Mark Steyn is swaddled in gloom. Reflecting on the results of last Tuesday’s elections, he says “we are all Spaniards now.” The Spanish electorate, it will be recalled, reacted to the Madrid bombings by turning out the Azner government and voting in the socialists. The “jihadi crowd”, he rightly argues, was smart enough to understand that an act of mass terror undertaken a few days before our election would have “re-awoken the primal anger of September 2001.” So, instead, they employed a craftier strategy: a “remorseless water torture” in Iraq that would “grind down enough of the electorate and persuade them to vote like Spaniards, without even realizing it.”
Without stating it explicitly, Steyn is clearly assuming that the election’s results, the appointment of Robert Gates as Defense Secretary and the forthcoming report by the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group mean that there will be a premature and inglorious withdrawal of U.S. forces, with devastating consequences.
Certainly, there’s a risk that this scenario, which brings to mind the image of American helicopters on the rooftop of the American embassy in Saigon, will unfold. If it does, the results would indeed be disastrous. As Steyn puts it: “What does it mean when the world’s hyperpower . . . decides that it cannot withstand a guerrilla war with historically low casualties against a ragbag of local insurgents and imported terrorists?” Here’s his answer:
. . . we’re in a very dark place right now. It has been a long time since America unambiguously won a war, and to choose to lose Iraq would be an act of such parochial self-indulgence that the American moment would not endure, and would not deserve to. Europe is becoming semi-Muslim, Third World basket-case states are going nuclear, and . . . America can’t muster the will to take on pipsqueak enemies. We think we can just call off the game early, and go back home and watch TV.It doesn’t work like that. Whatever it started out as, Iraq is a test of American seriousness. And, if the Great Satan can’t win in Vietnam or Iraq, where can it win? That’s how China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela and a whole lot of others look at it. “These Colors Don’t Run” is a fine T-shirt slogan, but in reality these colors have spent 40 years running from the jungles of Southeast Asia, the helicopters in the Persian desert, the streets of Mogadishu. ... To add the sands of Mesopotamia to the list will be an act of weakness from which America will never recover.i
The primary weakness of Steyn’s argument is that he assumes that the worst-case scenario is the only possible scenario. Another flaw is that he avoids addressing why the jihadi crowd’s water torture strategy worked. Its success didn’t occur in a vacuum, after all.
Admittedly, it’s early, but initial indications don’t support the premise that the Democrats are going to pull the plug on Iraq:
- House Speaker-elect Pelosi has said that she doesn’t favor cutting the funding of the war.
- Senator Schumer said: “If we are seen as just blocking the president, it will not serve us well in 2008.”
- The New York Times opposes the most common Democratic call during the campaign: “a ‘phased redeployment’ — a euphemism for withdrawal — of American troops starting before the end of this year.”
Am I skeptical? Of course I am. But what prevents me from sharing Steyn’s gloom is that there’s a presidential election in two years. If Iraq goes down the drain, the blame-game will operate in both directions: Democrats will blame Republicans for an ill-advised policy (which many Democrats endorsed in 2002) and mismanagement, and Republicans will blame Democrats for setting a date-certain for withdrawal and/or cutting off funding (notwithstanding Pelosi’s current denial of this intent). Thus, an American defeat in Iraq would pose big risks for both parties, as it couldn’t be known in advance which side’s arguments would find greater resonance with the public.
With an occasional exception (like Bush’s decision to invade Iraq), politicians don’t like to take risks. So I’m willing to countenance the idea that neither the newly-realist White House nor the newly-Democratic Congress will bring down the curtain on Iraq. If that’s going to happen, it will take place after the next President takes office. By the way, 2008 will be the first time since 1952 that neither a sitting President nor a sitting Vice President will be a candidate for the presidency. How this will influence the Iraq saga remains to be seen.
Now, let’s turn to the question of why the water torture strategy worked. Steyn refers to a recent meeting he had with President Bush during which he asked him the following:
You say you need to be on the offense all the time and stay on the offense. Isn’t the problem that the American people were solidly behind this when you went in and you toppled the Taliban, when you go in and you topple Saddam. But when it just seems to be a kind of thankless semi-colonial policing defensive operation with no end . . . I mean, where is the offense in this? [emphasis added]
Steyn doesn’t connect his own dots. The context for the “remorseless water torture” is the “semi-colonial policing policing defensive operation with no end.” Had operation Iraqi Freedom not devolved into a policing action, the opportunity for the jihadis to implement their strategy wouldn’t have happened.
Looked at in this way, it’s apparent why Steyn leaves open spaces between his dots. Connecting them would require assigning responsibility for what became a “defensive operation with no end.” And that responsibility doesn’t rest with the American people who he says emulated the Spanish on November 7. It does rest with the President and others—most notably, Rumsfeld—that Steyn is loathe to criticize.
