In the thread to yesterday’s post linking to Bill Ardolino’s interview with a Fallujan translator “Leo”, commenter Gabriel Frye (who, I should note, has proven himself to be a valuable addition to the pw commentariat, representing what I would call a left-centrist, anti-war perspective, but doing so in a way that is seldom preemptively dismissive) writes:
[…] the left isn’t saying only “stop it’s already too expensive,†we’re saying “these methods are creating more malefactors as quickly as they are eliminating the old ones†which is why it is foreseeably too expensive. Petraeus’s strategy is certainly a step up from the previous methods, but there is a distinct possibility that the flipside of Jeff’s tipping point idea is already in play, i.e. that Iraq has irreversibly become a cause celebre for anti-American terrorists, and thereby we have manufactured the will for them to continue while simultaneously sapping not only the will but also the military resources of the United States. The “surge†is called that because it is not sustainable. When April rolls around and we’re still in the same position we’re in now, with only cause for optimism where we ought to have positive results, we’re going to be out of options. Again. Just like we have been after every Friedman Unit for the past four years. At what point do we admit that our nation-building efforts at the outset of this exercise were so ham-fisted that the path of least long-term harm for both us and them is to withdraw? Never? We just keep putting off the eventuality of uncomfortable withdrawal, leaving ourselves militarily short-handed the entire time? It just seems to me that this exercise is actively harming our capability to enforce the “never again†that Maj. John speaks of, that the damage to the perception of American good intentions and wherewithal (not through the idea behind deposing Saddam Hussein and democratizing Iraq, but through the bungled realization of that idea) is what really tips this war into the “not worth it†category.
Leaving aside that much of this “damage to the perception of American good intentions” is self-inflicted, or at the very least reinforced by a vocal part of our own electorate and some of their more cynical or deluded leaders — and ignoring for the moment that the military says it capabilities are not being harmed by usage (any moreso than usage tends to degrade a thing that begins at a point of pristine readiness) — Gabriel encapsulates what he believes are the best arguments against a continuation of the current counterinsurgent strategy, couching them among the macro arguments we’ve been hearing from the anti-war side for some time now: killing terrorists creates more, destabilizing the region helps jihadists and Islamic fundamentalism, and the “bungled realization” of a specific (and, one can intimate, laudable, to Gabriel’s view) intent necessitates throwing up our hands and giving up on seeing it through — overcoming previous mistakes somehow now an impossibility. And so he deserves and answer.
So. Here it goes:
At what point do we admit that our nation-building efforts at the outset of this exercise were so ham-fisted that the path of least long-term harm for both us and them is to withdraw?
I imagine at the time we believe this to be so.
That YOU believe it to be so, Gabriel — against the testimony of Petraeus, and those who have recently visited Iraq or who are currently serving there or reporting from inside the country — is your prerogative. But you simply can’t MAKE those who don’t believe your premise “admit” to it on the basis of your passion.
The tipping point I described could, in fact, go either way. But it has always been thus — which is precisely the reason why showing a united political front toward our commitment to the Iraqi people has been so important from the get-go (and why those of us on the “right” who have spent inordinate amounts of time dissecting anti-war rhetoric, propaganda, and narrative collusion, be they intentional or otherwise, have been so constant in our efforts).
The status quo in the middle east is reinforced by US foreign policy “realism.” But it was decades of such realism — and failure to respond to increasingly provocative attacks from jihadists — that gave us 911. So the argument for the ME tipping the other way — toward more complete Islamic rule as a direct result of our current foreign policy — I find unpersuasive, not because it couldn’t happen, but rather because it is precisely that contingency which we have been trying to forestall by changing the conditions inside the region. And to do so, we have changed foreign policy strategy.
Or, to put it another way, the ME was already tipping toward the jihadists, however slowly. And the gamble — that democratic republics and the pluralism and freedom they both engender and reinforce are the best strategy to stem the tide, meaning we should actively agitate for such, particularly when doing so corresponds with our own national interests — seemed very forward-looking to many of those who watched the WTC towers collapse, and saw the smoking maws left in one of the Pentagon’s sides, and in a scorched field in Pennsylvania.
Has the gamble worked? Not yet, no. But given all that has militated against its success — not the least of which is that political cynicism of the very party that has always claimed to support liberation and the spread of democracy in theory (but, once given the opportunity to bring it about, has suddenly found a new savior in James Baker, and has traded in idealism for political expedience) — I’d say the fact that we are now still in a position to pull this dynamic restructuring off, and that Iraqis are turning away from al Qaeda and are moving slowly (but, I think, inexorably) toward a political solution to sectarian violence and ethnic troubles (which may manifest in the very kind of federalist arrangement we once had here at home) that could end in a representative Arab democracy, is a minor miracle.
That so many countries in the region find such a resolution threatening enough to send in foreign fighters is demonstrative of their fear that such a success would result in a drastic change in the region’s political culture — one that would effectively end aristocracies and marginalize pure theocracies.
And the only weapons such countries have to beat back this physical and memetic threat are terrorism and propaganda — not having the armies to try to halt progress by force of national arms.
That some here in the US haven’t been able to recognize this — that they in fact agitate for the very conditions that would lead the enemies of democracy, pluralism, and natural rights to declare victory and once again beat back the hopes of reformers in the region — is either a grave error in judgment or something much worse: a political ploy to regain power (by discrediting attempts being made by a Republican administration that resembles Kennedy Democrats moreso than Bush I realists) at the expense of throwing the entire ME into turmoil.
To the “neocons,” the risk was worth the reward, particularly in light of the 911 attacks, which only reinforced how seriously we need to take the threats of jihadists who have declared war on the US.
Others, however, long for the status quo — and into that vacuum have stepped “progressives,” acting very much like Colin Powell, and sounding very much like Bush pre-911: opposed to nation building, advocating foreign policy realism, and leaving it to the Other to fend for himself.
How quickly they forgot Iraqi Regime Change and the Clinton airstrikes, based, remember, on sketchy reports about chemical precursors in the soil.
Air strikes, I should add, that were supported by the likes of Bill Kristol.
For these reasons, we “wingnuts” look upon today’s left as either cynical and insincere, or else suffering from the kind of mass delusion and collective political amnesia that we can’t comprehend — especially because we are able to show them their own words from a half decade ago, when the cause seemed quite just (or, at the very least, when they thought that saying that the cause was just would keep them from being marginalized politically).
Long answer, I know — and there are doubtless bits I left out or nuances that I didn’t explore — but there you have it.
Discuss.
Have to go workout now, but I’ll be back posting later, and will look at your responses then.
I do not think they are cynical and insincere. Misguided/wrong headed and insincere – yup.
For the first 2/3’s of this essay, I thought Gabriel Frye WAS the Fallujan translator. I spent a lot of time scratching my head wondering how he could get a sense of things so different from everyone else on the ground in Iraq, but gave him great credit anyway because he’s there talking first hand.
It made a huge difference when I realized, no, he’s just another PW commenter like me. The conundrum resolved itself.
It’s often been theorized that one reason the US stayed in Vietnam for so long was simply to show the USSR and PRC that we were willing to take significant casualties and spend lots of bread to oppose their imperialistic dreams.
Same sorta deal here. It’s worth the “blood and treasure” simply to let the jihadis know that we are quite willing and able to kill them in large numbers if they fuck with us.
Gabriel choose to side with his pessimism over the skill and experience of the US Armed Forces, and from a distance, is able to act bemused at the thought that any rational person could disagree with his position.
Gabriel argues that our current Iraqi policy creates more malefactors than it eliminates. That’s a testable hypothesis and suggests that he somehow knew how many malefactors existed in iraq prior to the war, and how many exist there now. That’s, of course, utter nonsense.
He also asserts, without evidence, that the surge is unsustainable. That’s obviously not true. Granted, the conditions required to sustain the surge might be difficult and unaatractive, but they are certainly possible.
