San Francisco Chronicle: All war all the time

[Stoic]

The military game has changed, and the U.S. isn't ready

by William S. Lind

"...Fourth Generation War, which is now killing a few more American soldiers every day in Iraq, marks the end of the state's monopoly on war.

All around the world, state militaries are facing nonstate opponents, groups such as al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. Almost everywhere, the state is losing. Hezbollah defeated the Israelis in Lebanon, and Hamas has been doing the same in the West Bank. Russia's war in Chechnya is not going well. Nor is ours in Afghanistan. Far from securing the Afghan countryside, the United States and other state armed forces are losing control of Kabul.

President Bush's proclamation of victory in Iraq is looking more than slightly premature. The pace of fighting there is picking up, not slowing down, as American troops face Baathists, gangs of looters, Shiites, Arab fedayeen (who are still coming into Iraq to fight us), Wahabi mujahedeen, and so on. Because these enemies are not states, they have nothing we can bomb, no tanks we can take out, no capital we can occupy. And each one is a Hydra: Every time we kill an enemy, we recruit more.

It is not just conservatives in Washington who do not understand the kind of war we are now engaged in. No one in Washington does. Certainly the Pentagon does not. The high-tech weapons on which it lavishes billions are completely irrelevant to Fourth Generation War. A joke in Israel puts it well: Why does Israel need its own spy satellites? So it can see a 12-year-old Palestinian boy picking up a stone.

Nineteenth Century war scholar Carl von Clausewitz wrote:

"The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and Commander have to make is to establish . . . the kind of war on which they are embarking: neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive . . ."

Today, Washington is not even asking this question. It simply assumes that in its quest for world empire, it will fight only states. As the old saying goes, assume makes an ass of you and me."