Stardate 20030324.1432

(Captain's log): Evil times force us to confront evil choices. Many of us find ourselves hoping that really bad things will happen, and it's uncomfortable to realize this. We find ourselves hoping that something bad will happen because we think it's the only way to prevent something even worse from happening later. If honest, that calculation is a correct one and a moral one, but it's still hard to find yourself advocating death and suffering.

For instance, I know full well what an awful thing war is, and just how much it can really cost. Yet I have been advocating war in Iraq, and continue to think it's the right thing for this nation to do. It's not that I love war; it's that I am afraid of what will happen to my nation and to the world if we don't do it. In the long run, I think the outcome for everyone, but in particular for my own nation, will be better if we fight this war than if we don't. Yet that means that I'm advocating a course of action where the possibility exists that a lot of my countrymen, and a lot of Iraqis, may die or otherwise suffer.

Many who oppose the war are in a similar situation, and if anything it's even more anomalous. They recognize the danger that Arab/Islamic extremism and failure represent to the world, but they fear American power even more. Thus they find themselves hoping that we will suffer a bloody defeat, or a Pyrrhic victory. They hope that as a result of this America will be chastened, humbled, and will cease to embrace an activist and martial foreign policy. They hope that America will embrace self-doubt and moral paralysis and meekly return to its estranged allies and beg forgiveness and submit "multilaterally" to the nascent post-national world governmental structures (such as the ICC), and because of this will cease to be a danger to the world.

It's not that these people love Saddam; they don't. It's that they fear America even more. They deeply fear that if the US wins in Iraq, and wins what is perceived to be a fast and easy war there, that Americans will be emboldened and will gain self-confidence and perhaps even become self-righteous, and will eventually plunge the entire world into war. If America is willing to use direct aggressive military power to force a regime change in Iraq, where else will that then happen? And what else can possibly stop the American juggernaut without devastating the entire globe?

I don't agree with this point of view, but I can at least understand it. And that's why when I read some anti-war blogs, those who try to deal with the issues seriously and who do not descend to petty ridicule and fashionable cynicism, that their posts regarding the process of the war seem to be deeply conflicted. On one side they fear for the troops and at the same time there almost seems to be a wish that disaster will overtake the troops. For someone in this position, who hates Saddam but fears America more, among the best outcomes is that America wins, but pays such a high price that Americans will not support any future wars. Thus they find themselves simultaneously dreading and hoping that a lot of our soldiers will be killed and wounded.

To that end, there seem to be some in the world who are willing to overtly or covertly assist the Iraqis so as to make the war as expensive for us as possible.

But remember that the real goal for many is not dead American soldiers, but cowed American voters, and thus they have good reason to try to make things look as bad as they possibly can. For such a person, the absolutely ideal outcome is for America to win, Saddam to be deposed, life in Iraq to improve, overall losses to be low, and for Americans to still think that the cost was too high.

Many private individuals hold this point of view. More important is that many government leaders, and many press organizations also do, and they're using their visibility to try to cast war news in harsh terms, because their greatest fear is American confidence and American triumphalism.

Their targets for this propaganda (for that's what it is) are not just Americans; they're also feeding this to their own people. For governments who opposed the war, they need the war to be seen as a disaster by their own people, because they fear being repudiated by events. But it's also us that much of this is aimed at.

Many have pointed out that the BBC has been taking a particularly harsh tone, for instance. And the IHT reports that the attempts by French television to try to portray the war as a disaster have approached the ludicrous. In general it's been the case that Reuters has been giving a pessimistic slant to its coverage. And in some of the press conferences, with Rumsfeld or Franks, many of the questions have been deeply slanted.

Some of this comes from an attitude some have that anything short of perfection is failure. As a practical matter that's absurd; perfection in human affairs doesn't exist. As an engineer I'm fully aware of the fact that we can't even try to shoot for perfection; we try for "good enough" in all things. By the same token, one way of making it seem as if the war is going badly is to try to create an artificially high expectation for the outcome against which reality comes up short.

Take, for example, the psyops effort to try to dissuade common Iraqi soldiers and low-level officers from resisting us. Has it worked?

If by "worked" you mean that 100.0% of the Iraqi military surrendered at the first opportunity without any shots being fired, then no, it hasn't. But that's the wrong standard. Has it resulted in a significant reduction of the combat power of the Iraqi army? That's the question, and the answer is a resounding "yes".

It's important to note that most of the mass Iraqi surrenders in 1991 were front line troops, stationed in Kuwait along the Saudi border. For those men there were only really two choices: surrender to the Americans, or death by American action. Thus vast numbers of them chose surrender.

