Avdat

Surging in Afghanistan

Some reactions to Obama's speech:

1. At the beginning of the speech, as he summed up how we got into this jam and the nature of it, he looked alternately angry and disgusted. There's nothing like having to clean up someone else's pile of poo, but then again, he asked for this job, and he got what he asked for.
2. I thought that his attempt to put the best face on a possibly stolen election in Afghanistan fell flat. And doesn't that call into serious question this counter-insurgency strategy? Doesn't a successful counter-insurgency depend on the government that you're trying to prop up having legitimacy in the eyes of its people?
3. I was very glad to hear him set a deadline. A high school graduate who enlisted in the Army this summer was ten years old when this war started. Our fifth graders on 9/11 are now fighting in Afghanistan. Enough is enough.
4. I was also very glad to hear him say in effect, "We can't afford this war." Because we can't. A trillion dollars in "supplemental appropriations" for two wars is why we are broke. It's not the stimulus, and its not even the bank bailouts. For people wringing their hands about all the debt we're running up this year, the takeaway lesson is, Don't borrow money in good times to fight a war of choice, not of necessity, because when the bad times return, they'll bite you in the butt.
5. I was most pleased to hear the President commit to moving toward a world free of nuclear weapons. A Jack Bauer guided fantasy on torturing a terrorist who knows where the suitcase containing the loose nuke is great, but you know what would be even greater? Living "under your own vines and fig frees, unafraid" and untroubled by certain apocalyptic anxieties because nuclear weapons no longer exist. And what we've learned in this decade is that preventive war is a lousy way to work toward a nuclear free world. The more mundane work of negotiating treaties, verifying them, and vigorous law enforcement is what will get the job done.
6. As I said in the previous post,I don't think any President would have enough political capital to walk away from a war in which the enemy is ascendant. And because the enemy is on the march, the status quo is unacceptable. One last effort to pacify the country before we get out is thus our only viable option. It seems to have worked in Iraq, much better than I thought it would in late 2006. 
7. But given the corruption in #2, and the failure of the Iraqis thus far to take advantage of the improved security and forge a political reconciliation, doesn't this mean that both surges are more about finding a face-saving way to get out than victory?
8. It was sobering to see an audience full of pimply guys in gray cadet uniforms. Some of them will surely be killed before they live long enough to clear up their acne.That's not right.
9. If it's not right then why aren't you more vigorously opposed to this escalation, Marvin? I suppose the answer is, I think that some mixture of sin, history and even Providence have brought us to this ugly point of no good alternatives and no real alternatives at all other than the path outlined last night, and "opposing" the policy makes as much sense as opposing the tide coming in. I think a better question is, Are we learning anything from this slow motion disaster?
10. In Advent we dare to hope for peace on earth and good will toward men, but we also hear John the Baptist's contempt for pious hopes that aren't backed by repentance. Beating swords into plowshares isn't a mandate only for the bad guys.

Save us from weak resignation

I have no idea what to think about the ongoing war in Afghanistan. I do not speak any of Afghanistan's myriad of languages, have never read a good history of the place, and have never visited there. Moreover, I know very little about fighting a counterinsurgency.

I have a commitment to Christian nonviolence. At the same time I acknowledged that the 2001 NATO war to depose the Taliban and dismantle Al Qaida met the Just War criteria. I think that there's a case to be made to "see this thing through" here that I never found very convincing in Iraq, since the latter was a war conceived in sin.

There's a problem with Just War criteria: it gives good advice about when to get into a war (the answer is, "Hardly ever," if you take the criteria seriously), but it doesn't offer much guidance about when or if to get out of a war.

One criterion is "reasonable chance of success," which means that Just War theory allows pragmatism a role in the morality of war, although a far more circumscribed role than rulers would prefer. But as I said earlier, I'm no expert on either war or Afghanistan, so I have no idea if the new strategy there will work.

I'm not even sure what "work" means. Jeffersonian democracy in Central Asia? Or enough calm to allow for us to not have to withdraw under fire? That's all that the counterinsurgency seems to have accomplished in Iraq, although that's more than I thought we'd accomplish. Are we fighting for "peace with honor" in Central Asia?

