The American Spectator

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What have the various Afghanis and global spectators learned from Operation Enduring Freedom? Well, it may be that they have learned that the penalty for allowing a rogue regime to hijack a state is really not so bad, in the grand scheme of things. The West will delicately remove the conspicuously bad apples with a military campaign, which, while under way, won't be perceptibly worse for the masses than day-to-day existence under the rogue regime was, and life will go on with a shrug. In contrast, the Germans and the Japanese learned in their bones, every last one of them, that the absolute worst thing a people can do is allow a bellicose, authoritarian regime to lead them into a war against civilization. The punishment inflicted by the world community was collective, horrific and massive.

The thing that advocates of the surgical, "tumor model" approach to rogue states seem to discount is that regimes, all regimes, govern by the consent of the governed. We have become accustomed to thinking that this is an exclusive property of democracies, but it is in fact a property of all polities. Elections are simply one way (and no doubt the preferred way!) of expressing consent. The absence of an uprising is another way of expressing consent. There is no regime that cannot be overthrown if the populace is willing to pay the price: one is reminded of the late Shah of Iran. Saddam Hussein is in power in Iraq because the residents of that miserable domain decide every day that they prefer the risks of a Western military attack to the risks of rising up against the Ba'athist regime. They are thinking, rational human beings just like us, and their cost-benefit analysis yields this unfortunate result. In view of the Western powers' "vegetarian" approach to war in the current era, this calculation is not obviously wrong. The probability that a rank-and-file Iraqi will be killed or wounded by an American strike, if he does not rise up against Saddam, is much less than the probability he will be killed most painfully if he does. Why would "Iraq light" change this calculation going forward, should another psycho dictator make a power grab in Baghdad?

Dresden and Hiroshima changed hearts and minds. I think that Tora Bora did not.

How on earth do our finest strategic thinkers exempt the populations of rogue states from responsibility for their rulers' behavior? We in the United States enjoy our blessed liberty because our forebears had the courage to risk everything -- everything -- in an armed rebellion against the then-superpower. Why do we require less of others?

p>I fear we are teaching the troubled countries of the world that they have no need to walk the painful, scary and difficult path to liberal governance, much as our misguided compassion has led us to teach welfare recipients that they have no need to become productive: after all we will, in the end, pick up the tab. We are teaching them to use Western military intervention as a relatively painless mechanism for periodic regime change. What is it, exactly, that will cause this to change? br> -- Paul Kotik br> Plantation, FL /p>

I was only a sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps way back in the 50's but I still remember our basic battle tenet that we hit the enemy fast and avoid giving him valuable time to counterattack by holding ground rather than continuing to "punish" his forces with rapid strikes.

I would submit that General Franks has and continues to act in direct opposition to that tenet of battle and as long as he does our men are going to pay a higher cost in life than we need to and only embolden Saddam's counterattacks.

p>But then, what does an old jarhead know? br> -- Ken Wyman br> Huntsville, AL /p>

topics:
Military, Iraq, Iran, Africa