Here’s where I tend to feel more of an [...]]]> The Pew Research Center has published a poll, reported on CQ Politics that indicates amongst other things that only 28% of the voters can pick the number of casualties we have incurred in Iraq to the nearest thousand (4,000 as of the poll time).

Here’s where I tend to feel more of an affinity for war proponents than I do for that vast body of sheep whose interest in the war and support for it vary according to the latest news stories. I can understand how one can think that we ought to finish the job and make things work. Of course I can understand my own position, which is that we have defined a task for our military that they can never finish, and we should therefore realign our expectations and act accordingly. What I can’t understand is how the war can become unimportant to so many people.

I’ve watched it fade as a major campaign issue. Now we find that only 28% have a solid idea of how many casualties. Most of the rest underestimated the number of deaths. As a veteran I realize that people tend to forget wars after they are finished. There was a huge response to those of us returning from the first gulf war, though that started fading in a few months. But what we cannot afford to do is to forget about the fact that our young men and women in uniform are fighting and dying for us over there right now. (AP reports the current number as 3987 as of yesterday.)

That should be our first concern, more than personal comfort, our economic well-being, or a variety of social issues here at home. I heard one commentator, whose name I forget, say that the Republicans tend to make economic issues into security issues, while the democrats tend to make security issues into economic ones. Barack Obama has been doing the latter with the war, assuming that if we aren’t spending the money in Iraq, it will be available for a domestic agenda. Though on balance I support Obama, on this he’s likely wrong.

The reason I think we need to get out of Iraq is because we’re spending lives and resources without adequate return. But we are going to have to spend some lives and resources somewhere. We need to improve intelligence capability, especially training people in the languages and cultures of the middle east. We need to train more troops for quick strikes hunting terrorists. We need to spend more money on security here at home.

But all this is a digression on my part. The critical thing is that the American people need to remember and keep paying attention to what is going on in the world, because whether I’m right or wrong about what we should do, it is important to be thoroughly aware of this issue. The lives of those who have volunteered to defend our country shouldn’t be a secondary issue.

In an BBC article received via e-mail, I read the following:

[...]]]> It seems that some people in the military have noticed the fact that we don’t really understand the territories and the countries about which we so glibly pontificate. And much of the pontification is official, which makes the ignorance more egregious.

In an BBC article received via e-mail, I read the following:

But that is not all. The US military has developed a new programme known as the Human Terrain System (HTS) to study social groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The HTS depends heavily on the co-operation of anthropologists, with their expertise in the study of human beings and their societies.

Steve Fondacaro, a retired special operations colonel overseeing the HTS, is keen to recruit cultural anthropologists.

“Cultural anthropologists are focused on understanding how societies make decisions and how attitudes are formed. They give us the best vision to see the problems through the eyes of the target population,” he said.

There’s a story that brings up mixed emotions. We certainly do need to understand people better, but a phrase like “target populations” presents an understanding that is at least equivocal. What exactly are we targeting these populations for? What are we going to do with them, and what gives us the right to do it?

But despite my questions I welcome the notion of creating a better educated military. Hopefully somewhere in this process some military leaders will be asking just how we can cooperate with, rather than dominate local populations. Perhaps troops can learn how to work in a way that minimizes offense. But as long as those military forces are operating under orders to transform those societies into an image that is desirable in American eyes, I don’t think it will work perfectly. It’s good military strategy, but good military strategy needs to be employed in the service of good political and diplomatic strategy.

And that is the level at which I believe our country as a whole, and particularly the appropriate portions of our government need to be better educated. A little bit of anthropology would go a long way with our diplomats. To those who suggest that we have such experts, I would answer that we are 1) not listening to them, 2) they are not as expert as they appear, or 3) we don’t have enough of them.

I suspect all three. Why? Because somewhere up there in the American government somebody thought that we would easily accomplish the invasion of Iraq (we did), would be welcomed by the Iraqi people as liberators, and then would easily create a new government. Low cost in money, in lives, and even in time. Then we could get on with other targets in the war on terror.

Whoever painted that scenario was somewhere between criminally negligent and grossly stupid. There was never any reason for anyone to believe that in the first place.

Of course we need anthropologists and other social scientists in the military. The more wisely force is applied, the less force is needed. In social situations, the best result is when no force is actually applied at all. I’m not so optimistic as to think we can attain that easily, but the more intelligently we act, the less people we’re going to have to kill–our own and others.

