Arms and influence

Time tunnel

Since I'm going to be back to blogging this weekend, I'll obviously have a few words to say about the new "time horizon" for the American occupation of Iraq. Before I get into the specifics, let me just make a couple of observations that hearken back to the first postings on this blog, early in the Iraq war.

As Fred Ikle nicely summarized in the title of his great little book, Every War Must End. How it ends, of course, is less certain. Wars almost never end in the way the original parties, including the victors, intended. The Iraq war has been an extreme example of that maxim.

Therefore, we're far from being done talking about the beginnings of the Iraq war. All the lessons of this war will be shaped--perhaps warped--by the wide gulf between US war plans and the outcome. In fact, this gulf may make these lessons harder to discern. The murk at the grand strategic and theater levels will obscure many of the successes and failures at the tactical and operational levels.

We are also well on our way to re-creating the emotional and doctrinal chasm that separated Americans after the Vietnam War, to the point where people with differing views often could not have a civil conversation about the subject. Rancor, in large part the deliberate creation of one faction in American politics, is one of the great costs of the Iraq war, because it will make it hard to learn from it. As the Iraq war itself has shown, even learning the lessons of the last war is no obstacle to ignoring or misapplying those lessons. In other words, rancor makes grave risks even greater.

Vietnam on the brain

Disagreements over the Iraq war--something that's likely to become more visible, as we approach the presidential campaign debates--are inescapably discussions about the lessons of the Vietnam War. Both candidates worry that the United States will repeat the mistakes of that conflict. Obviously, they are focused on different mistakes.

The "lost victory" of the Vietnam War
John McCain worries that, after flailing for a few years, US officials have finally hit on a winning strategy for Iraq. The situation in his mind is comparable to the phase of the Vietnam War that started in 1967 and 1968, after Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland as the commander of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), and Ellsworth Bunker became the US ambassador to South Vietnam. The two men worked well together, which substantially improved the use of force as a political instrument. Among other changes, the counterinsurgency war took a dramatically more positive turn, thanks to both important doctrinal and organizational reforms that dovetailed with the Tet Offensive, which was a military catastrophe for the National Liberation Front.

Unfortunately, the American electorate was in no mood for nuanced discussions about counterinsurgency warfare. Even if the counterinsurgency side of the Vietnam War had visibly improved, Americans wanted to withdraw from South Vietnam. While the Tet Offensive might have crippled the NLF, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) continued attacks into the South. While the government of President Thieu seemed far more stable than its immediate predecessors, Americans remained skeptical about the political reliability of any Saigon government.

Most significantly, an increasing number of American voters did not feel that the Vietnam War was important enough to win. If dominoes were to topple, the damage to American interests seemed far worse than the blood and treasure lost in continuing to fight the war.

Predictable mistakes
Obviously, the differences between Vietnam and Iraq are considerable. However, the political dynamic of fighting a counterinsurgency war does appear the same. Whatever McCain's beliefs about the "winnability" of the Iraq war, he seems to have ignored how these dynamics. In fact, he bears a great deal of responsibility for fueling them.

We can bemoan how much better prepared the US government should have been to fight a counterinsurgency war. (And yes, I'm one of the chief bemoaners.) However, it seems that every counterinsurgency war seems fated to start with a lot of flailing around. Regimes under siege repeat familiar mistakes, such as rushing green troops into dangerous situations that require greater skill and discipline, or using terror in a counterproductive quest to crush the guerrillas' political organization.

Great power patrons make their own set of familiar mistakes. Here are a couple:

• Promising the war will be easy and short, when we know it will be long and difficult.
• Ignoring the political and cultural details of the conflict, preferring instead to overemphasize the military dimension.
• Treating the conflict as sui generis, without any useful precedents.

To his credit, McCain is not to blame for the latter two mistakes. He criticized the US Army for pursuing a "search and destroy" strategy that focused on killing insurgents over securing the safety and support of the population. He has cited precedents, not only from the Vietnam War, but from other conflicts that offered "lessons learned."

Repeating one of the biggest mistakes
His participation in the selling of the Vietnam War is where he bears the greatest responsibility for repeating the mistakes of the past. However dumbed down his current speeches may be, McCain is certainly not ignorant of this risk. After release from his North Vietnamese captors, McCain dedicated time to reading both histories of the two Indochina wars and the classic works about counterinsurgency. He is both smart and knowledgeable enough to realize what happens when a government promises to deliver a quick, decisive victory in the sort of conflict that is inevitably longer than expected, and rarely offers any chance for total victory over the adversary.

Later, McCain tried to rectify his mistake. His now-infamous "100 years" comment was, no doubt, a belated attempt to provide some amount of "straight talk" about counterinsurgency. Unfortunately, the message came far too late, when Americans in 2007 were as impatient with the Iraq war as they were in 1969 with the Vietnam War. McCain had joined the chorus in 2003 that predicted a short, easy war in Iraq. He therefore set the stage for the classic political backlash that ends counterinsurgency wars, from the American Revolution to the Vietnam War. If he's frustrated with how unwilling Americans seem to be in recognizing any gains made in the Iraq War, he has only himself to blame.