One factor that might make a difference is, Do the Afghans themselves want us there? I've heard nothing said on this subject.

It's been almost eight years since we went to war in Afghanistan. That's two years longer than the war in Europe that began seventy years ago today. I was sick to my stomach a good bit in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, not only at what those wicked men had done, but also at the war that was bound to occur.

Eight years later and war no longer fills me with dread. I'm inured to it--the drip, drip, drip of American blood over there, somewhere. Another suicide bomb. Another dozen brown-skinned people blown to bits. War is the muzak of our lives, omnipresent, yet barely detectable. It's got to be a hundred dead to get me to look away from the dishes I'm putting away and toward the radio and the NPR reporter's sober voice.

I greatly lament that cynical people in our government and media have so successfully hardened the hearts of the American people over the past eight years by waving the bloody shirt, fearmongering, and lying. The tacit support of torture is Exhibit A. But my own resignation in the face of endless war is proof that I'm not immune to their designs.

Torture

A few scattershot comments about the release of the torture memos:

• I heard David Gergen say that, Yes, the acts described in these memos are horrible, but we must keep in mind that the architects of this policy literally had to run for their lives on September 11. Well, we can all agree that fear makes us act irrationally at times, but what Gergen is really saying is, These people massively failed to defend the country and therefore, they get a free pass to resort to great evil as a way to compensate for their incompetence. Does that make any sense?
• If these people were waterboarded dozens of times in a month, that puts to rest the ticking time bomb scenario, doesn't it?
• The memos acknowledge that what agents of the U.S. government were doing to detainees in the War on Terror is routinely condemned by the U.S. government when done by agents of foreign powers to detainees in their custody. In other words, It's not torture if we do it. I think the word for people who believe that there are rules but that they aren't obliged to follow them is "sociopath."
• It seems like I heard some torture apologist somewhere say that we ought not be talking about what we do or don't do to prisoners in order that the imaginations of would-be terrorists might run wild and thus be deterred from launching attacks. This is the Pretend to Be Crazy Strategythat Ed Kilgore described a couple of months ago applied to foreign affairs. In other words, these people think that the way to ensure our security is to "carefully (cultivate) a reputation for barely contained psychotic anger and utterly reckless disregard for consequences," i.e. the U.S.A. is that guy at the end of the bar who'd just as soon break a bottle of beer over your head as look at you.

We've been ruled by people who were part nuts and a whole lotta evil.

When Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, the latter already been chased from the White House in disgrace. But nothing of consequence has happened to the people who made torture an instrument of U.S. policy, in violation of U.S. and international law and human decency. One of them is serving on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. It is not sufficient to let history render a verdict on these people. A U.S. criminal court needs to as well.

Perspective

Just say the name Neil the Ethical Werewolf and my cerebral cortex instantly goes into "Golden Age of Blogging Nostalgia" spasms (that would be 2003-4, when we all hated America).  He's got something else going now, a War or Car? blog that's just post after post detailing what we could have bought ourselves for the cost of the Iraq War.  It's hysterical in that "I have to laugh or else I'll cry" sort of way.

So what could your tax dollar have gotten you?  Why there's something here for everyone:

• For Jennifer:    You could buy every Iraqi woman the clothes the GOP bought Sarah Palin.
• For Lee:  You could buy each hen in California a quarter acre plot.
• For Gershon:  Give each king of Israel the entire value of the Israeli stock market.
• For Jonathan:  And everyone else in the Carolinas and Georgia, a Hawaii vacation!  OR, enough communion wafers to make the Body of Christ stretch from here to Neptune.
• For Elliott:  And every other Canadian, your own minor league hockey team.
• For Camassia:  Gift Subscriptions in your name to every US newspaper ever printed for Sarah Palin.
• And pour moi?  You could make me and every Virginian rich enough to be taxed more by Barack Obama!

If you care to, consider this a meme.

wassup

Who knew that Dookie was a day-trader?

It's been a long eight years.

HT.

While you were freaking out...

...about your 401k, that is, the Bush administration signed a draft Status of Forces agreement with the Iraqi government that commits the United States to withdraw all military forces by December 31, 2011.  The agreement contains other concessions to the Iraqis.

I eagerly await Mitch McConnell condemning President Bush for telegraphing a surrender date to Al Qaida.

