Arms and influence

The dilemma

IN THE NEWS

According to the Pentagon, the culprit behind the deadly attack on the US military mess tent in Mosul was not a rocket or mortar, but a suicide bomber. That fact is significant, to the extent that it defines which painful dilemma we face, but not if we face a terrible dilemma. The horns of the dilemma are quite real, and quite sharp.

The most basic operational question now is, where do American commanders deploy their forces? Force protection demands that US troops patrol, wherever they are. If they are trying to establish a safe area around a base wider at all points of the compass than the effective range of Katyusha rockets or light mortars, the troops need to patrol. If they are trying to intercept anyone on foot or in a car who may be trying to deliver a suicide bomb, they need to patrol. If they are trying to keep snipers from making harassment attacks on the bases, they need to patrol.

The dilemma is the choice between from where they will patrol, into what areas. If force protection were the top priority, American commanders would redeploy outside inhabited areas, preferring open ground where they can establish a no man's land around each base. All the technical advantages the Americans enjoy—night vision, IR vision, motion sensors, cameras, highly accurate weapons with very long ranges, on-call supporting artillery and air power—would be available. Traffic into the base would be confined to a narrow corridor, where each person passing in and out could be searched in an orderly fashion.

Of course, if the Americans were to redeploy in this fashion, they might as well not be in Iraq at all. "The mission" for now is to provide Iraqis with some respite from daily mayhem while the Iraqi security forces become a viable replacement. Surrendering the cities and towns of Iraq, a highly urbanized country, would be tantamount would be just that—surrender.

Unfortunately, as long as American troops patrol the streets and alleys of Iraq, they lose their significant technical, tactical, and operational edges over the different Iraqi insurgent and terrorist groups. Night vision doesn't peek around corners or into buildings where insurgents might lay in ambush. No amount of training protects you from getting shot in the face while your squad is clearing out a minaret, and you're unlucky enough to be on point. Artillery, tanks, and air strikes are not only militarily less effective inside a city, but they're politically counterproductive when the mission is to keep a substantial number of Iraqis supportive, or just tolerant, of the US occupation. (No election will change that reality, by the way.)

But, you may ask, what about the much-touted American skill in urban warfare? Here's where a name can be somewhat misleading, particularly if you're not familiar with how the different levels of strategy interact, and the variety of strategies at each level. The US military's skill at urban warfare is, by most measures, excellent when faced with a particular kind of opponent, fighting in a particular fashion. It's not very good when faced with certain types of enemy with much different goals and techniques. That's no slight to the Army and Marines at all, it's simply the reality of training and equipping your troops for one kind of war, and not another.

Andrew Krepinevich made the same point in his excellent and, unfortunately, not very well known book, The Army and Vietnam. The first decade or two of post-Vietnam post mortems suffered from very simplistic explanations of why the world's greatest military suffered defeat at the hands of a Third World country (North Vietnam) and its guerrilla allies (the National Liberation Front). Depending on whom you asked, the American problem was stupidity, arrogance, imperialism, back-stabbing politicians, war protesters, failure to use atomic weapons, or the tide of history. While any or all of these factors might have played a role, they didn't provide much of a military analysis of the war.

Krepinevich's point was obvious, but surprisingly, previously unexplored. The US military spent decades preparing for both nuclear and conventional war against the USSR and its Eastern European allies. Not only did the services train and equip for this scenario, but it also rewarded commanders who were part of the NATO effort. Other commanders in other theaters received fewer career benefits, so the best and the brightest naturally gravitated towards preparation for stopping the Soviet juggernaut crashing through the Fulda Gap.

The American forces on the ground had some experience with "little wars." Unfortunately, the branch that had this experience, the Marines, not only had a smaller number of troops, but also lacked the Army's power to decide the Vietnam theater, operational, and tactical strategies. When the Marines had the latitude to use their experience, such as with the combined action platoon (CAP) program, they got results. (For an insider's account of the CAP program, which can tell you a lot about how US troops should be working with "local forces" in Iraq, see Bing West's The Village.)

