Russia is attempting to bring up old treaties regarding Black Sea naval forces:
"Can NATO - which is not a state located in the Black Sea - continuously increase its group of forces and systems there? It turns out that it cannot," Nogovitsyn was quoted as saying Wednesday by the Interfax news agency.
There is a further problem with the Montreux Convention regarding the US. We never signed it. We were invited to the negotiations, but declined to even send an observer to the conference. So long as our allies in Turkey keep letting our ships in, and Turkey has the right to waive restrictions, we're not obligated to observe any limits.
Turkey's ability to waive has served different powers at different times, including the USSR/Russia. Aircraft carriers are not supposed to transit the Dardanelles but the Soviets were permitted to do so in 1976 and 1979. And when the PRC acquired a former Soviet aircraft carrier it was, eventually, permitted to transit the straits as well in 2001.
Imagine you're in the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. It's a pretty lonely thing to be. If your family looks like Iran, only 3/10ths of your relatives is happy with your career choice. And you've got all sorts of people calling you a criminal. Mostly that happens while you're putting a beat down on some uppity ethnic minority or long-haired hippie westernized college kids. But recently, you got called a criminal for doing your job for your country. You do a bit of non-uniformed work in Iraq, striking direct blows at the Great Satan, prepping the way for a full blown insurrection so that those bastard Iraqis can't get off the mat and ever come back and invade again and it all goes to hell. The operation is a failure and your own ambassador to Iraq is calling you and yours a bunch of criminals that needed to be put down like a rabid dog in the street.
What does that IRGC soldier think? And the next time that they need an insurrection put down, will he still enthusiastically answer the call?
I heard on the radio yesterday that President Bush is reducing deployment terms back down to 12 months. That's a good step to reduce the strain on our military, one that I've been hoping to hear about for awhile. The 15 month terms were scraping the barrel.
We may get out of this without breaking the army after all.
I support the war, have from the beginning. Unfortunately, we've gone past the line as to what we're trying to do with the resources we have. So far as I understand matters, we just don't have enough of a handle on PTSD cases to let them get back into combat. We seem to be sending them to Iraq and Afghanistan anyway. That's too much to demand. If we need a greater force structure to carry the day, we need to raise the force levels and not scrape this deep into our national reserves.
It's too much.
Irrespective of what your opinion is on the current state of affairs in Iraq, there should be no difference on what the signs are that we are on the road to victory. The ultimate end-state is that Iraq has built up a set of organizations that are sufficient to handle its political, economic, and security needs.
Let's take the easy ones first. Politically, they need their own constitution (check) with sufficient buy-in from the populace (referendum, check) and politicians that have a measure of legitimacy (elections, check) that can form a durable political class that does not resort to violence (needs work but better than two years ago). The sorting mechanism of time and political maneuvering will supply Iraq with a steady stream of better politicians and there's no way to advance more rapidly up the experience curve than 1 second per second.
Economically, the economy's booming so it is prima facie obvious that despite the crumbling infrastructure of Saddam and the blown up infrastructure of present security difficulties, something's going right. Aside from dividing up petroleum so that it does not curse the political system (which seems to be progressing smartly in the form of a new petroleum law) the major impediment to economic progress is security. This brings us to the most controversial of the signs, the security situation
Iraq's security situation is complex, to say the least. But any fair minded observer should agree that if the locals at any level (district, town, province or the entire country) can handle the security challenge, this is a sign of victory. Another sign would be if we are only needed as a tripwire force, such as we supply in Sinai, S. Korea, and lots of other places. In 4 entire provinces in the Shia dominated south and innumerable subdivisions there and elsewhere, we've turned over the security situation over to the locals. In 3 other provinces in the Kurdish north, their greatest security worry is foreign incursion from Iran and Turkey (but mostly Turkey). Those 3 provinces are nothing to worry about either.
Another sign of victory is where local institutions that had been hostile to us turn friendly (such as Anbar's tribes who are now fighting Al Queda instead of helping it and funneling in their own young men into the local police and army). A related sign is the creation of new institutions such as the new joint Sunni-Shia Bolster Dialah organization.
Is there a map out there of all the jurisdictions that have been turned over to local control? A time sequence of hand-overs nationwide would be a powerful objective indicator of the true security situation in Iraq. It's dumbfounding to me that there doesn't seem to be an easily accessible one around.
Strategy Page notes time is on Iran's side when it comes to the hostage situation. This is a familiar metaphor that I've always found best answered by changing the timing and pacing of the crisis.
If a slow bleed is in Iran's interest, the UK might be best served by simply announcing a date by which they would be marked down as KIA and proceeding with a response on that basis. Do not negotiate for the hostages release after that deadline with the current regime. Yes, it's really cold, awful to just write them off as dead but it radically alters the timing and changes their execution date from something Iran controls to something the UK controls from a geopolitic/diplomatic perspective. It ruins Iran's strategy and thus paradoxically makes it less likely that they will actually be physically executed. After all, what's the point? Somebody else might come to power later in the UK that would negotiate for their release so why kill them?
The US could best serve its ally by releasing a statement the same day honoring the UK's decision and acting on that basis, asking all other allies to keep to the same line. Win or lose the entire dynamic of islamist attempts to humiliate the West change. Hostages lose their death value when we "kill" them first. The only value they have left is being returned alive and in good shape and that is exactly as we should want it.
Michael Williams' Because We Didn't Defeat Them misses the point by a mile. The Iraqi people were doomed to many years of strife and violence back in the 1950s when the royal family was ousted in 1958. The misalignment between what the people of Iraq wanted and the hard men with guns delivered got worse and worse, culminating in Saddam's Republic of Fear.
Even if we had run as picture perfect a post-invasion as could be managed, we still would have ended up with major troubles because when violent change in politics is all that's been on offer for 45 years and more then you've got a society that's primed and ready for running multiple violent resistence movements. Throw in some not-so-friendly neighbors ready and willing to stoke the fires of violence and you have a nasty time in Iraq for at least a few years.
That isn't to say that we couldn't have run the post-invasion better but I would argue that the invasion itself was run very, very well. We put in the maximum force we could sustain and achieved the Big Bang we needed.
I still believe that we're planting liberty trees in Iraq, and over the long haul that's going to remake the region. But had we flattened them down as Michael Williams advocates, we'd have ended up with another FRG, practically useless for the next stage of the fight. These Iraqis have shed their own blood, and will win their own freedom, and for their own reasons will spread liberty to their neighbors. In the process they will begin to reverse several centuries of Islamic civilizational decline and provide a way out of the toxic mess that Islam has put the Middle East into.
At the beginning of the conflict, I marked a free ME and Islam pulling out of its death spiral down as worth 10K dead americans. Compared to the alternatives, it's a small price to pay. I still believe so. But being more savage in the invasion wouldn't have helped us get where we need to go. It would have changed the post invasion narrative for the worse.
I do believe that the only way the US will suffer defeat is if it picks up and goes home before securing victory. If I'm right, the job of shoring up the patience, combatting the lies of our enemies and the cowardice of too many of our friends is the critical point at which the wars for Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the wider war will be won or lost. Here is a grand entry, a strong effort on that front.
Four years in. An inch of time. Four years in and the foolish and credulous among us yearn to get out. Their feelings require it. The power of their Holy Gospel of "Imagine" compels them. Their overflowing pools of compassion for the enslavers of women, the killers of homosexuals, the beheaders of reporters, and the incinerators of men and women working quietly at their desks, rise and flood their minds until their eyes flow with crocodile tears while their mouths emit slogans made of cardboard. They believe the world is run on wishes and that they will always have three more.
That's got to smart.
Imagine for a moment, that you heard a military man, a former general on CNN argue that with chemical weapons attacks, the upcoming invasion of Iraq could see 3,000 americans die in the invasion. It's 2003, you have no idea what's going to face america when it invades. You do know a bit of history and that even the direst predictions tend to be light on the carnage that will accompany any decently sized war. So you up the ante and ask, will this war be worth 10,000 american dead? The answer from your conscience comes back yes. Breaking a downward civilizational cycle for over a billion muslims that's lasted centuries, getting them off the table as far as radical terrorism and other toxic movements is concerned is worth 10,000 dead. So you say it and shock your friends.
But it's true. The muslim world will inevitably cause a lot more than that in civilian casualties unless its present trajectory is altered. Something has to change and it's a huge task. Creating a free Iraq will change that trajectory. If Iraq can remain unitary and free without violence, its positive influence throughout the whole muslim world will be huge and influence many other governments to ditch their autocratic policies for a sustainable freedom strategy.
But fast forward to 2006. We haven't hit 40% of your initial casualty estimate and for you, the war, though not nearly as front-loaded on the carnage as you thought it would be, is going pretty well on the casualty front. For those who were estimating a thousand dead though, we're well over triple their initial estimates and so many have either jumped ship or are wavering in support of the war, willing to take a loss on the war and make meaningless all those deaths rather than add more lives to the tally.
