Interesting bit from NRO’s Stanley Kurtz (who describes himself as being “on the neo-realist end of the neo-con spectrum”) about the necessity of the Iraq strategy as a nuclear deterrent, not as a program to push democratization:
The problem in Iraq was never that it already possessed WMD’s, but that it might someday manufacture or purchase nukes. The failure to find WMD’s, and the resulting shift in the administration’s rhetorical emphasis, has obscured this fundamental fact. Not only could Saddam have reconstituted his nuclear program had we backed off, it’s now clear that he could have purchased finished nukes, or nuclear material and know how, from North Korea or Pakistan. Iran may have already done this.
From before the war, the administration has rhetorically downplayed the nuclear threat from North Korea and Iran. It has done this to avoid pressure for the losing game of bilateral negotiations with the North Koreans, because the administration is internally divided on how to deal with North Korea and Iran, and above all because we have no good solution to the problem of nuclear proliferation.
Invading Iraq was the easiest way for us to send a message to North Korea and Iran. It scared them at first, and took out Saddam, who would have been an irresponsible nuclear customer of Korea had he been left in power. The invasion also showed that our military would not be deterred by the threat of chemical or biological weapons use against our troops. We also got Libya to give up its nukes. Had we not gone into Iraq and instead saved our troops to hit Iran when it got close to weapons, we’d still be in a mess. Iran is more populous, powerful, and difficult to occupy than Iraq. And failure to invade Iraq would have left both Saddam and the Iranians free to gain nukes through manufacture or purchase.
Blogs are the good side of technological progress. Nukes are the bad side. Anyone can have a blog, and soon any nation will be able to have a nuke. For all our power, that puts us at a huge disadvantage. Classic deterrence won’t work on rogue states or terrorists, and we don’t have the troops or the will to control all the territory that needs controlling. We are at an inherent disadvantage in the war on terror. But the truth of our situation vis-a-vis nukes has been inadequately analyzed by the conservative press, and barely discussed by the administration. The true nature of the danger this country faces from nuclear proliferation easily justifies the military sacrifices we are making (much more limited than in WWII). But the administration, and even conservatives, have not been frank with the country about the depth of the problem.
It was a mistake to lay the invasion on the current possession of chemical and biological weapons, when the real problem was Saddam’s capacity to eventually manufacture or purchase nukes (and a history that cast ordinary deterrence into doubt as a strategy for keeping Saddam in check). So now we barely discuss the nuclear threat. Yet even without a lot of public talk, much of the country knows in its bones the danger we face from a nuclear Iran. That is why the doves are still not popular.
Detailed attention to hard truths about the nuclear threat from North Korea, Iran, and beyond would sober this country up and unite the ideological spectrum of hawks. Yet we continue to focus on democracy and Iraq when we ought to be talking about the nuclear threat from Iran, North Korea, and beyond. If we faced the nuclear reality, the insurgency in Iraq would emerge as a problem best put up with for the sake of sending a message of resolve to those beyond Iraq who mean us harm. Then we’d focus instead on the real problem: how to take out those nukes in Iran, and weaken or bring down the Iranian government without an additional occupation (even if that led to a conventional war over access to the Persian Gulf).
[My emphases; (h/t Noah D)]
Kurtz is correct about the seriousness of the nuclear threat having always been paramount—though I believe he is wrong in his assessment of the administration’s level of attention to the problem of particular rogue states and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. After all, it was no accident that the Axis of Evil included Iran, North Korea, and—for the first step in our strategic gambit, Iraq. Taking out Saddam (the low-lying fruit strategy, as it has been called), has had the welcome, incidental effect of drawing terrorists into Iraq, where they are being wiped out at an undisclosed (but probably quite considerate) clip; but the Iraq campaign is serving many functions, some of which we may not have adequately considered in our efforts to analyze the overall GWOT strategy.
Last evening, commenter Ric Locke expressed a notion that I had previously only shared in private with my wife—and frankly, I was glad to see it articulated by someone other than myself, because I’d begun to doubt my sanity on the matter. Responding to a liberal commenter’s talking point complaint about administration failure to “capture or kill Usama”—a point that has always carried with it the implication that the war we are fighting is largely symbolic—Ric writes:
When an Arab sees us hunting Osama, he does not interpret it as “seeking justiceâ€Â. He, like you, interprets it in the context of his own culture, where it comes out the Americans want to revenge themselves upon Osama for hurting them, and if we can prevent that we elevate our status and depress theirs. It is a game we cannot win. If we catch Osama, for Arabs it is simply another event in the revenge-round, a cause worthy of calling for further revenge. He becomes, in a way, a martyrâ€â€though that concept is more than subtly off-kilter; it’s more like a flag to rally around. If we do not catch him, while being seen to try, our impotence is proved, and others are encouraged by that success to try for their own triumphs.
“Catching†Osama, in the Dragnet sense you and a lot of people seem to be calling for it, requires above all information. When Joe Friday ask for “Just the facts, ma’am†the system requires that he receive facts, even if they are misleading or inaccurate; there must be at least data. Ask an Afghan villager or an Arab where Osama might be, and you will not, as a rule, receive data. Those ill-disposed toward us will lie as a matter of course, even those who are neutral will see it as improving their status if they mislead us into failing, and that’s not even counting the likelihood of Osama’s supporters seeing the giving of information as an offense worthy of revenge against the informersâ€â€which is an absolute certainty.
If we can’t win, we shouldn’t play. What Bush and his advisors are trying to do is change the game. We don’t want to kill Osama; we don’t even really want to catch him. We want to discredit him, to establish him as impotent, unable to hurt us in any way that matters. So we don’t chase him except in a casual way, as part of other operations. We certainly don’t go clanking through the mountains in division array, blowing dust, HE, and dieselrauch in a futile chase for one sick man, with the onlookers laughing behind their hands and pointing in random directions. “He went thattaway, effendi. [fx::sub voce
I don’t want Osama bin Laden dead. I want him to live forever (so he doesn’t get the white grapes, let alone the virgins), with every moment of that long life spent railing at the frustration of his aims. I don’t even want him caught, and I sure as Hell don’t want half of Afghanistan and all of Persia giving us lies and laughing when we take them seriously. I want Osama free, hale, and useless, and aware of it every waking moment.
[My emphasis]
I bring this up in the context of Kurtz’s article because I’m coming to believe there is a fundamental disconnect between most pundits’ attempts to understand and criticize (for good or ill) the strategy they see at play, and what is actually animating that strategy. Or, posed as a question: is it possible that there is something else at work here that in fact relies on the noise created by the combative chattering between the pro-war / pro-interventionalist “neo-cons” (and their allies) and the anti-war progressives / left-liberals / paleocons / Libertarians?
Ric Locke thinks there could be, and his analysis is intriguing. Responding to a couple of commenters: one conservative / libertarian, the other liberal, Ric writes:
There exists a fundamental, systematic problem, and Saddam and Osama are just the surface boils and rash resulting from it. Beetroot wants to treat it with poultices and bed rest; [Beck prefers] lancing and antiseptics. Neither of you is addressing the problem, and the “cures†you offer are placebos, or at best palliatives applied in the hope that the patient’s system will do the curing.
It is a fundamental of applied violence that you attack the weak spots, and a natural corollary of that axiom is that much of your effort will be spent probing, looking for places that give when you push. When you find one you apply maximum effort there, and leave the strong walls and stalwart defenders facing breezes and moonbeams. Any other philosophy leads eventually to the corrupt system found in Europe prior to the Thirty Years’ War, wherein war was the entertainment of princesâ€â€Prince: I’m bored. Courtier: Yes, my Prince. Let us invade Flatonia. Prince: Capital notion! Call up the peasants!
The Islamists really do mean to conquer the world and impose the Islamic Caliphate. They won’t succeed, but the fact that the ambition is large does not discredit it; Man’s reach must exceed his grasp/or what’s a heaven for said the poet, and there was that song about the ant and the aspidistra. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. There’s no stopping a man who knows he’s in the right and keeps on coming.
My own memory extends, with relative clarity, as far back as 1972 and Munich; I know there were previous occurrences, but have no direct mental contact with them. For all that time the Islamists have been probing. In every case there has been, from their point of view, no effective response; their conclusion is that those are soft spots, to be attacked more forcefully next time around.
The function of the Iraq war was to change that perception, the perception that regardless of provocation the West would not respond and was therefore weak, to be attacked with impunity. The Left errs by declaring that attack is not what was meant, and ascribes all sorts of (Western-thought-based) excuses for calling it “defense†or “responseâ€Â. The right errs by focusing too closely on a specific item, ignoring the larger picture. The war in Iraq could as easily have been in Syria, or Egypt, or Libya, or… The specific choice of Iraq as the place was due to a long string of chance eventualities that made it the right place, but the purpose was to demonstrate that we’re as crazy as they are, and a lot stronger.
Ric envisions Iraq, which he rightly notes was the right strategic choice after 911, as the anti-Beirut or anti-Somalia. And it is quite likely, I’d venture, that many in the business of learning from past mistakes viewed it similarly. Still, for all that, political pressures being strong as they are, Bush chose to go the UN route—possibly to lay cover for Blair and other, possibly to illuminate, should the international community not back the invasion, the depth of UN fecklessness and corruption—a decision which may or may not have provided Saddam with an opportunity to rid himself of WMD (if he ever had them to begin with; as many on the right have noted repeatedly, it was the possibility that he had them—in addition, as Kurtz points out, to his nuclear ambitions, which our intelligence had previously underestimated, that is what justified the Bush Doctrine of preemptive attack in the first place.
Ric continues:
It’s this simple: so long as we continue to offer them no resistance they will continue to attack. For the moment the attacks are flea bites. Even the WTC is, on a world scale, insignificant compared to, say, a medium earthquake. But the power of the attacks is growing, from a few guys with AKs shooting up a stadium to blowing up whole buildings, and there’s no reason whatever to expect them to diminish on their own.
Left to the Clinton/law enforcement/beetroot model, the attacks would grow in strength and ferocity until even beetroot was calling for Something to be Done, and at that point there really wouldn’t be any choices. The whole of Islam would have rallied round the “strong horseâ€Â, and the only way for our society to survive would be to kill theirs.
I would really, really prefer to do less than that.
Beetroot, the spies-and-diplomacy effort you urge is going on, full-court press, even as we speak, and is succeeding admirably. What you miss is that absent the war, it would be futile, useless, because there would be absolutely no reason for anyone with useful information to cooperate in any way. In fact, there would be a positive disincentive, in that the Islamists will treat informants against them with vicious savagery, while the West would be seen as utterly unable to protect itself, let alone anyone who helped it. Retreating will bring any success to an abrupt halt, because our helpers and informants will suddenly find themselves swinging in the breeze, open to any potshots the Islamists care to issue. At that point the information necessary for diplomacy and “intelligenceâ€Ââ€â€the Dragnet approachâ€â€to succeed will dry up and blow away.
Establishing fearsomeness is a necessary part of the strategy, but it’s only palliative, lancing the boils, so to speak. It may be all we can do, especially with the Left chorus obstructing us in every particular, but it was never the ultimate goal, only an interim step. The goal is to offer Middle Easterners a bite of the apple and hope it takes. It was always chancy, but the palliative could only work for so long; one cannot keep lancing boils after the scalpel is getting into muscle tissue. If it works, the problem goes away forever. If it doesn’t, we’ve spent a lot of time and treasure. It’s not that the outcome is certain; it isn’t, not by a long chalk. It’s that the game is worth the candle.