With the Army in charge, the ground war in Vietnam was an effort to cram an entirely different war into the NATO/Warsaw Pact mold. Familiar features of the Vietnam War, such as the omnipresent helicopters, were originally developed to fight the Soviets, not the North Vietnamese, and certainly not the Viet Cong. Helicopters were supposed to be maneuvering US troops around the highly familiar European battlefield, planting them at locations like the flanks or rear of a Soviet spearhead where they could do the most harm. In Vietnam, air mobility helped move troops quickly into "hot LZs" where other troops had "made contact" with the enemy. With the assistance of helicopter gunships and aerial spotters for air and artillery strikes, US forces could effectively clear a spot on the map of enemy troops. Unfortunately, since their services were soon needed elsewhere, for a new clash with the enemy, these same highly capable troops did not effectively secure that spot from further enemy infiltrations or attack. The effort was much like trying to hold back a flood with a broom.

Sound familiar? It should, because we're engaged in much the same exercise now in Iraq. We're trying to cram the unfamiliar enemy into a familiar mold, and it's not working. US doctrine is actually making the situation worse, both militarily and politically. Not only are we losing and increasing number of soldiers each month, both killed and wounded, but we're losing the political battle for Iraq.

That's a long way of coming back around to the topic of urban warfare, but it was an important detour. When American commanders talk about urban warfare, they're referring to an operational, tactical, and technical approach to fighting conventional or irregular forces. If we were fighting the battle of Stalingrad, our urban warfare doctrine would make eminent sense. The enemy is fighting for control of important pieces of terrain. These targets—let's start with the city of Stalingrad—easily break down into objectives for each level of command. The army commander is responsible for taking the city; a divisional commander might have complete or partial responsibility for some arbitrarily-designated zone of the city; a company commander might be ordered to seize and hold a city block. The battle for Stalingrad, not surprisingly, is a story not only about the deadly struggle between men, but the distinct urban locations for which they struggled. The "tractor works" factory, the grain elevator, the sewers, Pavlov's house, the Tsaritsa Gorge, the banks of the Volga—these clearly-identifiable locations are where the battle for Stalingrad was decided.

Similar locations exist in Fallujah, Karbala, Najaf, and Sadr City. The soldiers who fought to capture and defend these locations will never forget them. However, temporarily occupying them is no more likely to break the back of the Iraqi insurgency than the "big sweep" operations in Vietnam worked against the Viet Cong.

We're not fighting the Wehrmacht, a conventional military organization for which control of Stalingrad determined the front lines of the German invasion. We're not even fighting irregular forces like the ones we faced in Mogadishu and the Balkans. Our enemy is far less interested in terrain: rather than pointlessly dying in the siege of Fallujah, many of them simply shifted their attention elsewhere, including Mosul. Not only don't they care about their own front lines (or lack thereof), they don't care about ours. The target of their attacks isn't our military capability, which could be crippled by taking a strategic town, or killing a lot of American troops. Their goal is to make a political and psychological point, simply by being able to execute horrific attacks like the one in Mosul. These attacks are aimed at both Americans and Iraqis, and they're far easier to execute than a conventional military assault.

That's what makes our current dilemma extremely painful. In the cities, towns, and villages of Iraq, the enemy can ambush us more easily. They don't need to have control of the city to attack us; they only need to infiltrate a few people to carry out a suicide bombing, mortar attack, or roadside bombing. However, we need to keep the Iraqi population safe from the same enemy—but to do so, we have to put American troops in the most dangerous spots possible, where their advantages are all diminished.

The Viet Cong often made just the same type of attacks. They executed local leaders branded as imperialist collaborators, fired rockets into marketplaces, detonated bombs in movie theaters where US troops were relaxing. While there are no triple-canopy jungles in Iraq to frustrate us, there are plenty of buildings, alleys, and rubble piles to take their place.

Just enough is never enough

IN THE NEWS
You might infer from some of my postings that I don't think Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a very smart person. For example, how could someone with a higher-than-average intelligence say something as boneheaded as, "And if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up."

I don't have the means to test Donald Rumsfeld's IQ. I can make two definitive statements:

• Even smart people make mistakes.
• In fact, smart people often fall victim to their own intelligence.

Case in point: the emperor Augustus, the man who transformed the Roman state from a republic to an empire. Sure, the Roman state was already in shambles, so he had a unique opportunity to rebuild and refashion it. However, lesser men might have made a mess of things, but Augustus did not.

Augustus was a brilliant man, and he knew it. Among other problems that taxed his considerable skills, he needed to trim down the Roman army. Sixty or seventy legions, its size during the civil wars, was clearly far too large for the tasks of defending Rome's borders against enemies like the Parthians and Gauls, and policing its interior against slave rebellions, pirates, and other internal threats. A large army was also a threat to whomever ruled Rome, since a popular general could get enough disgruntled troops on his side to re-ignite the civil wars.