The tragedy is that we’ll be sending in anthropologists to help us deal with various tribal groups after much of the damage is already done. If we are to fight and win a war on terror, we will need more than a military strategy. The prime error of diplomats is the belief that diplomacy accomplishes all; the prime error of those who wield military power (but not usually of the soldiers on the front line) is to believe that force can ultimately solve all problems.

A strategic approach to the [tag]war on terror[/tag] will have to involve an intelligent strategy, first political, and then military where problems are actually intractable.

One further note–I can see the ethical objections to anthropologists in being part of these teams. Do you want to use your understanding of a tribal group to facilitate their manipulation by the military with no control over just what will be done and how? You would never know when your knowledge might become the key to destroying a culture. At the same time, applied at the proper level, such knowledge could result in great savings of life. Perhaps there is a balance to be sought here.

Now I don’t like the ad, and I don’t particularly like MoveOn.org, and I think private groups and politicians should go ahead and do all the condemning that the ad deserves. Though I’m an opponent of the war [...]]]> They took the time to condemn the [tag]MoveOn.org[/tag] Ad on General [tag]Petraeus[/tag] (LA Times story).

Now I don’t like the ad, and I don’t particularly like MoveOn.org, and I think private groups and politicians should go ahead and do all the condemning that the ad deserves. Though I’m an opponent of the war in Iraq, I think the ad deserves a good deal of condemning. But all of that, like the ad itself, is simply part of the free exchange of ideas that we have in this country. MoveOn.org gets to act irresponsibly; that’s their right. I get to loathe them for it; that’s my right. I get to think General Petraeus is wrong even though I loathe the ad attacking him, that’s my right. None of it is a matter for the law.

And of course one can point out to me that the Senate didn’t pass a law. It’s not binding. OK, fine. But if it’s not a law, it’s non-binding, and it just expresses their opinion, why bother doing anything about it in the Senate? This is not the only such resolution, of course, and they have varying relevance to the business of the Senate. But right now, our government lacks a coherent policy on terrorism, the president and congress are wrangling over just how to behave in Iraq, thus preserving the maximally nasty situation in which we hold on, but with no reason to expect success. At the end of the fiscal year, the Senate will be running out of time to accomplish important business like appropriations bills.

And here they are condemning an ad. Let them condemn (or condone) ads on their own time out on the campaign trail. That’s where it belongs.

I’m not going to make my own list, because I don’t think I’ve learned [...]]]> Joe Carter caught my attention again today with his post This I No Longer Believe: 5 Lessons Learned from the Iraq War. Now he’s responding to this post by Rod Dreher, but I actually found his list more interesting.

I’m not going to make my own list, because I don’t think I’ve learned five things from the Iraq war. I’m not usually terribly prescient, and I have a long line of bad calls on elections to prove it, but I thought this war was going to be a failure from the start. The one thing I have definitely learned is that the American voters in general, and the leadership in particular do not seem to be able to think in terms of strategy. We seem to manage one step at a time, with two at the outside. “Let’s withdraw from Iraq so American soldiers will quit dying.” That’s one step. “What do we do about the genocide that will result?” That’s two steps. A third might be to ask whether there will come a time we can withdraw without destabilization, and if so when that will be, and how much it will cost. We can continue on from there to ask what other things we might do with the same resources to change the future.

I think in general both sets of lessons learned don’t look far enough into the context of each war and why people might have supported or opposed them. I know that many people expected the war in Iraq to be short and easy, and there was no reason to expect that. In fact this is one area where I personally give politicians little slack. I think anyone should have known that establishing a stable and democratic government in Iraq such that we could withdraw was going to be massively difficult.

A couple of days ago I made a somewhat intemperate remark about the Lybian government with reference to the Lybia 6. Despite calling my remark intemperate, and despite the fact that I might well not have said it, I’m not apologizing for it, because it does reflect what I think in an unedited way. Yet the Iraq war has involved similarly stupid activities.

I would suggest Guantanamo as a good combination of the immoral and the strategically stupid. Leaving aside the immoral, let me look at the strategically stupid part. Is it likely that the additional information gained by the controversial actions helped against terrorism enough to justify the political fallout, both domestic and foreign? I doubt it. There is a tendency amongst some people to think it’s patriotic to say “the hell with everyone else” and go it alone. I won’t debate “patriotic,” but that attitude is definitely dumb. We do need international cooperation to fight terrorism. In addition, the domestic political viability of a policy is also one of the considerations for whether a policy is strategically viable. In other words, the political support has to last until the policy is completed.

