Category Archives: Iraq

Some thoughts on the president’s Mideast speech

Coverage of President Obama’s speech today is concentrating on one big item related to the conflict between Israel and Palestinians: “Obama Sees ’67 Borders as Starting Point for Peace Deal.” Plenty is being said about that.

Setting that aside, here are my favorite parts of his speech today:

He didn’t sugarcoat the way people have been manipulated in the region for too long: “In the face of these challenges, too many leaders in the region tried to direct their people’s grievances elsewhere. The West was blamed as the source of all ills, a half century after the end of colonialism. Antagonism toward Israel became the only acceptable outlet for political expression. Divisions of tribe, ethnicity and religious sect were manipulated as a means of holding on to power, or taking it away from somebody else.”

He made sure no one could doubt where we stand on the change sweeping the region (while specific responses to specific situations may, and should, vary): “Not every country will follow our particular form of representative democracy, and there will be times when our short term interests do not align perfectly with our long term vision of the region. But we can – and will – speak out for a set of core principles – principles that have guided our response to the events over the past six months:

“The United States opposes the use of violence and repression against the people of the region.
“We support a set of universal rights. Those rights include free speech; the freedom of peaceful assembly; freedom of religion; equality for men and women under the rule of law; and the right to choose your own leaders – whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus; Sanaa or Tehran.
“And finally, we support political and economic reform in the Middle East and North Africa that can meet the legitimate aspirations of ordinary people throughout the region.”
When he WAS specific, he was generally right: “The Syrian people have shown their courage in demanding a transition to democracy. President Assad now has a choice: he can lead that transition, or get out of the way. The Syrian government must stop shooting demonstrators and allow peaceful protests; release political prisoners and stop unjust arrests; allow human rights monitors to have access to cities like Dara’a; and start a serious dialogue to advance a democratic transition. Otherwise, President Assad and his regime will continue to be challenged from within and isolated abroad.”
Finally, he committed us to the most empowering thing we can do for people in the region, and for ourselves — help them bring something other than oil to the world economy: “Fourth, the United States will launch a comprehensive Trade and Investment Partnership Initiative in the Middle East and North Africa. If you take out oil exports, this region of over 400 million people exports roughly the same amount as Switzerland. So we will work with the EU to facilitate more trade within the region, build on existing agreements to promote integration with U.S. and European markets, and open the door for those countries who adopt high standards of reform and trade liberalization to construct a regional trade arrangement. Just as EU membership served as an incentive for reform in Europe, so should the vision of a modern and prosperous economy create a powerful force for reform in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Were there weaknesses? Yes, from my perspective. I could have done without another ritualistic slap at our decision to go into Iraq, which took this form: “…we have learned from our experience in Iraq just how costly and difficult it is to impose regime change by force – no matter how well-intended it may be.”
But I don’t think he meant it quite as negatively as that sounded at first, as I determined upon rereading it. I realized that after I heard this strong endorsement of what has been achieved there: “In Iraq, we see the promise of a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian democracy. There, the Iraqi people have rejected the perils of political violence for a democratic process, even as they have taken full responsibility for their own security. Like all new democracies, they will face setbacks. But Iraq is poised to play a key role in the region if it continues its peaceful progress. As they do, we will be proud to stand with them as a steadfast partner.” None of which would have happened, of course, with Saddam Hussein still in power.
On the whole, a speech that hit the right notes, and was a coherent and appropriate American response to a complex web of events and issues of critical importance to the world.
Good job.

Some thoughts on Robert Gates’ recent remarks

I like that headline. Sort of 19th century-sounding in its plainness. Anyway, moving on…

Back on the previous post, Phillip said:

This is somewhat indirectly related to issues raised by #1, but I couldn’t help wondering what you made of Sec’y Gates’ remarkable speech at West Point last week:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/world/26gates.html

And I responded in a comment that seems worth a separate post, to wit…

Phillip, I had several thoughts about Gates’ remark (which, for those who missed it, was “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”):

  • First, my facetious reaction — Asia? Africa? Middle East? So that leaves what? Europe? Australia? South America? Antarctica? Quite a sweeping set of eliminations. Next thing you know, we won’t be able to go war anywhere, and he’ll be out of a job. Golly, I wonder if the world will cooperate with us on that, and make sure, out of sympathy to our preferences, that the next crisis demanding a deployment of U.S. ground troops happens in, say, Sydney. MayBE, but it seems unlikely.
  • I like Robert Gates (here’s a column I did about him in 2006), have liked him ever since he became CIA director in the 80s (and especially liked him when he delivered us from the disaster of Rumsfeld), so he has my sympathy. And I fully understand why someone who’s had the challenges he’s had as SecDef.
  • From a pragmatic standpoint, what he says makes all the sense in the world. That’s why the option we’re looking at in Libya is a no-fly zone — you know, the mode we were in in Iraq for 12 years during the “cease-fire” in that war against Saddam that started in 1990 and ended in 2003. It’s manageable, we can do it easily enough (we and the Brits are the only ones with the demonstrated ability to provide this service to the people of Libya and the world). Air superiority is something we know how to assert, and use.
  • Ground forces are a huge commitment — a commitment that the United States in the 21st century appears politically unwilling to make. If you’re a pragmatist like Gates — and he is, the consummate professional — you consider that when you’re considering whether the goals are achievable. We’ve demonstrated back here on the home front that we’re unable to commit FULLY to a nation-building enterprise the way we did in 1945. It takes such a single-minded dedication on every level — military, economic, diplomatic — and that takes sustained commitment. One is tempted to say that there’s something particular about Americans today that prevents such a consensus — our 50-50, bitter political division, for instance — but really, this is the norm in U.S. history. The anomaly was 1945. It took two world wars for us to bring us to the point that we could make that kind of commitment.

So there you go. I had another bullet in mind, but was interrupted (blast that person from Porlock!), and it hasn’t come back to me yet. Please share your own thoughts…

Leon Lott’s just saving the world, isn’t he?

First, my twin, Sheriff Leon Lott, magnanimously agrees to solve one of the city of Columbia’s knottiest problems by taking over its police department.

Now this:

Lott heads to Iraq to train police forces

Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott has been invited to travel to Iraq to train Iraqi police forces.
The sheriff traveled to Iraq at the invitation of the U.S. Army and the S.C. State Guard where he is a provost marshal, said sheriff’s department spokeswoman Monique Mack. Lott will be at the Iraq Police College for two to three weeks.
While in Iraq, Lott will teach courses in community policing and will talk about the importance of having women on a police force, Mack said.
– Noelle Phillips

Ol’ Leon’s just saving the world, isn’t he? He’s pretty much got my endorsement for his next election sewn up.

Next: Mideast Peace!…

About why we invaded Iraq (here we go again, y’all…)

OK, I’ll bite on bud’s parenthetical back on this thread:

(As a side note, its, funny how the folks who wanted that war in the first place pretend it acutally started with the “surge”, forgetting the fabricated justifications that led to the initial invation.)

While I know I won’t get anywhere with bud (he and I have had this conversation too many times for me to entertain false hopes), I believe that every once in a while — say once a year at least — I should rise up and contest the conventional “wisdom” that we went into Iraq based on a pack of lies.

Nothing that causes me to conclude that we should go into Iraq later proved to be false. I say this with all due respect to people who didn’t think we should have gone in to start with. A legitimate case could have been made at the time that invasion at that time was not the best way to achieve our goals. But saying, after the fact, that all the reasons to go in were lies is itself a lie. I know, because I know why I believed we needed to take that action.

I also know that nothing I have ever written or thought has ever pretended that the war started with the surge. On the contrary, what you will find is that the surge was the moment when we finally started prosecuting the effort the right way, instead of the Rumsfeld way. (I know that some folks’ minds are boggled by the concept that whether we should have been in Iraq and whether we were going about it the right way are two separate questions, but I ask them to bear with me on that point.)

As for the “fabricated justifications”… first, I’ll refer you to a post on my blog from last year, headlined “Why we went to war in Iraq.” It was inspired by an opinion piece I had read in the WSJ by Doug Feith. bud’s reaction at the time was “Doug Feith is full of s***.” Perhaps you will agree, but I urge you to go back and read it.

Then, going back further, to before the invasion itself, I refer you to my column of Feb. 2, 2003. You won’t find a lot of talk about WMDs and other such distractions. You will find a lot of stuff about “draining swamps.” The need to do that, after 9/11 showed that our old strategy of maintaining the status quo in the region was extraordinarily dangerous to this county, combined with the fact that Saddam had been violating for a decade the terms of the 1991 cease-fire, constituted the argument for me.