We're paying a large price for not estimating the casualties heavy early on. Our enemies see our wavering and are encouraged to keep fighting, dreaming of another political victory by disheartening the american people. The big question in the minds of all our allies is whether the US public has the stomach to adjust its tolerance for casualty figures upwards. All that could have been avoided by setting them high in the first place.
Welcome to my world.
Reading this story on returning Israeli soldiers coming back from Lebanon, I picked up one fact that seems crucial.
Another soldier said that serving in the Palestinian militant stronghold of Jenin in the West Bank, as he had, was nothing compared with fighting Hezbollah’s guerrillas. “It was horrible,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like, with every second a rocket- propelled grenade shooting over your head.”
...
A third soldier said: “All the time, they fired missiles at us. They never come face to face, just missiles. When we find them we kill them. It’s just not right, the way we are doing it. Our air force can just bomb villages and not risk our lives fighting over there.”
Fire discipline and logistics are tough lessons to learn, the sort of discipline that is also very difficult to maintain in combat. Hezbollah has stocks accumulated for years. Israel is depleting those stocks by bombing the arsenals it can find and by prompting Hezbollah to use them on it instead of on the Lebanese Army when it comes down to take control of its territory. And that's the heart of why Israel isn't going to cease-fire short of its own stocks of weapons being drawn down to nothing due to an arms cutoff from the US. Israel's expense of soldiers to draw down those Hezbollah stocks is only moral if it's carried through to the end. A cease-fire that allows Hezbollah to restock means that those soldiers truly died for nothing.
Iran is bleeding cash for those weapons and they're likely losing a large chunk of them to IAF interdiction strikes before they even arrive. Iran is in such dire financial straights that it can't even maintain its regime of bread and circuses in the form of plentiful, subsidized gasoline. Fall will see Iranians forced into using rationing coupons while Iranian cash goes to purchase weapons and munitions (likely from Russia) to resupply Hezbollah. That's quite dangerous for regime stability. It brings into question what else is Iran going to run short of if it continues to pour money into its Lebanon front and Hezbollah.
For a Catholic, there's a two part test for an awful lot of things (not necessarily in this order).
1. is it legal
2. is it right
Mark Shea's Catholic and Enjoying It! blog is currently doing a very bad job of applying that test to the point where I and a bunch of others are regularly censored if we provide alternative perspectives hinging on the question of whether certain military acts are wrong merely 99.999% of the time or 100% of the time. My own perspective is that a lot of strange things happen out in the field and it's essential to actually listen before judging. Below is the comment I would have posted. The Mark Shea post is regarding the famous street execution photo of a general shooting a captured VC.
The problem of this famous incident is that it's always about the emotion. For this to have been a righteous shooting, the VC would have had to:1. have committed war crimes subject to the death penalty...
CHECK! According to commentary up above, he apparently killed a bunch of women and children and hid them in a ditch. You die for that, and justly so.2. the situation would have had to have been fluid, threatening, and manpower would need to be too short to safely devote resources to guarding the prisoner until a more formal judicial hearing could be convened
CHECK! This execution/slaughter was done in the middle of the Tet Offensive when things were very confusing and a number of positions were barely holding under assault. Pulling people away from safeguarding innocents to keep this guy alive wasn't likely practical.3. have been subject to some sort of judgment by a military officer acting in his capacity of a judicial officer.
BZZZT?? Did the general have the legal right to convene a drumhead court martial, judge the man, and immediately execute sentence according to the relevant law of the time? I really don't know. Since he was never judged for this very famous execution, I suspect that he did but am unsure.Of significant importance for catholics, what are the details of due process that a prisoner of this type is due as a minimal baseline inherent in the natural law? Is a single judge (with no jury) trial inherently unjust? That would be rather sticky because a large number of trials in the US are conducted under exactly those circumstances. There is judicial review here, and obviously not there but you need to be exact as to what the procedural problem is and why they are inherently against the natural law.
I was looking over this article where Colin Powell knocked Secretary Rice off message by publicly airing his doubts that there were enough troops for Iraqi operations. In the same article is Paul Bremer quoted as saying that we should have had 500,000 troops in Iraq. From what I can tell, there really aren't any more troops to be had in today's military (the same was just as true on the eve of Afghanistan and Iraq).
500,000 troops on the ground means 1.5M troops in the rotation to sustain that troop level for as long as is needed. We don't have a 1.5M army. We have a 500,000 person army and some of it has to stay in Korea to be a tripwire. Some of it needed to be in Afghanistan. There are other commitments that could not be stripped bare.
As far as I can tell, to say that we needed 1.5M in troop rotation and 500k on the ground is a fancy way of saying that we have to go to selective service and reinstate the draft. There is no troop fairy and we're not going to triple the Army in size as a volunteer force. Even we can't afford that. Yet the more troops dissenters never seem to get called on this. It's like the media can't do basic mathematics or haven't taken the couple of hours in research time to do the math on troop logistics.
I really do wish that we'd have that debate, that the press would get up and do their jobs asking these "more troops" advocates how, exactly, the US was going to come up with those troops. Does more troops mean Saddam Hussein's still in power? Does more troops mean there's a draft? What, exactly, were they advocating? What were the consequences?
I pride myself on being fairly sure footed on most issues. I read, think through a position, and don't very often have to change my mind much. Very rarely do I find myself whipsawed into taking a different stand.
Charles Krauthammer's Washington Post article is a remarkable exception. I admit it freely. I was asleep at the switch and didn't much see how dangerous the generals' revolt is. Throughout the world, generals are saying "oh, the US military is not so different after all". The consequences of this are likely never going to be tabulated. They are real, though, and tragic.
This is third in a series on options between the invasion now! crowd and TPMB's soft kill for Iran scenarios.
The thought occurs that there might be other firm kill options short of invasion. How about delivering Ayatollah Montazeri out of house arrest and to freedom in Najaf where he can preach openly in return to Iran as he chooses? This is not smile and convert via connectivity unless you think that connectivity at the barrel of an HRT member is a "soft kill".
The regime has an entire cast of religious figures under house arrest that are too important/influential to kill but do not support the regime. I can't imagine why their continued unjust imprisonment has to be a constant, an untouchable factor of safety for the current regime in Iran.
StrategyPage has a very informative list of items showing how military preparadness will inevitably backslide once peace breaks out. I can see why they've been true in the past but I don't see why all of them have to be true in the future. Out of five items, I think that two are solvable.
@ Make sure all troops have their basic infantry skills down cold. This means making sure that, during Basic Training, the civilian recruits get that necessary mental adjustment needed to deal with stress and combat. But Basic tends to get watered down in peacetime, mainly for political reasons. Too many (or just any) injuries during training can get the media and politicians in an uproar. During the 1990s, there was a major flap over the problems female trainees had keeping up with males. It wasn’t fair. For the moment, everyone is getting pretty strenuous Basic, but that will change one peacetime returns.
Why not make it a requirement to calculate the likely increased battle deaths that will be incurred by reducing training in infantry skills? By making the blood for money tradeoffs explicit, backsliding can be minimized.
@ Let the troops fire their weapons a lot, with real ammo. Marksmanship is a perishable skill, so you have to find the time, and money (for the ammo and building enough firing ranges) to do this. Gunfire is unpopular in peacetime, no matter how important it is. In wartime, it’s easier to get this done. Which is why the U.S. Department of Defense has, since September 11, 2001, been buying three times as much rifle and machine-gun ammo for training. Come peacetime, the amount of ammo bought will shrink, as will all that damn (to the increasing number of civilians building homes near military bases) noise.There are two cures for this. First, privatize the training bullet budget by creating a trust that will make up for congressional shortfalls in peacetime. If you manage the trust well enough, the skinflints in Congress aren't going to have their usual deleterious effects. The second half of the cure (noise issues) can be mitigated or entirely eliminated by sound cancellation.
The Poles are staying. It was clear earlier this year that Poland was going to pull out if things were going well in Iraq. The deployment was large and burdensome for Poland and if things were going well, they were out of there in order to tend to their own troubles. As a good member of the Coalition of the Willing, they're going through the process of sticking around. The anti-war left won't be reporting this too much because it undermines their "we're all alone" narrative. The pro-war side should be more honest. There's trouble brewing in Iraq, enough for Poland to stay. We need to be ready for the coming bad news so that we can fight through it to eventual victory.
It's the oddest thing that Rep Murtha claims that the US Army is broken and this is viewed with great alarm and as the end of the discussion. It is no such thing. Rather, it's the beginning of one. Let's assume that Rep. Murtha is correct, how broken is broken (ie how much less capable are we now than before) and how much time and money will it take to fix it? You'd think that at a press conference, somebody would ask those very relevant questions but it seems no reporter did.
Now Rep. Murtha is an appropriator with many year's experience. He should know the answers to these questions in more detail than just about anybody in Washington, much less the rest of the country. Why wasn't he more specific? Why weren't the reporters more diligent?
It is a mystery.
Finally got a link to Gen. Odom's recent column on Iraq. Gen. Odom is a serious man and deserves to have his views addressed seriously. I completely disagree with them.
Here are some of the arguments against pulling out:9) Talk of deadlines would undercut the morale of our troops.