But I wanted to respond to one particular point Carter said he learned:

3. I no longer believe that Arab nations are capable of sustaining liberal democracies. The empirical evidence for this belief is overwhelming: Arab culture is currently unable to sustain democratic forms of government. Some people will decry this belief as racist or xenophobic. But it is simply being realistic. I used to think that Samuel Huntington was an intelligent crank; now I think he’s prophetic. As he once noted, the Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous. Thinking that freedom could take root in the blood-soaked soil of Arab culture was a naive assumption. Iraq has disabused me of such notions.

It simply amazes me that anyone thought that they were capable of doing so, or that if they were, such a democracy could be imposed from outside. Iraq is an especially tricky case. We try to think of all the people of Iraq as “Iraqis” in the sense that we think of Americans as Americans. But the border lines that create Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait, and Jordan, amongst many others, are the product of the activities of western powers. We start with the notion of having the majority rule, or something close to that. Well, for Sunnis, that means Shi’ite rule in Iraq. They are, understandably, not crazy about it. And that’s only the first of many, many problems.

We have somehow gotten the idea that an American style democracy is the best thing for everyone, and that, if they are given the opportunity, everybody will embrace it. It’s a highly arrogant position for us to take. Might it not be better to suggest that a country’s government needs to arise out of its own history and culture? And perhaps we should extend that to the idea that a “country” should arise out of its own history and culture.

A similar oddity occurred with the Palestinian election. We wanted a democratic election amongst the Palestinians. But then they went and elected the wrong people! All from our point of view, of course. So we cut off funding because now the Palestinian government was run by terrorists. I would suggest that we go back to the first step and ask whether it should be up to us to tell the Palestinian government that it must be democratic. Maybe we should only specify our requirements of them in terms of foreign policy goals, not their governmental forms.

If we, as a country, could learn something from this war, I would hope it would be this. Be determined in defending ourselves, but lose the arrogance about telling other people how to run their countries. We don’t have enough troops available to pay for our arrogance.

Let’s not make a mistake about this. When we withdraw from Iraq, we’re going to lose most of our ability to impact the [...]]]> This story and video shows why Richardson really doesn’t understand how diplomacy actually works. He’s going to withdraw all the troops and then he’s going to go seriously into diplomacy.

Let’s not make a mistake about this. When we withdraw from Iraq, we’re going to lose most of our ability to impact the country diplomatically. What some people refuse to understand is that there are people in the world whose motivations are not good, who are not going to be persuaded by our good arguments, and who prefer killing us to peace. Once the threat of force is gone, countries like Syria and Iran will have no reason to cooperate.

The threat of sanctions is futile and always has been. The sanctions will leak, and Iran (the sanctions target specified by Richardson) will go right on doing what they intended to do all along.

I support withdrawing from Iraq, but I do so because we cannot create a democratic Iraq through military means. We are now pursuing a goal we cannot accomplish. It’s not because our troops are not good; it’s because a unified and democratic Iraq is simply contrary to the nature of the country itself. We need to withdraw for two reasons: 1) People are dying for an impossible goal–horrible strategy, tragic reality; and 2) We need those troops to take action elsewhere. We need them, for example, as a credible threat to add to the negotiating mix with Iran, amongst many other things.

The idea that we’ll pull out our troops and then settle in to serious diplomacy is absolutely ludicrous. After the withdrawal we aren’t going to have any chips to throw into the game in Iraq. It appears some politicians are living in dreamland and don’t have the courage to recognize the negative side effects of their policies.

Months before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that it would be likely to spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report released Friday by the Senate Select Committee [...]]]> I found the following article interesting but in no way surprising:

Months before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that it would be likely to spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report released Friday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Analysts warned that war in Iraq also could provoke Iran to assert its regional influence and “probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups” in the Muslim world.

The intelligence assessments, made in January 2003 and widely circulated within the Bush administration before the war, said that establishing democracy in Iraq would be “a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge.” The assessments noted that Iraqi political culture was “largely bereft of the social underpinnings” to support democratic development. (Source: Washington Post via MSNBC

They obviously got all that right. I had been wondering how the experts could have missed the obvious problems with the rosy view of democratization resulting in a stable and peaceful new Iraq. It seems that they didn’t do quite that badly. They were excessively optimistic, however, on how long it would take to clean up and on the oil revenues that would result.

The fact is that the war, as it stands, is a defeat. I would argue, however, that it is not a military defeat, but a political one. The objectives were not attainable. Every reasonable military objective has been obtained. The idea of going into Iraq and removing weapons of mass destruction or of toppling the nasty regime of Saddam Hussein were both obtainable goals. There were no weapons of mass destruction, so nobody could do that. Saddam Hussein has been toppled.

