Iraq: GO ALL OUT, OR PULL OUT

A netfriend writes: Friends, this article was inspired by a curious phenomenon of our media that I have noted for many years. On the one hand World War II and its vets are praised for being, respectively, the “good War” and our “Greatest Generation”. Yet, in contrast, the media–especially the media of countries we liberated in the previous war–are outraged at any tactics the modern military use that resemble what we did to Germany or Japan in Word War II. I wonder why.ignorance or perhaps in this war most media are on the other side?

GO ALL OUT, OR PULL OUT

The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 31, 2004

David D. Perlmutter

One of the most famous quotes to emerge from the Vietnam War was attributed to a US military officer engaged in retaking a hamlet from the Viet Cong: “We had to destroy the village to save it.”

The phrase may be apocryphal, but it summed up the futility of the Indochina conflict.

Now the American military has pulled back from Najaf – a “cease-fire” has allowed gunmen who have killed Americans to escape. At another city, Fallujah, a few months ago a Marine general threatened that the rebels had “days, not weeks” to disarm.

No one has disarmed.

The battles of Fallujah and Najaf highlight the crucial military and political dilemma for American foreign policy and military action.

The American army is designed to fight two kinds of conflicts: large-scale traditional wars and small-scale counter-insurgencies. In the former we dominate the world with the size and superiority of our land, air and sea forces. In the latter scenario, you can trust a Force Recon, Ranger or SEAL team to terminate any enemy strongpoint with extreme prejudice.

So we speedily defeated the tank brigades of Iraq and the sandal-shod militia of Grenada. But what about a large nation suffused with many insurgents embedded into civilian populations?

Worse, what can you do when the whole world is watching – and carping and demanding that you show restraint?

In a sense, the insurgency war in Iraq is too big a problem for the US’s elite forces and too small a problem for its full military deployment to solve.

The solution lies in traditional American military doctrine: Go all out, or pull out.

Consider that the phrase “destroy the village to save it” actually represents the kind of total war machine that won most of America’s modern wars prior to Vietnam.

It began as US doctrine with Ulysses S. Grant at the siege of Vicksburg and Sherman’s burning of Atlanta: Focus maximum force to destroy the enemy; give him no respite; devastate his material and logistical ability to wage war; allow him no haven, even among civilians; accept only unconditional surrender.

That’s what settled the war between the states.

In World War I, the astute American commander John J. Pershing warned the British and French that unless they took Berlin, the Germans would not accept that they had been beaten. The result was another war a generation later.

In Korea, again, the US insisted on fighting a limited police action – the outcome was a stalemate that lingers to this day.

And in Vietnam, again, we spent almost a decade fighting in a “prevent defense” – a strategy that attempts to prevent gains by the offense – which led neither to final victory nor to reduced casualties for our side or for the enemy.

In Somalia, as well, we tried to fight a low-intensity war with too few troops and too blurry a mission. Finally, in the first Gulf War, we accepted the sage advice of the Saudis to show restraint by not toppling Saddam.

Back in World War II, however, we understood that destroying Nazism as well as xenophobic Japanese imperialism would entail bombing cities into moonscapes and starving enemy populations.

For example, in 1945, the US military retook Manilla from fanatical Japanese defenders. Almost 100,000 civilians died and the city was left in ashes. But the city was taken. And to this day nobody reasonably fears Japanese or German militarism.

In the case of Fallujah or Najaf, even disarming the insurgents is but a temporary respite, since Iraq is full of weapons of minor but deadly destruction. Any insurgent left alive or uncaptured today will be killing coalition troops tomorrow.

So we could say, brutally, that yes – sometimes you have to destroy a village to save an entire country.

Private Ryan, GI Joe and millions of other Americans of the “greatest generation” fought that kind of war without remorse. We owe them our lives and liberties for it.

So the lesson endures. If you want to win a war, go all out. If you don’t think it’s worth it, then withdraw; or better yet, don’t start the war in the first place.

That’s the choice. The middle path of showing restraint while still hanging on (and on, and on) has never worked in the past. It won’t succeed in Iraq.

The writer is an associate professor of mass communication at Louisiana State University and a senior fellow at the Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs. He is author of Visions of War.