Aspects of Asymmetric Post-Modern Warfare - International Peace/War

All cultures have liabilities and assets; only fools and politicians demonise opponents and blind themselves to an opponent’s strengths and their own weaknesses. No better formula for defeat exists! All opponents must be respected, as they are perfectly capable of taking your life.

I recently received a chain email, which was a good example of a poorly planned and counter-productive propaganda ploy designed to boost support for the occupation forces in Iraq. I have since misplaced it, however, the following accurately reflects the general tone and content: ‘I’m a Marine, I’m made of steel, I am superman, I eat nails for breakfast, I am invincible etc, etc’. The person who originally mailed this piece of poorly planned propaganda forgot to consider the broader picture – costly oversights are also characteristic of the present Bush administration, but to continue:

Enemy combatants are acutely aware of their limitations; they go to great lengths to preserve their extremely vulnerable flesh and blood bodies in combat. The enemy delights in opponents who are divorced from the realities of war and imagine themselves to be somehow superior or 'made of steel'. The bodies of these arrogant idiots litter the battlefields of the world. Whoever originally posted that imbecilic poem was doing the enemy a favour, but America has a bad habit of always shooting itself in the head.

A gem from today’s post-modern warfare ‘manual’ follows: “one expert sniper is worth one thousand regular troops and one expert propagandist is worth one thousand snipers.” A modern fighting force and culture would disregard these simple strategies at their own peril.

The American mass media and entertainment industry (Hollywood) is perhaps the greatest domestic enemy America faces. The profit driven American media persists in perpetuating the mythology of America’s invincibility. “Black Hawk Down” is a typical recent example of a bungle and subsequent defeat portrayed as an heroic endeavour; but perhaps the archetypal piece of apologetic celluloid trash is “Apocalypse Now” (a pathetic attempt to apologise for America’s decisive defeat in Vietnam).

A mass media that transforms defeats and disasters into victories or highlights anything other than the inept and abysmal performance of the military in a specific engagement ONLY SERVES TO WEAKEN the nation, its military and the people. Failure on a national level to apprehend the stark reality of defeat, promotes a dissociated and delusional population, one poorly ‘equipped’ to survive in a post modern world. [The U.S. is presently contracting into the illogical, delusional world of religion. Resorting to the ‘refuge of fools and weak’ is symptomatic of the nation's inability to adequately cope with the stark realities of the world in which we live.]

In contrast to a highly developed, technologically sophisticated and ‘superior’ America, an untrained illiterate black African Somali fighter instinctively reacted to the presence of the international media by dragging – in the most humiliating fashion – the semi-naked dead body of an American soldier before the cameras. International coverage of this event resulted in America ‘dropping its bundle’ and running for its life out of Somalia. Victory was had by an illiterate untrained Somali fighter over the most powerful military force in the world – when is a ‘superpower’ only soup?

America’s inevitable defeat lies not with the generals, or its military academies – it lies in a culture’s failure to face itself. The day an American President resigns and confesses that he is not only criminally incompetent but is also responsible for the needless deaths of thousands of innocent people (and accepts full responsibility) is the day America faces the possibility of a tenable future – until then analysts continue to observe the nation in rapid decline and terminal regression.

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