Editor’s note: Now that war has begun, The Daily Standard will be deviating from its normal schedule. For the next several days we’ll have morning and afternoon editions posted regularly and other reports posted throughout the day, so you’ll want to check back with us often.
With Matt Labash and Stephen F. Hayes on the ground in the Middle East, Christopher Caldwell in Europe, and Fred Barnes, William Kristol, David Brooks, and the rest of the team in Washington, The Daily Standard will have some of the best reporting and analysis around. Stay tuned.
–JVL
AND SO WE MUST WAIT at least until this evening for Operation Shock and Awe, the massive but precise air strikes that will begin the campaign to liberate Iraq. That we appear not to have gotten Saddam Hussein last night–to the degree anyone can trust film clips coming out of Baghdad purporting to show him alive if not especially well–may be a blessing in disguise.
As in Operation Desert Storm, the measure of victory in this war against Iraq will not be how big we start but where and when we stop. “Going to Baghdad” means more than physically occupying the city. It is a metaphor for tearing out Saddamism, root and branch. There will be many moments–and a quick kill on Saddam would be one–where some might be tempted to say, as the first Bush administration did when the television pictures of the famous Highway of Death hit American airwaves in 1991, that enough has been done.
Because modern warfare is so dominated by the dance of technology, it is too easy to forget its intentionally brutal nature; precise weaponry does not transform war from the blunt instrument it essentially is. Television commentators scrambling to describe last night’s attacks invariably described them as “surgical.” True enough, but now, after the scalpel, must come the rapier, the cutlass, the massive broadsword.
“Kind-hearted people might of course think that there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed,” wrote a Prussian officer two centuries ago, “and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst. . . . It would be futile–even wrong–to try to shut one’s eyes to what war really is from sheer distress at its brutality.”
President Bush may or may not have read Carl von Clausewitz’s “On War,” but he has grasped its lesson. “Now that conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force,” he said in concluding his remarks last night. “And I assure you, this will not be a campaign of half measures and we will accept no outcome but victory.”
Tom Donnelly is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