Anyway, here’s that column in its entirety:

THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH ABOUT WHY WE MAY HAVE TO INVADE IRAQ
Published on: 02/02/2003
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: D2
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
AMERICA SEES ITSELF, quite admirably, as a nation that doesn’t go around starting fights, but is perfectly willing and able to end them once they start.
Because of that, President Bush has a tall hill to climb when it comes to persuading the American people that, after 10 years of keeping Saddam Hussein in his box, we should now go in after him, guns blazing.
In his State of the Union address, the president gave some pretty good reasons why we need to act in Iraq, but were they good enough? I don’t know. Probably not. It’s likely that no one outside of the choir loft was converted by his preaching on the subject. And that’s a problem. Overall, while there have been moments over the last 16 months when he has set out the situation with remarkable clarity, those times have been too few and far between.
He has my sympathy on this count, though: His efforts have been hampered by the fact that the main reason we may need to invade Iraq is one that the president can’t state too clearly without creating more problems internationally than it would solve. At the same time, it’s a reason that seems so obvious that he shouldn’t have to state it. We should all be able to figure it out.
And yet, it seems, we don’t.
I hear people asking why, after all this time, we want to go after Saddam now. He was always a tyrant, so what’s changed? North Korea is probably closer to a nuclear bomb than he is, they say, so why not go after Kim Jong Il first?
We left him in power a decade ago, they ask, so why the change?
The answer to all of the above is: Sept. 11.
Before that, U.S. policy-makers didn’t want to destabilize the status quo in the Mideast. What we learned on Sept. 11 is that the status quo in the region is unacceptable. It must change.
Change has to start somewhere, and Iraq is the best place to insert the lever, for several reasons — geography, culture, demographics, but most of all because Saddam Hussein has given us all the justification we need to go in and take him out: We stopped shooting in 1991 because he agreed to certain terms, and he has repeatedly thumbed his nose at those agreements.
Iraq may not be the best place in the world to try to nurture a liberal democracy, but it’s the best shot we have in the Mideast.
I’m far from the only one saying this. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman, who has more knowledge of the region in his mustache than I’ll ever have, has said it a number of times, most recently just last week:

“What threatens Western societies today are not the deterrables, like Saddam, but the undeterrables — the boys who did 9/11, who hate us more than they love life. It’s these human missiles of mass destruction that could really destroy our open society. . . . If we don’t help transform these Arab states — which are also experiencing population explosions — to create better governance, to build more open and productive economies, to empower their women and to develop responsible news media that won’t blame all their ills on others, we will never begin to see the political, educational and religious reformations they need to shrink their output of undeterrables.”

Journalists can say these things, and some do. But if the president does, the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Syrians and just about everybody else in the region will go nuts. In European capitals, and even in certain circles here at home, he will be denounced as the worst sort of imperialist. Osama bin Laden’s followers will seize upon such words as proof that the West has embarked upon another Crusade — not for Christ this time, but for secular Western culture.
None of which changes the fact that the current state of affairs in Arab countries and Iran is a deadly threat to the United States. So we have to do something about it. We’ve seen what doing nothing gets us — Sept. 11. Action is very risky. But we’ve reached the point at which inaction is at least as dangerous.
Should we go in as conquerors, lord it over the people of Iraq and force them to be like us? Absolutely not. It wouldn’t work, anyway. We have to create conditions under which Iraqis — all Iraqis, including women — can choose their own course. We did that in Germany and Japan, and it worked wonderfully (not that Iraq is Germany or Japan, but those are the examples at hand). And no one can say the Germans are under the American thumb.
But that brings us to a problem. The recalcitrance of the Germans, the French and others undermines the international coalition that would be necessary to nation-building in Iraq. It causes another problem as well:
Maybe we could accomplish our goal without invading Iraq — which of course would be preferable. By merely threatening to do so, we could embolden elements within the country to overthrow him, which might provide us with certain opportunities.
But the irony is that people aren’t going to rise up against Saddam as long as Europeans and so many people in this country fail to support the president’s goal of going after him. As long as they see all this dissension, they’ll likely believe (rightly) that Saddam might just hang on yet again.
If the United Nations, or at least the West, presented a united front, the possibility of Saddam collapsing without our firing a shot would be much greater. But for some reason, too many folks in Europe and in this country don’t see that. Or just don’t want to.
Maybe somebody should point it out to them.

Argue that we could have pursued other courses to achieve our legitimate goals. Fine. But don’t tell me the reasons I was persuaded we should invade were lies. I know better.

Who throws a shoe?

Bush_wart_2

Actually, that Austin Powers quote has little to do with the point of this post — although it was a weird thing to do, a la Random Task….

What I do mean to point out is the fact that across the Mideast, the "Arab Street" was out en masse demonstrating in favor of the guy who did his utmost (by Middle Eastern standards) to insult President W. in Iraq — less than 24 hours after the incident. From The New York Times:

Barely 24 hours after the journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, was tackled
and arrested for his actions at a Baghdad news conference, the
shoe-throwing incident was generating front-page headlines and
continuing television news coverage. A thinly veiled glee could be
discerned in much of the reporting, especially in the places where
anti-American sentiment runs deepest.

In Sadr City, the
sprawling Baghdad suburb that has seen some of the most intense
fighting between insurgents and American soldiers since the 2003
invasion, thousands of people marched in his defense. In Syria, he was
hailed as a hero. In Libya, he was given an award for courage….

What occurs to me is that this is an impressive display — or many impressive displays, I suppose — of organizational ability. Just think — if the energy and effort that goes into these spontaneous (and sometimes not so spontaneous) expressions of indignation were channeled into building viable industries or — dare we hope — self-government or respect for the rule of law — we’d never have another bit of trouble from that part of the world. Trouble is, a lot of these cultures and systems don’t do "constructive." But they certainly do resentment. You betcha.

Iraq_bush_shoe_wart

‘Hyperbole’ and Iraq

The last couple of days I’ve broken my rule about not responding substantially to e-mails. In the interests of making the best use of my time for the readers’ benefit, I try to steer people to the blog so that everybody can join in on the conversation. Anyway, when I break my rule I try to do this, which is publish the exchange on the blog. This exchange started, of course, with my Sunday column:

From: Pat Mohr
Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2008 4:34 PM
To: Warthen, Brad – External Email
Subject: hyperbole

Well, Mr. Warthen, isn’t your respect for the language, as the SNL church lady would say, "special?"  I guess I’m just another bleeding-heart liberal because I did watch in horror as my country approved torture and suspended habeus corpus for prisoners. And I did watch in horror as people died after Katrina because we had incompetent ideologues in the White House who sat and watched that devastation because  they wanted to "reduce the size of government to the point that they could drown it in the bathtub."  And I’ve watched in horror as we waged a "war" (otherwise known as an occupation) in which thousands and Americans and even more thousands of Iraqis died because we made a mistake about Saddam’s intentions.

Now if those things don’t fill you with horror, you’re not the man I hoped you were.

Sincerely,
Pat Mohr

On Dec 2, 2008, at 1:54 PM, Warthen, Brad – Internal Email wrote:

The NYT editorial in question wasn’t about the issues you mentioned. That was one of the bizarre things about it. It was about things like unauthorized wiretaps, and the operation of Gitmo. Hardly "horror" stuff.

I know lots of people look upon our involvement in Iraq with "horror." I don’t, but I know other people do. The NYT editorial wasn’t about anything like that.

You want to see what I look upon, with horror, read my blog. http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2008/12/some-things-tha.html

From: Pat Mohr
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 2:24 PM
To: Warthen, Brad – Internal Email
Subject: Re: hyperbole
Importance: High

Thank you for responding. I understand what you’re saying about the other issues in the NYT editorial, but I do believe that Gitmo is a horror because of the torture that has been sanctioned there (and in other places because of rendition). If this torture was indeed not just the work of some bad apples, and we have some evidence to say that it wasn’t, then it does qualify as a horror.  Like many other Americans, i never thought I’d live to see the day that my country sanctioned torture—not for ANY reason!

And I will go look at your blog.  One reason is that I’d like to know why you don’t look upon Iraq as a horror. I don’t attribute intent, but I do believe that our government mistakenly believed the boasts of Saddam and ignored/demeaned reports that did not support their preconceptions. Then we refused to wait for the inspectors to go back & look further for WMDs or to go through the UN for assistance, coming up instead with our "coalition of the willing".  Meanwhile, Bush and Cheney deliberately conflated 9/11 with Iraq to justify our preemptive invasion. I still see polls that report that something like 40% of evangelicals believe that Iraqis attacked us on 9/11. So I’ll look to see why you don’t believe that the ensuing deaths of thousands was not indeed horrible….