Precedented

I haven't had a chance to look at the just-released Army study of the Iraq War (just finished meeting some demanding deadlines at work, and the PDF for the study is STILL downloading). However, I'll pass along one preliminary observation.

Yesterday, I heard Donald Wright, one of the authors of the report, on The News Hour. I was listening to it on the car radio, which can be hazardous to your health if you hear someone say something so stupid that you almost lose control of the vehicle in anger and disbelief. When asked to explain the avalanche of bad decisions in 2003 to 2005 that made the Iraq war the nightmare that it has been, Wright said that the Army was unprepared for an "unprecedented" kind of war.

Unprecedented. Mull that word over for a moment. Unprecedented. Happily, you're not driving this blog post while reading this post (but if you are, you're already endangering yourself and other drivers.)

Unprecedented.

Sure, he used contemporary Army jargon about "full spectrum operations." In Iraq terms, that means simultaneously handling offensive operations, defensive operations, population security, civic action projects, and a bunch of other stuff. Wow, that's tough. Never faced anything like that before, Wright said.

Unprecedented, only if you overlook the Vietnam War.

Tone deaf

For the last several years, George W. Bush has been telling us that Presidential leadership is about having good intentions, not producing desirable consequences; making demands of American allies and enemies, instead of understanding what might be necessary to get their agreement or acquiescence; reaching the right conclusion, not having the expertise needed to arrive at a conclusion; making decisions, not seeing them through. Anyone with this worldview will confuse tone with content, words with results.

Therefore, in a recent interview with the Times of London, Bush said that a major problem with his Iraq strategy was his own tone:

In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.”

Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”. He said that he found it very painful “to put youngsters in harm’s way”. He added: “I try to meet with as many of the families as I can. And I have an obligation to comfort and console as best as I possibly can. I also have an obligation to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain.”

You might think that Bush is just being disingenuous, trying to argue from history's docket for a less severe verdict. Maybe so, but he's also being entirely consistent. Bush has asserted that dissent during wartime sends the wrong signal to whomever we're fighting in Iraq (something that's not entirely clear to him). He also said recently that continuing to play golf as a "wartime president" sent the wrong signal, though miniature golf seems to be exempted. Any public diplomacy with countries like Syria, Cuba, or Iran will also, in the Bush Weltanschauung, send the wrong signal. Setting any deadlines or defining any measures of success in Iraq would send the wrong signal to the troops.

And so on. Bush worries frequently and loudly about signals. Since, as a businessman and politician, he almost never had to suffer any personal hardships resulting from his own mistakes, he can reduce leadership to a series of signals.

Tone to Bush matters more than it might to other people. Therefore, to be fair to Bush, let's remember a few other "media is the message" aspects of his Iraq policy:

• With regards to the Ba'athist governments alleged unconventional weapons programs, Bush never made his accusations through Hank Williams-style yodeling.
• During his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech, he did not wink at the cameras.
• When, in 2003, reporters asked him about the expected difficulty of the Iraqi occupation, he did not answer in a Joe Isuzu-like voice.
• While trying to "comfort and console" the families of American soldiers killed in Iraq, he did not show them his dust-covered golf clubs to demonstrate his own personal sacrifices.

Monty in Baghdad

Reading Max Hastings' Armageddon, which covers the closing years of WWII in Europe, I realized that I was in the thick of yet another account of Operation MARKET GARDEN, the fabled (and failed) "bridge too far" campaign. I've read so many accounts of this particular battle, I can't accurately count them. So why read yet another one?

I'll skip quickly past the usual reasons: no one book adequately covers all the details; military historians get into interesting and important debates; even reading the same book twice may give you a slightly different understanding the second time around. My reason for mentioning the uncountable accounts of MARKET GARDEN is a bit different: you never know when you'll bump into an insight about current events, rounding a corner in an historically familiar neighborhood.

Monty's gamble
Here's the short version of Operation MARKET GARDEN: Between September 1944, the Americans and British had chased the Wehrmacht from the Normandy beaches to the banks of the Rhine. Overstrained supply lines, the ingenuity of the Germans on defense, and other factors brought the Allied offensive to a halt. After the seizure of Antwerp, the bulk of British forces faced the Germans in the Netherlands. The top British commander, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, looked across the Dutch landscape and saw an opportunity.

In his sector, Montgomery argued to Eisenhower, the Allies could make a surprise thrust through Holland, cross the line where German defenses were weaker, and then drive into Germany proper. The main problem was the landscape of Holland, which limited any offensive to a single highway, crossing several major rivers. If, in the first days of the battle, the Allies failed to seize all the major bridges around the Dutch cities of Nijmegen, Eindhoven, and Arnhem--and, just as importantly, prevent the Germans from demolishing them--the operation would fail.

