Arms and influence

Prisoners and ticking bombs

IN THE NEWS
Another unchallenged assumption about counterterrorism, akin to the "war like no other" myth, is the idea that terrorist attacks are always just about to happen. When you have a suspected terrorist in custody, therefore, you have the chance to prevent imminent bloodshed.

Case in point: the recently-leaked memos from White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez. Probably less spicy than other details, but no less important, is this passage:

"The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians, and the need to try terrorists for war crimes such as wantonly killing civilians."

Once again, the implication is, "If you've nabbed a suspected terrorist, you may be racing against the clock to prevent an attack. What do you do?" Abu Ghraib has now made famous the "ticking bomb" standard for deciding whether to suspend the normal restrictions on prisoner interrogation.

But how imminent is a terrorist attack? In some cases, such as laying mines on a convoy route, not a lot of preparation is needed. However, the normal terrorist attack takes weeks, months, even years to plan and execute. A Palestinian suicide bombers has to be recruited, indoctrinated and trained. The bomber then waits to receive instructions about the target the terrorist planners want to hit, records a farewell video, and then goes on the mission. Sometimes, the situation looks less promising or more dangerous than expected, so the terrorists scrub the mission. The whole process takes at least several weeks, usually longer.

The two World Trade Center attacks, of course, each required years to plan and execute. Naturally, right after 9/11, many Americans were worried about follow-up attacks. However, unless these attacks had been planned long in advance in conjunction with 9/11, they weren't going to happen--and they didn't.

The Geneva Conventions were written, of course, with conventional war in mind. However, the "ticking bomb" standard applies more to conventional conflicts like World War II or the Korean War than to terrorism.

During the Battle of the Bulge, American GIs regularly captured prisoners. The stakes were high: if the Germany army had broken through in the Ardennes forest and made it all the way to Antwerp, the entire Allied war effort would have been thrown off-track. US troops were surrounded in Bastogne, and American soldiers were dying every day in the battle. English-speaking German commandos, dressed in American uniforms, were causing confusion behind enemy lines, changing road signs, re-directing traffic, and spreading misinformation.

Every German soldier captured potentially had information that could save lives at that very moment. How many troops did the Germans have? How short were they on fuel? Where were their supply depots? What orders did each unit have? How many commandos were operating behind US lines, and how could they be identified?

Every answer received could save lives. However, the Geneva Conventions rightly condemn the mistreatment of enemy prisoners, from al Qaeda to the German SS, precisely at a moment like the Battle of the Bulge. That's when bombs are not only ticking, but exploding all around you.

Postscript: In the Battle of the Bulge, 19,000 Americans died. On 9/11, nearly 3.000 Americans and citizens of other countries died. The casualty statistics aren't the entire story, obviously, but they do help gain perspective.

World stage? Right this way, Mr. Zarqawi...

IN THE NEWS
CNN quotes a senior military official who blames the assassination of Izzedine Salim. president of the Iraqi Governing Council, on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I'm not sure why anyone in the CPA, CENTCOM, or the Bush Administration would want to depict Zarqawi as Public Enemy #1, since that would be a blatant admission that Operation Enduring Freedom has completely backfired.

As I outlined in my previous post, Zarqawi is the leader of Ansar al-Islam, a junior-league Taliban that had been based in northern Iraq before the invasion. Now, Zarqawi is reported to be Nicholas Berg's executioner in the infamous decapitation video, and I think it's not farfetched to include Ansar al-Islam on the list of leading suspects for the unsuccessful sarin gas attack on a US convoy two days ago.

Let's remove sarin scenario from the table. For the moment, we'll take at face value the Bush Administration's contention that Zarqawi is behind both the Berg and Salim assassinations. That would mean that...

• The United States passed on at least one chance to kill Zarqawi personally.


• We also had a good opportunity to cripple or destroy the entire Ansar al-Islam organization before the invasion. The group was confined to northern Iraq, the very region where we were the occupying power helping to defend the Kurds.

And, here's the clincher...

• By invading Iraq and mishandling the occupation, the Bush Administration gave Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his group a far bigger stage on which to operate. In fact, the last several days have shown that Ansar al-Islam--once bottled up in a corner of Iraq, raging at the Kurdish authorities and Saddam Hussein--now has the world stage on which to play, and the United States as its chief target.

We're not fighting a war on terror--that's a quixotic effort. However, we shouldn't be helping terrorist groups (our real adversary) spread terror. Nor should we be giving them greater freedom of action. Nor should we give them greater opportunity to kill Americans or our allies.

The war on terrorists vs. the invasion of Iraq

IN THE NEWS
The torture story is so big and nasty that it threatens to blot out other news--including important events in the war against terrorists. Case in point is the following chain of events that are being reported as if one didnt have anything to do with the other. It's a confusing picture, unless you look at the entire chain, and not each link separately.

• Before the invasion, a small Islamist terrorist group, Ansar al-Islam, operated in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq. Ansar al-Islam, which collaborated with al Qaeda, identified the Baathist regime and the Kurdish government as its primary enemies. The group tried to assassinate one of the Kurdish leaders, and ironically would not have had freedom of action in northern Iraq if not for the US and UN cordon sanitaire against the Iraqi army. Ansar al-Islam tried to brew up chemical and biological weapons in a crude lab in Sergat (also reported as Kirma); whether their target would be the Kurds or the Baathists wasn't known.


• After the invasion of Afghanistan, Ansar al-Islam leaders contemplate an attack on US troops. The attack doesn't materialize, in part because of a disagreement within the group.


• Before the invasion of Iraq, the United States had ample opportunity to attack Ansar al-Islam, including the Sergat facility. Since the United States was already committed to defending the Kurds in this region, any attacks on Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq would not have generated the kind of international backlash that Operation Enduring Freedom created.


• During his famous UN briefing laying out the case for invading Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the Sergat weapons lab as evidence of the need to invade. What he didn't say, obviously, was that the Saddam Hussein's regime had nothing to do with Ansar al-Islam, and was likely as anyone to be the victim of an Ansar al-Islam biological or chemical attack.


• Prior to the invasion, the United States also had an opportunity to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Ansar al-Islam, also reported to be actively coordinating his own operations with al Qaeda's. Continuing a trend, the White House decided not to seize the moment, since assassinating Zarqawi would imply that the United States could limit its military intervention to something less than a full invasion.


• The United States invaded Iraq. When the 173rd Airborne division occupied Sergat, US troops find the Ansar al-Islam facility abandoned. Ansar al-Islam fighters apparently retreated into Iran.


• The insurgency in Iraq began. American troops are attacked in a variety of ways, including road-side bombs. Ansar al-Islam, having slipped back into Iraq, joined the insurgency.


• Masked Islamic militants executed Nicholas Berg, an American telecommunications specialist working in Iraq. To maximize the horror of the incident, the militants videotaped his decapitation and distribute it to the world media. According to many reports, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi actually performed the decapitation.


• A road-side bomb detonated in an unsuccessful attack on an American convoy. The 155mm artillery shell contained sarin, a nerve agent. (It's the same chemical that the Aum Shinrikiyo doomsday cult released several years ago in the Tokyo subway.) How the attackers got the sarin--found it in a pre-1991 Iraqi military cache, manufactured it themselves, or purchased it from some other group--cannot yet be determined.

What do all the previous points have to do with the last point? As of today, we can't be sure who was responsible for the sarin attack, or how they were able to pull it off (as unsuccessful in killing anyone as it was). What can we say?

• There is some likelihood, given Ansar al-Islam's escalated war against the US occupation, that they were responsible for this attack. The use of sarin doesn't finger Ansar al-Islam definitively, but their interest in WMDs for terrorist attacks adds to this suspicion.
• There is no reason to conclude that the sarin attack is absolute proof that Saddam Hussein's regime had an active WMD program or stockpiles of potent chemical weapons.
• The Bush Administration put the full-scale invasion of Iraq ahead of other priorities, including eliminating Ansar al-Islam.

If we're trying to prevent further 9/11s, we should be focusing on groups like Ansar al-Islam. If we're trying to keep a future 9/11 from being an attack with WMDs, it seems, once again, we should be focusing on groups like Ansar al-Islam.

Torture and convicting terrorists

IN THE NEWS
Earlier, I posted several reasons why torture doesn't work. Today's Slate has an excellent article about the major legal reason why torture is a bad, bad idea: if we torture a suspect, whatever evidence we extract from him--evidence needed to convict him--will be inadmissable.

The war against al Qaeda isn't "a war like no other" until we've tried the normal means first. After 9/11, the Bush Administration went immediately to extraordinary means, from the PATRIOT Act to the special access program (SAP) that sanctioned "rough" interrogation. Apparently our collective memory didn't extend to the 1990s, when the normal trial courts convicted the group that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, including Sheik Omar Abdel-Ramen and Ramzi Yousef. Rather than being impotent and obsolete, normal police and judicial procedures did the job. Somehow, a very large number of people forgot that happy conclusion.

The very real risk now is that the sanctioned torture of "high value" suspects threatens greater harm than has been done already. Assuming interrogators did get the proverbial "smoking gun" from someone in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, how could this evidence lead to a conviction? Only if the US government decides to bend and break the law even further.

I think it's time for everyone to step back from the heated discussion of the day and ask the following question:

How many terrorist attacks has the United States government thwarted since 9/11, and how many attacks did it prevent in the four years prior to 9/11??

By now, the electorate should be demanding an answer to this question--particularly in an election year. Somewhere in the files must be at least one example that, if the White House decided to release the information, would walk us through the ways in which traditional and post-9/11 procedures helped prevent bloodshed. We should also be able to look at aggregate data, like the number of suspects arrested, the number of convictions made, or the number of planned attacks stopped.