I always read your column because even though I frequently disagree with you, you’re rational and provide reasons for your opinions. This is no small thing in an area of the country infested with ideologues!  I’ll always appreciate the work you do!

On Dec 2, 2008, at 3:14 PM, Warthen, Brad – Internal Email wrote:

Thanks for the kind words.

I doubt that I can explain my support for our invasion of Iraq in 2003 to your satisfaction. I can’t explain it to my wife’s satisfaction. I certainly can’t explain it to the satisfaction of people who disagree on my blog.

It has nothing to do with WMD. I realize it did for an awful lot of people, but not for me. So while I saw not finding the WMD (which we all know had been there, because Saddam had used it) as a big setback, it didn’t change anything about why I saw us needing to go in there.

It did have a great deal to do with 9/11, but not in some simplistic way such as you describe, the "hitting back at the people who attacked us" formula. I don’t think in those terms.

Either you look at the situation we had in the world at that time and agree with me, or you don’t. It’s very hard to bridge the gap. I looked at a lot of things, and that’s what it added up to for me. Other people look at the same things and don’t arrive there at all. Part of it is that I am by nature inclined to intervention. I think we were right to intervene in the Balkans, and wrong not to in Rwanda and Darfur. I think we were wrong to leave Somalia in 2003. I believe when you’re the most powerful nation in the world — economically, militarily, just about any other way — you have an obligation to act when people are suffering and being oppressed. Anti-war people think that’s arrogant. I think it’s cold NOT to want to do what we can. And the fact is, if we want to, we can do a great deal.

Here are two of those reasons, which make all the sense in the world to me, but not to antiwar people:
— Until 9/11, the U.S. policy toward the region had been maintaining the status quo. What that had meant was backing current regimes, however horrible — or at least leaving them alone — so as to keep the oil flowing. Don’t rock the boat. The 1991 Gulf War was a perfect example of this old strategy: Saddam had attacked Kuwait and was threatening the much bigger target of Saudi Arabia. We sent an overwhelming force to preserve the status quo ante — pushing Saddam back "where he belonged," and restoring the previous government in Kuwait, and protecting the Saudi regime. We didn’t want to take Baghdad then because that might have created a vacuum into which Iran, and to a lesser extent Syria and Turkey, might flow. That would upset the apple cart, and we didn’t want to do that. (We should have, because at that time we had something we didn’t have 12 years later — overwhelming force, enough to occupy and stabilize Iraq. I understand why we didn’t — but that calculation was based on the old, pre-9/11, policy of preserving the status quo.)
     9/11 changed this equation, because it showed us that preserving the status quo — one in which oppressive regimes produced political frustration and encouraged Islamic militantism — was extraordinarily dangerous to us. The 9/11 hijackers were the result of the old policy of supporting the status quo. We needed to begin the process of changing the region, and Iraq was a good place to start. Succeed there (and the problem in Iraq is that so many things were done wrong in the first years that it took far too long to succeed), and you encourage liberalizing, democratizing forces in all middle eastern countries. We saw the beginnings of that in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Libya — although much of it was set back by the increasing violence that was only quelled after the Surge began at the start of 2007. Much of that good effect has yet to be seen, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still happen.

— Iraq was the place to start because we had every reason to go in and take out the regime there. Saddam had violated terms of the 1991 cease fire for 12 years. He was shooting at our planes enforcing the no-fly zone. In 2002, the UN passed the resolution authorizing force unless Saddam met certain conditions — which he failed to meet. Some significant UN members balked at acting upon the resolution — France, Germany, Russia — but plenty of others, including most European powers, actually joined that "coalition of the willing." And why not? Saddam had spent the last decade and more cementing his reputation as an outlaw regime.

Anyway, that’s PART of my thinking on the subject. It doesn’t make sense to people who agree. It DOES make sense to some who do, such as the New York Times’ Tom Friedman.

Hope that helps, but I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t.

From: Pat Mohr
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 8:27 PM
To: Warthen, Brad – Internal Email
Subject: Re: hyperbole
Importance: High

Hmm, I’ve gone back and read and re-read your rationales for going into Iraq. I’m still thinking—because you’ve made some good points. I do have to tell you, though, that I’m not anti-war; I just think it should be restricted to defense. However, many of your reasons seem to indicate that you truly believe that you are your brothers’ keeper, and that’s morality I share. I too think we should have gone into Darfur and Rwanda. We do have an obligation to help the oppressed—but not only the oppressed with oil under their land. I just don’t think that Iraq should have been singled out, even in the mideast.  What about the outrageous treatment of women in Saudi Arabia for example? And how can we be the world’s policemen? How can we ever fix it all?

Moreover, I think our presumptuous invasion has brought us so much international ill will that it will be years before our reputation is restored. And then there’s the billions and billions of dollars that have been squandered in this war.  I wonder if Iraqis think it was worth it because I don’t think most Americans do. And now we’re in greater jeopardy in Afghanistan—and we still haven’t found Osama.

All that said, in the light of your comments, I intend to start reading your blog as I continue to think about my position.  I like to think that I’m open-minded enough to change my mind given additional evidence.  I wish I could come back in fifty years and see what verdict history renders on this war….

Thank you again for engaging in this dialogue with me.

On Dec 3, 2008, at 10:54 AM, Warthen, Brad – Internal Email wrote:

All I can ask for is to get people to think about the points I make, so I thank you for that.

In answer to one point you made, let me point out that we did not have an acceptable rationale for invading Saudi Arabia. Remember the 12 years of defiance of the ceasefire agreement, and all those UN resolutions that gave us authorization to go into Iraq. We had nothing like that in the case of Saudi Arabia, or Iran or anyone else. Just Iraq.

Also, the reference to oil is a non-sequitur. We kicked Saddam out of Kuwait for oil. The policy of supporting the status quo was about oil. Invading Iraq actually endangered the flow of oil by upsetting the status quo.

You might be interested in a column I wrote before the Iraq invasion, about why we needed to go in:

THE STATE
THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH ABOUT WHY WE MAY HAVE TO INVADE IRAQ
Published on: 02/02/2003
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: D2
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

AMERICA SEES ITSELF, quite admirably, as a nation that doesn’t go around starting fights, but is perfectly willing and able to end them once they start.

Because of that, President Bush has a tall hill to climb when it comes to persuading the American people that, after 10 years of keeping Saddam Hussein in his box, we should now go in after him, guns blazing.

In his State of the Union address, the president gave some pretty good reasons why we need to act in Iraq, but were they good enough? I don’t know. Probably not. It’s likely that no one outside of the choir loft was converted by his preaching on the subject. And that’s a problem. Overall, while there have been moments over the last 16 months when he has set out the situation with remarkable clarity, those times have been too few and far between.

He has my sympathy on this count, though: His efforts have been hampered by the fact that the main reason we may need to invade Iraq is one that the president can’t state too clearly without creating more problems internationally than it would solve. At the same time, it’s a reason that seems so obvious that he shouldn’t have to state it. We should all be able to figure it out.

And yet, it seems, we don’t.

I hear people asking why, after all this time, we want to go after Saddam now. He was always a tyrant, so what’s changed? North Korea is probably closer to a nuclear bomb than he is, they say, so why not go after Kim Jong Il first?

We left him in power a decade ago, they ask, so why the change?

The answer to all of the above is: Sept. 11.

Before that, U.S. policy-makers didn’t want to destabilize the status quo in the Mideast. What we learned on Sept. 11 is that the status quo in the region is unacceptable. It must change.

Change has to start somewhere, and Iraq is the best place to insert the lever, for several reasons – geography, culture, demographics, but most of all because Saddam Hussein has given us all the justification we need to go in and take him out: We stopped shooting in 1991 because he agreed to certain terms, and he has repeatedly thumbed his nose at those agreements.

Iraq may not be the best place in the world to try to nurture a liberal democracy, but it’s the best shot we have in the Mideast.

I’m far from the only one saying this. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman, who has more knowledge of the region in his mustache than I’ll ever have, has said it a number of times, most recently just last week:

"What threatens Western societies today are not the deterrables, like Saddam, but the undeterrables – the boys who did 9/11, who hate us more than they love life. It’s these human missiles of mass destruction that could really destroy our open society. . . . If we don’t help transform these Arab states – which are also experiencing population explosions – to create better governance, to build more open and productive economies, to empower their women and to develop responsible news media that won’t blame all their ills on others, we will never begin to see the political, educational and religious reformations they need to shrink their output of undeterrables."

Journalists can say these things, and some do. But if the president does, the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Syrians and just about everybody else in the region will go nuts. In European capitals, and even in certain circles here at home, he will be denounced as the worst sort of imperialist. Osama bin Laden’s followers will seize upon such words as proof that the West has embarked upon another Crusade – not for Christ this time, but for secular Western culture.

