June 3, 2003
No Foregone Conclusions
Another good read from Victor Davis Hanson: Lessons of the War
The whole thing is well worth your time, but I've included a small excerpt below.
Until recently, it seems to have been widely believed in the Arab world that the superior technology of the West could, in fact, be nullified by just such threats of random and horrific violence, perpetrated by goose-stepping death squads or masked, pajama-clad bombers. And the breakneck effort to craft weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, and nuclear, must also be seen largely in this context—i.e., the desire to find a surrogate capability, particularly after the loss of the Soviet Union’s nuclear deterrent, that might restore to Arab regimes the perceived power to stave off utter defeat in a conventional war against Israel or the West.
In their choice of military tactics, Arab dictators and Arab terrorists are, indeed, birds of a feather. Baathists who in the recent conflict ran from the 3rd Mechanized Division and suddenly reconstituted themselves as gun-toting civilians in the streets of Mosul and Tikrit resemble the West Bank Palestinian martyrs’ brigades who in daytime pose as nationalist protestors and at night become masked assassins. The Saddam fedayeen who bushwhacked American columns were pale imitations of Hamas and Hizbullah. It was no accident that suicide bombers and Arab “martyrs” showed up in the penultimate stages of the war in hopes of murdering Americans at check points and on patrols. Nor is it a surprise that Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas, the Palestinian murderer-terrorists, should have felt so at home for so long in Baghdad.
WHAT IS it that permits this radically dysfunctional system to perpetuate itself? The question is really political rather than military, and ultimately the answer is a state-induced terror that has its roots in the absence of consensual government and of notions of personal freedom, thus ensuring little self-criticism or accountability in matters of war-making or anything else. Helping to keep this entire edifice afloat is an ingrained (but also state-supported) habit of denial: a disavowal of just how deep, and how self-inflicted, are the deficiencies of one’s own society; a rejection of every alternative view of reality that would expose these inadequacies for what they are; an unwillingness to assume any responsibility for repairing them.
During Operation Iraqi Freedom, American viewers were exasperated or convulsed at the circus-like spectacle provided by Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the so-called Baathist information minister—a/k/a “Baghdad Bob”—whose daily communiqués detailed an endless string of catastrophes for coalition forces. Seeming at first odious, then deranged, at last almost entertaining, al-Sahaf confidently declaimed lines like “We have killed most of the infidels, and I think we will finish the rest soon” even as split-screen television images revealed Abrams tanks looming a few miles away, or Marines resting in Saddam’s Baghdad palaces.
A joke, but too bitter to be mere jest. Such state-sponsored whoppers, spread from Ramallah to Cairo and beyond, are hardly a new phenomenon. In June 1967, as Michael Oren reminds us in Six Days of War, there were triumphant broadcasts about heroic Arab armies approaching the outskirts of Tel Aviv and Egyptian jets pounding Israel even as Israeli soldiers were sweeping to victory on three fronts and Egyptian air fields were littered with the remains of that country’s air force, destroyed in the first minutes of war. Such fabrications are among the intellectual legacies of the Arab regimes of the Middle East, whose homegrown proclivities toward mythmaking and braggadocio were only enhanced by decades of immersion in a Soviet-style disinformation apparatus.
Posted by Ithildin at June 3, 2003 5:40 PM | PROCURE FINE OLD WORLD ABSINTHE