In a post yesterday, I noted something similar, and was rebuffed by a few liberals who found such a notion quaint and romantic. I wrote:
History, ultimately, will prove those of us who supported the strategy of the Iraq campaign as part of a larger war on Islamic terror correct in our principlesâ€â€and this regardless of the outcome. It will show that kicking the can along until it was too lateâ€â€while certainly the easy and feel-good diplomatic way to handle a boiling cauldron of hatred toward the west in the Arab and Muslim world (close your eyes, pretend “stability†is working, even if it means surrendering the old liberal principles of noted neo-con JFK and joining up with Pat Buchanan, International ANSWER, etc)â€â€so that you can concentrate on smoking bans and universal healthcare, is the way of those too paralyzed by political considerations to do anything other than protect themselves for upcoming elections.
It is power as an end in itself, even if wielding it leaves you, ironically, too frightened to wield it.
In other words, as Ric puts it, “It’s not that the outcome is certain; it isn’t, not by a long chalk. It’s that the game is worth the candle.”
I happen to believe this, but there are others who clearly do not. But here’s the interesting bit: how much of that discontent is actually useful to the overall strategy?
Ironic: one of the reasons George Bush doesn’t defend himself adequately for such hawks as Bill Quick and “Ace†is that the Lefty opposition is tremendously useful. Bush clearly won’t back off, even when strongly attacked by (what looks like, from far away) his own people; clearly he’s at least as nuts as any ayatollah, and he has all those soldiers… spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt among the opposition is always a good thing. Too, all the flak obscures the diplomatic and spy effort. Spies work better in the dark, and having the Press and the Left blowing smoke with such enthusiasm leaves the cloak-and-dagger boys with useful cover.
[My emphases]
On this last, I am torn: having railed repeatedly against the anti-war propaganda efforts of the politicized anti-war crowd (as distinct from those whose opposition has been principled and not engaged in disingenuous rhetorical ploys to undermine the President) and the deleterious impact these cynical partisans are having on the effort in Iraq (not only does their poisoned rhetoric demoralize our own troops and embolden the terrorists, who believe they are winning, but it saps the will of the US electorate, which is one of the strategic goals of any terrorist campaign), I am cautious of any analysis that posits the almost violent ideological divide created by such cynical creatures as “useful.” And yet, I can see Ric’s point: Bush doesn’t need worry about re-election, and he is unlikely to give in to the political pressures calling for a change in strategy in Iraq. Which could, conceivably, be said to show that Bush is beyond the reach of even the most vicious propaganda campaigns—something that our enemies note even if Bush’s political enemies don’t.
But if this is the case—and the argument relies on a level of psyops that the Bushies for which the Bushies have not shown an ostensible capability (though of course, that would be part of the point)—the danger of losing the House to Democrats in 2006, and the spector of tying the President up with “investigations” and impeachment proceedings, might force Republican politicians to distance themselves from the President, and support for the war could collapse completely from within.
At any rate, I am still puzzling through all these ideas (I thank Ric and Beck and Beetroot for setting the stage), so I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
Because it is possible that Kurtz is right, and that administration is as transparent in its aims and goals and strategies as he presents them, allowing for his criticism of their seemingly insufficient concern for nuclear proliferation. On the other hand, however, “transparent” has never been one of the more popular modifiers used to describe the “secretive” Bush administration, so it’s possible, too, that what we are seeing is an administration using smoke and mirrors to divert attention from the efforts of our spies and diplomats, who are working beneath the noise to create the conditions for the next phase in the GWOT.
Perhaps this is why Bush was so adamant about the legitimacy of the Dubai Ports deal? Who knows.
But all of this should provide fodder for some interesting debate—particularly among those who say Bush has no plan. Because wouldn’t it be ironic if he had too much plan, instead?
Discuss. But please, try to keep it civil. I welcome progressive / left-liberal opinion; but if such opinion begins by bursting in with accusations of idiocy and pole smoking, I’ll put a stop to it, I promise.
Stop the bold! It hurtses our eyes!
Yet another reason to support the Iraq War. Those who oppose it to be ‘fashionable’ don’t seem to be worried that they themselves would die from a WMD terrorist attack…
Well, nature programs some people to weed themselves out of the gene pool and act as vehicles for the disposal of genetic waste matter generated from the Darwinian evolutionary process. This also explains why extreme leftists are so ugly.
Here is agreat article showing how the Iraq War is a very minor war by historical standards, and with great historical context.
Food for thought indeed! Still digesting. But I think as a first iteration, the thought that capturing or killing OBL ill serves our long term interest is probably correct.
BTW, I did not bold my comment!
i gotta say rto always claims that if he came across OBL he would kill him, sprinkle him with lye, bury him, and never tell a soul. why give them a martyr?
i’m glad you featured ric’s comment, i really enjoyed it last night.
also, did you catch Bush mentioning the “low hanging fruit” yesterday? Strategery has been rto’s argument all along. Iraq puts us in the middle of a whole bunch of problem nations.
What’s with the boldface? <i>
you asked.
I disagree with GW on many things, but in foreign policy, i think he is a sort of genius, an idiot savant, like Ramanujan was to differential equations.
He is entirely capable of incorporating both Locke’s analysis and Kurtz’s into his master schema.
And I think even broader than those goals, perhaps.
Remember what finished off the sovs? The containment doctrine. We just fenced them in until free trade and capitalism and free thought kicked their collective asses.
I think Bush is employing a longterm version of this same strategy. But in the age of globalization and porous borders, how to contain the islamic fundamentalists?
I think Iraq is a “tethered goat”, a way of focusing and holding the adversary’s attention while the osmotic pressure of western free trade and free thought transform MENA.
And that would be why Bush pushed DPW. How awful for him to see that opportunity to insert a change vector via the Dubai stockexchange slip away.
Could he explain this strategy to the american public.
i doubt it.
<em>test<em> <s>test<s>
The leftoids are silent so far. Must be checking back to base…”PW has shifted the terms of the debate…what do we do now?”
Think? Nah…too hard.
BOOOOOSH IS INCOMPETENT!!!!
(com’on, one of the Atrios freak crew has to show up to push the talking point du jour).
If the idiot savant has this strategy, he would be savant enough to keep it to himself!
Sometimes you must show your enemies that you can roll through and conquer a country at will. Iraq puts us right in the middle of our enemies, and I am sure Iran and Syria are noticing that our tanks have not gone home. I think Den Beste addressed this before Iraq was invaded, but since his blog entries are so long, I might have dozed a little.
I also agree that the MSM is completely distracted while Bush has special forces and back channel diplomacy working overtime. There is alot of activity around the Horn of Africa, but our press is too busy focusing on whether Bush has too much manliness. Thank God for the useless MSM, who are missing most of the story on the War on Terror.
Left to the Clinton/law enforcement/beetroot model…
…we’d be left entirely with an us vs. them situation, in which the Muslim world cheered on OBL and his legions as if they were Robin Hoods to our Sheriff of Nottingham. A successful democracy in Iraq will indeed “offer Middle Easterners a bite of the apple” and give them other options.
Yeah, I’ve always thought Chimpy and our Dark Lord strategerized for the long haul.
You know I had the same argument with someone after Bush did the whole,”OBL isn’t important” presser. Anyone remember that? I thought that was great, like when Bush1 would intentionally mis-pronounce “Saddam”.
As far as OBL goes, the less (public) attention he gets, the better. Humiliate the bastard.
I think the easy win over Saddam was expected and was why we went there, I also think that getting our military real close to Iran was a consideration. I think that the people who planned the war thought that the people of Iraq had more trust in their institutions than they did. In the absence of trusted state institutions, people tend to fall back on either religion, family or ethnicity. That’s the mistake I see the planners made, doesn’t mean that the invasion was the wrong thing to do, just that the wrong assumptions were made. It happens, fix it and move on.
TW: I probably should get back to work.
noah, very true.
But i think he mourns the ports deal. it was a freebie. MENA stock markets are devaluing right now– GW could have advanced his master schema and been a hero to MENA progressive economists and free traders.
sad.
Just as I laugh at cospiracy theorists on the left, I’m skeptical that this is some vast and complex strategy being pulled off by the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. They seem disorganized and clueless as they stagger from one PR disaster to another.
I’m sure that there was a strategic component to the DP deal that was very important to them, and yet nobody thought to get out in front of the firestorm that was sure to occur when the deal became known.
I hope I’m wrong.
Jeff, good post, but in my experience the lefties will just resort to the “if that’s the strategy BushCo implemented it incompetently” line to rebut it. I have raised over the past years on more times that I could count the point that one of the benefits of invading Iraq (especially when coupled with our forces in Afghanistan) is that we have Iran surrounded from north and west, so we can project power into Iran (or Syria, or anyplace else in the ME) as needed. Also, we get there first before the Chinese do (who want to shore up ME oil supplies for their own needs).
Of course, the response I always get is “project power? How can we do that when we can’t even control the country?” This is followed by the same old lines about “cakewalk” and “mission accomplished” until the leftie concludes that Bush is just too dumb to have thought of this kind of strategy.
One point struck me the other night, though. In this day of 24/7 cable news and the internet, many people believe they know everything that is happening. If it isn’t broadcast prominently it isn’t true. People rarely stop to question if the administration is putting in place plans and/or actions that are secret and not broadcast the world over. I certainly expect that to be true. I find it amusing, however, how many people claim to know exactly what the administration planned and what it is doing just because someone on NBC or in the NYT says it must be so.
Which just begs the question: if people (especially lefites) elevate the irrelevant and untrue to matters of Serious Import, what use is Truth? Or reasoned discourse?
I also noticed something else – the Bushies didn’t start pushing the Wilsonian “spread of democracy” rationale for invading Iraq until well after the invasion. As I recall the first real in-depth mention of it was in a W speech to the Brits in 11/03.
I don’t believe it was to negate the growing political shrieking about nonexistent WMD’s either…
We couldn’t risk pushing the freedom rationale prior to the invasion for fear of the tyrannical regional players banding together against us.
While going hat-in-hand to the impotent & corrupt UN did offer cover for Blair, I believe it also served as a smokescreen to shroud the Iraq invasion as an isolated event, rather than the single campaign of the greater conflict it really was.
With the Afghanistan & Iraq “beachheads” established, we secured a long-term military foothold in the region, established an intelligence services recruitment center we were sorely lacking, and laid out a giant swath of jihadi flypaper.
Now time is on our side.
At last a model with my name on it!
Seriously, I’m stunned by the suggestion that we might be better served by NOT catching Bin Laden.
Step one of MY policy would be find the f***er and his lieutenants and kill them. They keep coming back, you keep finding them.
That’s what “human intel” and special ops and coalition-building and so on can be used to do. The notion that we could never get people to talk about him without scaring them by knocking off Saddam is, in my opinion, ridiculous. How’d they bust up the mob? By invading New Jersey? No, you build contacts and turn people and take advantage of internal divisions and all that. You don’t do it by blowing up Carroll Gardens and killing a bunch of little Italian kids along with a few wise guys.
And I flatly reject this baloney that the war succeeds even if it fails:
Why do I reject this? Because if the war fails, then a new weakness is exposed. In the Ric theory, terrorists see us coming and pee themselves. But what if they’re cheering? What if the lesson they learn is this: “If we attack America, it can be counted on to launch a poorly-planned, poorly-executed, bloody conflict that kills civilians by the bushel, confirms our rhetoric about its inherent evil, and opens up grand new vistas for terrorist recruiting, training and infidel-killing.”
I mean, isn’t that a reasonable response? Think about 9/11, for example. Was your response to cower and be afraid and look for means of appeasement? No, it was to fight back. I don’t think Muslims are any different, and it’s ignorant, in my opinion, to talk about the deterrent power of war without simultaneously calculating its power to galvanize and motivate opposition.
