Two Wars

Robert
Kaplan summarizes the real task before America in the coming years. It is
not to find "an exit strategy from Iraq", as if there were somewhere
on the planet it could hide from terrorism; nor is it simply to find Osama Bin
Laden as some, ever anxious to reduce the current conflict to a law enforcement
problem, would claim as a goal. It's task is to hold back the dark until a new
global civilization can find its footing.

The American military now has the most thankless task of any military in
the history of warfare: to provide the security armature for an emerging
global civilization that, the more it matures -- with its own mass media and
governing structures -- the less credit and sympathy it will grant to the very
troops who have risked and, indeed, given their lives for it.

And the dark is everywhere; in the vast, decayed structure of the Third World
where the shambolic post-colonial architecture has rotted away, leaving areas of
chaos the size of continents.

Indian Country has been expanding in recent years because of the security
vacuum created by the collapse of traditional dictatorships and the emergence
of new democracies -- whose short-term institutional weaknesses provide whole
new oxygen systems for terrorists. Iraq is but a microcosm of the earth in
this regard. To wit, the upsurge of terrorism in the vast archipelago of
Indonesia, the southern Philippines and parts of Malaysia is a direct result
of the anarchy unleashed by the passing of military regimes. Likewise, though
many do not realize it, a more liberalized Middle East will initially see
greater rather than lesser opportunities for terrorists. As the British
diplomatist Harold Nicolson understood, public opinion is not necessarily
enlightened merely because it has been suppressed.

Kaplan, who is writing a series of books on the US military experience in
different parts of the world, realized that Iraq was only a part, and not even
the best part, of the global war on terror. In Mauretania, Mali, Niger, Chad,
Ethiopia, Mongolia, Columbia, Afghanistan and the Philippines, Kaplan found
small bands of men who were remolding blank spaces on the map in ways unknown
since the 18th century. What they valued most of all were not "more boots
on the ground" but freedom of action. The freedom above all, to do the
commonsense thing. "Who needs meetings in Washington," one Army major
told me. "Guys in the field will figure out what to do."  Who
needed meetings in Washington it turned out, were the vast retinue of camp
followers, reporters and sutlers, who followed a great army to battle. Kaplan
writes:

In months of travels with the American military, I have learned that the
smaller the American footprint and the less notice it draws from the
international media, the more effective is the operation. One good
soldier-diplomat in a place like Mongolia can accomplish miracles. A few
hundred Green Berets in Colombia and the Philippines can be adequate force
multipliers. Ten thousand troops, as in Afghanistan, can tread water. And
130,000, as in Iraq, constitutes a mess that nobody wants to repeat --
regardless of one's position on the war.

What of that extreme pole on the cursed end of Kaplan's Law: Iraq? Writing in
the Weekly
Standard, Lt. Col. Powl Smith, the former chief of counterterrorism plans at
U.S. European Command and currently in Baghdad sees that campaign not as a
screen before the advancing vanguard of global civilization but as a battlefield
where the main force of the enemy has been brought to battle. Powl compares Iraq
to Guadalcanal, which depending on one's point of view is either exceedingly
ominous or optimistic.

In one of our first counteroffensives against the Japanese, U.S. troops
landed on the island of Guadalcanal in order to capture a key airfield. We
surprised the Japanese with our speed and audacity, and with very little
fighting seized the airfield. But the Japanese recovered from our initial
success, and began a long, brutal campaign to force us off Guadalcanal and
recapture it. The Japanese were very clever and absolutely committed to
sacrificing everything for their beliefs. (Only three Japanese surrendered
after six months of combat--a statistic that should put today's Islamic
radicals to shame.) The United States suffered 6,000 casualties during the
six-month Guadalcanal campaign; Japan, 24,000. It was a very expensive
airfield.

While Midway is enshrined in popular glory, it was really Guadalcanal
that  represented the graveyard of Japanese forces, the Island of Death
upon which Japanese naval and military reinforcements were dashed heedless and
seriatim, until there were no more left to send. But no one knew it at the time;
and when US forces embarked on a final sweep of the island they discovered to
their surprise that the remainder had been totally evacuated by Japanese forces.
The most popular account at the time, Richard Tregaskis' nearly-forgotten Guadalcanal
Diary is useless as a work of history, written too close to the
events and burdened by the misconceptions of the time, though it faithfully preserves the atmosphere of the early 1940s. Officers rarely use historical comparisons without intending some point and Powl leaves us in no doubt that he means Iraq to be the graveyard of the global Jihad.

It is possible that both Kaplan and Powl are right, as were the Blind Men of
India in their differing descriptions of the elephant. We are truly in the midst of a world war as far flung and various as any in history: one so large as to defy
description even by so talented a writer as Robert Kaplan . No one suspected
what lay beyond the door constituted by September 11. Not even the enemy.

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

-- Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach