Responding to our good friend Global Paradigm's comments on 'V for Vendetta' (in case you haven't noticed, we both really liked it) earlier today got us into a Johnny Lydon frame of mind. You know:

I am an antichrist
I am an anarcist
Don't know what I want but
I know how to get it
I wanna destroy the passer by cos I

I wanna BE anarchy !
No dogs body

Anarchy for the U.K it's coming sometime and maybe
I give a wrong time stop a traffic line
your future dream is a shopping scheme cos I
I wanna BE anarchy !

[sic] (Yes, we know it was all a send up and shrewd social hack by McLaren. And yes, they couldn't play to save their lives. We agree PiL was more interesting, too).



Today's general theme seemed to be anarchy — whether in movies, fiction, Bakunin's writings. A theme in almost Bach-like counter fugue to the 'We Love Authority' press conference Bush conducted in West Virginia seeking to gloss over events in Iraq. The Pistol's faux anarchy, V's more authentic sentiments and events in Iraq have one thing in common: the inability of States to stop them.

And here is where Martin van Creveld comes in. As we noted back in November 2005, he wrote a terrific column about the Iraq War,“Costly Withdrawal Is The Price To Be Paid For A Foolish War”. The famed military historian wrote this widely cited close:

For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.

Given Bush's claim this week that 'future presidents' will deal with withdrawal, van Creveld's thinking behind the November 2005 statement is worth pondering. A future presidency means not only prolonging the war in absolute temporal terms. A risk is that a new team may believe they, unlike this crowd, have figured out a way to 'win' or have 'peace with honor'. And van Creveld's point would be no.

To him, Iraq and Vietnam are, to use the terminology he used in his book “The Transformation of War”, non-trinitarian conflicts. The future of war, according to him, is non-trinitarian, non-Clausewitzian, and probably not winnable by organized state armies. He notes that almost all countries that tried to fight such wars from 1941 to the present lost. Most pointedly, the U.S. lost two such campaigns: in Vietnam and Somalia. Van Creveld asks, “Why should the war in Iraq end up differently?”

He explained it this way in 2004:

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