I’ll admit that “admit” was a poor choice. Inexact.
So…in 2007 we are hearing the Left-Centrist(whatever that is) spout the same oppostion to the ‘nation-builidng’ that many a Republicans chatterd in 1937.
Man, if I had not been mugged by reality on 9/11/2001 I supposed I’d still be tripping on that glorious LSD-drvien magic bus of peace, love and undertsnding.
Let’s try that again (sorry I are a collage gratuate in rehab)
“Man if I had not been mugged by reality on 9/11/2001 I suppose I’d still be tripping on that glorious LSD-driven magic bus of peace, love and understanding”
First, I say to anyone who characterizes our efforts as ‘ham fisted,’ the next time you are elbow deep in some new and unique endeavor, struggling mightily and making what you perceive to be your best choices to acheive your goals how would you respond to someone offering the ‘advice that your efforts are ‘ham fisted?’
Would such words be useful to you? Would you be inclined to accept them graciously? What if you thought your endeavor to be existential in nature? Is that really the kind of advice and/or support you would like? Would you think the utterer was there to help you?
Second
And if they had actually been the type to have voted for Bush pre-911 I’d be a little more inclined to appreciate their stance. As it is the opposition to all things Bush has been far too seemless, the events of 9/11 not withstanding, for me to not impugn the motives of at least some of the ‘anti’ crowd.
Critics of the Iraqi conflict–as opposed to the outright defeatists, who largely root for the other side, anyway–seem to overlook the fact that there is a value in having a military front active against the caliphatemongers.
If we’re not chopping them up in Iraq, they could be in internet cafes in Prague trying to enroll in U.S. flight schools, or planning schoolyard bombs. Better they’re pitted against people good (superior) at fighting back.
Cordially…
Er, seamless, not (necessarily)seemless.
I think yes, the gamble has worked. The media surged as well, and have decisively failed. They have explicitly embraced genocide, they have provided platforms for enemy propaganda at every opportunity, they have pronounced whole peoples unfit for Democracy. Unapologetically.
All this in partisan service to a Democratic majority that has been proven impotent. There is judo here, and as Bush is eclipsed by the coming campaign, the genocide enthusiasts among the Democrats and media will have nothing to brace against, no foil for their callousness and pessimism.
They have deprecated not only the institution of the media, but the military as well. For good measure, they loaded Katrina with explosives, drove it into town square and detonated it, obliterating any appeal to solutions that require confidence in government.
Nihilism. It’s not an empowering philosophy.
The media and the Democrats have failed because the surge, in the end, is a symbol. The media wished this symbol – “the so-called ‘surge'” – to be one of fecklessness and stupidity. But even if they were to be correct and the surge is of no long-term consequence, it will nevertheless represent, enduringly, optimism and resolve. The dynamics of Tet, inverted.
I’ll agree with JG’s opinion of Fry’s commentary as leftist, but not rancorous. Refreshing that. One quibble to start with, tho-
Ack! Sorry to mess up the HTML, Guys.
Something I’ve brought up before but will raise again:
Is it just a quirk that the latest attempts at terrorism in The West have been, to use Gabriel’s phrase “ham fisted” (I prefer stunningly amateurish?) While we wail and moan about all of the resources, both human and lucre, being expended in Iraq we forget that our enemies have to expend resources as well. While this is a relatively cheap proxie war for Iran (financially if not diplomatically) this is proving to be an expensive war for al qaeda both here and in Afganistan. Someone has to coordinate and plan attacks, acquire supplies and material and handle the finances. We’ve been taking these people down at a prodigious rate in addition to the large numbers of attackers, both idealogue grunts and more experienced fighters.
Do we not drain the resources of AQ as a result?
One of the fundamental issues that people like Aaron Brown, Colin Powell and other don’t get is it’s not just about the numbers of bodies we produce. AQ and the fundies are not magical creatures despite their fierce ideology and death wish. Like any other group they will lose support and people if they continue to produce nothing of substance! We spend so much time wailing that we “can’t kill them all” that we forget that nothing recruits jihadists like “success!” Something, byt the way, that reflects Osama’s own thinking.
Yea, it’s a long haul and a dirty business but a moderate, secular, democratic Iraq has huge long term implications to the very fabric of the future of the Middle East. If Iraq were to fall into chaos at our leaving the various radical groups, both Shia and Sunni, would reap a bounty of recruits and material support and parts of Iraq could well become the terrorist training and staging ground that Afganistan could only hope to be.
So, yes, it’s definitely woth it.
Craptastic!!!
“So, yes, it’s definitely worth it!”
these methods are creating more malefactors as quickly as they are eliminating the old ones
First, as Old Dad observes, we have no numbers or even ball-park estimates to know if this is even true. It might be, but it only works as a cogent argument if withdrawal from the conflict (whether in Afghanistan or Iraq or anywhere else) serves to let the air out of the tires of the jihadi’s aspirations.
But we know from bin Laden himself that our tendency to retreat from sticky situations (Beirut, Somalia) or to remain aloof doesn’t discourage them from their aspirations of “purifying” first Islam and then the whole world.
Perhaps what those on the left need to understand is that jihad really isn’t about us. It’s about Islam and Islamic nations and Islamic traditions, beliefs, practices, worldviews, aspirations, fears, etc. The foundations for the current jihad were laid in the 1940s, and it grew while the West was occupied with WWII and the Cold War.
Much of the problem has to do with the natural and inevitable consequences of one half of the world going hyper-modern while the other stayed behind. The static society will naturally feel threatened by the modern one, regardless of what the modern society actually does. As long as the inhabitants of Muslim countries know about the outside world and wish to emulate it, those in power will be threatened by it. Our foreign policy contributes only slightly to their sense of grievance. Had we ignored them completely this whole time, they’d still be mad.
Again, if we withdraw from Iraq, bin Ladin will be vindicated by his victory, just as he was “vindicated” when his mujahedeen “toppled” the USSR in the late 80s. It served as a recruiting tool then, and it would serve as a recruiting tool now to “win” in Iraq.
Furthermore, many on the left pooh-pooh the lost credibility argument, but they don’t seem to know what that means. It doesn’t mean saving face. It means the ability to make your enemies know that you’re not making idle threats when you tell them to knock it off.
Because if we withdraw from Iraq, after that, we will say, “you guys had better stop it or….”
And they’ll reply, “…or what? You’ll depose a hated tyrant, stir things up a bit, kill a few of us, then leave the country in such chaos that the people beg us to impose order? Please, please, Unca Sam, don’t throw us into that briar patch!”
What of our reputation/word/reliability?
We cravenly betrayed the Iraqis before (Thanks so much President G.H.W. Bush!) as we did the Hungarians in 1956 (roll back, indeed) and the South Vietnamese (not to mention the Cambodians – Noam Chomsky’s spluttering aside) in the 1970s.
Why on God’s Green Earth should anyone assume that a United States committment to help would be honored beyond an Wesley Clarkian attempt at zero-casualties or Clintonian cruise-missile lobbing festival?
I guess we should let it be known throughout the world that we will bear no burden, support no friend, oppose no enemy and pay no price… as long as it gains Harry Reid a few Senate seats, that is.
I am going to put my a$$ on the line to make sure the Iraqis get the opportunity to be free of 10th Century zealotry, and that nobody turns this into the next springboard to attack my country, the next recruiting poster for Islamic theo-despotism.
Never again.
I am going to help market media products that purvey an anti-American, defeatist perspective. We all have to do our part.
Like a little burro with chipotle sauce and fresh jalapenos, the self-loathing, it is piquant today.
Let’s face it, MJ, there is a significant crowd on the left who can’t get past the amount of money we are spending in this “futile” GWOT. Most know not to say this out loud but occasionally it shines through. How many babies fed, nay, after school programs, nay, free clinics, nay, public housing, etc. ad nauseum.
