Wolcott (emphasis added):
This afternoon Fox Newser Shepard Smith, stationed on the Lebanese-Israeli border, described the faces and demeanor of the Israeli soldiers returning from incursions into southern Lebanon. He said they looked “stunned” at the ferocity of the Hezbollah fighters. He added that even though the Israeli military knew Hezbollah had had six years to prepare defenses and traps in the southern area, they were unprepared for how lethally sophisticated the tactics were.* (I’m paraphrasing wildly, but I haven’t mischaracterized the gist of what he reported.)
Which brings me to one of the arch paradoxes of the War on Terror–that nearly five years after 9/11 we persist in both overestimating and underestimating our enemies. The hawks warn about a clash of civilizations, nuclear clouds as smoking guns, the global network of sleeper cells, an octopus with a thousand tentacles: a foe that kills without pity or remorse or discrimination, and ranks with Nazi Germany as a juggernaut of evil. Yet at the same time the politicians and pundits (particularly on the right) persist in deprecating the strength, agility, and ingenuity of the very foes they claim could bring down Western society, mocking Bin Laden in his cave (the greatest mass murder in American history, and the Bush administration treats his non-capture as a negligible detail), sluffing off the Iraqi insurgents as embittered Baathists and “dead-enders,” and deluding ourselves that massive air power will bug-squash guerrilla fighters and shock and awe the remnants into submission. We still regard them as savage primitives of low cunning who sporadically lash out. Our commentators and military strategists suffer from a catastrophic failure of imagination, unable or unwilling to see the world through our enemies’ eye and to think like them, assuming that our thought processes are superior, sufficient, and will prevail. Victor Davis Hanson’s Western way of war always wins, except when it doesn’t (Vietnam and, now, Iraq).
Today’s Bob Herbert column is good, too.
On my way to work today, I given the WaPo Express. It had a headline: Little Progress in Beirut Visit. Surprise, surprise. When has Condi made any progress in her visits to foreign countries. She could make progress if she really wanted to; but, none of these players want peace. So very sad.
Our leaders persist in thinking these non-state actorsa are building up the kind of war-fighting wherewithal we’d want (big scary weapons), when what they’re developing is the ability to fight guerrilla wars, which we don’t get at all, even deacdes after Vietnam.
(Or I should say our civilian leaders don’t get it. I don’t extend this critique to the career military, the people who actually fight.)