Arms and influence

We need many Madisons

I just finished Imperial Life In The Emerald City. You can never read enough about Iraq, since the catastrophe is larger than any single book can encompass. I'll have more to say about this book later, but one passage in particular stood out. The author, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, quotes an e-mail written by John Agresto, the person given the thankless task of reviving Iraq's higher education system, with no budget, in a country scarred by war and despotism. The e-mail was Agresto's bitter farewell to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) at the end of his tour in Iraq:

America's been so successful at being a free and permanent democracy that we think democracy is the natural way to rule--just let people go and there you have it: Democracy. But all the ingredients that make it good and free--limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, calendared elections, staggered elections, plurality selection, differing terms of office, federalism with national supremacy, the development of a civic spirit and civic responsibility, and above all, the breaking and moderating of factions--all this we forgot about. We act is if the aim is "democracy" simply and not a mild and moderate democracy. Therefore...we seek out the loudest and most virulent factions and empower them...

We, as a country, don't have a clue as to what has made our own country work, and so we spread the gospel of democracy-at-all-costs abroad. Until this country can find a Madison, it would be far better off with just a good ruler.

Agresto's frustation may have gotten the better of him. He overlooked the even larger tragedy: not all Americans would have handled Iraq in this fashion. Unfortunately, those ultimately in charge of the invasion and occupation didn't believe in the principles of "mild and moderate democracy" Agresto describes.

• Instead of limited government, we got a president who claimed the unlimited powers of a "unified executive," with war powers that do not exist in the Constitution.
• Instead of a separation of powers, or checks and balances, we had several years of Republicans in the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives who were (with a nod from a few members of the Supreme Court) eager to put all branches of government under the ultimate authority of the Presidency.
• Instead of the defense of the system of elections that has withstood two centuries of turbulent American history, we had people in the White House, Congress, and the Republican Party drooling over the idea of a permanent Republican majority.
• Instead of the development of civic spirit and civic responsibility, we got a leadership clique who shoved aside the qualified to hire the loyal, and who encouraged Americans to be uninvolved, as if we could defeat Al Qaeda by shopping at the mall.
• Instead of "above all, the breaking and moderation of factions," we had "leaders" who encouraged phony Red/Blue divisions; who were happy to fill the airwaves with shouting instead of discussing; who tried to make Americans believe that they should be as afraid of their next-door neighbors for having principled policy disagreements as they should fear young men willing to crash airliners into skyscrapers.

Mr. Agresto, the foreign policy fruit does not fall that far from the political tree. Fortunately, it's not the only tree in the forest. The Iraq war is not an American tragedy, in which a country's fatal flaws lead to destruction. It is the heart-breaking story of a very small, angry, defensive, and inept part of the country that shunned all the rest, but who made all the rest of us (and the Iraqis) pay the terrible price.

Spokesmodel update

According to her bio on Wikipedia, Dana Perrino--who finds military affairs baffling, and didn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was--majored in political science and communications at Colorado State University-Pueblo. No information about her GPA is available.

(P.S. A minor semantic point, but the United States does not launch a destroyer into a war zone.)

One of history's most moving moments

Shown here are two victims of the destruction of Pompeii. The man appears to be trying--in vain--to protect the woman from the wave of destruction sweeping through the city.

It's one thing to see this picture. It's another to see the real thing, created when archaeologists poured plaster into the hole that Vesuvius' pyroclastic flow left where two human beings once were.

Straight from 2,000 years ago, indescribable pathos. Amazing.

Meanwhile, back in the rest of the world...

The rest of the world is not on hold while the United States continues to dump more of its blood and treasure in Iraq. In the Balkans, angry Serbs attacked UN and NATO forces. Beyond the Secretary of State's obligatory tut-tutting ("very concerned"), what else could the US do in the Balkans?

Treaties and obligations

The White House and Defense Department have, for the last several years, been trying to "explore a new formula for our overseas presence." That's polite language for a permanent presence in the Middle East, based on "status of force agreements" (SOFAs) with countries like Pakistan. A recent diplomatic exchange between the United States and Pakistan provides a window into this campaign.

The United States has learned a hard lesson about democracy and constitutionalism. No declaration of war sanctioned the Iraq war. No Constitutional principle justified the warrantless wiretaps. No American law or treaty allowed Guantanamo Bay. All of these mistakes have hurt, not helped, the real fight against domestic and international terror.

There's another word for a SOFA: treaty. According to the US Constitution, the Senate must ratify any treaty. Using a different word than "treaty" does not change that obligation. The United States is asking Pakistan for permission to operate militarily inside Pakistan, while granting immunity to US personnel for any of their actions during these ventures.

Robots don't enforce the Constitution; people do. Those people--in Congress and the Supreme Court--are ultimately responsible for both any failure to uphold the Constitution, and any consequences that follow.