"Trust us" isn't just unconvincing--it's against the democratic spirit. An election year is the appropriate time to take stock of our real, measurable progress against terrorist groups.

If the White House can't provide this information, or if the measures of progress turn out to be worse after 9/11 than before, than Phillip Carter's argument in Slate is dead on the mark: the Bush Administration has done more to undermine counterterrorism than strengthen it.

Another vital counterterrorism tool discarded

IN THE NEWS
Whenever Seymour Hersh publishes a new article on counterterrorism or Iraq, it's a must-read. This article is no exception.

A lot of blogs and op-ed pieces are going to focus on the chain of command and "who knew what when" issues, so I don't need to pile on. I just want to add some background that, if you haven't been following defense and intelligence matters for a while, you might miss.

The core of today's article is how the special access program (SAP), a tool crafted during the Cold War. SAPs have been used only when the deepest secrecy and "plausible deniability" were required. As you might expect, the US government didn't use SAPs very often--both because of the riskiness of the operations they sanctioned, and the possibilities for abuse.

The important details I'll add on top of what Hersh has to say about SAPs is how they played a part in submarine espionage. In these SAP-sanctioned operations, American submariners were ordered to sneak into Murmansk harbor, the chief bastion of the Soviet navy. Sneaking under the hulls of some of the most heavily-armed warships in the world, these specially-fitted subs would maneuver over an underwater communications cable. Divers would then swim out from the sub, attach a bulky tapping device to the cable, and then return to the ship. The submarine would then stealthily leave the harbor, with the crew praying that the formidable anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities of the Soviet navy would continue to miss them until they were home free in the open ocean.

Obviously, one misstep might have unthinkable consequences. The submarine crews were therefore under orders to scuttle the vessel--killing themselves in the process--if they were detected.

If Hersh's account of what happened in Iraq is true, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, and Major General Geoffrey Miller are jointly responsible for squandering a dangerous but necessary tool in America's secret wars. They cavalierly misused SAPs so that untrained reservists would have greater license to interrogate petty criminals, the relatives of suspected insurgents, and luckless people just picked up by the military.

I'm not kidding. I wish I were. I commend you to read the article and draw your own conclusions.

As I've argued in other posts--such as this one about declarations of war, and this one about the notion that we're fighting "a war like no other"--we have the Constitution, international conventions, US laws, and a basic moral compass for good reasons. All of these are supposed to help us in the times of greatest urgency; we're not supposed to be chucking them aside because they momentarily seem inconvenient. I'm tired of having to make this same point over and over again, but apparently, far too many people in the US government and electorate need to keep hearing it, if it ever reaches them.

The grand strategic level

THEORY
We’ll start at the highest plane of strategy and work our way down. Since the “official posts” on this blog started with the political objectives of warmaking, grand strategy fits into that discussion naturally.

The grand strategy of any combatant includes the core interests and goals, which then guide the general thrust of what the government or group does as a whole. Grand strategy might sound like an extremely vague concept, but if you look at a few case studies, you can see that its contours are actually quite distinct.

Ancient Rome’s grand strategy, for example, consisted of the following components:

• Rome, either as an empire or a republic, saw itself surrounded by hostile powers, including some at an equivalent level of civilization, but also many barbarians.


• Rome could conquer its “great power” rivals, from the weak (Ptolemaic Egypt) to the strong (Carthage).


• Rome seized territories where barbarians were currently settled, but it could not eliminate the barbarian threat altogether (particularly given the frequent barbarian migrations from regions far out of Rome’s reach).


• In the process of making these conquests, Rome incorporated these new provinces into its political, administrative, economic, and even religious structures. From granting Roman citizenship to the elites of newly-conquered peoples to incorporating their gods into the list of officially recognized cults, the Romans gave their former enemies a stake in the defending the ever-growing Roman domain.


• Conquests provided the slaves needed to sustain the Roman economy, and many conquered territories, such as the grain-rich Nile valley, provided other economic benefits.


• The force needed to maintain security, the legions, could be deployed permanently on the borders, or held in reserve to react to any incursions by barbarians (like the Goths) or civilized rivals (like the Parthians). The legions were supplemented by auxiliary troops from conquered peoples (slingers from the Balaeric islands, cavalry from the Sarmatians, etc.), again integrating Rome’s conquest quickly into the imperium.

It was a brilliant formula that worked for centuries, until Rome reached the limits of its expansion. Rome depended on conquests for fresh supplies of slaves; otherwise, the cheap labor the slaves provided became increasingly expensive, upsetting the assumptions under which the entire Roman economy was based. In the late empire, this formula—Rome’s grand strategy—had to change. Rather than focusing on conquest, Rome instead pursued a new policy of turning control of its provinces over to the barbarian leaders oath-bound to Rome. Re-interpreted pieces of Roman law provided a sugar coating for this process of contraction and retrenchment.