They bark their outrage at the idea of war but, in their heart of hearts, they are lamenting the loss of the cash they feel impelled to spend. Couple that with their unreasoned hate of Bushhitler and their contempt for the slobbering, undereducated rubes like yourself (heh) that make up the military and the whole situation is just too much to bear.
Hence, tin foil hats…
FOR THE CHILDREN!!
[…] 12th, 2007 · No Comments A very excellent post by Jeff Goldstein in response to a commentator […]
Running along the same thoughts as proposed by Dicentra and Major John.
What bothers me most about Gabriel’s analysis is the lack of any historical context. We’ve been in Iraq for less than 5 years now and have made substantial gains, while not yet achieving our ultimate goal of a free, safe, and democratic Iraq (which in hindsight was overly optimistic in terms of time frames).
We still have operating bases in Germany and Japan 60 years after the end of World War II. We may not have had a ‘hot’ war in the European theater (ignoring Prague and Budapest), but we were in a hot war around the rest of the world until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
There’s no doubt that we broke a tyrannical, dictatorial regime in Iraq, just as we did in Germany and Japan. The difference being that then we fought against nation states, and so upon cessation of hostilities we could quickly get to the business of rebuilding our enemies into allies; and avoid repeating the mistakes made at the end of World War I. In the current situation we’ve broken the tyrannical government, freeing its people to try and build a better life and country for themselves. Unfortunately, other nation states (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc.) and terrorist groups (AQ) continue to interfere in Iraq’s internal affairs. We spent over a decade restoring both Germany and Japan – surely we can commit more time to the endeavor in Iraq and bring hope for a broad, lasting peace across the region.
As has been proven throughout history, when strong countries do not protect their interests they become destabilized and collapse, leaving other parties to step in and fill the power vacuum (see Kagan’s On The Origins of War: And the Preservation of Peace).
If one does accept that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war, a judgment which I believe to be only minimally true, then the other apt comparison becomes the U.S. Civil War. The Iraqi civil war is artificially enhanced by outside countries seeking to avoid direct armed conflict with the U.S. While our Civil War lasted roughly the same time as the current Iraq war, the rebuilding effort and its repercussions lasted for decades. And that effort was worth every penny!
Yes, the goals of creating a democratic Iraq and a peaceful Middle East are audacious. But shouldn’t they be?
It’s the something worse. This could be one of the most consequential battles in history, forever changing the face of a hopeless corner of the world in a very positive way. And yet we have those who only know that everything is a lie, because, you know, Bu$hco.
We simply can’t win. Bu$hco.
It isn’t about the future. It isn’t about liberation. It isn’t about security. It isn’t about democracy. It isn’t about charity. It isn’t about humanity. It isn’t about redemption. It isn’t about reconcilation and advancement. It isn’t about America or American ideals. It’s isn’t about America’s best interests. No, we’re not trying to see Iraq MoveOn. That can’t be it. What’s it about?
Bu$hco. Must be oil, and Halliburton. It can’t possibly be anything else.
America is not what it used to be.
“America is not what it used to be.”
Alas, it isn’t. But I’m not sure when in the past it was what we thought it should be, either. The 1920s?
Well, my comments with links are being eaten.
Gabriel writes:
The Left is wrong about that, too. Just use the site search in the left sidebar here — type in “Are Terrorists Doritos?”
Moreover, it is single-entry accounting. The turnaround in Anbar is due in no small part to the fact that AQ’s methods of Caliphate-building are far more “ham-fisted” than anything the US has ever done there.
Gabriel also writes:
By any calculation (and here I refer you to engram-backtalk at blogspot) civilian casualties have decreased considerably. The trendline is pointing down for the first time since civilian casualty stats have been regularly kept. I would argue that’s a “positive result.”
The Left, of course, might dismiss it because the Iraqi gov’t has not passed laws the US wants them to pass.
Oddly enough, given all the media coverage of the Iraqi gov’t being in disarray, I have seen almost no media coverage of the fact that all of the political blocs that were boycotting parliament have ended their boycotts. Or perhaps not so odd, given the establishment media. After all, they were months behind on the Anbar story, and they rarely give wide coverage when, for example, 40 tribal sheikhs in Diyala form a pact for local reconciliation (as happened the other day) or when sectarian leaders (reportedly incl. al-Sadr) meet in Finland to learn about reconciliation from representatives of Ireland and South Africa.
Oh, and I should add that the Left whom Gabriel is representing on this point are also clearly unfamiliar with the history of insurgencies, which is that most fail — but it takes time. On that point he could use the site search function and type in “Resurgency.” The working assumption seems to be that dealing AQ a crippling defeat in Iraq isn’t worth it if it can’t be done on the Left’s timetable.
It’s very refreshing to see someone remembering Bill Clinton’s call for regime-change and democracy in Iraq via H.R. 4655.
That all depends on what you’re talking about when you say “should be”, kelly. I’m talking about when Americans loved America and didn’t think her the root of all evil. I’m talking about when lying about her was highly frowned upon by most Americans. I’m talking about when Americans though America was the best thing that’s ever happened to the world. Because it is.
I think the Kennedy assassination was probably the beginning of the end. The poisonous environment of LBJ, Vietnam, more assasinations, Nixon and Watergate…
I don’t think we got our optimism back until Reagan, and in hindsight even his enthusiasm couldn’t resist the concentrated postmodern skepticism entrenched during Nixon’s administration.
It is my fervent hope that the pendulum will swing back, and the news media and academe will once again admit that for all our faults, the U.S. really is a force for good in the world. The Boomers are retiring soon, and less-damaged heads may yet prevail.
And yet Democratic support of the war is wholly unaffected by the methods of the terrorists.
Our methods but augment the forces of evil. The terrorists? Their methods are without consequence.
Democrats are morally inert is what this means.
First, as Old Dad observes, we have no numbers or even ball-park estimates to know if this is even true.
– Actually we do. By the accounts I’ve seen some 3000+ AQ insurgents, the vast majority said to be from outside countries, and the better part of those from Saudi Arabia, have bitten it largely during the last 2 years, and a sizable percentage of those just since the advent of the surge.. So yet another myth the Left continues to parrot is not exactly true. There are some metrics available, but you have to be willingly to unglue your eyes and ears to see them.
– As to the specifics, the Left has been skewered by its own arguments. the very fact that the surge has been able to turn alliegences in the worst three of the regions where 95% of the murdering has occured, proves we went in with far less florce than we should have. Currently the Left is yammering that as a talking point, with no regard to WHY we went in as we did. By my reasoning, as I stated elsewhere, it was BushCo tacking the minimalist approach hoping to minimize the reactions of the Left from the very start.
– It was their bullshit rhetoric, trying to fuck up the effort through the Left-wing media, that was a good deal to blame for having to “change course” in the first place. First they fuck with Bushes head, and cause the problem. then they deny a problem exists, and finally when it looks like we just night find some success they panic and go All defeatist All the time. Nice.
– You honestly have trouble distuinguising the Left from our stated enemies throughout this whole mess. All so they can shove Iraq into the “resolved” column before ’08, or kiss their sorry asses goodbye. Double nice.
– Fuck America. Fuck the future. fuck the Iraqi’s. Fuck the WOT. We need to get elected.
It ain’t over till it’s over.
One can be both cynical and insincere, and deluded and amnesiac, if one’s self-awareness is broken just right. And almost everyone’s is.
With the exception of maybe a handful of field experts in the military, no one has sufficient and reliable information about the happenings in Iraq and environs, and the contextualizing knowledge of strategy, history, and the players involved, to judge mission progress, effectiveness, shifting odds of success based on unfolding events, etc. — especially not “intelligence,” law enforcement, politicians and the press, who are, to be charitable, all fucking retards.
Yet almost everyone declares such judgments. That’s not the same as making them, of course.
And there’s no charitable interpretation of it.
How do you get up in the morning, psychologizer? Think of yourself as the ghost of Andy Kaufman, then go from there?
