Arms and influence

Time tunnel

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

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

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

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

Innovative ideas for Olympic security

The Chinese government has tried to cover as many Olympic security threats as possible. Beware if you are flammable. Think twice if you are water-soluble. And for God's sake, if you're a slow-moving terrorist bent on exploiting the Beijing Olympics, steer clear of these guys.

[Thanks to The Garden of Forking Paths for these links.]

Random search oddity

One of the stranger search results that I've seen in a while.

Vulnerable rear areas now safe

Well, whaddaya know. A recent study chaired by four retired American officer finds that gays and lesbians do not hurt cohesion in their units. The rebuttal, according to this Army Times article, consists of the circular argument, "Because we think gays might hurt unit cohesion, we frown upon them serving in the US military, which is a nudge-nudge wink-wink way of saying that discrimination against gays is OK, because it might hurt unit cohesion."

You'd think that someone whose job is to train and lead people to do extraordinarily difficult things, such as advancing under fire, might be able to rise to the challenge of saying, "Knock off the faggot jokes already. The guy you're scared might covet your ass is more likely to save it some day soon."

Nice guys bleed from the eyes

I sometimes marvel at how generous of spirit I can be. It's a marvel, because it leads me to do stupid things, like give Ridley Scott another chance to convince me that he can make an historical drama.

I watched Kingdom of Heaven over the weekend. I couldn't finish it. The scenes establishing Orlando Bloom's awesomeness (usually accompanied shots of Eva Green leering at him like an overfed cat) were bad enough. But why, oh why, did the director see fit to mangle the history to no good dramatic effect?

For example, Eva Green's character, Sibylla, was in real life a much more interesting character than the nymphomaniacal sidekick depicted in Kingdom of Heaven. And Bloom's character, Balian of Ibelin, was no medieval Horatio Alger. Had he been depicted as who he really was, the acknowledged son of an Outremer noble, his leading role in the events of Kingdom of Heaven would have made much more sense.

Equally nonsensical was his purported ability to tell the new king of Jerusalem to get stuffed, he wasn't going to join him in the march against Saladin that turned into the hattin disaster. On what grounds, then, was a disloyal subject given the authority to run Jerusalem's defenses? Again, the reality was far more interesting: Balian, who was captured along with other knights at Hattin, swore he would not take up arms against Saladin if he and his family (not depicted in the film) were released. After the citizens of Jerusalem begged him to stay and help defend the city, Balian broke his oath.

Of course, you'd have to give your audience credit for having some intelligence to understand this kind of drama. Instead, Scott gives us ridiculous villains like the fictionalized Guy de Lusignan, who provokes war with Saladin because....um....er....well...It's not altogether clear why, other than he's eeeeeeevil.

Ugh. Will no one ever make a decent movie about the Crusades?

Vietnam on the brain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johann Bach, Nazi thief

It's a cautionary tale about fact-checking.

Sometimes, the abyss stares back

After the 9/11 attacks, many people who had little or no experience in counterterrorism were casting about fearfully and desperately for ways to prevent another attack. We're aware of many of their mistakes, but this one certainly is in a category all by itself:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

Two things make this incident particularly odious. First, of course, there's the idea that US officials would copy the interrogation techniques used by our enemies in the Cold War. However, you might give them the benefit of the doubt if the methods actually worked.

However, it's important to understand exactly what these techniques were designed to do. Controlling behavior, not eliciting accurate intelligence, was the goal. The Soviets had applied similar techniques long before the Cold War had started, in many cases to get public confessions from "counter-revolutionaries," who in most cases were just people unlucky enough to lose Stalin's trust, but gain his attention. Foreign nationals, such as the leaders of the WWII Polish underground (pictured here), and captured American pilot Francis Gary Powers, were also the subjects of show trials.

Public political points, not the quiet gathering of accurate intelligence, was the endgame for techniques like "Semi-Starvation," "Exploitation of Wounds," and "Filthy, Infested Surroundings." In fact, these methods made it harder to get reliable information from the victims, since they were so broken down that they were eager to tell their captors whatever they wanted to hear.

During the Cold War, anti-communists in the West pointed to show trials and brutal interrogations as evidence that the USSR and other communist regimes were an evil on par with Hitler. While we might dicker over who deserves the "Most Evil" title, Hitler or Stalin, it's enough to say that the anti-communists were correct. Books like Darkness At Noon, Animal Farm, and The Gulag Archipelago gained talismanic power because they described an evil that needed to be confronted. They were never written to be how-to manuals.

If you think that I'm expending a lot of words on what may have been just the horrendous bad judgment of one Guantanamo Bay "instructor," I'll just add this final observation that might make these words worthwhile. Excessive secrecy has not been protecting interrogation methods that work. Instead, they have been keeping the public eye from seeing exactly how unprepared, unprincipled, and ineffective some of the people on the "front lines" against Al Qaeda have been.

[P.S. For those who don't know me, such as someone who posted in the comments section of one of yesterday's posts, I make these arguments as a person who spent a good part of his adult life worried that Americans were not taking the threats of terrorist and guerrilla groups seriously enough. I also worried that Americans did not realize how dreadfully unprepared the US was to fight these enemies. Unfortunately, after 2001, a lot of people who knew next to nothing about these forms of warfare devised strategies that they argued were necessary and effective, but have proved exactly the opposite.]