No less an authority on warfare than Frederick Kagan says that Rumsfeld—and, by implication, Bush—has a “flawed understanding of war.” Kagan claims that Rumsfeld became “captive” to a military theory that surfaced in Washington in the 1990s: “to rely on information technology to permit American forces to locate, identify, track and destroy any target on the face of the Earth from thousands of miles away.”
This “transformation” theory, Kagan avers, is profoundly misguided:
At its root, this “transformation program” is not a program for war at all. War is the use of force to achieve a political purpose, against a thinking enemy and involving human populations. Political aims cannot normally be achieved simply by destroying targets. But the transformation that enthusiasts of the 1990s focused too narrowly on destroyed the enemy’s military with small, lean and efficient forces. This captivated Rumsfeld, becoming his passion. He meant it to be his legacy. It was the fatal flaw in this vision that led, in part, to the debacle in Iraq. Focused on destroying the enemy’s military quickly and efficiently, Rumsfeld refused to consider the political complexities that would follow that destruction. He and Franks pared the invasion force down to the smallest level that could defeat Saddam Hussein’s army, but refused to consider the chaos that would follow the collapse of Hussein’s government. This failure is inherent in the military thought of the 1990s. Rumsfeld did not invent it. He simply executed it. [emphasis added]Having made the mistake of failing to plan for achieving the political goals of the Iraq war, Rumsfeld then compounded his error. The war in Iraq threatened military transformation. It was expensive and sucked scarce defense resources away from transformational programs. It was manpower intensive and hindered Rumsfeld’s efforts to reorient the military away from a focus on land power. It was intellectually distracting; counterinsurgency has little to do with transformation. Here Rumsfeld’s virtues became his greatest vices. Instead of recognizing the danger of losing Iraq, he remained committed to transforming the military to meet undefined future threats, spending billions of dollars preparing to fight Enemy X in 2025. He consistently opposed increasing the size of the ground forces, despite the obvious growing strains on the Army and the Marines of repeated deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. [emphasis added]
Ralph Peters’ criticism has a different, but complementary, focus:
Political correctness shaped the Bush administration’s approach to military operations as decisively as it did the Clinton administration’s pop-gun antics. The Bush bunch just did things on a larger scale – they wanted a war, but didn’t want to hurt anybody. No matter how many troops we send, we’re bound to fail if the troops aren’t allowed to fight – under the leadership of combat commanders, not politically attuned bureaucrats in uniform. At present, neither party’s leaders want to face the truth about warfare – that it can’t be done on the cheap and that war can’t be waged without shedding blood.ii
A smaller army is one aspect of the military transformation envisaged by Rumsfeld and others. Another is that it would reduce the casualty rate by substituting information technology for boots on the ground. NATO’s bombing of Serbia in the late 1990s was the perfect war: no American lives were lost and NATO prevailed without putting any boots on the ground. This experience of a successful, casualty-free military operation must have influenced the thinking of American military leaders and their civilian overseers. To the extent that this thinking pervaded the planning of the Iraq war, it was grossly misapplied. There’s obviously a huge difference between using force to persuade an enemy government to negotiate and using it to overthrow an enemy regime.
We are not all Spaniards now. What we are is a people and a country suffering from the consequences of a Secretary of Defense whose perception of reality was made to fit his preconceived notions and a President who was unwilling or unable to recognize that adherence to Rumsfeld’s views would provide fertile ground for the jihadis to successfully execute their strategy. If, as is almost certainly true, having the Democrats take control of Congress was what led to Rumsfeld’s being fired, it was worth it.
___________
- Other pundits share Steyn’s fears. Daniel Henninger says that “if the Iraq Survey Group proposes a solution with the merest whiff of selling out Iraq’s popularly elected Shiites, expect crudely realistic leaders in Russia, China, Nigeria, Venezuela, Bolivia, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to conclude they too can downgrade, or obliterate, their own U.S.-oriented democratic groups.↩
- David Warren expresses similar sentiments: “in trying to build a secular democracy over the ruin of Saddam’s regime, the Americans tried something they had not the stomach for. From the outset, they imposed upon themselves restrictions that would make that fight unwinnable. As in Vietnam, they adopted a purely defensive posture. So far as President Bush can be blamed, it should be for showing insufficient ruthlessness in a task that could not be accomplished by half-measures. Alternatively, for failing to grasp that America was psychologically unprepared for real war, not only by the memory of Vietnam, but by the grim advance of “liberal” decadence in domestic life over the generation since.”↩
Agreed, at least in large part. At this early point, only days after the election and before they’ve had a chance to reveal themselves more practically, after assuming control in January, there is ample reason for caution, concern and skepticism, but too early for such skepticism; perhaps Steyn is being more rhetorical and cautionary than asserting his unalloyed views, I don’t know.