None of which changes the fact that the current state of affairs in Arab countries and Iran is a deadly threat to the United States. So we have to do something about it. We’ve seen what doing nothing gets us – Sept. 11. Action is very risky. But we’ve reached the point at which inaction is at least as dangerous.

Should we go in as conquerors, lord it over the people of Iraq and force them to be like us? Absolutely not. It wouldn’t work, anyway. We have to create conditions under which Iraqis – all Iraqis, including women – can choose their own course. We did that in Germany and Japan, and it worked wonderfully (not that Iraq is Germany or Japan, but those are the examples at hand). And no one can say the Germans are under the American thumb.

But that brings us to a problem. The recalcitrance of the Germans, the French and others undermines the international coalition that would be necessary to nation-building in Iraq. It causes another problem as well:

Maybe we could accomplish our goal without invading Iraq – which of course would be preferable. By merely threatening to do so, we could embolden elements within the country to overthrow him, which might provide us with certain opportunities.

But the irony is that people aren’t going to rise up against Saddam as long as Europeans and so many people in this country fail to support the president’s goal of going after him. As long as they see all this dissension, they’ll likely believe (rightly) that Saddam might just hang on yet again.

If the United Nations, or at least the West, presented a united front, the possibility of Saddam collapsing without our firing a shot would be much greater. But for some reason, too many folks in Europe and in this country don’t see that. Or just don’t want to.

Maybe somebody should point it out to them.

Write to Mr. Warthen at P.O. Box 1333, Columbia, S.C. 29202, or bwarthen@thestate.com.

By the way, do you mind if I post our exchange on my blog? Whenever I spend this much time writing about a subject, I try to share it with as wide an audience as possible…

From: Pat Mohr
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2008 11:06 AM
To: Warthen, Brad – Internal Email
Subject: Re: hyperbole
Importance: High

Certainly, you may share it.

That’s it. Join in, if you got this far…

So when do we invade Pakistan?

OK, so now Iraq was a bad idea, because Obama was against our going into Iraq, and the people (except for 46 percent of them) voted for Obama, so that’s the new truth. Right?

And we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

See? I’ve always said I love Big Brother.

But here’s my question: When do we invade Pakistan? You know, that’s where al Qaida is and all, as certain people keep telling us. As one of my interlocutors said back here, "Al-Qaida was not in Iraq until we got there." Which prompted me to say:

If al-Qaeda is in Pakistan, and we can’t get AT them in Pakistan, on
account of the fact that Pakistan gets really, REALLY upset when we go
in there after them, and they’re a sovereign country and all (which
doesn’t bother ME; I still think it was a good idea to follow the enemy
into Cambodia in 1970, but presumably a lot of folks who voted for
Obama Tuesday disagree, although not necessarily Obama himself, which
is another topic), then isn’t it kind of a good thing to draw them into
Iraq, where we happen to have troops to fight them?

Sorry about the long sentence, there.

Re-education is never an easy process, and as you see, I’m a particularly hard case.

You see, I forgot for a moment that Obama is all for doing a Cambodia and chasing al Qaeda into Pakistan, so in that sense we really didn’t need to go into Iraq (I still think we should have, for other reasons, but let’s stick with this point for now).

At least, I think Obama’s OK with that. That was the impression I had back in August 2007, when I wrote:

BARACK OBAMA was right to threaten to invade Pakistan
in order to hit al-Qaida, quite literally, where it lives. And as long
as we’re on this tack, remind me again why it is that we’re not at war
with Iran.
    OK, OK, I know the reasons: Our military is
overextended; the American people lack the appetite; the nutball factor
is only an inch deep in Iran, and once you get past Ahmadinejad and the
more radical mullahs the Iranian people aren’t so bad, but they’d get
crazy quick if we attacked, and so forth.
    I can also come up with reasons not to invade Pakistan, or even to talk about invading Pakistan. We’ve heard them often enough. Pakistan is (and say this in reverent tones) a sovereign country; Pervez Musharraf
is our “friend”; we need him helping us in the War on Terror; he is
already politically weak and this could do him in; he could be replaced
by Islamists sufficiently radical that they would actively support
Osama bin Laden and friends, rather than merely fail to look
aggressively enough to find them; fighting our way into, and seeking a
needle in, the towering, rocky haystacks of that region is easier said
than done, and on and on.
    But when you get down to it, it all
boils down to the reason I mentioned in passing in the first instance —
Americans lack the appetite. So with a long line of people vying to be
our new commander in chief, it’s helpful when one of them breaks out of
the mold of what we might want to hear, and spells out a real challenge
before us…

Anyway, this seems particularly relevant at the moment, because Obama just won the election — perhaps you heard about that — and on Election Day itself, I read this in the WSJ:

ISLAMABAD — Pakistani officials warned U.S. Gen. David Petraeus
that frequent missile strikes on militant targets in Pakistan fan
anti-American sentiment in the country, an ally in the fight against
terrorism.

The new U.S. commander of America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq met
Pakistani officials, including Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar
and army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, as part of his first international
trip since taking over U.S. Central Command three days earlier….

So what’s the new Commander in Chief going to tell Petraeus to do about all that? Keep up the pressure on al Qaida and the Taliban in their Tribal Area hidey-holes? Or back off in deference to our ally?

I’m sorry to interrupt everybody’s warm and fuzzy feelings about how we’ll be at peace with all the world now that Obama is going to be our president, but I’m ornery that way. I’ve got this habit of noticing that the real world has this way of intruding upon us…

The WashPost’s endorsement of Obama: Hoping he doesn’t really mean it

This post is a spinoff of the last one.

In the earlier post, I mentioned The Post‘s endorsement of Obama. As I said, The Post‘s editorial board believes, as I do, that Obama has been persistently wrong about Iraq, but they rationalize that away:

Mr. Obama’s greatest deviation from current policy is also our biggest
worry: his insistence on withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Iraq on a
fixed timeline. Thanks to the surge that Mr. Obama opposed, it may be
feasible to withdraw many troops during his first two years in office.
But if it isn’t — and U.S. generals have warned that the hard-won
gains of the past 18 months could be lost by a precipitous withdrawal
— we can only hope and assume that Mr. Obama would recognize the
strategic importance of success in Iraq and adjust his plans.

As if that’s not enough, in the very next passage they ALSO rationalize away his position on trade — you know, the thing I was trying to get readers to take a fresh look at by mentioning the Colombian FTA in our endorsement:

We also can only hope that the alarming anti-trade rhetoric we have
heard from Mr. Obama during the campaign would give way to the
understanding of the benefits of trade reflected in his writings. A
silver lining of the financial crisis may be the flexibility it gives
Mr. Obama to override some of the interest groups and members of
Congress in his own party who oppose open trade, as well as to pursue
the entitlement reform that he surely understands is needed.

Here’s the thing about that: I think Obama is an honest man. I hope he’s just boxed himself into a rhetorical corner on Iraq, and I seize hopefully on his statements about other global hotspots as an indication that maybe Iraq is just an anomaly with him. But trade? Sorry, but I’m afraid I have greater faith in Sen. Obama’s veracity than some of his supporters do. He really does believe some of the bad stuff he says — for instance, about judicial selection.

