Moral Conflict

The late Colonel John R. Boyd, the brilliant strategist who introduced the concept of the OODA loop¹, put a lot of thought into the type of "highly irregular warfare" that we're encountering in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.  First we need to look at the essence of moral conflict, as practiced by our opponents, which is based on three elements:

• Menace: Impressions of danger to one's well being and survival.
• Uncertainty: Impressions, or atmosphere, generated by events that appear ambiguous, erratic, contradictory, unfamiliar, chaotic, etc.
• Mistrust: Atmosphere of doubt and suspicion that loosens human bonds among members of an organic whole or between organic wholes.

We've certainly got all that in spades. 

Boyd observed that we need positive counterweights to the negative side of moral conflict:

[W]e find that the counterweights to menace and uncertainty are not at all obvious unless we start with mistrust and work in the reverse order.  Proceeding in this way we note that...[t]he presence of mistrust implies that there is a rupture or loosening of the human bonds or connections that permit individuals to work as an organic whole in harmony with one another. This suggests that harmony itself represents an appropriate counterweight to mistrust.

Harmony for Boyd was defined as interaction of apparently disconnected events or entities in a connected way.  This fits with all our current wars.

First of all, the conflict is not just about the United States and Iraqi insurgents or al Qaeda terrorists, but involves other entities including our allies. It also includes civilians, not just members of the military, for we are both victims of terror attacks and part of the defense against them. Civilians in a democracy are key to success, so any government that wants to defeat our opponents must engage the people constructively.

The conflict is also not as simple as "they hit us, we hit back". It involves diplomacy, economics, culture, and myriad other factors. We must be aware of these diverse element and understand that not everybody is going to perceive the problem or the solution in the same way. For example, to assume that Iraqis want their country to be an American-style capitalist democracy is unwise.

Mistrust is exactly what hinders us the most in this struggle. It's mistrust between people and their government, and mistrust between governments. That's probably the biggest negative consequence of the missing WMD in Iraq: the US made terrible weapons out to be the basis for the war, and whether it be through willfull deceit, disastrous incompetence, or a combination of both, BushCo sowed the seeds of mistrust themselves. With more Americans doubting the case for Iraq and our allies feeling deceived, we lose the necessary counterweight of harmony and are in grave danger of losing this moral conflict.

So what can the Bush administration right now do truly help us succeed in our struggles? There's one lesson they should really take from Spain: come clean. The American people are sensing the deceptions used to get us into Iraq, and people are growing more concerned about Abu Ghraib.

Through it all, the adminstration is getting publicly caught in their lies and exaggerations. In the end, the truth will out and we will punish those who misled us, just as the Spaniards did. It would be much better for BushCo to be up front about their mistakes, truly cooperate with the various commissions, and support a full accounting of what happened.

Beyond any political considerations, being truthful is an absolute requirement for us to defeat our opponents. If the US government cannot be honest with its own people, then it is clearly not capable of being honest with its allies, nor with the people whose hearts and minds we need to win over if we wish to succeed in this moral conflict.

ntodd

1 - Boyd spelled it out in Patterns of Conflict, available in complete form as a PDF.  The file is a couple meg and is essentially a scan of Boyd's typewritten monograph.  For ease of excerption, I'm linking to another site which has distilled the concepts in HTML in a discussion on business strategy.