Limits
By Cicero | Related entries in WarA friend of mine said yesterday that he believes Israel and the United States have reached the limits of their power. He believes the battle is joined, is highly asymmetric, and has ground American and Israeli forces to a halt. He wasn’t gloating, but was hypothesizing.
He might be wrong. Having power assumes a monopoly of violence. As we restrain our power to appeal to our allies and win friends on the ground, Islamicists do everything they can to monopolize violence through random acts of terror. They’re quite unrestrained in that pursuit, and on that level, we are neck-and-neck with them for control on the ground. The battle for the monopoly of violence is symmetrical in this war because we restrain ourselves from unleashing our full fury. My friend assumes that we will restrain ourselves indefinitely, and so we have reached the limit of our power.
My friend will be right — that the Israelis and Americans have hit their wall — only if we continue self-restraint. We’ve made war with our seat belts on. There’s no guarantee that things can’t get to a point where further self-restraint makes no sense.
I am chastened when I consider the unlatching of our seat belts. Real war is total, not self-restrained. Real war is horrible for both sides, when everything is at stake; when everything can be lost. Real war is a desperate struggle for survival. Since 2001, we have not been fighting that kind of war, though the battles have been many, the losses tragic.
If July, 2006 marks the beginning of real war, I will have to take my friend’s observation with a healthy dose of skepticism. Our force must be fully unleashed before his hypothesis can be proven. Once we get to a point to where we really believe we are fighting for our lives, the limits of our power will truly be tested.
In the years to come, we may wonder how this thing started. We may look back through a haze and wonder why 9/11 happened, and why we went into Iraq. Our moral and political calculus will have evolved after the fury is unleashed. It isn’t for us to say today how our current motives will be interpreted by the survivors of this great war.
Part of me wants to see our self-restraint maintained; we have the keys to Hell’s door, a Pandora’s Box that is best kept shut. Another part of me wants to see our civilization’s enemies mercilessly vanquished. We can’t have it both ways forever.
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July 14th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
Is restraint not a symbol of righteousness, and of maturity? I believe so.
The immature baby rattlesnake bites and expends all of its venom in a single apocalyptic strike. It is more deadly than any adult rattlesnake in that respect. You don’t want to get crosswise of a baby rattlesnake.
But an adult rattlesnake, who’s been around for a while, and grown up in the world, has the good sense to conserve. It will kill you, if it has to. But it will follow a more gradual, more thought-provoked slope of hostility. It knows that going all-out, all the time, can be a bad move.
So too is fighting on the personal level, man-on-man. Know when to expend all of your strength. Know when to conserve. Know when it matters, and when patience might be a better strategy. Knowledge is power.
And finally, so too is fighting on any other scale… even the scale of nations. During World War II, a conflict generally regarded as “all-out” and “without restraint”… restraint was still practiced. It had to be. You don’t throw your soldiers at an entrenched enemy. You go around. You retreat when you must, in order to preserve your war-fighting potential. This involves restraint.
I personally believe that this is the greatest victory of democracy… it combines the knowledge of all of a country’s citizens into a greater consciousness, so that ultimately, strategy might be conceived by an intellect greater than any individual’s.
Is it working? Is it working in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, and in Somolia? Many would have you believe that it is not… but then… these many are just a part of this greater consciousness, expressing their opinion into the larger mixing-bowl of thought. Only time will determine how it comes out, in the end.
Sometimes, it takes time. And always, it takes a certain restraint.
July 14th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
Sometimes the cosmic thought cereal gets too soggy though because the milk of human evil has corrupted the whole grains of righteousness and….ahh…forget it…pass the bong would’ya…
July 14th, 2006 at 11:37 pm
It’s interesting that both you and your friend limit American power to the military. We have other types of power at our disposal but have become overreliant on the military.
The Islamists have no military so they rely on terrorist acts but also on ideology spread throughout various parts of the world with networks of schools, mosques, social service organisations and political groups.
We ought to take a page out of their book. Fund our own networks of schools, mosques etc. Networks that offer a competing and compelling ideology. There is no reason for us to cede that battlefield without a fight. Hell, good old-fashioned bribery has worked comparatively well with Jordan and Egypt for decades.
The unrestrained use of the military is but one form of power and we’ve neglected other avenues of power for too long. Sure, we could level Iraq, or the entire Middle East, but really where does that get us? This isn’t a nation state struggle.
July 16th, 2006 at 3:19 am
“We ought to take a page out of their book. Fund our own networks of schools, mosques etc. Networks that offer a competing and compelling ideology.”
…we have. They’re called “Christian Missionaries”. They’re everywhere. You figure the Phillipines was always hugely Catholic? Or Nigeria hugely Pentacostal Christian? Heck no. Missionaries did it.
And a minor history note: we did it so much, and were so thoroughly successful, that nobody (well… nobody in the Western World) seems to notice anymore. But back in the 1800’s, the American Indians sure noticed. In the 1930’s, the Japanese sure noticed (and they resented it so much that it helped start a big war).
Today, many Arab countries are seeming to take notice.
I don’t think that what they’re doing is helping the situation… I’m just understanding what’s going on.
You said: “This isn’t a nation state struggle.”
In this, you are both right and wrong. It is larger than nation states. It’s about ideologies, and principals… the things upon which nation states are built. We have ours, they have theirs, and the two don’t seem to mix too well.
Yet, the ignorant masses on both sides of the cultural gap often MAKE it a matter for nation states. Consider the outrage over the pictures of Muhammed, published in Europe earlier this year. Who was it that bore the brunt of mob violence in the Middle East? It was national embassies, several of which were burned to the ground. Many of those same mobs accused European nation states of being the ultimate wrongdoers, because they allowed those newspapers to publish.
Now, consider when events occur the other way around. Can nation states start a war, and have it degenerate into something no longer simply about nation states, but more about principals? Sure. Consider Vietnam, or Russia’s war in Afghanistan, or any of a huge number of guerrilla wars throughout history. In a guerrilla war, a nation state is involved, fighting against a foe which is no longer organized enough to be called a nation state… but is rather just a loosely organized group of people fighting for an ideology.
That has happened in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
I don’t mean to look like I’m confining discussion of these conflicts to military matters. Any general knows that winning a conflict means subduing the enemy by any means, whether it is pointing guns and shooting, or building schools and teaching and convincing.
Incidentally, we are doing both.