Have you ever been experienced?

[Before the brouhaha over Wesley Clark's recent comments started, I had planned on posting something about military experience and presidential leadership. I guess it's even more overdue that I thought.]

For the next several months, we're going to hear a lot of debate over how much personal military experience matters when making presidential decisions about foreign policy and national security. Already, it's clear that the typical discussion in the mainstream media makes a lot of incorrect assumptions, so I thought I'd add some perspective.

Certainly, being in combat does teach you important lessons. For example, every infantryman learns quickly exactly how boring the time leading up to a battle can be, and how terrifying it is when it starts. The average ground-pounder also sees how confusing battle can be. The unluck soldiers also learn how quickly a battle can unravel because of bad information, poor training, or weak leadership.

Leaving aside any existential lessons about life and death, do you really learn anything that is relevant to the job of President of the United States? Yes, to a limited degree. You certainly get an appreciation for how difficult the "management of violence" is. The obvious conclusion is to be conservative in your expectations of what soldiers can do, when chance and violence intersect.

Military experience provides lessons about the means of warfare. It doesn't necessarily teach you anything useful about its ends. There are exceptions. Soldiers who have been stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan may have learned something about how counterinsurgency  is the ultimate expression of the adage, "All politics is local." Someone stationed at NATO headquarters may absorb by osmosis many of the important dynamics of alliance politics. However, these are hardly all the experiences you might wish someone to have before becoming the commander-in-chief.

In fact, many people go through their military careers being dumb about warfare. Here are a few quick examples from the American military experience:

• Mark Clark, the general whose unimaginative, prickly leadership style helped turn the Italian campaign in a slow, bloody crawl up the peninsula.
• William Westmoreland, who vainly tried to treat the Vietnam War as the sort of conflict Americans preferred to fight, instead of the type it really was.
• George McClellan, who had bursts of inspiration at the theater level of strategy, only to fumble these plans when handling the operational and tactical specifics.
• John C.H. Lee, who as the general responsible for supply and logistics in the European theater of WWII, whose laxity and ineptitide almost single-handedly set the war effort back several months (and many thousands of lives).

And we're just getting started with the generals. If you keep going down the chain of command, you'll find countless officers and enlisted men who "saw the elephant" but didn't understand what they were seeing.

While you might prefer your presidential candidates to have served in the military, service is no guarantee of good leadership. For example, while many historians have overlooked Grant's virtues as a general, there's little disagreement that he was a mediocre president.

We also have to be careful not to confuse gratitude with praise. We may be grateful that someone served in the US military. That is not the same as saying that they were good at the military profession, or that they will excel in a different role related to the waging of war.

Baptism of excrement

With each passing month, we learn about more executive branch employees complicit in the Bush Administration's worst policies. The latest inductee is Richard Myers, former Air Force general and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman:

In late 2002, documents show, officials from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps all complained that harsh interrogation tactics under consideration for use at the prison in Guantánamo Bay might be against the law. Those military officials called for further legal scrutiny of the tactics. The chief of the Army's international law division, for example, said in a memo that some of the tactics, such as stress positions and sensory deprivation, "cross the line of 'humane treatment'" and "may violate the torture statute."

Myers, however, agreed to scuttle a plan for further legal review of the tactics, in response to pressure from a top Pentagon attorney helping to set up the interrogation program for then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Apparently, to work in the higher echelons of the Bush national security team, you had to accept the baptism of excrement. Once you show that you're willing to participate in things you know to be wrong, you're a made man (or woman, such as Condoleeza Rice, Karen Hughes, or Harriet Miers). Not only have your superiors learned exactly how compliant you're willing to be, but they also have the power over to you that  the secret knowledge of shameful actions can grant.

I suspect that the baptism of excrement was a consideration in setting up the meetings among Bush's top advisers to approve the CIA's handling of prisoners. You didn't need Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet, Rice, and Ashcroft in the same room, just to determine which tender mercies the CIA could use on someone who might have a real connection to Al Qaeda. Some other motive was at work.

Similarly, Myers knew that people in the Defense Department were raising reasonable concerns. Had he listened to them fully, he might have had to deliver an unwanted message to the civilian leadership. Therefore, he didn't listen to them. Myers also knew that the few in uniform who did manage to voice their objections, such as General Tony Taguba, were not isolated crackpots.

In April of 2003, the DoD held a press briefing featuring experts on the treatment of enemy prisoners. At the time, the concern was how the US military would handle irregulars like the Saddam Fedayeen, or any other soldier who tried to fade into the civilian population. Here's a quote from W. Hay Parks, an assistant to the Army's Judge Advocate General:

PARKS: When someone is captured, they go through a process of being taken from the capturing unit back to a collection unit and ultimately to the higher-level theater prisoner-of-war camps. And Article V of the Prisoner of War Convention, it specifies that if there is any doubt as to the status of a person, that person is entitled to prisoner-of-war protection until his or her status has been determined. That determination can be done by an Article 5 tribunal, which is a tribunal, set up by the military to look at the facts and circumstances of the capture and any other information. They then make a determination or recommendation. Our past practice, in Vietnam as well as in the first Gulf War, was that if at any time there remains any doubt, that person will be entitled to prisoner-of- war status.

Had Myers wanted to hear, he could have listened to his own employees--but, of course, it would have made his own role untenable.