Stupid? Cowardly? NOT!!!

We Americans are living in a dream world. We hear that al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and many other groups are cowardly for failing to fight us straight up and that basically they’re all cut from the same cloth. This comes from the propaganda emanating from the White House and its apologists. I don’t blame them for putting out this malarkey since previous administrations did the same thing with world communism during the Cold War. But that’s how we got enmeshed in Vietnam with communism being seen as a lock step monolith directed straight from the Kremlin. Unfortunately – and unforgivably – the names on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial are mute testimony that when we left that beleaguered country nothing much happened, except the fall of much of world communism as we thought we knew it.

Whenever I tune in on el Rushbo, I learn that the cowards of Hezbollah are hiding behind the innocent residents of Southern Lebanon and undermining the Israelis’ efforts to kill them. Am I missing something here? Hezbollah terrorists should stand up and exchange fire with the obviously superior force in front of them? Let’s begin with the assumption that anyone standing up to superior firepower simply to show they’ve got guts is stupid and unbalanced. I’m pretty much convinced that that’s not the case. As a boy, I played the old card game of whist for hours on end with Arabs and can assure you that many of them are mighty smart – a lot smarter than a lot of Irish Americans. Intelligence is not one of their short suits.

There is a letter to the editor in today’s Washington Post from Raymond V. Rush of Stanardsville, Virginia that inspired this posting - it’s the last letter of three, in case you click onto the link – which points out the obvious stupidity of the traditional view of insurgencies.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/04/AR2006080401370_2.html

First, let’s try to back down some of the propaganda. Labels limit our ability to see these people for what they are. Hezbollah has far different goals than al Qaeda. Sunni Baathists in Iraq may well be blowing up Shiites, but they’re quite different in their goals from al Qaeda and Hezbollah. Hamas is significantly different from Hezbollah. While Hamas and Hezbollah both want to damage – even destroy – Israel, they have significantly very different objectives.

If we can’t see that most of the insurgents, terrorists, and whatever other bad labels we apply to people revolting against the status quo around the world are not products of the same cookie cutter, we’ll never get anywhere in attempting to deal with the problems at hand. Much of the confusion goes back to the initial reaction to 9/11 by President Bush. He lumped together every group at war with established governments as international terrorists, and we’ve spent the next five years trying to separate them in our minds.

One thing that is becoming clearer to me – and which I’ve recently started blog about – is that modern armed forces are no longer organized properly to deal with their enemies. Massed attacks are no longer viable. The Battle of the Bulge, Stalingrad, and the human wave attacks by the Chinese army during the Korean are out – period. The overwhelming fire power of modern armies makes such attacks suicidal. Insurgencies and terrorism are the tools of choice by nations and groups who can’t stand up to their adversaries frontally.

So in Iraq, we find the fire power of our forces insufficient to overcome the insurgents. The war raging in Lebanon is beginning to show that the best and most modern army in the region – that of Israel – is not equipped to deal with the problem of rousting out dedicated foes fighting in the guise of local residents.

Israel and the U.S. have re-think their positions in the region. The overwhelming conventional advantages that carried the Israelis to rapid victories over Arab states in the past are not nearly as effective as they used to be. The insurgents in Lebanon are extremely well trained and adequately equipped. Clearly, they’ve been paying attention to Vietnam, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and our own ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are not stupid. They are not cowardly. They learned a lot over the past decades, and we seem not to have kept pace.

It is also clear that much of the reasoning behind the maintenance of land conquered in previous Israeli victories is suspect. To occupy territory as a buffer against infantry, armored and artillery incursions against Israel proper no longer makes sense if such attacks aren’t coming. It also doesn’t make sense to spend lives and treasure defending territory from artillery when rocket attacks clearly demonstrate that the range of these weapons is well beyond all the strategic territory that can be defended.

As Lebanon and Palestinians in Gaza suffer and as Israelis die fighting amorphous insurgencies – call them terrorists if it makes the reader feel better - the strongest power in the region, Iran, becomes stronger by the day without losing a single soldier.

The rationale for all of our actions in the region over the past five years appears wrong to me. We’ve got to create divided government in November and elect a Democrat president in ’08. This crowd is all wrong as far as I can see. Their only answer is to stay the course, and that ain’t gonna do it.

Blog on!

Wild Bill