U.S. must remain adamant, persist with Iraq mission

In Iraq, we indeed face a possible reprise of the Vietnam
situation, though not in the way that much of our punditocracy and
media elite have posited. The strongest parallel is this: We, now
as then, have ample chance to snatch defeat from the jaws of
victory, depending on the conduct of the establishment media and
the wavering convictions of our policy makers.

Vietnam was the first war whose horrors were shown to a captive
audience at home in real time. The results were paradoxical and
instructive: for all of its fleshed-out coverage, what many
Americans still believe about Vietnam is as much myth as reality. A
crowning example is the 1968 Tet offensive. Still widely looked
upon as a major U.S. loss, as evidence of a pitiful giant’s
hopelessness in a peasant’s jungle, Tet’s imagery to
viewers at home was that of chaos and inferno, confused and angry
U.S. soldiers, a brutal execution by the U.S.-allied police,
“destroying the village in order to save it,” etc.

In fact, though chaotic and miserable as all wars surely are,
Tet was a smashing victory for the U.S. forces ““ and an
almost unimaginable loss for the Vietcong whose every advance was
eventually repelled and who lost men to us at a ratio of about 50
to one. The Vietcong or National Liberation Front, basically the
guerrilla arm of the North Vietnamese Army, was effectively
destroyed as a fighting force. It likely could not have returned to
pre-Tet levels of attrition for at least three years.

And, during the time it took for the North to regroup, both of
our options looked good. If the communists realized their weakness
and held off, we could have consolidated our hold over the South
and pressed for negotiations from a position of power. Or, if the
North decided to send in its regular armies to fill the vacuum left
by the destruction of the NLF, which is what happened, then we were
in the favorable position of fighting a conventional war against
outmatched forces rather than a murky, vexing guerrilla
struggle.

But we blinked, lost nerve and withdrew, and the rest is
history. Our withdrawal was due, in no small part, to the
media’s conduct during Tet and afterward. This conduct gets
at the larger philosophical problem of conducting war in a
technologically advanced, media-saturated society. Succeeding in
geopolitics and its handmaiden, war, ultimately depends upon seeing
the long view, the historical big picture.

There will always be problems with postmodern war and the
media’s involvement in it ““ particularly because the
media feeds on the imagery and emotion and now has access to the
front lines in unprecedented ways. But the outrage or despair that
follows real-time media coverage of wartime events ““ whether
the Tet highlight reel, Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon and
incursions into the territories or the failures in Mogadishu,
Somalia ““ can often serve to obscure the wider context into
which such horrific losses of life, ruefully, must be placed.

Thus, it is incredibly disheartening to hear that the war in
Iraq, which by any sane measure has so far been a great American
victory with minimal casualties on either side, is already
described as a “quagmire.” And it does not bode well
that the current pool of Bush challengers have apparently based
their campaign strategies on criticizing Bush’s most
successful endeavors and indeed, tenuously promising to reverse
them if given the chance. Such a reversal would be an unmitigated
disaster, and no fiscal solvency or Medicare boost would make up
for it.

Yes, the fact that some ancient regime holdouts and
Jihad-imported mercenaries are murdering our soldiers in Iraq is
disheartening. But it should serve to strengthen, not weaken, our
resolve. The establishment media are not only mostly ignoring the
bigger picture, they are not even asking the right questions. Where
are the mercenaries coming from? Which border ““ Iran’s,
Syria’s or Saudi Arabia’s ““ is the most
cancerous? What is the involvement of the Assad regime or the
Iranian mullah’s in promoting terrorism in Iraq, and what are
their motives? The obviousness of that last question simply belies
the gross dereliction of the establishment press in barely asking
it.

We know from his own words that Osama bin Laden took
Clinton’s hasty withdrawal from Somalia as evidence that the
United States was a paper tiger whose civilians and policy elites
would not spend even minimal blood and treasure to fight. The
reaction to a similar abandonment of Iraq would repeat this
phenomenon 100-fold. Granting that one believes in the values and
defense of his own society, which I do, a moral war is one that
ends as quickly and decisively as possible ““ nothing
else.

During the lead-up to the Kosovo conflict, Slobodan Milosevic
taunted a U.S. envoy that we were “not crazy enough” to
bomb Serbia, according to “To End a War” by Richard
Holbrook. To which we had to reply that yes, perhaps we were crazy
enough. The Jihadist forces, and their patrons in the region, are
now similarly banking that we are not crazy enough to stay in Iraq
and on weather-sustained losses.

For the good of the United States, the future and the world, we
must clearly show them that not only are we indeed crazy enough to
stay, but should they provoke it, we may be crazy enough to take
the war to the cities and palaces of their own desiccated
regimes.

Schulman is a political science graduate student.