In today’s Friday interview, Carolina Journal’s Mitch Kokai discusses the War on Terror with historian Larry Schweikart, author of the recent book America’s Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror. The interview aired on Carolina Journal Radio (click here to find the station near you).
Kokai: You are pretty confident this war is winnable.
Schweikart: I think we already won it in November 2004 in Fallujah. I think if you look at both the incredible casualty levels the enemy has taken, which none of the news accounts ever mentioned, they don’t ever even treat that like it is an issue, like there is some inexhaustible supply of these terrorists. The Japanese found out in World War II there was a very finite and limited supply of Kamikaze pilots. After the first wave died, their recruiting dried up, like “Who wants to die for the emperor? Not me, not me.” And they had trouble recruiting after that. And the same thing is happening in the Middle East. After that first wave of people went in and we annihilated them, they are finding it very, very difficult to recruit these fighters. I think from a historical perspective we will look back in 30 years and say, “Okay, we won the battle of Iraq,” and I hate the term “War in Iraq” because the battle in Iraq and the battle in Afghanistan are just two battles in the War on Terror. Maybe two fronts, but they aren’t separate wars any more than Sicily was a separate war from the Pacific. So I think historically speaking, we are going to look back and see that probably November 2004 was the turning point — the death of Zarqawi, it is eerily similar to the shooting down of Yamamoto in 1943. The thing is, historically if you look at insurgencies — guerilla wars — they typically take between five and eight years to win and overwhelmingly the government — and that would be us in this case — has won three-fourths, almost 80 percent of those wars.
Kokai: You mention that five to eight year time frame. Some have said this is a different kind of war, we are not fighting a sovereign state. So fighting terrorism could lead to a conflict that lasts decades.
Schweikart: People say, how can you fight a war on terrorism? It is not a nation or a state. And I would have to remind people we have defeated three “isms” already in the 20th Century — fascism, communism, and Bushidoism. Now it so happened that most of those were contained within a certain state, but not communism. We defeated communism and yet there are communist states still around. Heck there is even a communist still at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. We defeated the “ism” without having to defeat all the states. That is entirely possible. The Cold War took 40 years. I don’t think this war will take that long. I think especially after you set up the book ends of Afghanistan and Iraq around Iran, which is clearly in the targets, I mean eventually you will have to deal with Iran and Syria. Once those four are out of the way, I think you’ve got pretty much the war won and then we are into the mopping up and pacification stages.
Kokai: Earlier you mentioned several “isms,” but what about pessimism? A lot of people, including those capable of drawing a lot of publicity, don’t think we can win the war in Iraq.
Schweikart: You always need to be concerned that it doesn’t get to be so overwhelming that it begins to erode the morale of the majority, and so far I don’t see that. The majority of the American people are still behind the troops, and still understand that this is a desperate and important mission. There is another way to look at that, though, as I say in the last chapter of my book — protestors make soldiers better. Ever since World War I we have had anti-war protestors in every war going back to the Revolution. I mean people were thrown in jail as Emerson, or Thoreau were thrown in jail in the Mexican war, you had draft riots against the Lincoln administration in the Civil War, William Jennings Bryan was opposed to the Spanish-American War. World War II was the only war without significant numbers of anti-war protestors and even then you had anti-war protestors. But what has tended to happen since World War I is that anti-war protestors have found they have no impact on American public opinion by emphasizing either collateral damage to enemy noncombatants or American brutality/barbarism. In every war you are going to get some rogues that go nuts and do things that they shouldn’t do…you can’t get away from that. But as a whole, the United States does not engage in these kinds of acts. In terms of emphasizing enemy noncombatants, we were bombing cities in Germany; no Americans really cared about that. They wanted to get the war over. So the only tactic that the anti-war protestors found really worked was to emphasize American casualties. That is the whole Cindy Sheehan thing; until she went off the deep end, she was having an effect because here is a mom who lost a son and it is this whole thing — would you want to be that mother, that father? Ever since World War I the U.S. Army especially has recognized this. They had a study called the “Casualty Issue” in which they said essentially we can’t take high casualties; the American public will not tolerate intensely high casualties — Civil War-era casualties — ever again. So what they began to do, and it has permeated our system ever since, is to engage in relentless training, whereby to lower casualty rates our soldiers are by far the best trained in the world, the best armed, the best supplied, the best medical evac to the point that in Iraq, the survival rates are astronomical from war wounds. And so what that has done, ironically, is to make our soldiers better, more lethal than ever. Which I am sure the anti-war people would hate to hear but it is a fact.
Kokai: The title of your book is America’s Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror. So why will the U.S. win?
Schweikart: There are seven main points. One, we have an army that is primarily citizen soldiers. We’ve had a few drafts in the past — interestingly I was just reading Max Hastings’ book Warriors in which he dealt with the criticisms of the American infantry in Europe and it seemed that the draftees were largely criticized by the British and the Europeans and the Germans didn’t think very much of the draftees. But the volunteer units and the airborne units, the specialized units that had the heavy training, they were terrified of those units. And the same is true now because we have citizen soldiers who are volunteers, free people who can vote. They are willing to undergo training like no other. As a result we push autonomy down to the lowest levels, we entrust our sergeants with levels of autonomy that are the envy of colonels in the Middle East. We expect people to know the jobs of the man above and below him. We learn from loss. Now that is a no-brainer to Westerners but there are many cultures, including the one we are fighting now, that to lose is a shame — it is not just a loss, it is a shame. And to admit you’ve lost and say, “Why did we lose?” that is a double shame. So it is very difficult for those cultures to learn from loss.