There may come a time where such thoroughgoing pessimism in more warranted, but we’re not there yet. A well grounded and undeluded hope can be and generally needs to be a solid counter-weight to cynicism and in this case Steyn approaches or is on the verge of too much of the latter.
All in all Marc a very nice and well measured framing.
Iraq the Model on the U.S. elections.
If I were Steyn, Warren or Henninger I’d be writing in a similar vein, I’d rather risk over-stating the cautions and concerns – which are in point of fact sobering and quite real, not merely imagined – rather than understating them. These writers are opinion leaders whose opinions are voiced in the general complex of all the other pols, pundits, et al. who help to form the broader consensus and viewed within that calculus I’d prefer erring on the side of caution and concern.
I am afraid that I don’t quite agree with Kagen’s and Styen’s analyses.
One of the greatest problems of the U.S. Military is that when it became so drastically smaller in the post-Cold War era it also became smaller in spirit, in intellect, in vision, and in overall outlook. The military is first foremost, and primarily a huge bureaucracy – and after the 40% downsizing of the 1990’s that still huge bunch of bureaucrats focused on internal issues: “Who do we let go?†“Who do we keep?†“What are the new rules for getting promoted?â€
The problem was greatly exacerbated by the senior military leadership that came into position in the late 80’s – after the Reagan Era buildup and the associated emphasis on R&D, it was to be the Era of the Operator. After the collapse of the USSR it should have been a time of reassessment, with a new emphasis on R&D and reorganization. The natural resistance of the leadership that was oriented 180 degrees the other way, combined with Bill Clinton’s Invasion of the Month Club, instead made it a period of intense turf battles and inane internal arguments.
Such a force is ill suited to meeting the challenges of the future, whatever their nature. And remember – the smaller size of the force and “the now is the enemy of the future†attitude was handed to Sec Rumsfeld when he walked in the door. He did not cut the military in favor of some arcane new transformational ideas – it had been cut almost in half nearly a decade before. He was trying to match requirements with capabilities – which is the SECDEF’s real job, and which had been all but ignored for the previous decade.
You dance with who brung you – and to the music that someone else decided to play.
...amazing! That the constant criticism, neggling and harping of the press and the left for six years would be forgotten in these new prognostications. People today are so brow-beaten by the constant harping from the left at Bush that they are now ruminating about failures in Iraq. Interesting, that the story of successes and improvements coming out of Iraq differ so greatly from the stories from the press..especially from the pundits, those great, elite wizars of today. Go to the right websites, and one gets all sorts of success stories and good news. And, why is it, that many wounded GIs want to return to finish the job? Come on now…
A smaller, quicker, more agile military is great for destruction at small cost. It’s dreadful at “creation” and nation building, though.
If you would indulge me, this is why (taken from Complexity and Network Centric Warfare):
Forest Fire: The rate of sparks dropping onto the grid is termed the sparking frequency. This sparking frequency (sp) is a key driver of the dynamics of the forest ecosystem. If sp is small, very large clusters of trees are allowed to form, which span the entire grid. When a spark is then dropped, the forest fire wipes out an entire forest stretching from one side of the grid to the other. In Complexity Theory, this is known as snapping noise.
With so few troops on the ground, the rate of attrition (sparking frequency) we could bring to bear on the insurgency was inadequate to keep large clusters of terrorists, dead enders, and opportunists from forming.
In systems where the dynamical evolution is a struggle against various types of thresholds or barriers, the action will predominately occur where the net barrier to change is the smallest.
Obviously, places that have no US troops have a drastically lower net barrier to the insurgency than places that are saturated. Our absence allowed entire population zones to “grow” insurgents and insurgent-support networks.
The intricate interrelationships of elements within a complex system give rise to multiple chains of dependencies. Change happens in the context of this intricate intertwining at all scales. We become aware of change only when a different pattern becomes discernible. But before change at a macro level can be seen, it is taking place at many micro levels simultaneously. Hence, microcomponent interaction and change leads to macrosystem evolution.
A quail-hunt strategy (attack after the enemy has revealed itself) combined with a small footprint put us at a terrible disadvantage. Most of the enemy’s movement and evolution takes place beneath the radar, in mosques and tribal councils and family dinners. It’s hard enough to detect and address it when in control of the town. It’s impossible when absent. Before you know it, instead of family ‘x’ or tribe ‘y’ you have to solve city ‘z’.
Battling an enemy who can move unseen through the system—an enemy who can, with modern communications tech, cluster rapidly even when dispersed and attack unpredictably and effectively in a coordinated manner—requires a sufficient amount of “blocking force” (pinning force in complexity theory) to guard the various system thresholds and critical points. A small, quick and agile force is useful, but not sufficient, for such an endeavor.
