All Wrong
The other day the President in a speech took another stab at what I
call the flypaper argument for the war. Usually it contains an
effusive and upbeat declaration that we have the insurgents or
terrorists (the preferred term) right were we want them. Busy engaged
with the US military in Iraq, far and safely away from American shores.
At the time he was trying to cast the slaughter of 49 new recruits for
the Iraqi Army as proof that his policies were working, and as
planned. If Zarqawi and his ilk weren't down in the bunker in
besieged Fallujah, they would clearly be here, and they would still be
they: armed, active, hostile and aggressive, mounting waves of terror
attacks across these United States. In the course of watching the
reaction to our attempts to press democratic elections on Iraq and
Afghanistan, I note an observation I've heard made. Democracy is the
revolution in these parts, not the insurgency, not "rebel" leaders like
Sadr. In the middle east the conventional, or at least familiar path
to power is violence -- strategic and tactical violence, assassinations
and demonstrations. The greater the vacuum the greater the
demonstration of violence. A considerable vacuum was created in Iraq
and a considerable opportunity for opportunists was born in the chaos.
I always believed that George W. Bush
intended to preside over his presidency with a minimum of fuss and
drama. He seemed to have worked out a personna for this; a sort of
genial Will Rogers. Warm personable and endlessly likable. More Reagan
than Reagan, a sure shouldered Atlas. Architect of the New world
Order. In the Fall of 2001 that had to change. So he exchanged it
for the Red Cross of Saint George, and turned to those advisors who
stepped forward with confidence and bold plans. I believe in giving the
President the benefit of doubt in foreign policy matters - particular
military. This is tradition and to enjoy a degree of it, a president's
prerogative. This is not a free pass though and no one should interpret
it as such. That is the difference between a democracy and big brother.
Almost from the start the judgment of the advisors seemed suspect. I
knew the administration was bear-baiting Saddam Hussein, I knew their
opinion on sanctions. I felt they had a reason and a plan. After
Secretary of State Powell went before the UN I knew that they didn't
know whether Iraq had Weapons of Mass destruction or not, or anything
definite about his relations with terror networks. I began to wonder
about their hell-bent drive for a war in Iraq. A war that has
been wrongly conceived of, and enacted upon at every juncture. 200
billion dollars and nearly 1200 American lives, untold civilian lives ('War raised Iraqi death rate by 100,000')
have been spent to create an anarchic wilderness. This can only be
possible when the first principles of your entire world view have
error.
The central policy document of the
administration is their Doctrine of Pre-emption. Its virtue, being
insight into the relative disparity of preparation time and operational
personnel, needed to carry out attacks of massive destruction.
Proportional to prior eras this has changed, while the outlay of
resources needed has not. For a non-state entity to become truly
dangerous it wants a state patron - maybe several. So the
administration choose to focus on the bad actors of international
governance. The message was "our hand has been tipped, if you are
playing this game, we will take you out." The problem with crafting
policy out of this message is that is that it is invalid to assume
the fundamentals of right and wrong have changed. That 11
September 2001 was the boundary to a new era with different rules of
conduct. Pre-emption has problems distinguishing between the
necessary and sufficient conditions for war. Beyond causality, the
notion that until you've been attacked, you haven't been attacked,
there is condition. Thunder implies lightening, one might even say
thunder necessarily implies lightening. Lightening sufficiently
explains the thunder. To bring death and destruction to a people,
unseat their leaders, hold their sovereignty in abeyance. These leaders
must be necessarily and sufficiently responsible for harm to you. This
must exist as a fact, it can not be done on distant presumption.
Attempting to create a uniformity between the war in Afghanistan and
in Iraq, and the 'war' on terror in general, the latter which can never be a war in
more that a metaphoric sense, breaks these bonds of condition. The
struggle against those who attack us and oppose our legitimate
interests will always be a practical affair consisting of particular
fights against particular foes on particular justifications. In use of
force in may resemble the former program of renditions and police
actions more often than not. By diplomacy it will proceed against
states, more often than not.