But for a lot of the troops in Iraq itself, there's a third choice: desertion. The soldiers in Kuwait in 1991 couldn't desert because there was nowhere to run (in the desert in a foreign country), but in Iraq soldiers can remove their uniforms and blend into the civilian population. It's more difficult to tally this; it's not as obvious on the evening news. But it's just as good from our point of view; it means they're not fighting us, and that's what we're really after. And while it's true that it isn't universal, it's truly substantial already and likely to become even more significant later. A process of mass desertion becomes self-reinforcing. As many do it, those they leave behind are more likely to follow them later.

If we can whittle their force down by 10% through drops of leaflets, that's a major victory. And there's good reason to believe that it has been and will continue to be a lot more successful than that.

But you're still going to end up with a core of the unit which doesn't desert, and may even fight. At which point you fight them, and the news broadcasts will be full of pictures of men firing machine guns, and artillery raining down on enemy positions, and it may seem as if resistance is stiff. And indeed it might be; but not as stiff as it would have been if the enemy force hadn't been weakened by having many of their soldiers leave.

But as soon as that happens, those with unrealistic expectations, and those who want to deliberately recast the perception of the process, will emphasize the resistance, and especially emphasize the losses that result.

For war is dangerous. It isn't possible to be on a battlefield without taking risk. It isn't possible to engage in a firefight without some people dying. And anyone who actually thought we were going to win this war without any combat at all are on drugs.

One of the problems with TV coverage is that it lends itself well to inducement of a fallacy known as "misleading vividness". That happened over the weekend, when a few of our soldiers were captured by Iraq. Two HMMVs carrying about 12 people from a support unit were captured by what were probably members of the Special Republican Guard. Some were probably executed; some were taken captive. Film of both the corpses and the prisoners was transmitted to an Arabic news channel, and from there broadcast to the world.

Yes, it was horrible. There's no doubt about that. It made me sick to my stomach. I wish it hadn't happened; I feel deeply sorry for relatives in the US who had to see their loved ones interviewed, and even more for those who had to see their loved ones dead. But let's get some perspective here, OK? 12 people out of a force of two hundred thousand made a mistake and got into real trouble. Is this really a disaster which will cause all of the rest of the 199,988 to suddenly give up and retreat?

Of course it isn't.

Nor is the fact that there have now probably been as many as fifty Americans and Brits killed in combat. That's horrible, but by historical standards it's also extremely low.

And the advance we've made is also close to being historical. It isn't a record; the Mongols were able to make sustained advances of 50 miles per day and maintain that rate for weeks. No modern mechanized force has ever come close. But by modern standards, this assault has been breathtakingly successful.

For instance, in France in 1944, after the Cobra breakout, the "dash across France" involved units which might move up to ten miles per day, while taking casualties at much higher levels than we're taking now. Some combat in the past has been astoundingly intense with a very high price.

Second Marine Division assaulted the atoll of Tarawa, which was defended by 4800 men. The US won but lost 3300 casualties, including 900 dead. (Ever after, it was known as "Bloody Tarawa" among the US Marines.) It was the first major amphibious assault of the war against a prepared position with determined defenders, and much was learned from it. And yet, later island battles were also very expensive. At Iwo, five weeks of fighting cost the US nearly 26,000 casualties, including more than 6800 dead.

Which is to say about 188 KIA per day just in that one battle. And that was with an American force of about 110,000 men, fighting against only 22,000 defenders. But they were determined defenders, and nearly all of them died in the battle.

Our force involved in this is somewhere around 2-2.5 times that large, and estimates of the total numbers in the Iraqi military range from 300,000 to 500,000, possibly 25 times as many. And yet, in five days of combat we've only had something like 50 dead, and most of those have been due to operational accidents (primarily helicopter crashes in Kuwait) and a couple of extraordinarily unfortunate friendly-fire incidents.

It's true that there is an apparent stiffening of Iraqi resistance. That was to be expected, for two reasons. First, we actually did achieve surprise. The decision to start ground operations before the main mass air assault caught nearly everyone by surprise, and when combined with a very surprising surgical bombing mission the first night, it left the Iraqi defensive forces confused and unguided.

But surprise wears off; it's not a permanent condition. And now the Iraqis are beginning to get it together and starting to fight. That was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

The second point is that it was always expected that resistance would stiffen as we got closer to Baghdad. The forces in the south were among the worst and least dependable Saddam has. He's keeping his best forces for close defense in the Baghdad area, and also hopes to lure us into city fighting in Baghdad itself if he can. So as our forces advance north, it's really not at all surprising that there's more and more combat.

