Avdat

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."

Today's realpolitik proposal

When I was in high school, I'd go over to Buck's house quite a bit to work on debate stuff, and to play this great (by 1980s standards) computer game.  Can't remember the name of it, but it was like Risk, but updated for the nuclear age.  You could be either the U.S. or the Soviet Union.  Your goal was to conquer or otherwise expand your sphere of influence over the world while not provoking Armageddon.  This meant that, if you played the U.S., you could go ahead and invade Central America, unlike that pantywaist in the White House, Ronald Reagan, but brokering an arms sale to Poland was a recipe for disaster.

When the computer played the Russians, it would invariably make the audacious move of invading Iran.  This wasn't something that you could go to wall over, since Iran was by no means an American ally, but if you stood idly by, the computer would win, like, hundreds of points for taking control of an oil rich, Middle Eastern state.  So the least bad option was to invade Iran too.  Reconstruct, if for a time, the WWII alliance against a common, despised enemy.  The lion's share of the points would still go to the Soviets, but you'd get some as well.

And so for this reason I have concluded that our best course of action is to crown Muqtada al Sadr Shah of Iraq.  Of course, Sadr is rabidly anti-American, and an ally of the Iranians.  But it's clear that our man in Iraq can't beat him, and even we've had a hard time with him (remember the showdown with the Mehdi Army in 2004)?

Let's face it.  Iran has won the Iraq War.  The best we can hope for is to cut our losses.  Brokering Sadr's rise to power will at least keep our foot in the door.

You think I'm crazy, but as schemes go, it's no more hair-brained than dreaming of Al Gore being a compromise candidate at a brokered convention.  To say nothing of the neocons in the White House and at the think tanks who really do think that foreign policy is an exercise in playing Risk.

As good as it gets

Sunday's Observer editorial was noteworthy for its lack of evenhandedness.  No hand-wringing about the management of the war "balanced" by tut-tutting at Democrats who were opposed to the invasion and who "recklessly" call for a "precipitous withdrawal" of American troops.  This editorial, riffing off the Frontline documentary, castigates the White House in unusually strong terms.  When we read that the documentary is liable to leave viewers feeling furious, we wonder if the Observer's liberal hawkish editorial writers aren't speaking out of their own profound sense of betrayal.

So why aren't we elated?  It's this lovely paragraph, the second one in:

Sensible people still argue about the justification for invading Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant who was massacring his own people. His regime had the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction. If he had barred weapons inspectors and the U.N. had been unwilling to use force to overcome his resistance, who knows how the situation might have developed?

Sensible people might argue, but there's no doubt about who won the argument.  You do not go to war, make orphans and widows, break a whole bunch of stuff and destabilize an entire region of the world just because of something that might happen sometime down the road.  That's the argument we made, and it turns out that we were right. 

We further argued that Saddam's threat was entirely manageable under the strict U.N. inspections regime to which he was submitting in the spring of 2003, when the White House elected to go to war.  Turns out we were right about that one too.

We argued, further still, that deposing Saddam wouldn't necessarily lead to a peaceful, democratic Iraq, but something along the lines of the Balkans in the post-Tito era, only with less likelihood for resolution, given the complete unfamiliarity with democracy in that society, and the Shia majority's strong affinity for theocratic neighbor Iran.  And guess what?  We were right about that too!

And yes, these arguments were out there in late 2002 and early 2003.  Why, I myself made some of them.  And because I'm never above quoting myself:

Just War Theory and its underlying assumptions raise a lot of questions about the morality of the administration's war plans. Is war right now our last resort? There is no evidence that Iraq is on the verge of attacking the United States or its allies. The weapons inspectors insist that they need months to fully determine whether or not Iraq has fully complied with U.N. resolutions that require it to disarm. Iraq is currently surrounded by U.S. military forces, strangled by grueling U.N. sanctions and subject to the fine-toothed comb of the weapons inspectors. Why rush to war now?

Is there a reasonable hope of success in this war? Indeed, what would "success" mean? Would winning the war at the cost of 10,000 American lives constitute a success? How about 500? What about 20,000? What if the war were won with low casualties, but in the aftermath, Iraq disintegrates as Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south go their separate ways, allowing Iran to rise in power in the Persian Gulf region? Would that scenario allow the United States to declare victory?

The point is not to laud myself for my astounding prescience (OK, maybe just a little), but to show that if such arguments were being made in a small, southern newspaper in the run-up to the invasion, then they were out there in sufficient numbers for liberal hawks like the Observer's editorial board to take notice.  They didn't.  And history has judged them for it.

Why's it still so hard to say, "We were wrong?"

Maybe we'll never hear those words.  Maybe a much-belated acknowledgment that Iraq is FUBAR, and congressional Democrats don't really bear any blame for the situation is as good as it gets.

