Chuckie Watch 4: Chuckie wins the war

CHARLIE DANIELS, would-be arbiter of Patriotic Correctness for country performers and fans, has a book out called Ain't No Rag, published by the rightwing Regnery Press. One of the essays is called "Veterans," which recycles a blowhard "lesson" of the Vietnam War, one that anyone who grew up in America has heard a few dozen times. And to let us know where this fits in the culture wars, he writes:

When I think about brave men and women being spit on by dirty, stoned-out, jobless, pseudo-intellectual hippies whose only contribution to this nation had been to burn their draft cards, it makes my collar get about two sizes too small.
Now, Chuckie's not too big on citing sources. But presumably he knows about some incident in which a couple of intoxicated unemployed guys with poor personal hygiene who read Hermann Hesse novels and had burned their draft cards spit on some veterans. Or maybe they were just drunk and threw up on them.

However that may be, Chuckie knows about fightin' wars:

We could have won that war [Vietnam], if it would have been fought on the battlefield instead of the halls of Congress and the Oval Office.

Now, I'm not quite sure how it is that the US could fight a war without the President and Congress being involved. But anyway, Chuckie says:

In my book, when you go to war you shoot at the enemy every time you see him and you keep on shooting until he either surrenders or doesn't exist any more. You throw everything you've got at him every hour of every day until you grind him into the dust. Bomb him; shoot him; overrun his positions; cut his supply lines, and do it consistently until you pound him into submission.

Now, this sounds to me more like a description of an antebellum Southern slave patrol going after some planter's human property who had absconded from the plantation than like guerrilla warfare.

But here in the real world where American troops are involved in guerrilla wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that's not very useful advice. One of the particular challenges of counterinsurgency warfare is to find ways of protecting your troops while targeting guerrillas, avoiding civilian casualties and proceeding with normal government and development, all at the same time.

Yeah, it'd be grand if them there "Baathist diehards" and "Taliban remnants" would come out and fight like a regular army so we could kill 'em quick. But they just don't seem to be cooperating in that plan.

And just identifying the enemy is also a big factor in counterinsurgency. If you go blasting away indiscriminately at small bands of guerrillas ("shoot at the enemy every time you see him and you keep on shooting"), especially in urban settings, the troops are likely to kill civilians or friendly police. Which has already been happening in Iraq way too much as it is. And large-scale guerrilla warfare requires lots more than quick-and-easy battles that make exciting stories on Fox News. It requires police, paramilitaries and a regular army from the country where the insurgency is going on.

But Chuckie thinks they all need to be quick and easy:

And then, after he is thoroughly beaten and you can deal from a position of absolute authority, sit down at the peace table with him, work out something sensible, and get our troops the heck out of there.

If we're not willing to go all out to define and attain victory, we should never, ever get into another war.

"Absolute authority" - there's that Old South touch again. But isn't that what Bush and Rummy have already done in Afghanistan and Iraq? In both cases, the enemy government collapsed so completely there was no one to sit down with at the peace table. But our troops haven't been pulled "the heck out of there." Bush and Rummy also still seem to be working on that defining and attaining victory part. Does anyone know how to tell when we've won in either Iraq or Afghanistan?

Yet Chuckie's still cheering for both wars. And I can't help thinking that reconstructing Iraq to be a model democracy for the Middle East - which Chuckie's hero Bush still says we're going to do - may be a little more complicated than "working out something sensible."

In other words, Chuckie's macho formula for winning wars is just a bunch of bluster and hot air.

Tags: charlie daniels, charlie daniels soapbox, chuckie, chuckie watch, iraq war