The New Front

David Frum - via Brian Preston at Malkin's blog - notes that the real front in the Iraq war today is right here in the US.

The president could have made news yesterday by itemizing the reasons to regard Iraq more positively than most journalists do. He could have ticked off some of the achievements daily posted on the centcom.mil site. (Here's the latest.) He could have teased details even out of the mainstream media. (Mickey Kaus the other day noted that the reliably dour Robin Wright of the Washington Post casually mentioned in the course of her latest down-beater that Iraq has gone on a car-buying boom that has put a million new cars on the road since liberation. Kaus: "A 'car-buying boom'--another shocking failure! Don't they know about global warming?")

Or, alternatively, the president could have skipped the good news and delivered a blood, sweat, toils, and tears speech: Yes things are hard, harder in fact than expected, but the stakes remain enormous - and here is why we must win, and why I am determined to fight this thing through to victory. That would be powerful too.

As it is, though, he says nothing, and is perceived to say nothing, and soon nobody will be listening at all, if anybody still is.

As Preston notes, the war in Iraq - to the terrorists, anyway - is the secondary front. The real front is on America's front pages and evening newscasts. Preston notes the architect of this idea, perhaps the most radical and successful asymmetrical warrior in history, 20-50 years before Osama Bin Laden became the catchall keyword for the subject:

We lost Vietnam because it was the first post-modern war theatre, and we failed to appreciate that. One man did appreciate it, though, but unfortunately for us he commanded the other side. His name was General Vo Nguyen Giap, and he commanded the North Vietnamese army from the 1950s through the 1970s. In that time he defeated in succession France (at that time a world power), the United States (a superpower) and China (a rising regional power). The latter is especially interesting--Giap studied infowar under Mao Zedong in the 1930s. He used Mao's own tactics, improved by Giap's brilliance and extensive experience against us, against Mao's own creation, Communist China. Giap managed to defeat three nations whose military capabilities were vastly superior to his own. He may have been the 20th Century's most intelligent general.

Giap understood that you could lose every military battle - and after Dien Bien Phu, he did - and still win the war.

Bin Laden and his lieutenants are no doubt familiar with Giap. Editors and producers in America's newsrooms no doubt think Giap is a type of noodle soup or a bargain brand of jeans.

Posted by Mitch at August 23, 2005 12:27 PM | TrackBack