Unconditional
The President has once again pledged this country to win the war in iraq. Unconditional Victory is the order gone out, storm and fury signifying nothing. This last attempt to drum up support for the war occurs against backdrops of increased violence and instability in the region
Bush Bluntly Defends Iraq Strategy, but Admits Missteps - New York Times, the third anniversary of the invasion
Across US, rising doubts | csmonitor.com, our decreasing ability to effect change as the transition continues
In Iraq, US influence wanes as full-scale civil war looms | csmonitor.com, and the President's falling poll numbers. However you choose to look at it what there is to this is levels of optimism, blindness, or unconcern. And very little else. In a crack of a Washington wall a letter from the long forgotten district figure Chaldeus Chumsfeld has come to light dated July 4th 1863. It reads, in part: "how placid this country is. Yet how commerce concerned. Sunshine from Augusta to Brownsville, the wheat grows thickly. Children laughing, babies petting little kitties as the morning dew dries on the grass, and their fathers head off to work to do the nations business. A beautiful women pauses to admire a ship setting out down the Hudson destined for trade on far flung shores. Yes, there are reports of some shooting way out in a small town in Pennsylvania, Gettysburg, something about shoes. What petty cad engaged on what agenda would point to this and say, of this peaceful lawful land the best of all possible worlds for eighty-seven years: 'civil war'." I have a General disagreement with the tone and amount of this optimism, but is it is done to dress up up a disaster or draw down troops who are no longer needed to add positive value to the situation? At the same time the administration's Doctrines of Preemption are still operational. As seen in the issue of the 2nd revised edition of the national security strategy
Bush to Restate Terror Strategy. In principle looks fair and far sighted. There were those in conservative circles who were prepared to use it to justify the invasions of a half-dozen different countries and would have if Iraq had gone as well as their imaginations desire.
I had a referer hit on this web log a few weeks ago for the phrase: "we have done nothing extraordinary, nothing contrary to human nature in accepting an empire when it was offered us and then in refusing to give up" I don't think that quote has ever appeared in Atomized, but I knew it. It's from Thucydides (bk 1, 76) Peloponnesian War full text. An assembly in Sparta has invited those with grievances against the Athenians to come before it. A delegation from Athens in Sparta on other business has heard of this and asks to come before the assembly as well, to issue a few statements on the real world (as they see it).
An interesting book come into the library the other week. How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict - Ivan Arreguin-Toft .[1] Its all about relative power and realist international relations. The Logic of Small Wars: 'The strong do as they will." It seeks to empirically explain the outcomes of asymmetric conflict. First he deals with various competing explanations of why small opponents sometimes prevail over powerful rich nations when they do and don't. Nature of the Actors: Authoritarian actors fight 'better' wars than than democratic actors. More degrees of freedom (for ruling elites). Decision process more compact. Arms Diffusion: Everybody's got a gun nowadays. Not just a gun, an AK 47, AK 74, and RPGs. The idea that quality and quantity of effective small arms have made insurgencies an order of magnitude harder to defeat. Interest Asymmetry: determination to persevere is created around the weak actor whose regime's survival is at stake and the future freedom of the state. and last Democratic Social Squeamishness. The normative gap theory, Thesis of Gil Merom's book How democracies lose small wars [2], which I wrote about a year or so ago. His own theory he calls Strategic Interaction. Its aim is to identify the realm of political vulnerability, how and when it comes about and demonstrate its causal bearing on the outcome. First he proceeds to a reduction of key factors. For actors there is the Strong actor associated with the attacker. The Weak actor with the defender. Second there are the basic Strategies each side chooses to prosecute the struggle. These are Direct or Conventional which aim at opponents capacity to fight. And Indirect or Guerilla warfare strategies (GWS). These include terrorism and the strong actor flip-side, barbarity. They aim at the opponents will to fight. In his view the match-up are the key determinant. | d/d | d/i |
| i/d | i/i | Intensity or material commitment of the struggle on the vertical axis, duration on horizontal. Political Vulnerability occurs when the conflict drags on to long, or is seen as being unjustifiably destructive.