Meanwhile...

American soldiers, sailors and Marines are still dying.  The rate of one a day is well below the bad old days of 2007.  But it's about where things were in the summer of 2003, when there was the growing realization that the quick fall of Saddam's regime didn't mean that the war was over.

You and I have forgotten about Iraq, but the thirty or so familes who will receive the worst possible news this September haven't forgotten at all.

Tactics vs. strategy

I've been called out for not acknowledging the success of the surge.  Not personally, mind you, but in op-eds stating that liberals hate Bush so much that they're blind to the success of the surge.  So, in response...

The surge has reduced violence in Iraq to 2005 levels.  It is good that the violence isn't as bad as it was at the height of the sectarian bloodbath in 2006, but as I recall, 2005 was a pretty dreadful year in Iraq.  I think that the success of the surge can be attributed in some part to "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

We don't know what would have happened had the administration adopted the Baker-Hamilton Report and begun to draw down troops in Iraq in 2007 rather than escalating the war.  Perhaps things would be even better had we done that.  But we'll never know.

But given the administration's decision to continue to fight, the choice of fighting a true counter-insurgency was a good one.  I think that General Petraeus and Secretary of Defense Gates have done as good a job as anyone could do making lemonade out of the lemons they inherited from Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

That said, good tactics cannot redeem a bad strategy.  The surge was a tactical change.  But the strategy, to wage preventive war in order to achieve the goals of non-proliferation and democratization, is a failure.  We can see that well enough by now.  Only hard core partisans would see otherwise.

It is all well and good to credit the surge's tactical success in tamping down the violence, but the debate we need to have is on the strategy.  The recent success of the negotiations with the North Koreans shows that we can achieve a safer world without making violence a first resort.  And the awful human and financial cost of the Iraq War shows that we must.

Happy Mission Accomplished Day!

Five years down, 95 to go!

Blinkered

The first comment at this Ivy Bush post is a pretty good example of the blinkered world view that keeps the fiasco in Iraq chugging along.  The commenter boils down "the Muslim World," a truly vast world that stretches from Lagos to Jakarta, encompassing deserts, jungles, and frigid mountains, where over a billion people live in cities, towns and villages, some under pro-American dictators, others in democracies, still others under anti-American dictators, to the hard-core ideology of Al Qaida. 

These people (all these people, apparently) needed to be taught a lesson after 9/11.  These people (again, all these people, I suppose) can't be trusted with nukes.  Deposing the Taliban in Afghanistan just wasn't enough to accomplish either of these goals.  So you get the invasion of Iraq.  Which, incidentally, fits the requirements for Just War for the above mentioned reasons.

Set aside the obvious fact that it's we who are getting taught a lesson by this little foray into imperialism.  In this world view, it doesn't matter whether the war is progressing well or not.  All that matters is that Muslims are getting killed in great numbers.

"Hopefully, the introduction of quasi-democracy and quasi-human rights in Iraq will do the trick," he writes.  Well, there isn't even "quasi-democracy" in Iraq.  There is a rump government, propped up by the Americans, that can't even command the loyalty of its own police and army, much less the millions of Iraqis it purports to govern.  But all that proves is that "these people" need their attitudes adjusted even more.  Heads I win; tails you lose.   

And set aside the fact that perhaps the rest of the world is as dubious about our stewardship of nuclear weapons as we are of theirs.  After all, we alone have actually used them.  It doesn't matter what a billion potential suicide bombers think.

What's truly preposterous is the idea that this makes for a Just War.  Going to war today to prevent something that might happen twenty years from now is in no way a last resort.  Moreover, it's hard to read off the pages of the New Testament, or even much of the Old Testament, a 21st century foreign policy of bombing people into an attitude adjustment.  It's all reason (of a decidedly warped kind), and no revelation. 

This is the mentality of the three out of ten Americans who still think that President Bush is doing a good job, and who rely on Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Bill O'Reilly to inform them about what's happening in the world.  I laud Jonathan for his perseverance, but I am not sure there's any argument than can break though the willed ignorance, myopia, and ethnic and religious prejudice that prop up such a mentality.

Three out of ten is still a pretty big number.  To quote Thomas Jefferson, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever."