Theodore L. Gatchel: Democrats' 'metrics' -- Who decides that a war is lost?
Who decides that a war is lost? Scholars who wrestle with this question and related issues have posited several possible answers.
One is that the victor decides, with the acquiescence of the loser. An example is the 1991 Gulf War to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.
After an extended period of bombing Iraq, the coalition formed to recapture Kuwait launched a ground attack, on Feb. 24, 1991. Despite predictions of massive casualties made by foes of the war, the coalition forces rapidly defeated the Iraqi army, took Kuwait, and within a few days were about to close the trap on much of Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard. At that point, public opinion in the United States took a strange turn.
Focusing on U.S. air attacks on Iraqi forces fleeing Kuwait laden with loot -- the so-called highway of death -- war critics exchanged their predictions of catastrophe for a novel complaint: The Americans were being too hard on the enemy. As a result, President George H. W. Bush ordered Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf to end hostilities after 100 hours of combat.
In negotiations after the cease-fire, the Iraqis agreed to a set of conditions designed to destroy their ability to make and use weapons of mass destruction and to limit their ability to threaten their neighbors with conventional weapons. Unfortunately, the coalition lacked the will to occupy Iraq or rigorously enforce the conditions to which the Iraqis had agreed to end the war. The result was increasing defiance on the part of Saddam, a series of ineffectual U.N. Security Council Resolutions, and, ultimately, the current war in Iraq.
A similar chain of events occurred at the end of the First World War, with the German army defeated but still on French and Belgian soil. This led to the myth later fostered by Hitler that the German army had not been defeated by the Allies but, rather, had been "stabbed in the back" by cowardly politicians. Because the myth facilitated Hitler's actions that eventually led to World War II, the Allied leaders of that war were determined not to make the mistake of their predecessors. The result was the Allied policy of unconditional surrender.
This, in turn, suggests another possibility answer to "Who decides that a war is lost?": the loser. The losing side either gives up unconditionally or fights until destroyed. The latter describes essentially what happened in World War II with both Germany and Japan.
The lack of comparable physical destruction in Iraq in the Gulf War led some Iraqis to believe that they had not been defeated, and may have contributed to the willingness of others to support the insurgency, or at least tolerate it. The point is academic, however, because members of today's coalition would never have considered visiting the kind of punishment on Iraq that the Allies wreaked on their enemies in World War II.
With neither of the two previous methods proving useful in the current war, both the George W. Bush administration and its detractors have been searching for alternative answers to "Who decides?" One possibility is that the decision could be made by pre-determined "metrics," to use a fashionable buzzword.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said recently, "One thing the Democrats agree on is that this war has taken too long, is too expensive, and has cost too many lives." If that is a serious statement of policy -- rather than political grandstanding -- it implies that the Democrats determined a set of time, cost, and casualty figures that would be acceptable but that have now been exceeded. Using that approach, future strategists would calculate such figures in advance and simply accept defeat if the war was still going when their calculated limits had been reached.