the new calculus
VICTORY AS VANISHING POINT IN THE AGE OF TERROR
by
LOUIS RENÉ BERES
___________________________
Louis
René Beres is Professor of Political Science at Purdue
University. He is author of many books and articles dealing
with international politics. His columns have appeared in the
New York Times, Washington Post, The Jerusalem
Post and OUPblog
(Oxford University Press).
We
lost the Vietnam War. There is little reasonable ambiguity about
this judgment, nor can there be any apparent consolation. Losing,
after all, is assuredly worse than winning. And victory is always
better than defeat.
But
what if there is no longer a meaningfully determinable way to
calculate victory and defeat? What if it should turn out that
the Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Syrian wars will have been fought
without ever being able to ascertain the victory versus defeat
outcomes? With such a future, we would have to abide, inter
alia, a pattern of endlessly confused war terminations, a pattern
potentially more destabilizing than one that would exhibit endlessly
conspicuous failures.
Whatever
our current views on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria,
one analytic judgment is certain. Going forward, traditional
notions of victory and defeat will have diminishing or little
relevance in measuring our military operations. This instructive
indictment also holds true (but even more so) for the ongoing
and increasingly inchoate American “war on terror.”
To be sure, this Bush-era term is no longer in fashion, but
the underlying concept remains very much the same.
In
the past, whenever our country’s wars had more-or-less
readily identifiable beginnings and endings, declarations of
victory and defeat could still make military and political sense
– at least in principle. Today, however, when we are engaged
in simultaneous interstate and counterterrorism conflicts that
will never close with any ordinary war-terminating (treaty or
armistice) agreements, and that are animated by compelling promises
of power over death (“martyrdom”), such declarations
are bound to be hollow or premature. Now, it will be difficult
to challenge, the core lines of demarcation between conflict
and peace have become blurred, merely distracting, meaningless,
and very, very gray.
For
the future, there will likely be no recognizable enemy surrenders.
Instead of parades and flowers, there will only be interconnected
plateaus of exhaustion, suffering, and – of course –
an exasperatingly empty rhetoric.
Always
– and this never really changes – we can expect
the utterly humiliating and debilitating rhetoric. What does
this all really mean for America? At a minimum, it suggests
that we should no longer cling desperately to manifestly outdated
and futile strategic expectations. No, at some point, at least,
truth will have to have its correct place, and truth, as we
must already know, is always exculpatory.
The
ritualistic pleas of both politicians and generals that we should
always plod on till some glorious “victory” can
no longer be grounded in any serious thought. Accepted too uncritically,
these grotesquely vain exhortations would only lead the United
States to further insolvency, and to a state of more-or-less
absolute vulnerability. It’s very nice, of course, to
plan to “make America great again,” but any such
plan represents little more than a tactical obfuscation. It
is always just an unspeakably shallow witticism. Surprisingly,
perhaps, there is also a significant upside to these changing
meanings of victory and defeat.
Here,
what is true for America, is also true for its principal enemies.
Like us, these assorted foes must now also confront potentially
huge homeland vulnerabilities in the absence of any prior military
defeat. Properly understood by our leaders, this largely unforeseen
mutuality of weakness could soon be turned to our own critical
advantage. Once we can acknowledge that our strategic goals
may now have to be far more modest than traditional ideas of
“victory,” our indispensable exercise of world power
could begin to become much less visceral, and thus far more
thoughtful.
In
the final analysis, as the ancient Greeks and Macedonians had
already recorded in their principal historical texts, war –
though a “violent preceptor” – is ultimately
an intellectual affair, a calculating contest of “mind
over mind,” not one of mind over “matter.”
Even if this country is not yet prepared for a more generally
reinvigorating blast of Emersonian “high thinking,”
our military plans will still need a far more explicit grounding
in “mind.”
