Thursday, January 18, 2007

The problem with not winning wars

When is a win not a win?

Answer: when the defeated nation can pretend to itself successfully that it didn't really lose.

Obvious candidates- Germany after World War I, the Arabs in Palestine after the 1947/48 war, the Sunni's in Iraq in 2003.

On all three occasions, disinterested parties would have unequivocally said the losers had been defeated. On all three occasions, there was enough psychological wriggle-room for the losers to build up a great story about how they actually didn't lose. Its not really important to go into the intricacies of their self-decieving rationalisations. What is important is, how come there was wriggle-room?

In late 1918, when the British Army was reeling off victory after victory on the western front, the High Command of the German army knew there was no hope. But in the usual traditions of European warfare, as soon as the Germans sued for peace and admitted their defeat, the armies stopped fighting and everybody went home. For many millions of Germans, they never had the experience of staring down the business end of a howitzer or vickers machine gun. For them, defeat was a technicality. Something that decades of self-deception about could mutate into a betrayal rather than a defeat. Hitler just took that self-deception and turned it into a political program.

In 1949, the Arabs in Palestine had been humiliated, comprehensively beaten by the much smaller Haganah, the nascent Israeli Defense Force. Many hundreds of thousands then voluntarily upped and moved out of Israel because they refused to live in a state run by Jews. Many military age men left without ever having fired a shot or helped the Arab cause in any way. For years afterwards, the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza held Egypt, TransJordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon directly responsible for failing to destroy the new state of Israel. Over decades, all those facts have mutated into todays completely fabricated history, where a conspiracy between Britain and the US foisted a dominant Israel on the weak but virtuous Arabs (both Britain and the US government tried to prevent Israel from being created by the fledgling UN).

In 2003, the US army conquered Baathist Iraq in three weeks, completely destroying the Iraqi army as a fighting force and probably breaking all manner of records in the defeat of one nation by another. But because many of the Sunni Iraqis didn't actually bother to show up at their units to fight the Americans, they didn't ever have to test their metal in a straight fight. Four years later, despite the huge casualties the Sunni's have suffered (plus the catastrophic ones suffered by the foreign jihadis who are treated as cannon fodder by the Sunni's) both Sunni Arabs and many millions of people around the world consider the US to be losing and the insurgency to be winning.

What should we deduce from this?

It is not enough just to win wars from the technical point of view. It is not enough just to attain your strategic goals. You must also enforce your victory psychologically, in a way that is way beyond dispute by the losing combatant. This is a very important point, and one I will be returning to soon.

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