The resulting plan, Operation MARKET GARDEN, depended on British and American paratroopers and glider-borne troops to surprise the Germans, secure the bridges, and wait for the British XXX Armored Corps to assault down the highway connecting the three critical cities. Unless the airborne troops moved quickly, the Germans would destroy the bridges. Unless the XXX Corps moved quickly, the Allied troops behind enemy lines would be the lightning rods for devastating German counterattacks.

Operation MARKET GARDEN suffered many problems, all of which contributed to a costly debacle. The Germans delayed the airborne troops from seizing their objectives as quickly as planned (especially difficult, since the parachute and glider drops took more than a single day to put all the troops into the battlezone). The tanks of the XXX Corps could not leave the highway to drive overland, given the risk of bogging down in the soft Dutch terrain. The armored advance, therefore, remained only a few tanks wide across its entire length, making it relatively easy for the Germans to bring it to a halt at any point. This geographic limitation, combined with a strange lack of urgency at key points in the battle, made it impossible for the XXX Corps to link up with the British 1st Airborne division in Arnhem, where the "Red Devils" fought a courageous but doomed defense. Aside from massive casualties, the Western Allies also suffered months of delay in finally defeating Nazi Germany.

The biggest problem with MARKET GARDEN, however, lay in the plan itself, not its execution. Montgomery's plan--unusually risky, for a general famous for his caution--depended on every element succeeding. If the Allies seized the bridges around Eindhoven, and if they seized Nijmegen, and if they seized Arnhem, and if the British armored column reached all three cities in time, MARKET GARDEN would be a success. If any link in this chain of events failed, the entire campaign would fall apart.

Bush's blunder
MARKET GARDEN, therefore, is a cautionary tale to which the practitioners of war should regularly return. Whenever someone feels tempted to take this sort of risk, they can sober up quickly just by remembering the American paratroopers crossing a river in small boats, in broad daylight, into German machine gun fire, because it was the only chance to seize the next link in the chain. Or, you might remember the slow death of the 1st Paras in Arhhem, fighting a delaying action from house to house, with inadequate weapons to combat the German tanks blasting their hiding places into rubble.

Of course, there's nothing stopping people who are ignorant of history from violating its lessons. There's also no firm barrier between ambition and sense. Just as Montgomery imagined he saw a chance for the British to claim the great prize, the killing blow to Hitler's Reich, George W. Bush and members of his Administration thought they found the moment to deal, once and for all, with the Ba'athist regime in Iraq.

As anyone could and should have seen at the time, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM depended on too many military and political "ifs" going exactly according to plan. If Iraq forces collapsed quickly, as the proponents of "shock and awe" had hoped...If a roaring success in Iraq could silence any domestic and international critics...If Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's promises that the American forces committed to both the invasion and occupation proved to be correct...If the Iraqi populace felt more gratitude for the occupation than resentment...If the Iraqi exiles, or their counterparts who remained in Iraq, could quickly assemble a functional government...Then, of course, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM would be a success.

Again, you might fault many aspects of this military operation's execution. Had the US officials been more concerned about the shadowy insurgency than capturing Saddam Hussein, the critical first few months of the occupation might have muted the violence to come. Had the same officials thought more carefully about how the motley insurgent groups might react to American actions, instead of treating them as if they were target dummies waiting to be shot and then collected, the Americans and Iraqis might have avoided wasting the first few years of fighting a counterinsurgency war.

These questions of execution can mislead us into believing that there was just a tactical adjustment here, a few extra resources there, that might have led to a happier outcome. The problem with Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was just the same as with MARKET GARDEN: too many elements had to succeed for the overall plan to be anything but a failure.

Refusing to take the sucker's bet
The major difference, of course, was who bore the responsibility for stopping the needlessly risky enterprise (or radically re-designed it to the point where it was a different campaign entirely).
In 1944, Eisenhower should have said no to his nominal subordinate, Montgomery, even if this refusal put greater strain on the American-British alliance. In 2003, the Congress--the President's Constitutional peer--plus the American press, and ultimately the American public, should have recognized a bad plan for what it was. Even if few of them were experts on Iraq, they could have asked the obvious question: "What's the fallback plan if any part of this strategy should go awry?"

For anyone who doesn't see the point of revisiting the failures of 2003, military history poses an obvious question. If, in 2003, Americans were willing to ignore the bloody, awful lessons of 1944, what are the chances that we've really learned the lessons of 2003 yet?

Prison statistics

A whole generation of instant experts on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism have spent the last several years proclaiming how these struggles are real wars, not police matters. Being people with more volume than knowledge, they've missed the point. Of course, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism are forms of warfare. However, victory depends on turning these wars into something that looks like police matters.

At the end of a counterinsurgency war like the one in Iraq, political and military measures will have reduced the insurgents from revolutionaries to criminals, from a movement to a gang. Robbed of political legitimacy, the ability to intimidate or persuade, larger numbers of active members and supporters, and a free range of action, the insurgents dwindle to something that should be treated as a police matter.