Because that’s my job, brother. You wanna play? Take Tony Clifton.
“…And almost everyone’s is.”
– The “Give it up, no one can possibly figure this out, throw in the towel” meme is always a good defense when you bring absolutely nothing to the table, have no clue on what to do because from the start it was all about getting Iraq null and void to sidestep historical precedence.
– Hey Leftards. Give it a shot. Maybe you can be the first party that deposes the White House party in a time of war. Show some guts for a change. You might find that having principles is not so bad after all.
Gabriel writes:
the left isn’t saying only “stop it’s already too expensive,†we’re saying “these methods are creating more malefactors as quickly as they are eliminating the old ones†–An assertion which has yet to be proved.–which is why it is foreseeably too expensive. Fortunately for the United States you lot weren’t around in 1775. The idealism of the left only applies to westerners, I suppose.
psychologizer I think of more like Racer X who is really Rex Racer who had a falling out with Pops years ago cause Pops thought he’d crash-em-up and that one time he did but he became a great driver and he always pulls out in the end and wins the race fair and square and always returns when Speed needs help but leaves before Speed can even thank him.
Whaaaaaaaaaaa?
I’d like to extend my condolences to the retards.
I think that makes you Chim Chim, and Collins Spritle. Or maybe Trixie, I’m not sure.
I’ll cop to being Chim Chim for the sake of comity.
Can I be Apache Chief?
Wait. He got killed, didn’t he? Never mind.
psychologizer
Even if, as you so ineptly state, every professional who comments publicly on Iraq is (“especially” you belligerently type) a “fucking retard,” your missing something.
In fact, unless you join “them” in that echelon of mental faculties, you should have made yourself aware by now that, possibly if only by chance and chance alone, some of the “fuck(ing) retard(s)” would have to be close to accurate with regards to Iraq.
Think of a broken, stopped clock being correct in it’s reading of time twice a day.
Then use your mind a wee bit and realize that with the amount of people who encompass the sample of people you collectively call “fucking retard(s),” some will be close to accurate in describing and predicting the future of Iraq.
Now, your entire argument is all shot to hell. You can recover though, if you act quickly. Just think of What General Patton Would Do, which would be to start seeking out voices among the “fucking retard(s)” and neutering them. Voices, that is (again). Figuratively speaking nitwit.
But, I’m no Patton either, I’ll be the first to admit (and you might find some, if you take a large enough sample, that would have a hard time, indeed, in admiting that I’m no Patton).
It’s Fall, and I’ve let
myself down.
It’s “you’re” of course.
I’m now “inept” too.
“your missing something”
Yeah? That phrase is too. Like an “e” and an apostrophe for starts.
Damnnit, damnit, sonofabitch.
Yikes.
Couldn’t agree more, Pablo. Can I get a witness?
Guys,
Folks who see it Gabriel’s way risk entering a rhetorical trap that they may not be able to escape before ’08’s election.
If (when?) official military retrospectives reveal that the efforts deemed to have failed so badly early-on in the post-invasion period were actually drafted during the Clinton administration, then those too wedded to the “Bush-Screwed-it-Up-Early-On” narrative will need to direct their criticism at Candidate Hillary’s hold-over military advisors.
Or, the Left could just toss the “Ham-fisted” talking point in the trash, and, instead, laud Bush for lending America’s credibility to the UN Security Council’s NPT-enforcement regimes – such as they are.
Either way, it should make for good political theater.
Grammar Alert. I should have written:
Grammar matters, huh?
Um, the only reason a stopped clock is right twice a day is because once every twelve hours the time, it eventually comes around to what the clock says.
I don’t think history works quite the same way. There’s a reason we use different words to mean these two different concepts.
But then, I’m no Stephen Hawking.
If you fix the clock it will be wrong again. That’s so counterintuitive. But it’s like what will happen if the surge succeeds and Iraq’s government meets every benchmark. As U.S. forces withdraw, the Democrats and their media decry America’s “declining influence” in Iraq. Democrats are patriotic like that.
– In keeping with my honorific I must report that there is mounting evidence that the “ham-fisted ideologocally nuanced”, “intellectually dishonest elitist Identity groupist bigots”, “intolorently tolorent toloraters”, “Massively deversified Hive collective”, “piously aetheistic anti-Godbotherers”, “Uber humanistic body piler death bringers”, “Authentically immoral thruthiness People Powered Peoply Prolitariat chaos ideologs”, are, in fact, the elusive “dark matter” causing the entire universe to explode outward, much like their own heads.
– I think I’ll name it the “LunarBat theory”.
Happy,
“As U.S. forces withdraw, the Democrats and their media decry America’s “declining influence†in Iraq.”
Totally. Or, they’ll pay some “stringer” named Hussein to set an IED in a hotel lobby – or wait ’till an Iranian agent kills a bus-load of little children, and then claim Bush “lost” Iraq.
In the end, if you apply Gabriel’s somewhat unoriginal thesis (it is really just the euro-socialist “precautionary principal” expanded) to foreign policy, the result can only be paralysis in the face of foreign military threats.
And I can’t imagine for a moment that Gabriel, American and patriot, actually desires that outcome.
I’d give good money to see an HTML graphic comparing the issues the Iraqi government is expected to resolve v. known issues challenging the very existence of the U.S. Government (SocSec meltdown, Medicare insolvency, Immigration/border security, Energy policy, just for the cream) that have even begun to be addressed by our contemptible Legislative branch.
Should be pretty simple. Just supply a date when an elected official described an issue as a “crisis” and start the clocks from there.
The Iraqis are (and my memory is crap) what, three or four years downrange from their first democratic elections… and they have a functioning government and interim constitution and the United States as prime patron (not thank God the UN)?
I appreciate the tenor of Mr. Fry’s position… but cannot but disagree with him all the way down the line.
Economics of victory or defeat DO NOT COUNT in the calculus of progressive thought. A goal outside the accepted list of progressive utopic objectives is simply rejected on its face.
Everything after that is just tactics.
Mark me down for the “they aren’t the opposition, they are the enemy” column, by all means.
Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi should have their own blocks on Al Q orders of battle. Shit, DO have, at least on the psyops annex of their plan, without a doubt.
I call Sparky. And I call shotgun in the GRX.
Melange still races… Melange still races…
Bonus:
….Hey…..gimme that back…..Silly rabbit…..everyone knows Trixies are for kids…..
Yet the armchair generals and defeatocrats have made such judgments that fly in the face of the declarations by that handful of experts who say that there are definite and definable standards whereby we can actually measure success in an area where there were none before.
The defeatists have gone so far as to state categorically that they will refuse to belief the man whose job it is to actually know these things, simply because he won’t be reporting the defeat and failure they clearly crave. And called the expert a traitor, to boot.
And it is those “fucking retards” who get to shape the narrative. Is it any wonder that only about 1/3 of Americans who think that the President is doing a good job? (At that, it is almost twice the approval rating that Congress gets.)
Okay. Lots of territory here, but here goes. I’ll try to explain the reasons for what you guys appear to think is an overly pessimistic view of the situation in Iraq. As far as the data or vacuum of data surrounding the insurgency’s numbers and/or capacity for regeneration goes, I’ve managed to dig up a few things. We’ll start with the snot-nosed reply to those whose tone invites it, which is taken from Guy Raz’s NPR report the other day wherein he pointed out that in Feb. 2004 “a top military official in Iraq estimated that there were about 15,000 total insurgents” and then “[a]bout a year later, U.S. military leaders in Iraq [ed.- Gen. George Casey] announced that 15,000 insurgents had been killed or captured in the previous year.” Mission Accomplished! We won years ago!