I’ve been going to pro-war rallies since 2003. There’s always a bunch of dudes in t-shirts that say, “War is the Answer.” That’s the Ric theory, right? It’s part of this whole cultural movement that says, “Weak-kneed Jane Fondas cost us Vietnam and discredited the idea of War as a tool, and we need to re-establish War as a part of our diplomatic arsenal, first by defeating the Moonbats at home, and then by exacting massive costs on our enemies abroad.”
Again, while there’s value in deterrence and truth that War lost popularity after Vietnam, war carries costs. The longer, bloodier, and more chaotic the war, the weaker and more unjust the instigator appears, and the greater the attraction of opposition.
I’ve always thought that a main reason we’re in Iraq is because it’s a war that the Bushies understand. It’s a war against a nation, at one level, and it’s a war against Jane Fonda – a cultural war, a war for War – on another.
I just don’t think it was the right war. And Ric, your philosophy to the contrary, I think it’s a war that is exposing our weaknesses.
*sigh*
You may recall that as the first mention, but your recollection is wrong. Does the phrase “Operation Iraqi Freedom” ring any bells?
Idly:
President Discusses the Future of Iraq: “A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region, by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions. America’s interests in security, and America’s belief in liberty, both lead in the same direction: to a free and peaceful Iraq”
It was part of the general rational from day one, it was just ignored.
Perhaps, but the biggest is a weakness that’s been well-known for decades—our domestic politics.
With Iraq unstable and teetering into civil war after 3 years, after Abu Ghraib, after Katrina, after the Medicare debacle, after 5 full years of complete fiscal mismanagement—your position is that everything is going well and the administration that brought us all those good things simply has a brilliant secret plan to win the war on terror?
And you want to, erm, debate (cough) this alleged secret plan on the basis of some speculation and assumptions?
Oh, and you reserve the right to spew insults at anyone who disagrees with you and ban them from further commenting.
I’ll go keep it civil somewhere else. Nice blog, sparky.
[translation: YOU AREN’T THE BOSS OF MEEEEEE! AND DEBATE AND SPECULATION IS FOR THOSE WHO AREN’T BORN WITH THE BLINDING BRAND OF TRUTH ON THEIR PROGRESSIVE BOSOMS! FEH! MEH! CONVERT TO THE REALITY BASED COMMUNITY! ONCE YOU LEARN A FEW KEY POINTS, THERE’S NO MORE NEED FOR THIS ‘DEBATE’ OF WHICH YOU SPEAK! -ed
ps. You’re right about one thing You will be keeping it civil somewhere else. Bye]
I came here looking to try to understand why Atrios has been bashing Jeff Goldstein fairly continually today. Mr. Goldstein, and some of the commenters, appear to be the type of people who are rather comfortable in ordering the military to invade countries simply as an expression of American power. I tend to think that all of you would deplore that kind of behavior when it is directed by another nation.
For the families of the American soldiers killed in Iraq, and for the thousands upon thousands of noncombatants killed in Iraq, and the millions who have had their lives disrupted, power lost, and hope of a positive life destroyed, could you guys do me a favor for the future? The next time you all line up behind the invasion of a country, could you wait for a legitimate casus belli? “So-and-so is a bad man and might do something bad to me someday” doesn’t give you license to break into a neighbor’s house and preemptively shoot the man – at least, that’s been the tradition in nations ruled by law.
The United States does not have access to an infinite supply of money or manpower to fund this kind of adventurism. (Incidentally, most of my conservative friends agree on this point – but they are old-fashioned isolationists, as opposed to neocons who hold sway these days.) By all means, if a threat manifests itself as Al Qaeda did, smack it down hard. But the Iraq invasion is an ongoing debacle that simply drains money, manpower, and good will, and accomplishes nothing.
Addendum:
beetroot at least seems to grasp the need to understand the psychology of the Arabs. And yes, it is important that the war fails, in the sense that it’s not easily shrugged off. But it’s also true that energy, money, and manpower expended in a futile and ill-defined pursuit will only serve to weaken the country. Furthermore, the lesson other nations learned from the difference between the American invasion of a prone Iraq and the American indifference of nuclear power in North Korea is that developing one’s one nuclear weapons it the path to self-sufficiency. Small wonder that Iran is trying to develop nukes while they think our attention is diverted.
Bee Troot Sez:
The significant tie together here is that, yes war carries costs. Lack of will to win the war makes the war longer, bloodier and more chaotic. Which then, in turn leads the results you note above.
I don’t think anyone in their right mind forgets that wars cost, the problem is that the dovish contingent seems to be of the opinion that they’re the only people in world who recognize this. In thinking that the hawks don’t understand this, they basically put the US, as a whole, in a hell of a bind when dealing with people less squeamish.
Just because people protest the war with the most noble of intentions doesn’t mean that the rest of the world and the totality of history provide a lot of evidence that things are, in fact, nasty, brutish and short.
BRD
One note of caution: there’s a screen door.
Mind it doesn’t hit yer ass on the way out.
I supported the war because of the grand-plan rationales al’a Ric. The UN theater was just that, and in hindsight I think a mistake. Legally nobody’s permission had to be asked.
Of course the war was justified on the limited legalistic premises layed out before the UN, but the lefties always had Bush’s number….it’s always been about more than that. Hence the “Bush mislead us into war meme Taking hold: He “cherry picked” intelligence! It wasn’t about WMD at all! That not why he took us to war!
It’s sort of true. That cry sticks to the extent it does because it’s true Bush’s plan has always been part of a *larger* plan he did not even attempt to justify. In fact to lay it out may only have drawn and intensified opposition from persons concerned about wider war and hegemony in the region. Or at least I’m sure that was the fear, and the reason to say, “this line is crossed, and this line is enough”.
Bush’s most solid support has always come from those who understand it’s all part of a wider campaign, and accept a wider campaign is necessary, and that Iraq is just a beginning and the most obvious place to start, seeing how we are already legally in a state of war with Iraq, and Our cease-fire terms had been violated.
If we are going to talke about boils and leeches and puting therapeutic, maggots in necrotizing wounds, I guess I can shift the analogy. Religious and political fanaticism in the middle east is a CANCER. It requires attacks on multiple fronts; it’s too late to simply scoop out the tumor.
Huh?
If you rephrase that to say “when it’s in America’s best interests to do so—like, say, after we’ve suffered with little pushback a series of increasingly confident attacks from Islamists”—I’d agree. But I am certainly not for “ordering the military to invade countries simply as an expression of American power.”
International manifest destiny, imperialism, and colonialism don’t particularly appeal to me. NOt that I expect you to note the distinction—or even try to. After all, ATRIOS HAS SPOKEN!
“G01D5+eIn is teh SUXor. OPEN THREAD!”
Sure he does. It’s his blog.
Plus, why take the time and effort (that could be going, I imagine, into composing the posts themselves, not to mention caring for his family) to repond to each offensive troll individually when a single one-size-pretty-much-fits-all response serves to both blow off a little collected frustration and simultaneously issue notice that certain shit has to cease.
Minor point number one as “proof” of the Ric hypothesis:
Libya voluntarily ceding their WMD program. It wasn’t done because they suddenly saw the error of their ways. It was done because they didn’t want to get the “shit kicked out of them”.
I have occasionally thought that the internal debate in the West was useful in concealing our true objectives—our enemies hear different voices saying different things, and it confuses them as to our real intentions.
The question, in my mind, is whether that Babel of voices confuses them more than it confuses us. I’m not so sure it does. To have Bush demonized as the equivalent of Hitler by the more deranged elements of the left might be helpful to Bush—that much I’m willing to grant.
But to have the mainstream media give us soft propaganda against our own war efforts is something of a different problem. Despite their falling market share and failing balance sheets, the mainstream media still sets the debate for much of America and is still seen as credible by a significant portion of American society. This is the real poison that threatens our war effort.
I’m old, hardheaded, and a former soldier—I’m not easily moved from my opinions once I’ve reasoned them out. I’m immune to attacks on my beliefs, at some level, and on the War on Terror and the War With Iraq, I’m certainly not going to be shaken by the press.
But there are still people out there who think that the news is, at some level, the truth, played down the middle. It’s unhelpful to our country when the New York Times replays the Abu Ghraib story above the fold, page one, for a month even when there’s no real news there. It’s unhelpful when the press ignores the reconstruction efforts, the rebuilding of the Iraqi military, or when they can’t be troubled to learn anything about the military beyond watching reruns of Platoon on HBO.
And the blogosphere, as much as it has done to improve the flow of news to people, isn’t getting it done big enough, broad enough, or fast enough. Ask everyday people who Glenn Reynolds or Michelle Malkin are, and you get blank stares. And much as I admire Jeff Goldstein and appreciate his thoughtful, deeply-reasoned, beautifully-written, well-researched posts, I go to sleep at night worrying that millions more Americans believe Jon Stewart is a font of wisdom, and that Michael Moore makes deeply troubling documentaries.
I fear we are losing the internal discussion. Blast “Bush lied” through a fifty thousand watt bullhorn and it moves people. It heartens our enemy and weakens our resolve. And I’m not certain that the advantages we get from the terrorists hearing mixed messages outweighs the cost of the American public turning against the only people willing to protect them.
In fact, I’m pretty certain that it would be better for everyone if we showed a unified front and simply said “no quarter” to anyone who opposes us, even if we have our own private misgivings.
Rick notes:
Is this another way of saying that war should always be a last resort?
The other thing worth noting is that right now the US spends 3.7% of its GNP on defence. This compares with +/- 5% of GNP during the 80’s, and doesn’t even show a speck on relative funding amounts brior to 1972. When it gets down to it, America isn’t even budgeting like its a war. So, no, we’re not any where near limits.
BRD
Wow, that was one long read. But as always it was excellent.
Thanks Jeff
Jeff,
Your goal is noble.
Your cause is just.
It’s your methods that are failing and counter-productive.
Maintaining its present course of pre-emption, regime change and unilateralism the USA will exhaust itself damn fast.
You’re not supermen.
And I don’t want to live in a world where the United States has crippled itself to the point where it is no longer the leading nation among nations. And I know you don’t.
So fight smart.
Fight to win, not to impress or dominate or secure foreign nations.
Fight to win the ideological battle with islamo-facism.
All the information you need to know about this has already been written, you just need to look at it with fresh eyes.
Beetroot says:
This argument, too, has been made to me many, many times. Basically, it is a longer version of “the war creates more terrorists than it kills.”
I would submit two things: First, that you are partly correct. This war, like any war, will increase the number of people who will take up arms against us in the short term. If we manage to kill/neutralize/demoralize sufficient numbers of them, it will reduce the number long term. I think the latter time frame is most critical.
Second, I submit that the “cycle of violence” argument (for lack of a better word) is untrue and suggests an incorrect view of history and human nature. The use or threatened use of force in an isolated setting will not deter a group of people from opposing you in the future. That only comes when one side punishes the other sufficiently that they give up. We need to continue to succeed in that endeavor.
Also, your argument imputes to the jihadis a sort of movie-villain sensibility. “Aha, the Americans have invaded Iraq, just as I predicted. Now I have them right where I want them.” This may make for good movies, but doesn’t translate well into reality. Concepts like “poorly planned” and “poorly executed” don’t really matter in the end so long as you win. While one could argue poor planning and execution make victory difficult or impossible, I do not hear you saying that. Rather, you seem to suggest that these are qualitative factors that have significance beyond their usefulness to victory, that their existence aids the jihadis regardless of whether we win or lose.
Look at it this way: the North’s early prosecution of the Civil War suffered these exact failings. Still the North won. How is the poor planning and execution relevant today other than as a historical footnote? Can the South claim a moral victory for having forestalled defeat as long as it did? All that matters is that the South lost.