Long before the war has reached this point, what happens to suspected insurgents while in custody matters greatly. Unspeakable acts that fall under the polite term "human rights abuses" are the persistent mistake that governments under siege make. Form a combination of impatience, arrogance, and fear, regimes see torture, murder, indefinite detention, and other forms of "abuse" (another polite term) as the short, urgent road to defeating the insurgents. The political backlash is rarely worth the limited, unreliable information gained, or the number of potential insurgents jailed.

People with successful track records at counterinsurgency counsel a much different approach. (For an example, see Stuart Herrington's recent op-ed piece.) Therefore, stories about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners are central to the counterinsurgency story. If war outlasts the bad memories of Abu Ghraib, jails will still be an important stage on which Iraqi drama plays out. Prison statistics may be far more important than casualty numbers.

The big game

This morning on CNN, Senator Joseph Lieberman asserted that, if the US were to withdraw from Iraq, "Iran and Al Qaeda win." Finally someone willing to stop hinting about dire consequences, and instead give voice to the real problem for the United States in Iraq: the willingness to admit defeat.

Lieberman, of course, expected that to be the final word on America's Iraq policy. It's not.

Losing here, winning there
For sake of argument, let's agree with Lieberman. We leave, and Iran and Al Qaeda "win." (That's not necessarily true, especially for Al Qaeda, but let's not get off track.) By implication, the United States loses. But what did we lose?

One of the reasons I started this blog is point out, whenever necessary, the importance of separating the different levels of strategy. Grand strategic, theater, operational, tactical, and technical levels are very different.  Success at one level does not necessarily bring success at all the others.

Just as importantly for the iraq question, failure at one does not trigger failure at the others. If the United States were to lose one part of its theater strategy for the Middle East, it does not portend a cataclysm for the United States in that region, or for the most recently added priority in American grand strategy, counterterrorism.

The United states may have to contain the consequences of occupation and withdrawal, but there are several outcomes that may be eminently tolerable for the United States. The Iraqi factions are likely to remain focused on each other, not the United States. Iran may gain power and influence within Iraq, but exactly how does this automatically translate into a catastrophic loss for the United States? Freed from the Iraq trap, the United States might be able to do more in the Middle East overall, instead of pouring more blood and treasure into a single country. Americans might live in less danger of terrorist attack, if the American occupation no longer inspires outrage against the United states.

Don't look for a scoreboard
It's hard for Americans to avoid conflating Iraq with the Middle East, and with US national security overall, in part because Americans hate to lose. It's the reason, for example, why military recruitment rates are lower than desired, but reenlistment rates are higher than many expected. American soldiers who have served in Iraq have faced a tough challenge. They feel responsible for the Iraqis who live in mortal danger. Therefore, they don't want to leave a job undone.

While America's allergy to losing might be a good thing for the teams playing the Super Bowl, it's a bad thing for US foreign policy. For the United States to remain a superpower, Americans have to be mature enough to accept defeat at one level of strategy, if it does not endanger American successes at the other levels of strategy. There are no military equivalents of Hail Mary passes or on-side kicks. War and diplomacy are not games with simple ways to measure winning and losing--something for which we should all be grateful.

Some thoughts on the Petraeus hearings

In no particular order, some responses to yesterday's hearings:

• Americans still have no clear definition of victory in Iraq.
• There's no clear picture of the enemy. Worse, we have the lingering "Al Qaeda in Iraq is Al Qaeda who attacked us" problem.
• Senators need to learn to ask a question in two sentences, not ten minutes. The more words you say, the more the person answering the question can pick and choose the words to which he responds.
• At least in the Senate, the coalition supporting the indefinite continuation of the war is falling apart.
• Politicians keep mouthing words they don't need to say. For example, let's just all assume that everyone support the troops, if not everyone supports the war.
• Pottery Barn continues to be our moral and foreign policy compass.

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.

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.

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.

Douglas Feith, go to hell

"Wait, wait! I was against the Iraq war all along! Doesn't anyone believe me?"

Well, it's a start

Armchair Generalist has an interesting post about tighter procedures around foreign military sales to Iraq. No, these new measures are not 100% corruption-proof. An Iraqi soldier can still claim that he lost his gun. Munitions, once under the control of an Iraqi quartermaster, might go a lot of different places. Nevertheless, you gotta do something.

I'm sure Lt. Col. Muschalek has a few interesting stories about what it took to put these procedures into effect:

“FMS has had its challenges, and one of the biggest problems is (Iraqi officials) understanding the FMS system and program,” Muschalek said. “What makes it hard in Iraq is the translation. It is very important that the Iraqi officials and the Ministry of Defense understand the FMS program.”

