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August 23, 2004
Iraq: It isn't war....
Boring Sunday, and with nothing better to do in my hotel, a short commentary on the following:
'It Isn't War'
By Richard Hart Sinnreich
Sunday, August 22, 2004; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20338-2004Aug20.html
An interesting if flawed commentary, of which the essential point is that the United States’ current blundering non-policy is something of a worst of both worlds scenario. There is much to this point.
Watching the gallant but doomed charge of the British light cavalry brigade against the Russian guns at Balaclava during the Crimean War, French Gen. Pierre Bosquet commented acidly, "It's magnificent, but it isn't war." The same might be said of recent military operations in Iraq.
Observing them, Americans might be pardoned for wondering just what we think we're doing. One week our troops are clearing Fallujah of Baathist insurgents. The next week they aren't. A month later they're clearing Najaf of Shiite insurgents. Then, a few days later, they aren't. Meanwhile, casualties and insurgents alike multiply.
Of course, in my opinion, this comes as much from the unfelicitous bravado talk from on the ground commanders – understandable to be sure, but not to be broadcast for one ends up with a carry a small stick and jabber on loudly image..
Somewhere behind all this, there must be some coherent strategic intention, but for most of us it isn't easily visible. As far as we are able to judge, the war in Iraq has become a sort of military perpetual motion machine, producing plenty of activity but not much evidence of progress.
Oh I don’t think there is any coherent strategy behind this at all.
On Iraq's borders, infiltration persists apparently unchecked. In the heartland, the only month-to-month change seems to be which town or city will erupt in rebellion next. In the meantime, even Iraqis who heartily detest each other are daily more unanimous in detesting our continued presence.
Indeed, in a negative sort of way, the United States is forestalling a civil war.
The author then takes a moment to use the American Civil War as a point of reflection on Iraq. It may not be ideal, but there are some interesting items.
Re the General Grant and his memoirs
General and soldiers alike were products of the mid-19th century, with a view of war shaped by the formalistic conflicts of the recent past. Grant himself at the outset of the war expected it to end with a few decisive battles. The issues in dispute having been tried on the battlefield, the loser would accept the verdict and make peace.
In the West, however, the war didn't go that way. Instead, enflamed by widespread popular resistance in the areas occupied by Federal troops, it took on a character few on either side had foreseen. It became what it had to be if the rebellion was to be defeated: a war against Southern society, not just its soldiers.
Well, however discussable the summary, the key concept cited is that eggs had to be broken, civilian eggs to achieve a win.
On this context
There are indications that a similar hard realism is beginning to imbue soldiers and leaders in Iraq, but little evidence so far that it has percolated up to their political masters. In an interview earlier this month, multinational corps commander Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz admitted, "As much as I would love the Iraqis to love me, and my doctrine tells me I want to win the hearts and minds, I know I'm not going to do that."
Well, not know you’re not, although to be entirely defeatist about the potential is to ignore the grave errors made along the way (and the success other militaries such as the British had with a more sophisticated, policing oriented approach to relations with Iraqis.
However, those eggs have been broken already. The population has turned, that is clear. How hard, well that’s hard to say.
He's right. But few of his superiors seem to have accepted that reality.
Rather, as recent events in Najaf reveal, military operations in Iraq continue to fall between two levels, destructive enough to provoke Iraqi resistance but not ruthless enough to suppress it.
Instead, we continue to play at making war, sacrificing both our own and Iraqi lives to the so-far-vain hope that military self-restraint will promote civility among people who historically have evinced little even among themselves.
Leaving aside the vaguely racist closing sentence (historically when?), it is indeed probably correct that this is exactly what is being achieved in Iraq.
Of course the question is, what else can be done?
Our author writes:
There's no future in that, no more than there was in the invaded South of 1862. On the contrary, if it proved so difficult then to subdue a society that, however rebellious, at least shared the language and religious heritage of its invaders, why should we expect to succeed more gently in pacifying one even less predisposed by history, culture and religion to be tractable? [Interjection: one does have the suspicion the writer has no clue as to the history, culture or religion, but let us be generous and not delve deeply into that.]
Not all our commanders need be U.S. Grants nor all our presidents Abraham Lincolns. But we can and should expect their successors to recognize and adapt to the unmistakable evidence of the battlefield. Above all, that means dealing with Iraqis as they are, not as we wish they were. [interjection: one does wonder what the author means by the underlined, but again, let us be generous.]
Nor is it any excuse that operations in Iraq must be framed to avoid antagonizing Muslims elsewhere. They're already antagonized. However much, like Metz, we might wish them to love us, it's far more essential to our own safety that they be compelled to respect us. [interjection: ah again someone who forgets the complete observation of Machiavelli.]
But respect requires them to believe that we are serious as well as sincere. And, just as it did for Grant, in what clearly also is a conflict of societies, seriousness requires using war's "cruel weight" in a way that makes continued resistance intolerable, not just unpleasant.
Well, it appears that our writer would like to see the US military commit atrocities as in the Philipinnes, scorched earth policy as by Sherman.
At one level, he is likely correct, but it is incorrect and indeed ignorant to stop there. It is also an observation that is distorted by the analogy to the American Civil War.