That's what she said

Via Armchair Generalist, White House spokesmodel Dana Perino explains why women don't know nothin' about deployin' no carrier battlegroups:

Some of the terms I just don’t know, I haven’t grown up knowing. The type of missiles that are out there: patriots and scuds and cruise missiles and tomahawk missiles. And I think that men just by osmosis understand all of these things, and they’re things that I really have to work at — to know the difference between a carrier and a destroyer, and what it means when one of those is being launched to a certain area.

Also on the list of things Ms. Perino has not learned, by osmosis or otherwise: the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Dear Lady, at the risk of offending your tender sensibilities, may we proffer an observation. It is our fondest hope that our words cause only the mildest distress, no worse than the quiver of a leaf gently caressed by a spring breeze.

You are a dumbass, in a string of dumbasses whom this Administration has hired, who don't have the good sense or civic duty to recognize how woefully underqualified you are for your job.

The COIN debate within the US military

This article by Spencer Ackerman is a must-read for anyone concerned about being better prepared for the next Iraq or Afghanistan.

The South American kerfuffle

Now that the governments of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela have agreed to stand down from their recent confrontation, why did Colombia ignite this crisis in the first place? And who, if anyone, won?

Colombian president Álvaro Uribe certainly knew that a cross-border raid against FARC camps in Ecuador wasn't going to destroy the FARC, even if a high-ranking FARC leader died in the process. Uribe could easily calculate Ecuador's response to the raid (indignation, chest-thumping about sovereignty), and Venezuela's reaction to charges that Hugo Chávez was sending money to the FARC (outrage, some sort of retaliatory threat or action).

Therefore, the events of the last several days may have been Uribe's version of what Egyptian president Anwar Sadat did in 1973: using a short conflict to attract international attention to a neglected problem, and international pressure on some of the sources of that problem.

Sadat calculated that, even if the Israeli Defense Forces won a military victory, the US and USSR would rush to end the conflict before it got too far out of control. Having been forced to put out another Middle Eastern fire, the two superpowers then engaged in some fire prevention. The United States, for example, helped convince the Israelis to return control of the Sinai Peninsula, seized during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, to Egypt.

Uribe also knew that any military action would remain within strict limits. Although Colombia is receiving billions of dollars in US military aid, the FARC endures. Despite occasional bluster from Washington about Chávez, the US government is actually putting very little effort into containing him. Americans feel almost no sense of immediacy about Colombia's problems, and in several months, the Democrats may control both the White House and Congress.

Therefore, a limited military operation would, at worst, force the Americans and other outside parties to focus their attention on Colombia and Venezuela. Uribe now can play a more convincing game of brinksmanship, since he's clearly willing to reject diplomatic niceties if they get in the way of dealing with Colombia's security problems. The inevitable "Sorry, I don't know what I was thinking" press conference would occur, in which the leaders of the three countries would shake hands.

Everything beyond these results were just a bonus. The Colombian military killed FARC leader Raúl Reyes, seized valuable intelligence from the FARC compound they raided, and even got a J'accuse! opportunity with Chávez. The raid may have inflamed divisions within the FARC: FARC guerrillas may have assassinated Iván Ríos, another FARC commander.

Not bad, for the low cost of an apology.

El Alamein

This weekend, I watched El Alamein: In the Line of Fire, an Italian movie about the North African corner of WWII. Like most war movies made since the 1960s, El Alamein takes the soldier's perspective, not the generals, so don't watch it to learn about the battle. However, it's refreshing to see the Italians given their due for a change.

The story is familiar: War is brutal, confusing, and random for the infantryman. The characters face some interesting challenges along the way, and the acting is top-notch. The movie shows "the face of battle" extremely well, including the terror of being on the receiving end of an artillery barrage or a tank-led attack.

The Italian army is one of the most interesting and the most under-studied combatants in WWII. Good luck finding an institutional history of the Italian army, compared to hundreds of books about the Wehrmacht. Italians fought and died in the Italian peninsula, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Eastern Front, and all most Americans know of them is an unflattering caricature.

That's a shame, not only because of the gaps in the historical record, but also because of the Italian army's little-known opposition to the Holocaust. As an organization, not as discrete individuals, the Italian army regularly threw a spanner into the machinery of genocide whenever it could. For example, Italian troops guarding the trains carrying prisoners to German concentration camps would regularly "forget" to lock the doors of the train cars. If I had more time and resources, I'd love to research this topic more deeply.

Shorja made a fool of yourself

Dukakis and the tank. Bush and the Mission Accomplished banner. Kerry in the NASA "bunny suit." Jane Fonda and the North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. Larry Craig's lecture about posture. Alberto Gonzales anywhere near the Department of Justice. You can tell when a particular moment is going to haunt a public figure. You may not be able to predict exactly how the blow will fall, or when. But it's coming.

