Perspectives
History -- one of America's blind spots
AMERICA, today, is obviously divided at home and bitterly resented abroad -- a position the global military hegemony can ill-afford to be in. Worse, it confronts a worldwide terrorist movement with an apocalyptic streak, and finds itself in difficult counter-insurgency battles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even a convincingly re-elected President Bush could hardly allay the anxiety and recrimination among the policy elites and a sizeable chunk of general public; neither could he offer the kind of course corrections that the US allies were hoping for.
Indeed, US foreign policy options had never been more limited with the collapse in its prestige and influence. Yet, the US and its allies are in dire need to find enough common ground to deal prudently with the realities that face them.
The tragedy of September 11, 2001, did bring a rejuvenation of both American domestic and transatlantic solidarity. On September 12, 2001, America's Nato allies invoked the alliances' central article of collective defence, declaring the terrorist attacks on the US to have also constituted an attack on all of the 19 signatories of the Nato charter.
The solemn declaration was followed by many more offers of practical military help for war than the Bush Administration was inclined to accept. By the time the Talibans were routed in late 2001 the US had assembled one of history's most impressive global coalitions to combat transnational Islamic terrorism. Yet, a measure of arrogance on the part of America was evident from the moment the US chose -- out of the context and without reason -- to escalate the anti-terror war, and in March 2003, it invaded Iraq -- this time facing a near-solid wall of world opposition.
George Bush entered office in 2001 with no ambition to be a foreign policy radical. The neo-conservative intellectuals whom he brought with him, however, came into administration with a set of bold ideas about the unilateral use of US power. Emboldened by the quick fall of the Talibans, the neo-conservative strategic doctrine was rolled out in a series of belligerent policy postures, exemplified by Bush's infamous "axis of evil" statement, his call for pre-emptive war for regime changes, his claim of US's position of unparalleled military strength, his desire to establish a balance of power that favoured human freedom, and so on.
There was arrogance galore, at least in a totemic tableau of Bush's long election campaign in which he alighted in full flight-suit from a Viking jet that landed on an aircraft carrier in front of a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," while the United States was still stuck neck-deep in the quagmire of Iraq -- with only military's higher echelon ensconced in Baghdad's Green Zone. In display of a certain amount of hubris, the administration missed many opportunities to extricate itself from the Iraqi morass and ran after inconsequential "surges."
In 2001, the new American administration was required to replace the outmoded analysis of terrorist networks with a deeper understanding of how both state and non-state forces threatened the security of America and its allies. The fact of the matter was that the powerful myth of having defeated a superpower with a handful of Arab volunteers under his command fuelled CIA created bin Laden's ambition and propaganda, turning him into an authentic folk hero. It appears in hindsight that an incipient Arab civil war aggravated by the 1991 Gulf war victory and its aftermath blurred American understanding of what was happening.
Militants who had been fighting the Arab regimes then redirected their fight against what they saw as the American bulwark of those regimes. The Americans never wanted to analyse or understand that this was what resulted in September 11. In the process, the historical dynamics were altogether ignored.
In the same way, when the US Marines landed on the beaches of Da Nang in 1965, history was poised to repeat itself as the Americans were poised to repeat the mistakes made by the French a decade earlier at Dien Bien Phu. They had come with the belief that the "racially inferior gooks" wouldn't be able to stand up to the superiority of American arms. They soon discovered that their belief was entirely misplaced. They dropped 7.8 million tones of bombs of all kinds, compared to 2.06 million tons dropped during the Second World War, and sprayed 75 million litres of defoliants including dioxin over verdant fields, forests and hamlets of South Vietnam. Yet the resistance not only grew, it grew also in intensity.
Ten years later, having employed everything in their conventional arsenal, the Americans withdrew, defeated, disgraced and traumatised. Their arrogance resulted in seven million Vietnamese casualties, and their own million dead.
The guerilla resistance they are now fighting both in Afghanistan and Iraq is of a different character. It is characterised by small-scale engagements at the time and place of the guerilla's choosing. While the occupation army seeks battles, guerillas avoid it. The guerillas do everything to attack the minds of the enemy's forces, because once the mind is defeated the war is won. They are kept updated by the wide intelligence network, which is supported by the people. After having gone through the Vietnam ordeal, the Americans are not supposed to be oblivious of these facts of history.
History is one of the Americans' blind spots. They are once again counting the cost of their failure to learn from it. But military history teaches that only fools do not learn from their own mistakes. They can still make amends by swallowing their arrogance and going home -- never to return and defy history again.
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