Arms and influence

Changes are gonna come

ABOUT THIS BLOG
Soon, I’ll be making some changes to Arms and Influence, starting with some minor cosmetic improvements. The big experiment will be the addition of an Arms and Influence podcast. Although the themes of the podcast will be the same as the blog, the exact content will be different. I’ll post more details as we get closer to the first episode.

What's wrong with the "surge"? (2)

IN THE NEWS

[For the first post in this series, click here.

Grand strategy: Alone again, naturally
Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush Administration has insisted on, whenever possible, going it alone. The “coalition of the willing” was, short of acting without any allies at all, the furthest the Bush Administration could have gone from the traditional American approach to coalition warfare. In domestic politics, the Administration, once it got a poorly-worded approval from Congress to attack Iraq, shoved the other two branches of the federal government aside. In fact, the Administration deliberately excluded or neutralized important parts of the executive branch, most notably the State Department and CIA. To a startling degree, a narrow part of the US government, the White House and the Department of Defense, prosecuted a war with a far weaker alliance than the United States used in previous conflicts of this scale.

The “new” strategy for Iraq, the so-called “surge” of 20,000 troops, primarily in Baghdad, does nothing to  break the Administration out of its imperious solitude. Foreign governments are not providing additional troops, money, or even rhetorical support. The Administration has not revised its Iraq alliance, a brittle arrangement in which there is no formal obstacle to the British leaving at any time, and severe doubt that the Iraqi government is even fighting the same war as the United States. There was no sweeping re-formulation, in which regional powers, NATO, or the United Nations made new commitments to ending, reducing, or containing the violence in Iraq.

Within the US government, the proposed escalation—surge, augmentation, spike, spurt, whatever—hasn’t changed the Bush Adminisration’s relationship with other parts of the US government. Quite the opposite: the Administration is already digging in its heels during the first round of hearings, such as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ recent testimony. If there are private talks between the Administration and the new House and Senate leadership, so what? Politically and constitutionally, the important next moves will occur in the open. Negotiating with the legislative branch of government is not like negotiating with Iran or Syria.

The "surge" changes nothing about the Bush Administration's radically different version of American grand strategy. If you have any doubts, look at how little has changed outside of Iraq. Iran continues its march towards nuclear weapons. North Korea has not budged, either on its nuclear weapons program, or anything else. China continues to assert its independence, most recently by trying to blind US spy satellites. Russian continues its effort to cement a sphere of influence and a separate direction from the West. Relations with the European Community have not changed. Whatever the merits or faults of the "surge" as a policy toward Iraq, it is certainly not a new direction for US foreign policy.

In announcing the strategy, the White House clearly tried to signal that something had changed. Unfortunately, moving the camera from one Presidential set to another did not alter one of the iconic images of the Iraq war: George W. Bush, speaking alone to the camera.

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What's wrong with the "surge"? (1)

IN THE NEWS
The Bush Administration’s “new” strategy for Iraq—which, as we’ll see, isn’t a genuine change in approach, is wrong on many levels. In fact, it’s wrong on nearly every level of strategy, from the grand strategic to the technical. That framework for understanding warfare is a good guide to why the United States should not prosecute President Bush’s “surge,” and what better alternatives might look like.

Rather than create one big mega-post, I’m going to make this one the first in a series. We’ll start by looking at the US grand strategy.

GRAND STRATEGY: HOW IMPORTANT IS IRAQ?
At the highest plane of strategy, the US government has to put Iraq, one theater among many where American interests are at stake, in its proper perspective. Iraq is not the only concern for US national security; in fact, it’s probably not the most important locus of problems. To date, supporters of the Iraq war—from Wolfowitz to Ledeen, from Leiberman to McCain—have had free rein to refer to horrible consequences if the United States fails in Iraq, without ever having to describe what those consequences would be.

By now, the connection between US grand strategy and the Iraq theater of operations should be clear. If not, the prima facie justification for continuing to fight in Iraq fails. Anyone who won’t make the connection in an explicit, convincing way should be laughed out of the room.

It doesn’t help matters that Americans, voters and leaders alike, don’t have a clear idea of what US grand strategy should be. The 9/11 attacks may have raised important questions about how well Americans were monitoring threats from enemies who were not states, operating out of countries like Afghanistan that did not seem important. Raising a question is not the same as answering it, however. Americans should not be congratulating themselves on their collective wisdom for having ignored a real threat until planes crashed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Nor should we be pleased with the visceral and brainless reaction that followed.