Seven years on

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Seven years ago this week, I was filled with optimism. Not everyone responded to the events of 9/11/01 that way, but I did.
    Yes, I was mindful of the horrific loss of human life. But nothing could change that; my optimism rose from what I believed would come next.
    Surely, I thought, we could set aside foolishness and use the unprecedented resources our nation possessed — military power, certainly, but also our economic dominance and perhaps most of all the strength of the ideas upon which our nation is built — to make future 9/11s less likely.
    By “foolishness” I mean a number of things. Take, for instance, our insatiable appetite for oil produced by nations that consider fostering al-Qaidas as being consistent with their interests. (Joe Biden has a great speech he’s given around South Carolina for years about the incalculable opportunity wasted by George W. Bush on Sept. 12, when, instead of urging us to every sacrifice and every effort toward transforming the energy underpinnings of our economy, he told us to go shopping and delegate the war fighting to the professionals.)
    But the greatest foolishness was the pointless, poisonous partisanship that militated against focusing the nation’s resources toward solving any problem. It should have been the easiest to set aside. It’s not that I read too much into those Democrats and Republicans singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps; it’s that partisanship is based on considerations that are so much less substantial than the realities of 9/11. Those attacks should have melted away party differences like the noonday tropical sun burning away a morning mist.
    But partisanship is an industry that employs thousands of Americans — in the offices of Beltway advocacy groups, in the studios of 24/7 cable TV “news” channels, in party headquarters, on congressional staffs and in the White House. And they are much better focused on that which sustains them — polarization for its own sake — than the rest of us are on the interests we hold in common.
    They lay low for awhile, but as most of us went back to shopping while our all-volunteer military went to war, the polarization industry went back to work dividing us, hammer and tongs. They tapped the powerful emotions of 9/11 to their purposes, and led us to levels of bitterness that none of us had seen in our lifetimes.
    But what did I expect to happen, seven years ago? Nothing less than using our considerable influence to build a better world. Go ahead, laugh. All done now?
    In an editorial the Sunday after the attacks, I wrote that “We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term — military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.” That meant abandoning a lot of foolishness.
    Take, for instance, our policy toward the Mideast. Our goal had been stability above all. Prop up some oppressive regimes and come to terms with others; just don’t let anything interfere with the smooth flow of petroleum. Saddam upsets the equilibrium by invading Kuwait and threatening Saudi Arabia? Send half a million troops to restore the status quo ante, but don’t topple his regime, because that would upset the balance.
    But 9/11 showed us that the status quo was extraordinarily dangerous. It produced millions of disaffected young men, frustrated and humiliated by the oppression that we propped up. Things needed to change.
    Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed part of the equation well in Cairo in 2005: “For 60 years the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East — and we achieved neither.” The New York Times’ Tom Friedman took it further, speaking of the need to “drain swamps,” the figurative kind that bred terrorists the way literal bogs breed malaria.
    But instead of leading a national effort on every possible front — the military speaks of our national power as being based in the acronym DIME, for “Diplomatic,” “Information,” “Military” and “Economic” resources (those who put their lives on the line are wise about these things) — we’ve spent most of the past seven years bickering over the military aspect alone. This argument between the antiwar left and the hawkish right has so weakened the national will to do anything that we came close to failure in Iraq, could still fail in Afghanistan and are helpless in the face of Russian aggression in the Caucasus and Iranian nuclear ambition.
    So how do I feel about our national prospects today, given all that has happened? Forgive me, but I am once again (cautiously) optimistic, based on a number of signs, from small to momentous:

  • Dramatic improvement in Iraq — thanks largely to the “surge” that he belatedly embraced after four years of floundering — has changed the national conversation, and led President Bush to speak of starting the process of moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, the battleground even the partisans can agree upon.
  • Last week Secretary Rice sat down to solidify a new understanding with Moammar Quaddafi of Libya, the once-intractable sponsor of terror whose mind was changed by the Iraq invasion.
  • The choice for president is between two men who gained their respective parties’ nominations by speaking to the deep national desire to move beyond partisan paralysis. (I realize they would lead in different directions. But if either can lead a national consensus toward implementing his best ideas, we will be better off — if only for having had the experience of agreeing with each other for once.)

Yes, the threads of hope to which I cling are delicate, and cynics will regard me as laughably foolish. But the alternative is not to hope. And that, given the potential of this nation, would be the ultimate foolishness.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

9/11 plus seven years

The way we split up duties on the editorial board, Cindi Scoppe handles scheduling. For instance, she maintains "the budget," which has nothing to do with money — it’s newspaperese for a written summary of what you plan to publish in upcoming editions.

A couple of weeks back, Cindi put a bold notice on the budget to this effect: 9/11 ???? Beyond that, she’s mentioned it a couple of times. Each time I’ve sort of grunted. The most recent time was Monday, and I felt compelled to be somewhat more articulate. I explained that I hate marking anniversaries. Such pieces are so artificial. The points one might make 365 days after an event should not differ from what you would say the day before, or the day after — if you’re saying the right things.

Nevertheless, I’m kicking around a column idea, one that I’m not sure will work. If I can pull it together between now and Wednesday morning, we can run it Thursday.

Actually, it’s a couple of column ideas. One would simply be a bullet list of things to think about: the movement of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan would be one bullet, another would be Osama bin Laden, another would be the state of the NATO alliance — or something like that. Something acknowledging that it’s tough to isolate One Thing to say on a topic so complex.

The other would be to hark back to the editorial I wrote for the Sunday after 9/11 — 9/16/01. In it, I set out a vision of how the U.S. needed to engage the world going forward. A key passage:

We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.

There’s nothing profound about it — it seems as obvious to me as the need to breathe. But America is a long way from embracing the concept holistically. We seem to lack the vocabulary for it, or something.

A couple of months ago, former State staffer Dave Moniz — who is now a civilian employee of the Air Force with the civilian rank of a brigadier general, operating out of Washington — brought a couple of Air Force guys to talk broadly about that service and how it’s doing these days. In passing, one of them mentioned the concept of DIME (which refers to "Diplomatic," "Information," "Military" and "Economic" as the four main elements of national power), which apparently is widely understood among military officers these days, even though it doesn’t enter much into civilian discussions.

We’ve wasted much of the last seven years arguing about the legitimacy of the exercise of military power, to the exclusion of the other parts. It’s sucked up all the oxygen. Occasionally we talk about "soft power," but as some sort of alternative, not as a necessary complement. And as long as our discussions are thus hobbled, it’s tough for us ever to get to the point of accomplishing the overall goals of making the world safer for liberal democracies:

    But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.
    We must cease to regard "nation-building" as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.

With rescue workers still seeking survivors in the smoking rubble of the twin towers, it didn’t occur to me that the military part would be such a political barrier. I couldn’t see then how quickly political partisanship would reassert itself, or how quickly we would split into a nation of Iraq hawks and the antiwar movement.

I’m encouraged that the surge in Iraq has been successful enough — Gen. Petraeus was thinking in DIME terms as he suppressed the insurgencies — that we are prepared to redeploy troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. (Which reminds me of something I often thought over the last few years when antiwar types would talk about "bringing our troops home." I didn’t see how anyone would think we could do that, with the battles still to be fought against the Taliban. The most compelling argument those opposed to our involvement in Iraq had was that it consumed resources that should be devoted to Afghanistan. Obviously, as we turn from one we turn more to the other — not because we want to exhaust our all-volunteer military with multiple deployments, but because until we have a larger military, we have no choice — no credible person has asserted that Afghanistan is a "war of choice.")

You know what — I’m just going to copy that whole Sept. 16, 2001, editorial here. Maybe it will inspire y’all to say something that will help me write a meaningful column. Maybe not. But I share it anyway… wait, first I’ll make one more point: What the editorial set out was not all that different from the concept of "Forward Engagement" that Al Gore had set out in the 2000 campaign to describe his foreign policy vision — although after he unveiled it, he hardly mentioned it. Too bad that between his own party’s post-Vietnam isolationism and the GOP’s aversion to "nation-building," we’ve had trouble coalescing around anything like this.

Anyway, here’s the editorial:

THE STATE
IN THE LONG TERM, U.S. MUST FULLY ENGAGE THE WORLD
Published on: 09/16/2001
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: A8

IF YOU HAD MENTIONED the words "missile defense shield" to the terrorists who took over those planes last Tuesday, they would have laughed so hard they might have missed their targets.
    That’s about the only way it might have helped.
    Obviously, America is going to have to rethink the way it relates to the rest of the world in the 21st century. Pulling a high-tech defensive blanket over our heads while wishing the rest of the world would go away and leave us alone simply isn’t going to work.
    We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.
    Essentially, we have wasted a decade.
    After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled, there was a vacuum in our increasingly interconnected world, a vacuum only the United States could fill. But we weren’t interested. After half a century of intense engagement in world affairs, we turned inward. Oh, we assembled and led an extraordinary coalition in the Gulf War – then let it fall apart. We tried to help in Somalia, but backed out when we saw the cost. After much shameful procrastination, we did what we should have done in the Balkans, and continue to do so. We tried to promote peace in the Mideast, then sort of gave up. But by and large, we tended our own little garden, and let the rest of the world drift.
    We twice elected a man whose reading of the national mood was "It’s the economy, stupid." Republicans took over Congress and started insisting that America would not be the world’s "policeman."
    Beyond overtures to Mexico and establishing a close, personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, President Bush initially showed little interest in foreign affairs.
    Meanwhile, Russia and China worked to expand their own spheres of influence, Europe started looking to its own defenses, and much of the rest of the world seethed over our wealth, power and complacency.
    Well, the rest of the world isn’t going to simply leave us alone. We know that now. On Tuesday, we woke up.
    In the short term, our new engagement will be dominated by military action, and diplomacy that is closely related to military aims. It won’t just end with the death or apprehension of Osama bin Laden. Secretary of State Colin Powell served notice of what will be required when he said, "When we’re through with that network, we will continue with a global assault against terrorism in general." That will likely mean a sustained, broad- front military effort unlike anything this nation has seen since 1945. Congress should get behind that.
    At the moment, much of the world is with us in this effort. Our diplomacy must be aimed at maintaining that support, which will not be easy in many cases.
    Beyond this war, we must continue to maintain the world’s most powerful military, and keep it deployed in forward areas. Our borders will be secure only to the extent that the world is secure. We must engage the help of other advanced nations in this effort. We must invest our defense dollars first and foremost in the basics – in keeping our planes in the air, our ships at sea and our soldiers deployed and well supported.
    We must always be prepared to face an advanced foe. Satellite intelligence and, yes, theater missile defenses will play roles. But the greatest threat we currently face is not from advanced nations, but from the kinds of enemies who are so primitive that they don’t even have airplanes; they have to steal ours in order to attack us. For that reason, we must beef up our intelligence capabilities. We need spies in every corner of the world, collecting the kind of low-tech information that espiocrats call "humint" – human intelligence. More of that might have prevented what happened last week, in ways that a missile shield never could.
    But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.
    We must cease to regard "nation-building" as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.
    This may sound like an awful lot to contemplate for a nation digging its dead out of the rubble. But it’s the kind of challenge that this nation took on once before, after we had defeated other enemies that had struck us without warning or mercy. Look at Germany and Japan today, and you will see what America can do.
    We must have a vision beyond vengeance, beyond the immediate guilty parties. And we must embrace and fulfill that vision, if we are ever again to enjoy the collective peace of mind that was so completely shattered on Sept. 11, 2001.

