"I think we are winning. Okay? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05
"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.
Pat Lang's surprising defensiveness and seemingly stodgy commentary on Civil War issues - which has apparently led him to take down all his recent posts dealing with Civil War issues at his Sic Semper Tyrannis 2006 blog - reminded me again that the current chorus of critics of the Cheney-Bush administration are, to put it generously, singing in a polyphonic harmony.
In other words, there are a wide variety of voices that are currently sharing various criticisms of the Iraq War: liberal internationalists, traditional realists both liberal and conservative, rightwing isolationists, pacifists and near-pacifists.
At some point, the differences between the various approaches will become obvious. Some of the current critics of the Cheney-Bush policy would be at least as critical, if not more so, of an Al Gore or John Kerry or Hillary Clinton foreign policy. So it's not to soon for us to be aware of those differences in the current environment and what they imply in the longer run.
With that in mind, I read with interest Lang's commentary of 10/06/06 on the statement by Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and torture supporter, that the current Iraqi government has 2-3 months to get things together. And I've begun to wonder, how much substance is there in what he's telling us?
Lang begins by writing of torture supporter Warner, "John Warner is my senator and I have always respected him greatly. I continue to do so." I think we can take him at his word on that.
For him to say that the Maliki government has 90 days to get control of the situation or the United States should reconsider it options is a major step. The bomb throwers may not think it is a big deal, but it is. He says that "no option should be off the table."
He doesn't specify who he thinks the "bomb throwers" are. Does he mean Iraqi Sunni guerrillas? American "libertarian" isolationists like those we often find at Antiwar.com? Democrats who criticize the Iraq War but who don't express nostalgia for the Confederate States of America?
Or is it just a throwaway line from someone whose head is stuck in the "culture wars" circa 1970 and thinks anyone who criticizes the military or a military action and who's not a like-minded conservative must be a bunch of hippies who love the Weather Underground?
And, in this case, it could be important in the current context that Warner specified two to three months, not just 90 days. Robert Dreyfuss focuses on a key point that Lang's post doesn't even mention: Coup In Iraq? TomPaine.com 10/06/06. Warner's statement was one of several indications that the Cheney-Bush administration has given the Maliki government in Iraq 60 days to do what Washington is telling them to do, or be outsted. No mention of that in Lang's post.
Lang then gives us some boilerplate like this:
In other words, military strategy can not be made in a policy vacuum. In my opinion, no change of deployments or new military courses of action will have a real meaning unless they are grounded in a new US foreign policy in the Middle East, and specifically a new policy intended to deal with Iraq in the context of its own geo-strategic position in the midst of the Islamic World.
Yes, I think we can all agree that military strategy should support foreign policy. And that US policy in the Middle East should "deal with Iraq in the context of its own geo-strategic position in the midst of the Islamic World". We can all agree, because its a vague, airy statement that doesn't mean much of anything by itself.
He then talks more about our current situation:
So far, we have been following a policy that envisions revolutionary change in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East leading to a Utopian and Earthly Paradise of the sort fantasized by Frum and Perle in their egregious book, "The End of Evil."
That's true. Except those of us who read current news have noticed indications that a shift away from the strategy of bringing democracy to the heathens through wars of liberation, to at least talking about uniting the so-called "moderates" against "extremists". (See Seyon Brown, Beware a New Bush Doctrine Truthout.com/Boston Globe 10/04/06 and accompanying Jim Lobe analysis.) Not that it should get in theway of Lang's pronouncements from on high. But it might be significant in some way. He continues:
The military strategy we have been following was inflicted on the armed forces by the Bush Administration in pursuit of that goal. Large forces were not thought necessary because Iraq, like the rest of the Middle East, was thought by the Bush Administration to be a "pile of tinder" awaiting only a match in order to burst into revolutionary flames.
Really? Our poor generals were slapped around by that mean Rummy? They were, we know. But that shouldn't get them off the hook for their contributions to the disaster known as the Iraq War.