...9) On not supporting our troops by debating an early pullout. Many US officers in Iraq, especially at company and field grade levels, know that while they are winning every tactical battle, they are losing strategically. And according to the New York Times last week, they are beginning to voice complaints about Americans at home bearing none of the pains of the war. One can only guess about the enlisted ranks, but those on a second tour – probably the majority today – are probably anxious for an early pullout. It is also noteworthy that US generals in Iraq are not bubbling over with optimistic reports they way they were during the first few years of the war in Vietnam. Their careful statements and caution probably reflect serious doubts that they do not, and should not, express publicly. The more important question is whether or not the repressive and vindictive behavior by the secretary of defense and his deputy against the senior military -- especially the Army leadership, which is the critical component in the war -- has made it impossible for field commanders to make the political leaders see the facts.
Most surprising to me is that no American political leader today has tried to unmask the absurdity of the administration's case that to question the strategic wisdom of the war is unpatriotic and a failure to support our troops. Most officers and probably most troops don't see it that way. They are angry at the deficiencies in materiel support they get from the Department of Defense, and especially about the irresponsibly long deployments they must now endure because Mr. Rumsfeld and his staff have refused to enlarge the ground forces to provide shorter tours. In the meantime, they know that the defense budget shovels money out the door to maritime forces, SDI, etc., while refusing to increase dramatically the size of the Army.
As I wrote several years ago, "the Pentagon's post-Cold War force structure is so maritime heavy and land force weak that it is firmly in charge of the porpoises and whales while leaving the land to tyrants." The Army, some of the Air Force, the National Guard, and the reserves are now the victims of this gross mismatch between military missions and force structure. Neither the Bush nor the Clinton administration has properly "supported the troops." The media could ask the president why he fails to support our troops by not firing his secretary of defense.
While not every military voice is united in optimism, the vast majority are and you can read them in all their glory on the Internet. But not all milbloggers are currently serving. Some could resign or retire at any time and do a sharp about face the moment that they are no longer covered by the UCMJ. I watch for such about faces because I'm fully aware of the possibility of feeding disinformation through the milblog channel. If we start finding fake or pressured milbloggers it would be right to discredit this source but until then, named military officers who write on the record beat out anonymous claimed officers who won't sign their names to their supposed opinions. These people come to the end of their careers too. Why aren't they writing, speaking out, putting their name to their opinions? The discussion might actually improve public discourse
If Newt Gingrich is right that this is a Long War, a war of multiple generations, then pacing our sacrifice and involvement is key to our ultimate victory. If we're less than 10% into this war, I'm not sure what the appropriate pace of civilian sacrifice is. What I am sure of is that it shouldn't be a huge effort that will leave society burned out long before ultimate victory is in sight. It's a legitimate request to increase societal sacrifice but we've got to make sure that it's on a pacing that is sustainable.
Massive personnel increases combined with rapid pullout of Iraq do seem to be an odd policy combination. Personnel are the most expensive part of fielding an army. If we aren't to stick around to the finish in Iraq, what are all those soldiers supposed to be doing? We're closing down the FRG bases, moving to new basing structures that have far fewer troops at them, and flooding Afghanistan with US troops was never a bright idea because it might give the Afghans the wrong idea that we wanted to actually stay on a permanent basis.
Finally got a link to Gen. Odom's recent column on Iraq. Gen. Odom is a serious man and deserves to have his views addressed seriously. I completely disagree with them.
Here are some of the arguments against pulling out:8) We haven’t fully trained the Iraqi military and police forces yet.
...8) On training the Iraq military and police. The insurgents are fighting very effectively without US or European military advisors to train them. Why don't the soldiers and police in the present Iraqi regime's service do their duty as well? Because they are uncertain about committing their lives to this regime. They are being asked to take a political stand, just as the insurgents are. Political consolidation, not military-technical consolidation, is the issue.
The issue is not military training; it is institutional loyalty. We trained the Vietnamese military effectively. Its generals took power and proved to be lousy politicians and poor fighters in the final showdown. In many battles over a decade or more, South Vietnamese military units fought very well, defeating VC and NVA units. But South Vietnam's political leaders lost the war.
Even if we were able to successfully train an Iraqi military and police force, the likely result, after all that, would be another military dictatorship. Experience around the world teaches us that military dictatorships arise when the military’s institutional modernization gets ahead of political consolidation.
What little we know for sure about the insurgency's position is from captured correspondence that is released by Coalition forces. From that we know that they fear the establishment of a democratically elected Iraqi government. They fear the arrival of an Iraqi military and the loss of the visible presence of US forces on Iraqi streets. They fear that they will have to pack up and move on because they are running out of places to move on to.
This does not sound like an insurgency that is fighting effectively and winning in Iraq. This sounds like an insurgency that prays that figures in the US, figures such as Gen. Odom, will win in the fight domestically and force a pullout of critical US forces before the Iraqi armed forces are ready to fully take over the task of Iraq's security. These Iraqi forces are already shouldering part of the burden and their part grows greater every month.
The idea that Iraqi forces are tentative about their loyalty to their government is an unfair broad brush. Iraqis are individuals and will have varying commitments to their government as we have varying commitments to our own. It's unrealistic and insulting to make negative categoric statements about all Iraqi soldiers and policemen as lacking loyalty to and belief in their government. Surely some lack conviction and some lack loyalty. It's also a sure thing that such things come out in combat and that such people are washed out when they desert, run from a fight, or just don't run their patrol routes but hide in a building for the requisite amount of time and go home.
All measures of Iraqi troop and police effectiveness are improving over the past year. Iraqi police stations don't get overrun anymore (the insurgents gave up on that after losing too many battles) Iraqi troops no longer suffer from massive desertions in combat situations (training is improved and there are experienced troops with them that stiffen their resolve). Iraqi troops are successfully holding what US and Iraqi forces are successfully clearing.
It is true that Iraq's political leadership is going to win or lose things in the end. That's true for every country in every war. Here, General Odom assumes incompetence instead of bothering to demonstrate it. The Iraqi political class is not made up of one party, one faction. Judgements about their ability to lead the country are extremely premature at this point.
Finally got a link to Gen. Odom's recent column on Iraq. Gen. Odom is a serious man and deserves to have his views addressed seriously. I completely disagree with them.
Here are some of the arguments against pulling out:7) Shiite-Sunni clashes would worsen.
...7) On Shiite-Sunni conflict. The US presence is not preventing Shiite-Sunni conflict; it merely delays it. Iran is preventing it today, and it will probably encourage it once the Shiites dominate the new government, an outcome US policy virtually ensures.
It's much better to make peace with the Sunni in a pluralistic government and get about the religiously vital business of cleaning up the mess of mullah run Iran. Najaf's scholars do not want Tehran's domination and thus will resist sectarian fighting. The US presence aids that fight and our service will be fondly remembered. The US presence need not be permanent. It only has to last long enough for a peace to be worked out despite Iranian and Syrian meddling.
Finally got a link to Gen. Odom's recent column on Iraq. Gen. Odom is a serious man and deserves to have his views addressed seriously. I completely disagree with them.
Here are some of the arguments against pulling out:6) Unrest might spread in the region and/or draw in Iraq's neighbors
...6) On Iraq’s neighbors. The civil war we leave behind may well draw in Syria, Turkey and Iran. But already today each of those states is deeply involved in support for or opposition to factions in the ongoing Iraqi civil war. The very act of invading Iraq almost insured that violence would involve the larger region. And so it has and will continue, with, or without, US forces in Iraq.
So is Lebanon today better for the US than Lebanon two years ago? It certainly is better for Lebanon itself and I think it is better for the US too. Would open Syrian intervention in Anbar and surrounding provinces be a preferred US outcome? Only if Syria having troops in the Bekaa was a preferred outcome for us.
Finally got a link to Gen. Odom's recent column on Iraq. Gen. Odom is a serious man and deserves to have his views addressed seriously. I completely disagree with them.
Here are some of the arguments against pulling out:5) Iranian influence in Iraq would increase
...5) On Iranian influence. Iranian leaders see US policy in Iraq as being so much in Teheran's interests that they have been advising Iraqi Shiite leaders to do exactly what the Americans ask them to do. Elections will allow the Shiites to take power legally. Once in charge, they can settle scores with the Baathists and Sunnis. If US policy in Iraq begins to undercut Iran's interests, then Teheran can use its growing influence among Iraqi Shiites to stir up trouble, possibly committing Shiite militias to an insurgency against US forces there. The US invasion has vastly increased Iran's influence in Iraq, not sealed it out.
Questions for the administration: "Why do the Iranians support our presence in Iraq today? Why do they tell the Shiite leaders to avoid a sectarian clash between Sunnis and Shiites? Given all the money and weapons they provide Shiite groups, why are they not stirring up more trouble for the US? Will Iranian policy change once a Shiite majority has the reins of government? Would it not be better to pull out now rather than to continue our present course of weakening the Sunnis and Baathists, opening the way for a Shiite dictatorship?"