Woodward: ‘Surge’ not the main factor

The WashPost is touting its serialization of Bob Woodward’s latest book, The War Within. Here’s a summary of today’s installment:

In the fall of 2006, the nation’s military leaders found themselves badly out of sync with the White House over what to do in Iraq, with one of the Joint Chiefs telling Bush, “You’re stressing the force, Mr. President, and these kids just see deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan for the indefinite future.” But as the surge progressed in 2007, violent attacks began to drop dramatically in Iraq. Was the surge the reason for this reversal? Knowledgeable officials say the influx of troops was just one of four factors, and not the most consequential one.

By the way, in a quick skim of the excerpt, I did not find the reference to the "four factors" mentioned in the summary sent to me today. But I did find them in a WashPost news story from three days ago:

The book also says that the U.S. troop "surge" of 2007, in which President Bush sent nearly 30,000 additional U.S. combat forces and support troops to Iraq, was not the primary factor behind the steep drop in violence there during the past 16 months.

Rather, Woodward reports, "groundbreaking" new covert techniques enabled U.S. military and intelligence officials to locate, target and kill insurgent leaders and key individuals in extremist groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Woodward does not disclose the code names of these covert programs or provide much detail about them, saying in the book that White House and other officials cited national security concerns in asking him to withhold specifics.

Overall, Woodward writes, four factors combined to reduce the violence: the covert operations; the influx of troops; the decision by militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to rein in his powerful Mahdi Army; and the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and allied with U.S. forces.

American Sardaukar? Best combat picture from Iraq, anyway

Sardaukar
Although Susanna seemed to like it, my analogy back on this post — comparing American troops to the Atreides in Dune — wasn’t quite perfect.

Truth be told, the overwhelmingly superior efficiency, dedication and effectiveness of U.S. troops today is more closely comparable to the Sardaukar. That’s not an analogy I like to make, because the Sardaukar were the bad guys — or at least, allied with the bad guys. They were arrogant, and received their comeuppance from the little-regarded, fanatical desert people they thought they could easily crush. So you can see how I wouldn’t like that analogy at this particular point in history. It doesn’t fit with my worldview at all.

Probably the best way to put it in Dune terms (if one is to be so frivolous as to draw such analogies) is that the U.S. military has the virtue of the Atreides combined with the competence of the Sardaukar. (And now that I think about it, I seem to recall that the reason the emperor sent the Sardaukar after the Atreides was that the Atreides troops under Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck had been trained to the point that they were almost as tough as the Sardaukar, and the emperor saw that as a threat. So maybe our guys are the Atreides after all — or what the Atreides might have been. That makes the sci-fi nerd in me feel so much better.)

This brings me, through a leap that probably makes sense only to me, to a photo I grabbed from AP back during the fighting in Fallujah in 2004, and never used. If I had been blogging then, I would have posted it, but I wasn’t.

It’s the best photo I can remember seeing from the fighting in Iraq. Actually, when you think about it, it was one of the LAST photos of actual fighting I’ve seen. You don’t see pictures of action any more on the wires. You see portraits of soldiers and marines who have died, and pictures of caskets and funerals. You see pictures taken AFTER something happened — say, the aftermath of an IED. Or you see pictures of soldiers on routine patrol, or aiming their weapons from a fixed defensive position, but not firing them.

What you don’t see is American troops inexorably, irresistibly advancing the way they are in this photo. This photo is classic, and illustrates a standard offensive infantry tactic in the act. Maybe some of you with infantry experience will correct me on this, but what I see is one soldier laying down covering fire down a street with his M-240 Bravo (which, as James reminded us Monday, is likely manufactured right here in Columbia SC, at FN) while the other men in the squad cross the street. Another soldier (actually, I’m guessing these are Marines; someone with sharper eyes than mine can probably tell for sure) backs up the machine-gunner, prepared to shoot with aimed fire at any enemy who stick their heads out, using his standard rifle.

The second man to cross the street is another machine-gunner, who will no doubt establish a base of fire from the opposite side of the street in order to allow the first MG operator and the last of the squad to cross.

The squad seems to be operating with a relentless, almost mechanical efficiency that is terrible to behold — if you are the enemy. In fact, it’s probably the unusual perspective of this photo that created the literary (if you can call sci-fi "literary") allusion in my mind: This is probably what it looks like when you are the enemy, and the U.S. Marines are coming to get you — like the Sardaukar with their "hard faces set in battle frenzy."

As I said, you don’t see many pictures like this one. It’s impressive. It certainly made an impression on me.

Provocative thoughts about Iraq

Fallujah

Now that the Surge has been indisputably successful, and the debate is mostly about what one does with that success going forward, it’s possible to have more intelligent and dispassionate discussions of what has happened, is happening and should happen in Iraq.

Here are two examples that were side-by-side on the WSJ‘s opinion pages this morning:

  • Francis Fukuyama’s "Iraq May Be Stable, But the War Was a Mistake," in which he tells of a $100 bet he lost. He had predicted in 2003 that at the end of five years, Iraq would be a mess of the sort that "you’ll know it when you see it." Of course he lost, and paid up. But he is not giving ground on whether we should have gone into Iraq to start with. He still says that much-larger-than-$100 gamble wasn’t worth it.
  • Jonathan Kay, in a book review of The Strongest Tribe by Bing West, describes how local U.S. commanders in Iraq understood from the start what it would take to succeed as we now have. But they were hampered by a SecDef who ironically had a little too much in common with the antiwar folks:

    Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary until November 2006, was focused from the get-go on bringing the troops home and insisted that "the U.S. military doesn’t do nation- building."

    It was only after Bush got rid of Rumsfeld and then decided to do what the likes of Petraeus and McCain advised did our success begin.

    Probably the most compelling part of the review is at the beginning, where a passage describing what it was like to be a gyrene in Fallujah in 2004 was quoted at length:

    "Imagine the scene. You are tired, sweaty, filthy. You’ve been at it day after day, with four hours’ sleep, running down hallways, kicking in doors, rushing in, sweeping the beam of the flashlight on your rifle into the far corners. . . . there’s a flash and the firing hammers your ears. You can’t hear a thing and it’s way too late to think. The jihadist rounds go high — the death blossom — and your M4 is suddenly steady. It has been bucking slightly as you jerked and squeezed through your 30 rounds, not even knowing you were shooting. Trained instinct. . . . ‘Out! Out!’ Your fire team leader is screaming in your face. . . . [He] already has a grenade in his hand, shaking it violently to get your attention. . . . He pulls the pin, plucks off the safety cap, and chucks it underhand into the smoky room."

The Iraq paradox

Obama_2008_iraq_wart

We’ve arrived at a very weird place in terms of our presidential candidates’ positions with regard to Iraq. Thanks to the amazing success of the surge — the policy that Bush at long last initiated after four years of John McCain saying that’s what we should do — both McCain and Obama find themselves in an awkward situation.