Augustus, therefore, became enmeshed in the calculations needed to determine the minimum number of legions needed. He finally arrived, after a few adjustments, at the figure of 28, deployed around the provinces and on the frontiers. Through careful management of crises, Augustus was sure that he could always deploy enough troops to stop an invasion, crush an uprising, or make a punitive attack against an enemy. Equally important, Rome had enough legions to continue military conquest, a vital source of the slaves, land, and trade that kept the Roman economy successful.

He was therefore supremely confident that he could walk a very thin line between having enough legions to protect Rome from without, and having too many legions to keep Rome from collapsing from within (the way it did during the civil wars). The system worked—for a while.

Augustus' plans fell apart with Publius Quinctilius Varus's disastrous campaign against the Germans, who ambushed and destroyed his three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. Suddenly, Augustus' delicately balanced system collapsed, forcing major changes to Rome's grand and theater strategies. Augustus abandoned any further plans for conquest and ordered the evacuation of Roman colonies between the Rhine and Elbe rivers. 

The margin of error was far too thin to sustain Augustus' plans. He had outwitted himself--a hard admission for anyone to make. For years to come, people often overheard Augustus mutter, "Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!" Augustus was more than angry at a single general who led  Rome to an embarrassing defeat. He was thunderstruck by the failure of his own grand design.

Other extremely bright people have built equally delicate strategies, which failed for different reasons. Bismarck's foreign policy for the new German empire depended on maintaining a complex web of alliances and antipathies among the other European powers. While Wilhem I was the German emperor, Bismarck had the latitude he needed to pursue this strategy on his own. Wilhelm II, however, proved far less likely to defer to Bismarck. Even worse, the new Kaiser displayed a combination of personal pugnacity and fixation on expanding the German navy, qualities that doomed Germany's delicate relationship with Great Britain. Bismarck's foreign policy ran just fine as long as Bismarck was running it—a situation that ended just as swiftly as the Roman disaster in the Teutoburg Forest.

History, therefore, provides more than one kind of lesson. Sometimes, we learn about how our weaknesses can lead to failure. At other times, we have to be on guard about our strengths. Augustus and Bismarck both demonstrated how strategies that depend on razor-thin margins of error cannot survive. Rumsfeld may be a genius, or he may be a fool. Either way, he should know better than to pursue a military doctrine based on having just enough troops to defeat the enemy.

Raw iron

IN THE NEWS
I'm  convinced that Donald Rumsfeld belongs to a previously unidentified species of savant. I've observed almost no one with his genius for stupid public statements. Even when he might have a point—such as, no amount of armor provides complete protection—he manages to turn the tables on himself by saying something completely insensitive and ludicrous. And just when you think he can't be more outrageous, he tops himself. Amazing.

There is a point in there somewhere: 

• No amount of armor is perfect protection for a vehicle.
• Indeed, as some commentators have noted, WWII-era tank crews welded additional armor to their vehicles.
• In Iraq, insurgent groups have grown very clever in devising explosives that can damage or cripple a vehicle, no matter how much armor you add.

However, Rumsfeld misses the real point in his transparent effort to duck a real question, and he also manages to contradict his own statements about the subject. In May, a soldier asked essentially the same question, but Rumsfeld gave a much different answer:

You do not have all the up-armored humvees you need. You got about -- around 3,000 out of the 4,400 roughly that they want over here, that your leaders want.  Production is ramping up this month. I think it's around 220, 225 per month.  We've gathered them from all other services that had them except for a few we held back for a nuclear security role back in the United States.  The rest of them shipped over here.  We're trying to get them to you as fast as we can. We understand the difference they can make, and for that matter we're shipping some armor over as well.

That time, Rumsfeld didn't blame Newton's laws of motion for unnecessary battlefield deaths, as he did last week. In May, he made a clear promise to the troops that, In December, has not been fulfilled.

Here's what Rumsfeld might have said during last week's Q&A session with the troops:

Obviously, the added armor will save lives, and we'll be upgrading the protection on your Humvees at [insert a rate that sounds substantial here]. At the same time, we can't kid ourselves that the enemy fighter is going to sit still. Rather than wait for the insurgents' next innovation for attacking our troops, we're doing a much better job at building meaningful intelligence about the insurgency—its organization, methods, members, and plans—so that we can take the initiative away from them.