If they're supposed to be waiting to settle scores with the Baathists until we leave, those torture rooms some Shiites have been running are showing a little bit of eagerness and independence, no? Allawi has been making an issue of the provisional government's mishandling of Sunni prisoners. His share of the Shiite vote on December 15th is a good sign whether the bulk of the Shia are going along with this scenario.
Iraq and Iran have been fighting each other for centuries. The idea that they will become lasting best buddies because of a short-term US occupation is just not serious. These are traditional regional rivals. Any alliance between the two will be fleeting. The best we can hope for is to sublimate the rivalry into a bloodless economic competition instead of a bloody battlefield one.
Finally got a link to Gen. Odom's recent column on Iraq. Gen. Odom is a serious man and deserves to have his views addressed seriously. I completely disagree with them.
Here are some of the arguments against pulling out:4) Iraq would become a haven for terrorists.
...4) On terrorists. Iraq is already a training ground for terrorists. In fact, the CIA has pointed out to the administration and congress that Iraq is spawning so many terrorists that they are returning home to many other countries to further practice their skills there. The quicker a new dictator wins the political power in Iraq and imposes order, the sooner the country will stop producing well-experienced terrorists.
Why not ask: "Mr. President, since you and the vice president insisted that Saddam's Iraq supported al Qaeda -- which we now know it did not -- isn't your policy in Iraq today strengthening al Qaeda's position in that country?"
Is that guy there with the cell phone turning me in? Is that buzzing overhead a UAV, or even worse a UCAV? Has my cell been penetrated by the local intelligence forces? Is a marine sniper looking at my head through a scope? Am I going to be the next "emir of the week" to get promoted and quickly killed?
Iraq is not a terrorist haven. If we pull out the wrong way, it could become one and some future Richard Clarke will once again worry about terrorists doing the boogie to Baghdad.
Saddam offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq. He was turned down because the Taliban gave bin Laden a better deal, not for any other reason. It's just not true that Saddam didn't support Al Queda.
Finally got a link to Gen. Odom's recent column on Iraq. Gen. Odom is a serious man and deserves to have his views addressed seriously. I completely disagree with them.
Here are some of the arguments against pulling out:3) It would embolden the insurgency and cripple the move toward democracy.
...3) On the insurgency and democracy. There is no question the insurgents and other anti-American parties will take over the government once we leave. But that will happen no matter how long we stay. Any government capable of holding power in Iraq will be anti-American, because the Iraqi people are increasingly becoming anti-American.
Also, the U.S. will not leave behind a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq no matter how long it stays. Holding elections is easy. It is impossible to make it a constitutional democracy in a hurry.
President Bush’s statements about progress in Iraq are increasingly resembling LBJ's statements during the Vietnam War. For instance, Johnson’s comments about the 1968 election are very similar to what Bush said in February 2005 after the election of a provisional parliament.
Ask the president: Why should we expect a different outcome in Iraq than in Vietnam?
Ask the president if he intends to leave a pro-American liberal regime in place. Because that’s just impossible. Postwar Germany and Japan are not models for Iraq. Each had mature (at least a full generation old) constitutional orders by the end of the 19th century. They both endured as constitutional orders until the 1930s. Thus General Clay and General MacArthur were merely reversing a decade and a half totalitarianism -- returning to nearly a century of liberal political change in Japan and a much longer period in Germany.
Imposing a liberal constitutional order in Iraq would be to accomplish something that has never been done before. Of all the world's political cultures, an Arab-Muslim one may be the most resistant to such a change of any in the world. Even the Muslim society in Turkey (an anti-Arab society) stands out for being the only example of a constitutional order in an Islamic society, and even it backslides occasionally.
It's absolutely false that if we pull out of Iraq, we will not leave behind a liberal, constitutional democracy. We've already established one and its first election is December 15 of this year. Denigrating this achievement, pretending it never happened, is just not right.
The only question is whether this new Iraqi order is self-sustaining. Is the political savvy that defanged Sadr, is pulling in the Sunnis tribe by tribe, in from the cold, the very talents that formed the INC itself all just a series of flukes or are the Iraqi people blessed with a series of secular and religious leaders in this generation that have the critical mass necessary to sustain the constitution that they have already adopted? Is all this political talent just a mirage? I don't think it is. I don't think that the Iraqi leadership is just a bunch of US puppets. They have their own leadership, their own talents, and, objectively, it looks pretty good. If we stay long enough so that they have a decent army and police force and continue to support them with air cover until they get a decent air force, they're very likely to continue the political system that has already been established.
As for the supposed arab incapacity to have a liberal democracy, if they're so bad, shouldn't they be barred the vote here? Of course that would be plain lunacy to even suggest it but it's the logical conclusion of the idea that arabs are incapable of governing themselves in a free, democratic society.
The US has done innumerable things that have never been done before. Being the midwife to Iraqi democracy is no more astounding than digging the Panama Canal or landing a man on the moon.
Finally got a link to Gen. Odom's recent column on Iraq. Gen. Odom is a serious man and deserves to have his views addressed seriously. I completely disagree with them.
Here are some of the arguments against pulling out:2) We would lose credibility on the world stage.
...2) On credibility. If we were Russia or some other insecure nation, we might have to worry about credibility. A hyperpower need not worry about credibility. That’s one of the great advantages of being a hyperpower: When we have made a big strategic mistake, we can reverse it. And it may even enhance our credibility. Staying there damages our credibility more than leaving.
Ask the president if he really worries about US credibility. Or, what will happen to our credibility if the course he is pursuing proves to be a major strategic disaster? Would it not be better for our long-term credibility to withdraw earlier than later in this event?
It's just absurd to say that we're not weakened by abandoning allies. Odom can't or won't concede that we might actually make this project work. Seeing the inevitability of credibility destruction, which course would have the least of it. That's a legitimate point to make and debate but dressing it up with the idea that our hyperpower status makes it impossible for us to lose our credibility because we're not insecure is just a nonstarter.
I do see ways that this could end up being a win for the US so I see the whole point as being an exercise in making false choices. Trapping ourselves in a false strategic viewpoint is bad. There I agree with Odom. It's actually worse, though, to trap yourself into a false strategic viewpoint and pull defeat from the jaws of victory than it is to fight the good fight and go down in a moral campign to spread freedom. The question remains, what's the correct strategic viewpoint? This analysis point doesn't do a thing to help answer that.
Finally got a link to Gen. Odom's recent column on Iraq. Gen. Odom is a serious man and deserves to have his views addressed seriously. I completely disagree with them.
Here are some of the arguments against pulling out:1) We would leave behind a civil war.
...1) On civil war. Iraqis are already fighting Iraqis. Insurgents have killed far more Iraqis than Americans. That’s civil war. We created the civil war when we invaded; we can’t prevent a civil war by staying.
For those who really worry about destabilizing the region, the sensible policy is not to stay the course in Iraq. It is rapid withdrawal, re-establishing strong relations with our allies in Europe, showing confidence in the UN Security Council, and trying to knit together a large coalition including the major states of Europe, Japan, South Korea, China, and India to back a strategy for stabilizing the area from the eastern Mediterranean to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Until the United States withdraws from Iraq and admits its strategic error, no such coalition can be formed.
Thus those who fear leaving a mess are actually helping make things worse while preventing a new strategic approach with some promise of success.
I would say that authoritarianism is not stable in a modern world of super-empowered individuals like Osama bin Laden or even on a more minor scale, like Mohammad Atta. Authoritarian regimes are not very good at controlling small groups of individuals. They traditionally have let minor irritants go unaddressed, waiting for them to grow to convenient size before they are suppressed brutally. To get down to the fine grain control of the individual level, the repressive machinery really has to be totalitarian, not authoritarian in nature.
We have abandoned our support for authoritarian regimes, in part, because authoritarian regimes are breaking down in their effectiveness. To our credit, there is a moral component as well and we should be proud of raising the banner of freedom as a moral enterprise but even just looking at things in a utilitarian way, authoritarianism is dying as a practical control vehicle. Something new must come and that something new should be the least-worst alternative possible. Reasserting the status quo is just not acceptable, even in a purely realism based foreign policy perspective.
But I don't think that civil war is necessarily a bad thing. There are certainly a lot of bad actors in Iraq. If the decen citizenry (which you can find across ethnic and religious lines) unites to bring those bad actors to justice in a civil war, this is not a failure. If, on the other hand, the civil war occurs on ethno-religious grounds and results in a tripartite partition of Iraq and a regional war fighting over the scraps left of that country, this would be a bad sort of civil war. I submit that with our presence, the former type is much more likely than the latter. Without us, the probabilities worsen for a bad type of civil war.
Finally got a link to Gen. Odom's recent column on Iraq. Gen. Odom is a serious man and deserves to have his views addressed seriously. I completely disagree with them.
If I were a journalist, I would list all the arguments that you hear against pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, the horrible things that people say would happen, and then ask: Aren’t they happening already? Would a pullout really make things worse? Maybe it would make things better.Here are some of the arguments against pulling out:
1) We would leave behind a civil war.
2) We would lose credibility on the world stage.