At this point, our problem is that we’re expecting our military to create a democratic society, something they are in no way equipped to do. I cannot imagine how our government thought this would work. In an off-hand conversation the other day, I commented that it might be possible given a decade and perhaps 1.5 million troops. But even then I would suggest that the only option would be to create a strong and hopefully benevolent dictatorship or oligarchy favorable to our goals.

As it is, we are trying to support a government that has next to no chance at all in its present form. Further, no likely governing group is Iraq is likely to fulfill all our goals, i.e. being a free government and suppressing international terrorism.

In the 21st century style of war, the war on terror, we need greater strategic flexibility. Right now we need credible force to use in negotiating with countries such as Iran and North Korea. Because we are tied up trying to do the impossible in Iraq, we don’t really have the necessary force available.

None of this–none whatsoever–is the fault of the troops who have done an extraordinary job in the face of the muddled and ill-considered objectives they were given. They should come back to victory parades, not because we as a nation have won, but because they have done even better than that. They have fought hard and effectively even without and end in sight.

During the first gulf war, I knew approximately when I was coming home. Oh, there was the standard military shuffling of the paperwork, but then soon I was on a plane. We came home to wonderful welcome. Stores were offering discounts and everyone was celebrating. We had been in what the U.S. population likes–a short, victorious war with very light casualties. I was and am proud to have served.

Our troops right now deserve no less. In fact, they deserve much more. They have labored through the heat of the day. Not only that, we need them for the future, and we need more volunteers like them. What is missing in the current debate over getting out of Iraq is any sense of further strategy for the war on terror. When we leave Iraq, no matter what the circumstances, radical Islam will still exist, terrorism will still exist, and there will still be states supporting terrorism. What are we going to do about them.

Having muddled and impossible goals is bad. But having no goals at all is even worse. A strategy of reacting to individual acts of terrorism is not going to win the battle. Money will have to be spent on technology and personnel to improve security. We’re going to need the troops many more times. We need to be thinking about that.

He’s started a new blog at Townhall.com, and for better or for worse his first blog touches an issue on which we disagree, the [...]]]> Elgin Hushbeck is a friend and also business associate (I publish his books in the Consider Christianity series). He is a contributor to the Running Toward the Goal podcast.

He’s started a new blog at Townhall.com, and for better or for worse his first blog touches an issue on which we disagree, the war in Iraq, under the title Is there a War on Terror?. I’m not going to get into answering it now, as I think I’ve blogged enough on the war for the moment, but Elgin’s post is a thoughtful view from the other side of this issue.

I will comment only so far as to note that I agree that there is a substantial threat to be faced, and that complacency has set in. I simply don’t agree that even in the face of that the invasion of Iraq, at least with the stated objectives, was a good strategic choice. But that is a long discussion part of which we have already had in person.

I think many readers of this blog will enjoy Elgin’s posts in this series, some because I annoy you and Elgin won’t, others because he’ll annoy you and you’ll have to think of more arguments, all of which will be to the good.

Daniel Pipes writes about protests by moderate Muslims in Pakistan and Turkey (HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars). It’s worth reading.

My first thought was that the fewer and weaker moderate Muslims are, the more we ought to support them. I have always [...]]]> . . . and some of them speak up, too!

Daniel Pipes writes about protests by moderate Muslims in Pakistan and Turkey (HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars). It’s worth reading.

My first thought was that the fewer and weaker moderate Muslims are, the more we ought to support them. I have always maintained that we should be careful to distinguish the guilty form the innocent whilst being vigorously opposed to those radicals who would use violence.

But I think that our government makes a dangerous mistake when it puts democracy above freedom. It’s quite possible for a majority to be tyrannical, which was the major reasons that the United States places limits on what the majority can actually do. A major problem with “winning” the war in Iraq is that we have set goals that cannot be accomplished. One cannot blame the military for not being miracle workers. We somehow want a democratic, unified Iraq that will not be an Islamic state. We need to consider one or another of those goals

Consider this quote from the article, regarding Turkey:

This resolute stand against Islamism by moderate Turkish Muslims is the more striking when contrasted with the cluelessness of Westerners who pooh-pooh the dangers of the AKP’s ascent. A Wall Street Journal editorial assures Turks that their prime minister’s popularity “is built on competent and stable government.” Dismissing the historic crossroads that President Sezer and others perceive, it dismisses as “fear mongering” doubts about Prime Minister Erdo?an’s commitment to secularism and ascribes these to petty campaign tactics “to get out the anti-AKP vote and revive a flagging opposition.”

If the Turkish military helps keep the country secular, more power to them!