A problem with containment on the old Cold War model: people trapped on the wrong side of the iron curtain saw their relative poverty with relation to the West, correctly concluded that the cause of the disparity was their different economic & political systems, and promptly began agitating for freedom, capitalism, and democracy.
In the case of Arab nations, however, they don’t ascribe their relative backwardness to cultural factors rooted in inflexible religious doctrine (especially as that doctrine is interpreted and enforced by fundamentalist religious leaders). As such, Arab immigrants to the West, rather than adopting the systems of their new homes (as defectors from communist nations did), they continue to presume that the cultural system from which they came is a normal, healthy, and desirable one.
Containment, then, won’t work as long as it is paired with an open border mind-set. This has proven especially damaging to the West, as the West used to welcome communist defectors with open arms–for the propaganda value if nothing else. What’s more, the flow of communist defectors was a relatively thin trickle as a consequence of draconian emigration laws in communist countries. Arab nations have no such restrictions.
So while we might “contain” Islamist countries politically, we completely fail to contain them culturally. The result is effectively a spreading cancer throughout the freer parts of the world. The manifestations of this cancer can already be seen. Witness the Danish cartoon furor. Can you imagine something like that happening even ten years ago?
Trying to talk about strategy with BDS sufferers is like teaching a pig to dance: it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
It is comforting to have a bunch of troops in Iraq, though, for a great number of reasons.
Beetroot:
Rick:
What’s to understand? According to you guys they are just like us.
Robert Crawford *sighed*:
*sigh*
You may recall that as the first mention, but your recollection is wrong. Does the phrase “Operation Iraqi Freedom†ring any bells?
Perhaps I should clarify…
The speech at Whitehall was the first time W
started pushing for regionwide reform.
“Operation Iraqi Freedom” wasn’t
called “Operation 2nd Step in Reforming the
Entire Region” for the reason I noted,
plus it’s not nearly catchy enough
But the long-term (that means decades, for all
who expect a 14th Century culture to be dragged
into the 21st in just a few years) strategy to
remake the region was already in place.
Whee!!!
I think Northern Observer has put forth one of the few arguments against going into Iraq that actually has a chance of doing something other than preaching to the converted anti-war folk. Heck, it’s even like civil and debatable and everything! ^_^
Well done.
At the risk of causing the lurking Left cult members hives (oh well, I lie. I hope they DO get hives), there’s a part in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead where Ellsworth Toohey has been trying to destroy the architect Roark. He thinks he’s done it, and he really wants Roark to know it was him. So
Toohey slithers up to Roark and says “You know, it was me who brought you to this. We are alone. You can tell me what you really think of me.” Roark replies, “But I don’t think of you.”
But if I might differ a bit with Ric on the chances of Islamism succeeding. Not today, not tomorrow, not even in ten or twenty years. But as long as we have amongst us those so-called “Americans” working to demoralize our troops, cripple our military and constantly beat the drum that OUR government is the “real” enemy and terrorism of 9/11 and Islamists is either not our concern or only a “criminal” matter, Islamism WILL gain the upper hand. The US might survive but it will be dhimmitized. With Islamists taking Britian to the UN that denying SHaria in England is usurping their human rights (for polygamy), Eurabia is not far from reality. How long will the US as we know it today last against Islamist totalitarian theocracies in place of the EU?
Interesting post.
Didn’t Sun Tzu (or some old military chap) state that to win at war one needs to turn one’s enemy’s strengths into disadvantages?
If I assume that
1) the main strength of the terrorists is on the informational front (hard-line propaganda, main stream media soft propaganda, legitimate critics, useful idiots, normal political opportunists, etc.)
and
2) our military knows that the terrorists have this advantage;
then surely we have bright military/government boys and girls who are working to turn the terrorist’s advantage into a disadvantage?
Even if it was not part of the original plan then it surely must be now.
At least I hope so.
___________________________________
As for the ““So-and-so is a bad man and might do something bad to me someday†doesn’t give you license to break into a neighbor’s house and preemptively shoot the man – at least, that’s been the tradition in nations ruled by law”
logic….
What if that “bad man” is building and selling guns to the local gang-bangers (aka N. Korea to Iran).?
What if that “bad man” is building ever bigger bombs and keeps loudly threating to kill you and that evil Jew? (Aka Iran, Iraq)
What if that “bad man” gives money to the local gang-bangers to shoot/harrass your evil Jew neighbor? (aka Iraq supporting suicide bombers against Israel)
What if the local cops (the UN) does nothing about stoping the gun selling, support of harrassment of the evil Jew, the death threats, except claim that your efforts to get the “bad man” to change his ways are hurting the “bad man’s” family? (Aka UN sanctions enforced by US & England.)
What if the cops are on the take from the “bad man”? (aka food for oil bribes)
What if that “bad man” is occasionally taking one of his children out and shooting him/her? (aka the various Iraqi mass graves)
In other words, a country in this world is not a house or town where one can call upon an outside force like the cops (the UN) to enforce some set of nice rules when one is threatened. Nor can a country pretend that everyone is playing by some set of fair rules simply because people tend to in one’s own country.
Rick:
“Mr. Goldstein, and some of the commenters, appear to be the type of people who are rather comfortable in ordering the military to invade countries simply as an expression of American power.”
Simply?
I believed the Iraq war was sadly necessary, because I believe that if we didn’t fight it now, we would as a consequence wind up fighting an uglier war in the future.
If as an incidental byproduct of that, we achieve an “expression of American power” that intimidates other unfriendly countries without firing a shot at them (e.g. Libya’s sudden apparent cooperation on nuclear non-proliferation), then so much the better.
“I tend to think that all of you would deplore that kind of behavior when it is directed by another nation. “
Depends on the nation, but yes: I do have a great big honkin’ double standard, depending on my estimation of a government’s basic decency plus what it’s trying to accomplish by its action, and I don’t feel sheepish about that.
To strive for consistency on this is, in the words of the now-disillusioned Bill Buckley (he was clear on the Cold War), “like saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of an oncoming bus, and the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of an oncoming bus, are both just men who push around old ladies.”
Prior to 9/11, you could have called me an isolationist hawk in the “walk softly and carry a big stick” mold. For example, I felt that the first gulf war was not justified, at least based on the information that was public knowledge. I also tend libertarian domestically, so I’m not a big Bush fan, in general.
During the run up to the Iraq war in 2002, it took me several months to come around to supporting the idea. I listened to all the arguments made by the administration and read whatever I could about it, from Lew Rockwell to NRO. I would only support the war if I felt that, should that the worse-case estimates come true, it would still be worth it—a sobering thought when those estimates were for tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to die just in the taking of Baghdad.
The argument that finally got me on-board was the one put forth by Stephen Den Beste that we needed to send an unambiguous message to the Arab world that, as Ric puts it, “we’re as crazy as they are, and a lot stronger.” Note that this is not an attempt at deterrence at the individual level, but at a dictatorial (for lack of a better word) level. I don’t expect the average jihadist to put down his bomb belt and go home because Saddam was toppled. But, I hope that the Assad’s of the world will take notice and avoid even the appearance of assisting the jihadists. Indeed, it seems to have worked on Libya in just this way. I never had a lot of faith in our ability to establish democracy in the region, and I still don’t know if we can. But our brave servicemen have accomplished a great deal to this point, and with much fewer lives lost than originally feared. I’m afraid the wider war, however, is only just begun.
Even if Pres. Bush had this idea as one of his reasons for going into Iraq, politics would prohibit him from coming out and saying so. I don’t know, and doubt we will ever know, all his actual (as opposed to stated) reasons. I guess if pushed to admit it, I’d agree that “Bush lied,” or at least told less than the whole truth. He’s a politician. That’s what they do—all of them. Any president of any party would cherry-pick facts and embellish justifications to gain support of a war he sought to have us fight. That alone does not inform us as to whether the war is worth fighting. It’s depressing, but sadly not surprising, that so many people do not understand this simple distinction.
I should add that, while I disagree with much of what “beetroot” has written in this debate, I appreciate his/her relatively civil tone and willingness to address the issues in a meaningful way. The same goes for “Northern Observer.”
Oh, and I found rather interesting Ric’s idea that it’s better to neuter Bin Ladin than to capture him. I can’t think of a good argument against it.
Bonus question: If you take as a given that any president would “spin” the issues to gin up support for a war, does the fact that Bush has done a less-than-stellar job at selling the war at home suggest that he may actually be more honest than we might expect in this regard? Or is he just feckless when it comes to PR? Or both?
SarahW or Darleen…do you date?
See, we’re back at the Jane Fonda argument: the weak at home cost us the war abroad, and strip War of its power to deter.
It’s the argument, passionately held by many, that says that we only lost Vietnam because of what was happening at home, not what was happening abroad. “They didn’t let us win,” goes the saying, and while I’ve heard that rejected countless times by military people and historians who consider the facts on the ground and the incredible difficulty of fighting an entrenched insurgency on its home turf, it’s an article of faith from which many cannot be moved.
Just as our gracious host cannot, evidently, be moved from his belief that opposition to the war here at home has cost us tactically on the ground in Iraq.
In an earlier thread I said that I thought that was bogus, and I’ll say it again: despite the gnashing and wailing of the antiwar movement, this administration has never lacked for the power to make the tactical decisions it wanted to make. They got all the troops they wanted, they got all the materiel they wanted, and they could’ve’ had more but Rummy et. al. decided that they had everything they needed, both in terms of partners and in terms of military assets.
Now, if the “will to win” is waning, it’s not because people at home are protesting, but because the job has dragged on for three years, with no end in sight, and oodles of evidence that suggests we’ve created a cauldron of sectarian chaos so dangerous that we can’t even leave the Green Zone.
But I recognize that many here hold as an article of faith the notion that the MSM is actively undercutting the war effort, due to its inherently anti-American (or at least, anti-Bush) nature. Changing that perspective is usually impossible, just as it’s impossible to convince a Jane-Fonda-cost-us-the-war believer that good old Hanoi Jane was just insult, not injury.
Give me a break Beetroot. Two months ago on This Week panelists were rolling their eyes at the idea we could win in Iraq. Clearly the unspoken wisdom in Washington was that even Bush had given up. Go on C-SPAN and check out Bush today at his press conference. Does he impress you as someone who has given up? If so you are either a liar or a retard with respect to assessing others.
Now, if the “will to win†is waning, it’s not because people at home are protesting, but because the job has dragged on for three years,
Has it really dragged on for three years, or have the weak-minded finally been beaten down by a three-year barrage of negativism?
Negative people drag on forever.
Maybe reporters won’t leave the Green Zone…
No end in sight? How do address the growing IA responsibility for security? Every time another FOB gets turned over to the IA, do you ignore it? in favor of the view that we’ve created
Not to say that Cokie Roberts (eye roller in chief on the show in question) is unpatriotic, but that in the bubble she exists in it was simply inconceivable that any rational person could continue to support the war.
Dammit Jeff, I have had nothing but trouble with the comments here lately – well, that and my own fumble fingers…
What I wanted to add was that, Beet, the most egregious part of your point is the thought that we’ve “created” some sort of out of control chaos. That flies against reality – you have been fed a steady diet of “increasing insurgent attacks” “civil war” and the like since day 1. When some Saudi or Syrian blows up an Iraqi school bus – we’ve done this? Hmmm.
Normally I would call this a deliberate strawman, but I think beetroot seems to be willing to debate honestly and I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. I will agree I don’t believe the antiwar propaganda has had a great effect on the administrations decision making. I believe it can be reasonably argued that it has had some effect, but that’s never been the main argument.
The argument has been that the antiwar propaganda has had a great effect on the decision making of the Al Quaeda and the insurgency in Iraq, of their under-the-table supporters in southwest Asia (Iran, Syria, elements in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan), and of the Arab Street from which the insurgency draws its support.