The greatest sin in warfare is fighting without a clear point. Despite (or because of) the kaleidoscope of Iraq war justifications (eliminating Iraq’s alleged nuclear program, changing the balance of power in the Middle East, etc. etc.), there is still no clear justification for continuing the war. Here is the best case I can make for the importance of Iraq.

Iraq in 2007 is what Afghanistan was in 2001, a base of operations for terrorist groups that might be a threat to US interests in the future.

Of course, you have to qualify the hell out of that statement: the American occupation inflames anti-Americanism; almost none of the anti-government factions in Iraq have the global organization and resources that Al Qaeda had in 2001; more importantly, almost none of these groups have any interest in attacking enemies outside of Iraq, including the United States.

Therefore, you might just as easily build a strategy for containing these threats as eliminating them. From a purely selfish perspective, American foreign policy aims at deflecting attacks against American targets. The fact that terrorists or guerrillas exist somewhere in the world has not, to date, been the problem. The threat that some of them present to American interests, such as the physical safety of American citizens, is the real concern.

Instability in Iraq is a threat to American interests in the Middle East. This is one of those places where distinguished foreign policy experts get to waggle their bushy eyebrows and frown, but not say anything meaningful. Political instability in one country is usually a problem for its neighbors, but it’s not an infectious disease that automatically is transmitted to everyone in the vicinity. Iraq may be where factions opposed to the current regimes in other Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, get experience, recruits, weapons, and prestige. The risk to allied regimes may increase as a result, but perhaps not beyond containable levels.

Of course, the biggest defect of this argument is its narrowness. Iraq is a threat to American interests in the Middle East—not necessarily to American global interests. Because American attention is disproportionately focused on that region does not mean that other parts of the world are getting the attention they deserve. Just as Iraq should not be conflated with the Middle East, the Middle East should not be conflated with US grand strategy.

American credibility is now at risk. According to some pundits, having declared Iraq to be the central battlefield in the “global war on terror” (I still chuckle at the acronym, GWOT), the US government risks looking foolish if it abruptly withdraws from Iraq. Breaking American promises to the new Iraqi government and its neighbors would make other allies question American commitments to them. American enemies would gain confidence, seeing the United States retreat from Iraq.

Fortunately, every one of these concerns is unfounded. Average citizens and heads of state around the world do not believe that Iraq is the central battlefield of counterterrorism, except to the extent that Islamic extremists in their own countries are using the Iraq war as an opportunity to sharpen their swords. Shifting 20,000 American troops to Iraq will have no effect on what happens in Morocco, Yemen, Uzbekistan, or Pakistan. Given how strongly world opinion is set against the US strategy in Iraq, perpetuation of that strategy is the greatest risk to American credibility.

Anyone following the Iraqi conflict knows that American promises to the Iraqi government may be moot. If Shi’ite leaders use government security forces to wage their side of the civil war, instead of building a confessionally neutral Iraqi state, the current American strategy effectively stops. American diplomacy will have to shift to new targets, such as mediating an end to the civil war, and trying to salvage something from the collapse of the Iraqi constitutional and political arrangements.

Only the most insecure person believes that never admitting a mistake is the road to credibility. In fact, there are few things more comforting than to hear a powerful individual admit that he or she made a mistake, but is rectifying it. Sure, the normal rules of American politics mandate the rigid, Kabuki-like drama around blunders and scandals, in which admitting error is the very last step in a long, predictable process of denying, stonewalling, distracting, and finally, confessing.

To summarize, at a grand strategic level, there are plenty of reasons to question the importance of Iraq. American leaders who supported the war are now trying to depict an American withdrawal as the ultimate boogeyman. By American leaders, I mean anyone who makes the unchallenged assertion that an American withdrawal would be the worst possible calamity. This category includes politicians and pundits who say that, while they admit they were wrong to support President Bush’s policy earlier, the United States has to clean up the mess it made. (I still marvel that a major part of US foreign policy has been based on a Pottery Barn slogan.) No proposal for continued prosecution of the war should be given one second of attention unless it starts with a convincing explanation of how Iraq substantially threatens the truly important things at the plane of US grand strategy.