6.6 OVERWHELMING POWER IGNORES WAR DIPLOMACY
Historically, war was viewed as a continuation of policy. Therefore, diplomacy not only preceded and succeeded war, but often was conducted concurrently with it. This war diplomacy involved the calculated use of national leverage, and of persuasion or camouflage when leverage was missing, to get other governments to fit their policy to ours and thus prepare the way for the political influence we sought when we began the military campaign. Exclusive focus on technological supremacy rests on the notion that war diplomacy is an oxymoron, that the personal interests and the cultural biases of other nations are irrelevant to the outcome of a war. Armed with the latest technology, Network Centrists find no advantage in using the culture of other nations as a means of manipulating their responses through war diplomacy.
This issue of cultural differences between ourselves and our enemies has become particularly acute in recent years when the perennial enemies, as well as their natural friends, seem to hail more often than not from the Islamic world. No matter how altruistic our ultimate motivation, peoples raised in the culture characterizing that world are easily manipulated by our enemies to distrust those motives essentially because we make no effort ourselves to manipulate right back. Had we made an early effort to counterbalance the quite predictable influence the Iranian government would want to exert upon the Shia population in southern Iraq, we might have had to deal with a far easier problem to solve than it transpired in the event. However, penetrated by the knowledge that no matter our enemy’s predisposition against us, we shall be able to eventually impose our will upon him by virtue of our overwhelming military capability, we ignored the obvious opportunity for long-term tranquility that would have flowed from recognizing what makes the Shia public opinion click and using that knowledge for our own purpose.
Although it is true that we can depend upon our military might to overcome most tactical resistance, it is not true that the long-term strategic goal of returning to peace should thereby have no influence upon how we use that might in the first place. Indeed, as we have already pointed out, the mightier the force at our disposal, the less likely that the enemy would even want to take the field against us, and therefore the more likely that he would be forced to find other, non-military, ways of resisting our political will. Therefore, employment of our military capability without consideration for the political goal we seek through war, is likely to render that political goal elusive.