James P. Pinkerton: People Power Wins Again

James P. Pinkerton, in Newsday (3-3-05):

War is hell. Worse, it's unpredictable.

That's the lesson that the Syrians are learning in Lebanon, as the new-style war they've been fighting there appears to have backfired badly.

It seems likely the Damascus government of Bashar al-Assad will be forced to relinquish much or all of its decades-long domination of its neighbor, the once-and-future independent country of Lebanon. If so, historians will identify the Feb. 14 car-bomb assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, as the cause of Syria's geopolitical defeat.

Hariri, of course, was once a loyal puppet for the Syrians, but recently he had been getting "uppity." And so, apparently, the Syrians engineered his death. What the Syrians didn't count on was the worldwide condemnation - uniting even the United States and France - as well as the exercise of spontaneous "people power" in Lebanon.

"People power" can be remembered as a phrase describing the spontaneous eruption in the Philippines that caused the downfall of dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. Marcos had assassinated a political rival, but the Filipino masses, cheered on by the people of the world, soon rose up and deposed him. Now, evidently, Syria's Assad has made the backlash-provoking mistake.

But there's another, larger element to the Hariri assassination. Political murder is as old as human nature, but the idea of governments using such tactics, instead of formal military invasions, is generally more recent. Yet no country seems to understand fully how to practice, let alone defend against, "Fourth Generation" warfare.

Fourth what? In 1989, the influential military theorist William Lind and his co-authors published "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation," an article in The Marine Corps Gazette describing four distinct phases in the history of war. The first generation, Lind argued, was "mass manpower," that is, big armies. The second was "mass firepower," that is, heavier weapons, notably long-distance artillery. The third generation was "maneuver," that is, using tanks and airplanes to deliver firepower onto the enemy.

The fourth generation, Lind prophesied, would be characterized by "dispersion," as smaller units fought, not just against their foes on the battlefield, but everywhere else as well. The terrorist, operating in a cell or alone - yet capable of enormous physical and psychological damage - is the paradigmatic fourth-generation warrior.

"The fourth-generation battlefield is likely to include the whole of the enemy's society," Lind wrote. The idea that terrorism, including an enormous media/morale component, would define future conflict was a daring forecast 16 years ago. But now, in the wake of 9/11, it's conventional wisdom....

In the Fourth-Gen battlefield, public opinion, at home and around the world, is a key variable....