Not Like Africa

Your Humble Blogger found Easily Distracted fairly recently, and it’s an interesting blog of lengthy, rambling, high-falutin’ Big Thinks. I’m not, on the whole, in agreement with a lot of his conclusions, and furthermore I’m not particularly interested in a lot of the things he’s interested in, but for some reason I’m still enjoying the blog. A good example is the entry Don’t Play It Again, Sam, in which Tim Burke compares the mess in Iraq to his own specialty, British colonial Africa. He gives nine reasons why the Brits were better positioned to keep control, despite pocket rebellions here and there. Most of these fall into two categories:

First, what I’ll insultingly call public relations. It encompasses a variety of aspects of the way people react to things. We live in a different moral world than was true a hundred and fifty years ago; both the soldiers on the ground and the people back home would be unwilling to support some of the tactics used without either mutiny or political rebellion. Also, news gets around much faster, and the people it gets around to react in the context of the current moral world. In other words, the Brits could engage in activities, the news of which they could then suppress more or less successfully, and when the news did get out, it caused outrage on a much lower order, domestically, internationally, and in the colonies. Now, when US forces knock down a wall of a mosque’s courtyard, everybody knows it within a day, with whatever embellishments it picks up, and the reaction is largely negative.

The second category is ways in which the Iraqis differ from Africans of a hundred years ago. They are better armed and have better communication, both internal and external. Any outrage in one part of Iraq can be quickly used in another part of Iraq, or outside Iraq, to drum up support. Organized attacks are easier, and are made with weapons only by a slight degree less effective than those offensive weapons that US forces can usefully resort to. Not that the Iraqi communication network or arms are as good as the US ones, but they are much, much closer than the Africans to the British in 1900.

The problem, then, with the whole analogy is that the differences seem on first glance to be so large and broad-based that the whole analogy is suspect. And it is. But the whole exercise isn’t therefore worthless, as it brings up a host of other interesting questions.

Given what we know of the communications network and the arms of anti-US forces, and the fact that the US can’t usefully destroy cities, both because of international and domestic pressure, and because they still hope to rebuild Iraq (in our lifetimes, soon, soon), how great is our edge? How important is international and domestic pressure? How important to us is the rebuilding of Iraq? How can we exploit our edge in communications to good effect in a war like this? How does the passing of weeks and months affect those positions?

Frankly, I’m too depressed to seek out answers to practical questions such as these. I have little faith that the current leadership of our military will make successful use of the knowledge and wisdom it has, and no faith that our civilian leadership will even allow such factors to influence its political decisions. But that’s just me; I’m glad to have other people thinking about them.

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.