Blowback And The Paradoxical Futility Of Modern War

Failure is an option.

And it is made most likely by those who claim it isn't.

***

Alan: Americans are uniquely dedicated to the proposition: "Failure is not an option." 

To avoid failure and to guarantee "success," Uncle Sam relies on massive acts of violence - "carpet bombing," "bombing them back to The Stone Age" - as if sufficient destruction will necessarily bring victory. 

Until recently, armies fought on designated battlefields (away from civilian populations), and belligerence -- at least the neo-imperial kind waged by super-power surrogates -- has been projected "over there, far away." 

Surely the "designation of enemies" in Iraq and Afghanistan would insulate "The Homeland" from direct devastation.

The seeming advantages of "violence over there, far away" formerly conspired with limited transportation and primitive communication so that blowback was geographically contained or sufficiently delayed to detach cause from effect, providing the prurient semblance of "solution" through climactic violence 

The fact that The Treaty of Versailles ended World War I while causing World War II is a case in point. 

Most people are unaware of the connection. 

Rather, Hitler was an inexplicable monstrosity, not the predictable embodiment of German rage at the onerous terms of The Treaty.

Nowadays, blowback is so swift that "cause and effect" are linked by visible chains. 

No sooner did ISIS perform two beheadings than Republican congressmen saw them cross the Tex-Mex border to "kill us all."

Marshall McLuhan summarized this sea change in blowback with an insight both tragic and laughable: "To the spoils belongs the victor." 

A case in point is Netanyahu's recent war on Gaza, ostensibly "won" by Israel. 

"Behind" The Official Story, it was Hamas who resisted beyond all expectation so that Gazans - despite their devastation - consider themselves "the victor." 

As night follows day, understandably resentful Palestinians will lick their wounds and be back on the battlefield as soon as they accumulate enough psychological energy to re-direct attention from "the ruins" to "the battlefield."

Short of extermination, people who live in "killing fields" eventually prevail precisely because they live there. 

It is their home and they are not going away.

Occupiers, on the other hand, always go away.

(An afterthought... Perhaps the Jews are unique in that they collectively abandoned their homeland and therefore may not get it back again. It is one thing to lay claim to land by continuity of possession and quite another to finagle a dubious purchase-migration-dispossession-of-inhabitants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora)