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Friday, November 19, 2004

The Principle of Pursuit

The Principles of War differ depending on which military historian you favor, but they all include the Principle of Pursuit, and most acknowledge that while battles are won by the proper application of many principles, wars are generally won in the pursuit: when the enemy is defeated and running, pursuit, to kill or capture his forces before they can reorganize and fight again, is the most important thing you can do. Time after time you read of victories so close that there was no pursuit, and the campaign continued, often with the defeated enemy being able to organize well enough to win the overall war. When a small and elite force defeats a larger force badly led, pursuit is the only way to prevent this.

So, of course, the US, having won in Iraq, in the First Gulf War, and then again in the whirlwind first phase of the Iraqi war, deliberately did not mount a pursuit; did not round up the enemy's disorganized forces and render them unable to resume the war. We are paying the price for that now, recently in Fallujah, and soon in other cities. The great fear everyone had when the war began was of having to slog through Iraq city block by city block, in the worst kind of urban warfare in which you cannot isolate the combatants from the civilians, and even ten year old girls may be carrying lethal weapons.

By not pursuing the enemy after the victory in Baghdad, we made it all but certain that the next phase of the war would be precisely what we had mostly feared. The Iraqi campaign shows again the truth of what is taught in first year military history (in those few remaining places that still teach military history): Wars are won in the pursuit. Rendering an enemy temporarily hors d' combat is not the same as winning the war, much less winning the peace.

We can spend some time looking into why there was no pursuit after the fall of Iraq, and perhaps we should. Was it the Jacobin principles of the neo-cons, who thought that we would carry freedom (in the person of Chalabi the Thief?) into Iraq on the points of our bayonets? Lack of military history study on the part of our civilian bosses of the military? Lack of study of military history on the part of the senior officer corps? Squeamishness: having conquered Iraq we did not want to render the country helpless? Fear of the criticism that we only went in there for the oil? For God knows, if we had done things right, the oil would be pumping now, and Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction, and it would not be costing the United States five billion ($5,000,000,000) dollars a month. A billion dollars is still a lot of money; for a billion a year (and the power to bring in the B-52's at need) I would have undertaken to guarantee that Saddam never had a nuclear weapon. Five billion dollars a month is a lot of money, and there is no end in sight.

Iraq fell in a brilliant campaign; but there was no pursuit. Was it even thought that there should be one?

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From The Strategy of Technology by Stefan Possony, Jerry Pournelle, and Francis X. Kane:

Part of the traditional method of learning the art of war is studying the principles of war. These principles are a set of general concepts, like holds in wrestling, and no exact group of principles is universally recognized. Some strategists combine several into one or divide one of those we show into several. The following list will serve well enough for our purpose:

It will be noted that some of these principles, if carried to their extremes, would be contradictory. They are intended to serve not as a formula for the planning of a battle, but rather as a set of guides or a checklist which the planner ignores only with peril. They are as applicable to the Technological War as to any other war. At first glance, it might seem that one principle or another might be more directly applicable to the Technological War than the others, but in fact none can be disregarded if success is to be achieved.

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The Lure of Jacobinism

The more I think about the Iraqi campaign, the more I am convinced that the chief cause of this debacle -- I fear that is none too strong a word -- is the pervasiveness of Jacobinism among the intellectual leadership of this country. The notion that "all men are created equal" is a noble concept, and useful when establishing a government by the middle class which has only begun to wrest political control from an aristocracy that controls most of the wealth. It is useful as a legal principle in a nation governed by the rule of law. Objectively, though, it is nonsense. All men -- and women -- are not created equal. Some are smarter than others. Some are so stunted as to be counted human only through religious assumptions and legal definitions. If we expand our horizons beyond our own borders, the notion becomes even more absurd. Be it heredity or be it culture or be it a combination of both, nothing is more clearly false than the assumption of the equality of cultures, societies, and the people who live in them. To say otherwise would be to say that a culture of death and destruction which seeks to enslave as sub-human all those outside that culture; which says that there can be no peace with outsiders, only conquest; is the equal of the liberal democracies that believe in the notion of equality. Carried to extremes, the assumption of general equality states that the only thing the Nazis did wrong was to lose. Of course logic is never the strong suit of the Jacobins.

Note that xenophobic cultures can be of two kinds: those who consider only their relatives and fellow tribesmen as candidates for humanity, and those who allow conversion. Of those latter, a few claim to be universal: that until the world is converted there can be no peace. There are elements of this in Christianity: being Christian is the most important thing, and thus any means of bringing heretics and sinners to the True Religion is not only justified, but the converted sinner will, upon realizing the truth, thank his oppressors for the inestimable gift of Salvation. This is the logic of the Inquisition and the Missionaries to the New World. It has pretty well vanished in the religions of Western civilization, which put much more emphasis now on the importance of free will and seek voluntary converts.

It is also the logic of the early Muslims, only they carried it to greater extremes. Their instructions were clear: bring the world to the Truth of the Prophet; and those who will not believe must be slain. Islam -- submission -- or the sword. Exceptions were made for the People of the Book, Christians and Jews, who are permitted to pay tribute in exchange for a greatly abridged freedom to worship Allah through the early and incomplete prophets; but even these exceptions are limited and revocable. As for the rest of the world, there is the House of Islam and Peace, and the House of War, and with the House of War there can be only truce, never peace.

The Jacobin view of the world does not seem to take this into account; or rather, it does, but ignores its conclusions. The Jacobin view is Jeffersonian principles carried to an extreme. All are equal, and thus all will be reasonable, and thus if given the opportunity all will choose to be like the Jacobins; and make no mistake, this is taught in almost every political science and anthropology class in the nation, and if the enlisted troops have not been forced to act as if they believe it, the officer corps, all of whom have college degrees, most certainly have been required to act that way to get those degrees. Think upon the fate of anyone in our colleges who asserts that some people are born smarter than others, and nothing the society can do will change that; and who asks for the evidence that his view is false. We do not have anything like freedom of thought or rational debate of ideas on our college campuses, and in our credentialed society one cannot become an officer without pretending to believe the current views despite the simple fact that those views are self-evidently nonsense.

And that, I think, is what happened in Iraq. No one in the command chains really thought that the people of Iraq would behave as they did. No one in higher authority anticipated the looting and plunder. A few minutes reflection on history would give many examples, but not many of our credentialed leaders learn any history. Colin Powell warned the President that "if you break it, you own it," but neither the President nor his advisors, nor the Democrats in Congress, understood, How could they? Jacobins all, they believed that "ownership" could easily be transformed from Saddam Hussein to something more responsive to our wants and needs. Why wouldn't that be simple?

So while we seek to disarm our own citizens, we didn't think to disarm a defeated enemy; and sent home, with weapons, tens of thousands of those who days before had been trying, unsuccessfully, to kill us. Why? On what logic was this done? And try as I will, I can only think it must have been Jacobinism: we were truly blind to the notion that people are generally selfish; we no longer read Hobbes; we no longer read Burke, who wrote prophetically of what Jacobinism would lead to in France; we know no more of The Terror than a few scenes from the History Channel and movies of A Tale of Two Cities.

Armies believe in Jacobin principles at their peril, and all the successful armies have learned the lesson quickly. Unfortunately, when the Jacobin principles are lost, the usual result is cynicism. God is dead. But if God lives all things are possible; if God is dead, all things are allowed. Why was Abu Ghraib a surprise? One suspects there are few Jacobins in uniform in Iraq.

There remain plenty of them here, although perhaps they are a bit chastened. Perhaps.

What is to be Done?

We are there. Perhaps we should never have gone in, but there we are. The people did not rise up to strew our way with flowers, the oil is not pumping, the Iraqis cannot feed themselves, and five billion dollars a month is barely enough to sustain the status quo. Our reserve and National Guard systems are a shambles, and the magnificent New Model Army capable of defeating any organized force on the planet finds itself harried day and night in Iraq while belittled, denigrated, shamed, depicted as beastly monsters, in the national press. When good things are accomplished they are not news, that is what everyone expected; when evil things happen that is the news. And the news, increasingly, is not reported by anyone we know, for the journalists huddle in small safe places and send their agents, former students, former frumentarii for Saddam Hussein, anyone they can hire who can pass safely through the streets to gather information and perhaps a picture or two. What is happening in Iraq? Who knows? Who can know? Many good things, surely; but the fact remains that most Western journalists will never know because the streets are not safe for Americans; the journalists can't go find out when something good happens. Nor do the Iraqis who are sick of the war want any publicity for anything we might be proud of, lest it become the focus of attention for the enemy.

Is any of this to change? If so, how?

I ask again: what is to be done?

I have some notions; but first let me hear from you.

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A PETITION to Congress regarding the young Marine in Fallujah: see mail

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IF YOU HAVE ANY INTEREST IN PRIVATE SPACE TRAVEL,SEE MAIL IMMEDIATELY. Like NOW.

I have made my phone call. You do that too.

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