Crush or be crushed--Victory has never been about hearts and minds.

Jerusalem Post ^ | 8-4-04 | EDWARD BERNARD GLICK

[SJackson]

Events in both Israel and Iraq prove that the winning-hearts-and-minds approach to ending wars and insurrections has the same success rate as getting rain by praying for it. If it were indeed the key to victory, armies would have exchanged their weapons for public relations kits ages ago.

The ancient Persians conquered the Babylonians, and the Greeks the Persians, and the Romans the Greeks, and the Turks the Byzantines, and the British the Turks not by capturing their hearts and minds, but by overwhelming them with so much might that they lost their will to fight and surrendered.

Swords, not sermons, swept Islam quickly from the Middle East to Africa and the Far East. Swords, not sermons, enabled King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to rid Spain of 700 years of Moorish rule. And it was swords, not sermons, that stopped the Muslims at the gates of Vienna.

During the Revolutionary War, Great Britain's King George III did not relinquish his American colonies because General George Washington had somehow won his mind and heart. Similarly, England's Duke of Wellington didn't prevail at the Battle of Waterloo because he won the heart and mind of France's Napoleon Bonaparte.

And the South didn't surrender and end the American Civil War because Union General Ulysses S. Grant won the hearts and minds of General Robert E. Lee and his Confederate troops.

Nor did the Allied powers vanquish the Axis powers in 1945 because their brilliant propaganda and psychological warfare tactics captured the latter's hearts and minds. Germany and Italy surrendered because they knew in their brains and their bowels that they had been beaten by slow, sustained, and superior force, applied over a number of very bloody years.

And the Empire of Japan surrendered not because US navy captain (later admiral) Ellis Zacharias, a specialist in intelligence and psychological operations, was able to broadcast our surrender terms in fluent Japanese, but because Japan had already taken the measure of America's atom bomb.

IN 1970, Canada presented an excellent, if forgotten, example of force prevailing over hearts and minds.

French Canadian terrorist separatists had kidnapped James Cross, the British trade commissioner, and Pierre Laporte, Quebec's minister of labor. They later murdered Laporte. Instead of trying to win their hearts and minds, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, himself a French Canadian, got parliament to proclaim a War Measures Act and suspend Canadian civil liberties.

Then he ordered Canadian troops and mounties to search the streets of Quebec house by house. They arrested 500 people and crushed the terrorists.

The Cold War did not end in the 1980s because Voice of America broadcasts or State Department exchange programs eventually got to the hearts and minds of the Soviet people. It ended because the Kremlin leadership finally realized that president Ronald Reagan, with the backing of most of the American people, was ready to use all means, including economic strangulation and military prowess, to end communist domination of Eastern and Central Europe.

On the other hand, since the Korean War was at best a draw, and the United States did not win in Vietnam, many Americans no longer accept war as part of the human condition. So they seek to appease with nonmilitary approaches enemies who cannot be appeased.

Neither can these Americans fathom that when a nation does go to war, it is entirely proper, as US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill knew so well, for it to sacrifice one in order to save 10, ten to save hundreds, hundreds to save thousands, and thousands to save millions.

Islam does not look kindly upon infidels who lose. So the issue confronting Israel and the United States is not whether one is pro-Bush or anti-Bush, pro-Sharon or anti-Sharon, for or against the invasion of Iraq, or for or against Israel's leaving the Gaza Strip unilaterally. The issue is how can the United States and Israel defeat their foes?

The Ba'athists and the jihadists will not stop fighting the Great Satan because they have been made to like, respect, or fear the United States. They will stop fighting only when they are convinced that America's Vietnam trauma is over and that America is once again willing and able to use crushing force.

And Israel, the Little Satan, will prevail over its existential enemies only when it realizes that in order to survive it must fight by the rules of the neighborhood in which it lives.

In short, America's and Israel's struggles will end favorably only if they follow Churchill's dictum: "Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival."

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at Temple University in Philadelphia and author of Peaceful Conflict and Soldiers, Scholars, and Society.

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

And a ping for those on Alouette's list, she's away from her computor.

[Maria S]

Outstanding article! Thanks for the post.

[RebelBanker]

The writer is comparing apples and oranges. The situation in Iraq is more closely akin to Reconstruction than the actual War Between the States. We have already won on the battlefield, the trick is now to convince to population to accept the new government.

Deo Vindice!

[BlueLancer]

Orchides Forum Trahite
Cordes Et Mentes Veniant

Grab 'em by the balls
And their hearts and minds will follow

(From the desk of G. Gordon Liddy)

[anotherview]

I can't agree. Iraq is very much still at war, with the surgents backed by Syria, Iran, and bolstered by Saudi, Syrian, Pakistani, and Palestinian fighters. It isn't reconstruction. Indeed, the ongoing "security problem", which is really a terrorist war, is preventing the kind of reconstruction the United States and Great Britain, with very good intentions, would like to do.

The American left likes to call Iraq a quagmire. Unless, as the author suggests, the U.S. is willing to fight to win, it will be just that and the end result will be no better than in Vietnam. The U.S. can certainly win the war in Iraq if it has the will to do so.

There are times it is better to be feared than to be popular.

[Valin]

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. The war on terror is really about hearts and minds, ie. a war of ideas. That is unless you want to start going to war with the 1+ billion Muslims in the world?

[Uncle Miltie]

Churchill's dictum: "Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival."

Kerry's dictum: "Victory if the French allow, victory only against specific terrorists' specific acts, victory as long as the conflict doesn't become difficult and make us withdraw, for without nuance there is no appeasement."

