He’s kind of right and he’s kind of wrong

Ralph Peters, looking at Hamas versus Fatah, draws some bleak conclusions about Iraq, based upon the fanatic nature of our enemy:

HAMAS won its shut-out victory in Gaza with alarming ease. And the reason Hamas won is even more alarming: Fanaticism trumps numbers.

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Fatah’s security forces in Gaza outnumbered the Hamas gunmen. Fatah had stockpiles of weapons and military gear (now in Hamas’ arsenal). Fatah even had the quiet backing of Israel and America.

And Fatah folded like a pup tent in a tornado.

Hamas won because its fighters are religious fanatics ready to die for their cause. Fatah runs an armed employment agency under the banner of Palestinian nationalism. Most of the latter’s security men are on the payroll because relatives or ward pols got them jobs. And they want to stay alive to collect their wages.

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Yes, Iraq is more complex than Gaza. But once you pierce the surface turbulence and look deep, the similarities are chilling: Iraq’s security forces do include true patriots – but most of the troops and cops just want a job, or were ordered to join up by a sheik or a mullah, or are gathering guns until their faction calls.

The al-Qaeda-in-Iraq terrorists, the core members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the hard-line Sunni ghazis are willing to die for the victory of their faction and their faith. They believe they’re doing Allah’s will. It gives them a strength we rush to explain away.

The raw numbers suggest that Iraq’s fanatics don’t stand a chance. The government has a far greater numerical advantage than did Fatah. But numbers often mislead analysts during insurgencies: Iraq’s government wouldn’t last a week without U.S. troops.

The lesson from Gaza is that such wars are neither waged nor won by the majority of the population. A tiny fraction of the populace, armed and determined, can destroy a fragile government and seize power.

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Our refusal to acknowledge the unifying – and terrifying – power of extremist religion has deep roots. As academics rejected and derided faith in the last century, even the Thirty Years’ War – the horrible climax of Europe’s wars of religion – was reinvented as a dynastic struggle, or a fight for hegemony, or a class struggle.

But the Thirty Years’ War was about faith. All the other factors were in play, but the core issue, from the Protestant coup in Prague in 1618 to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, was religious identity. And the atrocities committed on both sides make Iraq look like amateur hour: Wars of religion always demand blood sacrifice. (It was a compromise of bloody exhaustion that ended the Thirty Years War.)

Peters is certainly right that fanaticism trumps a whole bunch of other stuff. I’m hoping, though, that another historical analogy, one closer in time than the Thirty Years’ War and closer in culture than the Fatah thugs versus the Hamas thugs, is a little more apropos. That would be our own American Civil War.

Think about that War: On one side, we had a culture of fanatics. The South had a “to the death” commitment to slavery and states’ rights, and was also a warrior culture (something that still holds true today, as demonstrated by the South’s greater commitment to the American military). Defeat was inconceivable, as was their belief in the ultimate righteousness of their cause.

On the other side, we had a more limited warrior culture, not the mention the fact that a whole lot of Northerners didn’t like blacks and didn’t much care what happened to them. Although the North had a vastly larger population and greater wealth and industry, ordinary citizens were more likely to try to avoid service. This meant that a lot of the soldiers were simply raw immigrants, bought on the streets and sent to the battlefields. While a large number fought with bravery and distinction, an equally large number were just marking time and trying not to get killed.

This imbalance — wealth and numbers versus deep commitment and military spirit — meant that, for a very long time, the War’s outcome was not a foregone conclusion. It’s only in hindsight that we say that the North’s wealth predicted a Union victory. Not only were Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson superb military leaders from the get-go, Lincoln was plagued in the beginning with a group of inept generals (many of whom inspired him to his greatest witticisms). It’s not easy to remember now, but Gettysburg, which was a turning point in the War because of the enormous Southern carnage, could have gone the other way. It was just bad luck for the Confederacy that it didn’t.

And the North’s problems weren’t limited to the battlefield. It also had big problems on the political front, with Copperheads working diligently to undermine the Northern War effort. And yet the North won and slavery was banished from American soil.

It doesn’t take a large mental leap to analogize the situation in Iraq to that during the American Civil War. In Iraq, we, the Americans, are a vastly more sophisticated military force, engaged in a war against a smaller cadre of fanatics and sadists. Although our American troops in Iraq are committed to the war effort, something that distinguishes them from many of the Union soldiers in the Civil War, the Iraqi Army is a bit closer to the Union example: some are mere wage slaves, some are people willing to give their lives to the cause of a civilized, vaguely Democratic Iraq. In common with poor Lincoln, our war party (that would be the Republicans) has to deal with Copperhead Democrats working to undermine the War.

But we also have a couple of differences from the Civil War, one really good, and one really bad. On the good side is the fact that, not only can we win because we are a better military with better weaponry, we can do so with the smallest blood loss of any major war in American history, and that’s whether you count casualties in sheer numbers or in proportion to the American population. That’s good. There’s no war without human loss, but the mercy is that the human loss has been small compared to the scale of the war, and can continue to be so.

But there’s a bad difference between our war and the Civil War, and that difference is the Vietnam template. Copperhead politicians notwithstanding, in the painful years from 1861 through 1865, ordinary people could only envision a victory for one side or another. You fought war until one side won and one side lost or, as in Peters’ 30 Years War example, both sides collapsed completely. The concept of a walkaway, with the Devil taking the hindmost, was inconceivable to people before 1974. Now it always hovers in the background: we did it before, we can do it again. Every one of us can see as do-able a scenario in which we just pick up our marbles and go home. The Hell with the people we leave behind. Indeed, the Vietnamese and Cambodians have graciously forgiven us for our sins, and welcome us and our dollars into their countries, and this despite the fierce savagery of the years after we, the Americans, left.

At the end of the day, then, it’s not their apocalyptic belief in victory that’s our problem. Instead, our destruction lies in our own nonchalant attitude about the ultimate meaninglessness of an American defeat. Our own self-directed nihilism is what can destroy us.

UPDATE: Someone smarter always gets there first:

There is only one way the U.S. can lose in Iraq, and that is to give up. This probably explains why commentators like Simon and Takeyh, and politicians like Harry Reid, are so eager to sell the notion that Iraq is already lost. They would like Americans to believe that their defeatist policies are merely ratifying a defeat rather than creating one. That way they can avoid responsibility when their prescription — making more concessions to Iran and asking Israel to take risks — fails to alleviate the consequences of the defeat giving up in Iraq would produce.