Sam Smith - To understand why Obama and others in Washington
have become so obsessed with drones, it's important to remember that
traditional warfare has been a total failure for nearly seven decades
and that our "military experts" may finally be admitting it.
America's
only successful invasion in that period was Grenada with a population
of 92,000 (The other possible claim, Panama, doesn't count because we
just exchanged drug dealing dictators).
The shift away
from conventional warfare has been going on since Vietnam and, in fact,
that struggle is not a bad marker for the end of a century of
extraordinarily deadly conflict beginning with the Civil War. We are
taught that mass war deaths are an inevitable fact of human history, but
statistically that's not the case, and bad as Iraq and Afghanistan have
been, they experienced a marked drop in war fatalities compared to,
say, Korea or either world wars.
Why was the previous
century so deadly? I once asked a historian why neither side in the
Civil War had used the guerrilla tactics of the Revolution that had
worked so well. His response was that the generals on both sides had
learned their skills at West Point and played by its rules.
Clearly,
modernized military bureaucracy was one deadly factor but so was the
explosion of military technology. Both relegated the human - including
its bodies and brains - to a minor role in the action.
Yet
in the end it proved a failure. Little things interrupted like the the
end of the draft, an economy that demanded global customers more than
global enemies, the soaring costs of weaponry, and the failure of West
Point to figure out how to defeat those who refused to fight by its
rules.
And now our leaders are trying to extricate themselves from two of the dumbest wars they ever fought.
The
shift from huge divisions to small drones can be seen as a move from
the military approach to war to that of the mobster - and from weapons
of mass destruction or those of crass destruction. Think of America as
seeking to control the world the way a Mafia boss would control a city
and the dynamics of the change begin to become clear.
To be sure, this is less deadly, at least until you remember Dylan Thomas line about World War II air raids, "After the first death there is no other." We have moved from being soldiers to being murderers.
In
a way, 9/11 taught the lesson. If you can wreck the most powerful
country in the world the way a few planes did on that occasion, who
needs an invasion any more?
Of course, that's the danger. We can kill cheaply and precisely. But so can they, whoever they are.
Which is why, if Obama and his ilk have their way, the new war will never end. There will always be another they.