  • The Surge has succeeded so well that Maliki is emboldened to say that we can start talking about the Americans leaving, since the Iraqi government sources have gotten so much better at kicking the Sadrists around and other such demonstrations of prowess.
  • Obama is so wedded to the mythology of MoveOn.org et al, for whom it is a religious precept that every soldier or Marine ever sent into Iraq was the worst, most horrible mistake in the history of the universe (actually, I’m probably understating their position just a little here).These are the bruised innocents who reaction to the surge was, "What? We’re going to send MORE soldiers in to be maimed and killed; have we lost our freaking minds?"
  • McCain feels like, "Finally, everybody (except the MoveOn types) recognizes that MY idea of boosting our force levels has worked beyond our wildest dreams, bringing us closer and closer to being able to declare victory." Of course, with things going so well he’s not about to say that the success of the surge we can, irony of ironies, speak about Americans drawing down forces — just what Obama’s always wanted to do, regardless of realities on the ground. That would look like Obama was getting his way, and among the simple-minded it would look like "Hey, Obama was right all along" — even though he was the exact opposite of right, even though we only got to this good spot by doing what Obama adamantly opposed.
  • And Obama certainly can’t recognize currently reality and say "Oh, well, the surge worked. Wow, great jobs guys; you proved me wrong. But now can we leave?" If he ever uttered the phrase, "the surge works," his most intense and devoted supporters’ heads would explode spectacularly.

So here we are:  Things are going well in Iraq, and neither campaign can use that fact advantageously.
How weirdly ironic is that?

Mccain_2008_wart

Why we went to war in Iraq

We all read all sorts of back-and-forth about Iraq. There are the coulda-woulda-shouldas of whether we should have gone in or not, how we could have managed things better after we got there (which we sure as anything coulda and shoulda, long before we finally implemented the Surge), and whether we should stay or not now (which, of course, we should).

But few couch the situation preceding the Iraq decision the way I remember it as clearly as Doug Feith's piece in The Wall Street Journal today.

What I remember is that we had an unsolved problem that needed solving. For 12 years Saddam had violated the terms under which we had stopped shooting in 1991. This was not a mere abstract problem, not a question of tidying up loose ends. As Feith writes, Iraq was shooting at U.S. and British pilots enforcing the No-Fly zone almost daily. Regime change had been, for good reason, the policy of this country since 1998 — but we hadn't figured out how to get it done.

Totally apart from the need to "drain swamps" in the Mideast, apart from whether Saddam still had the WMD we had already seen him use on his own people, this was the situation (and had been the situation ever since the first Bush administration):

    In the months before the 9/11 attack, Secretary of
State Colin Powell advocated diluting the multinational economic
sanctions, in the hope that a weaker set of sanctions could win
stronger and more sustained international support. Central Intelligence
Agency officials floated the possibility of a coup, though the 1990s
showed that Saddam was far better at undoing coup plots than the CIA
was at engineering them. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
asked if the U.S. might create an autonomous area in southern Iraq
similar to the autonomous Kurdish region in the north, with the goal of
making Saddam little more than the "mayor of Baghdad." U.S. officials
also discussed whether a popular uprising in Iraq should be encouraged,
and how we could best work with free Iraqi groups that opposed the
Saddam regime.

    Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld worried
particularly about the U.S. and British pilots enforcing the no-fly
zones over northern and southern Iraq. Iraqi forces were shooting at
the U.S. and British aircraft virtually every day; if a plane went
down, the pilot would likely be killed or captured. What then? Mr.
Rumsfeld asked. Were the missions worth the risk? How might U.S. and
British responses be intensified to deter Saddam from shooting at our
planes? Would the intensification trigger a war? What would be the
consequences of cutting back on the missions, or ending them?

However wrong he'd later prove to be about how to conduct our operation in Iraq — and he was WAY wrong — Rumsfeld was at that time raising the right questions.

After 9/11, things changed — among them our willingness to let a problem such as this one fester. As Mr. Feith notes:

To contain the threat from Saddam, all reasonable means short of war had been tried unsuccessfully for a dozen years.
The U.S. did not rush to war. Working mainly through the U.N., we tried
a series of measures to contain the Iraqi threat: formal diplomatic
censure, weapons inspections, economic sanctions, no-fly zones,
no-drive zones and limited military strikes. A defiant Saddam, however,
dismantled the containment strategy and the U.N. Security Council had
no stomach to sustain its own resolutions, let alone compel Saddam's
compliance.

You may remember it differently. But that's pretty much the way I remember it.

Through a Marine’s eyes

This was forwarded to me today, and I pass it on as I received it:

I was part of the Dateline NBC special program titled “Coming Home” that aired Sunday, May 25th. It is about the “cost of killing.” I live in South Carolina. My name is Jesse Odom and I am 25 years old. I served in the Marine Corps and fought in Iraq. Here is my story.  Thank you.

    People on both sides of the spectrum, those for the war in Iraq and those against the war in Iraq, for the most part, say that they support the troops.  That support is typically limited to putting yellow ribbons around trees or by placing some type of sticker on their cars, and of course, by verbally saying that they support our troops. People automatically assume that our troops will get the armor they need to protect themselves in combat, they will assume that they have decent living conditions here in the States and in our warzones, they assume that our men and women are getting all of the health benefits they need, they will assume that our men and women who have been in combat will get the proper mental health care they need in order to get back on a stable mental track. The list goes on. I am tired of our naïve approach to supporting our troops and I pledge to change that. 
    On March 20th, 2003, my unit (Alpha Company 1st Bn 5th Marines) was the very first group to cross the Kuwait-Iraq border. Shortly after, we were engaged in combat and I found myself holding a fatally wounded Marine in my arms, my friend and leader, Shane Childers. I watched him die and he spoke his last words to me. He was the very first American killed in the war. We fought our way to Baghdad, accidentally and unfortunately killing the innocent, constantly living in fear, and trying to stay alive. Once we made it to Baghdad we found ourselves in what many have said was the most violent and fierce firefight during Operation Iraqi Freedom. We fought for nine hours. Nearly a hundred men were wounded and I witnessed the death of another Marine that I looked up to. We raided Saddam’s palace and the Abu Hanifah mosque where Saddam had been sighted. We killed many men and captured others. We lived at the palace for a while and then moved back to southern Iraq and eventually back to the United States.
    Shortly after getting back to the United States I finished my enlistment while my friends in my unit went back to Iraq. I started to write a book when I got out of the Marine Corps. I didn’t plan to publish the book but I used it as a coping mechanism. I camped out at my computer night after night, putting my unit’s story into words. Throughout this process, I kept up with some of my other friends that also got out of the military. Many of them struggled, and some still do. My friend, Chip Wicks, could not handle his problems and hung himself in February of 2004. This put me on a path to try to change some things. I started talking to my other friends and many of these men also had, and still have, a difficult time coping with the fact that they had witnessed and did things that many in our country could never imagine. They have a hard time coping because they are good men with Christian beliefs and a moral conscious; even though many do not regret fighting in Iraq. Many of these men will not get help, but even those that do, have to fight tooth and nail to get the help they need.
     Some of our men are being asked to use their own money to get counseling for their PTSD. The list of faults is too long to list in this email.  The faults are not limited to mental health care. However, I have decided to focus my efforts on PTSD and the suicide epidemic among our combat veterans.  People read my manuscript and loved it. I was told I should get it published and eventually I took the steps to do this. In the book, I tell my unit’s unbelievable story. But, the story does not stop on the battlefield. The battlefield has followed us home. Also, I tell of the haunting aftermath of war. I describe some of the issues that our troops and veterans face today.  I use real examples.
    In this book, I follow my unit as we prepared for war, when we went to war, and now home, where we have been put on the back burner. I am devoted to support our troops and I am going to do what I can to make a difference.
    I set up a fund titled the Chip Wicks Fund in honor of my friend that took his own life.  I am donating 10 percent of my royalties from the book sales to this fund, and the publisher has agreed to contribute 10 percent of their net proceeds from this book to the fund.  I am also accepting donations on my website.  The fund will be used to seek out and help those that have problems adjusting back into the civilian world.  Those that have or may have PTSD.  I don’t want any more of my brothers and sisters to die due to depression (suicide) when they can be helped.  I want you to help me support the troops. Not by simply waiving a flag or putting a ribbon around a tree. I want you to put this story on the front page of your paper and help me change some things.  I am trying to get more support from our government, but that will take some public pressure. 
    My book is eye opening.  It is not written by a seasoned author, a ghost writer, a politician or journalist who went on a fact-finding tour in well protected areas in Iraq. This book was written by a Marine infantryman who went and served his country and is now asking our country to truly support our troops and our combat veterans. You can help me and our men and women in uniform (and veterans). I want people to read my book and see what is going on behind the scenes of our media. I want to sell books and raise money for an unresolved problem in our country. I want people to read the book so they can see the world through an enlisted man’s eyes. My efforts are not limited to the book and the fund, I am going to go to our politicians and demand change.
    My book is titled “Through Our Eyes” (Bella Rosa Books, June 2008, ISBN 978-1-933523-14-9).
    You can go to my website and copy anything on it you want to put in your newspaper article (excerpt, pictures, bio, etc). My website is www.iraqthroughoureyes.com — I want to open the public’s eye and this book will help do that.

