Dr. Toon: War and Pieces
The metaphor is, in many instances, remarkable. One of the earliest and ultimately fatal mistakes of the Vietnam War was a failure to understand the enemy, their culture, political structure, or even their language and geography. Russia made the same mistakes in Afghanistan, despite being able to call upon a multiplicity of ethnic conscripts. Many at the highest levels of American military command underestimated the North Vietnamese and their tactics, leading to disastrous consequences. General William Westmoreland proposed to fight under the untenable strategy of big-unit warfare, and seemed to discount the enemy’s guerilla methods.
Technicians and counterinsurgency “experts”, rather than soldiers, ran the war using, as Cold War historian Derek Leebaert put it, “games,” “models,” “probabilities,” and “options.” As with the Coyote’s meticulously drawn blueprints, most of the time they guessed wrong. Many of these mistakes resonated in Iraq and the Soviet war with Afghanistan, with the addition of miscalculating the importance of the opponent’s religious beliefs (despite a wrenching example earlier in Iran).
The Coyote is equally ignorant of his enemy. The Road Runner is more than a physical being; he is supernatural, a trait sometimes attributed to “Charlie” by Vietnam veterans. The Soviet forces called Afghan fighters duhkti or “ghosts.” Nature and physics are the Road Runner’s unfailing allies, and the bird seemingly has the power to turn even the cliffs, rocks, and mesas of the desert against his avid, well-armed foe. The Coyote simply ramps up several levels in determination, puts in another order for intimidating weaponry, and attempts to defeat the Road Runner without a change in strategy. Fanatic escalation marked his efforts but in the end they were all for naught.
The Acme Company, an eponymous arms supplier that delivers high-tech weapons on demand, arms the Coyote. Acme is much like the military-industrial complex that powered America’s post-nuclear wars. From jet-propelled roller skates and Iron Bird Seed” to explosives and biological weapons such as “Triple-strength fortified Leg Muscle Vitamins” or “Earthquake Pills”, the Coyote is the recipient of a prodigious arsenal that is supposed to help him subdue and destroy his foe. Thus it was in Vietnam and Iraq, from use of defoliants and the first helicopter gunships widely used in combat to the lethal computer-operated hardware and laser-guided weapons of the Iraq campaign.
The Road Runner, on the other hand, has no such recourse, as he is a lightly armed, low-tech opponent. The bird has neither teeth nor visible claws. The Roadrunner does have his wits, stealth, and the capacity for an occasional surprise attack that sets a catastrophe into action. The Road Runner also has the speed to disappear into the territory within seconds, a trait shared with the Viet Cong and Iraqi insurgents. Even when the avian does show up where the Coyote plans him to be, sustained combat does not take place. Like the American forces in Iraq and Vietnam and like Soviet troops in Afghanistan, the Coyote must continually chase down an elusive foe and fight on the enemy’s terms.
In both Vietnam and Iraq, the President and his Pentagon strategists faced public criticism over the lack of an “exit strategy.” After hearing stirring affirmations of “lights at the end of the tunnel” and “missions accomplished”, America continued to see thousands of lives and trillions of dollars cast to the winds of war with no certainty as to when it all might end. In both cases, the governments America propped up did not seem to have the viability to survive should American troops withdraw, and so the struggle took on an indefinite length. In Vietnam withdrawal led to the collapse of South Vietnam. In Iraq, the result could well be sectarian civil war. Exactly how to extricate one’s forces when one is “nation” rather than “empire” building seems to be a considerable conundrum for American foreign and military policy.
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