I'm afraid our infallible generals have contributed more than a little to the debacle: even including the troop shortage. Andrew Bacevich in his The New American Militarism (2005) describes the process by which the officer corps took a few questionable lessons from the Vietnam War. One was that cournterinsurgency wars should be avoided. And so they spent the time between 1975 (the fall of Saigon) and 2003 (invading Iraq) preparing to fight Soviet Army Central pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany. Even after the Soviet Union went out of existence, they continued to train, organize and equip their forces to fight that sort of conventional war, which they considered "real" warfare as opposed to counterinsurgency.
Another misguided lesson from the Vietnam War was the notion that Lyndon Johnson had committed a major mistake in not mobilizing the reserves for that war. Their perception was that if the reserves had been mobilized, more of the public would have supported the war effort they were waging and supported it longer. So they sized the forces so that when a "real" war (i.e., a conventional war) occurred, the President would be required to mobilize the reserves, as occurred during the Gulf War of 1991 and the Iraq War of 2003-?
A related lesson has to do with the volunteer army. Part of the generals' gripe about not mobilizing the reserves was that they were deprived of some of the best potential soldiers and had to rely too much on the draft. Military conscription has always been unpopular in the US, and it became extremely so during the Vietnam War. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush were scarcely along in seeking to avoid being drafted. And so one of the lessons learned from the Vietnam War was that it's far, far better to rely on volunteers rather than draftees.
Then came the Iraq War, which very quickly turned into a counterinsurgency war. And our infallible generals' strategy for counterinsurgency since 1975 had been, don't do it. So they weren't prepared for it. And putting another 100,000 or 200,000 soldiers into Iraq (even if that were remotely feasible in the short term) won't do that much good if their preparation is directed against Soviet Army Central.
They got their mobilized reserves. Hopefully, they will learn a more lucid lesson from the experience. The long and repeated deployments of the reserves not only failed to make the Iraq War popular. In fact, it was a significant factor in the drop of public support. The Iraq War is clearly more unpopular than the Vietnam War was. Plus, the deployments have been devastating to the recruitment and retention for the reserves as well as detrimental to emergency preparedness by the state National Guards. It will likely take a decade or more for them to recover, under the best circumstances.
And how many generals, either serving or retired, have been clamoring for a draft to fill the gap they see in troop needs vs. current deployments? I haven't noticed a lot of that, myself.
So I would say that Lang's post is being more than generous in making Rummy's faults - and Lord knows those are real - into an alibi for the serious failings of the senior military leadership.
Fortunately for our distraught generals, Col Lang has a solution:
Iraq is going to be partitioned. This may be either de facto or de jure but it will be partitioned. The process of disintegration launched by the United States in eliminating the mechanisms of state integrity has progressed so far that effective dissolution of the old Iraq is inevitable. The recent frustrated desperation evident in the statements of the US command in Baghdad, and the ridiculous futility of Dr. Rice's latest trip are unmistakable signs of disintegration. Indeed, the partition is now underway. ...
A recognition that this partition of Iraq has now become inevitable and beyond the ability of the United States to prevent is a pre-condition for the adoption of a "reality based" policy which can deal with the vital issue of American relations with the pieces of Iraq. Equally important are the issues of relations among the states which surround, and influence the tri-partite Mesopotamia of the future.
Lang's comfortable pronouncements of the inevitability of partition are hardly comforting. Because by most accounts from specialists in the region, partition would inevitably be accompanied by massive ethnic/sectarian cleansing and protracted military conflict among the remaining parts. The oil-rich region of Kirkuk would be one of many points of contention, that one between the Kurdish area and the Sunni Arab area.
Lang mentions that Turkey takes a dim view of an independent Kurdistan. But, hey, no prob. Lang writes, "Will Turkey accept that? Ah. That should be the subject of creative diplomacy on all sides." Indeed.
And it's very likely that if that "creative diplomacy" fails to prevent a direct Turkish intervention to suppress Kurdistan, neighboring states like Iran, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia will be mightily tempted to direct interventions of various kinds. A regional war, in other words.
Partition is obviously one possibility for Iraq's future. But it's by no means such a self-evident destiny as Lang confidently asserts. Or, to put it another way, the unstated but unmistakable implication of Lang's analysis here is that the US should throw its support to a partition plan.
Lang titled his post, "A Policy and Strategy of Realism". But his confident declaration that partition is the inevitable outcome may well be as utopian an idea as those of the neocons he criticizes.
"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05
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