But to those of you who are not so combative/dismissive/generally abusive, I would say that those figures suggest that estimates of the strength of the opposition have been, at the very least, somewhat unreliable, and perhaps a wee bit low. In fact, I had some difficulty finding more recent estimates, and I would guess that is at least partly traceable to the spooking of the guys who put that first estimate together. There are other estimates floating around, such as these Brookings and CNN things I found, but the one that comes closest to explaining how Raz’s figures could be as they are is this piece by a guy named John Robb, which indicates that the original pool of combatants was around ten times the Feb. 2004 estimate, or around 150,000. The BBC reported in November of 2006 that Iraqi intel estimates had run “as high as 40,000 fighters, plus another 160,000 supporters” but that foreign fighters were only about 10%. The US military is sourced in that same article as saying that about 90% of Zarqawi’s suicide bombers were foreign.
So if we take that to be true, or at least close enough to the truth for our purposes, it follows that US policy at the outset of the occupation/beginning of the insurgency was designed around an unrealistically small estimate of opposition strength. The degradation of conditions on the ground during those years could reasonably be tracked to such a misunderestimation, yes? And one possibility we can take from those figures is that foreign fighters are being used as ammunition by an established cadre of domestic insurgents. In other words, the Iraqi insurgency could be using jihadis to achieve its desire of removing the Americans, instead of the jihadi movement using Iraqi insurgents to advance its larger anti-US agenda, which would suggest that if we were to leave, while the situation might not improve, no one would be “following us home.” That’s just conjecture, but then so is the “follow us home” narrative.
So, if we’re being generous, and why not, we’ll assume that Petraeus has taken this potentially much larger insurgent force into account (because to do otherwise would be to assume fabulous levels of regeneration amongst insurgents, which you guys have indicated you are perfectly willing to categorically rule out), even though no one has, to my knowledge, openly stated as much. Thus the “surge” right? More troops to deal with more enemies. But according to Gen. John Abizaid’s testimony last fall to the Senate Armed Services Committee, “[w]e can put in 20,000 more Americans tomorrow and achieve a temporary effect… but when you look at the overall American force pool that’s available, the ability to sustain that commitment is simply not something that we have right now with the size of the Army and the Marine Corps.” Petraeus’ report that we can start returning to the pre-surge troop level of 130,000 is more a reflection of that reality than of success in Iraq. The National Intelligence Estimate from 8/23/07 states that “the level of overall violence, including attacks on and casualties among civilians, remains high; Iraq’s sectarian groups remain unreconciled; AQI retains the ability to conduct high-profile attacks; and to date, Iraqi political leaders remain unable to govern effectively. There have been modest improvements in economic output, budget execution, and government finances but fundamental structural problems continue to prevent sustained progress in economic growth and living conditions. We assess, to the extent that Coalition forces continue to conduct robust counterinsurgency operations and mentor and support the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), that Iraq’s security will continue to improve modestly during the next six to 12 months but that levels of insurgent and sectarian violence will remain high and the Iraqi Government will continue to struggle to achieve national-level political reconciliation and improved governance. Broadly accepted political compromises required for sustained security, long-term political progress, and economic development are unlikely to emerge unless there is a fundamental shift in the factors driving Iraqi political and security developments.”
Apologies to those reporting good news from Iraq, but that’s the consensus of what, 16 or 17 agencies? They continue to say “[t]he IC assesses that the Iraqi Government will become more precarious over the next six to 12 months because of criticism by other members of the major Shia coalition (the Unified Iraqi Alliance, UIA), Grand Ayatollah Sistani, and other Sunni and Kurdish parties. Divisions between Maliki and the Sadrists have increased, and Shia factions have explored alternative coalitions aimed at constraining Maliki.” If the surge was designed to give the central government the breathing room it needed to sort out its issues and get the government organs necessary for political progress up and running, then the surge does not have a whole lot to show for itself, relatively positive developments in Anbar and Fallujah notwithstanding.
And that rosy picture, let me remind you, is what we get if we assume that our presence is not a radicalizing force, if we assume that the drop in sectarian killings is not the result of successful ethnic cleansing and carefully circumscribed definitions of “sectarian killings” that exclude the hundreds of Yezidis who got blown up last month, for example, and if we assume that “bottom-up” is not just a euphemism for acceptance of the failure of the Iraqi army and police to establish a viable rule of law and the embrace of vigilantism.
So does that explain my pessimism? That even when I ignore all the factors that you guys won’t accept the situation still looks intractable? The NIE predicts “modest improvement” in the security situation if everything goes according to plan, i.e. no catastrophic events occur. That’s cause for optimism? So my question to those who think that this current path is going to work is, what’s your answer to the NIE contention that success is “unlikely to emerge unless there is a fundamental shift in the factors driving Iraqi political and security developments” and what do you expect that fundamental shift to be, if not troop withdrawal? What makes your optimism realistic, and not just wild speculation? What differentiates it from pure, baseless faith?
“And they’ll reply, “…or what? You’ll depose a hated tyrant, stir things up a bit, kill a few of us, then leave the country in such chaos that the people beg us to impose order? Please, please, Unca Sam, don’t throw us into that briar patch!â€Â
Dicentra, I think that that was the argument for not going into Iraq in the first place. The reason being that this outcome was foreseeable. Which is why nation-building has a such a bad rep. But now that we’re past that point and the option of not going in is no longer available, we’re forced to think in optimistic terms. And the example of Iraq kicking out the jihadis and pulling itself together after we leave is no less inspiring, and I would argue a little more inspiring, than Iraq stumbling into respectability with us holding their hand the whole way. So if we’re looking to send the strongest message possible that this nihilistic ideology is not tenable, and we’re willing to gamble our credibility and security to do it, why is troop withdrawal less appetizing than continued occupation?
I like it more better when we have 130,000 troops on that side of Iran. Iran does not have Iraq’s best interests at heart I think. Just something about their attitude is all.
> So…in 2007 we are hearing the Left-Centrist(whatever that is) spout the same oppostion to the ‘nation-builidng’ that many a Republicans chatterd in 1937.
There is, of course, a big difference. 1937’s Repubs got behind the war effort after Pearl Harbor. Today’s Dems, not so much.
Maybe they’re waiting for Pearl Harbor.
My reaction? Wonderful!!
Gabriel – In short, it is nice to know that you consider your opinion to be more educated and more valid that the Commanding General of the Armed Forces. Forgive me for trusting his evaluation more than yours.
> So if we take that to be true, or at least close enough to the truth for our purposes, it follows that US policy at the outset of the occupation/beginning of the insurgency was designed around an unrealistically small estimate of opposition strength.
Whether or not the estimate was accurate is irrelevant. The relevant questions are (1) Are there workable strategies for dealing with the situation as it is? (2) Are we following one of them? (3) Can we move to a better one?
One of the left’s big mistake in this discussion is their assumption that “proving” that Bush was wrong somehow makes them “the right choice”. Since they were just as wrong, that assumption doesn’t even start to make sense. Another problem is that Bush is out in 08. And, even if he was wrong then, that doesn’t tell us that they’re correct now.
Andy – They have never been the “right” choice, because other than retreat, they have never offered a substantive alternative. Ironically, the Dems called for more boots on the ground, and a change in leadership. They got both, and then immediately declared them a failure. To me, this showed that they were patently unserious about the war in practical terms, and that it was only useful to them in terms of electoral politics.
Andy, that sort of zero-sum thinking drives me nuts too. However, I am so very disappointed in the Republicans that I’ve really got no where else to turn. My calculus is that the Democrats are worth a shot because, at the very least, they’re not as certain that they’re right.
JD – You often consider your opinion to be more educated and valid than a whole host of United States Senators. You and I are not the type of men to be intimidated by rank, I suppose.
At what point do we admit that our nation-building efforts at the outset of this exercise were so ham-fisted that the path of least long-term harm for both us and them is to withdraw?
The side that quits, LOSES. The side that does not quit, WINS. Is that too difficult a concept?