Of course, he can't make this statement, because the Department of Defense hasn't been doing a significantly better job at intelligence-gathering. Worse, the continued overstretch of US and allied forces on security duties ensures that they can't hold the initiative in this guerrilla war. The insurgent groups always have some choice of when, where, and how to attack. The troops know this; Rumsfeld knows it; but it's easier for him to flub an answer about armor plating than it is for him to acknowledge a bigger, darker truth.

Right now, the American public is getting an education in the military notion of the initiative in the most painful way possible: by watching our own troops pay the ultimate cost. We're accustomed to holding the initiative in nearly every military operation in the last few decades—the invasion of Panama, the air campaign against Serbia, the liberation of Kuwait—so we can't adapt the way the WWII tankers did.

Adding armor plating to a Sherman tank wasn't the only response to the battlefield situation against German panzers. From 1943 to 1945, the standard German tank models—the PzKw series IV, V (Panther), and VI (Tiger)—outgunned the American Shermans. At the same time, the Sherman crews also faced threats from German infantry, armed with anti-tank weapons like one-shot Panzerfausts, bazooka-like Panzerschrecks, and the occasional anti-tank mine.

Fortunately, just as the threats to these tanks were varied, so were the responses. Not only did Sherman crews add armored protection (a technical response), but they learned how to take down the tougher German tanks, particularly the deadly Tigers (a tactical response). It might take four or five Shermans to kill a single Tiger, and one or more of the Shermans might not survive the engagement. However, overwhelm the Tiger with too many targets, and one of the Shermans would get in the killing shot.

Sherman crews weren't alone when facing the German panzers. They could radio for assistance from artillery batteries and, more effectively, aircraft armed with rockets and bombs (an operational response). American infantry, too, might sneak into position to immobilize or kill a German tank. At a higher plane of conflict, the

United States could manufacture more hardware, and train more soldiers to use it, than the Third Reich could match. The balance of economic power worked against the Germans at the grand strategic level, and the massive amounts of materiel and troops deployed in Europe gave the United States and its allies a powerful advantage at the theater level.

In other words, the American response to the superiority of German over American tanks worked at every level—technical, tactical, operational, theater, and grand strategic—not just one. The United States held the initiative at these levels, and that's how it defeated Nazi Germany. The last week of hubbub over Humvee protection has focused on the technical level, but it's also worth stepping back and considering the responses at other strategic levels we can and cannot make to the Iraqi insurgents.

The options aren't nearly as good as they were in World War II. We can blame part of the problem on the nature of guerrilla warfare--inherently difficult for heavily-armed and -armored troops to handle--but a big chunk of the blame lies with US planners who didn't plan effectively for the occupation. They did hear warnings; they just chose not to heed them. Now, we have to squeeze every bit of initiative we can out of every level of strategy, and it may not be possible to do so in some cases. These vulnerabilities are just as deadly as an unarmored Humvee, and you can't bolt on a refigerator door to cover them.

A year later...

IN THE NEWS
It's hard to believe that it's already a year since US and Iraqi forces captured Saddam Hussein. It has been an eventful year, and unfortunately, Hussein's captivity has had little or no effect on events. Fallujah remains under seige; yet another bomb exploded in Baghad, this time killing 11 at the entrance to the fortified Green Zone; the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi continues. Life for Saddam Hussein is even improved in one way: at least he's not living inside a spider hole.

Of course, many can--and should--ask, Where will it all end? Let me add at least one bleak observation, but perhaps not as bleak as you might think:

For at least the next decade, probably longer, there will never be an end to political violence in Iraq.

Someone--a dissatisfied Kurd, a clever criminal who smells opportunity, a Shi'ite encouraged by Iranian agents, a foreign terrorist wanting to make point, a grieving mother or father who sees nothing left to do--will pick up a gun, bomb, or knife, and someone else will die. We will feel sympathy for some of these people, and contempt for others.

Every Middle Eastern nation has some version of political violence, whether or not the Western press chooses to cover it. The mullahs in Iran, the president of Egypt, the prime minister of Turkey, the royal family of Saudi Arabia--every regional leader has to worry about some guerrilla, terrorist, or criminal in their midst, often out to kill them personally. Iraq's political wounds are so raw and large that a regional problem cannot help but be far worse in its case.