There is an odd characterization to his initial Merom dismissal. He does not try to understand why the normative gap might exist. Why state and society would have differing norm values concerning right and wrong; vis war, torture, suspension of civil rights and due process in the application of coercive punishment. The arbitrary loss of property and life. What that might mean to a society [3]. He doesn't seem to want to contend with the moral dimensions of violence at all. Also coursing through all this there is a tendency to accept a notion of the enemy in small wars of being not simply a nations enemy but the enemy of order. An objectification of the enemy that opens the door to barbarism. ArreguÌn-Toft initially seems to assumes only totalitarian/ authoritarian regimes will leverage barbarism (savagery) or be capable of it [4]. He charactorizes Merom as assuming it will always obtain results. That it seems statistically not to - shows Merom to be wrong. As a tactic severity can be done with varying degrees of effectiveness partly due to perceptions of arbitrary or non-arbitrary application. For this you must not collapse your enemy into an indistinguishable evil. Also a distinction must be made between barbarism, savagery and brutality as a strategy, and understanding that War (as a strategy) is in its essence barbaric. Violence is a reducing strategy. It is psychologically destructive, it annihilates the ability to re-create normality, order, and right judgement. The only good indian is a dead indian. That is its true process. ArreguÌn-Toft's way of making this point is noting that the cost of winning small wars is steadily rising will always cost more than is initially estimated. Particularly strong actors face perhaps insurmountable difficulties arranging as stable peace when they have achieved only a narrowly construed military victory. Difficulties avoiding cycles of revenge violence spawned by brutality or severe means in counterinsurgency operations (COIN) suppressing the unintegrated in the land they intend to rule (227). The materialism of his realist outlook tends to drive him to look at all influences on the outcome of war as multipliers of the initial material condition sets of the players. His way of dealing with intangibles such as the strength and cohesion of the weaker actors national identity is (he admits) awkward as it pushes the conflict policy out from directly militarily controllable actions. (223-4). As well it seems to me no non-montitized economy is ever as without means as a monitized economy will view its parity as being. Let me bring this back to decisions we have still in front of us, near and distant. To the new conquistadors of the current administration. Considering the paucity of shifts and departures in the administration. I assume that forces and personalities that initiated the Iraq war are still in charge. group that. There was a discussion last fall on TPM Cafe
TPMCafe || The Man Who Led a Revolution and
TPMCafe || So Why Did Bush Go to War? surrounding a preview of a revised edition of Ivo Daalder's book America Unbound (still not out). These where outlined as Assertive commercio-nationalist, Wilsonian Hawks (incorporating those called neoconservatives), Jacksonian Nationalists. Bringing up the rear if truly present at all realists, pragmatists, and internationalists. In those threads the wars these people were willing to fight were wars of (entrepreneurial) opportunity, against opponents perceived to be weak, popular domestically or at least capable of being used as a wedge issue. While there is disagreement across the spectrum as to whether these wars are or can genuinely improve America's security, or ascendency. The Consequences of muddling thinking about terrorism state/non-state actors. War or criminality leave us with ancillary prison antilles. A population of prisoners we have removed from established categories (citizen of x or y; criminal, prisoner of war) and now have no due process to deal with them. There is the notion I've seen recently that advocates the U S develop an unconventional warfare force. Separate and in addition to conventional forces. It is how ArreguÌn-Toft recommends avoiding political vulnerability against Gorilla war strategies, targeting only the actual guerilla combatants with extraordinary methods largely out of sight. Without involving large conventional forces. Kaplan in Imperial Grunts), and Leebaert with To Dare and to Conquer have similarly idealized and romanticized special forces in recent books. The war turning efficacy of small special operations may be illusionary arising out the need to see narrative in events which otherwise might seem almost arbitrary in their complexity. Big special operations programs may carry their own problems. General Clark in the review of Leebaert's book outlines these The Commando Option: Small groups of audacious soldiers have repeatedly shown the military value of the unexpected (Washington Post Bookworld 12Mar06)/ Briefly, is it possible to scale up special operations and see any effectiveness over conventional forces at all? Is there a training regime and tradition that can encompass this? Large scale special operations have been effective according to ArreguÌn-Toft, but only when growing into being during a long conflict against a particular foe. It is not clear whether this can be institutionalized. More somberly he questions if this is compatible in long term with democracy. Special forces operate outside the realm of law or civilized behavior I assume we are not talking about merging the See Bee's with the Seals or creating Peace Corps beret battalions, but rather widely deployed hunt and kill teams. The process of administratively enabling certain activities by backfilling cover onto a retyped sheet of paper with or without legislative acquiescence does not make it lawful, only at the most legal. Can normalized deployment of these means be harmonized with the open society or will it close that society. Fascination with torture, constitutes a psychological departure (occurring prior to the ethical departure) from the ideals of open society, due process legitimate use of the coercive power of the state, it is a marker of fascism. By the time rights or desert enter the argument, if one believes violence and cruelty have the power to obtain, the question is already resolved. You cannot re introduce ethics back into the equation at at later point. _______
1.Arreguín-Toft, Ivan. How the weak win wars : a theory of asymmetric
conflict / Ivan Arreguín-Toft. Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge
University Press, 2005. ISBN 0521839769 (hbk.)
2.Merom, Gil, 1956- How democracies lose small wars : state, society, and
the failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United
States in Vietnam / Gil Merom. Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge
University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521804035
3. It is corrosive for a democratic republic to find itself with the people whether you understand this to be a public, or mass of private citizens to hold an demonstrably different value structure from the ruling class It puts the rulers at odds with people and induces them to control their behavior, awareness and opinions. There is often a unwarranted presumption to see this as soft headedness of the people rather than despotry of the rulers.
4. He does deal with this in the concluding chapter noting that "authoritarian and democratic actors fight asymmetric wars the same way...and resorted to barbarism when the going got rough"(217); however adding that Britain's resort to Barbarism nearly forced it from the [Boer] war, but at no time did the USSR's resort to barbarism threaten to do so. They do not share equal political vulnerability.
11:58:33 PM  ;;
|
|