Look at historical counterinsurgency operations. If you can quell an insurrection in five to seven years, you’re doing well. Twelve is average. Sixteen to eighteen is a bit on the long side but can still succeed. I’d expect us to succeed in Iraq faster because of the situation (largely foreign fighters who don’t have popular support). And if the Rabid Opposition weren’t engaged in arguably treasonous behaviour, then we might ALREADY have been done. How about a resolution in the House and Senate, saying “We’re going to give the military whatever it takes to stay in Iraq and kick ass for the next ten years, and if Iran and Syria don’t shape up, we’ll kick their ass too”? You think a unanimous YES vote on that wouldn’t cut jihadi recruitment by 50% or more?
“My calculus is that the Democrats are worth a shot because, at the very least, they’re not as certain that they’re right.”
Really? Have you not been listening to Edwards, Obama, and Bill “Immediate Withdrawal” Richardson?
The only Democratic candidate to whom that might apply would be Sen. Clinton. But only because she will neither claim she was right nor admit she was wrong in 2003.
“…and ignoring for the moment that the military says it capabilities are not being harmed by usage (any moreso than usage tends to degrade a thing that begins at a point of pristine readiness)…”
I think there’s little doubt that the military is substantially strengthened by its experience in Iraq. While the performancy of our political class makes one wonder about the future of our country, the performance of the folks in the services has been an inspiration.
While shaking my head at the self-destructiveness of our political and cultural leadership, it has begun to dawn on me that there is a significant group of people who don’t really believe in nations per se anymore, and certainly not in the USA. They think we’d be better off if we were folded into some transnational organization. Not only are they not patriotic in a traditional sense, they see the US as an obstacle (the largest obstacle, in fact) to the evolution of transnational governance. In this light, their behavior becomes comprehensible. Things that work to undermine an American sense of identity, national purpose or important American institutions are generally to be encouraged. After all, anything that serves to speed the demise of national sovereignty is good.
I think there is a case to be made for a world government, but my own feeling is that centralizing power and authority in one governing authority will not be a recipe for liberty or the pursuit of happiness. I prefer to remain an American, and to be governed by American institutions and laws, imperfect though they may be.
This may turn out to be a minority point of view. But if America is to opt for an “international system”, I would at least like people to be aware that that is what they are doing, and to think about what they are gaining by doing so, and what they are giving up.
Because it’s not that SIMPLE, my emphatic FRIEND. The side that gets what it wants WINS, the side that does not LOSES. If leaving allows us to realize our OBJECTIVES, we WIN. And just for a little PERSPECTIVE, Iraq is not exactly the fifty-first STATE, so when you refer to “foreign fighters who don’t have popular support,” you could just as EASILY be referring to US, which certainly casts your EXPLANATION in a different and less optimistic (Laser)LIGHT.
Also, dude, “ass-kicking” is not the preferred nomenclature; “winning the hearts and minds,” please.
Then tell us, what do you think “our” objectives are in Iraq?
Gabriel Fry, if the number of terrorists will go up but never go down, then they’ll take over the country. Even sooner, someday they’ll storm a police station in a small suburb of Tikrit and take that over. When that happens, give us all a pre-emptive “Toldya so”.
Very nice post, Jeff.
In some ways, this war has gone better than planned.
By having a period of setback where AQ was allowed to take over some communities in Iraq has created millions of Iraqi’s who despise these creatures. AQ has proven to be the true face of evil and when the rest of the world stops reading propaganda opens there eys for a moment, they will begin to learn from the Iraqi’s that it is the Muslim AQ and it’s affiliated scum that is the true evil in the world and that the U.S. is a force for good. This will have more impact on destroying the AQ cause than any other single event could possible have.
If we could only get millions of leftist Americans to believe this to be true it might be easier to educate the rest of the world. If we could get the MSM, Academia and Hollywood to believe the U.S. is a force for good, we could end the war with the Jihadists many years sooner with far less bloodshed than I am afraid is still going to be shed.
Gabriel
Re metrics on number of insurgents, why do you believe that the number should be a fixed one? The number in the fall of 2006, probably the worst period in Iraq so far, was far greater than the number in 2004. Because….
In Feb of 2006 the golden dome mosque was bombed. That broke Iraq wide open.
But beyond that, when you fight an enemy, the enemy, you know, FIGHTS BACK. They don’t sit around waiting to be picked off—they do recruit. No surprise there. And nothing unusual in war. Heck WE recruit too!
That’s the way it works.
Now if you, instead of being oh so concerned about replacements for the bad guys IN IRAQ, would talk about the number of jihadists WORLDWIDE who have been recruited, not for Iraq, but for their own local jihads. I do believe this number has risen over the past few years.
But then again, this is a worldwide jihad and that’s to be expected also. Recruiting for any aspect of jihad would have increased simply by our continued presence in Afghanistan, even without Iraq in the midst. Though I don’t doubt Iraq has increased that number by a large amount.
So then, let’s quit the fight. If we leave do you believe recruiting will stop or pick up? Will the jihadis think we left Iraq because we’re nice, or that we left because they defeated us?
Hmmmmm. Your call.
The side that gets what it wants WINS, the side that does not LOSES.
The side that wins, gets what it wants. The side that loses does not. Subtle, but more accurate.
The objective should be obvious. A stable ME partner that is not Israel. Now. Assuming Iraq can’t be made stable is assuming it has never been stable before and the Iraqi people want instability. How long is it going to take? Many, years.
If you think that the situation in Iraq was not considered beforehand, then you misunderstand why we are in Iraq in the first place.
Gabriel,
“My calculus is that the Democrats are worth a shot because, at the very least, they’re not as certain that they’re right.”
I should think they might be less certain of their position given that, as JD points out, they really have not committed to one. Their constantly shifting stance seems to me to be the height of cynical indifference to the need to settle upon and execute a strategy. The democrats have over-trained as an opposition party. They’re not trying to lead, just shrilly opposing the notion of being led. Rather like teenagers.
The stopped clock analogu only works on analog 12 hour clocks. A stopped digital clock generlaly is displaying no time at all and so is only accurate at the beginning or end of the universe. Or maybe at the edge of a black hole. Let me check with Mr. Hawking and get back to you.
But seriously, and I’ll have to keep asking this for a long time, what if this is as good as it gets. Why do so many people assume that we have actually taken the worst path imaginable? Imagine that Chamberlain, Daladier and Roosevelt had decided to check Hitler in 1938 by invading Germany and deposing Hitler when he had annexed the Sudetenland? Imagine if 200,000 Germans had been killed and another 5200,000 Brits, French and Americans had also been killed. Can you imagine how the “Western” allies would have been condemned for their hasty, imperial war? Of course, in comparison to what we know followed, it would have been massively preferable, but that’s another post for another day.
The 2006, early 2007, sectarian violence, brought about by AQI and JAM, caused so much destruction and despair in Iraq, resultimg in the Iraqi people turning against these foreign influences. As they pull themselves up, with the support and security of the American military, they will emerge into a viable and independent democracy. Going through the turmoil of 06-07 will actually make the country better and stronger. They have seen what can happen and they see that it will result in only chaosif they do not reject the foreign influences.
Each district is getting stronger, especially as we build the local and regional governments. We are building up now, as well as down (politically).
Yes, there have been mistakes. And we have corrected these mistakes with the surge, but more importantly, along with the surge, came a new way of fighting, a more forward positioning of forces that will continue even after the surge forces leave. We have had the surge forces in theater only since June and look at the difference in those three months. Imagine how things will look in April when they start to depart. But, even after the surge forces leave, we will still have the more forward tactics.
It amazes me, when seven enlisted soldiers write into the NY Times, their word is taken as gospel, even though their view point is only at Battalion level. When the Commander of all the coalition forces in Iraq speaks, though, his word is called into question.
GEN Petraeus is not a politician. He does not lie. If he thought progress had not been made in Iraq, then he wouldn’t have said progress had been made.