The grand strategy of the United States during the Cold War was also easy to define. The mobilizations needed to fight the Axis powers gave both the United States and the Soviet Union new strength on the world stage. At the same time, the war created a European power vacuum previously filled by other great powers—England, France, and Germany—now devastated by the war. American and Soviet power filled that vacuum. According to many historians of the Cold War, the frictions of these two new superpowers were as natural as those between Athens and Sparta (as Thucydides observed, the inevitable rivalry between a great land power and a great sea power). The ideological conflict between democratic capitalism and totalitarian socialism deepened the conflict. The introduction of nuclear weapons made the mutual anxieties absolute.

The United States, therefore, had a clear grand strategy to pursue:

• Continue the traditional pursuit of American prosperity, liberty, and security.


• To protect security, the United States must prevent a nuclear war.


• To preserve prosperity and liberty, and to keep the balance of power from tipping in the wrong direction, the United States must contain Soviet political and military expansion. The Iron Curtain, therefore, could not move one inch further into Europe.


• As George Kennan famously argued in the X telegram, the United States then had to play the waiting game. Eventually, the Soviet Union would implode from its own “internal contradictions” (to borrow a bit of Marxist terminology), and the Cold War would come to an end.

Different presidents tinkered with the details of American containment strategy, and certainly they fought this conflict at the lower levels of strategy in different ways. However, policies as different as Eisenhower’s New Look and Kennedy’s flexible response differed never really challenged the grand strategy of containment.

Grand strategy for Rome explains how the Romans defined their interests and responded to threats. If you’re curious why the Romans bothered to invade the British Isles, but looking at the grand strategy of Rome, it made sense. Grand strategy for the United States during the Cold war helped the nation adapt to important changes like the Chinese Revolution, and then later, the Sino-Soviet split. Whatever happened in Asia, the same grand strategic principles applied.

As a vessel of important strategic decisions that needs to be filled, grand strategy has a definite shape and purpose. What may not be altogether clear, however, is if anyone has bothered to fill this vessel.

PRACTICE
Many foreign policy analysts like John Lewis Gaddis and John Mearsheimer said, in the 1990s, that we would miss the Cold War. Given the constant nuclear threat under which Americans had lived for generations, that was a shocking statement to make. Their point, stated provocatively, was that Americans would miss the clarity of the Cold War. No one really struggled to understand the correct grand strategy for dealing with the Soviet threat; grand strategy in the new, post-Cold War age was a lot harder to figure out.

It might even be fair to say that, after the collapse of the Soviet empire, the United States had no grand strategy. If we use the terms national security and grand strategy interchangeably, which would be fair to do, the national security policy of the Bush and Clinton presidencies didn’t clearly define what national security really meant. Both Administrations tried to sell a new national security policy to the American public, but it’d be hard to make a convincing case that they succeeded. (In fact, I’d argue that the lack of a national security policy helped Clinton win the 1992 election. Bush may have won the Gulf War, but it didn’t seem like a great victory in an even larger struggle.)

Events conspired against Bush and Clinton. After the recession of the early Nineties, the United States enjoyed a level of prosperity that didn’t inspire much insecurity. Neither did the minor conflicts in the Balkans, Somalia, Haiti, and elsewhere. These seemed like the “little wars” of the 19th and early 20th centuries: however well or poorly we handled these affairs, they seemed clearly peripheral to us, easily kept at arms length from anything really vital. The one major conflict that did threaten our core interests, the war with Iraq, was such a seemingly easy victory for the United States and its allies that we believed we could rest on our superpower laurels, having established the supremacy of American military power. The 1993 attack on the World Trade Center didn’t succeed, and two years later, the Oklahoma City bombing made terrorism seem like an unavoidable part of both international and domestic politics—worth policing, but not worth elevating to a higher level of threat. Until 9/11, terrorists did not replace the Soviets as the new enemy.

According to many analysts, 9/11 forced clarity on us. We suddenly realized our blind spot for a very serious threat. International terrorist groups like al Qaeda could hurt our core national interests, of which the security of life and limb was the most basic. At the same time, we breathed a collective sigh of relief that the attack wasn’t worse than it already was. Americans realized that hijackers could have hit a target of supreme economic, military, or political importance, such as the White House—and, if they had been even luckier, more people could have died.

As I’ve argued earlier, 9/11 made us angrier, but it didn’t necessarily make us smarter. Because we feel that 9/11 forces us to have a better grand strategy, doesn’t mean that we do. National security, as someone once famously observed, merely identifies what makes us feel insecure. We can easily misidentify the things that should inspire insecurity (as we did with terrorism), or we may feel too much or too little of this emotion.

