The Realities of America's Past and Present Wars

America has a skewed sense of historical war. We fight hyena wars, licking up the scraps when the battle is nearly over. We don't really know imperial war, and we really don't want to fight it.

In the Revolutionary War, we never faced the enemy on his own ground, or at full strength; the British were wrapped up with a world conflict of their own, and we were nothing more than the jackal snapping at the heels of the empire. When the lion ran, we believed we had chased him away, rather than recognizing that he had other lions to fight, far away from where we could see. We were like those little boys who believed they had chased the Germans out of Italy, when the German Army was pulling back to fight other foes in other theaters.

In the Indian Wars - backed by a government policy of genocide and land-theft -- we won by virtue of our own filthy past: We brought in diseases we'd inherited from cattle, and brewed up in crowded, dirty cities, transforming them into brutal air-vectored eating machines. Over the centuries, our ancestors gained some immunity to them, but no population facing measles or smallpox for the first time could hope to endure the disease onslaught. If the native peoples had possessed our immunity, the Americas today would look like Africa; continents full of the people of the First Nations, with a few surrounded enclaves of whites. Our bravery didn't win us our new world - our bad health did.

With our conquest of the new world as an example, we attacked small island nations full of native peoples. Where our diseases would work for us, we conquered by plague. Hawaii was taken by disease. Where the population already possessed the immunity, we conquered by weight of population. American soldiers - sometimes literally -- walked on the bones of Haitians, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. We thought we were conquerors because we'd stepped on mice.

In the great wars of the 20^th century, we held back until the empires had exhausted one another. We didn't win World War Two - the Russians did. The Germans - and earlier the Japanese - had battered their tiny, determined selves against the Bear. By the time we got to Europe, backed up by everybody we could ally with, there was nothing left of the German Armies but exhausted remnants - and they still nearly booted our armies off the beach.

The Germans also faced another foe: the partisan, also called the insurgent, terrorist or freedom-fighter. The regular army could not win against the partisans. The civilian fights with no rules, no leaders, no controllable hierarchies. They will die and die and die to make an enemy leave their country. They will not stop to negotiate a surrender or abide by those agreements. Men, women and children want the invader OUT.

They fight, cheap, too. Armies pay billions of dollars to trains soldiers and build weapons systems. War is business, and the corporations working in it work to raise the prices. The politicians work to get them higher prices, as part of their cut.

But the insurgent? He fights with nothing. He takes from the supplies of the invader. Even if he hits the invader where he lives, he uses the invader's materials. Nobody on the planes on 9/11 had a suitcase bomb - they were using their enemies' planes and their enemies' fuel as a readily available bomb. The partisan makes his or her bomb wherever he or she, can with whatever's there. He doesn't wait for the sergeant to give him orders.

So here's where we are:

We are involved in an imperial war, for oil fields, overseas, with no allies to speak of, nobody else taking the brunt (and why should they? They're not going to get the spoils). We must pay far more than the insurgent for our weapons or our soldiers. They want us out. They will not stop. We have no draft to replace soldiers. Most of our own people know this is an economic war for fuel, and will not join those armies. What soldiers we have will grind and grind and grind against the constant insurgent attack. We have no diseases to lay our enemy low.

Welcome to the Russian Winter campaigns. How does it feel to be the French of the 19^th century - or the Germans of the 20th?