The antiwar propaganda has given the insurgency hope that if they can continue to bleed America enough they can win regardless of the situation on the ground. The propaganda has given the state supporters of terrorism hope that they can stop the American push before it impacts their power base, which it will because they use the political will which drives terrorism as an outlet for domestic political unrest. The propaganda has given the Arab Street an incorrect depiction of what is going on Iraq (see recent Egyptian and Turkish movies depicting the US as evil) which further incites terrorism and opposition to the US.
All of which drives the insurgency to further violence which would be counterproductive in a world in which the effects of violence would harm the insurgency if reported completely and honestly.
TW: does anyone else want to try?
BeetrOot sez many things:
The biggest problem with Vietnam is that we wanted to avoid another Korea. Without getting into a lot of the interim history about Tet and all that, would it at least be safe to point out that the withdrawl of American air support and financial backing for the South Vietnamese government (after the withdrawal of troops) most certainly had to have been a product, in part, of the anti-war contingent at home.
I think this is a fair point, to an extent. Where the question arises is how this domestic opposition has played out in terms of our diplomatic relations with third-party nations – which I would assert it has hurt. But more broadly, I think that the portrayal of the war has had significant consequences for the information war and campaign for hearts-and-minds. I think there are some other significant consequences, but I’ll leave that for later.
A national will to win, when nurtured, is a much stronger thing than I think you give it credit for. My sense is that this desire to win hasn’t been embraced by people from across the spectrum, and more over, the opposition to the war has colored how people percieve the war, which, in turn, feeds more opposition.
Fair enough. Just as food for thought, I have been mulling over the notion that risible as the press coverage is, for both tone and appalling lack of basic situational understanding, that the 24-hour, if it bleeds, it leads, news cycle is as much a factor as anything else. They don’t willingly root for disaster, but hey, war zones generate great footage.
Vizsla manages to state something I could never put into words properly. Most of the reasons some are against the war (destabilization; creating more terrorism; building hatred for the US) are primarily short term problems. They are long term only if we lose. Working to make sure we lose now while at the same time decrying the long term effects of our loss seems morally questionable at best.
To put it another way: the US faced a much greater threat from fascism in 1942 than it did in 1940. However, it faced less of a threat from fascism in 1946 than it did in either 1940 or 1942.
I have long believed that our mission into Iraq was predicated on things other than WMD. However, WMD had to become the “cover” for the real motive, which could not be publicly disclosed for political reasons. Unfortuantely, what all surely thought was a “slam dunk” (WMD in Iraq) turned out to be, for now, something of a mirage.
When I argue the ulterior motive theory with leftist friends, they go ballistic. “Bush went in based on evidence of WMD!!”, they say. But I believe that it possibly had more to do with the Saudi government as much as WMD. Recall that most of the hikackers were Saudi, and that it’s well known that they harbor and accomodate terrorists, the accomodation occuring so that the terrorists take their craft to an outside enemy, and not to the Royals.
After 9/11, when the Saudi terror connection became front page news, and Bush was rattling our saber at governments that harbor them, the Saudis didn’t believe that we have the will to use the force available to us, and that they could therefore continue with the status quo of looking the other way. After all, hadn’t successive previous American presidents declared that “terrorists would be brought to justice”, only to then be distracted with other matters until the next, larger attack on American interests, usually abroad? The Saudis believed that we would not follow through on any threats to bring anyone to justice. Our situation then became one of necessity: don’t bring war to Suadi soil and kill terrorists right in their training grounds, but bring it close enough to make them uncomfortable and understand that we mean business this time, and will follow through until the job is completed.
What better place to undertake this operation than the keystone of the Middle East: Iraq? Adjacent to Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. Centrally located for your wartime strategic enjoyment. And, who better to do this to than Saddam, what with his WMDs, his atrocious civil rights abuses, and him thumbing his nose for years to the UN and the world community?
Two stories had to be told to accomplish this; the public story and the private story. I’ve tried to explain the private story, and the public one we already know. Most of us undertand that a president, if he’s to carry out his responsibilities as CIC, has to do things on the sly. Even in a democracy like ours, full disclosure is neither favorable or wise. If the WMD had been found, all might be forgiven by the left, but who knows. What I do know is that Bush did what he had to do, and for reasons that have everything to do with securing this country and bringing the fight to those that have asked for it, in fact have demanded it.
Appeasement is not possible with this enemy, and I would go so far as to suggest that the flexing of our strength has not been sufficient enough. Not because I’m a warmonger, but if you enter this game, you might as well give it all you’ve got, and pummel them with a force that leaves them reeling. We’ve been too surgical, too patient, and too methodical in our approach to an enemy that plays by no rules.
What amazes me from both the left and the right is the over-simplifying that goes on when trying to parse “why” we’re in Iraq. It’s a confluence of factors: control over oil (dumb in the long term), the real fear of karmic-payback for the made-up states in the Arab world (that’d be a toughie, except for the fact that those folks can keep themselves weak without our help), the fact that bad guys do want to be in control, and there’s money to be made by Halliburton.
Having said all that, Bush’s approach is nothing but nakedly political, the future be damned. Bin Laden is still our Emmanuel Goldstein; catching him should have been our first priority, but that train left the station.
For quite some time I’ve favored a New Deal in energy – or call it a Manhattan Project if you like. But that won’t happen. What you guys can’t or won’t face is that Bush and Co. is both incompetent and corrupt (if his folks were competent there’d be no need for corruption). One half saw that after 9/11 looking at his “my pet goat” face; another 25% saw that after Katrina.
I said it in 2004, and I’ll say it again: if we can’t get rid of the Republicans in office, then indeed the terrorists will have won.
huzzah- another catch of the day at Jeff Goldstein’s Troll-Shack. Should you be served with a side of cheesy-garlic bread or rice pilaf?
BTW- you said “Bush and Co.”, you might just want to shorten that down to “BushCo.”…easier on the wrists and all.
Mumon,
Aside from all the Iraq stuff, switching to “alternate fuels” isn’t going to do much to make us less ecnomically dependent on the Middle East, unless it’s some sort of super-cool cold fusion thing. Among other things, if we reduce our consumption of oil drastically, what happens? Price drops. As price drops, the slack usage will be essentially picked up elsewhere. Since we’re all quite globalized these days, it still means that a massive supply shock still creates sufficient upheaval resulting in signficant effects here.
That any the vast majority of oil produced in the Middle East isn’t used in the US.
BRD
BRD,
Also, don’t forget that we also would have to make sure that such an investment in new energy sources would also have to encompass supplying our allies, or we can be hurt by the effects of an oil embargo on them.
I mean, we could cut our reliance on foreign fossil fuels by investing in good old nuclear (fission) power, but that makes all good progressives even angrier than the thought of Haliburton oil. Okay, that’s an advantage, but still…
TW: nature
Here’s a hypothetical for you all: Let’s say that there was no coverage of the war whatsoever in America. Let’s imagine that we were all blissfully going about our business without consuming any media whatsoever.
And let’s extend the hypothetical to imagine that not only was there no coverage, but there was no opposition; no protests; no nothing. Nothing but a smooth, unbroken Will to Win.
Finally, let’s also assume that the war’s first year went exactly as it was: initial invasion, quick overthrow of the Baathists, widespread looting and social breakdown, sporadic combat with “pockets of resistance,” leaving some innocent civilians dead, and the arrest and imprisonment of numerous Iraqis.
Would the insurgency (which, for argument’s sake, we’ll call a freewheeling blend of domestic fighters and Al Qaeda imports, with various agendas) be:
a) Bigger
b) Smaller
c) The same
I’m not yanking; I really want to know what people think.
Be Etroot,
Quick qualifier – we’re talking here purely about American domestic “smooth, unbroken Will to Win”, and the US not doing anything completely off the charts like nuking Fallujah, right?
Given those bounds, I would say the insurgency would be smaller than it is today by a fairly measurable portion.
BRD
Ric seldom says anything I disagree with, but this time…maybe.
This being part of the Bush strategy wouldn’t surpise me. It fits their behavior, it’s within the tradition (so to speak), and it’s almost a good idea. Almost.
I left out the subject there because it doesn’t matter.
In England, everything left of Labour is openly allying with local Bin Laden proxies, and, at a distance, with the “Iraqi” “insurgency” and against Iranian anti-government strikers and demonstrators, on the grounds that the left and Islam share in a larger-than-any-prole’s-life fight against “global capitalism”â€â€with loot and power to be divvied once that fight is won…surely.
Remember this story from Iran? They don’t. They’re fooled.
See here: http://tinyurl.com/oan65
Likewise, at U.S. lefty protests, Der Stürmer-inspired blood-drooling Jew puppets and “From the riverâ€â€to the sea!” cheers are progressively overtaking pacifist placards and chants.
They’re more fooled every day.
This was inevitableâ€â€a philosophical necessity. And a “blowing smoke” strategy that doesn’t account for a real fire concealed there is inevitably failing. Bush and Blair have misovererestimated us.
Yes. But how? In the common sense of our time, there exists no ground from which to make a case for fighting any fascism but an imaginary one at a rural Kansas school board.
So what happens? What always happens? It gets to be too late.
And this time, maybe it [cough] always already [spit] was.
Beetro Ot,
Something from another thread, but I think it captures much of my thought about the role of dissent and press in the current conflict. It’s kind of edited, but there might be a confusing you or something in there.
As far as the kind of stuff to which I object is the kind of “dissent†that is basically handicapping us in the Information War and hearts-and-minds campaigns. For instance, the assertion that the US used chemical weapons in Fallujah. Or the uproar over the US putting factually true stories in the Iraqi press. There are a million and one things to add to, but those are two of the examples that come to mind.
The other, more serious element, is the role that press plays in the policy making process. Media reports are a staple of open source intelligence. When that stream gets polluted, it debases the quality of information available to decision makers. This has a cascading effect and causes problems. For example, when Congressman Murtha spoke about the state of the military, he said that he talked to military in Iraq, and althgough they said things were going well, he decided that they were just saying that because they were obliged to. Now, for sake of argument, let’s assume that the professionals who are putting their ass on the line and getting shot at might have a valid opinion on their own needs and status. Murtha opted to decide that their opinion wasn’t valid, because it didn’t fit with the internal narrative he had constructed about the progress of the war in Iraq. There are a whole bunch of other, similar, items. Basically, in my view, dissent becomes a net negative when it starts becoming obstructive rather than constructive. Fighting a war is hard enough without having to take political flak at home on top of it.
Responding to a quote from another poster:
With respect to that point, you are aware, of course, that the Abu Ghraib story was held for some months before coming out? That doesn’t seem to square with the ‘neutral conveyers of fact’ proposition. Additionally, you do recall the seemingly exhaustive publication of photos from that scandal? Don’t you think that saturation of the public debate with something that, as you note, will help recruit terrorists? Moreover,
don’t you agree that moving from reporting to highlighting that story didn’t make a bad situation worse?
BRD
The unspoken little nugget of poo wrapped in Mumon’s dulcet tones is that once “we” become independent of “Middle East Oil” we can kick Israel to the curb and let the jihadists have their way with those uppity Jews.
Beetroot,
I assume by the insurgency being “bigger” you mean “stronger” or “closer to victory”. and mean the opposite by “smaller”. If we accept your givens as true, then yes, I believe the insurgency would be “smaller.” (Although you don’t give a time frame – I assume you mean now).
Rationale? The “insurgency” is in large part supported covertly by Iran, Syria and other non-indigenous groups. Showing a unified, unwavering will to win would have shown the jihadis that their tactics would not work. If I had to give a time frame, in your hypothetical I would say the insurgency would really have weakened (more so than in reality) around the Iraqi elections. The powers that be supporting the insurgency would have had enough by then and seen the writing on the wall (to trade a reference relating to the Persians).