3) It would embolden the insurgency and cripple the move toward democracy.
4) Iraq would become a haven for terrorists.
5) Iranian influence in Iraq would increase.
6) Unrest might spread in the region and/or draw in Iraq's neighbors.
7) Shiite-Sunni clashes would worsen.
8) We haven’t fully trained the Iraqi military and police forces yet.
9) Talk of deadlines would undercut the morale of our troops.
The big unlisted elephant is, of course, national partition along ethno-religious lines with a tripartite division with Shiite Arab, Sunni Kurd, and Sunni Arab successor states emerging. This doesn't match the Odom narrative so is unmentioned.
A corollary to that would be the precedent in the region of creating such ethno-religous sub-states would become popular in a region that is full of artificial lines and weak authoritarian governments. The regionalization of that precedent would be a separate bad outcome from the original partition.
One of the crucial (and very underanalyzed) outcomes necessary for a victory on the War on Terror is the emergence of a muslim theological corpus of judicial decisions that delegitimizes terrorism. Iraq is very much in the forefront of that developing body of anti-terror theology. A US pullout would free imams to shut up anti-terror theologians by violence in a way that they are constrained from doing today.
No doubt there's others but it's a fundamental flaw of the article that no inconvenient pro-stay the course rationale that doesn't fit the preconceived narrative is included. Wasn't that supposed to be the major Bush administration sin on pre-war intelligence? Here we see the effect in full flower without the least excuse for it.
It seems that arab opportunists are smelling a shift in the wind and supporting Iraqi and Afghan governments by secretly sending special forces in support. This spells doom for the insurgencies as unofficial support routes for them largely depend on those same governments. Nobody's amused if their secret aid to rebels chews up their secret deployments of their most capable troops. The money will slow and stop as financial controls will against the rebels follow troop deployments.
It's one more in a growing list of signs that we're winning in these two fronts of the GWOT.
From the important StrategyPage comes an intriguing August 12th tidbit on US homeland defense:
The Intel agencies have spread the word around the criminal underground that pursuit will be relentless, and punishment harsh and certain for anyone who gets too cozy with Islamic terrorists. It's understood that the criminal gangs will do business with just about anyone (including intel agencies from just about anywhere). But even in this amoral atmosphere, the Western intel agencies have drawn a line of death for the players. At the other extreme, the word is out that valuable favors can be had for any gangsters who pass on valuable info about terrorist operations. Such deals are fairly common, although not given much publicity for obvious reasons (the resulting headlines cause major political headaches.)
Now the mystery is solved. The coyotes and drug barons who carry on illegal cross border trade have been warned in a manner that has scared them into being US allies on the issue of US homeland defense in much the same way that the Mafia was recruited into our forces for WW II duty as black hat auxiliaries.
The safety of the US southern border is thus now under indirect, and not direct, US control. This is tenable, for now, but we might not understand impending failure of the arrangement until two late. Two important failure modes come to mind. First, that Al Queda could inspire greater terror and flip these forces to become their auxiliaries. Second, our own tales of unendurable retribution could no longer be believed and commercial avarice could carry the day.
The first seems unlikely, though tales of Al Queda going after latin american people smugglers and drug kingpins should be watched for and sound an important alarm if they happen. The second threat is much more likely. Every change in the executive will lead to a reassessment by our forced southern auxiliaries. Will this new president have the guts to enforce those grisly promises of retribution? The first president that we elect that is generally viewed by mexican gangsters as light in the cojones will undo a major component of our domestic safety and force a pull back of our world-wide commitments in order to militarize our border as the only reasonable plan B alternative security arrangement. Plan C is to absorb a major attack and reshuffle the deck.
Recently, we passed the 60th anniversary of the use of the atomic bomb in WW II. I've been thinking about that usage and today's situation where people do talk about "nuking Mecca" and other nuclear weapons uses.
It's become clear that the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was largely based on communications intercepts which demonstrated that Japan would not surrender and were prepared to fight to the finish. That fight would have created huge casualties and might well have caused a repeat of Germany's WW I situation, where the war was ended in a negotiated settlement with the loser in control of their own territory. That would have been a terrible and bloody solution and set us up for WW III around 1970 as the cycle of war and peace repeated again. The decision to drop the bomb was justified.
I would expect that, at a bare minimum, if the jihadists were to gain the power to create mass casualty events that exceeded the death toll of small nuclear weapons that nuclear warfare would once again be on the list of realistic policy responses. We're a long way away from that but I expect that within my lifetime we'll get there. I just hope that we have a significant gene pool off this planet when we do.
In an otherwise entirely admirable article, Christopher Hitchens misses a stitch:
I call your attention to a report in the London Independent from Patrick Cockburn, published on Dec. 1, 2004. I should say that Cockburn is an old friend of mine, an extremely brave veteran of Iraqi reportage for three decades, and no admirer—to say the very least—of the war or the occupation. He reprinted a letter from Naji Sabri, Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, to his supreme leader. It is dated five days before the fall of Baghdad. In the letter, Sabri expresses concern that world opinion is receiving an impression of too much fraternization between Iraqis and American forces. A cure for this, he argues, is "to target their vehicle checkpoints with suicide operations by civilian vehicles in order to make the savage Americans realize that their contact with Iraqi civilians is as dangerous as facing them on the battlefield."
It bears repeating, time after time after time, that these actions are war crimes. It also bears repeating that the customary penalty for these sorts of crimes is death. The perpetrators of these crimes are equivalent to the worst of mass murderers.
It is a propaganda action of the enemy to make us forget that these are war crimes. It is psychological war against the population of Iraq and the populations of the coalition forces fighting for Iraq to take on the guilt for these civilian deaths. It is the plain duty of the media to give context to these reports and ensure that we do not forget the truth. The laws of war that create sanctuary for civilians by requiring soldiers to wear uniforms are there to save civilian lives. When those laws of civilian sanctuary are violated, the side that violates them bears the blame for subsequent civilian deaths. Force protection measures that lead to extra civilian lives lost due to war crime actions of our enemy are the fault of the enemy.
The insurgents are giving themselves away:
There have been cases where terrorist gangs have tried to seize all the cell phones used in a neighborhood where their hideout was.
I'm linking to Instapundit instead of just to Strategypage because the latter has no permalinks.
Thomas Friedman wants to talk about Iraq but it's pretty much a content free column. The one real issue he raises seems to be whether the factions are going to start investing in their own militias so much that national institutions are going to start to whither.
Well, we need to talk about Iraq. This is no time to give up - this is still winnable - but it is time to ask: What is our strategy? This question is urgent because Iraq is inching toward a dangerous tipping point - the point where the key communities begin to invest more energy in preparing their own militias for a scramble for power - when everything falls apart, rather than investing their energies in making the hard compromises within and between their communities to build a unified, democratizing Iraq.
What would be needed would be a list of active militias, their activate strength and an estimate of their loyalties. No doubt such a loyalty chart exists but it's no doubt highly classified. We just have to trust that US troops are not sleeping on the job in keeping an eye on these groups.
Brian Dunne speculates on why Israel is ordering 100 bunker buster bombs. Common speculation is that they're for Iran's nuclear program. He thinks that this is not correct but doesn't come up with an alternate use for them.
Any reasonable speculation on Israel's US defense purchases really needs to have a use for new weaponry. The US is restricting Israeli technology transfer because we've found Israel selling on tech in violation of agreed upon restrictions a few times too often. So not only is it interesting why is Israel buying such weapons but why are we selling them the Israel?
I think that those bombs are for deep tunnels into Gaza used by Hamas and others to run arms from Sinai. Instead of having to invade Gaza, find the surface point, battle your way through the tunnel, and collapse it from inside with explosives, you simply launch a plane, bomb it, collapse it without any warning and no surface casualties.
Such strikes would be a politically superior solution both raising the risk for palestinian use of such tunnels and also lowering Israeli risk. Depending on the cost of the munitions, this solution might actually be cheaper in strict dollar terms as well.
Building up an armed force from scratch can take a generation. For basic soldiers it's much shorter, of course. But NCOs take longer than privates, officers still longer and ultimately, your generals can take that generation to grow and mature into their roles. Most people understand that. But even green troops that are inadequately trained can stand and fight. As a statistical matter, they're just less likely to do so. Most people understand that too. Apparently not Joe Biden. He believes that
The guard has taken heavy casualties, been plagued by high absenteeism -- the result of an effective intimidation campaign -- and been infiltrated by insurgents. At best, the guard can handle fixed-point security -- as it did with the police and army for last week's elections -- but only if it has heavy U.S. combat and logistical support.The police and guard make up 94,000 of the 136,000 "trained and equipped" Iraqis. The army, border enforcement units and specialized forces make up the rest. Yet despite their courage few can operate independently against the insurgency. Their ability to take on other key missions, such as providing basic law and order, is unproven.