[Uncle Miltie]

Cut and run with Kerry!

[KC_for_Freedom]

And Israel, the Little Satan, will prevail over its existential enemies only when it realizes that in order to survive it must fight by the rules of the neighborhood in which it lives.

I like that, "fight by the rules of the neighborhood" and note that the level of morality of this fighting is set by the side willing to go lowest. The US needs to understand this concept.

[jpl]

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. The war on terror is really about hearts and minds, ie. a war of ideas. That is unless you want to start going to war with the 1+ billion Muslims in the world?

Total nonsense. While it's true that many of the terrorists themselves are little more than ideological fanatics, most of these terrorist organizations are being supplied and assisted covertly by elements within numerous of the Middle Eastern governments. It's a clever war being fought by proxy because they can't take us on directly and they know it.

And there were plenty of people in Germany who didn't support the Nazis or what they were doing during World War II, so the idea that we need to go to war against one billion Mulsims is just preposterous. The Muslims will eventually take care of their own if we give them enough incentive to do so.

[jocon307]

"Kerry's dictum: "Victory if the French allow, victory only against specific terrorists' specific acts, victory as long as the conflict doesn't become difficult and make us withdraw, for without nuance there is no appeasement."

LOL! that's very good.

SJ, great post. I found it doing a search or I would have posted it myself, totally interesting. I never knew about that whole Candian debacle until this article. It truly is a forgotten historical episode. OK, I was 12, that's my excuse. But can't we learn from our Northern neighbor's history and go door-to-door in Northern New Jersey?

Wait and see what happens if the Islamofacists start to pull the stuff they're pulling in Israel and Iraq here. I'm telling you, it's going to be interesting.

[The Scourge of Yazid]

In a broad sense, the author is correct.

The fiends leading the assault against Western civilization will not ever be persuaded to lay down their arms, therefore, they'll probably have to be eliminated by force.

However, the deluded, ignorant souls that flock to their cause need to be confronted through multiple channels, most of them not involving direct military confrontation, if only because that would exhaust our nation's resources.

True, the Confederacy did not surrender because they wholeheartedly embraced the vision of a centralized, industrialized union of states, answerable to a congress seated in Washington. However, that does not mean that there were an equal number of people who supported the cause of secession at the conclusion of The Civil War as there were at the onset of hostilities.

The same rule can applied to WWI, WWII, and almost every other major conflict of the past century. While the main component of people's disillusionment with their original cause came from suffering a succession of debilitating military losses-and the fear that worse was to come-a good deal of their depletion in morale had to do with their opponent's resiliency and the efforts made to communicate that sense of resilience to their enemies.

I realize that propaganda does not win wars isolated from other influential factors, but this professor's supposition that our victory in the Cold War had nothing to do with propaganda is simply preposterous.

[Valin]

However, the deluded, ignorant souls that flock to their cause need to be confronted through multiple channels, most of them not involving direct military confrontation, if only because that would exhaust our nation's resources.


BINGO!! We have a winner!
Very well put.

[The Scourge of Yazid]

Thanks for the compliment. I appreciate it.

[Wombat101]

I beg to differ, sir. Iraq like Reconstruction?

In the American South, unlike Iraq, there was already a history of free, consensual government. What the War of Northern Aggression was ultimately fought for (despite the propaganda about slavery)was the continuation of that ideal. Should a people,and by extension, a state, that finds itself no longer part of a happy federation have the right to leave it? The answer, truthfully, was YES. This was discussed at length at the Hartford Convention, and resulted in the "All powers not specifically assigned to the Federal Government, etc, etc" language in the Constitution.

Southerners fought for their freedom against a tyrannical regime (as they saw it) the same way New Englanders had 90 years before. The basis for both conflicts was the idea that the governed had a say in how they were governed.

Reconstruction had nothing to do with reestablishing this long tradition of self-determination; it was a policy aimed at reabsorbing the south into the Union up until the point that any talk of leaving it again was laughable, while leaving the idea of self-determination intact.It was the Victor lording it over the Vanquished and leaving his stamp upon a conquered people.

Iraq is nothing of the sort. Iraqis have no history of self-determination. They have nothing resembling Western-style democratic processes. They are tethered, physically and morally, to a system that has raised the strongman and the mullah to respected, unassailable, positions. We are not reabsorbing our own here, we are laying the foundations for "the other" to become "us". It's a totally different operation.

And the unfortunate part of it all is that the author is correct: we cannot instruct them on how to become "us" until we beat the snot out of them and show them the error of their ways. This is not a political or economic war, sir, it is a war of civilizations --- their worldview versus our worldview. Unlike Southerners though, the Islamonazis have not set out with the idea of having separate states based mutual respect and common ideals (as many secessionists did), they just want the rest of us dead. Even the most die-hard secessionist never wanted every Yankee dead.

[RebelBanker]

Wombat,

You make several excellent points, but I must defend the central thesis of my response to the article: The enemy command structure has been vanquished and its armies defeated, so the "formal" combat phase of the war is over. We are now in the (exceptionally unpleasant) reconstruction phase. This is quite difficult for a number of reasons, including the lack of democratic traditions or history you pointed out. However, many defeated nations have continued to have resistance movements, often supported by outsiders (as the French did in WWII). Some of these were successful, some were not.

Again, I wholeheartedly agree that there are vast differences between Iraq in 2004 and the defeated former Confederate States of America in 1866, but my point is that the current situation is more akin to 1866 than 1863.

Deo Vindice!