By "understand the FMS program," Muschalek might mean, "agree to turning down the corruption spigot." Sloppy oversight on the American side, made worse by the deepening political and security crisis after the invasion, created a lucrative business for Iraqis who wanted to make personal profit from American military aid.

Corruption around military aid is nothing new. American officials have struggled with it during other wars in which the  US acted as the patron of a government. The unusual part, as with other problems in the Iraq war, is how long it took to address it.

Expert testimony on cleavage in Iraq

Do House Republicans not want to be re-elected? First, we had the hilarious partisan defense of the instrinsically non-partisan Roger Clemens testimony. Now, we have a Thelma Drake (R-Virginia) wants Angelina Jolie to testify about Iraq before the Armed Services Committee.

"Sadly, Ms. Jolie's positive perspective on the current security situation in Iraq has gone largely unnoticed by the mainstream press," Drake wrote in a letter to Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the committee chairman.

Perhaps, if you read between the lines, you'll find a cry for help: "I can't stand being a Republican in Congress any longer. Please don't vote for me. I can't make myself look much more ridiculous than this."

SOFs not being drawn down

Worth noting in discussions of withdrawing troops from Iraq: US special operations forces  (SOFs) are not part of that reduction. In fact, their numbers may be increasing.

That's good news, if the mix of forces in Iraq tilts more in the direction of the SOFs. While unconventional warfare as waged by the SOFs is not necessarily the same thing as counterinsurgency, the SOFs have a better track record of understanding and contributing to counterinsurgency campaigns than many conventional units.

Unfortunately, US troop levels will not return to pre-escalation levels. The numbers will still be 8,000 soldiers higher than in January 2007. The strain on the Army and Marines remains, as does the strategic vacuum at the theater level.

The Pentagon Papers, without the secrecy

The Army's decision to bury a 2005 RAND Corporation study of the Iraq war misadventure is cause for outrage on many levels. One of them is the damage inflicted on the US Army itself.

Honest warriors are better warriors
The impressive performance of the US Army depends on a lot more than just cutting-edge technology. The US military in general has a tradition of scalding self-criticism that takes many forms. For example, officers are responsible for writing after action reports (AARs) that depict recent military operations in the most brutally honest terms possible. If an AAR about a clear-and-secure operation in Karbala omits important details, soldiers in a similar engagement won't have the chance to learn from past successes and failures. Given that there isn't a clear, neat boundary between the last operation in Karbala and the next one, the soldiers you may be short-changing may be bunking right next to you.

Since AARs provide insight into an officer's character and skills, they play an important role in personnel decisions. The quality of the personnel, far more than the technology, is the key to the US Army's success.

Let's play a semantic game: instead of calling the RAND report a study, let's call it an after action report. The importance of the study in organizational learning might make a little more sense, using that language. Without AARs, soldiers don't change their behavior as much as they need to. Without a government-wide AAR, the big bureaucracies involved in the Iraq war displayed much the same inertia.

Falling back on old habits
According to The New York Times, the RAND study criticized practically every organization involved in the Iraq invasion and occupation. That wide dragnet became the study's death warrant, since it blamed too many highly-placed officials, in and out of uniform, for the war's mistakes. While the study was never secret, the Army just decided not to publish it. The bogus rationale is highly transparent:

“The RAND study simply did not deliver a product that could have assisted the Army in paving a clear way ahead; it lacked the perspective needed for future planning by the U.S. Army,” he said.

Of course, "future planning by the U.S. Army" for any conflict like Iraq will involve many agencies beyond the Army itself. There's no way to compartmentalize counterinsurgency in the military. The State Department leans on governments to make changes that will steal political appeal away from the insurgents. Intelligence agencies collect information that might have military implications. Aid organizations, inside and outside the government, contribute resources and expertise needed to rebuild the country.

These parallel efforts do not separately, magically turn into a unified counterinsurgency strategy. Only by overcoming the natural centrifugal tendency among military and civilian bureaucracies does the US government have a prayer of succeeding at counterinsurgency.

Of course, the Army might decide, as it did after the Vietnam War, to avoid these conflicts. Fool the US military once into fighting a messy, unpopular war that doesn't fit the Army's conventional military mold, shame on the civilians. Fool them twice, and shame on the military. Fool them three times...Career military officers undoubtedly prefer not to finish that sentence.

Taking this war, and the next one, seriously
Public criticism of the war effort would have helped the Army, not hurt it, in two important ways. First, publishing the study would have indicated that the Iraq war was important enough to take seriously. A serious effort is founded on trust--in the public, that it will continue to support an important war, despite early mistakes; in the military and other parts of the government, for rectifying those mistakes.

Second, publication of the study would have indicated that this type of war is going to happen again, and worth handling better next time. Unlike the Vietnam War, the Iraq War could be the jolt to make "little wars" an important, expected part of the military's repertoire. The military would not, next time, stand as alone as it did this time: other agencies would be expected to play their parts better, and in concert with the military. Never again would officers be digging around for 30 year-old books about guerrilla warfare. Never again would civilian officials in the mold of the Coalition Provisional Authority be working in one universe, and the US military in another.