And as a result, it's also not a surprise that there are more and more casualties. Every one of those is to be deeply regretted, but it's a price we have chosen to pay. And in fact, the price we've paid so far has been ahistorically light. It hasn't been zero, but it was never possible that it could be zero.

But if you're trying to convince Americans and the world that this war is already a failure, then you will try in your news reporting and commentary to linger with horror on all the awful things which have happened. Every time any unit runs into any kind of resistance, you raise questions about whether it will throw off the entire attack. Every time anyone is killed or wounded, you start to ask whether the plan was a failure.

And you go into a press conference with some American military official, and ask whether the fact that there's been five whole days of fighting and we haven't won yet means that we're sunk into a quagmire, and the entire war has become a new Viet Nam.

Just for historical reference, by this point in the war in 1991, our ground forces in Saudi Arabia had another five weeks to wait before even being given permission to cross the border. And that operation was considered to have been preposterously short for the military objectives it gained. After all, it only took six weeks!

If you, as a civilian who is quite naturally worried about the war, find yourself obsessing on individual events and begin to wonder if we're facing imminent disaster, then what you need to do is to take a deep breath, turn off the damned TV, and look at the overall progress of the war. If some reporter talks about how there's serious resistance in some particular village and combat taking place, ignore the fact that the reporter tries to cast it as being a disaster and instead consider the fact that it means the troops had to advance a long way to even be in that particular place to even meet that resistance.

And then look at what other units, elsewhere, are doing. Look at the big picture. It isn't going perfectly for us, but it's going extremely badly for Saddam.

When news reports talk about the trouble one unit is having capturing certain bridges in An Nasiriyah, try to remember that other news reports say that 3rd Division bypassed that town entirely, put a pontoon bridge across the Euphrates river, and is well past that point and on its way to Baghdad.

Ralph Peters is easily the most knowledgeable commentator on war in general and this war in particular that I've seen. He's been writing editorials for the NYPost, and his most recent one does a good job of dispelling the doomsayers.

Things are not going perfectly, but they're going very, very well. That doesn't prove that they'll continue to go well, but his point is correct that many out there writing about the war, and commenting about it, are distorting the view they present to a degree which approaches an outright lie.

Yes, there's been resistance. There's been combat. And in particular, there have been atrocities and war crimes, and most of those have been committed by the Fidayeen, which is to say the Special Republican Guard. This force of 12,000 to 15,000 are the best Iraq has, and the ones most likely to resist to the end. One reason for that is that a lot of them stand to be murdered after the war by other Iraqis, so they've got little to lose.

It was probably them that captured the people from the 507th Maintenance Company. They're probably the ones who have been responsible for some of the feigned surrenders, and who have in some cases been operating in plain clothes and trying to ambush our troops.

They're not trying to intimidate us. They're trying to infuriate us. If they can make it seem as if trying to take prisoners is dangerous, then they hope we'll stop doing so. If they make it seem to us as if we can't trust civilians, we may be more likely to start slaughtering civilians. When they torture and execute our POWs, they hope to enrage our troops so that they'll go on a rampage.

Our political goal in the war has been to try to make it clear to the mass of the Iraqi people that we are only fighting the leaders and the core of the army. The Fidayeen want to broaden the war to include all of Iraq, so that resistance will be stiffened. If we stop taking prisoners, or if we start mistreating them, then fewer will be inclined to surrender, to Saddam's benefit later.

The right thing to do in response to Fidayeen atrocities is to not be swayed by them, especially not with mass retaliation. Get angry? Yes. Mourn the victims? Of course.

But don't change course. We're on the right course. That's what they're trying to change.

And even though there are a lot of people out there who would really, really love to convince you that things are going badly, it isn't true. Things could be better; I'm first in line to say that I wish we could fight this war without losing anyone. But things could be a whole lot worse. That's no comfort for the families who have lost sons and daughters already, but it's a blessing that so few face that deep tragedy.

And disabuse yourself of the idea that it's not going to get worse. The hardest fighting remains ahead of us. It always has. The territory we've moved through so far was always expected to be the least contested.

More of our people will be killed or wounded. There will be more crying families here at home. (And I'll be crying, too.)

Keep in mind that they're all volunteers. That doesn't mean we can feel free to waste them; and we aren't. But we, the citizens at home, have the ability to waste their sacrifice if we lose heart and give up. If some of them must die, we owe it to them to make sure they don't die uselessly. This is not Viet Nam, and we are not sunk in a quagmire. But we at home can lose what our soldiers in Iraq are winning, if we let ourselves be convinced that things are going worse than they really are.

So read about "misleading vividness". Read Peters. Then turn off the damned television.