Signs of deafeat
by John Thompson
04/07/03
Lawrence of Arabia was quoted as having said "With 2,000 years of examples behind us we have no excuse when fighting, for not fighting well." Indeed, military history is rich with examples of success, failure and everything in between; and human behavior seldom changes much.
Naturally, a close study of military history can tell one when defeat is looming — especially for a totalitarian regime. The signs are clear for all to see. The trick is to see them early enough, because collapse tends to slide in on a steep exponential curve, but in this war, some of the signs have been clear from day one.
When a war is lost, desertion rates skyrocket as troops on the losing side calculate that their cause has failed. By way of example, one can look at Lee’s hardened veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia in between March 26th and April 9th of 1865 — an Army of 60,000 lost over half its men to desertion when it became clear that Dixie was going down the drain. Totalitarian states can try to limit this effect through the use of ferocious disciplinary measures, but this doesn’t always work.
Even before the start of this current war, it was evident that most of the Iraqi Army had no real interest in fighting it. One of the clearest signs came two weeks earlier when British paratroopers were test-firing weapons in northern Kuwait, and a party of Iraqis showed up to surrender under the impression that the war had begun. Seventeen days into the war, the vast bulk of the Iraqi Army has been conspicuous in their absence except where Political militias have ‘encouraged’ them to fight. Only the Republican Guard has offered serious resistance -- for which thousands of them have died.
Another clear sign of defeat can be the quality of a losing government’s communications, and few voices have been as hysterical as those of the Iraqi (Dis)Information Ministry. Like the Nazis in Berlin during 1945, they have clung to reports of minor incidents and hold-outs in distant cities as reliable indicators of ferocious resistance, and every small counterattack was a clear sign that now the invasion would be reversed and total triumph was nigh.
Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels never had access to global television networks, but one would like to believe he would have been as amusing as the Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf who assured the world that "They [the American Army] are nowhere near Baghdad. That’s silly. The lies of the losers have no end." Meanwhile, the 3rd Mechanized Division was rumbling over Saddam International Airport and contemplating changing the name of the place as they did so.
When the senior leadership of a country suddenly becomes shy about public appearances and media interviews, it is another sign that the end is nigh. Hitler last emerged from his bunker to decorate some teenaged soldiers a full month before he died. Saddam has been especially coy these last few weeks.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Stalin sent women and children out to dig anti-tank ditches and bunkers around Moscow in 1941 and Hitler’s Volksturm militias sent 12-13 year-old boys and their grandfathers out to pit their bodies against the wave of steel washing over Germany in 1945. Meanwhile, of course, Hitler and his cronies stuck to a deep well constructed bunker — thus is the ‘will’ of Totalitarians expressed. The opinion of many Iraqis was made clear by Nizar Ahmed Mohammed, a 21 year-old man who defected to the US Marines… "I was told by my boss to go and blow myself up in a suicide attack. He told me that I would be sent to paradise and be given 77 nymphs. I told him: ‘Why don’t you blow yourself up?’"
Why not indeed?
But perhaps the clearest sign of a looming defeat is when the winner suddenly finds a host of new allies. The United Nations originally began as a descriptor for the Allied nations during the Second World War. There was a minor stampede in 1945 as 13 Latin American and Middle Eastern nations suddenly signed onto the war so they could get a seat at the table when the fighting was over. While only Australia, Poland, and the Netherlands have sent men and hardware to join the British and Americans, the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ has been growing steadily since the war began. We will all know that victory has finally arrived when Jean Chretien signs us up…
John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca
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