If we're too sensitized to violence in Iraq, we'll raise the bar of victory so high that we'll definitely never see it. Although spokespeople for the White House and CENTCOM often exaggerate the role of the criminal class in the insurgency, they are a substantial part of it. We therefore don't want to conclude that we've only won in Iraq when the Iraqis eliminate all violent crime within their borders.

It's therefore long overdue, then, for the Bush Administration to make it clear exactly what victory means in Iraq. Arresting Saddam Hussein? Bringing him to trial? Successfully convicting him of war crimes? Killing al-Zarqawi? Destroying his organization, the Jama'at al-Tawhid wal Jihad? Destroying all insurgent organizations? Convincing some of them, like the Army of the Mahdi, to join the non-violent political struggle? Convince a majority of Iraqis that violence isn't a legitimate form of political expression? Hold the elections? Ensure that the elections are meaningful? Keep a central government in power, rather than watching the country divide along sectarian, ethnic, and clan lines? Reduce the incidence of insurgent attacks below some acceptable threshold? Eliminate certain kinds of attacks, like car bombings?

The White House keeps throwing out these different pieces, claiming that each is a meaningful part of a larger picture. However, the fragments do not yet form a mosaic. Every piece represents something important to the Iraqis themselves, who have their own (often widely varied) picture of when the war has ended, and what a victory for themselves looks like.

For the moment, however, I'm just talking about Americans. When, short of unrealistic accomplishments, such as an end to all violence, or events that are irrelevant to the current war, such as Hussein's arrest, do we feel that we can finally claim, "Mission accomplished?"

My earlier point--political violence will be a feature of Iraqi life for many years to come--isn't as bleak as it looks for Americans, since we can accomplish our own national security goals without turning Iraq into an earthly paradise. We can make it better than it was, or it is now. But how much is enough?

But don't wait for the Bush Administration to define victory for you. For those among you who are American citizens, make up your own minds, and then hold the government accountable for drafting a plan for victory that's at least as reasonable and high-minded as your own.

Suing the CIA

IN THE NEWS
A former CIA analyst is suing the agency. According to the unnamed proliferation expert's court documents, his managers at the agency retaliated after he refused to write documents that supported the Bush Administration's assertion that Iraq had an arsenal of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

As I wrote earlier, I expected there to be a significant number of resignations from the State Department, CIA, and other national security agencies after the November election. Many experts who were not only ignored, but often the target of hostility by members of the Bush Administration, undoutbtedly were waiting to see who would occupy the Oval Office in November before making a career-ending decision. We know the process already started, most notably with the chief of clandestine operations, Stephen Kappes, and his deputy, Michael Sulick, both highly respected and highly experienced--qualities the CIA acutely needs right now, particularly in the operations wing.

But I can't say I expected to see someone suing the agency over retaliation on the job. Maybe I should have.

What has been missing from the discussions of these resignations and intelligence reform plans is how broken the CIA really was before the Bush Administration ever came into office. The first-person narrative of Robert Baer is chilling, since it shows an agency in the late Nineties already too sensitized to the twitches of its political masters, and therefore too uninterested in the proper work of analysts and spies. Plus, we know that in the latest phase of the long-standing feud between the CIA and the FBI, started by the Aldrich Ames investigation, the CIA came out the worse for it. Not only did the agency lose a lot of its bureaucratic clout, but the widescale investigations of CIA employees made them leery about what statements or activities might land them in court.

It's worth remembering that Baer's book is only one account, and perhaps not every part of the CIA was as badly broken as his corner was. (Unfortunately, he was working in the thick of the very issues and countries that are now on the front burner.) Still, the Bush Administration clearly made a bad situation at the Agency and made it worse--and continues to do so. As David Ignatius argued in The Washington Post, if this sort of purge were happening in the military, wouldn't Americans be a lot more worried?

Oh, wait, it is sorta happening. Just not quite on the same relative scale, and a lot more quietly.

Kerik out

IN THE NEWS
Bernard Kerik has turned down his nomination as new Secretary of Homeland Security. Who knows what really happened here. We can only hope that someone noticed that there were many, many people vastly more qualified for the job--unless you don't think the Department of Homeland Security is all that important--and the nanny issue is just a cover story.

