[Mb-civic] MUST READ: Winning's Everything - Henry Allen - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Winning's Everything

By Henry Allen | Saturday, May 6, 2006; A17 | The Washington Post

"In war, we have to win," said Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap.

This was on television about 20 years ago, a PBS series about the war in 
Vietnam. Giap was sitting behind a desk, as I recall, a picture of 
lethal ease. He seemed amused to think he knew something that the 
Americans still hadn't figured out. He added: "Absolutely have to win."

For me, a former Marine corporal who'd heard some Viet Cong rounds go 
past at Chu Lai, Giap spoke and the heavens opened -- a truth seizure, 
eureka. I finally had a useful, practical explanation for why we had 
lost after the best and brightest promised we were going to win. And 
nowadays, thanks to Giap, I have a theory, no more than that, about why 
winning is so elusive in Iraq.

I suspect that the people who run our wars, particularly the best and 
brightest, know when we fight a war that:

We have to be fighting for freedom and national security.

We have to get the will of the country behind the war.

We have to maintain a strong economy to pay for the war.

We have to have allies.

We have to have God, freedom, the inevitability of history or some other 
philosophic entity on our side.

We have to have well-trained and motivated troops armed with the latest 
weapons.

Sure enough, we started out with all of that in Iraq, as we did in Vietnam.

But do our high-ranking leaders believe, like Giap, that we have to win?

America is getting used to loss, futility and fiasco -- amid some small 
successes, we had stalemate in Korea, the loss in Vietnam, the botched 
Iran hostage rescue mission and the embarrassments in Lebanon, Haiti and 
Somalia. One wonders if we even expect our leaders to win the fights 
they start. Certainly we don't punish them when they lose. Years later, 
former secretary of defense Robert McNamara announced that he'd known in 
1966 that we couldn't win in Vietnam, but he kept on sending Americans 
to their deaths in a doomed cause. For this he was rewarded with the top 
job at the World Bank, a job held now by Paul Wolfowitz, a prime 
architect of the war in Iraq.

Why fault them? As all of our war planners are quick to point out, they 
had the best of intentions, although they forget to mention that good 
intentions don't win wars. Certainly intellectual acuity has abounded, 
too. Who is smarter than Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice or Dick Cheney, all 
of them with graduate degrees and the sort of quick thinking we began to 
admire during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, who said, "There's 
nothing like brains. You can't beat brains." As it happens, you can, or 
we would have won in Vietnam. Strange: This has become an age in which 
intelligence is seen as a moral virtue, like courage or perseverance -- 
two elements of winning. Of course, intelligence is just a tool, it has 
no more moral virtue than Arnold Schwarzenegger's bicep or the ability 
to ace the SAT, but we honor those who possess it. Could we be confusing 
intelligence with the skill of winning?

Some possibilities about the people running our wars:

One: Winning isn't the point to them -- they use the military as an 
instrument of policy, and winning or losing anytime soon is irrelevant. 
Their consequent fine-tuning of political and diplomatic niceties leads 
to complaints of micromanagement.

Two: They don't worry about losing because winning to them is a foregone 
conclusion, as it has been to a lot of Americans since World War II, 
despite our history during the past half-century. Besides, all the way 
through school, graduate programs, internships, and corporate and 
political bureaucracies, they've always been winners. How could they lose?

Three: They know we have to win, but they don't know how to win. Do they 
know that winning is a skill in itself, a skill that stands apart from 
tactics, equipment and righteousness?

It gets a little mystical, this talent that foundation analysts can't 
quantify for a PowerPoint display, but it's real.

<>Great competitors of all kinds have this skill, the ability to 
"finish" as they say in boxing. If you recall the first fight between 
Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas "Hit Man" Hearns, you know that Hearns knew 
how to hit, but Sugar Ray knew how to win. In 1864 Ulysses S. Grant took 
on Robert E. Lee with the same army that had been losing to Lee for 
years, and he finished him -- he was a winner who'd won for years 
throughout the western theater, too. In World War II, America produced a 
stable of winners who won the war for us.

Nowadays is it possible that our leaders don't have that skill? Worse, 
is it possible that they may not know that they don't have it? I wonder 
what they've gotten into in the way of passionate sports or fistfights. 
(Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a star wrestler at Princeton, but 
just about none of them have been in combat.) I would be reassured if I 
knew they understood what athletes mean when they say, "We couldn't win 
for losing." And the old expression: "You make your luck." We are not 
making much luck in Iraq.

This war is not working out the way our leaders thought it would. We 
could lose. If we lose, we'll be humiliated, we'll be the schoolyard 
hotshot who picked a fight and then got whipped. I'm tired of our 
leaders putting me and my country in this position.

I'm not saying I want to fight no wars, or even saying I want to win 
more wars -- I'm just saying that I want us to win the wars that we 
fight. And I'm worried that Iraq was never one of them because it was 
started by people who knew everything except how to win -- who have yet 
to learn that in war we absolutely have to win.

Henry Allen is an editor and writer for The Post's Style section.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/05/AR2006050501475.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060506/90872df2/attachment.htm