One can support the Bush tactic or dismiss it as all wrong but this post claims that those there who know things etc know our actions are going in the right direction. There may be some who say this but there are for sure many who are there, are skilled journalists, are military people and they do not say things are going well. And that is not even talking about the political situation.
Drop us some specifics, fred. By way of links.
You know there were folks just like Gabriel back in WWII and WWI and Korea, right? Well, look what happened when they finally got their way in Vietnam.
Look, we’ve fought these things before, and we’ve f’ed up along the way and we’ve persevered and we’ve won. We did it by 1)adapting our tactics and 2)not listening to Gabriel.
I suggest that we simply not listen to Gabriel now.
Victory. Or Victory. There Gabriel. There are your two choices. You make the choice.
Too simple for you? Not enough verbiage about it? Wanna argue until we weep from exhaustion and you ejaculate?
Bloody F’ off.
Journalists skilled in military matters are few and far between and they are not writing for the main stream media. For military skilled journalists, you need to check out MILBLOGs. Funny, 4 dead, shot in the head in Baghdad, is a quagmire. 3 dead, shot in the head in Newark, is too many guns.
> However, I am so very disappointed in the Republicans that I’ve really got no where else to turn. My calculus is that the Democrats are worth a shot because, at the very least, they’re not as certain that they’re right.
If that’s the argument for Dems, why not turn to my cat? He’s even less certain that he’s right about Iraq than the Dems.
Also, feel free to provide supporting evidence for the claim that Dems are less certain than Bush that they’re correct. Yes, some of them have changed positions more than Bush, but changing so that you’re opposing Bush when that’s popular and opposing him when that’s popular doesn’t suggest that you’re less certain about what to do about Iraq – it just says that you’re certain that being elected is a good thing. (FWIW My cat is just as certain that I should get up earlier to feed him so if certainty is your guide, he’s still your man, er, cat.) Bush is out in 08, so they can’t use him as a guide-post.
Flipping to oppose/support has actually impeded Dem thought on Iraq, even if you believe that Bush’s political support levels have correlated with the correctness of his actions. (Since the political support levels and actions have changed independently, it’s tough to argue for such a correlation.)
Also, that “calculus” is less rational than staring a goat guts. It’s rationalization. You’re entitled to have whatever opinion you’d like for whatever reason you’d like, but can we stop suggesting a rational basis that simply isn’t there?
For better or worse, the choice is between Repubs and Dems. (Okay, so it’s not rational to support my cat, despite his certaintly qualifications.) There’s no guarantee that one (or both) of them will have good solutions. However, it’s quite likely that one of them will have better solutions than the other. Pointing out that one side has made mistakes doesn’t help us find out which one is better.
Perhaps we can start by defining objectives.
I’ll start. I think that US foreign policy should have
(1) If you have cool stuff, we’d like to buy it.
(2) We’d like to sell you our cool stuff.
(3) If you kill Americans or tolerate/support those who do, we’ll kill you.
(4) We’d rather that you didn’t kill sympathetic people, or kill people for dumb reasons, and yes, we get to define dumb. We’ll use some irrational process to decide when this is important enough for us to act.
US Senators are not smarter than you or I, they just got elected. Gen. Petraeus, on the other hand, is a bona fide hands on expert.
FWIW ALL CAPS IS REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING !!!
Andy – That sounds like an excellent foundation for a foreign policy.
I think that most Americans and other non-fatalistic people have one thing in common: we take what is most serious to us as a battle worth fighting to the end. For some, it is sports. How often does a sports team give up with the game not yet won, even if the game is objectively unwinnable? Or if business is what you take seriously, how many companies give up a strategy that still might increase revenue, even if it looks like it’s not working out the way you planned originally? When it’s important to you, you keep your eyes on your goal, change your tactics and positions as you go along, until it’s obvious that you cannot achieve your goal, cannot return to the start state, and have to salvage whatever you can.
If you think of it that way, it’s pretty obvious that the vast majority of the anti-war types, and more than a few of the pro-war types among the politicians and punditry at least, see the real battlefield as being in Washington. How else to explain the shifting positions and rationales, often in direct contradiction to passionately-voiced positions and rationales of only months previously?
The Democrat leadership and partisans wanted to win the Congress, and want to win the White House, and they are willing to lose the war to do it, because the war isn’t real and tangible to them. All the platitudes about supporting the troops are so much drivel. The Republican congressional leadership and some Republican partisans are in the same position, and would take a military defeat in a heartbeat to save their elected offices or to win more offices for their party. I think Bush and a Lieberman and many others on the pro-victory side are acting from principle. I think a very, very few (Bernie Sanders comes to mind) on the withdraw-at-any-cost side are also acting on principle, however misguided I think that principle is.
But really, for the vast majority of the politicians, and for too-large-by-far a fraction of non-politicians, the real war is in Washington, and that one they are willing to fight to the bitter end, even if it means national defeat and disgrace, and another attack as big as or bigger than 9/11, to accomplish it. Thing is, I think that if they realized that that isn’t just rhetoric from their political opponents, that losing Iraq really could lead to such an outcome, they’d be horrified. But they just don’t take the enemy seriously, because they are invested in a Prime Mover ideology about American politics.
Dicentra makes excellent points. Let me expand on this one…
The foundations for the current jihad were laid in the 1940s, and it grew while the West was occupied with WWII and the Cold War.
First there was Nazism which was quite compatible with the Arab mind view. It is chilling to see Arabs with swastika’s in some old WWII pictures. Then in the 60’s who was the major power to many of the middle eastern countries? The USSR. Many hatreds and lies were seeded in the Soviet’s disformaskaya campaigns about us conveyed seamlessly in state-sponsored middle eastern press.
So add this pernicious stew to the Muslim coutries being left behind by modernity, and we gain a nice series of concentric circles on our backs.
Question for our Gabriel Frye: do you think that the United States is capable of winning a war against the type of enemy being fought now in Iraq? Why or why not?
their word is taken as gospel, even though their view point is only at Battalion level.
More likely at the Company or Platoon level, but your point is taken. Sadly, I read that two of these fine young soldiers died in the last couple of days. God Bless them.
OK JD, I’ll bite. Soldiers have to convince one person that they are worthy of promotion to get promoted. Politicians have to convince large groups of strangers that they are worthy of promotion to get promoted. Soldiers have clearly defined metrics of success and failure upon which to base their attempts at promotion. Senators have a constantly shifting, ill-understood, and often completely irrational target to hit in order to get elected, and are often objectively not worthy of the positions to which they aspire and have to lie, cheat, and steal convincingly for months on end, sometimes years, to achieve and then consolidate their gains.
So who’s better suited (experientially) to hold forth on Iraq strategy, a successful soldier or a successful politician?
Hey Paul, I’ll choose Victory, thanks. The second one, to be precise. And I think it will be best achieved by a serious reduction in combat troops and more forceful and direct diplomatic engagement with the regional powers, given that our current methods are proving to be ineffective at all but the advancement of certain players’ domestic political goals. And I think a change in management, while it oughtn’t to be necessary to implement that strategy, will not only end up being necessary, but in fact will be quite helpful in and of itself.
Exhausted yet, hoss?
As to this ancillary point about certainty, I think you folks are more in agreement with me than you think. The Dems’ uncertainty (as seen by their inability to commit to pretty much anything and the fact that an amateur orator like Bush has been able to effectively steamroll them on things that they ought to have stood their ground on) means that they will constitute a weaker central government, and power and decision-making authority will devolve further down the ladder towards the people. The Republicans have so lionized this moral certitude that Bush likes to project that they have begun to act as if stubbornness is inherently virtuous, no matter in what context it appears. Slap my ass and call me libertarian, but I don’t look for that in an elected official.
Who woulda thunk, 6 years ago, that today Democrats would be crying for the rest of us to pay attention to James Baker?!
If James Baker died tomorrow I would get a haircut this weekend and also I want to go to Trader Joe’s and get a bunch of their burritos to take for lunch next week and also their spinach salad is really good. They put craisins in it.
