Why is it that our American leaders don’t seem to learn from past mistakes involving military conflicts? Whenever I get involved in a debate about Vietnam or Iraq, it seems so obvious to me and others that military force or hegemony just doesn’t work anymore. But, here we are again involved in an armed conflict with no end in sight, and a presidential candidate singing the praises of war. Can’t they see that old truths about war and warriors are no longer useful? What exactly has happened to change this, and why do we still adamantly cling to the old warrior ways?

In a book by a British general, Sir Rupert Smith, entitled The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, he relates his ideas concerning war to his personal experiences in Africa, Northern Ireland, the Balkans and the Persian Gulf. What other authority would be more valid than a British general to comment on Western imperialism? With his opening sentence of the book claiming that “war no longer exists,” one is intrigued by what makes him make this statement.

What he argues is that in the traditional concept of war as a collision of armies in which one side emerges victorious is no longer meaningful. He went on to say that “time and time again, attempts by machine-age armies to impose their will on irregular forces supported by a sympathetic population failed.” It seems the old paradigm of war was not only obsolete but even pernicious, yet this paradigm still thrives today.

This was spectacularly displayed in the Vietnam war where an old-fashioned war was waged with the intent of dealing death and destruction to the enemy. In the Bombing Vietnam: The Long-Term Economic Consequences, by Edward Miguel and Gerad Roland, a prominent Air Force chief of staff, Curtis LeMay was quoted as saying “we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age”. And God knows we tried, with the U.S. dropping 7.6 million tons of bombs in Vietnam, three times the tonnage in all of WWII. This amounted to 200 pounds per person with only 11 out of 3,500 villages left unscathed.

So, what did we learn from this disastrous episode in American history? Perhaps the lesson to be learned was that ordnance matters less than ideas. Even with the extent of military commitment in money and lives, we could not “win” the Vietnam war. All we seem to know is to throw the right mix of tanks and fighter-bombers into the hands of warrior-generals, and we’ll have victory. That was certainly the old paradigm from WWI and WWII.

But this new age of foreign military intervention is much more complicated. The aim should not be to defeat the enemy who we really can’t identify to begin with, but to change the way they think. This couldn’t be more true of what is happening in the Iraq war right now. We should be in a struggle not with combatants but with the noncombatant population for whose allegiance we should be fighting for.

According to Andrew Bacevich in the Spring, ‘07 Wilson Quarterly, “the name of the game is no longer to win but to influence”. When we launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, we did so “with utter disregard of the realities that defined the nation we presumed to liberate”. It seems that the Bush administration miscalculated concerning the “invincibility” of the U.S. forces in securing a quick end to their task but instead it proved to be just the beginning.

What lead to this military invincibility on the part of the U.S. was the aftermath of the Cold War, in which the U.S. foreign policy took a right turn deploying into zones of disorder in which conflicts sputter on indefinitely. Even in recent times, from Bosnia and Kosovo, to Somalia and Siera Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan, political and military activities are constantly intermingled throughout. There is no longer a decisive “victory” or end to the conflict. Therefore, the conflict continues via physical momentum and failure on the part of the leaders to admit defeat even in the throes of it.

What we should have learned from past mistakes, is that if we do want to proceed with democratization of the Middle East, our perceptions of military supremacy have to give way to a different set of principles. We will have to get a lot smarter. We will certainly need more intellectual horsepower than is inherent in our present president, if we are ever to persuade the Islamic world to embrace the “blessings of democracy”. If it is even possible to begin with.

If our American presidents continue to be oblivious to history and all the valuable lessons they supply, they will surely lead us into the decay and destruction of a truly great Superpower of unprecedented proportion. What a shameful waste of an unfettered opportunity. It saddens me to think of what we truly could have accomplished and how far our great nation could have gone in leading the world in peace instead of war.