Beck, i said it wasn’t the classic containment doctrine.
More, it is like tiger hunting. You stake out the goat and wait.
you kill all the tigers as they come.
And while the tigers are busy trying to get the goat and getting killed, western culture is insidiously building osmotic pressure outside the cell membrane of Islam.
Islamic culture is porous, the greatest threat is the adoption of western values spread by music, movies, print media and the internet. The more exposure muslims have, the faster Islam will evolve to accomodate new memotypes.
If Islam can’t evolve, it will go extinct.
BUT the whole tipping point idiocy, the meaningless manifestos, Wafa’s angry tirade, DPW, the whole Islam-as-eeeevil-monolith are easily exploited by islamic propagandists to demonstrate western antagonism and bigotry and suspicion of MENA.
Nishizono – good point about porous Islamic culture. A funny example of that was watching a bunch of Afghans checking out each others ring tones on their Afghan Wireless Nokia phones… heh.
Nishizono,
Interesting trivia. Prior to the Fall of the Shah, can you guess what the two most popular cassette tapes were (or rather who they were by)?
Number one: The Ayatollah Khomeni
Number two: Freddy Mercury, an openly gay rock star of Persian ancestry.
The osmosis element is one of the critical ones. And also one of the reasons that I’m not spectacularly happy about things like Fahrenheit 9/11. I think it sets us back a bit on that front. (Not cripplingly so, but a bit)
BRD
b) Smaller (Weaker, more specifically)
This is, of course, idle speculation based on assumptions. One cannot completely ignore the second order effects of the lack of American media coverage, but I would not bet which direction that effect would take. There is also the influence from the BBC, AFP, state-run Arab TV, etc. By and large, however, American self-criticism, whether valid or invalid, is extra influential in influencing outside opinion of American actions.
The theoretical scenario you present is completely theoretical. Al Quaeda and the insurgency may have instead waited until the US drew down its forces before openly attacking a weaker Iraqi state. Al Quaeda may have devoted its efforts to Afghanistan or Pakistan.
This is a specific scenario of a more generalized belief of mine: global anti-Americanism is to a substantial degree an American export. It is driven by opinions from American intellectuals, who, while trying to portray America as a failed state, portray the world’s ills as a product of American selfishness. Ironically, a united America with substantially less self-criticism really would be the proverbial 800 pound gorilla on the world stage.
(I don’t believe a lack of internal dessent per se is necessarily a good thing. Without the checks and balances public review provides, there would be additional problems facing the US in the long run in your scenario, but I think that would be overshadowed by the long term positive effects. The problem with what exists in reality isn’t so much that their is criticism, but that much of the criticism is not fair, and exists to serve a particular agenda. In the long run, this is bad for everyone as those of us on the receiving end of the criticism are apt to throw away the valid criticism with the agenda-driven BS.)
Beetroot,
A question for you:
What factual evidence would convince you (or at least cause you to consider) that press coverage, as opposed to the blowback from the actual events on the ground, was providing a greater advantage to the insurgent cause?
In my case, I would need to see blowback for a significant event which was not covered by the press to cause me to consider that the insurgents were not feeding and feeding off of press coverage.
Perhaps the insurgency would not exist at all in beetroot’s scenario. From where I stand, the entire point of the tactics adpoted by the jihadis is to use the mass media as a “force multiplier” if you will. They are neither organized enough nor strong enough to be a factor on the battlefield in the traditional military sense. It is only by playing to the cameras that they are able to attack us at our weakest point, which beetroot aptly described upthread with the Vietnam/Jane Fonda reference.
In other words, as Ric puts it, “It’s not that the outcome is certain; it isn’t, not by a long chalk. It’s that the game is worth the candle.â€Â
We need a new manager and a new coaching staff.
In other words, as Ric puts it, “It’s not that the outcome is certain; it isn’t, not by a long chalk. It’s that the game is worth the candle.â€Â
We need a new manager and a new coaching staff.
Wow man, that is so fucking heavy.
[fx: heavy sigh] This will be long, because I’m essentially going to Fisk beetroot. I really don’t see any other way to do it. Jeff, I beg your indulgence…
First, beetroot, many thanks. It isn’t often that I state a thesis and have an erstwhile opponent spend so much time and effort illustrating it. You are clearly an urban professional of some kind, and your entire post reeks with the assumption that our opponents are Just Like You, heirs of Charles Martel, the Magna Carta, the Treaty of Westphalia, and the rest of the roots of the Western European system. Dammit, these are people who never even invented feudalism! Their Charlemagne got executed. Their Magna Carta got burned as heretical. Their Habsburgs won their Thirty Years War, which took more like a century and a half. Their cultural basis is utterly dissimilar, and expecting them to reach the same conclusions you do is asinine.
What’s especially asinine is that I’m willing to bet you’re one of the ones who accepts, if not trumpets, the bigoted stereotype of the theofascist rightwing Evangelical Christians. Got news for you, bub. Those people exist; they aren’t just boogermen for you to scare the children with. [fx::hollow voice Joooooooooooos! Joooooooooos!] Their numbers are diminishing, and even frightened by that they don’t resort to anything but committees and politics, but we remember, we do remember. You have at your disposal a group of people, basically tolerant to well-disposed toward your aims and causes even though disagreeing, who are much closer to the mind-set of the Arabs than you can be without serious brain damage. Listen to them. Think of me as an interpreter.
Beetroot, if you’ll send me your snailmail address and a binding promise, I’ll send you a roll of quarters. The promise will be that you will go to the nearest Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater, find the Whack-A-Mole game, use up the entire roll—and report back: did you win?
The idea is not to win at Whack-A-Mole. You can’t. It’s inherently an unwinnable game. No matter how hard you try, eventually one slips through. And every time one does slip through, somebody dies. Worse yet, it isn’t your quarters—you’re chained to the machine, the coin changer’s broke so it runs continually, and the moles have knives. The only way to win is to shut off the machine. The question is, can we talk the landlord into unplugging it? Or do we have to wait until the flying pieces start poking the kids’ eyes out, and nuke the power plant?
That’s not even pusillanimous. That’s television. It is genuinely absurd that a group of people who would only sneer at Tom Clancy could have such a touching faith in spies.
Dammit, the bigoted hyperbole pisses me off. Fuck you for putting lies in my mouth, fucktard. That’s not what I said, and it’s not what I meant.
No, we can’t terrorize Afghan villagers into finking on Osama. They already are terrorized by bin Laden’s supporters. You can’t build contacts and turn people if you can’t offer them security. You have to have Witness Protection Programs and anonymity, but most of all you have to establish a rule of law, which is, at bottom, an assurance to the prospective informer that you will at least try to protect them when the heavy guys come calling, and that you have at least a chance of doing so when you try. And if J. Random Afghan notes that when the Arabs kill and mutilate you you do absolutely nothing about it, it does not fill him with enthusiasm to grass on the people he knows beyond any shadow of a doubt will rape his daughters and wi[fe|ves] before his eyes, kill his sons, destroy his house, castrate him to keep him out of Paradise, then behead him.
You cannot offer him protection if you won’t protect yourself. More importantly, you cannot offer him protection if he perceives you as weak, and he will inevitably see your failure to protect yourself and revenge yourself on others as weakness. We can’t do anything about the last part; we’re Westerners, we don’t do revenge, at least officially. So we have to show symbols of strength.
Wrong, wrong, Western urban professional thinking at its purest. The weakness already existed, clear for anyone to see; bin Laden goes on about it at length—“the strong horse”. We are helpless. We can be attacked at any time and in any way they choose. We will never respond because we cannot respond. We are too riven by dissension, too soft, too far from God.
There’s a wonderful old Happy Days episode where Fonzie is instructing Richie on how to deal with bullies. Stand your ground, don’t flinch at threats, the whole list—then he stops:
FONZIE: This isn’t gonna work.
RICHIE: What? What’s wrong?
FONZIE: I forgot.
RICHIE: Forgot what?
FONZIE: It’s gotta be credible. At some time in your life you have to have hurt somebody.
It’s never good to hurt people. But, as I said elsewhere, a year ago Thursday a gang of people grabbed my wife, carried her off to an isolated place, and opened her up from neck to navel and played with her innards. What? Oh, she had a heart attack, and now has a triple bypass. Sometimes bad things aren’t the worst thing.
Again, urban professional Western thinking, in this case left-pacifist. The center of that is confirms … rhetoric about its inherent evil—what we might call the Michael Moore thesis: they killed the wrong people; they should have gone after the warmongering Red Staters, right?
Wrong.
It’s the single most frustrating aspect of the whole business. They go off and explain their grievances and aims in words of few syllables and sentences of simple structure, and you and the rest of the leftards ignore them, call them liars and ignoramuses, and substitute your faux-Marxist drivel. They don’t give a damn about “imperialism”, and in fact intend it themselves. They don’t care about “repression”; we’re amateurs at that compared to the meanest country imam. They don’t give a s*t about “stealing the oil” except to the extent that they regret not extorting more wherewithal for weapons and ammunition. They get more “cruelty” and “torture” from their family and village life than any Westerner has the stomach to dish out to an axe murderer, and yes, that includes Lynndie England.
Read what they say instead of substituting your own preconceptions. What they regard as a vicious, unprincipled attack, worthy of the most severe response is—the whole liberal, left/”progressive” program: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, opportunity for individuals, a rationalist approach to Nature, rights of women and homosexuals. The people who sent Mohammad Atta aimed him directly at their identifiable enemies. They didn’t go for the epicenter—that would be the Harvard University Social Sciences faculty—because they wanted something more spectacular, but they didn’t make a mistake by not going after Red Staters. We’re their enemies, and have to be conquered. You are filth, corruption, a walking, talking AIDS virus with a pocket full of bribes. You don’t need to be defeated. You need to be exterminated. Disinfected. Consider yourself a disease-carrying cockroach.
Again, Western-urban thinking, plus playing off a stereotype of the military that has been obsolescent since 1917 and (in the United States, at least) totally obsolete since about 1980. What makes you think war supporters don’t consider “…its power to galvanize and motivate opposition”? It’s a basic fucking calculation, and has been since Sun Tzu (which is a few millenia, in case you don’t catch the reference). You ought to at least consider that it might be possible that some people might reach a different conclusion from yours. They might have evidence that you haven’t seen, and your towering intellect may be missing a brick here and there, too.
This is where you and the rest of the “anti-war” left have done real, substantial damage. By exaggerating the toll beyond all rationality you have contributed materially to the “galvanizing and motivating”. A hundred thousand dead! trumpets the Lancet, and it’s only in the four-point footnotes that we learn that that’s extrapolated from doubling the numbers from the worst-affected areas and extending it to the country as a whole, including counting the f*ing Erg as being as populated as Baghdad. Every child that falls off a cliff in a remote village that’s never seen a Hummer for real gets counted as one fatality due to the “war of aggression”. Every potential bomber that gets knifed in internecine squabbles between al Qaeda and the Ba’ath revenants goes on the list as an American victim.
In the three-year-long “rush to war!” it was made emphatically clear that our argument was with Saddam and his party, not with the Iraqi people and certainly not with all of Islam. You and the rest of the leftards have consistently and deliberately attempted to blur that distinction, to make it seem that America was deliberately attacking the populace, which is a damnable, palpable lie and an insult to everyone who’s ever worn a green suit, including those who’ve never picked up a weapon but have sweated blood for the last forty years trying to make our weapons as accurate and selective as possible to avoid that very contingency. Your purblind insistence on Leftist-related motivations (“imperialism! it’s all about oil! halliburton profiteering!”) feeds that. The perception that America is attacking Iraqis or Islam is strictly due to your efforts, not to anything George Bush or I have said or done. George Bush isn’t recruiting “insurgents”. You are.
