War With Iraq

The Issues Of An American World War Culture

By Roy D. Follendore III

August 29, 2002

I am against war, except as a last resort. Having said this, if we must choose war then we must understand the consequences. I am not merely talking about the potential dead and wounded on both sides. I n this essay I am concerned with all of the new problems that the "easy" decision to make war creates. In terms of physics, war is a form of entropy. War is therefore not a solution to a single problem, war is a means to many unexpected ends, the majority of which we do not choose. The act of winning a war is not nearly the same thing as choosing and accepting it ultimate ends.

There should be little doubt that the United States military can attack and defeat Iraq. Since World War II, America has retained the ability to insert large numbers of combined forces anywhere on earth. Terrain is a factor. Iraq is a sea of desert and mountains. The cities are like islands surrounded by kill zones. The kinds of modern weapons that the United States military would put into action would take advantage of that. Going onto open terrain against these weapons systems would be simply crazy. Moving underground into harder to kill bunkers is a foolish dead end. New ground penetrating sensing methods will illuminate bunkers, which can then be destroyed or sealed off. In either case, the military of Iraq will lose effective control of their country.

The question of the military defeat of Iraq comes down to this single simple question. What will be the cost?

When you consider this question carefully, this is primarily a civil and social, not a military question.

The cost of ordinance is easy to estimate. The formulas for estimating munitions expenditures are trivial. Similarly, given the right code and data, an estimation of military logistical resources in any conceivable dimension can be calculated by even the slowest desktop computer. The question of cost is not about the logistical cost to defeat a third rate military power. Terrain is a factor in evaluating cost and when you really dig down and begin to think about it, there can be all kinds of terrain.

If this world consisted of only Iraq and the United States, then a singularly military minded estimation of war would be in order. During the colonial days it was an accepted practice to do war for any number of reasons so that forces could occupy the enemies territory. Back then, it was common practice to incorporate the foreign land into their colonial empire. It seemed then like a simple solution, and in most cases it was, but only in the short run. In the longer term every single colony ran into the wall of culture conflict. It turns out that it is far easier to take control of a culture than not be affected by one.

Cultures are in some ways analogous to amoebas searching out others to surround and to absorb. The rule of thumb for culture is that it becomes what it eats. They therefore should choose their food wisely. You can see this where a larger and more powerful business takes over another. The smaller business culture often becomes more powerful and takes internal control of the larger because it is more cohesive and self protective. Moreover, the cultural problems that caused the smaller company to remain small and less competitive are now amplified within the larger. In order to follow this line of thinking further we should make time to examine the chain of dynamic relationships that exist between concepts of military and cultural interaction.

War is can be most simply defined as the act of forcing your enemy do what you want them to do. It is for this reason that war is an extension of politics. Politics is the act of forcing your opponent to allow you to do what you want to do. It is for this reason that politics is an extension of business. Business is the act of putting what is in your competitors pocket into your pocket. It is for this reason that business is cultural activity. Cultures are competitive organizations of people. Cultures are able to form niches and fight for survival. They constantly reorganize and reinvent themselves. This is a conceptual chain of interactions which lead to expected results. Tug on this chain at one end and things will begin to happen at the other.

We do not see this thing we call culture directly, yet it is easy to read history and accept that such a powerful organism exists. History tells us that when cultures having very different value systems clash, profound and often terrible things happen. Since cultural interactions are not only taking place within a particular geographic boundary, the evolution of what is beyond territories affects what happens internally. If the United State inserts a foreign force into Iraq, we must expect that there will be unexpected cultural complications. There will be unexpected costs. These costs would be the justification for future actions to take place which are beyond our existing ethical boundaries.

What is different today from the colonial era is that all cultures are engaged with each other. The concept of a world economy is much more than that. There exists today a world culture. All cultures are competing with each other for limited resources. Cultures are consuming each other. If we were to randomly place competitive and hostile animals in groups of isolated cages the largest most aggressive ones would win. If on the other hand we were to place all of the animals together at once, the survivors may not be the largest or the most aggressive. The reason is simple. The dynamics of aggressive competitive activities change according to how they are deployed. Fine grain factions and niche group alliances are created whenever there is competition. The modern culture is seething in constant change and large scale concepts of political dominance and military control have been outdated.

If the United States were to defeat Iraq, then America must ask itself about the implications of that chain between the military to cultural objectives. What are the total costs we must pay and what are the ultimate objectives we wish to achieve? We are discussing the total cultural implications. How will the defeat of Iraq affect the culture of the United States? Military campaign planners halt planning when the plans show that that the enemy has been defeated because they start to get into the political domain. It is not perceived as their job. The political planners halt their campaigns when they have forced their opponents out of their way because to go further would be to start to get into the way of the business of free enterprise. Business planners stop when they have established the way to get money into their pockets because to go further would be to interfere with the client culture. But there is no such restrictions on cultures.

The cultural response to military, political, and economic attacks becomes a survival response. We see that the effect in the fact that the culture of Jews have retained that response for thousands of years. We see it in the cultural response of the Palestinians to the actions of the Jews. We are seeing it with the refugee people of Tibet who maintain the will to return to their land. Perhaps we see it best in the tribal factions of Afghanistan where internal allegiances are easily bartered for gain. The entire continent of Africa has been awash in dynamic cultural warfare and it is the reason why actions of genocide, starvation and slavery are acceptable practices. The fact is that for societies, these things become acceptable because the alternative is perceived to be cultural dissolution. We must not forget that this is true for the United States as well as for Iraq. The cost of invoking a culture of war involves the acceptance of new value systems that can not be estimated in terms of dollars. There are unaccountable impacts to our value system. We should therefore not take war as a simple end game solution set because we can not predict the cost of the end game we seek. If we are not going to become an isolationist country, Americans must come to understand this.

At this point in time, an invasion of Iraq is only inevitable if we choose to make it so. There can be other solutions. The development of nuclear capabilities by Iraq becomes inevitable if the cultures of this planet chooses it to be so. Only one thing is certain and that is change. This will situation can go away and it can reappear regardless of our military actions. The United State of America can not continue the military role we have had in the past. This world has been reinvented and American leaders seem to be ignoring that fact. Political and military cultures may be able to choose to engage or disengage from specific activities, but they can not accurately estimate the cost of their campaigns.

If war with Iraq is to take place then it must be swift and decisive. We must know exactly what we want to achieve in the short term. We must be prepared to settle for very expensive short term solutions. We should limit our cultural interaction. Americans should not be left in place to govern, advise or keep peace. The United States can not afford to do otherwise.

Ultimately, war is a horror for America, not an Executive decision by a President.

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