Some consensus about the new American notion of national security has formed, and I do think it makes sense at its most basic level. This new grand strategy looks something like this:

• As we did at the beginning of the Cold War, we must continue our traditional quest for American prosperity, liberty, and security.


• Unfortunately, the very things that make modern societies like ours highly successful—openness, mobility, communications, interdependence—also make them vulnerable. Just as the New York blackout in the Seventies showed how the failure of one moving part, the electrical grid, could bring all the machinery of modern society to a standstill, a deliberate attack on some part could threaten everything and everyone.


• Anti-American terrorist groups seriously threaten us. They understand our vulnerabilities as well as we do.


• The very nature of these groups—tied to no place in particular, clever and ruthless, organized in ways that make it difficult to assault them root and branch—make it imperative that we devote more attention to them.


• Given the terrorists’ modus operandi, it’s hard to believe that they wouldn’t use “unconventional weapons”—nuclear, chemical, and biological—if possible. The Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack on the Tokyo subway is, according to this view, the harbinger of worse things to come.


• Therefore, the United States needs to move quickly, not just to contain or eliminate terrorist groups. but to deprive them of these doomsday weapons.

We can debate all these points, but for sake of this discussion, I’m going to take them as a given. If these points define the new US grand strategy, whatever we do at the lower levels of strategy have to conform to these guidelines. Whether they do, of course, will be the subject of the next several postings.

Levels of strategy

THEORY
Nearly every book about the Vietnam War written in the last twenty years includes the following exchange between Harry Summers, an Army colonel, and one of his counterparts in the North Vietnamese Army. "You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield," Summers said. The North Vietnamese colonel tartly replied, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."

The fact that the United States won all the battles it fought, but still lost the Vietnam War, was the inspiration for Summers to write On Strategy, a Clausewitzian critique of US strategy in the war. This observation about the Vietnam War is also an inspirational point for starting a discussion of the levels of strategy. As in Vietnam, what we're doing today in Iraq and Afghanistan may be successful at one level, but a complete disaster at the higher levels--the ones that ultimately determine whether we win or lose.

There's a lot about Summers' analysis that's flawed (for example, he got Clausewitz's notion of friction all wrong). It's a good book, but there's a better one for the topic at hand: Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace by Edward Luttwak, A must-read books for anyone interested in the subject of this blog. Strategy is a distillation of many classic ideas about military strategy, and Luttwak mixes in some very thought-provoking observations of his own.

This subject deserves a lot of explanation, but I don't want to write one overlong post about it. Instead, I'll break the discussion into one level per post. That approach fits the blog medium better than a mega-post, and I'll actually get the whole thing written faster and better in small chunks. So stay tuned, Dear Reader, for this series of critical postings. Believe me, once you digest these concepts, you'll never look at warfare the same way again.

The levels of strategy are...

• Grand strategic.


• Theater.


• Operational.


• Tactical.


• Technical.

I'll explain each in turn, and I'll provide a running series of examples to illustrate them. Since the Chinese civil war provides an excellent overall example, I'll wrap up things up with that case study.

For now, keep in mind the following point: the difference between victory and defeat often turns on whether efforts at one level actually contribute to the other levels. The success story of the blitzkrieg wasn't just a story of fine German engineering, manifested in the panzers that slashed through Poland, the Low Countries, and France. The blitzkrieg depended not only on the tank, but also how it fit into a combined arms approach that linked armor, infantry, and air power through radio communications. In the first two years of the Russo-German conflict, the Wehrmacht actually faced an enemy with better tanks. Aficianados of WWII armor will tell you that the Soviet T-34 was easily superior to the German PzKW III and IV, as measured by firepower, speed, and protection. However, the Germans fought better with their tanks than the Soviets did, which made it possible for the Wehrmacht to stop just short of Moscow in 1941, and just short of the Volga in 1942.

Every science starts with classification. Putting names to things, identifying the differences among them, is a critical exercise whether you're a student of entymology, astronomy, or military history. Since classification makes the overall picture of what you're studying more clear, it's often the catalyst for inspiration. Classifying the differences among birds in the Galapagos Islands gave Darwin the mental nudge the theory of evolution. Classifying the different species of military strategy can also inspire Big Thoughts, as we'll see.

PRACTICE
If you've read the earlier posts on theory and practice, you've seen that I don't have much patience with the notion that Do something! is a good guide to action. Nothing we'll discuss on this blog will put a stake through the heart of that great fallacy than this discussion of the levels of strategy. Do something! is meaningless, once you see that doing a fantastic job at one level of strategy may be irrelevant to the ones that ultimately decide victory or defeat. In fact, success victory at one level can blind you to the real problems brewing at other levels, as the Vietnam example illustrates. It's natural for people to look for signs of hope when American soldiers are dying, but the signs may be pointing in the wrong direction.

US and allied forces did a stellar job invading Iraq. The list of what made this victory possible at the theater level of strategy is long and familiar: superior equipment, outstanding training and organization, experience fighting the Iraqi army in Operation Desert Storm...Reading or listening to the news, we've heard the pundits run through this list over and over again.