Treat the RAND study as an AAR on a grand scale, and you will see it immediately in a different light. Anyone who really cares about the US Army would have demanded its publication, however bad it made a Rumsfeld or a Rice look.

And they get all Qaeda with us! I'm sure!

Once again, the confusion of Al Qaeda with Al Qaeda in Iraq goes unchallenged. Should we be keeping score somewhere?

There is no base deal. I mean, yes, there is.

While the American voter is focused on the presidential primaries, one of the most important stories about Iraq is getting little attention. Is the US government trying to get permanent bases in Iraq? And, more to the point, how is the executive branch pursuing this goal?

There are few other issues that reveal the real US strategy in Iraq and the Middle East generally than military bases. What is the Bush Administration's current strategy for the Middle East: (1) not losing the Iraq war, or (2) using Iraq as a platform for spreading US influence throughout the Middle East? Do American officials expect the United States to be a direct military participant in future wars in this region? How much is the Administration willing to lose in good will in the Middle East in pursuit of its goals?

One interesting aspect of the pas de deux on this issue is who is doing the dancing. Thus far, the public face of this discussion is, more often than not, the Secretary of Defense and various Defense Department officials. Interesting how little you see, oh, say, the State Department or the White House represented. It's as if the basing issue were as purely a military issue as projected spending for attack helicopters in FY 2009. Obviously, the big, big lesson of the last several years is that we ignore the political consequences of military power at our peril.

The other lesson, which you also don't expect anyone in the White House to agree is that you should never bypass Congress and the electorate on major issues of war and peace. While there are lots of reasons why support for the Iraq war has plummeted, one contributing factor is the perception that it is Bush's war, not our war. Now, in his last year to steer America's Iraq strategy, Bush is, yet again, insisting on doing it in the least inclusive fashion possible, arguing (falsely) that he is not Constitutionally bound to get Congress' approval for any basing agreement.

Just as in 2003, the Administration is trying to convince us that it's not doing what it's obviously doing. Just as in 2003, it's up to Congress and the public to do more than watch.

You can call me Al

After writing that last post, I realized that, if the press is having trouble keeping Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda in Iraq straight, they might be having other problems distinguishing between things that have similar names. Perhaps we can help.

Question #1
Shown here are (1) an actual bear, and (2) the Chicago Bears. Show these pictures to a journalist--maybe someone you know, perhaps a member of your own family--to see if that member of the Fourth Estate can tell the difference.

Question #2
If they experience trouble, immediate attention may be required. Take the test to stage two, in which the journalist must tell the difference between (1) Prince Charles, monarch-in-waiting of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and (2) the cast of the sitcom Charles in Charge.

Question #3
Perhaps these examples don't hit close enough to home. Therefore, the acid test asks the journalist to distinguish among (1) a wolf, (2) the German blitzkrieg in World War II, and (3) Wolf Blitzer. This challenge is especially tricky, since it presents 50% more choices than the previous tests.

The painful truth
If the journalist fails any of these tests, you know for sure that he or she will have no chance whatsoever of telling the difference between (1) Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, and (2) Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, former leader of Ansar al-Islam and founder of Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, a.k.a. "Al Qaeda in Iraq."

The journalists with this problem are suffering from a substantial handicap. After years of trying and failing, it's clear that they are being asked to do a job for which they are functionally crippled.

These journalists deserve our pity--and our help. "Lazy Reporter's Brain" is, like Turrett's Syndrome or chronic flatulence, no laughing matter.

We can only hope that, soon, we will find a cure. Until that happy day arrives, just be careful when the journalist you know says, "I hear Wolf is going to be at that dinner party--I can't wait to go!"

They're all Qaeda

What will it take to end the obnoxious behavior of DoD briefers who refer to every Iraqi insurgent group as Al Qaeda? And what will stop the press from compounding the problem? Here's the lead from an article on CNN's web site:

A major movement of Iraqi forces gathered on Sunday in Mosul as a prelude to a planned offensive against Islamic fighters loyal to al Qaeda, an Iraqi government spokesman said.

No, you dunderheads, they offensive is targeting Al Qaeda in Iraq, which is not the same as Al Qaeda. How many years does it take to learn the difference? Long ago, the press should have insisted on using some version of the former's full name, Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, instead of confusing it with the latter, the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Call them Tanzim, if you need a shorter version. Just don't use Al Qaeda.

There's no reason to play along with the misleading agitprop of both the group founded by Zarqawi, who wanted to steal some marketing from the real Al Qaeda, and American officials, who want to market the Iraq war as somehow related to 9/11. For shame.

Purge, reconcile, repeat

Another sign that Iraqi politics isn't going to stay nasty for the foreseeable future: a "reconciliation" law that is so confusingly written that it gives anyone implementing it broad discretion over which Ba'athists to get jobs, and which don't. Some formert Ba'athists are likely to lose the jobs they hold; others may or may not be hired. Given the collapse of Iraqi's economy, getting a job, any job, can be a matter of life or death.

