We can't win anyway

By Michael F. Scheuer

Adjunct Professor of Security Studies, Georgetown University

The military option should be taken off the table in all instances -- save an immediate response to foreign attack -- until we elect a president and congress that will abide by the constitutional requirements and machinery for declaring war that were put in place by the Founders.

In addition, and more practically, the option should be taken off the table vis-à-vis Iran because we have a military that cannot win a war. The common wisdom is that the politicians are to blame for preventing the generals from doing their job; that is, killing the enemy and, as needed, its civilian supporters until each is convinced it is irrefutably defeated. I begin to think, however, that the common wisdom is only partially correct. Our bipartisan political leadership surely is pathetic when it comes to war-making, but the U.S. general officer corps -- save for a few Marine generals -- is today chockfull of bureaucrats, nation-builders, and wanna-be social scientists.

Take that might warrior General McChrystal, for example. In the midst of a supposedly “major offensive” in Helmand Province, the general has spent most of his time apologizing for the deaths of civilian supporters of the Taleban and al-Qaeda, and withdrawing from the battlefield a weapon system that presumably was there because it contributed to victory and helped protect our soldiers and Marines. Sparing civilian casualties might make sense if those civilians were pro-U.S. or even pro-Karzai, but they are not.

The Taleban’s steadily upward trend line across Afghanistan -- not just in the southern provinces -- since 2006 can only be explained by growing popular support from Afghans who are pro-Taleban (some) and/or opposed to the U.S.-NATO occupation (most). To think you are going to win the hearts and minds of these Afghans by limiting civilian casualties is a figment of the social-science minds of counter-insurgency theorists. It is not for nothing that the acerbic but thoroughly brilliant Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld wrote that counter-insurgency doctrine is always written by losers.

Martin van Creveld is the Israeli academic who threatened that 'we could destroy all European capitals' and that "we have the capability to take the rest of the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen, if Israel goes under."

For the life of me, and as the father of a newly draft-age son, I cannot imagine why American parents still trust their soldier-children to politicians -- in both parties -- and generals who are unwilling to do anything so old-fashion, anachronistic, and politically incorrect as relentlessly killing the enemy and his supporters until they are defeated. One hopes that American parents will soon wise up and begin to discourage their kids from joining a military whose generals increasingly see U.S. casualties as the necessary cost, not of winning, but of nation-building, fawning over their addled political masters, and pleasing international opinion and the pacifist purveyors of international law.

[Yeah, who cares about international law? Pfft.]

The wars we are fighting today are the products of the lethal-for-America fantasy that war has changed and no longer requires much killing or an outright victory. This, of course, is nonsense and only our elites and those of Europe believe it; our Islamist enemies know better. America once knew that you never go to war without aiming for victory, and led by men like William Sherman, U.S. Grant, Nathan Bedford Forrest, George Patton, and, until recently, most Marine generals, our military leaders knew that, in Forrest’s words, war means fighting, and fighting means killing. Armed with this fact, and with Sherman’s dictum that the only mercy in war is fast and complete victory, the U.S. military once put fear and sober second thoughts into those who meant America harm. Today, the same military causes some circumspection among our enemies, but it mostly causes mirth in their minds over the specter of a hapless pack of coddled general officers who seek to win un-winnable hearts and minds at the cost of many hundreds of billions dollars and numerous wasted young lives.

Tom Feeley of InformationClearingHouse.info (ICH) posted this on his site, but not to point out Scheuer's callous disregard for human life. It was posted under the title What Should Obama Do Next On Iran? Act For The Republic and Independence, apparently to endorse a list of actions that Obama should take on the Iran issue, which was apparently written by Scheuer. But if you click on the source link at the ICH post, the list is not there. The link will take you straight to Scheuer's rant about all the fuss over killing innocents, which to him is just an impediment to "victory".

Scheuer is a regular contributor to Antiwar.com. He might claim to be a non-interventionist but he doesn't sound very anti-war, does he?