On Lulofs' thoughts about war: The good old days you remember? Never happened

By John Haas


Best Defense guest
respondent

Sean Lulofs's "Thoughts about Fallujah" is a welcome
addition to what's becoming a wide-ranging debate over America's strategic
posture at this difficult time in our history. This is a debate we all need to
be having, and Lulofs's sincerely expressed view is an important one to attend
to. It is worthy of our attention if only because it is representative of the
thinking of the vast majority of our fellow citizens.

Lulofs presents us with a jeremiad: Once upon a time,
Americans got the job done; now, "we're just not built to win
anymore." What happened? Don't blame the military -- it is still as
effective as ever, or would be, if only our national leadership wasn't so
"piss-poor." Of course our leaders only become our leaders because
the people have elected them, so they have a share of the blame, too. Our
leaders are more concerned with "public opinion" than doing what
needs to be done to win decisively, says Lulofs. These same people then turn
around and refuse to "hold our leaders accountable for completing the
mission of the war." Of course, that not only the U.S. military, but
militaries worldwide, have routinely blamed the politicians and the people as
insufficiently supportive of their men (and women) under arms should not dissuade us
from considering that, this time, the complaint may be right.

America's military declension, says Lulofs, has been an affair of "the
past 50 years." He appears to hold Eisenhower -- with his willingness to
cut our losses in Korea in 1953 -- responsible for initiating our losing
streak. It's unclear why he begins there. It was Truman, after all, who
"lost" China and went on to reject Douglas MacArthur's victory
strategy in Korea, settling instead for containment in Asia. It was Truman also
who failed to take on the task of driving the Red Army from Eastern Europe,
settling for containment there, too. By my estimate, Lulofs should be claiming
that the United States has labored under a cloud of infamy for at least the
past 70 years. Be that as it may, Lulofs knows who is responsible for America's
decline: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Clinton,
another Bush, and Obama, and all the voters who elected them and then failed to
hold them to account.

Not content to complain, Lulofs points toward a solution, too: If America wants
victories of the sort that gave us "the defeat of the Axis powers" in
World War II -- our last decisive military victory -- it will need to overcome
its "unwilling"-ness to win, rediscover its "willpower,"
and demonstrate "resolve." In other words, international affairs
aren't very different than football games. We may be down for the moment, but
it's still only halftime, and coach is reminding us that if we could only dig
deep, find some gumption, and believe in "true victory" again, the
good old days will come back.

As I said, large numbers of Americans find this sort of analysis thoroughly
attractive: Part Ralph Waldo Emerson, part Émile Coué, part Dale Carnegie,
and thoroughly Hollywood, it's sentimental and naïve talk of the sort we've
used for more than a century to silence our insecurities and convince ourselves
we really can "get out there and shine!" It's also enormously
dangerous. One would think Americans had learned by now that the world isn't as
susceptible as we've wished to "I think I can"-ism. 

But, then, what about those good old days? The ones when America won decisive
victories over enemies that only understand "strength and force"?

The first thing to be said is there were precious few of them. Lulofs's notion
of "victory" is at the heart of what Russell Weigley called "the American way of war." Articulated most
forcefully by Douglas MacArthur, it has always been more a dream than a reality -- at times a deadly
aspiration, and also, given our blithe ahistoricism, a myth.

Of the dozens of armed conflicts the United States has engaged in over the
centuries, only three have followed the decisive "victory" script: the
Indian Wars, the Civil War, and World War II. All had unique features that
cannot be replicated by simple force of will.

Each, for example, was perceived at the time as an existential conflict, a zero-sum
game where it was believed that America's future and well-being was at stake. Failure,
we believed, was not an option. (Most historians probably agree with those
estimates, though they might offer some caveats on the Indian Wars.)

That kind of belief, as necessary as it is for sustaining the kind of massive
military efforts required to produce "victory," cannot simply be
willed into existence out of thin air. President Obama can talk until he's blue
in the face, but he will not convince Americans that the United States has an
existential stake in determining which faction of kleptocratic Pashtuns rules Kabul.

These "victorious wars" were massive commitments (well, two of the
three were). Each death in the Iraq War brings immeasurable pain to those
closely involved, but the national commitment to the war is reflected in the
numbers: About one per 20,000 Americans of military age gave the ultimate
sacrifice. One in 25 Americans of military age died in the Civil War; if it
were held today, with losses proportional to our current population, there
would be around 7,000,000 casualties. In World War II, with 12,000,000 men and
women under arms, about one in 160 military age males died, and the financial
burden was huge -- the U.S. government spent more than 120 percent of GDP to
achieve that victory.

Is there any way Americans could come to believe that whatever (considerable)
effort it would take to pacify Ramadi is a rational policy option?

The Civil and Second World Wars each involved an onerous draft, significant
taxes, the reorganization of the private sector around the war effort,
troubling infringements on civil liberties (far beyond merely collecting
metadata), and the mobilization of huge propaganda campaigns to keep the people
in line.

Again, eliminating the most extreme of Sunni Islamists from Fallujah may sound
attractive, but even our most robust effort would still leave only slightly
less extreme Sunni Islamists in charge. I doubt any amount of propaganda will
convince Americans of the wisdom of sacrificing whatever blood and treasure it
would take to secure a more desirable outcome.

If you want a World War II-style victory, you need to put forth a World War
II-level effort. That's simply not going to happen unless we face a World War
II-level threat.

As for the Indian Wars, we will not see their like again, so we should expunge
them from our memories, at least insofar as they beguile us into believing
they're anything like a model for the future. The Indians could offer
courageous and effective resistance on occasion, but the
final outcome was never in doubt. Disorganized (relative to the United States),
out-manned, out-armed, demoralized, and (most of all) devastated by diseases,
the white man was winning the West, no matter what.

I won't elaborate here on the Revolution, 1812, the Mexican War, or Grenada,
but none of them even begin to rise to the level of "decisive military
victories." Indeed, even World War II -- our most iconic war -- didn't end
quite the way we recall. In Europe, it was a Soviet war: Without their effort,
with its massive casualties, eroding the Wehrmacht, it is doubtful the Allies
could have prevailed. Indeed, they might never have gotten off Omaha Beach. In
Asia, even our atomic bombs couldn't compel the Japanese to agree to a truly
unconditional surrender. The threat of Soviet occupation played a much larger
role in Japan's capitulation than we prefer to appreciate.

In sum, the good old days weren't quite what we think, and our recent failures
are more a salutary recognition of reality than a failure to measure up to the
standards of the greatest generation. We have fought the way we've fought for
the past 70 years not because "on or about December 1947, American character changed," but because we are fighting different
enemies with much less at stake. If we ever align the America of our
imaginations with the America that really has been and is, we may find
ourselves waking to a vision that, while less romantically satisfying, might
also find us inflicting less unnecessary tragedy on ourselves in the pursuit of
glories that never were.

John H. Haas , Ph.D.,
teaches U.S. foreign relations, American history, and the political geography
of North Africa and the Middle East at  Bethel College
in Indiana .