FIghting to win? No, we're busy fighting not to lose.

I originally wrote the following just before Michael Brown was killed by Police. I've been thinking about it now and then since then. I've decided to post it now, so it can rapidly drop to the bottom of the posts with the other dead letters.

Vietnam was lost in 1968 for all intents and purposes. It was announced on the news by Walter Cronkite. The problem is, we didn’t want to lose. But we never had a plan for victory. The plan we had was to stabilize the South Vietnamese Government and hope for the best sometime in the future.

Let’s contrast World War 2 shall we? It is just days after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Churchill traveled to Washington DC to meet with President Roosevelt to discuss the war, the future, and how the war could be won. Churchill believed that Japan would fall when isolated, the first and most deadly peril to the world was Hitler. Roosevelt agreed, but knew he could not turn his back on the Pacific, the Japanese had started the war. However they agreed that the largest share of American Material would be sent to the European Theaters of the war to fight the Nazi’s.

In December 1941 with the smell of death and smoke still clinging to Pearl Harbor the general plan to win the war was being worked on by the allies. We knew what we would accept, Unconditional Surrender of the Axis powers. We knew basically how, the outline if not the general details of the path to Victory. As early as the Tehran Conference in 1943, we were looking at the post war, post victory actions in Europe and Asia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehran_Conference
We were fighting for Victory. Victory was easy to define, the destruction of Nazism. The destruction of Fascist Italy. The destruction of Imperial Japan.

How about earlier. World War I. President Wilson kept trying to get peace discussions going. He refused to believe that all the combatants would demand victory or death. To oversimplify it a bit, no one could afford to lose, and remain in power. Everyone had planned on the losing side paying for the war under the term Reparations, a common bribe paid to end hostilities by the losing side for centuries. Russia, Germany, and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire proved that to be true.

Wilson finally learned in 1917 that the combatants were determined to fight, and the last choice he had was to pick sides. Germany had already taken hostile action against the United States, so the decision was academic.

We fought to victory in conflicts. Historically Peace treaties were rarely the final word on the issues. The perpetual state of war between England and Spain went on for centuries. The same with France that lasted until the beginning of the 20th Century. Peace treaties were a way to back away, gather strength, and start again in a few years, perhaps a generation would pass in relative peace, then the hostilities would recommence.

So the war on drugs has been going on since the 1970’s with no end in sight. We arrest the dealers, the users, and the drug smugglers. We get a kingpin, and announce a major victory in the war on drugs. But there is no real victory in sight. We don’t address the core issue, the desire of people to use, that drives demand for drugs. We aren't fighting to win. We are fighting because the alternative scares us more, the idea of drug addled people all over the place. The truth is, legalization would pretty much end drug availability. Liability laws would make production of drugs stronger than Marijuana problematic. Personal Injury lawyers would go up and talk about how Gasoline was used in the production of Cocaine and huge settlements that would finally make the tobacco awards look puny by comparison would wipe out the drug producers.

The war on Terror. Since World War II we have been reluctant to declare war on anything but vague ill-defined terms. We had war on Poverty. We had war on intolerance, war on war. We like ill-defined wars though, because that way we can get involved without doing what FDR did in December 1941. We can fight without declaring what victory will be. We do this because the reality is we know that victory over these things is a virtual impossibility.

How do you win a war on Terrorism? Terrorism by definition is always small cells that have been preparing for an attack that is nearly suicidal at best, outright suicide at worst. How do you win that?

I had a discussion with a friend who is black at work the other day. We were talking about Iraq, and we both agreed that racism didn’t end because of a court decision to integrate schools. Racism ends when people decide to live together. Live and let live. There are whites who won’t do that, and there are blacks who won’t do it. But generally speaking, most of us have decided to live, and let live.
Iraq, the disparate groups show little interest in living together. ISIS/ISIL or whatever you are calling them today have little tolerance for anyone who does not join them. It is a join us or die movement that may consist of hundreds of thousands of followers who are dedicated to some extent or another. So what are we doing? We deploy troops to secure our Embassy and the American Compounds. Then we deploy bombs to protect the troops protecting the compounds.

We are fighting not to lose. We don’t know how to win, and we are unwilling to lose. This is not a foreign policy, this is a we don’t have a better idea at the moment, maybe tomorrow will bring something that we can use plan.

My Father told me that if I was going to fight other schoolboys, I had to know what I was fighting for, and when I would stop. He told me that I could fight as long as the other boy was standing, but once he was on the ground I was to stop, because that was defined by him, and me, as the end of the fight. That was victory, when the other boy would not get up. Later, I defined it as preventing him from hurting me anymore. For two boys in the school yard using fists and feet to settle their issues, this isn't a bad plan. Eventually that other boy would get up, or I would, and go home to lick our wounds. Perhaps the issue was settled, perhaps it was like one of those peace treaties mentioned above, a temporary cessation of hostility. The point is that there was a clearly defined point of victory, or defeat. This point was generally speaking pretty universally accepted.

We identify people with hostile intent. We bomb them and destroy them. Then another four pop up, and we start hunting for the four, then the twelve, then the fifty. We are applying the schoolyard principle to the world at large, and nobody we are at war with is playing by those rules.

Now, some will insist that I come up with an answer. I've identified a problem, we’re fighting not to lose instead of fighting to win. So what is the solution? That’s the problem. I don’t have one. OK, there are some obvious ones that are inconceivable.
We could wipe out anyone who believes in a specific religion. Besides being infamous that is the definition of Genocide, which is prohibited by international law with good reason.

We could station our troops on our borders and build a wall to prevent anyone coming in and hurting us. Obviously besides being impossible, that is stupid and wouldn't work.

We need to learn to live together. Jew and Gentile. Muslim and Hindu. Brown, Black, White, Red, Yellow, and Turquoise. But we don’t do that. Even as political parties, we define ourselves by being different than the others, and superior because of those differences. Every Religion is convinced that they are the ones who are right, and everyone thinks the others are going to suffer for eternity because they are wrong. I've read the Bible, and I've read about Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Wicca. I've never found a book anywhere that says I have any say in what happens to anyone else in the hereafter. Nowhere in any of those books does it say SavannahMann will decide what reward or punishment you shall receive. Believe me, no one is more glad of that than I, because I don’t have the wisdom to make those determinations.

If we are going to fight these wars. Poverty, Drugs, Intolerance, and even Terrorism. We need to decide what victory is, and how we reach it. Because without knowing what the win is, there is no way to figure out how to reach it. Berlin was easy, we knew where it was. Tokyo was easy, we knew where it was. But where can we find victory as long as we are fighting to keep from losing. In that instance, victory is defined by surviving to fight another day.

We view elections much the same way. Many of our battle cries here on DU and out there in the real world of media resonate with the idea that we can’t let them win. We aren't fighting for anything. We are fighting to keep from losing. We have no strategic plan, nor any short term plan. We argue endlessly about how much worse things would be with “them” in charge. So what are we going to GOTV for? Why we have to do it to keep them from winning. We have to do it to keep from losing.

I know this rambled a bit, but I see a lot of intertwined threads that I wanted to briefly touch as I explained what I was thinking. Please feel free to tell me how wrong I am, or what you think we can or should do for victory on any of these wars. Because I’m getting a little tired of the plan to fight just to keep from losing.