Why We Fight--With Restraint

I am often bemused and frustrated when I hear people on the left gloat that "America is losing the war" in Iraq. In the first place I don't think it's true. But, it does beg the question, "why are we 3+ years into this war with no definitive end in sight?"

No one in their right minds believes the U.S. can be defeated militarily in Iraq. "What about Vietnam?" some say. Students of history know that we were winning that war on the battlefield, but lost it when the media spun the defeat of the Vietcong during Tet into a loss for our troops. Grisly images of American casualties on the nightly news broadcasts eventually turned public opinion against that war and, subsequently, America lost the political will to continue the fight. This loss of political will to fight was the first of many over the next 35 years (excluding the first Gulf War) that emboldened Al 'Qaida into believing that the U.S. was a paper tiger, precipitating numerous terrorist attacks against our citizens/interests around the world and culminating in the 9/11 atrocities.

Even without the use of the devastating unconventional weaponry at our disposal, we could end the fight with brutality and ruthlessness. But, that would involve genocidal warfare on an unimaginable scale, which would not be tolerated by the American public. So, we allow our enemies enough room to fight back at the cost of the lives of some of our finest men and women.

Any leverage our enemies have over us on the battlefield is a direct result of our self-imposed restraint. The question is, "why do we allow them to fight back?".

In this article, Shelby Steele traces what he calls "this new minimalism in war" to white guilt. Sounds strange at first, but some of his arguments are compelling.

Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly disparate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort--only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.

Steele argues that white guilt requires the U.S. to fight a two-front war: one militarily and one of "dissociation" from our history of racism and imperialism. He writes,

...though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war--and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past.

This hyper-sensitivity to the stigmatization of their objectives causes our leaders to impose severe limitations on their execution of the war. Steele continues,

To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a "unilateralist cowboy"? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism.

As they say, read the whole article. Steele's case for why America is so restrained in the execution of this war is, in my opinion, compelling.