"Victory" in Iraq  

We Are the Borg

by William E. Merritt

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The War on Terror is a conflict that America can't win and can't stop fighting. Osama and company think they are fighting for the very life of their civilization — and they're right.

Back when Uncle thought I was just the guy to bring peace and freedom to Vietnam, he shipped me overseas and gave me three days of what he called "in-country training" before actually setting me loose in the country. This gave him the chance, among other things, to show me how to use an M-16 rifle, which he hadn't bothered about in the six months before he sent me to 'Nam.

So late one afternoon I found myself, along with about 150 other guys, hiking to the rifle range out the back gate of the 25th Division base camp at Cu Chi.

The rifle range proved to be a footpath along the wrong side of the last string of concertina wire — where we straggled out until we were in a line about a quarter of a mile long, then turned and pointed our rifles across a field. It was a big field, and sloped away for hundreds of yards. There weren't any targets out there. Or trees or bushes or stumps or anything else to give Charlie something to sneak up behind. So, it came as a surprise when a green tracer sailed back the other way.

There was a lot of ineffectual scrambling around, then we all slunk back inside while gunships spent the rest of the evening using Vulcan miniguns to plow up the rifle range. It was quite a show, although I seriously doubt that whoever plinked off that tracer was still there. And since, as far as I know, nobody on either side was hurt, no equipment was busted up, and no real estate changed hands, what happened that evening had no military significance. Except, of course, it was the whole reason we lost the war.

Here we were, maybe 150 guys, all trained soldiers, all locked and loaded in the most free-fire of free-fire zones on a rifle range — all of us flown 10,000 miles for the one purpose of shooting at the very guy who had just shot at us and, yet, we never did because, in the meantime, we had managed to get ourselves so strung out in front of our own wire that we weren't soldiers anymore, just ducks lined up in a shooting gallery.

Now the problem with the Vietnam War wasn't that we stupidly chose the wrong tactics and foolishly relied upon inappropriate weapons. The problem was, there weren't any tactics we could have used, or weapons we could have designed, that would have changed the outcome. We lost that war the moment we got into it, because there was not, and there never could have been, any way to win it.

I think something like this happened in 1941 to the Japanese. The United States could beat them with one hand tied behind our back, and we did — although it was more like one hand and three fingers, because 83 percent of our resources went to Europe. And the Japanese who thought about that kind of thing knew before they launched the first plane at Pearl Harbor exactly what was going to happen.The Japanese didn't attack Pearl Harbor because they were stupid. They attacked Pearl Harbor because they were caught in a geopolitical trap. They were up to their eyeballs in a war with China when President Roosevelt cut off their oil and steel, and they had no choice but to fold — with unguessable political consequences at home — or go after the natural resources in Indonesia. And there wasn't any way to do that without getting it on with us, the Brits, the Dutch, the French, and the Aussies all at the same time — so they did. And hoped for the best.

When nothing at all will work, but you have to do something, whatever it is you do best can seem like the best thing to do, even if it won't work any better than anything else. It's the oncologist approach. Catch cancer, and some oncologist is going to fill you up with radiation and poisons, even though he knows you are going to die anyway. It's just that radiation and poisons are what oncologists know how to do.

In 1941, what the Japanese knew how to do was fight. Their soldiers may well have been the most loyal and most disciplined ever to go into battle. The Zero was the best fighter plane in the world and, by Pearl Harbor, the average Japanese aviator had been training since he was 13 years old, had 4,000 hours in the air before even being assigned to a combat unit, and had flown a lot of missions over China. Our guys went to flight school after college, had about 300 hours in the air before being assigned to a unit, and no time in combat at all.

In weeks, the Japanese had cleaned every clock from Honolulu to Hong Kong to Singapore to Bangkok, from Manchuria to New Guinea, and owned every island, oil well and rubber plantation in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Wake, Guam, and every place in between. And none of it changed the fact they were going to lose because, in the end, there simply was no possible strategy to win.