But what did we win? I hope this discussion of the levels of strategy will help answer that critical question.

Release the photos

IN THE NEWS
In trying to figure out how to handle the second wave of Abu Ghraib photos, there may be nothing but bad choices. However, releasing the photos is the best among these painful options.

It's entirely possible that the release of the photos will trigger more anti-American violence. The photos may have motivated the execution of Daniel Berg, merely by providing a fig leaf of respectability to cover naked brutality.

It's also entirely possible that we're making these assumptions without any reference to the Iraqis themselves. If you follow any of the news sources from the Middle East (or, for that matter, many places outside the US), you'll notice that the Iraqis are already speculating about the still-secret forms of torture and humiliation. The average Iraqi doesn't have to exercise the imagination too much, since many released prisoners are talking about their experiences in Abu Ghraib.

Americans may have a hard time imagining torture without the aid of pictures, but Iraqis certainly don't. As the Bush Administration has repeatedly stated, torture rooms were as much a fixture of the Baathist period as Elks Club meeting halls in the US. The damage is already done, first by turning Abu Ghraib into a detention facility instead of destroying it as a symbol of the Hussein regime, then by slowly converting it back into a torture chamber.

Here's a formula certain to worsen the "hearts and minds" campaign in Iraq: much like the Hussein regime, the American occupiers are loathe to admit their crimes. Top leaders, either in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) or the US government, didn't release the photos--CBS News did. From the White House to Bremer's CPA office in Iraq, everyone in the US government seems to be working extremely hard to keep the truth from being exposed.

That's a more damaging message right now than the photos themselves. Many Iraqis believe the United States is hiding a lot more than just the torture photos. The people we had hoped will welcome us as liberators now worry about American plans for the permanent basing of US troops (particularly now that we've left the Saudi Arabian facilities), the neo-colonialist domination of the Iraqi economy, and other well-hidden agendas.

Many or all of these concerns may turn out to be unjustified. However, the more secretive the US government is--and it's being secretive about nearly everyting it can--the more these fears will escalate. An Iraqi's trust in our good intentions may collapse if all we can do to butress it is send out press releases full of pablum about "bringing democracy." The radical Islamists claims that the United States just wanted to establish an outpost in the Middle East may suddenly make more sense to that average Iraqi. How we act right now paints as vivid a picture as anything stored in a digital camera currently held in an evidence room.

Of course, a real concern for the Bush Administration and Congress is how the American public will respond. It's not just the pictures and videos themselves that are damaging. It's not even the idea that someone in the chain of command encouraged, ignored, or even ordered what happened at Abu Ghraib. It's the very justified concern that the abuses weren't limited to one prison in Iraq, but were happening at secret facilities throughout the world. The same conditions that led to the Abu Ghraib offenses possible exist at all these facilities. The same reports of abuse, including telling details--stripping captives naked, taunting them about having sex with animals, etc.--echoed in these accounts.

Americans aren't stupid. We don't need the pictures to horrify us. We do need our government to stop treating both ourselves and the Iraqis equally like children. If there are steps needed to protect the privacy of the innocent, or avoid humiliating the Abu Ghraib victims further, then digitally mask the faces. The same technique can protect anyone currently involved, as a defendant or witness, in a criminal investigation.

But please, please release all the evidence immediately. Now is the time, before the speculation and suspicion get any worse than they are already.

Maybe the choices are all bad. But one choice--disclosure--better fits "the real America" to which Bush, Rumsfeld, Myers, et al. allude than all the others.

Showing your hand

THEORY
Power—especially the hard variety—is something that by nature has a limited quantity. In fact, by using power, you give all kinds of evidence about how much you really have. Once the OPEC countries demonstrated how they could use oil prices as an economic weapon, the United States learned how vulnerable it was to this tool of extortion, and could it could defend itself through improved gas efficiency, the maintenance of a strategic reserve, and other measures.

The limits of military power, of course, are sometimes the easiest to measure. The Nazi war machine, as fearsome as it was, reached its limits at the English Channel and the Volga River. The frontier of Roman power in Britain had a very visible marker, Hadrian’s Wall.

Governments often choose, however, not to expend their military power to their furthest limits, or even at all. Withholding force maintains the mystery of how much you really have—a question that you may not be able to answer accurately yourself, and certainly don’t want to learn in the worst possible way. Threatening attack, or escalating attack, therefore can be more effective than throwing all the firepower you can at an enemy.

Sometimes, withholding force doesn’t work. Johnson may have thought that the North Vietnamese would have understood how bad things could get if the war continued to proceed up the escalation ladder, so keeping military action at the lower rungs made sense on paper. It didn’t succeed, however, in forcing the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table—though later action, such as the US response during the Easter Offensive, did work. In the 1990s, US air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs and the Serbian government did bring the enemy to the bargaining table, without having to deploy US ground troops.