Medcalf and red, I’m mostly with you, but I think that your points illuminate another flaw in our methods, which is that parts of these less modern cultures that dicentra spoke of have designated us wealthy industrialized types as an enemy, and our political leadership has embraced that dynamic and legitimized that view, when in fact we ought to be dealing with those actors as troublesome but in need of help. In other words, if the underlying problem is just the division of prosperity/education/other factors that define the advancement of civilization, military force ought to be a much smaller ingredient in the addressing of that problem. But since they declared us (incorrectly) to be natural enemies, our leaders have embraced that dynamic and are responding more violently than is necessary.
NB: if your knee-jerk reaction to this post is to make snide comments about peace’n’love and sending care packages to terrorists, I’d like to humbly suggest that maybe you’re pigeonholing me incorrectly.
So in order to help them get over their anger at the rich west, we ought to patronize them like the sadsack poor?
Excellent. I propose an affirmative action program for terrorists. That will show them our enlightened largesse — and probably won’t wound their “honor”!
Happyfeet makes a strong point; craisins are the sheezy. Also, politics makes for strange bedfellows, and I think that the party that has always claimed to support liberation and the spread of democracy took a look at the way that Bush was trying to do it and said, in unison with Baker, in four-part harmony, “UR DOIN’ IT WRONG,” and both were equally so surprised by the other’s agreement that neither one had the presence of mind to yell “JINX!”
soooo, we should have just bombed the crap out of them like we did in Kosovo? for starters anyway. How’s their government coming along?
That’s one way to put it, Jeff. But in those terms, we’re currently patronizing them like the ignorant, weak, and misbehaving sad-sack poor. So the state of their honor is not going to improve either way.
I’m not a big proponent of bombing the crap out of things, Maggie. Yes, I know, Clinton did it. Strangely enough, I don’t agree with everything that Clinton did, even though I am a liberal. Wild, isn’t it? I just want to get that out there.
To borrow from Mr Eastwood, dying ain’t no way to make a living, boy.
> Soldiers have to convince one person that they are worthy of promotion to get promoted.
If this is representative of Gabriel’s knowledge of the military, we can safely ignore his arguments that depend on said knowledge.
The fact that you think that you need something to be true to support your argument does not make it true.
If you don’t know how something works, you should just say so instead of making things up. People that know better will point it out every time.
A only one aspect of the puzzle that has eluded you here I offer the OER, or the Officer’s Efficiency Rating. This done either anually, or any time an officer changes his duty position. This involves a Rater, a Senior Rater and an Approver. Any one bad OER can sink an entire carreer, let alone any one promotion. And if you think these are objective you’re oput of your blooming tree.
gah! it ate my comment! anyhoo, since RTO covered part of it, here’s what’s left….
my Kosovo comment came from this:
soooo, what exactly is the difference in “spreading democracy” in eastern European countries and Iraq? It seems like we took a more nuanced approach to operations in Iraq to reduce “collateral damage” and yet have received nothing but complaints for it.
For the record, my politician/soldier comment was a joke. You see, friends, when you caricature a pair of professions for the purpose of comparison, it sharpens the juxtaposition, and the sharper the juxtaposition and the more incongruent the pair, the easier the humor. Generally, and I don’t mean to install a blanket rule here, because that’s usually a recipe for disaster, but generally, if I, or a similarly-minded person, and I’m not going to go outing people here, but if they want to they can sign on to this, make a statement that’s so over the top ridiculous that it makes you think that I’m completely full of shit, and that statement is in response to a series of decreasingly serious statements between me and someone else who seems inclined to play ball, and such people exist here, no doubt, but again, it’s not my position to out them, should they wish to keep their capacity to engage in frivolous wordplay under the table, as it were, then that very last aforementioned statement’s ridiculousness is in fact, in and of itself, a comment on the validity and/or relevance of the whole exchange, and therefore itself a sort of meta-joke, which I often find is a good way to bolster or, perhaps more properly, to grant some justifying subtext to, an overt joke that isn’t quite funny enough to, all by its lonesome, lay out there for public scrutiny.
See? Hilarious, right?
Oh and you there, be sure to answer with a variant on “like that time you said we should withdraw our troops?” or words to that effect. Yeah, you, the clever one.
You so stole that from Robin Williams.
I think that one of the most important differences between Kosovo and Iraq is the PR. Kosovo was sold, from the start, as an emergency humanitarian mission being undertaken by an established coalition (NATO) and only reluctantly, whereas Iraq was sold, at the start, as a unilateral attack to preempt an inevitable attack on US soil. The return of the 800,000 or so Albanian refugees to Kosovo, despite the continuing turmoil, gave some credence to the original mission statement, and there were a number of industrialized nations lending credibility by consensus, whereas in Iraq, the post-invasion revelation that the original motivation was a load of hooey and the fact that we were the only country left holding the bag when that particular record scratched contributed to the evaporation of the perceived legitimacy of the operation. The relative length of the operations also tips in Kosovo’s favor.
That really only explains the differing public reactions, it’s not meant to be a claim that Kosovo was a model of how to conduct a successful operation.
That seems fair to me, except for the differential in our national interests between the two regions. The whole Kosovo thing was largely uninteresting I thought at the time. I remember though that CNN went all out on the AMERICA AT WAR graphics and stuff. Lots of cool music. They sold that little war with every bit of enthusiasm some people have accused that other cable news network of having this time around.
“whereas Iraq was sold, at the start, as a unilateral attack to preempt an inevitable attack on US soil.”
Most of the us regulars were paying attention at the time, so that particular rewriting of history ain’t gonna fly here.
Well, that explanation might work if you had written anything else that indicated that you understood the military and how it works.
um, yeah, I seem to recall some U.N. resolutions that some of us had been thinking should have been enforced since about ’98. oh well.
I seem to recall the poo-pooing of the United Nations’ legitimacy at around the same time, which grated somewhat unpleasantly against our zeal to unilaterally enforce their resolutions. For me, at least. Predicating your military action on UN resolutions and then completely bypassing the organization when your factually-troubled powerpoint presentation isn’t the hit you hoped it would be isn’t what I’d call “expert statecraft,” to put it gently. I believe the UN’s response to our offer to enforce only those resolutions that jibed with our predetermined desire to invade Iraq could be adequately paraphrased as “Thanks, but no thanks.” How noble it was of us to ignore them. It’s just shameful how we’ve been rewarded for our altruism.
Ah, Gabriel. Where to begin? First, the poo-pooing of the UN was based directly on its feckless inability/refusal to enforce its resolutions. Secondly, the UN was not bypassed. Sec Res 1441 allowed for member states to act to enforce the resolution by “all necessary means”, so not only was the UN not bypassed, the invasion was conducted with UN authorization. Thirdly, the “Coalition of the Willing” consisted of 30 countries plus several Arab states that were not named but we’re clearly supporting the effort. Unilaterally means that you’ve taken a decision alone, not with 30+ of your friends.
Somehow, I imagine that you already knew all of these things, and yet…
Altruism, you say?
[…] a great post (in response to one of his more well-spoken liberal commenters much resembling Tim) “On the Surge and Macro Strategies” where he argues: The status quo in the middle east is reinforced by US foreign policy […]
Wasn’t the “all necessary means” clause part of an earlier resolution and specifically opposed by the french in 1441? And wasn’t the unanimity on that resolution achieved by making assurances to other states that it would not lead directly to war? Because it just seems a little odd to me that the UN would authorize an invasion that required it to interrupt ongoing investigations that it was conducting on the ground. You could be saying that the UN implicitly authorized the invasion, but that, like claiming that the 30+ countries you cite (many of whom don’t make the “Where are they now?” file on account of their inclusion in the “Where were they then?” file) were a functional military coalition on par with the first Gulf War, would be kind of disingenuous.