Again you dig into your bigoted stereotypes to rephrase my words as a lie. At best you have the article wrong: war is an answer, sometimes. “Weak-kneed Jane Fondas” did not discredit war as a tool. On the contrary, they endorsed it with exuberant enthusiasm, the only caveat being that “just war” can only occur if it kills Americans and frustrates Amerikkan Imperialismâ„¢. And yes, there are ignorant people who think Stalin was wise, on both sides of the aisle. There aren’t any in positions of power, and there won’t be unless you send them there.
Umm, yeah. Oh, by the way, the Sun rises in the East most days. [I just thought I’d throw that in. It’s about the same level of insight.]
I will quarrel with “…and more unjust…” It’s the first glimmer I’ve seen of any possibility that you might figure out what’s what. What you’re doing is endorsing trial by combat. The one that’s weak is obviously in the wrong, eh?
Which is to say, you started with a bigoted stereotype and projected the motivations realistic for that stereotype onto the situation, ignoring the plain statements made before and during the action and contemptuously discarding any evidence that might weaken your projection. Makes me nostalgic, that does. It’s exactly the way my neighbors and I treated successful black people forty years ago.
No, it’s exposing your weakness. The Army’s doing fine, and George Bush is muddlin’ along pretty well. Countries and societies, encouraged by the demonstration of American strength, are cooperating in the sub rosa spy-and-diplomat effort, even while trumpeting anti-Americanism in public, and as a result the network is being slowly eroded. Our Special Forces are operating in places you (and I) have never heard of, and making inroads. There are reverses from time to time, which is understandable in any conflict; they’d be easier to deal with if they weren’t treated like the end of the World by the Pull[1]. Things are not going great, but there is cause for cautious optimism. Why don’t you go huddle in your bed and pull the covers up? Poppa George will protect you.
Regards,
Ric
[1]My favorite Three Stooges routine. They want to get into an event, so they go into the rest room and sabotage the dispensers for all the buttons labeled “Press”. Except that Curly isn’t fast enough and doesn’t pay attention: his button says “Pull”.
Bravo Ric.
Secend that.
The Army’s doing fine
Not even close.
http://radamisto.blogspot.com/2005/11/troop-drawdown.html
http://radamisto.blogspot.com/2005/11/more-on-drawdown.html
http://radamisto.blogspot.com/2006/01/thin-green-line.html
The perception that America is attacking Iraqis or Islam is strictly due to your efforts, not to anything George Bush or I have said or done.
Really? Didn’t Pres. Fredo use the word “crusade” in 2001?
Well, sure enough, he did:
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/gen.bush.terrorism/
Steve J,
If this truly was a war aganst all Islam, it’d have been over in about 30 minutes. And only that long because of the need to enter new coordinates into the ICBMs.
Can someone tell me why “jihad” can be redefined and explained away but “crusade” is forever tainted?
Then get us a manager with a better plan. But I haven’t seen a manager with a real plan, much less one I thought was better. And you have to accept that some of us think the half-assed plans you seem to support are unrealistic, immoral and therefore useless.
The desire to do so. Or, feelings, if you will.
Civilis, do be careful. What you are implicitly guaranteeing is that all of your plans will work perfectly forevermore.
This is one of the main things people on the left/pacifist side don’t understand about the U.S. military, which has invented the AAR or “After Action Report” and actually uses it. To a close first approximation the strategy consists of making a general estimate, getting tied in, and refining the plans on the fly. It works, generates enormous flexibility, and avoids getting tied down by a Montgomery with an Infallible Plan That Must Be Followed Regardless of Actual Events.
Steve J., you illustrate why I don’t bother to link—links can be chosen for ideological reasons just as arguments can, and the Net of Ten Million Lies contains something for everyone. The three you provide are both redundant and misleading. The Army’s recruiting shortfalls, where they exist as other than statistical variations, derive more from (a) general prosperity and (b) rejecting those too fat, too stupid, too out of shape, or too drugged-up to help than they do from “disillusionment”.
Regards,
Ric
WAIT A MINUTE! Chimpy told us that this was gonna be over in a week, didn’t he?
What happened here, Steve?
Ric, that’s the confounding part of the incessant “failure” argument. Everyone knows what we should have done. But no one can show that a different outcome would have resulted. There’s an easy, but wrong, assumption that the enemy is incapable of adaptation and response.
We do what we do. They find ways to get around it. We figure that out and change tactics. Then they change. And then we change, ad infinitum.
You can’t predict the course of these things, and even in hindsight you can’t show that a different course of action would have resulted in a more favorable outcome.
One thing I do feel comfortable in assuming an outcome in is this: If we had done what the armchair, Monday morning quarterbacks insist we should have done, namely 300K troops in at the start, we’d have a far higher casualty count.
That’s a likely outcome of giving the enemy more to shoot at.
Aside from that point, the troop increase only has a meaningful effect if you also increase the “footprint” those troops are leaving (whether we are talking more patrols, more operations distinctly engaged by American forces, etc)…but then the complaint would be we aren’t giving enough responsibility to the Iraqis; that we are occupying in the sense of imperialism (or, at least, that we aren’t doing enough to ready an independent Iraqi government).
I’m reminded of some of the dumber thoughts of Andrew Sullivan, who has argued we didn’t/don’t have enough troops for the invasion/transition and we didn’t transfer authority to Iraqis fast enough. The idea only makes sense if you presume you can have a legitimate national authority that doesn’t provide security for its citizens.
Ric Locke,
Bravo, sir.
Funny, I don’t feel fisked …
…. but seriously, Ric, I appreciate the effort, even if I don’t fully understand what it is you’re trying to say.
I get that you think I’m bigoted, shortsighted, a professional of some sort, a hater of Christians, naive, and so forth.
You also seem to think that I opposed the Afghan invasion as much as the Iraq invasion (not true; the former seemed perfectly logical to me, as to most Americans); that I’m willing to whack moles instead of overturning the machine (which is actually true, since I think the “machine” is a social movement that can’t be “whacked,” while the “moles” are specific threats that can and should be targeted and eliminated, and that one need not rely on Tom Clancy to get it done); that I’m “recruiting insurgents” (an accusation that leaves me more sad and frustrated than angry), and that I don’t understand just how much the enemy hates me and my ilk (which is untrue).
Additionally, you called me a “fucktard” and said “fuck you” and made a lot of assumptions about me that leave me disinclined to work too hard to figure out what it is that you’re getting at.
So maybe, if you’d like to make a serious effort to sell the Iraq war to someone who understands that war can be an answer, but who also believes that this war was not the answer to the problem of Al Qaeda, and that this war has actually set us back in GWOT, you might try to leave out the obscene ad hominems and the sweeping (some might say bigoted) assumptions about me and my beliefs.
Is that fair?
As to my question above, thanks to those who took the time to answer; it is in keeping with the philosophy of this site’s host and many commenters that folks should believe that less critical American media coverage would result in a smaller, less powerful insurgency.
<object is the kind of “dissent†that is basically handicapping us in the Information War and hearts-and-minds campaigns. For instance, the assertion that the US used chemical weapons in Fallujah …</blockquote>
Indulge me, if you would, with thoughts on a follow-up question:
Which caused more damage to the hearts-and-minds campaign:
a) The first major attack on Fallujah, with its displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, the deaths of uncounted Iraqis(some insurgents, some not), the widespread destruction of homes, businesses, and infrastructure, and the subsequent occupation of the town (with its roadblocks and identity cards and so forth);
b) Debate in American media about the description of white phosphorus as a “chemical weapon.”
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that both caused damage to the hearts-and-minds campaign, and both attracted new recruits to Al Qaeda. The question is, which do readers think did more damage?
Beetroot,
I’m really not in a position to speak for or about Ric, but if I may, I would like to suggest that perhaps some of his ire isn’t directed so much at you per se, but reflects an irritation built up from the comments of the less intellectually honest or sincere folks who come by here for a rash of drive-by postings and then disappear into the ether with a fading “McChimpbyHitlerBurton and Cheneeyyyyyy…”
Moving along to your question, and skipping a lot of the musty logic-chopping and parsing – and the effects of the US media on debate outside of Iraq, I thikn that the “gross” damage to the information campaign is proabably greater with option A. But, I am far from certain that the “net” damage is greater. This is, I suppose, inherent in the murky logic of psyops.
What I find more interesting about your question is that it skips by the more essential point that regardless of whether or not A>B or B>A, most certainly B+A is greater than either one of them alone. Essentially if things are difficult as is – that we are encountering damage to the hearts and minds campaign – we on earth do we want to exacerbate that problem?
BRD
fist time commenter, been reading for a few months now.
Wow, what a thoughtful peice by both Ric and Jeff.
I think Ric hits it on the head, I too felt as Jeff did when I read it. so clear, so correct. And what I have been half thinking unconciously myself.. but much more thurough than I had managed to get to.
It is tough to figure the ‘shadow’ cover of the left for the spooks.
Probably would have to actually quantify the morale droop of the troops for each statement and then calculate a total morale slump to really address that thought. It may be as (somewhat) entertaining to them as it is to use (though ire hightening also). Heck may even make some more stalwart than already are (former vet myself, their comments just harden me to the mission).
I agree that Bush’s responses to the left anitwar crowd does, indeed, show the enemy that he is willing to go the distance, even in the face of dissent from his own people.
Thanks Jeff and Ric, great posts!!!
I disagree entirely, BRD. (not about Ric, but about the need to assess the actual damage done by critical American media coverage.)
The reason I ask the question is because I’m trying to get folks to consider the relative impact of critical media coverage and American opposition.
Relative to what? Relative to the impact of events on the ground.
My opinion (as I’m sure you can guess) is that the assault on Fallujah itself (to take one example) created far more animosity towards America and far more ammunition for enemy propaganda than did the debate over its propriety here at home. No matter how good the intentions, Fallujah resulted in death, destruction and social upheaval for thousands, and in turn created enormous animosity towards American troops among the locals, while also providing our enemies with thousands of stories and images easily used to “prove” their own propaganda points (war on Islam, America kills babies, etc.).
Meanwhile, the debate over white phosphorus provides nothing but confirmation of an argument that the enemy will make anyway: “America is divided.”
It’s like the Abu Grhaib debate. I hear all the time about the “damage” done by the fact that torture at AG got so much coverage. The implication is that no damage would have been done had the story not broken. But what do you do about the actual human beings who were in AG, who leave or who talk to friends through the bars or who see what’s going on, who go out and tell their friends and so on and so on? Isn’t the true damage done by the actual torture itself? Mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters who hear the stories and will never, never forgive?
Look, I can sympathize with Ric’s barely-contained fury, because I too sometimes want to reach through my screen and strangle people. In my case, I’m infuriated by people who think, for example, that the big problem is that the media reports torture, when, in my opinion, the problem is that we’re f***ing torturing people, in contradiction to every value for which we supposedly stand.
I mean, how good is that for “hearts and minds”? What kind of advertisement for democracy is that?
It’s like some people think, “If you can keep it out of the media, it’s like it never happened.” I.e. if we didn’t have all this fuss about white phosphorus, nobody from Fallujah would be thinking that the Americans killed women and children in horrible ways. But the fact is that we do kill women and children in horrible ways, and whether or not that’s an inevitable byproduct of war, each death is another clan of hearts and minds that are lost to us.
AS you say, A+B may be greater than A alone. But in my opinion, B—words on screens—adds a tiny number of “insurgents” to the pot, while A—dead bodies in the streets, destroyed lives, and all the images an anti-American propagandist could desire—creates them by the bucketful.
