Essay

A captured document

By Douglas Lummis

A copy of the following letter was recently captured from a high official in one of the anti-U.S. forces in the Middle East.

Dear (name withheld),

You have asked me to suggest a strategy for destroying United States imperial power. As you know, I have thought about this question for years and I do have some ideas about it.

The first question is: What is the nature of U.S. power? The United States has the strongest military in the history of mankind. No other military force can defeat it. At the same time, the United States has not gained a clear victory in any major war since 1945. Why? Because the United States has been attempting something that is almost impossible to achieve by military power. The U.S. military can defeat any army in the world. But that does not mean it can defeat any people in the world.

The second question is: What are the U.S. military's major weaknesses? The first of these I just told you: As a force whose job is to defend the empire, the U.S. military must do things that are almost impossible for any military to do. A second weakness is that an imperial military, while immune to feelings of guilt, is very susceptible to shame.

This doesn't mean that military culture is "shame culture." Shame in the military is not a personal matter. To an imperial military, shame is strategy. An imperial military must not allow itself to be shamed by defeat. Defeat in one place proves that the imperial military is defeatable anywhere. For proof of this, one need only look at the statements of the U.S. military leaders themselves. During the Vietnam War, they repeatedly said: If we are defeated here, people everywhere will take courage and rise up against us. After their (illusory) victory in the first Gulf War, they repeatedly said: Now our enemies everywhere will abandon their hopes of rebelling against us.

What strategy does this suggest? The way to destroy U.S. imperial military power is to trap it into committing itself to a war which it can neither win nor withdraw from. That is, a war it cannot win because it is a war to achieve something that cannot be achieved by military power, and a war from which it cannot retreat because to do so would shame the empire all over the world.

If we can succeed in entrapping the U.S. military into such a war, we should be able to hold it there and slowly grind it down to impotence. This strategy will extract a terrible price in suffering from the people of the country where it takes place. But it should succeed in its main purpose, not simply of defeating, but of destroying, the power of the U.S. military, at least for many years to come.

Sincerely,

(name withheld)

All right, now that you have read this, I will confess to you that it is not a real document: I made it up. The last time I did this a lot of readers got angry. But after you get over your anger, ask yourself: Does this letter give you a new perspective for understanding what is happening now in Iraq?

Shukan ST: Aug. 24, 2007

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