Small Wars ii
Several months back I was trying to write a long piece about Iraq which I was going to put up as an essay link. I intended to write about Gil Merom's book
How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failure of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the US in Vietnam
as part of this and took some notes to that end. Then Winter break was over and I had to go back to work. I never got around to finishing that post, but since I intended to (so I told myself) I mostly avoided stepping on its topics. I have taken that piece which I was writing in Userland's outliner and have posted it as is on the Essays and Stories page NeoCon's Piracy still in outline and decidedly draft form. Eventually I'll finish it and replace the draft. This lets me move on.
What Gil Merom indicates he is trying to do with this book is look at the two main theory's on asymmetrical warfare, and how they deal with fact that large rich democracies often lose small wars. In the course of this he proposes a third way.
The first, named realist, looks largely at the resources each combatant commands, it is biased towards measurable things: wealth, material and technological resources, population, and above all the military order of battle. From this it predicts a winner. It always predicts the side who has more. If this is not the case this model can only accomplish ex post facto rationalization - about how the initial accounting may not have been complete or geography and other overlooked natural resources favored the insurgency.
Against this is staked the balance of power, or balance of wills model. This trys to take into account more of the intangible sides of an insurgency, particularly the motivational aspects which side had more to lose: The U S for, instance, trying to keep one domino out of many upright, or Ho Chi Minh and his idea of a united (communist) Vietnam. This method will assign a victor based on the stakes of the outcome. Its reasoning can seem too pat, like a sports announcer intoning after a game is concluded that one team "came to play and just wanted it more".
Merom building on observations of the Vietnam war, and particularly Israel's war in Lebanon believes that in the case of democracies at least the frisson occurring between the leaders and people of the democracy more nearly determines the outcome. He conjectures the existence of a "normative gap" between state (the governing elites) and society (the people). This is the difference, and measure of distance between the opinions and understandings of the two. Merom tacitly acknowledges that there are things a state has to do or its leading elite believe that they have to do (or desire to do) in order to survive. Things just to maintain the status qou which would prick the conscience of the average member of the society. Ordinarily the normative gap is small enough that the elites have a comfortable degree of freedom. When a small war begins, especially if not accompanied by a general consensus, the process outlined in the his table (Small Wars | previous post)
will begin.
In a democracy the people are nominally in command of the production and wealth of the nation. The soldiers and sailors that fill the ranks, and their families are voters. In order to embark on foreign adventures acquiescence is necessary to mobilize and use resources. If the war is straightforward, short and predictable this is never questioned by more than a few. When an insurgency creates a need for an additional outlay of resources, or when fighting an insurgency causes casualties. These facts bloom as information in a democratic society, and a second front of the war opens in the marketplace of ideas. As dialogue and debate concerning the war begin; demand for, and supply of, information about the conduct of the war, its initial reasons and rationalization take place. The control over the war - the combined consensus position shifts towards society, who are generally understood to hold only nascent inchoate opinions on such management tasks. If control of the insurgency is sought by resorting to ever sterner, repressive and violent measures, the initial expedient opposition (opposition to cost and casualties) will be joined by moral opposition. If the reaction of the ruling regime is to to become deceptive, coercive to engage in obfuscation, misrepresentation and censorship at home, then a second expansion of the normative gap occurs. The people begin to form a fully realize view of their own and recognize this set of opinions as being different from that of the regime (the ruling elite - societies have other elites). Consensus for prosecution of the war comes apart.
Fighting an insurgency becomes as matter of nuance, considered choice and experience. As much if not more than it is a matter of "resolve and will" 1, 2. After Vietnam any campaign against an insurgency and nation-building was understood to need to be professionally managed and free from any hypocrisy if the message was to come through. Planned, not ad hoc. The pull of gravity - the daily trial. The human instinct for reprisal, and rigidity in the face of confrontation. This filtered through the institutional push of the military to fight. The mixed and shaded objectives of the Coalition Provisional Authority. These have proved stronger than any common sense apprehension of the progress of things, to diminish rather than increase the armed opposition. To assuage its causes - fear of domination by the U S, or one ethnic group by another. Or civil war. To steer away from increasingly unsympathetic and untenable subjugation of native Iraqi sovereignty, and in this way stay inside the initial normative gap.
11:34:30 PM  ;;
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