If you can withhold some or all of the force you can exercise, it’s usually a good idea. Fighting on every front, exercising all of your strength, trying every strategy you have—once you’re done, you’re done.

PRACTICE
We’ve currently reached the limits of US military power at the current level of mobilization. After deploying a limited force in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military has cycled through as many units as it could, kept the Guard units in theater for as long as possible, and cancelled the planned rotations of regular units. Short of a draft, we have no further military strength to bear, unless we start “drawing down” forces in Korea, Europe, or other areas.

The US military has approximately 500,000 active duty (regular) troops, supported by 700,000 reserve and Guard units. Approximately 130,000 are stationed in Iraq, with another 50,000 in Korea, Afghanistan, and Bosnia.

We can feel how badly overextended we are now. In particular, we feel the pinch in areas where we can least afford it. Many units critical to the Iraq and Afghan wars come predominantly from outside the regular units. Approximately 95% of the psychological warfare and civic action specialists, for example, are not regulars. Logistical units, too, often come from the Guard and reserves, which was one of the temptations of “outsourcing” logistical duties to “contractors” (mercenaries) who are increasingly skittish about doing their business in Iraq.

We have, in other words, shown our hand. Not only do we know the limits of our power, so do are adversaries. The North Korean government continues to thumb its nose at us over its nuclear weapons program. Any possible threat to go to war with them over nuclear proliferation—as we did in 1994—is not what it used to be.

Reality doesn’t fit the Richard Perle and David Frum theory: fight a war to show how powerful we are; threaten war with other adversaries; if they aren’t impressed with our power yet, use it on them, too. Repeat this process as often as necessary to end the threats to us.

Leave aside the backlash this approach might create, and the certainty that, even if we were to reinstate the draft, we could not fight every war, everywhere that we feel threatened. The problem of “showing our hand” alone is good reason not to go this route. Our enemies will learn how much strength we have, and how to fight us. (For example, there’s good evidence that the Iraqi insurgents learned from how the Taliban and al Qaeda adapted to US tactics in Afghanistan.)

Showing your hand is a lousy way to play poker, and it’s an abysmal way to protect vital national interests.

"A war like no other"

THEORY
Now that we're nearing the third anniversary of 9/11, we've certainly had enough time to think more clearly about some of the assumptions we've made about what that tragic event actually signified and justified.

Most of all, we're overdue for a re-examination of the following statement:

"And the truth is, this will be a war like no other our nation has faced." (Donald Rumsfeld, 09/18/01)

We've heard echoes of this sentiment ever since 9/11. Most people assume that the war--whatever it is--has no precedent, either for us, or for the entire world.

Because 9/11 was sui generis, many would argue, preventing future 9/11s requires abandoning old assumptions and tools. When someone says this, they're usually talking about are (1) using violence, or its threat, much more freely and intensely than we have in the past, (2) removing legal, Constitutional, and traditional restraints on when and how we use force, and (3) removing these same comstraints when dealing with prisoners accused of being terrorists.

In a way, the consequences of this philosophy circle back on its justifications. If we invade other countries without our traditional allies, aggressively pursue and assassinate terrorist leaders, and detain people without counsel (or even contact with the outside world), we have indeed created a new reality.

But was 9/11 the trigger for "a war like no other?"

Since this notion sloshes around in an inchoate stew of unstated assumptions, it's hard to say. What made 9/11 unique, and for whom, isn't a rhetorical question. The United States since the end of the Cold War already had almost no clear concept of its own national security. It's more than a bit reckless, therefore, to think that a single event, however dramatic or horrifying, made the hard outlines of our new national interests absolutely clear. Our rage, shock, and need to respond certainly were clear--but that's it. These same passions may also blind us to reality: in our towering and justifiable rage over 9/11, we may be less able to see our real interests.

What then might the statement, a war like no other, mean?

The world has never seen a terrorist attack like what happened on 9/11.
This isn't true. Bombs have gone off in London tube stations and Paris shopping malls--attacks designed to kill innocent civilians, not military targets. Red Brigade terrorists kidnapped and killed a former Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, in 1978. At the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Palestinian terrorists took the Israeli Olympic team hostage and slaughtered them. No one had successfully used airliners as flying bombs before, but certainly, terrorists recently tried at least once to crash an airliner into Paris. And terrorists tried to blow up one of the World Trade Center towers in 1993, with the expectation that it would topple into the other tower, destroying them both.

The United States is no longer safe from terrorist attack.
Aside from the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the United States has already suffered several incidents of terrorism, both inside and outside US borders. The FBI thwarted the "Millennium plot" in 2000. During the 1960s and 1970s, American citizens were hostages in several airline hijackings. The worst incident prior to 9/11, of course, was the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, in which 168 people died, including a large number of children in a day care facility. Since 1995, other domestic terrorists have continued to plot attacks. Some were successful (abortion clinic bombings, the Atlanta Olympics bombing, etc.), others not. Whatever the fate of Timothy McVeigh or Mohammed Atef, domestic and foreign terrorists have attacked the United States before 9/11, and continue to plan attacks since 9/11.