Elections and insurgencies

THEORY

One fault line along which revolutionary pressures run is elections. Questions of who gets elected, for what type of position, and under what conditions, have ignited political violence throughout Western civilization. These issues are as old as the conflict over the German electors that ignited the Thirty Years War, and the nasty war between the democratic and oligarchic factions in Corcyra during the Peloponnesian Wars.

In perhaps a better world than ours, the offer to hold a national election might bring an insurgency to a standstill. Assuming the election was meaningful (real political power would be apportioned as a result) and fair, the warring factions might see the election as a superior way to settle their differences once and for all.

Elections often do have an important role to play in ending internal wars, but not in this fashion. Once serious violence has broken out, the combatants have little trust for one another, and the competition for votes (as Fareed Zakaria has argued) can deepen animosities among groups, rather than squelching them. And those aren't the only unintended, unwelcome side effects of trying to hold an election in the middle of a revolutionary conflict. The US push for elections in South Vietnam didn't stop the NLF insurgencyAs in other such conflicts, the guerrillas frequently threatened anyone going to the polls. These threats heightened fears of the NLF, exactly the opposite of what leaders in Saigon and Washington wanted to happen.

More frequently, elections play an important role at the beginning and end of an internal war. Elections may create enough outrage (the Gurr thesis about the causes of revolutionary violence) to incite an insurgency. Under some conditions (for example, the strong chance that a dissatisfied faction might fare poorly at the polls), elections may also convince competitive elites (the Tilly thesis) that there's little to be gained from the elections. The best course of action for ousting the incumbent elite, then, is to take up the gun. Jonas Savimbi's decision to lead UNITA out of the coalition government created in the 1994 Lusaka accord fit this picture, a competitive elite that saw "normal politics" far less promising than continued fighting.

An election may be the capstone to negotiations and military campaigns that are bringing the insurgency to a close. If both sides have reached a point where they see further combat leading nowhere, they may broker an arrangement where the election ends that unproductive phase of the competition between them. Happily, the recent civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua ended this way, with the insurgents agreeing to participation in planned elections as a formal end to the conflict. Insurgents may also losing to the point where elections proceed in spite of them, adding to the current government's legitimacy. At the end of the Hukbalahap Rebellion in the Philippines, elections showed exactly how impotent the insurgency had become.

Elections are a means to a political end. You therefore have to be as Clausewitzian about them as you do about warfare: the ultimate aim is the creation of a new political reality that didn't exist before citizens pulled the handle in the voting booth, or guerrillas pulled the triggers of their guns. Until both sides are convinced that elections are in their political interests, there's practically no chance that they will end an internal war.

 

PRACTICE

Since the Iraq invasion didn't turn out as expected, with a smooth handover of power and sovereignty to a newly-formed Iraqi government, the Bush Administration has been rather quiet (actually, silent) about its "exit strategy." Clearly, Administration officials think the January elections will be a significant landmark—but how, exactly? Do they mark the end of American military involvement in Iraq, or something else?

Reading the paragraphs above, it's obvious that, based on past experiences of insurgencies, the elections won't convince the different guerrilla groups in Iraq to lay down their arms. Elections won't convince the average Iraqi that they shouldn't be afraid of insurgent reprisals for cooperating with the interim government.

That's not to say that elections won't matter at all. I often worry that, when we talk about the politics of countries like Vietnam and Iraq, Americans see the people who live there as dumb brutes. To say something like, Iraqis just aren't ready for democracy, is a grave insult not only to the highly Westernized Iraqi exiles, but also to most of the people living in Iraq today. Certainly, there are Iraqis who are ignorant of the theory and practice of democracy, just as a matter of education. (You could make the same claim about segments or pockets of any country, by the way.) And there are those for whom anything smacking of Western civilization is an anathema to their version of Islamic piety. Even those without much of an education can figure out the value of some kind of representation for themselves, their village or neighborhood, their clan, or their sect.

Those who were ready to embrace some kind of constitution and democratic election immediately after the invasion never got the chance. The chaos of the poorly managed occupation made these issues moot. The January elections may, to some degree that's hard to predict in advance, re-ignite their desire for a better political order than the mess they have today. For that to become an important new force in the Iraqi insurgency, those people—their feelings, their calculations of daily advantage and survival, their affiliation to local and national groups, their sense of hope amidst the rubble—have to have a place to go, and something to do. If the election is just a checkbox item in the Bush Administration's hastily cobbled-together List of Things To Do In Iraq, it won't make a difference, and in fact, may make things worse. Despair is as powerful a political force as hope.