Which is why I do subscribe to the theory that V. stated (dismissively) above, that Iraq is “creating more terrorists than it eliminates.” I think that’s absolutely correct.
I’ll add this qualifier. If the US was able to balance the scales by providing an excellent quality of life, that might—might—outweigh the damage done by the brutal war itself. And that was the theory going in—so you kill a few people, but if prosperity and peace and democracy follow, we’ll be forgiven.
That’s the theory. But as has been widely reported, we’re not provided peace and prosperity. Ric’s rosy assessment aside, we’ve created chaos, and it’s not improving; it seems, in fact, to be getting worse. So which contributes more to the loss of hearts and minds: three years of blood, destruction, and chaos, or three years of anti-war stories?
Again, I’ll ask it, if you took all the anti-war stories and blogs and memes out of the picture, but left the invasion, death and destruction, would the insurgency be any smaller?
I don’t think it would, personally.
But that’s just me, and everybody here knows by now that I’m just a mole-whacking latte-drinking Jesus-hating fucktard.
beetroot, amongst other problems I’m sure Ric will look to point out, your analysis doesn’t fix itself in the ground of other actions and what they mean or how they are perceived.
Take Tal Afar, for example. Operations in Tal Afar put lives at risk (and in all likelyhood resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire), property in danger, and ensured some level of basic misery for the lives of the citizens there. However, once you consider that action in comparison to the idea of letting insurgents terrorize the city (and, in controling that travel point, insure other cities will be subject to similar terror), the relative value (from a tactical and PR perspective) becomes clear. Choosing to not act is still an action- and one that we can be (and are) criticized for.
Furthermore, you make it sound as if Ric is advocating a position of “go in, shoot things up, and let the locals sort out the mess”. But that’s not Ric’s position- that’s your position! That’s “intel and special ops”, that’s the model of just chasing down the bad actors.
Indeed, there were people who were angry with US forces after Fallujah- some we can never win back. But there are also plenty that are won back- and they are won back by continuing operations that not only seek to repair things because it’s a good thing to do, but because that’s the hearts and minds operation- it isn’t conducted in the midst of a search and destroy mission.
And a key to understand here also is that it is not just US civilians and Al-Queda listening to our media- it’s the average Iraqi also! AP stories and NBC/CBS coverage is picked up and re-cycled by Arab stations, and in some cases our media is directly reaching the normal Iraqi. Now, let’s give the average Iraqi some credit: while they may not take everything we say at face value, they also may not take everything Al-Queda says at face value. But when our media is saying things nearly identical to Bin Laden- that’s something of a consensus! When our media implies that we are in Iraq for the oil or for petty family revenge (as Helen Thomas did yesterday), and Bin Laden says the same thing…it may be tough to convince Iraqis otherwise- especially after the outrage over the military having the audacity to produce factual propoganda that tries to demonstrate the US’s good intentions and actions in Iraq! Furthermore, we rely on the media to convey our message of goodwill and good actions to those everyday Iraqis when our military can’t be everywhere…to let them know we are coming to help them. When our media fails to do that, we are handicapping ourselves.
tw ground: as in the object-ground relationship.
Okay, but aren’t those stories and images themselves the cherrypicked product of a media campaign? Admittedly, much of that campaign is being waged in the European and Arab press, but would it be any different if there was a contrasting campaign to compare it with?
Why is there no media coverage of the effect of IEDs on Iraqs civilian population, which is surely a PR hit for the insurgency an order of magnitude worse than the debacle in Fallujah was for the US? I’ve seen pictures from people over there of the devastation caused by an IED; of Iraqis… children… lying broken, bloody, and dead in the street. I’ve seen Michael Yon’s tragic photo of the US soldier with the dying girl in his arms. But I’ve not seen those in the media, US or otherwise.
Personally, although the chemical weapon story is a good example of bad media processes, its a bad example of the effects of those processes. We’ve seen better examples… the pissing on the Koran at Gitmo story at least had a few deaths. The Fallujah story, meanwhile, is the largest single incident that can be blamed on the US, and the media has blown it well out of proportion. Aside from that, you get an occasional incident where the US killed some civilians in with some combatants, or a case where the US uncovered cases where American soldiers committed a very limited torture as interrogation (and prosecuted those involved).
Part of the problem is that we are trying to work with a restrictive set of rules. Question 1: What do you think would be the effect of a (successful) US campaign to demonize the insurgency? Say, publishing a photo of every Shiite Iraqi killed by the insurgency (before and after pictures, with the before picture helpfully including the wife and kids in happier days)? I’d wager the result would be civil war, but the Shiites would only be mad at the US for getting in the way of revenge.
Question 2: Your scenario postulated no US media coverage of the war at all. What would be the effect of a US media with attitudes similar to those of the US media during the second world war? A campaign of blatant, naked, demonization of the Baathist Sunnis, to the point of exaggerating the atrocities committed during Hussein’s rule? Coupled with massive homefront boosterism, such as a bunch of movies where a group of various American stereotypes (the farmer, the city boy, the jew, the intellectual, the African-American, and add the latino, the woman, and the Arab-American) heroically triumphed over a blatantly evil Baathist menace? Would Iran or Syria risk angering an America that has freed itself from much of the moral baggage through the transition to total war?
Bonus Question 3: How do you know the quality of life in Iraq is so bad? Where do you get the information? Whose reports are you listening to?
beetroot:
By waging war against Germany and Japan, did we not create animosity there as well? I’m sure conditions in those countries were not exactly peachy in 1946 through 1949. This theory that says we cannot confront the enemy because it makes more of them is patently absurd. If thoroughly defeated, they will get over it. Check your history.
I haven’t read all the responses, nor will I. I just wanted to comment on what Jeff originally posted.
With proper reading, one can see that the Bush administration’s methods are quite effective in their own way. The Administration may not do what they are doing solely for the explicit reasons they state. There are other issues and strategies involved. In order for current strategies to be successful, Bush et al. cannot, as a rule, state explicitly what they are aiming for. And to expect such would be somewhat ridiculous. There is a lot of information which must be kept secret.
One example is Rumsfeld’s very clever “Old Europe” remark before Operation Iraqi Freedom. Some have suggested that the off-the-cuff remark was deliberate and, if so, it worked wonderfully, driving a significant wedge between “Old Europe” (France, Germany, Russia) and “New Europe” (mainly Eastern European states) and increasing support for Operation Iraqi Freedom by Europeans.
Like any operation by the Government, criticism (especially constructive criticism) has its place. But people have gone out of control. The White House is not obligated to follow anyone’s advice. The White House has access to information that the vast majority of critics have no access to. People seem to forget this. People also seem to forget that every Government keeps certain facts, goals, and plans secret. They may be revealed after the event or when conditions make it safe to do so, but to expect the Government to tell all is ridiculous. Any Government that does tell all from the get-go ought to be impeached for endangering its operatives and the Nation.
This is not to say that the Government is perfect or that it has always made the best decisions. But we should give it the benefit of the doubt.
Regarding Bush and his failure to speak up: I believe he knows what he is doing. The point that the debate provides cover for operatives is an interesting one, and one I am inclined to accept. However, imagine if the President were to begin answering all of the criticism lodged against him and his administration. First, he would not be able to satisfy everyone (or even most of his critics). Second, he would have to address the responses to his statements. Third, he would have to reveal a lot of information, which may not be good. If he chooses not to reveal it, people will accuse him of deliberately hiding the truth. Although some may think that countering criticism might help morale, this cannot be certain. There’s really little use for him to get so intimately involved in these hurricane-like debates. He has far better things to do.
However, I am at a loss of how the Government should deal with lies that are spread about its actions. I think they should be dealt with – people need to challenged to support their claims with suitable evidence – but I have no idea how. It’s not like we have some Minister of Information who can shut down newspapers, nor would we want such a thing. But the media and politicians in the opposition need to be challenged so they can be more responsible. Their actions undermining the war, just for the sake of undermining the war, are treasonous. How can we expect to gain our sure victory of our own people are trying to shoot us in the foot? It’s untenable, unacceptable, and utterly ridiculous.
Furthermore, people who criticize the Administration bring in points, events, and issues in a simplistic manner without allowing one to realize that not all things are so black and white as using chemical weapons or massacring civilians. Reality is often complicated. Not allowing one to listent to the other side muddies the issue even more. Our enemy is very adept at misrepresenting the truth and even outright lying. I do not, as a rule, trust any claims they make. I would go so far as to say that I will not accept at face value any claims (against Bush, the Administration, the military, or the War) by any person whatsoever. I must be convinced what he/she is saying is, in fact, the truth. I have seen already too much manipulation and misrepresentation to give any of the War’s opponents credibility from the beginning. Others should do the same. I am amazed at how people are so willing to be duped by master manipulators whose agenda are as much against America as it is against the War or against Bush. Another reason I don’t think Bush should even enter the debates on the War has to do with the enormous amount of misrepresentation that goes on. How long should the President take to explain what the reality has been? Why should the President be obligated to explain away blatant lies lobbed at him?
Also, thanks to Jeff, Ric Locke, BRD, et al.
Beetroot,
Thanks for the response! Ok, let’s start broadly. I guess the first part is what function the media performs. It has, at least as part of its brief, the role of reporting information. As a subsidiary effect is has the ability to focus the debate and set the agenda for discussion.
Natalie Holloway disappeared, but without the media I would have never heard about it, nor would I have (evidently against my will) a new understanding of the Aruban legal system.
To riff of your examples a bit, let’s take the First Battle of Fallujah. Ok, firing, chaos, madness. Now if you have crews wandering around looking for dead babies to film, I think that will make the already difficult circumstance of the battle itself much worse. With the bit on chemical weapons, it’s not that folks will decide, based on our coverage, that there’s a debate – rather those whose interests run counter to ours will cherry pick, and then assert that the US use of chemical weapons is a known fact and is even reported in the US.
So rather than the simpler, more straight up notion of “The Terrible and Grisly Things That Are All But Inevitable In Urban Fighting Occurred” you end up with “US Troops Storming Fallujah To Kill Babies With Outlawed Chemical Weapons (And Might We Note That The US Made False Allegations About Iraqi Chemical Weapons To Justify It’s Illegal Invasion)”
I don’t think that anyone is making the assertion that not covering something will make it unhappen. Rather it’s that selective overemphasis on the negative makes a bad problem worse. But to move on to a specific you give:
Nothing you say there is anything I disagree with, but let’s flesh out the story a bit. The first and second hand accounts are going to be out there. But how about the guy who is living in Mosul who doesn’t know anybody who was in Abu Ghraib, and is basically not deeply involved in anything other than getting by day-to-day. The first he will hear of Abu Ghraib (much like the first we heard of Abu Ghraib) is from the press. And so, appropos of nothing, presented without context, is all this super-evil torture stuff. Now, you may recall that when Abu Ghraib hit the front pages, no mention was made of the fact that the internal investigation and rendering appropriate punishment was already several months along.
So one piece of information omitted changes the story to “US Troops Did Bad Things” when it could have been the slightly more complex story of “US Troops Did Bad Things And Are Going To Be Punished For It By The US Gov’t”
To look at another example – do you remember the rioting that resulted from the Koran down the toilet story? Had that not been covered, what would have occured?
And as a final example, let’s look at the basic assertion that the US invaded Iraq because of WMD and Iraq had completely disarmed. Neither of those two contingent points were actually, factually true. But the press coverage has entrenched those notions firmly in the minds of people around the world. Regardless of what actually happened.
BRD
Beetroot,
A quick addendum:
So the rationale for publishing and pushing those images and stories is what? If we already have the problem, making worse is useful to whom?
BRD