After more than a year of drift, the administration took a critical step in the right direction: It put Gen. David Petraeus in charge of the security training. He has added counterinsurgency to the police curriculum, emphasized leadership skills and building cohesive units, and developed special forces with much longer training times. As a result some Iraqis are starting to get the equipment, training and leadership skills they need to fight the insurgency. They include police commandos (about 5,000), special intervention forces (about 9,000), SWAT teams and other specialized forces (about 4,000). These forces total some 18,000 men.
But that is far short of the administration's 136,000 estimate. And of those 18,000, many are rookies with little experience. Indeed, in testimony Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, senior administration officials couldn't say how many Iraqi forces can operate independently against the insurgency. That's why I believe the number of Iraqis prepared to take on the insurgency is somewhere between 4,000 and 18,000.
Senator Biden is apparently comfortable calling the vast bulk of the Iraqi armed forces incompetent and hinting at cowardice. That sort of confidence sapping analysis is simply not acceptable for a person in a position of power and responsibility. Shame on him.
Donald Rumsfeld gets it right
Many thousands of Iraqi security personnel are performing exceptionally, and a few examples are worth mentioning. On Election Day, Iraqi security forces stopped a total of eight suicide bombers across Iraq who were hoping to upset the democratic process and kill innocent people. As was widely reported, one Iraqi policeman tackled and drove a suicide bomber back 50 feet from a polling station screaming, "Let me save the people!" before the bomber's belt exploded, killing them both. In the lead-up to the elections, Kirkuk police and the 207th Iraqi Army Battalion raided eight terrorist safe houses, capturing more than 30 extremists. The 205th Iraqi Army Battalion independently planned and executed an operation in the town of Miqdadiyah, capturing six extremists. Three days later, after receiving tips from local citizens, the 205th captured another 70 extremists, a large cache of weapons and bomb-making material.Many observers have focused critically on setbacks with respect to the Iraqi security forces. And over time, the performance of units has been somewhat mixed. Early on, in particular, some forces did not perform as well as hoped. But this is not without historical precedent. George Washington repeatedly expressed frustration with poorly trained troops, many of whom fled from battles. At one point, Washington threw down his hat, whipped fleeing soldiers with his riding crop, and muttered: "Are these the men with which I am to defend America?" They were; and he did. Americans won their battle for liberty because they were willing to take the risks and make the sacrifices that freedom requires. The Iraqis' performance last Sunday shows that they are ready to do the same. They deserve our respect for their courage, and not criticism from the safety of thousands of miles away.
When I say retarded suicide bombers, I don't mean they're rhetorically mentally deficient, I mean literally. The technique seems to be to take up (by force) the mentally impaired and put remote control bomb vests on them, point them towards their targets and simply tell them to go walk towards it.
This is sick, disgusting, and utterly beyond any legitimate military tactic in any code. Unfortunately, I've got no doubt that there are fatwas out there in support of this. I'm looking forward to the unified roar of condemnation from all mental health professionals, all muslim scholars and every decent person out there of whatever faith (or none at all).
The hard part is in figuring out what the proper punishment is when you catch somebody who does this kind of thing. Treating them the same as military POWs can't be it though.
As usual, I wish StrategyPage had permalinks. They don't:
January 26, 2005: The U.S. Army has found that troops going to countries where malaria is common, are not taking the medicines meant to prevent them from coming down with the disease. In one study, a battalion of U.S. Army Rangers, after spending four months in Afghanistan, had 5.2 percent of the troops coming down with malaria. This was because only 52 percent of the troops took the medicine (to prevent them from getting malaria) while they were in Afghanistan, and only 41 percent continued taking the meds when they got back (to make sure no one developed a case). Worse yet, only 29 percent of the troops used insect repellant while in Afghanistan. On the bright side, the strain of malaria in Afghanistan is not fatal. But it can really knock you on your butt if you come down with it. Malaria is the all time killer disease, although rarely the number one cause of death. But each year, it kills several million people, and debilitates many more. As far back as World War II, there were problems with getting the troops to take their anti-malaria medicine. If the local strain of malaria was not particularly nasty, the troops had no ever-present incentive to take their meds. It’s an old problem, and the only solution that works is some kind of medicine that need only be taken once.
If it's small, sturdy, and non-toxic if it releases everything at once, the surgical costs are likely to be outweighed by the cost of malaria. Then again, why not simply mandate it for soldiers who are caught not taking their meds?
A major problem in any discussion on the use of torture is the problem of definition. The idea and practice of a zero tolerance policy is all well and good in theory but the problem of discouraging our enemies' explicit policies of military perfidy and other war crimes such as body desecration. A zero tolerance policy eliminates any grey area and colors it black. The practical effect is to enshrine in our laws a "perfidy bonus" in combat operations undertaken by our enemies. It will end up with our own and allied troops and civilians dying in greater numbers due to inexistent fear of retribution. Why not attack civilians when there is no penalty? You might as well legalize murder and seek to disclaim any responsibility for the increased traffic at the coroner's office. .
That being said, there is good reason to color the grey areas grey. Negotiating the slippery slope is difficult but if we're to stay entirely out of that sort of transaction, we have to come up with modern responses to eliminate the perfidy bonus unless we prefer the unjust blood on our hands to be that of us and our allies rather than our enemies. That sort of preference is something that I simply do not understand.
When speaking of torture, there is an obligation on both sides to responsibly pair the moral problems of torture and perfidy. Unfortunately neither side seems to be strongly raising the connection.
Phil Carter's Slate article (as well as on his blog) on equalizing casualties across wars really bothers me. He explicitly links it to constant dollars, taking out inflation. You do this by equalizing what you can buy across time.
So what do you "buy" with one casualty and how does that change? What is the purpose of equalization? Why are better technologies, better tactics, and better medical care factors that can legitimately be taken out of the system?
I have a gut feel that this concept is ripe for politically motivated abuse. When you get the idea of fake casualties pumping up actual funerals that are being attended by flesh and blood casualties, two effects seem to be inevitable. The first reaction is an increase in negative feelings toward current military operations, the second is very much a backlash reaction that casualties, being partially fake, will reduce the impact of the actual casualties that are real tragedies. What the good effects of creating the "constant" casualty are, I can't really see.
According to the Telegraph, Syrian NGOs are raising an army and sending it piecemeal over the border to Iraq to fight for a Baathist restoration.
A network of Syrian mosques is sending men, money and weapons to Iraq, fuelling the insurgency.An investigation by the Telegraph has shown that Arab volunteers are streaming across the border despite Damascus government claims that it is curbing cross-border terrorism.
Much of the traffic is financed by former members of Saddam Hussein's regime living in the Syrian capital and has the backing of prominent tribal leaders.
In today's sad political reality, this doesn't seem to be in the cards. So if westphalian solutions are out, what would pre and post westphalian solutions offer us.
Pre-westphalianism would have H. Ross Perot, or some other corporate titan, rent a mercenary company to enter Syria, hang Assad in a public square with a message pinned on him for his successor to do better at controlling the jihadists and go home. This is a solution that would have all sorts of difficulties attached to it in the form of poor coordination, a marked increase in the chance of reprisals and other mayhem on US soil, and all sorts of unpredictable consequences that could spin the world political situation out of control.
That's the past. But what about a future, post-westphalian response?
Unfortunately, post-westphalianism, at least to the extent that it's developed, doesn't yet offer much better than plain jane westphalianism at this juncture. Sure, when Iraq dies down, Syria really has to worry that it's next for a makeover and that makeover will likely have a higher probability of success but there is currently no material advantage in this particular situation of post-westphalianism over westphalianism and a distinct disadvantage in the ability to marshall supplementary forces relative to pre-westphalian practices.
Is there a way to increase our ability to raise ad-hoc forces? I think that we're stumbling our way to it. Private military contractors are increasingly used and we're trying to reign in the bad effects by making their actions subject to the UCMJ. The system's by no means complete but I can see a future where present trends continue into a de-facto or even de-jure invigoration of the letters of marquee and reprisals clause of the Constitution. Close integration with US C4I systems would reduce the amount of trouble that an out of control unit might get into.
So why depend on such irregulars at all? I suspect that there is a pool of manpower out there that would be willing to participate in military operations of a specific duration and type as long as they could be sure that they go home at the end of what they signed up for. This is something that no army really every promises, certainly not the US Armed Forces. Dipping into that sort of pool of manpower, or renting mercenary forces would fit into Dr. Barnett's idea of a plug in military force, though he was thinking of it in terms of the back-end Sys admin force instead of ad-hoc improvements to the Leviathan force.
I think the Leviathan force is just as much in need of plug-ins as the Sys Admin force because of the strategy of parallelization. Al Queda clearly has been trying to stretch forces thin. If we can successfully demonstrate the capability of incorporating temporary units, parallelization becomes much less practical. We're no longer trapped between bulking up and crippling our economy with a massive military infrastructure and running so lean we can't stop our enemies from winning.
Dimitrios Gavriel will be buried two days from today at Arlington National Cemetary, a Marine Corps casualty of the Iraq war and proof positive that the blue states provide their own heros, their own contribution to the defense of this country. A New York Wall Street banker, he turned down financial opportunity to put on the uniform, to serve his country. He did his job and more, and for that we should all remember that our men in uniform are neither red nor blue but come from all of us.