I worry that we are in the same boat — that, from the moment that first plane slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, we had lost, because we have no path that will lead us to any result we can live with.

We can seal our windows and doors, but the only way to keep poison out of our bedrooms is to use so much plastic sheeting and duct tape that we smother.We can seal our borders until we commit economic suicide, and as much cocaine as anybody wants to snort will still get through, as many Mexicans as anybody cares to hire will still slip across and, even in the midst of an Orange Alert, armed Cuban soldiers will still have to come ashore and hunt around Key West until they can find a Coast Guardsman to defect to.

Even if we could seal our borders, that wouldn't be enough. We live in a productive country. Everything it takes to do us in is already in here. Timothy McVeigh took down an office building, and a lot of people, with fertilizer and a rented truck. You can still buy box cutters down at Office Depot. And, with almost 300 million people in America, somebody is going to want to use them.

Or we can go goose-stepping into the future with John Ashcroft, and commit social suicide by enlisting the whole country into our very own Stasi, until we have no creativity and no freedom and no reason left to exist as a society anymore.

Or, we can kill ourselves the Japanese way. We can knock over Afghanistan and Iraq, and we will look pretty impressive doing it, although our tactics won't be as imaginative as the Japanese bicycle invasion of Singapore, or as daring as the hit on our battle fleet at Pearl. Then we can go after Syria and Iran and Arabia and Egypt and Pakistan and, maybe, Indonesia and Malaysia and Thailand and the Philippines, just like the Japanese did. And none of it will save what we want to save any more than anything the Japanese could do saved them.

When I think of the absurd, ineffectual scrambling around we do in the name of Homeland Security — mothers being forced to drink their own breast milk to prove they aren't sneaking dangerous liquids onto an airplane in baby bottles, people who are undergoing cancer therapy arrested when they set off radiation detectors in New York subways, kids busted for making jokes at airport security checkpoints, federal guards feeling up 80-year-old women so we can pretend we don't have profiles on terrorists — it reminds me of that day at the rifle range 35 years ago when we didn't have a clue how to win that war, either. Then, like now, we were good at battles. In Vietnam, we won every single battle we fought. But battles weren't the point, and we wound up running in circles every time some guy with a green tracer bullet took a potshot at us. Because there wasn't anything better we could do.

Of course there is one other option. We could stop dancing with dictators, stop defiling the sacred sands of Saudi Arabia with our infidel boots, shed ourselves of the murderous thugs who run Israel, start acting like we believe in our own ideals and, in general, quit bugging everybody else.

But I doubt that this would ever have worked — even if we hadn't already pissed off the rest of the planet by now. Because it's not just us Americans that the underdeveloped parts of the world worry about. It's the whole modern, post-Enlightenment, industrial, consumer thing — what Middle-Easterners call Western Industrialization — that they hate and fear. And they hate it and fear it with good reason. It is destroying what they love.

We are the Borg.

And we are coming to assimilate them.

And they know it.

The thing is, like all those television Borg who are coming to assimilate Captain Janeway, we didn't start out as Borg. We just happened to get assimilated first. And, now, what destroyed the culture of Locke and Jefferson is coming after them. And there's nothing more they can do to protect their heritage than we were able to do to protect ours.

Assimilation never goes down easy — and it always seems to be accompanied by violence and upheaval. For us, it was the Civil War where our ideals of individual freedom and limited government got strangled. In Europe, it was Napoleon and Nazis and Bolsheviks and a couple of World Wars. Japan went through firebombing and Hiroshima and foreign occupation until now, with their Pokemons and Hello-Kitties, they must be the most assimilated people on the planet.

All of which makes me very pessimistic that the Middle East is going to get off easier than anybody else. If anything, Muslims have a greater sense of their own history and culture than we and the Europeans ever did. And they are likely to kick the hardest to hang onto it. And kicking at us must look like the best way to protect themselves from what they think we represent. And there isn't anything we can do about that, no matter how fine a military we have. Because, when you come down to it, we do represent it.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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