Inertia

Last week, to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, NPR interviewed a lot of people on the ground there.  They are doing good work in an extremely difficult environment.  If for no other reason than to validate their blood, sweat and tears, one wants to "stay the course," as we said once upon a time.

But I am mindful of Tom Ricks' observation:  Good strategy can withstand any number of bad tactics, but no amount of good tactics can redeem bad strategy.  And what we're dealing with here is two very bad strategies:  nuclear nonproliferation by preventive war; and the absurd paradox of coerced self-determination.

Matt Yglesias has also observed that everything we feared would happen if we departed (ethnic cleansing, civil war, etc.) has already happened despite the fact that we haven't departed.  So why not, you know, go ahead and get out, if our presence is so ineffective?

And now, with trial balloons aplenty in the air about a "pause" in troop withdrawals, coupled with the Shia civil war blazing in Basra and Sadr City, the perceptive among us will realize that the Surge was a no surge at all, but a permanent escalation of our presence in Iraq, an escalation that has thus far failed to deliver on the promised political reconciliation that would enable our departure from that wretched country.

But we will see an exercise in Memory Hole Politics the next time funding the Iraq War comes up.  Last time we were told that we couldn't wind down our presence there because the situation was getting better.  Now we'll be told with straight faces that it's too unstable for us to pull out. 

If you live in a Neocon think tank, with visions of an Imperial America with a permanent heavy military presence smack dab in the Middle East dancing in your head, then any and all news, both good and bad, is reason to stay.  Or if you're just happy that we're killing Arabs, and more or less indifferent to the question of "To what end?" then you'll be happy for us to stay there forever.  But most Americans don't fall in these categories.  Yet the war grinds on.

General Petraeus has said that his counter insurgency model for Iraq is inspired by the British approach to Northern Ireland.  But has the Bush administration had a frank conversation with the American people about a 30 year commitment to Iraq?  No.  All they're committed to is stringing the narrowest of propaganda victories together to wring war funding out of congress in 6 month increments from now until next January 20.

It really is time (as it has been for some time now) to get out.  But I wonder if this war is becoming like all other government programs:  impossible to pull the plug on.

Five years

I've been trying to compose a post in my head about the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, but I can't do any better than what Leonard Pitts has written.

Appalling

These guys say that, for less than the cost of the war in Iraq, we could convert the U.S. electrical grid to mostly solar power by 2050.  Sounds like a bargain to me!  Now, where's the political leadership to make it happen?

Not in the present administration, whose thinking is stuck firmly in the Industrial Middle Age.

And so we continue scandalizing our grandchildren.

For the record

The Iraqi government still cannot control its own borders, or project power beyond the narrow confines of the Green Zone in Baghdad.  Political reconciliation between Iraq's three major ethnic groups remains elusive.  Violence at 2005 levels continues apace, including the flattening of an entire city block in Mosul last week.  Electricity remains spotty.  Millions are refugees.  The minority Christian community has been especially hard-hit.  Al Qaida in Iraq didn't even exist before the war.  Repeated assurances that it's on-the-run merely reinforce the notion that their stubborn refusal to pass out of existence is a problem of our own making. 

So I must regretfully dissent from all the crowing about the success of the so-called Surge, like that which we heard in the SOTU address last night and that which we hear on the GOP campaign trail.  Again, there is no joy in being right on this account, but there you have it.  And there it will be, at least until next January 20, and possibly thereafter, depending on how things go.

Still looking for a few good options

This Robert Farley post at TAPPED is rather old by blog standards, but it's worth reading today. 

In short, the good news is that the violence is down in Iraq.  That's not merely Bush administration propaganda. 

The bad news is that we are farther away than we've ever been from political reconciliation.  The al Malaki government cannot assert its sovereignty over vast swaths of the country and is loathed by even its Shia constituents.  Moreover, the U.S. strategy of reducing violence has succeeded at the expense of the larger goal of political reconciliation.  The U.S. has bolstered sub-state actors (tribes, militias, etc.) to defeat Al Qaeda forces and extremist militias.

What happens now that the surge peters out?  Will this hodgepodge of armed factions submit themselves to a unified, non-sectarian Iraqi government and work together to create a government that rules in fact and not just in name only, and can control and defend its borders?  Or will they turn on us and each other once again?

Pointing out how much work remains is not to look a gift horse in the mouth.  I'm glad the violence is down.  Nor is it being a "Defeatocrat."  It's simply true to observe that a series of tactical military successes does not necessarily lead to strategic victory.  Vietnam proved that.

Despite the reduction in violence we still seem to be in a place where there are no good options.  And if there are no good options I don't want American soldiers to die in my name for nothing.  I understand the desire to want to stay there until the job is finished, but we could stay forever and nothing will get better.  We haven't been defeated and never will be in Iraq.  But we've failed.  And since most people are loathe to admit failure, it'll fall to the next President to end this debacle.