A Tangled Web

ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE



One of my favourite writers is Prof. Victor Davis Hanson. In his latest column, here, he provides us with a key insight that explains so much of what we see and read in our ever-so-liberal media;



"Key here is our own acceptance of such moral asymmetries. Storming the Church of the Nativity is a misdemeanor in the Western press; shelling a minaret full of shooters is a felony. Blowing up Westerners in Saudi Arabia or Jordan is de rigueur; asking Muslims to take off their scarves while in French schools is a casus belli. If Afghanistan has roads, a benevolent man as president, and al Qaedists on the run, call it a failure because Mr. Karzai has not been able, FDR-like, to tour the countryside in a convertible limousine waving to crowds.



Institutionalized cowardice plays a role as well in this weird way of war: Call the few dozen dead in a West Bank town the wages of Jeningrad or the fire-fighting in Fallujah an atrocity, but don't utter a peep about the 80,000 dead in Chechnya or the flattening of Grozny. The Russians are not quite folk like the Israelis or Americans. They really don't care much if you hate them; they are likely to do some pretty scary things if you press them; they don't have too much money to shake down; they don't put you on cable news to yell at their citizenry; and you wouldn't really wish to emigrate there for a teaching fellowship anyway.



The moral of all this? The West can defeat the enemy on the battlefield, but in distant and much-caricatured wars on the dirty ground it can only win when it has leaders who can convince a fickle public into sacrificing, being ridiculed, and putting up with inevitable short-term disappointment that is the price of long-term security and stability — a sacrifice that in turn will never be acknowledged as such by the very people who are its beneficiaries both here and abroad."