Where do we find such men?
Jason Van Steenwyk sets out what progress means in Iraq in the final section of an interesting post on Fallujah:
I do take exception to the reporter's statement that "the victory over the insurgency isn't neccessarily any closer."You don't kill more than a thousand screaming muj and not get closer to victory. Really, the reporter misses the point, entirely:
Every day we get closer to an election in Iraq, every day another police trainee gets trained, every day another Iraqi National Guard unit confronts the enemy and doesn't flinch, we get closer to victory over the insurgency.
And there's nothing Zarqawi can do about it.
He's doomed.
Iraq is bigger than a counterinsurgency war. A few thousand radicals cannot overcome the impulses of a nation.
Zarqawi is doomed. He's just hoping to break us psychologically before it becomes to obvious to the media and governing elites in the West.
His column from Fallujah has all the elements necessary to figure out what's going on but Friedman still misses the point. He sees that we're at a tipping point. He sees that Iraqi leaders are starting to emerge. He sees that US troops are not enough to do the job alone. He just never asks the (to me) obvious question. Would more Iraqi leaders emerge if there were sufficient US troops in Iraq to do the job without risk to Iraqis? The obvious answer is no, that Iraqis would, if they could, be like everybody else and let somebody else do it for them if that's an option. An insufficient military force to do the job alone in Iraq isn't a bug in US strategy, it's a necessary feature of US strategy to win.
The day that Thomas Friedman understands that and explains it to the rest of blue state america is the day that our victory in spreading democracy is assured. It's that simple. Strikes at our psychological will are no longer going to have any realistic chance to succeed once we gain consensus that we want to grow local patriots by making it clear to them that only they can win their own freedom, that the best the US can do is to give them a fighting chance. That consensus is going to save a great many lives, may it come soon.
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy they're discussing OBL's threat to use the 2004 electoral map as an Al Queda targeting list. I don't know that there is that much to talk about. It's just not true. In reality, every state that does not follow sharia is on the target list. What is being discussed is the timing list, who goes first. Everything else is hudna, temporary, deceptive truce until Al Queda or successor recovers enough strength.
Since our security since 9/11 seems to have improved sufficiently to prevent new spectacular attacks, we are also getting a hint as to the type of attack. Let's say that they pick Alabama for a red state first target. No offense to that state but they don't exactly have a Pentagon or a WTC there. So if they do end up on the top of the list, what are the targets in the state? We're more likely going to see non-arabic terror snipers with an Al Queda seal of approval than planes going into buiildings. In short, we're going to see operations that are incredibly cheap, effective, and entirely out of character with traditional Al Queda operations of spectacular targets and spectacular attacks.
Instead, look for a lot of "ghost" attacks that do not use up agents but instead become impressive because they are repeated across a wide area. Take two cars, steal license plates, wire up one car with dynamite. Drive both cars to a gas station and evacuate the bomb driver with the other car. blow up the bomb as you're leaving. It's low cost, almost impossible to defend against, you can do it a hundred times all over the country simultaneously, and it's effective.
Hopefully Al Queda's still slow, still stupid but we can't count on that forever. Eventually, they will adopt such tactics, count on it. The question is whether we have the stones to keep putting ourselves at the head of the target list because living our lives as we please in freedom is going to end up doing just that. This time it's vote for Bush. Next time it might be a sharia referendum. The specifics of the vote don't matter, violently threatening to act depending on the outcome does.
Update: Here's the MEMRI translation of Bin Laden's tape. It's much better than what I've been working off of and specifically speaks to the issue.
In past editions of this series I hypothesized that it would become incredibly important to get a robust network up in order to enhance communications with locals so that information flow could be quick and relatively risk free. Cheap simputer style multilingual machines would speak the local language and not require literacy in order to access information on curfews, job availability, Internet connectivity, and give the ability to provide intelligence reports without having to risk physically going to US troops. Simputers are already being worked on in India but the networking backbone looked to be a more difficult problem.
I thought that the idea of such information nodes would take awhile to 'catch fire' inside the Pentagon but apparently, they're not only not that far away, they're getting deployed as part of a more conventional battlefield network backbone that carries combat information between US troops called SuperCrumbs which are hardened 802.11b nodes, a component of a larger system called Pathfinder. [Note: I'm linking to Google cache copies so the links will expire]
The only thing really left on this story is the technical specs of the Supercrumb (if they aren't classified) and I have a message into the people who are building the things to find that out. Ideally, they would have power generation systems on board (solar cells most likely) that could keep them live without maintenance but even if batteries have to get changed, if it's infrequently enough, it would still be worth it.
Phillip Carter's Intel Dump misses the point in the recent analysis on the offensive in Samarra. Here's the money graph.
So why does it matter that we're back at war? Well, if you're the type who likes to keep score, it matters. If you're going to judge this president on his wartime record, it matters. This administration, though a series of major miscalculations, has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Our best hope in Iraq is to leave some sort of lasting democratic government there and to set up the Iraqis as best we can to manage their own security mess. But hope is not a method, and this will be a gamble. Nonetheless, I do not see any way for the U.S. to impose order on Iraq, short of committing 2-4 times as many troops as we have there now and imposing absolute U.S.-controlled martial law on the country. And even then, we would continue to bleed slowly from IED attacks and ambushes on a regular basis. There aren't a lot of good options out there — just varying degrees of bad ones. The tough part is picking the least bad option that will not lead to a failed state of Iraq that we must come back to again in 5 or 10 years.
There is a plan B and we're seeing it in Samarra and are likely to see it in the rest of the insurgency hotbeds prior to polling in January. The plan is simple, adjust and experiment in different ways to do the handover to different groups of local leadership until, town by town, a formula is discovered that succeeds in defeating efforts by the insurgency to drive out the legitimate local government and security services.
The fact that we've not had 100% success with plan A but merely 80% does not mean that we've "snatched defeat from the jaws of victory". A solid B does not a defeat make. If we continue our present strategy, we're going to go through another 2-3 rounds of this cycle with more towns and cities successfully resisting insurgent efforts to take them over each time the US pulls back into "support the locals" mode. The only possible way we can lose this fight is to renege on the promise of launching as many cycles as it takes, something that is a real possibility with the election of John Kerry to the White House.
Victory is not going to be, and never was going to be, US troops in the streets. It always was going to be freely elected Iraqi governments running the show with their own police and troops keeping order. Even in the US, under conditions vastly more favorable to order than pertain to Iraq, municipalities sometimes go bad and need intervention to bring them back to a civilized, lawful state. How long did it take to eliminate Tammany Hall? How long did it take to fix the corruption of Cicero, IL? You can't answer because the corrupt practices law enforcement has been fighting for decades still aren't over yet.
If corrupt municipal pols in the US thought they could realistically resist anti-corruption action militarily, there's no reason to believe they would be any more peaceful than their ideological twins in Fallujah. The difference is that our military is so good as to make armed resistance unrealistic and nobody is pumping in arms and money to corrupt pols in the US to fund an insurrection.
Robert Novak's missing an important option in his recent analysis of the next president's Iraq options. The key paragraph follows:
Whether Bush or Kerry is elected, the president or president-elect will have to sit down immediately with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military will tell the election winner there are insufficient U.S. forces in Iraq to wage effective war. That leaves three realistic options: Increase overall U.S. military strength to reinforce Iraq, stay with the present strength to continue the war, or get out.
Even if Novak's assertion is correct that we cannot fight an effective war at current troop strength, it is insufficient to justify bugging out early. In fact it would be a horrible betrayal to leave before sufficient Iraqi forces exist to secure a free Iraq. All we need do is to maintain our strength in country and simply use the positive trend line of more and more good guy forces to turn the tide and beat the insurgency. Novak's entire story makes no sense unless he's either ignoring Iraqi troops as effective combat forces or ignoring the increases in troop strength that are constantly coming on line. In either case, it's bad military math for Novak.
A recent article entitled Catching Al Queda completely misses the significance of killing and capturing Al Queda's leadership. Perhaps looking at how another longstanding illegal organization system died might help make things clear.
The Mafia has largely died in the US. It is a death by a thousand cuts that was administered, is still being administered to the sad remnants of that once fearsome organization. The formula was and remains simple. Catch low level organization men, turn them states evidence, and climb up the chain of command until you take out a family's head. The dead and arrested will be replaced but the disruption and replacement of seasoned leaders by immature, green talent means that repeating the cycle of bringing down the family boss is easier next time.
The exact same mechanism is applicable to Al Queda. The more senior level people are caught or killed, the more people get promoted too fast, get too much responsibility for their talents and maturity, and make beginners mistakes, further eroding the organization.
Froggy Ruminations provides some expert opinion on why we're dangerously vulnerable to a Beslan style attack. I left the following in comments:
One of the things that I remarked about Beslan was that men resisted the takeover, and were shot for it straight off. A school hostage situation here is going to have people trying to defend their kids (either literally or figuratively) and they're going to get killed for it. The problem is that we've got legislation that ensures that their resistance will be as ineffective as possible because they will not be armed even if they normally have the right to concealed carry in the local jurisdiction.Essentially, all you can do is resist, make the terrorists bleed straight off, allow the maximum amount of time possible for the kids to run before the terrorists have control and thin out their perimeter so they cannot effectively control the building, perhaps allowing even more to escape. Bleeding them enough so that they break and flee is a possibility but probably a remote one.
