The failure of "non-existential" war

John Robb at Global Guerillas makes an interesting case for his contention that our conventional methods of warfare are obsolete and that now the western countries are learning that they can't attain their objectives through war because they don't have the will or resources to fight "non-existential" conflicts (wars of choice, not neccesity).  He leaves out any discussion of nuclear weapons, maybe because he understands the nuclear option to be self defeating and therefore unthinkable.  (I'd like to introduce him to Richard Bruce Cheney, but never mind.)  He enumerates the reasons why warfare is not turning out to be the tool of policy that the neocon fantasists imagined, including the fact that conventional military strategy and weapons are futile in the new asymmetric "4GW" conflicts against dispersed non-state organizations like Al Qaeda.

I wonder if any of this new thinking has made it through the endoplasmic filters that have insulated the executive branch for so long.  Former President Khatami has been invited to Washington, which is a surprising diplomatic turn.  Of course the know-nothing tabloids are already screaming that it represents appeasement, and maybe it's just a short period of (Condoleeza-style) theatrical diplomacy before Cheney gives Rumsfeld the go-ahead to unleash the Weimaraners, but let's be optimistic for a change.  I'd be happy to be wrong about the nuclear paranoia, anyway, though I feel quasi-idiotic.  Am I crazy or do I have a death wish, or what?  And what is all this criticism of Israel?  Am I anti-Semitic too?  I better watch my step or I might alienate my non-existent readership, and then where would I be?

Hell, that's where, just like that Jehovah's Witness preacher told me the other day on the subway.  He was yelling at the top of his voice, warning me that I was in danger of going there, and I probably should have listened to him instead of yelling back:

"I'm in hell already!"

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Labor day update:  I keep returning to the notion that the apparent outbreak of diplomacy we're seeing now is nothing more than a kabuki dance intended to show that no stone is being left unturned in the effort to avoid war.  If congress flips to the Democrats in November, there will surely be a movement to impeach for the high treason of falsifying evidence to mislead the country into the Iraq quagmire.  It could be that the Bushites want to embroil the country in another war so they can wrap themselves in the kevlar cloak of wartime emergency and avoid that bullet of accountability.