Among other bad effects of this law, it can only add to the already swollen ranks of emigres and refugees.

Airpower is for airheads

The U.S. military conducted more than five times as many airstrikes in Iraq last year as it did in 2006, targeting al-Qaeda safe houses, insurgent bombmaking facilities and weapons stockpiles in an aggressive strategy aimed at supporting the U.S. troop increase by overwhelming enemies with air power.

So says The Washington Post a few days ago, in a credulous article about US counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq. By now, all Americans should be aware that close air support has, at best, a minor role in counterinsurgency. Insurgents don't normally make themselves easy-to-find targets. Even when you locate them, they're unlikely to be found in large numbers, huddled together in easy-to-bomb clumps. And, of course, there's the continued problem of political backlash from bombing suspected guerrilla locations, since bystanders often lose the property, their limbs, or their lives during the attack.

A five-fold increase in air-to-ground attacks is not, therefore, a sign of progress. It's a sign of desperation, the only measure that the US military has--particularly given the pressure for results in the recent escalation.

Since the insurgent groups are not complete morons, they have taken countermeasures, after years of fighting, to blunt US airpower. Not every group is as smart as every other group, but in general, you won't find them marching around the Iraqi countryside in large groups, waiting to be annihilated.

Any weapons caches or bomb factories are also dispersed enough so that no single attack, or even a series of attacks, will completely eliminate them. Even if the attacks are the result of better intelligence, is bombing a safehouse used by the Army of the Mahdi or Al Qaeda in Iraq (these groups have names, by the way) the best way to get rid of them? Or even start a clear-and-secure operation against them?

Colin Kahl, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University who studies the Iraq war, said airstrikes rose in 2007 because of a combination of increased U.S. operations and a realization that air power can have a strong psychological effect on the enemy.

"Part of this is announcing our presence to the adversary," said Kahl, who recently returned from a trip to the air operations center. "Across this calendar year you will see a reduction in U.S. forces, so there will be fewer troops to support Iraqi forces. One would expect a continued level of airstrikes because of offensive operations, and as U.S. forces begin to draw down you may see even more airstrikes."

Apparently, we are fighting a war against insurgents who don't read the newspapers, or are too stupid to draw conclusions about the staying power of the United States. Therefore, no amount of "announcing our presence to the adversary" matters if the guerrillas conclude they can out-wait the United States and the Iraqi government.

If, instead of "announcing our presence," the air strikes are intended to knock some Sunni and Shi'ite insurgent groups temporarily off-balance, while Iraqi forces assume larger operational responsibility, why not just say it? More corporate PR-ish announcements merely corrode trust between the US government and the electorate that much further.

Blackwater gives you gas

In 2005, Blackwater contractors dropped teargas cannisters to clear a checkpoint of a snarl of people and cars. Armchair Generalist provides some important extra information that the NY Times article lacks. (Like knowing that CS and tear gas are the same thing.)

Using CS to clear a traffic jam, of all things, is definitely reckless, unjustified, and inhumane. Equally  frightening is imagining some panicked contractors tossing tear gas into the middle of a Ramadi intersection, where  Iraqis and Americans are involved in a confrontation.

Iraq for Iraqis

From this morning's Washington Post, bold new ideas in American policy about Iraq:

In the year since President Bush announced he was changing course in Iraq with a troop "surge" and a new strategy, U.S. military and diplomatic officials have begun their own quiet policy shift. After countless unsuccessful efforts to push Iraqis toward various political, economic and security goals, they have decided to let the Iraqis figure some things out themselves.

Of course, US Iraq strategy--erect and support a friendly, stable government capable of holding the country together--depended from the very beginning on "letting the Iraqis figure some things out for themselves." According to the Post, the impetus for this new policy is the failure of the American-devised benchmarks. If the Iraqi government can't meet goals we set for them, why not let them set the goals for themselves?

Given the realities of Iraq, this policy is an eminently practical approach at a regional level, and probably doomed at the national level. At the level of a province, city, or town, leaders have a decent chance of first agreeing on what these objectives might be, and then taking steps, with American assistance, to achieve them. A lot depends on the peculiarities of each situation: one town may have two competing factions which refuse to work with one another; a different town might not experience such divisions.

Sadly, the process of sectarian cleansing that has occurred does make it easier for local groups to reach consensus, since people will not be as fearful that adherents of some other branch of Islam were getting more than they deserved out of the deal. Of course, the long-term survival of Iraq as a country depends on defusing these religious tensions; Iraqis will have a smaller opportunity to achieve local amity before taking this reconciliation to the national stage.

At a national level--which is where crucial decisions about the oil industry, counterinsurgency strategy, and other critical matters need to be made--Iraqi-driven goals, timetables, and metrics are less feasible. The highest plane of Iraqi politics still summarizes and intensifies sectarian anxieties, factional rivalries, and violent disputes.