US citizens are now vulnerable to attack by enemies from within.
Aside from domestic terrorists, the United States has weathered many sources of violence from within its own borders, or on its frontier. Clashes with Native Americans, from the first Powhatan War to the ghost dancers, have been a sadly consistent feature of American history. After the British surrender at Yorktown, American colonists still feared Tory sympathizers whom they suspected of providing information about US troops and warships to a vengeful Britain. The Shays Rebellion was one of many incidents that made Americans fearful that the new republic would be torn apart in riot and revolt. Gang violence--the Molly Maguires' bare-knuckled intimidation of coal minors, Prohibition-era mob wars, clashes among rival Vietnamese or Cuban gangs--has also been a recurring theme in American history. And, of course, the United States fought a bloody civil war over slavery, but emerged as an intact nation.

US citizens are now vulnerable to attack from enemies from without.
That's not exactly true either. The "atom spies" cases of the 1950s were scandalous both because Americans were passing secrets to the Soviets, but also the Soviets were using these secrets to sharpen the nuclear sword against us. Foreign enemies have attacked US territory, and even burned the White House during the War of 1812. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, US marines landed in China, Nicaragua, Haiti, and elsewhere to protect American citizens during uprisings like the Boxer Rebellion. American civilians, therefore, faced a far larger threat to life and limb during the Cold War, and frequently came under fire during "little wars" in Asia and Latin America.

Al Qaeda represents a new kind of enemy.
Terrorism is hardly new. Al Qaeda might be more ruthless, clever, and organized than previous anti-American terrorist groups, but they're hardly the first. And other countries with whom we have close working relationships in counterterrorism, such as the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Egypt, Colombia, and Israel, have experience with terrorist groups as ruthless as al Qaeda, if not moreso.

Americans didn't see terrorism as a threat.
Whether or not Americans missed the warning signs, they were there. This statement--we didn't understand the terrorist threat before 9/11--condemns our own ignorance. It doesn't identify anything truly new that's a threat to us. It's the fault of the American public or American politicians that terrorism--from foreign groups like al Qaeda, or from homegrown terrorists like Timothy McVeigh--consistently appeared lower on our list of imminent dangers than perhaps it should have.

And, in spite of the feeling that we've risen to the challenge that terrorism poses, we still might not understand the threat. We may be overrating the significance of 9/11, or of al Qaeda relative to other dangers we face. Or we may misunderstand the terrorist threat altogether--correctly identifying the danger, but mistaking its sources and the best ways to fight it. 9/11 may have frightened the hell out of us, but it didn't necessarily make us smarter.

PRACTICE
I've started the discussion of "the spectrum of conflict" with this question--was 9/11 the Year Zero for the United States--because it's both an important question to address on its own, and it launches us directly into some of the critical issues about military strategy. We'll get to that second point soon enough, but for the moment, let's stick to the Year Zero idea.

As I said earlier, for many people, the break from the past that occurred on September 11, 2001, took the following form:

Because we are now fighting "a war like no other," we have to abandon old ways of fighting wars, old ways of thinking about the threats we face, even hallowed legal and Constitutional principles, in the face of the hard reality of this "war like no other."

You can question whether the second part of that thesis--counterterrorism requires not just a different American way of warfare, but almost a different America--on at least two grounds. The effectiveness of these "new ways" is highly questionable, whether or not they're justified by some new reality.

However, the "new reality" is sheer poppycock. 9/11 wasn't anything new, and it didn't signify the worst threat that we've ever faced. We've faced threats before that resembled some of the shocking aspects of al Qaeda's attack. We faced down a nuclear-powered enemy who could kill not thousands, but millions of Americans, and we patiently waited until the Soviet Union self-destructed and we exited the Cold War with our cities, military, alliances, and Constitution intact. During the early years of the republic, we feared British sympathizers and insurrectionists from within, and both Native Americans and British troops from without. Americans weren't sure the fragile republic would survive its first few decades, and the Civil War almost did wreck the nation. Terrorists are nothing new, and many of our best friends, new (Russia) and old (Britain), can (and do) tell us a lot about their own experiences fighting terrorists.

The sentiment that 9/11 signalled "a war like no other" is understandable. We were in shock, mourning both our dead and the safety we used to feel. That safety was, to some extent, illusory. But at the same time, we weren't at the mercy of dark forces, defying our understanding, capable at any moment of inflicting more pain and suffering at unthinkable levels. We made a mistake, both in downplaying the threat before 9/11, and exaggerating it since then. It's time, now, to start thinking and behaving like adults.