Damping the insurgency early on, we would have most likely avoided the coevolution that led to Shia death squads and Sadr’s preeminence. If we’re going to win now, however, we’re going to have to start a big, big fire.
One of the reasons for the success of the insurgency is that it is operating from secure bases in Syria and Iran. This reminds me a lot of the Korean war and is likely to play out the same way. Essentially, you can never win proxy wars fought against enemies operating from secure bases. The solution should be obvious: attack the bases. A move now against Damascus to overthrow Hafez al-Assad and against Iran to overthrow the Mullahs would throw the supporters of the insurgency into their own pot.
This would have a salutary effect on all concerned, who currently have felt no pain for much gain.
The legal method of doing the above is the policy of “hot pursuit”. The US should station an armored division in the north of Iraq and wait for the inevitable cross-border incursion of jihadists. A firefight should ensue, followed by a pursuit of the stragglers across the border.
My contribution to this concept is to suggest that the pursuers be cranked up to divisional status.
The more I consider this the more I’m moving to Steyn’s and Warren’s position. (Beyond also realizing I could better edit my comments.) Pelosi’s intimations of how she is going to act do not match her words cited in this post. And Schumer’s cited quote is nothing more than a pragmatic political concern, barely if anything more than a political/Machiavellian calculation. As far as the “bi-partisan” study group is concerned, it may be bi-partisan vis-a-vis formal political party alignments, but it’s difficult to characterize it as bi-partisan in less formal, strategic terms vis-a-vis Iraq.
Still too early to tell with any certainty, but there appears to be more than a little bit of double-talk from Pelosi and elsewhere which does not bode well for Iraq in the longer term imo. Perhaps that is one reason why Lieberman is considering formally joining the Republicans.
[...] The Politics of Iraq, American FutureThe March of Folly, Joshuapundit [...]
[...] American Future, “The Politics of Iraq†[...]
I can see the influence of the Kosovo campaign, but it’s as though they didn’t see the followup. A lot of troops are over there still.
I remeber right before we went into Iraq hearing that there wasn’t enough money to pay some units in the new Afgan army and thinking that was a symptom. It was.
fhilliard:
The “insurgency” is only part of the problem. Denial of the importance of militias and criminal gangs allowed them to explode and we had no response. Indeed the new government is intertwined with them.
Incidently Anwar province is a sanctuary for the insurgency. Our military admits thy can’t control it and regards it as a secondary battleground while they struggle for the centers. Attacking Iran would bring the south against us and our supplies run through there.
The time of faith based reality is over. i realize some will contnue to imagine we are engaged in perpetual victory or that a few more bombs will do all, but the reality is this is a difficult problem, it’s unlikely the solution if it occurs will be brilliant or elegant, but partial, slow and very much a matter of learning and evolving at the organizational level.
[...] The Watcher’s Council has announced its picks for the most outstanding posts of the preceding week. The winning Council post was Joshuapundit’s post, “The March of Follyâ€. Second place honors went to American Future’s “The Politics of Iraqâ€. [...]
[...] Congratulations to Joshuapundit for its winning Council post, “The March of Folly”. Yours truly took the runner-up spot with “The Politics of Iraq”. [...]
[...] The votes are in from this week’s Watchers Council and the winner in the Council category is Joshuapundit for “The March of Folly.” Finishing second was American Future for “The Politics of Iraq.” [...]
The Iraq WAR! Right R Wrong? I know the polls show that the majority of Americans are now against the war. I Prupose this question to them. If we pullout of Iraq now, what happens when we are attacked again and dont have access to the oilfields of Iraq to supply our great military machines with the fuel they need to defend us.Now i realize that many Americans dont believe that we will be attacked again. So I prupose this question to them. If we can not stop thousands of illegal immigrants from crossing our borders on a daily basis, how will we ever be able to stop terrorist from crossing those same borders. I also know that alot of Americans also believe that we should be fighting in Afganinastan rather thanIraq, well my point is we ran them out of Afganistan into Iraq. It seems very simple to me, we can keep giving them targets and trying to win an unwinnable war in Iraq, our we can fight them in Mannhattan, the choice is ours. In response to what Bill Maer has said, “How do we know they will follow us home?” They have already attacked us once before and are contiuosly looking for ways to do it again. Remember this, had we not reacted the way we did after Pearl Harbor, none of us would have the fredom to CHOOSE wether we wanted to serve our country our not. ITs common sense to me. If they will do it once, they will do it twice, and if they will do it twice, they will do as often as they can!
just searched by….
Wasn’t what I was looking for, but very neat stuff. Cya later….