If Foreign Policy is made and realized through
the Department of Defense; then it is not the Department of Defense. It
is the department of external affairs. You have no real foreign policy,
only guns. This is the true meaning of the Cheney/Rumsfeld military,
which they have been shaping now for more than 25 years. A light mobile
mechanized force, with significant components of large bore firepower
mostly from air platforms. It has been specifically crafted to be
an active instrument of foreign policy. Easy to use because it was
created to use, to be the first choice for underscoring American
intention. Behind it a contingent of service providers much of it taken
up duties stripped away from the traditional military, and mercenary
supernumary forces that can do an armies job for a sub contractor's
pay. The Instrument of the new world order, a flame for moths of
action and desire. For all the rhetoric on evil, this policy is beyond
good and evil it recognizes only force and seeks after it's
monopoly. The question they ask: "isn't the world better off Saddam
Hussein ...?" Is the wrong question, its answer moot. The leaders of
men invariable ill-serve their followers, often beyond the level of
general mischief. If they make clandestine war, the choice is to meet
it clandestinely, or to make it apparent to meet it openly
That last contains an implicit question - make
it apparent - to whom? It's a pop quiz for your friends, other nations,
NGO's. Can they see it? You won't know unless you ask. Are they
cheerleading, are they silent, their support in the breech, or are they
letting friends drive drunk? If a war can have a quiz it can have a
grade. Taking care to distinguish the rational for a war from its
prosecution. Distinguishing the the effects of the opinions and
judgments of the professional military from the civilian leadership;
micro-managing , and ideologically harnessed. This leads onto the litany
of smaller errors that have plagued this affair. The non
occurrence of an Iraqi Force Stand down at the outset. the
indeterminacy of shock and awe, limits of air power to do more than
break a certain layer of material objects. Force planning that was
caught up in muddled thinking of on-ramps and off-ramps but not boots
on the ground. There was an inability or unwillingness to concede the
difference between mechanized warfare and peacekeeping. A nearly blind
refusal to see the forming insurgency. To mess with their wry
catch-phrase: you cant't lose the peace after winning the war, if the other side
understands itself still at war. They are under no obligations to fight
on our terms, or make themselves visible to high-tech intelligence. The
waves of carpet-bagging small worlders we threw at them did little to
turn the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people one way or the other.
Through it all we stuck to the pre-planned scenario, not making friends
outside it, we had our friend: Chalabi. Making enemies, and then not
dealing with them. What we regarded was always too apparent: the
oil (markets/contracts), permanent bases. Anything else culture,
security, weapons, any weapons, of mass, or merely conventional
destruction, were of obvious lesser importance.
Over year ago Michael Schrage wrote an insightful piece for a Washington Post Sunday outlook section (now a pdf from his website No Weapons no matter, we called Saddam's bluff)
He argues that one thing the Intelligence community seems to never have
done is look at WMD's from the Iraqi perspective, unable to work
on large scale programs if not openly at least with the degree's of
freedom enjoyed by Pakistan, India, Iran, and North Korea, (Brazil,
Argentina, Israel, etc.) They choose to place it all in stasis, but
behave like they might have something, leaving their opponents
guessing. For all their iconoclasm those often called the
Neo-conservatives within the administration who came from a background
of defense community anti-establishmentism couldn't see this. Their
vision ran only one way: the number and depravity of our
adversaries, and the size of their arsenals was always held to be
under-estimated. Schrage wrote another piece two weeks ago on the
likelihood of significant disinformation being in play currently and
the possible roles the internet is playing in that: In Wartime, Deceit Can Be the Better Part of Valor (washingtonpost.com).
A central point perhaps is Abu Ghraib, as a
symbol for what happens whenever we confront the enemy and the enemy is
a man. A mirror showing what we are willing to do. It tells us about
ourselves. The war on terror treads on the border of paranoia
where enemies, dark, lurking, and evil, abound. Any opposition becomes
or befriends the terror and meaning dissolves into fearfulness, action
into reaction. For Wolfowitz et al the architects of this war their
pride rescues them from the comparison, they will never look in the
mirror or learn from it.
Post script: Usually I try to work any links into a text in
a webbish bastardized MLA like way. This time most are just appearing
in a short list here. Mainly it was this three part New York Times
series by Michael Gordon that prodded me to the conclusion that the war
terror is too loosely defined to exist even for those who champion it,
its just a grab bag of separate rationalizations incapable of
coordination.
'Catastrophic Success': The Strategy to Secure Iraq Did Not Foresee a 2nd War, Poor Intelligence, Misled Troops About Risk of Drawn-Out War, and Early Analyses: 'A Long, Difficult and Probably Turbulent Process'. Also a pair of first person accounts from within the green zone earlier this year: WSJ reporter Farnaz Fassihi's email and the memo of the AEI member working with Coalition Provisional authority
reported on in the Village Voice earlier this year.
Also good is Naomi Klein's Baghdad in Year the Zero in Harpers. Additionally the CS Monitor has kept up a steady and consistently edited stories in a series called Iraq in Transition.
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