The Vietnamese War will be used to illustrate the bankruptcy of Cripple Factor thinking. Placing it in the context of the general collapse of European hegemony since the end of World War II, highlights its character as a watershed. Finally we will show how the Cripple Factor makes us victims of our own delusions.
The doctrine of global control through inappropriate technology transfer rests upon 3 assumptions :
Considering each of these assumptions in turn:
This argument, a weak form of the Cripple Factor, has a limited validity, but is seriously flawed. Clearly those values which inspire us to dump weapons on helpless nations as a way of maintaining our own prosperity are not of the sort that anyone else should emulate. It is indeed doubtful that a truly free society would permit the giving away of valuable military hardware and secrets to dictators and oligarchs.
The Nixon Doctrine no more represents the will of the American people than the criminal brain-washing of teen-age suicide bombers represents the will of the peoples of the Middle East. Notions about the inability of the Muslim world to fathom our culture and therefore our technology are self- serving justifications arising from a guilty conscience. Few of us are willing to face up to the fact that our government and corporations have given away our security to perpetual an irresponsible way of life.
Japan can serves as a counter-example to this kind of thinking . Until the end of the Second World War it was a monarchy dominated by the military. Civil liberties never achieved the level they had in the West, and under the fascist dictatorship that produced the war they vanished altogether. For almost a century the Japanese were avid for all forms of Western technology, from which its own was modeled, all the while preserving its own millennial system of values. Over a 35 year period , Japan carved out a huge Asian empire. Its formation and eventual dissolution required the destruction of millions of lives, and if the United States had not entered the war, this empire might still be intact. The Japanese supply a the decisive counter-example to the first tenet of Cripple Factor thinking.
For the Cripple Factor to continue to function in the Middle East. therefore, something more than a mere estrangement of cultural values is required. The Arab states must be maintained in a condition which will make it impossible for them to take their destiny into their own hands. One sees this pattern in all of the countries of the Third World deemed vital to American economic and military interests.
On the one hand ruling elites are being enriched at the expense of their populations, giving them a vested interest in opposing national development. In the Middle East one has seen how, as far back as the 20's, national boundaries were drawn up in such a fashion as to destroy the economic integrity of the region. This may not have been done deliberately. The unrestrained grab fest by Western European and American oil cartels of the oil riches of the Near East, was enough in itself to insure that this region would be divvied up with little regard for local realities. The artificial creation of the pseudo-nations of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the 1920s deprived Iraq of effective access to the ocean, forcing it to build long pipe lines through Saudi Arabia and Turkey for the use of which it must pay enormous rates to both these countries. The barbarity of Sadaam Hussein is not to be excused. However, with the successful occupation of Kuwait, Iraq would have gained the economic and strategic clout to promote an effective policy of auto-determination in a region which both the United States and Great Britain have pledged must never become truly independent . [13]
The strategies of conventional warfare are only effective against a conventional enemy, and our conventions derive from the Second World War. The deployment of weapons of mass destruction that brought Germany and Japan to their knees didn't work in Vietnam; the Vietnamese could not (and would not) fight our kind of war.
The disadvantages of waging war against an unconventional enemy resonate through all recorded history. The story of the rout of the invincible armies of the Roman empire by the darts of the Parthians is well-known. In the Hundred Years War the French armies were callously massacred at Agincourt, Crécy and Poitiers by the English, who refused to be drawn into "conventional" engagements in which the purpose of fighting had been the capture of princes for ransom and the key personal element was the display of reckless valor for the sake of honor. The radical innovations in military tactics and the choreographing of troop movements introduced by Gustavus Adolphus at the battle of Breitenfeld in 1631, produced the decisive turning point of the Thirty Years War.
Later the English themselves lost the American Revolution partly because of their reliance on compact phalanxes of infantry moving as a block in a country where the settling of the frontier had led to the development of more flexible tactics.
Likewise, Gandhi's strategy in the Salt March thoroughly upset all conventional expectations bound up with the very concept of force. His powerful ideas have yet to be understood and assimilated in most parts of the world.
So that when Saudi Arabia - a royal family of about 20,000 acting in the name of 5,000,000 people living in a desert 1/3 the size of the continental United States - purchases $26 billion of military hardware each year for an army of 70,000 , it is not difficult to conclude that one purpose of our eagerness to fill its shopping lists is to render it functionally unable to wage war.[15]
Look at the evidence: when the Gulf War came around - that is to say, a genuine threat to Saudi Arabia's security - the United States acted realistically as if these many billions of dollars of ostentatious weaponry constituted so much kitty litter, and sent in over 100,000 troops to protect, not the people of Saudi Arabia, but its own concessions and derricks in the interminable desert, where one finds almost no people at all.
To this way of thinking the Vietnamese War serves as the decisive counter- example. Here is an extended quotation from David Marr's essay , "The Technological Imperative In US War Strategy in Vietnam" ( The World Military order, pg. 36) :
".. At its peak operation in 1971-72, Igloo White was a tremendously ambitious, intricate system for seeking out and destroying truck convoys, supply depots, bivouacs, anti- aircraft sites, construction crews, repair teams, and just about any other signs of life in the hundreds of miles between the Mu Gia Pass on the North Vietnamese border and the general area where the borders of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia converge. Ground sensors, airborne 'people sniffers' , and infra-red detection equipment pinpointed local activity and transmitted this information automatically to a battery of IBM computers in Nakorn Phanom, Thailand. Depending on the nature of the alleged target, operational commanders at Nakorn Phanom ordered B-52's , fighter bombers, transports with side-firing weapons helicopters to vector in and attack, often on the basis of automatic firing signals. Much of this activity occurred at night, without pilots ever actually seeing the target. Meanwhile, during the day, they increasingly unloaded 'smart bombs' , guided in by diverse means usually beyond the reach of the pilot. As one commentator rhapsodized, ' The entire process, "from beep to bang ", may take less than five minutes.' The whole operation seemed like a wild scientists dream come true.
But as the 1972 Spring Offensive demonstrated, something had gone wrong with American planning . Researchers and operational commanders had failed to understand the enemy or give him enough credit for ingenuity. Once again, by making the termination or drastic curtailment of north-south traffic a pre-eminent measure of success, they had continued to ignore or downgrade other critical elements of the struggle throughout Indochina.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail had become an obsession. Yet even within the terms of that obsession, US planners never fully appreciated how tens of thousands of men and women along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1972 could outwit the electronic battlefield or, when that failed, reconstruct with alacrity , multiply the number of roads and paths available for alternative travel, and strip the most damaged trucks for repair of the least damaged."
We do not appear to have learned the lessons of this most recent in a long tradition of unjust colonial wars waged by the United States against weak and helpless nations ( the Native Americans, Mexico, Central America, the Philippines, Korea, Panama, Iraq,..... ) . It left us with two legacies: the sense of defeat, and the knowledge that we had ruthlessly devastated a poor nation. There is a great ballyhoo in the media about how the Vietnamese War made Americans "cynical", how they lost faith in the "American dream", and " no longer trust their leaders". One is astonished to learn that none of this happened after 3 centuries that have included such constructive phenomena as slavery, the Trail of Tears, the rape of Mexico, the incredible brutality of the Civil War, the dropping of the 2 atomic bombs, the stalemate in Korea, and hosts of major and minor infractions of a similar nature.
If there is any reason to say that we "lost" in Vietnam, ( as opposed to, for example, "winning" in the Philippines ) , then we should, at the least, be able to draw important lessons from it, for there are many things to be learned from defeat. Indeed, Vietnam demonstrated the bankruptcy of all three aspects of Cripple Factor thinking :
The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong , unified rather than demoralized by massive campaigns of bombardment, stubbornly refused to be drawn into the conventional engagements of the post-WWII period. The bombing of open cities, carried out against Haiphong and Hanoi in Christmas of 1965, was condemned as the very acme of barbarity when first employed by the Germans over Rotterdam in WWII. It has since become the very the hallmark of Western military policy.
It is therefore a mistake to automatically assume that the Cripple Factor will continue to work in the Middle East. One should not assume that illiteracy, poverty and general backwardness will render the Muslim world forever incapable of making proper use of their stockpiles of weapons. There will always be an Osama ben Laden somewhere who will figure out a way to use a jet liner as a guided missile. One should also not assume that their indoctrination is more disabling to them than ours is to ourselves. The word jihad translates as crusade . Islam may superficially translate as submission , but can also be translated as freedom . And which civilization is more adept at twisting and exploiting the manifold meanings of the signifier God -theirs or ours?
Our society continues to seriously underestimate the amount of damage that Cripple Factor thinking, and the allied Nixon Doctrine, are causing around the world. At the same time we have become increasingly victim to the fatal mentality that they generate.