Contests of power and contests of discrimination

In World War II, we often knew where the German troops were located, but it was difficult and dangerous and a chancy matter to defeat them. Our power has grown to the point that in the initial stages of the Iraq war, we had no difficulty defeating Saddam Hussein’s armed forces. Any military target we could locate, we could destroy. We had a far more difficult time defeating them once they gave up their tanks and started using far less sophisticated weapons*. The problem has changed from one of a contest of power to a question of discrimination, in the original sense of “telling things apart”. We cannot easily defeat Iraqi fighters because we cannot easily distinguish them from the Iraqi population, which we do not want to destroy. The situation was almost the same in Vietnam.

The same progression has happened with our nonhuman foes. It has been some time since we had a raw contest of power with lions, tigers and bears. We have no trouble defeating them (so little, indeed, that such animals became endangered species). We can exterminate smaller foes such as rats and bugs in our houses, and the main difficulty is how to avoid poisoning the human residents at the same time. In the wild, the problem is how to avoid poisoning the rest of the ecosystem. Our most serious foes today are bacteria and viruses. It is easy enough to destroy them, as we do every time we sterilize medical instruments. The problem is destroying them while preserving the human bodies they live within. The most difficult discrimination problem is cancer, tissue that is so similar to us that it IS us, a small part run amok.

*This is a description of how things are, not how they should be. In writing dispassionately about how to destroy targets in Iraq, I am not addressing directly the question of whether that is a good idea. I do not intend this essay as a prescription for doing anything differently, just perhaps a slightly differently way of looking at things. But this perspective can be brought to bear on various other human conflicts too.