The Strategic Dilemma of Bitter-Enders
This means the strategic calculus is altered by such a stance. The war itself and the driving need to wage it to it’s ultimate conclusion may have come to outweigh the value of the original “End” over which the conflict began; perhaps a policy concession or bit of territory or admission by a state’s rulers of a subordinate place in the diplomatic pecking order. While adopting a “bitter-end” position logically seems disadvantageous to the weaker party, it presents the enemy with a new set of problems. The “Means” or costs required to wage a war of conquest and lengthy occupation may be economically or attritionally prohibitive, or even physically impossible. Israel has a fine military and nuclear weapons but the Jewish state is too small to subdue and rule over the Arab states; Imperial Japan, for all it’s martial ferocity and cruelty, could not swallow the vastness of China, divided by civil war and fighting without allies, even before Pearl Harbor. Reach can exceed grasp.
Likewise, the moral burden and diplomatic friction of waging war not only against the opposing army, but the enemy population as well – of bombing or blockading into starvation women, children and the elderly – may be more than a political community or it’s leadership are able to bear and remain unified. As callous and narcissistic leaders of great countries usually are, few of them (fortunately) aspire to follow in the footsteps of Hitler, Stalin or Mao and openly spill an ocean of blood. The impressive firepower of the bombing campaigns of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon did not break Hanoi’s will to fight the Vietnam War, they broke the Eastern Establishment’s will to pursue anticommunist Containment by force in Vietnam or elsewhere. The brutal counterinsurgency tactics of the French Army in the Algerian War destroyed the Algerian rebels militarily, but it shattered the Fourth Republic politically.
Insurgency, the “war of the weak”, is powerful because it inherently contains elements of bitter-endism. To rise up against one’s own society usually is an act of politically burning your boats and wearing, so far as the state is concerned, the mantle of treason and all that it entails. A desperate act by desperate men and conversely, many of the leaders of states, being tyrants, are in no better position. Tyrants are widely despised; the Gaddafis or Mussolinis know that their power is their only guarantee of safety and their fate, if they fall into the hands of their people, would be terrible, so any rebellion must be crushed immediately, lest it gain traction. The Shah by contrast, was a congenital coward but a realist. He knew what might happen if he and his family fell into the hands of his political opponents, so the Pahlavi dynasty preemptively fled at the first sign of trouble (twice).
Finally, a word must be said about the position of a people under the leadership of bitter-ender rulers in a war. Caught between a rock and a hard place, they essentially have three choices, none of them attractive:
1. Make a supreme effort to win the war.
2. Make a supreme effort to overthrow the government and sue for peace.
3. Desert the cause as quietly as they can on an individual basis and hope for the best.
The best almost never happens. Kershaw’s history of the fate of the Germans in 1945 would have been well understood by Thucydides, even if the Melians were as blameless as the Germans were deserving of their fate:
….About the same time the Melians again took another part of the Athenian lines which were but feebly garrisoned. Reinforcements afterwards arriving from Athens in consequence, under the command of Philocrates, son of Demeas, the siege was now pressed vigorously; and some treachery taking place inside, the Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves.
If you want the bitter end, be prepared to drink the last drop.
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J. Scott Shipman:
April 8th, 2012 at 4:56 pm
Hi Zen,
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Excellent post!
Rob Paterson:
April 8th, 2012 at 5:51 pm
Brilliant! Now I would love to hear your views as to why America keeps fighting wars like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – as an outsider it is easy to see that they cannot be won – but each time a massive effort is made and then after a generation another one???
larrydunbar:
April 8th, 2012 at 5:58 pm
But isn’t that the point? The End Timers, or as you suggest the Bitter End Timers, only have one last drop? Kind of makes you wonder what is going to happen to all the “Sunni” followers of the Book of Mormon, now that the last of the blood-line is a woman.
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I mean, the main difference between Sunni and Shia followers of Islam is in the one whom is in the position of command at the time of “end”. If I understand it correctly, this position is under stress in the Mormon religion.
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Perhaps Mitt could start where the Other left off 🙂
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I would be interested in what JF has to say.
zen:
April 8th, 2012 at 7:55 pm
Hi Scott – thanks and Happy Easter my friend!
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Hi Rob,
.
Thanks! Good question, well worth a post. I have two quick explanations. The first is the corrupted OODA Loop of both the Big Army as a military institution in presenting feedback to the political leadershipwhile the war is in process as well as the broken OODA Loop in the White House where LBJ was unwilling to hear contrary views and Bush II refused until after the 2006 election returns. The second explanation is that America has enjoyed for the past century, most of the times, an excess of means to bury the enemy materially in a comparative advantage of equipment, technology and firepower and the belief that this overwhelming capacity negates the need for effective strategy or clear-headed policy permits the pursuit of disaster long after most nations would have been forced to change course.
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Hey Larry,
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Mormonism is not my bag. Maybe Charles will chime in? I think JF has “retired” fromthe interwebs for a while.
Lynn Wheeler:
April 8th, 2012 at 10:30 pm
with regard to US activities for several decades, there is always “perpetual war”, latest from Spinney
http://chuckspinney.blogspot.com/2012/04/goodbye-occupy-political-engineering.html
above references “Profits Without Production” which somewhat also:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/10/journal-why-the-us-middle-class-is-broken.html
earlier “perpetual war”
http://chuckspinney.blogspot.com/p/domestic-roots-of-perpetual-war.html
for much more caustic view “Extreme Prejudice”:
http://www.amazon.com/EXTREME-PREJUDICE-Terrifying-Patriot-ebook/dp/B004HYHBK2/
a somewhat different view (send in the jackels when other approaches fail)
http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-Man-ebook/dp/B001AFF266/
Spinney’s article from 1983 … behind paywall but lives free at wayback machine
http://web.archive.org/web/20070320170523/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,953733,00.html
Boyd would tell story that they spent 18months preparing for article and then afterwards SECDEF blamed Boyd for the article, tried to have him transferred to Alaska and banned from the Pentagon for life.
L. C. Rees:
April 9th, 2012 at 6:00 am
The second largest Latter-day Saint denomination, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (known since 2000 as the Community of Christ), was “re”-organized on April 6, 1860 by Joseph Smith III. The CoC passed the office of President down through the descendants of Joseph Smith, Jr. until 1996 when Wallace B. Smith chose a non-Smith as his successor. Since Joseph Smith, Jr. has thousands of descendants, if the CoC wanted a “bloodline” they have no shortages. In the larger Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the only hereditary office was that of patriarch that was held by descendants of Joseph Smith’s older brother Hyrum until the office was discontinued in 1979. Many leaders of the LDS Church have been relations of earlier leaders but they were drawn from a small pool. As the LDS Church has grown from 3,000,000 to 14,000,000 members within my lifetime, its leadership has been increasing drawn from first or second generation members, many from outside the United States. Doctrinally (or “theologically” as others say), the only teaching about “bloodlines” that the LDS Church teaches is that, by accepting the grace of Jesus Christ, demonstrating our acceptance through good works, and making and keeping covenants with Him, we become adoptive descendants of Abraham and partakers of the covenant that Christ (known in the Old Testament as YHWH or Jehovah) made with Abraham in Genesis 17. You can learn all you’d every want to know about LDS teachings on lineage by reading the epistle of Paul to the Romans found in any New Testament translation.
Purpleslog:
April 9th, 2012 at 6:46 pm
I was hoping JF would still pop up here and elsewhere as a commenter. 🙁