Excellent article on the strategies employed by both sides, from the National Review.
Excerpt:
Yet in the present struggle, our enemies made three critical mistakes that have for the time being upset their otherwise brilliant plans. First, September 11 woke Americans up to the danger of parasitic terrorism from the Middle East and the larger realization that there might be even easier ways of leveling a Manhattan block than crashing planes into skyscrapers. So 9/11 taught us that the will to kill all of us was certainly there - our only reprieve for the moment being the inability of the enemy to trump what they had begun. In response to such cataclysmic damage on that terrible September day, Americans were willing to question the old political calculus of appeasement, at least for a while, and realized that recklessness was not bombing the Taliban or marching on Baghdad, but the old mantra of "sending a stern message" and "keeping Hussein in his box."Second, President Bush, whatever one thinks of him, is, well, let's face it, a strange sort of president. For all the hysteria about Karl Rove's supposed political calculations and machinations, I sense that the president doesn't care much what others think of him; indeed, for the price of winning this war he might even be willing to be a one-term president. In other words, this is a man who probably would not have withdrawn from Beirut, turned ships around off the harbor at Haiti at the sound of gunfire, or yanked Americans from Somalia as two-bit thugs dragged their corpses in the street.
For some reason or another he does not seem to crave future rave reviews from the New York Times, a late-night private dinner in Georgetown, or an obsequious phone call from a European apparatchik. Indeed, he seems to have expected the invective from the Europeans, the slander from our own media, and even the irrational, if not visceral, hatred of American elites as the inevitable wages that come with at last saying "enough is enough" and thereby dissolving in a moment the comfortable fraud that so many of us had invested so heavily in the last 20 years. How long his resistance will last in the face of slander and slurs of historic proportions is unclear; but for now he has again responded in a manner that his enemies would never have anticipated.
Third, the bin Ladens, Taliban remnants, and Saddamites figured that Americans knew only the Western way of war, or more precisely that we fielded only some sort of big clumsy Vietnam-era, tank-driven army. Few figured that GPS bombing, counterinsurgency, special operatives, and our own sniping and raiding could allow us too to wage a low-intensity war, as now is going on in the Sunni Triangle. And unlike the Russians in Chechnya, Americans have the capital to fund largess, the message of freedom, and the strategy of resolute mercy that give the U.S. a much better chance at winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, the key, after all, of any unconventional fighting. Once more, the critical question is not strength, but determination: If the American people decide that they truly wish to rid Baghdad of the Baathists and pacify Iraq and Afghanistan under the auspices of consensual governments, then they most surely can.
And it would certainly help if we understood the psychology of denial and appeasement a little better than we do. I suspect it isn't quite the black box it has been thought to be.
Posted by Demosophist at October 3, 2003 01:16 PM | TrackBack