Please support the troops.
Thank you,
Jesse Odom

Speaking of books. On a blog related to the Dateline NBC segment referenced above, a producer mentions one called "On Killing: The Psychological Cost Of Killing In War And Society" by Lt. Col. David Grossman. I’ve read much of it while drinking coffee on a couple of separate visits to Barnes & Noble. It is truly fascinating, and contains a lot of data I had not encountered before. For instance, I had known that a lot of soldiers never fire their weapons when in contact with the enemy, but an analysis of widely scattered battles through history demonstrated that a startling number of those who DO fire more or less intentionally MISS.

Don’t back down on the 100-year remark!

My least favorite thing John McCain has said in this campaign was that "no new taxes" nonsense. But one of the best things he’s said was the bit about our being in Iraq 100 years.

It was about time somebody said it. Sure, maybe it was a tad hyperbolic (Why’d you say 100, Luke? I thought it was a nice, round number), but the point needed to be made. This is a long-term commitment. We’re not getting out any time soon. Everybody knows that, including the Democratic candidates (although they have to tiptoe around it much of the time). They say no, we won’t be out in 2013, but fortunately no one asks them about beyond that. McCain, like grumpy old Dad, just told us kids to stop asking if we’re there yet — it’s a long trip, so settle back.

It has always seemed obvious to me, from the moment we went in, that our involvement with Iraq would be long, too long to predict the end, if there is an end. If you want to be mad at Bush for committing us this way, be mad. But there’s no changing the fact — we’re committed. No friend could ever again trust us, and no enemy ever be deterred, if we walked away from that.

I don’t know how long we’ll need to have troops there, and neither does McCain. Saying "100 years" moves us off the absurdity of talking about how fast we can skedaddle, and helps us focus on, "Well, we’re here — so what do we do next?" And, not least among the advantages, we no longer encourage terrorists to think, "Just one more car bomb, and they’ll leave!"

It’s also a gift to the antiwar folks. No longer need they moan vaguely about "unending war." Now, their grievance can be specific: "100 years of war!" It clarifies things for everybody.

So you can imagine how distressed I was to see this headline today: "McCain says 100-year remark distorted." No! I thought — don’t take it back!

But he wasn’t. He was just explaining that he meant what I’d always thought he’d meant — we’d have a presence there over the next century in the same way we’ve been in Korea and Germany for over half a century now. He wasn’t talking about fighting that long. In fact, he said, we "will win the war in Iraq and win it fairly soon."

That brings us to the semantic question of when a war ends, which is not as simple as it sounds in this post-Clausewitzian world. Conventional warfare ended a few weeks after we invaded in 2003. Although there have been some good-sized ground actions since then, they have not formed a coherent whole, in the sense that there’s no specific, unified enemy out there to surrender to us — which is how a war normally ends. So we get into movable measurements of relative peace. Is the war over when there are this many casualties in a month? No? How about this many?

Does the mere presence of troops on the ground constitute a state of war? Some would probably say "yes," but I certainly would not — and point, once again, to Germany. We kept our troops there as a stabilizing force, long decades after the shooting stopped. It’s worked beautifully. It’s worked, somewhat less easily, in Korea and Bosnia as well.

The thing is, 100 years from now, we will have troops in a lot of places around the globe. There are Bosnias not yet thought of. That’s assuming we’re still the unipolar power. There are reasons to think we won’t be, and plenty of Americans today think that would be fine. We won’t be if the Chinese have their way, and it’s certainly not the vision of the future that Putin’s peddling. This faces us with a question — is the world a better place with its first and greatest liberal democracy still dominant, or with a KGB or Tiananmen Square sort of regime?

The brass come out for McCain

Mccainadm

This morning, I turned out for a campaign announcement by John McCain, and realized when I got to the State Museum that I should have dressed better — or at least shaved. He was there with four admirals, representative of the 110 admirals and generals who are endorsing his campaign.

It wasn’t just the brass; there were some impressive people from the ranks as well. Command Sergeant Major James "Boo" Alford, formerly of the U.S. Army Special Forces and veteran of Korea and Vietnam, was among them. That’s him pictured below with Tut Underwood, P.R. guy for the museum.

Here’s video from the event:

And here’s an excerpt from the release (which you can read in its entirety here):

Today over 100 retired admirals and generals endorsed John McCain for President of the United States at a press conference in Columbia, South Carolina. These distinguished leaders supporting John McCain come from all branches of the armed services and include former POWs, Medal of Honor recipients and former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

John McCain was joined today in Columbia by five distinguished military veterans: Admiral Leighton "Snuffy" Smith, USN (Ret.); Vice Admiral Mike Bowman, USN (Ret.); Rear Admiral Tom Lynch, USN (Ret.); Rear Admiral Bob Shumaker, USN (Ret.); and Major General Stan Spears, USA, Adjutant General of South Carolina.

"This nation is at war and we’d better damn well understand that fact," said Admiral Leighton "Snuffy" Smith, USN (Ret.). "John McCain understands it, and he is the only candidate that has not wavered one bit in his position regarding the importance of victory in the war against Islamic extremism or in his commitment to the troops who are doing the fighting. He has consistently demonstrated the kind and style of leadership that we believe is essential in our next Commander in Chief. Our nation faces a growing array of serious foreign policy challenges. John McCain is the ONE candidate who, in our view, truly understands the strategic landscape and is fully prepared to deal decisively and effectively with those who wish to be our friends and, importantly, those who wish us harm."

RobertadamsThe event was held on the museum’s fourth floor. Sen. McCain and the admirals stood behind a twisted
steel beam from the World Trade Center — what you might call a way of focusing civilians’ minds on what’s important. (Inset, at right, you see Green Diamond opponent and McCain supporter Robert Adams and his kids by the beam.)

Anyway, when the event was over, I paused only to grab a quick coffee before going straightaway to get a nice short, regulation haircut. Next time, I’ll be ready.

Alford

McCain on Murtha


This video clip, poor as the quality is thanks to the dim lighting at Hudson’s Smokehouse in Lexington last night, reminds me of a discussion we had regarding the "b-word" clip a couple of weeks back.

Some, who are not inclined to think as highly of John McCain as I do, tended to think of the way he spoke of fellow Sen. Hillary Clinton — with sober, collegial respect — AFTER he regained his composure as the phony part of that earlier clip. I saw it as consistent with the way Sen. McCain talks about everybody. Respecting others, regardless of political differences, is an essential part of the man’s character.

Here we see another partisan gathering — a larger one this time — and another case in which an apparent supporter tees up an opportunity for the candidate to trash a political opponent. In this case, it was someone asking about John Murtha’s past comments with regard to the conduct of American troops in Iraq.

Without the flustering factor of the profane language in that earlier incident, McCain answers in a way typical of him: He soberly expresses his respect for Congressman Murtha (in the same tone in which he expressed his respect for Sen. Clinton, the same tone in which he generally speaks of other people), then expresses his strong disagreement with the congressman and other Democrats on policy.

This speaks to the essence of what I am always seeking in political discourse — the kind of civility in which ideas can be discuss, and even debated fiercely, without the distraction of ad hominem bashing.

You don’t normally see this sort of clip, and with good reason — it’s not an explosion or a pratfall, and it doesn’t break new ground. McCain says things he says all the time. But my point, is that day in and day out, this is the way he speaks of people with whom he disagrees.

The hunter, home from the hill

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,    
  And the hunter home from the hill.    

Leon Uris closed his epic novel about the U.S. Marines, Battle Cry, with those lines from Robert Louis Stevenson. They came to mind when I viewed this video clip sent to me and others by Samuel Tenenbaum, the cover message saying only "Just watch!"

It’s an ABC News clip about a Marine staff sergeant surprising his young daughters upon his return from Iraq. It’s an evocative piece of video, and it stirred Rusty DePass to share this with us:

I can sympathize. I got my boy back from Afghanistan yesterday for 2 weeks. Nothing quite so dramatic but we are glad to have him home. During the next 2 weeks I think his Momma is planning to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, St. Patricks Day, and any other holidays she can think of.

Here’s wishing a joyful Chrismukkah, and many more such to come, to the DePass family, and my God bless all who serve, and their families.