection.
If this analysis is correct, these Third World insurgent wars exist only because of Western human-rights activism. So why don't Western human-rights activists recognize this? Why don't they notice that they are creating violence and destruction, rather than suppressing it?
A simple explanation of this phenomenon is that Western human-rights activists are in fact political activists, seeking power by the only means that are available to them. It is not that opposing the Pentagon is a necessary method of their human-rights activism. It is that their human-rights activism is a necessary method of their opposing the Pentagon. The US military is as necessary to these people as drugs are to anti-drug warriors.
Thus, it is inconceivable that they would conclude that the best way to end the war in Iraq is for the US to impose martial law, dismiss the Iraqi government and suspend all civil liberties. We saw exactly how much Western human-rights activists cared about their swarthy mascots in the '70s, when they finally managed to force South Vietnam to surrender to the North. As tens of thousands of Vietnamese were shot, hundreds of thousands imprisoned without trial, and millions fled on boats, these watchdogs of humanity uttered not even a meow. I'm sure most of the "peace" protesters of the '60s sincerely believed that they loved their little brown brothers, but the real political motor of their movement was their hatred of their American enemies, and their desire to achieve power by defeating them. Same old, same old.
No, what's truly amazing about these "liberations" is their assiduous avoidance of every technique for governing foreign populations that might, actually, possibly, work. This is because all of these techniques were practiced under "colonialism," and we know colonialism is bad. Because we heard it in school.
For example, the Pentagon may not dissolve the corrupt, murderous, and dangerously ineffective "democratic" government it has installed in Iraq. It may not declare that democracy has failed in Iraq, and hand the place over to a Hashemite, Saudi or other Gulf prince, or even better split it into UAE-like emirates. Because that would be just too British Empire.
For example, the Pentagon may not under any circumstances create hybrid organizations, military or political, in which the leaders are foreign and the front-line employees are native.
Britain governed half the world, at costs which are negligible compared to the Iraq bill, by creating military forces with British officers and native troops. To call this a no-brainer would be an insult to the brainless. Yet it has not been done, nor can anything like it be done. Similarly, it is absolutely verboten to create an Iraqi government run by foreign executives with Iraqi personnel. That would be colonialism, and colonialism is wrong.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot...my-of.html
RVF Book Club February: Julius Evola - Revolt Against the Modern World
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