Still, it's not all bad news. Being the patron of a government beseiged by guerrillas is a tricky dance between public and private positions. Publicly, the United States has to appear to support the Iraqi leaders crafting their own approach. Privately, the US will exercise its leverage to steer these Iraqi leaders in what American officials think is the right direction.

This dance will be harder to continue without stumbling in the US Congress even more than Iraq itself. Legislators from both parties are skeptical of Iraqi national leaders, after nearly five years of infighting and paralysis. Members of the Senate and House have additional doubts about members of the Bush Administration and some top officers in the US military. Leaving aside the people actually working in Iraq, do their bosses in Washington understand what's the right course for Iraq? Do they even have a clear picture of where this road leads? These parallel lines of questioning will dominate the discussion of "Iraqization" in 2008.

P.S. Does anyone else think it's odd that an article about how Iraqis are supposed to be determining their own destiny includes no quotes from Iraqis?

The hole in the Iraq war budget

After looking at the staggering cost of the Iraq war budget, Armchair Generalist is surprised that the Army's portion consumes only one-third of the total. What's in all the rest? Many of the line items mentioned in the Washington Post article--for example, $500 million for local development projects--consume only a fraction of the $81 billion proposed for 2008.

Private contractors certainly take a big share. By 2007, KBR alone had already received
$19 billion in contracts. With about 120,000 personnel in the theater, and other support staff also included in the cost, private companies (including, but not limited to, approximately 30,000+ mercenaries), the US government is paying a lot of money to people who aren't American soldiers in uniform. Even the military intelligence part of the proposed Iraq budget,  $3.7 billion for the whole year, isn't exclusively, or even mostly, payments to US government employees. As in other areas of intelligence, private contractors play a very big role in military intelligence operations in Iraq.

The more overt part of the proposed Iraq budget is the hefty increase. The total cost jumps from $72 to $81 billion. The monthly cost increase from $12 billion to $15 billion.  In contrast, the total cost of Operation DESERT STORM was $61 billion--and at least we knew what we were getting for that investment of money, materiel, and lives.

Poisonous words

Armchair Generalist has a short review of Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja that's worth reading. As you might expect, the book adds depth and complexity to our understanding of one of the signature events of the last few decades, Iraq's use of chemical weapons against its own population. By "depth," I mean details that show how countries develop and use chemical arsenals. By "complexity," I mean the larger story around a particular incident, including the US government's willingness to turn a blind eye to Iraq's chemical weapons program during the 1980s, when containment of Iran was the bigger priority.

A side note: we've yet to come to grips, morally and practically, with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. A sure sign is when you don't know what to call something: are they weapons of mass destruction? Not exactly, since chemical and biological weapons might be used "tactically" (i.e., in a very limited scope on the battlefield), and not just "strategically" (intended for mass destruction). Is it better to call them unconventional weapons? It depends on the context, perhaps. For national militaries, they certainly are a different category than small arms, tanks, and helicopters. However, for anyone in the business of inspiring terror (governments and private organizations may both apply), they're just another kind of terror weapon, with particular advantages and disadvantages.

Maybe it's not worth trying to lump them together at all--except in the contexts, such as proliferation of them as terror weapons, when they do inspire a shared abhorrence. If we choose a term that names but encapsulates all of them, such as CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear). Unfortunately, naming all of them begs the question, how are these things alike?

If you can't name something effectively, good luck on managing it.

Another day in Hobbesville

A short time ago, the possibility of Turkish military attacks into the nominal territory of Iraq was front-page news. Now, the reality of regular air and artillery strikes on suspected PKK positions only merits page 14 coverage in The Washington Post. If anyone needs another sign of how wrecked the Iraqi polity is, there you go.

Thanks for the gift, but...

An important rule of counterinsurgency is, Gifts that the recipient does not want, or does not need, will never win "hearts and minds."

Case in point: a $38 million accounting system for the Iraqi government, which for the last year, no one in the Finance Ministry is using. Obviously, the Finance Ministry needs accounting. However, it wasn't necessarily ready for state-of-the-art accounting software. Or, perhaps, the problem was the fashion in which American contractors and officials delivered this system, which failed to convince Finance Ministry's employees that this particular system would work for them.

Either way, $38 million is a lot of money to waste learning a basic lesson about "hearts and minds."

The missing WMD report

Armchair Generalist asks an important question: Now that the Democrats control Congress, where's the second half of the WMD report?

Sending bullets, not men

As I was saying in "The captains' war," counterinsurgency can't succeed without trust. Needless to say, if you can't establish trust with a general in the Green Zone, you really can't establish trust with an A-10 pilot dropping bombs on your neighborhood. The increased dependence on "aerial counterinsurgency" is, like dependence on "private security firms," a natural outgrowth of not having enough of the right kind of forces for the mission in Iraq.