First, let us clearly admit that it is without a doubt true that current military operations in Iraq are as he says, merely doing just enough to antagonize without actually stopping the resistance. That is clearly true.
However, his sequential observation in that the resistance must be crushed and the Iraqis bear, as he puts it so quaintly, the cruel weight of war, is not as true.
It is certainly true that is one way to proceed, but at what cost versus what gains is the proper question. Of course there is a corollary, what are the costs.
Now, supra I note he is someone who forgets the complete observation of Machiavelli, to whit that while it is better to be feared than loved, it is important not to be hated. Therein lies the key problem facing the United States.
But let me return to the analytical error in regards to the use of the American Civil War as his analytical point of departure – I may add the error is the error of someone engaging in no small bit of navel gazing. – for it seems to me the differences are such as to explain immediately why it is not a good point from which to draw lessons.
First, of course, it was a civil war. Whatever the ultimate legitimacy of the political point of view, the effective question of the legitimacy of the Union trying to regain lost territory was one not particularly in question among the Union’s population or its main economic partners (whether they wished it success or not). That automatically puts a different cast on how any post-war or wartime … unpleasantness shall we say?... will be understood. Invasions of another nation are not typically understood in the same light.
Second, of course, is that the Confederacy was more or less alone. Certainly certain European powers played with the idea of intervening for power reasons, but that is rather different. The trend among relevant powers was to abolish slavery, and there was little ideological audience of any important for the Confederacy. Moreover, there were no immediate or related neighbors implicated in the struggle. Iraq, on the other hand, is part of an Arabo-Muslim ideological network, where the events in Iraq have echoes in the body politic, where American interests may be harmed by negative echoes.
Third, wider Muslim and Arab anger at the United States is a continuum. To blandly consider antagonized as a simple state is to rather badly misconceive the range of the problem, or its potential. Angered but not motivated to active opposition is not the same as angered and ready to declare war, etc. etc. That al-Qaeda and its affiliates and fellow-travelers have experienced a boom in recruiting I think is well-accepted. Ever greater violence is not merely something that plays into a black-white / on-off state, rather it is something that feeds a continuum from the unfortunate (merely annoyed or frustrated with American policy), to that which concerns (angered and ready to protest), to the dangerous and beyond, (angered to the point of hatred and violent action). Fear and respect are not bad things, but angered to the point of hatred – that is the sense of the back against the wall and violently lashing out, that is something that breeds new rounds of terror.
The author probably, instead of reflecting on a war that was completely different, under circumstances utterly different, and involving two state actors, should have considered actually relevant analogies. Two that spring to mind are of course Algeria and Lebanon. In the former case, France, in the latter case Israel. The Lebanese example is so close to the Iraqi example that it is almost painful, and the lessons it holds are rather painful as well. In the Algerian example, one can rightly object there was a real difference in terms of French settlers and the French fighting to retain a colony, whereas the US is fighting to set up a friendly but ‘independent’ government. Sadly, while the difference is real, in terms of the political dynamic, I think it counts less than it appears, for most Iraqis certainly believe that the United States is there to colonize them, to take their resources. Ergo, and this makes a usage in the French press all the more… poignant for some parts of the French press have taken to calling the Iraqi police et al the harkis of Iraq, the actual political dynamic is likely to be the same. For those that do not know, the harkis were the Algerians who fought for/on the side of France and suffered terribly in the post-war period, most fleeing to France. Perhaps the United States can look forward to welcoming its Iraqi harkis.
The main lesson may be that once the resistance reached critical mass (I believe it is hard not to argue that it has indeed reached critical mass, and probably did so sometime in the Fall of 2003), there is little a power such as the United States can do if it lacks strong local allies with their own, independent legitimacy.
In short, I am arguing that Iraq is doomed to be a complete failure for the United States, that the point of no return was already passed, in Fallujah perhaps, or perhaps sometime in the late Fall or early Winter of 2003.
The question is what options are the least bad. While crushing the Resistance is certainly possible, militarily, I suggest that the gain would be ephemeral (like the French winning the battle for the city of Algiers, the resistance might go quiet for a bit), and the costs in terms of lost prestige, in terms of dirty hands would far outweigh the gains, above all insofar as the time horizon for the costs will likely extend beyond those of the gains.
However, merely pulling out of Iraq is a disaster as well, and certainly a pure pullout, the negatives, the immense costs (attention: not just to the US or to the present Administration, but globally) are likely to outweigh the costs of crushing the Resistance.
Recall, I have argued what presents itself now is not a question of “winning” in any meaningful sense, but of limiting losses. Given the above, one should chose crush the insurgents and install a nasty little dictatorship in its place, to keep the lid on.
But that is a short termist strategy. Well, rather, a nasty little secular dictatorship is, insofar as it is likely not to survive long after departure – and it does, not well.
It may well be more profitable to try to find a modus vivendi with the Shiite hard core (ex the unstable Moqtada) and Iran and quietly renounce the pie-in-the-sky transformational rubbish that is still mooted. Better other Shi’a militias eliminating Moqtada than US troops, although that would be a dangerous game to play.
On the other hand, there remain only dangerous games to play in Iraq.
Posted by The Lounsbury at August 23, 2004 06:17 PM
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Aug-Dec 2004
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