John McCain's "moron minute" was his 2007 shopping trip  in the Shorja market. McCain wanted to demonstrate how safe Baghdad was, since the beginning of the Temporary Escalation--as long as you took along 100 personal shoppers, who just happened to be US soldiers.

Today, McCain can't visit the market. The Army of the Mahdi, which now controls that part of Baghdad, can't be trusted not to shoot any visiting US senators.

How easily McCain could have avoided this embarrassment. Obviously, in the type of war we're fighting in Iraq, battle lines are going to shift all over the place. Shorja market might be safe again in a few weeks, and then not safe a few weeks after that. However, these nuances are going to be moot in the coverage of McCain's bizarre of the bazaar. He has only himself to blame.

Rendezvoused with Rama

Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and dozens of other "hard science fiction" stories, died today at the age of 90. Clarke was one of the pillars of the SF genre, alongside writers like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, Frederik Pohl, and others.

To be honest, Clarke was a hit-or-miss writer. Many of his books are not worth reading, especially the sequels to his better novels. However, when he hit, he hit hard, with lasting effects.

Forget the fact that one of the most famous movies of all time is based on one of his books. (Or that it's still a watchable, interesting movie.) Clarke also helped cement science fiction as fiction about science, not just a futuristic backdrop for plots transplanted from Westerns or Regency romances.

Clarke's greatest gift was to help us experience the mystery and splendor of the universe, as seen through the lens of science. Childhood's End, for example, was an even better Big Idea book that 2001 about the evolution of mankind. Rendezvous with Rama showed how our first contact with aliens probably would be utterly baffling. "A Meeting With Medusa" argued that, by the time we encounter these aliens, humans might not even be all that recognizable to people alive today. "The Nine Billion Names of God" is one of the most staggering short stories written in the 20th century.

Whenever you hear Clarke quoted, it's usually the line, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I have greater fondness for a different Clarkean quote: "The truth, as always, will be far stranger." Anyone who has ever had a scientific career, or even just a genuine interest in science, knows exactly what he was talking about.

[Now that Gygax and Clarke passed away within about a week, we're going to start worrying about geek icons dying in threes. Beware, Larry Niven!]

Fleet in being and nothingness

Defense and Freedom points out the startlingly high rate of naval expansion in Asia compared to the rest of the world. Is this a problem?

I agree with most of what Sven has to say. Here's where I part company with him:

Conclusion; The capability to easily overturn naval power balances exists in East Asia (including Japan and Taiwan) - they were just kind enough not to use it (and were our friends for decades). But now the PRC is on the rise also in shipbuilding - and might not be so kind in 20, 30 or 40 years if we piss them off.

First of all, according to the chart in Sven's post, two American allies, South Korea and Japan, are outpacing the PRC in ship construction. To the extent that represents two major allies in the Pacific assuming a larger part of the burden of keeping the sea lanes open, great. After 60 years, there's no sign that Japan is suddenly going to have another imperialist seizure any time soon, so we'd be alarmist in the extreme to be afraid of a reasonable expansion of the Japanese navy.

Second, the PRC doesn't necessarily want or need to continue expanding (or "modernizing," to use the more polite term) at the same rate. Chinese naval strategy is more about sea denial than sea control; the former is always a lot cheaper than the latter. We can start worrying when the Chinese start investing heavily in sealift capability, signaling obvious designs on Taiwan.

Third, we're just talking about numbers of ships here. Technology plays a much larger role in naval and air warfare than in ground warfare. As long as the US maintains its technical edge in all three parts of the USN, subs, ships, and aircraft, increases in numbers are far less alarming than they might first appear.

The big question to ask is, how can the PRC afford to invest heavily in sea power? Sadly, the United States is helping to pay for all these new ships. Before 2001, the amount of American debt that the Chinese held was the source of a lot of leverage and potential economic power. US policy towards the PRC has been, for decades, best to use that economic leverage right back at them, by staying economically and politically engaged with the Chinese regime.

After 2001, cut-and-spend Republicans ballooned the debt, making it harder to manage this relationship. Meanwhile, the decline of the dollar reduces a key American advantage in the global economy. Last year, the US trade deficit with China was $162 billion. Bye-bye, leverage. The burden of federal debt makes any quick build-up of the USN far less likely, and certainly more expensive in the long run, if, in 20 years we "piss off" the PRC.

Worried about China? Take a long, skeptical look at the war in Iraq.

Best damn infographic ever

Democracy Arsenal has an outstanding table contrasting the war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Among many points of comparison--number of American troops, overall cost, amount of public support--the critical one might be the two alliances.

Success in counterinsurgency depends on staying power, which in turn increases substantially when Americans aren't fighting alone. Only half the troops in Afghanistan are American soldiers. Because we went to war as part of NATO, instead of a goofy "coalition of the willing," the United States is enjoying the support of 36 countries in Afghanistan, as opposed to only 20 countries in Iraq.

The Iraq war has been a long, expensive, violent reminder that multilateralism helps more than it hurts.