The very good guys with guns are on our extended national perimeter. I agree that they're going to be too late. Even the medium-high quality SWAT/HRT guys are likely to have difficulty dealing with the post-Beslan world, at least the first time around.
The one advantage that we have as a nation over most of our 1st world compatriots in hardening all our soft targets is the concept of the unorganized militia (look the term up in your state military code, all 50 states have one). In short, the unorganized militia is the whole of the people and the that original legacy embodied in state and federal law as a consequence of the 2nd amendment gives us an edge if we are willing to dust it off and use it.
Again, I've got no illusions that 9 times out of 10 in place defenders will do no more than allow for more people to escape and bleed the terrorists before they can set up their intended blood baths. For those who would resist anyway, making instruction available and permitting them to carry arms hardens the whole of society.
Zef Chafets gets his main point right that the point of Islamist action is empire, not terrorism for its own sake. He gets two details desperately wrong though. The most important is that there is a method to harden a Beslan, and all the shopping centers and other purely civilian targets out there. It is as old as the republic, the unorganized militia.
Improving the readiness of the unorganized militia would increase the numbers needed to take over any target, achieve any goal further than blowing themselves up in inconvenient places, a form of terrorism that depends on the maintenance of a profoundly unislamic societal matrix extolling the false gods of the death cult. Defeating the death cult in their midst should be something that even the most hard core islamists have to worry about theologically.
Chafet's second error is that while the super-empowerment of subnational groups is being taken advantage of most by islamists, the tools are there for any group to take advantage of and it's quite likely that others will make a name for themselves doing the same thing. A trio of domestic threats, Timothy McVeigh with his right-wing militia ties, the ALF with their bombing and arson campaign, and ELF with its strikes against loggers and other imagined corporate demons all have the potential to pick up right where the Islamists leave off.
All these threats, foreign and domestic, rely on the existence of undefended soft targets. The unorganized militia is all about raising the generalized level of "hardness" everywhere, and doing it in random, secret distribution patterns that are not susceptible to any intelligence analysis by our enemies. XYZ neighborhood might look innocent and easy meat for an attack but the percentage of people with guns, of alert people who have the means to foil an attack, are unknown and it's an uncertain and deadly crap-shoot to go and find out.
This pushes targets more towards empty buildings and isolated pockets with few people. It's a distinct improvement to push the enemy target list out of major population centers, an effort that we need to gear up, and soon.
After reading this Rocky Mountain News opinion piece it struck me that the writer seemed absolutely clueless regarding asymmetric warfare and how it's supposed to look when the side using it is winning. Nobody's ever tried to climb up as steep a hill of asymmetry as the Islamists v. the USA. When the odds are not so lopsided, you get Beslan writ a hundred times over, repeated at will until the "stronger" power gives up. This is the jihadist war plan, for us as well as Russia. Such school takedowns will be coming to our shores soon enough. The test run was a success.
If you've ever cracked open a US state law military code, you find the funny sounding term, the unorganized militia. It's there in the federal code as well. This term dates back to the founding of our republic (and probably beyond) to mean the whole of the people (with minor exceptions for those incapable of bearing arms). By definition, the unorganized militia has no units and no officers. But I wonder if it might not begin to have some order.
These thoughts are prompted by the tragedy of the poor account Russia's unorganized militia (the parents and teachers present) at the Beslan school terrorist takeover. There were plenty of failed heroes. One account I read remarked that 20 men were shot for resisting the terrorists. If those 20 had been armed the tragedy might have played out differently. With their ranks thinned by those 20 (who would likely have died, armed or no) more might have escaped without being shot in the back. Russian special forces might have had better options with a thinner terrorist perimeter and fewer might have died in the ultimate mad scramble when everything went wrong.
In some sense, Russia's unorganized militia is somewhat better off than the US as their conscription system (even though it's brutal and dysfunctional) creates widespread familiarity with firearms and with basic military concepts. Their material poverty and withered civilian gun culture put them right back at square one though.
In a sense, I shouldn't be writing this post. Somebody with military experience, a former officer who knows both how to soldier and how to lead should be writing this. But what I do know are systems and information and these two are critical to the question of ordering an unorganized body and practically creating a functional group without the normal (and expensive) coordination of a formal structure. This means I have a vision in my head but I don't necessarily have the tools to get things down in one draft as I do where I've been thinking about such things for much longer.
Lots of people have been hyperventilating about Russia and loose nuclear weapons material for over a decade. So what's our excuse? We've been spending a great deal of money in assisting the Russians in securing their nuclear material via the Nunn-Lugar Act. If we heard about 1,375 kilos of plutonium gone missing, the commentariat would be out for blood with every paper in the country running tabloid headlines and panic would grip Washington and probably far beyond.
So we've got that much missing and it's a minor mention in a few little sites. What logical reason do we have to differentiate the two?
After a night's sleep and a bit of reading, I think I know what the price will be for a Kerry success in making our traditional allies love us again. As I've noted in the past one of the major player factions on the global stage is a group of people who thrive on monopoly/monopsony profits, providing the spider thin controlled connectivity that most Gap states have to the Core in order to supply the elite's whims for expensive cars, jet setting travel, and PS2s.
The US has played along with this game in the past but the major unforgivable sin of this Bush administration in old Europe has been threatening all these sweet, cosy deals by wanting to open connectivity wide and bring in all the world's major players into these countries, bringing prosperity and freedom to the Gap while costing the established players their ultra-fat profits.
This is the heart of France and Germany's beef with us, the reason why they are so implacable in their enmity. Major contracts are threatened, established relationships would largely be rendered worthless, and a high amount of unpredictability would ensue with US firms winning an awful lot of those new opportunities. The problem is that Bush wants to bring too much competition, too much free market, too much rule of law into the Gap. Pace, Dr. Barnett this is not a neo-marxist critique but rather a very capitalist one.
Kerry has an opportunity to reestablish peaceful relations with Germany and France, Russia and the PRC by letting them maintain and expand their network of spider-thin connectivity webs, by running the GWOT as a war without Gap shrinking. Satisfy these established powers, don't force rule set resets in the Gap, and all will be right with the world. We will have glowing press releases. The UN will bless our military endeavors. All we have to give up is any hope of ending the war by appeasing the implicit villains.
We would end up in an Orwellian nightmare, 1984 writ more complex with a kaleidoscope of ever shifting enemies in the Gap, reaching out and striking us in unpredictable, bloody ways but with us unable to do much more than we did in the Clinton administration. The major difference is that the tents will not be empty, individual terrorists will be killed. The only problem is that we will be accelerating their creation with every strike.
If the opposition we're encountering in old Europe is truly centered around the hidden villains, Kerry's boxed himself into authorizing a perpetual war. It'll be containment v. rollback all over again with GWB being the early rollback guy and Kerry accepting aggressive containment as the best we can do without losing France and Germany again.
Do we really need another four decades of continuous cool war before another heir to Reagan comes along and rolls back the Gap? I certainly hope not.
The first modern US ABM interceptor has now been deployed. We're not quite there yet but we're likely to soon reach the point where poor state nuclear blackmail will lose its threat. It's not the entire solution to the problem by any means but it is a necessary step to getting a sufficient solution.
HT: The Corner
IraqNow has an article on troop recruitment where Jason Van Steenwyk ends up with "My baloney detectors are singing these days." Mine are too but I'm not quite sure who's dishing out the baloney or is everybody doing it.
The Washington Post article on the Army's Delayed Entry program notes that we're at a 3 year low with 23%. The 2001 number was 22% and the 2000 number was 19%. The Army's goal is 35%. Would it have killed the Post to put in a graph showing the historical numbers since the system was started (most likely with the volunteer Army in the 70s)? How common is it to have a 23% number or lower? We don't know from the story and I have no idea where to find such information.
This is the kind of grunt work that makes professional reporting a real job that will survive blogging. It's worth paying for that information because with the data, you can judge how bad things are. If we were hitting 35% for most of the 80s and the first half of the 90s, that says one thing. If we've hit 35% once or twice in the entire history of the program with low-to-mid 20% levels being the norm, I'm a whole lot less excited about our impending manpower crisis.
Greg Burch just resurrected one of those stories that will just not go away, the Al Queda suitcase nuke story.
The reality is that GB should be deeply skeptical. From all accounts, these things had to get taken apart and rebuilt every couple of years in order to continue functioning. Their high maintenance costs were what led the USSR/Russia to abandon them. It was only after they were well past their "explode by" date that the Russians sold them if, in fact, they ever did sell them. So the question really is whether bin Laden did or did not get taken by a russian military con game and got stung for millions for a lot of worthless junk, not whether we are actually at risk. It's still an interesting question but not something that I'll stay awake at night worrying over.