The only other way that the January election may be meaningful is the re-mapping of the new government's membership to more closely match the demographic realities of Iraq. If the government can mirror Iraqi society, at least in a simple numerical sense, that may be a good thing. However, the struggle over how big a piece of the electoral pie a group wins is, as mentioned before, often the cause of further violence among groups.

The specifics of the election, therefore, are critical. It's tough to find them, even on the State Department's web site (cluttered to the point of uselessness with listings of press releases and transcripts), and it's even harder to divine how well the elections will be managed.

The election may have some impact on the war, good or bad. Or it may be a de jure moment with no de facto significance. Whatever the result, it won't be the end of the war, sad to say. We do not live in that better world I alluded to at the beginning of this post.

The Baghdad terminator

IN THE NEWS
We all know that the Bush Administration was initially less than thrilled with the idea of a Department of Homeland Security, despite their efforts to later take credit for it. However, they did sign the bill that created it into law, and they gave its first head, Tom Ridge, a lot of media time. (Not to take that as a measure of actual progress.)

Ridge's replacement, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, is just as media friendly, if not moreso. For the talking heads who can't be bothered to do any real research, Kerik's thumbnail resume looks good: Hmmm, former beat cop...Advanced through the ranks to become commissioner, and was there on 9/11...Worked as a security professional abroad...Helped the training effort in Iraq...OK, plus he knows karate and can bench-press a lot of weight. Katie, I think we can sail through this interview without any problem.

Problem is, Kerik is not an impressive candidate. He may have been advanced too quickly through NYPD ranks, thanks to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's patronage. The brief stint in that position certainly doesn't make him more qualified to head the Department of Homeland Security than, say, some former heads of the FBI or their deputies, the top officials from state law enforcement agencies, or someone who worked on the international (or "inbound") side of national security as a senior official for a substantial time.

The closer you look at Kerik's resume, the more you have to ask, Was there no one better out there for this job? The Bush Administration already has a terrible record of hiring the underqualified (but politically trustworthy). Unfortunately, this appointment seems like more of the same. At the very least, could the Bush Administation have found someone who didn't have some connection to the Saudi royal family? (Kerik worked a brief stint as a bodyguard for some Saudi royals.) Could we have found someone who seemed a bit more effective working with foreign governments on problems of America's physical security, rather than someone infamous for having his term working with the Iraqi security forces cut short because of his demonstrated ability to insult and alienate his foreign colleagues? (He got the nickname "the Baghdad terminator" from British troops who had seen his pugnacity in action.)

No one else? Kerik is really the absolute best person to tame Washington bureaucracies, machete through the tangles of federal-state and federal-local collaboration, share intelligence and operational plans with foreign governments, and, ultimately, anticipate the next move of terrorists who may be planning the next 9/11?

Maybe Kerik's appointment is the latest step in a diabolically clever effort to gut Homeland Security. Perhaps, having given into Congress and various opinion leaders on the question of having a Department of Homeland Security in the first place, the Bush team decided, Heck, why not just keep putting incompetents into the top job? Ridge has nothing to show for his time in the post. (Sorry, I don't buy the "no terrorist attacks since 9/11" argument. I keep snapping my fingers to keep the tigers away, but I don't recommend using this technique if you stumble into the tiger enclosure at the San Diego Zoo.) His claim during his farewell press conference that his staff spent "months and months" on the color coded alerts was hilarious. What were they doing, poring over hexadecimal color values in Adobe Photoshop?

More likely, it's yet another example of the Bush Administration hiring the politically friendly but obviously underqualified. When my wife says, "You'd make a good president," I say, "No, I absolutely know I wouldn't. I don't have the operational experience with politics at the federal level and state levels. Without that, pfft, you're dead in the water." I know a lot of very smart, patriotic, dedicated people, and if they tried to be President, or Secretary of Homeland Security, I'd say the same thing to them.

As always, the Romans had at least one good epigram to fit the moment: Cicero once said, Cuiusvis hominis est errare, nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare. (Translation: Anybody can make a mistake, but only the fool continues making it.)

Half a league half a league

IN THE NEWS

Today is the anniversary of the publication of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade. It struck me that this anniversary has more resonance than it did in previous years.

