The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” So wrote Sun Tzu two and a half thousand years ago, and in spite of the fame of the book in which this line appears - The Art of War - it seems to be a book more talked about than actually read. The media commentary on the recent war in Iraq, for example, has appeared even to me, a non-general, to be so spectacularly ill-informed and lacking in even a basic understanding of how wars are fought as to be virtually useless as a guide to what was really going on. Instead, we were treated to a dismal parade of second-hand ‘knowledge’ and third-guessing dressed up as thoughtful insight - and, if not that, rather faux-clever attempts by the various authors to ‘interpret’ the events unfolding before them by the lights of their own preoccupations and a priori notions, relevant or not.

Brendan O’Neill’s ‘Liberation by Snapshot’ is the latest in a long series of articles preoccupied with the place of image in the coalition campaign. Brendan, I suspect, has noticed that the propaganda and symbolism employed by the coalition forces (the toppling of statues, the widely-disseminated images of Uday and Qusay Hussein’s dead bodies, etc.) is reminiscent of the spin and gesture politics currently in vogue among the West’s political classes, and has - I’m reconstructing what I think are the most likely thought-processes here - arrived at the conclusion that the latter has somehow infected the tactical thinking of the coalition military so as to produce the former:

In wars of old, it was usually after declaring victory that the winners would put on massive displays of symbolic force and topple symbols of the defeated regime. In Iraq, such gestures took place before the war had ended, as part of the campaign to ‘liberate Iraq’. In a war where the very aim was to ’send a message’ and project a positive image of the coalition forces, toppling statues was seen as being just as important as winning cities.

Brendan has always seemed to me to have a rather romantic view of warfare (note the poetic “wars of old” in the above quote), filled with notions of equal adversaries facing off mano a mano on what in a previous article he termed “the open battlefield” (never mind that the techniques of modern warfare have rendered the concept of ‘the battlefield’ completely meaningless) - all chivalry and Marquis of Queensberry rules.

The truth about warfare, for as long as warfare has existed as something more than simply tribal scuffles, is that bluff and image are one of a commander’s best weapons. The Duke of Wellington once said that Bonaparte’s presence on the battlefield was worth an extra division (or words to that effect), such was the magnetism of his personality. During Alexander the Great’s campaign in Asia his reputation preceded him so well that potential adversaries came out of their walled cities and offered him their fealty (not to mention their daughters) without a fight. The notion of doing things that to the layperson might not seem to involve any immediate gain in territory or decisive victory over an opponent, yet were entirely purposeful, would have been well-known to all three of these generals, as it would have been to Sun Tzu (”Make a noise in the west; attack in the east.”).

If there is a link between government spin and military bluff (shock ‘n awe, etc.) - and I doubt there is - then the causal arrow points the opposite way. Perhaps the spin doctors have simply stolen some two millenia-old military ideas and applied them in the political arena? Given the increasing influence of business practice - where we know Sun Tzu has had an effect - on the practice of government, this isn’t entirely outside the bounds of possibility. Then again, as any decent scientist will tell you: correlation doesn’t imply causation.

I doubt you’ll hear that point made by many media opinion-makers, however.