The Ming Report

Inevitibility of Victory

August 2, 2007 - In 1947 a young John F. Kennedy wrote to Claiborne Pell saying of World War II, “It turned my father and brothers and sisters upside down and sucked all the oxygen out of our smug and comfortable assumptions.” Kennedy was planning his 1948 maiden campaign for Congress in the Boston district from which his grandfather had gone to Washington. He was a genuine war hero whose parents had lost a son and a son-in-law in combat. In his letter to Pell he said, “Now, after all that we experienced and lost in the war, we finally understood that there was nothing inevitable about us.”

He was writing of his family but he might as well have been writing of his country. Korea and then Vietnam were to prove that there was nothing inevitable about US military power. In neither conflict was the United States able to impose its will on a vastly less powerful foe. Kennedy himself would be drawn into Vietnam by that shared American belief that victory in any conflict in which its military was engaged was inevitable. Johnson’s escalation was driven by a sincere belief that a US military victory was inevitable. Nixon’s secret plan to end the war with air power was built on a similar foundation.

The experience of the short 1991 conventional campaign in Kuwait and the subsequent air campaign in support of guerilla fighters in Kosovo only reinforced the widely shared belief in the irresistibility of American military power. Even though the United States experience in Vietnam and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan had conclusively demonstrated that overwhelming military superiority did not guarantee that intervention in what was essentially a civil war would result in a victory for the intervening power the United States entered the 21st Century with the inevitability of American military victory as a cardinal tenant of its national political understanding.

That is how it stood on September 11, 2001 and the nation was unified in support of President Bush’s decision to engage in a punitive war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The rapid disintegration of Taliban resistance and the fall of Kabul reinforced the impression of inevitability. The administration declared victory without capturing or killing either the Taliban leadership or Osama Bin Laden. Though events demonstrated otherwise the belief in the inevitability of military success persisted.

It remained so even as many questioned the rationale proposed to justify the invasion of Iraq. Even the early days Iraqi War seemed to justify that optimistic viewpoint as Baghdad fell and the Baathist regime was rapidly deposed. But events have overtaken assumptions and events have made clear that military victory in Iraq is both not inevitable and impossible to define in the midst of a protracted civil war. Events in Afghanistan demonstrate that even there victory, like Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, has eluded western arms. It is in Afghanistan where victory, the capture or killing of the Jihadist leadership is essential, if not inevitable. Only when that is accomplished will the United States be able to defeat its real enemy – its own fear.