The Crimean War was Great Britain's great imperial sideshow. The issues were obscure, confused, and in short, peripheral to British interests. Of course, it started with the same patriotism and optimism that swell before every war, followed by clamor and alarm that can obscure how well the war effort is proceeding. Like our own current war, the Crimean campaign had its dramatic but unproductive siege, Sevastapol. More importantly for drawing contemporary parallels, the war started as a dispute between a Christian power, Russia, and a Muslim one, the Ottoman Empire. Religion and Realpolitik were entangled, and the conflict drew in outside powers, Britain in France, to defend the gates of Christian Europe.

Tennyson's poem had a privileged place in Victorian culture. It took a profoundly stupid military action, the charge at the battle of Balaclava, in a extremely questionable war, and turned it into a moment of romantic heroism. (Once again, as today, you have to always have to acknowledge the difference between the valor and skill of individual soldiers and the questionable judgment of those who command them.) Great Britain faced all the attendant surprises, setbacks, and mistakes that any world power suffers, plus an depeening responsibility for the administration of a growing number of colonies. The Charge of the Light Brigade, therefore, was the palliative for treating many of the anxieties and doubts Britons had about their imperial mission. However confused, bloody, or pointless today's struggle seemed, the 600 at Balaclava showed that there was a point to it all, even if was honorable slaughter in the face of impossible odds. Later generations would adopt a far more jaundiced view of Balaclava and the whole Crimean venture (as brilliantly lampooned in George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman At the Charge). At the time, however, few wanted to admit to themselves that, maybe, Crimea and other ventures were a bad idea, badly executed by buffoons and blowhards like Lord Cardigan.

Today, you might want to raise a glass in remembrance for the 600, the brutal fate they suffered, the orders they carried out in spite of the odds, and the good fortune we have of learning from the mistakes of others.

Insanity and reality

IN THE NEWS The last few years of political discussion have resurrected old topics: What are the warning signs of tyranny? How much distance is there between our own democracy and forms of government we’d find execrable? Was fascism something limited to a particular place (Europe) and time (the 1930s and 1940s), or was it an early eruption of a political force we’ll see again?

Obviously, all of these questions deserve better treatment than I can give in a short blog posting. However, there are warning signs that you are headed in the wrong direction. How inexorable the momentum is, or how far you have to go before you slip into the abyss, are vitally connected, but separate, questions. In any case, once you spot a sign of danger, you should hit the brakes.

This article chronicles the story of an Army intelligence expert who witnessed prisoner abuse in Samarra. For taking a stand on the subject—something which makes practical sense, since the torture and detention incidents are only deepening the political gulf between the United States and the very people whose cooperation we hope to win—Sgt. Frank Ford found himself labeled as mentally unbalanced, strapped to a gurney, and shipped out on the next plane to Germany. At the end of the article, the author, a fellow Army intelligence officer, says that the Army has used the same tactic—declaring a whistle-blower to be mentally imbalanced, and therefore subject to immediate constraint and detention—with at least one other soldier.

As I said, I won’t wrestle with the question of how much certain ideological strains in our current polity resemble fascism or generic totalitarianism. I will point out the obvious: a very, very big red flag just went up. Shutting politically suspect individuals into psychiatric prisons (Psikhushka ) was, of course, one of the ways the Soviets crushed dissent. The Chinese government is carrying on this proud totalitarian tradition with the Falun Gong, and Cuban exiles have accused Castro's government of the same misdeeds.

Totalitarian societies go to great pains to justify themselves, hence the towers of Stalinist tracts that the Soviet Union published. In the case of the USSR and its Eastern European satellites, China, and North Korea, the refrain is always the same: the accused has committed the crime of social disruption. Anyone who wants to create trouble for the great society on its great mission is clearly insane. Therefore, the state is justified to put him into immediate, involuntary psychiatric custody, for his own safety as well as that of his fellow citizens.

Of course, this account isn’t the final word on this incident (and we don't have hospitals full of dissidents yet). Many of the people involved aren’t talking—most notably, the people who stand accused of ordering and executing this psychiatric detention of Frank Ford, an American military intelligence specialist. If the truth fits the general outlines of the story as written, I just have to ask the people who ordered Ford’s detention, Didn’t the horrifying resemblance to the Great and Recently Defeated Enemy, the Soviety Union, cross your mind? Or didn’t you care?