Andrew Bacevich has an informative article in the print edition of Current History Dec 2005 called "Requiem for the Bush Doctrine". He looks at how the Iraq War, which was the first apllications of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, has shown the practical limits of the doctrine.
Bacevich describes briefly the important distinction between "preemptive" and "preventive" war:
The president went on to explain [in a speech of 06/01/02] that the United States would "be ready for preemptive action when necessary." But the substance of his remarks indicated clearly that he was referring not to preemption, but to preventive war. The distinction is crucial. Preemption implies launching a war when facing the clear prospect of imminent attack - as, for example, the state of Israel did in June 1967. Preventive war implies initiating hostilities to eliminate the possibility that an adyerwry might pose a future threat, again as Israel did in its 1981 attack on the partially assembled Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. Effective June 2002, the United States embraced the concept of preventive war. This is the essence of the Bush Doctrine. (my emphasis)
The Bush Doctrine as formally embodied in the National Security Strategy of the United States (2002) is careful to speak only of preemptive war. Undoubtedly one reason for that is that preemptive war and preventive war are also established terms in international law. "Preventive war" is illegal in international law.
The neoconservative worldview underlying the Bush Doctrine of preventive war proceeds from the overwhelming military supremacy of the United Sates in today's world. Whatever rhetorical niceties they use to dress it up, the neocons see war and the threat of war as the premier tool of American foreign policy. Looking at the experience of the Iraq War. Bacevich writes:
The most important of these conclusions is the following: as measured by the effectiveness and capacity of American arms, the quality of American generalship, and the adherence of American soldiers to professional norms, this administration has badly misread what the us military can and cannot do. The sword of American military power is neither sharp enough nor hard enough to meet the demands of preventive war.
For the neocons and the Bush Doctrine, the credibility of American power and the will to use it is central to the success of the preventive war doctrine. And the military doctrine and force structure that is in place is designed for rapid victories. In conventional warfare.
But the guerrilla war in Iraq shows American power in a very different light than that of the hegemonic superpower that can and will impose its desires by military force anywhere in the world. Bacevich very clearly sees some serious, major problems in the performance and perspectives of the US officers corps, not just Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and the like. The "full spectrum dominance" of the battlefield that seemed to work so brilliantly in March-April 2003 in the conventional phase of the war has now bogged down into a counterinsurgency war that, Bacevich writes, "in a strictly military sense may be unwinnable". And he desribes the implications for Bush's preventive war doctrine this way:
The significance of this military failure - and by the standards of preventive war, the Iraq War cannot be otherwise categorized - extends beyond the conflict immediately at hand. As the astute commentator Owen Harries has noted, the conflict in Iraq has shattered the "mystique" of us forces. All the world now knows that an army once thought to be unstoppable can be fought to a standstill. Thirty years after its defeat in Vietnam, it turns out that the United States still does not know how to counter a determined guerrilla force. Far from overawing other would-be opponents, the Iraq War has provided them with a template for how to fight the worlds most powerful military to a stalemate - a lesson thai other potential adversaries from Pyongjnog to Tehran have no doubt taken to heart.
According to an ancient principle of statecraft, the reputation of power is itself power. By deflating the reputation of us forces, the Iraq War has considerably diminished the power of the United States and by extension has called into question the continued utility of the Bush Doctrine. (my emphasis)
Bacevich presses this point, which is too litlle understood even by many critics of the Iraq War. The US right now has the capability to strike Iran's nuclear power industry at multiple locations and effectivelydisable it. (SeeKevin Drum's post How likely is a military strike on Iran 02/04/06 reporting on Wesley Clarke's evaluations of the potential; although I'm not sure what "conventional wisdom" it is to which Drum referes that assumes such a strike to be infeasible.) But the US doesn't have the soldiers to go beyond what Bacevich calls "inflicting punishment". The crunch on military recruitment which Bacevich emphasizes in Current History is very real.
(For more on current recruitment and retention issues, eee Fred Kaplan's Rumsfeld Surrenders Slate 02/03/06; Army's Rising Promotion Rate Called Ominous: Experts say the quality of the officer corps is threatened as the service fights to retain leaders during wartime and fill new command slots by Mark Mazzetti Los Angeles Times 01/30/06; GI Schmo: How low can Army recruiters go? by Fred Kaplan Slate 01/09/06.)
Bacevich violates what is still a near-total taboo, even among Democrats, of criticizing the strategic wisdom and performance of top generals. He criticizes Tommy Franks on the Afghan War:
As commanding general of us Central Command, Franks planned and directed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In Afghanistan, the forces commanded by Franks handily toppled the Taliban regime and scattered, but did not destroy, the Al Qaeda cadres that had used Afghanistan as a safe haven. Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda's supreme leader and the chief architect of the 9-11 attacks, eluded capture and remains at large. Although ousted from power, the Taliban refused to submit to the new American-installed political order. The effort to pacify Afghanistan continues, a low-level war that may become virtually perpetual. The decision gained by Franks in Afghanistan qualifies at best as partial and incomplete.
He also criticizes Franks for having treated the capture of Baghdad as the "endgame" of the Iraq War. He also suggests that Franks' successor as head of CENTCOM Ricardo Sanchez, will be remembered asthe William Westmoreland of the Iraq War, both of whom - one in Vietnam, the other in Iraq - "in failing to grasp the political-military nature of the problem he faced, set US forces on an erroneous course from which recovery became all but impossible." He elaborates:
Similarly, Sanchez in 2003 judged the correlation of forces in Iraq to be in his favor and decided that a tough, aggressive strategy would disarm the insurgency before it could gain momentum. He too miscalculated, as badly as Westmoreland had. Rather than intimidating the insurgents, his kick-down-the-door tactics emboldened them and alienated ordinary Iraqis who came to see the Americans not as liberators but as an alien occupying force. Over the course of Sanchez's tenure in Baghdad, the insurgency grew in scope and sophistication. His successors have been struggling ever since to regain the upper hand. Today, the conflict drags on, eroding American popular support for the war and sapping the strength of the forces engaged.
Bacevich's talks at greater length about these issues in his review of Franks' memoirs American Soldier in A Modern Major General New Left Review Sept-Oct 2004. In that article, he writes:
Consider: when Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez assumed command of coalition forces in Iraq in 2003, the first stirrings of an insurgency had begun to appear; his job was to snuff out that insurgency and establish a secure environment. When Sanchez gave up command a year later, Iraq was all but coming apart at the seams. Security had deteriorated appreciably. The general failed to accomplish his mission, egregiously so. Yet amidst all the endless commentary and chatter about Iraq, that failure of command has gone all but unnoted, as if for outsiders to evaluate senior officer performance qualifies as bad form. Had Sanchez been a head coach or a ceo, he would likely have been cashiered. But he is a general, so the Pentagon pins a medal on his chest and gives him a pat on the back. It is the dirty little secret to which the World’s Only Superpower has yet to own up: as the United States has come to rely ever more heavily on armed force to prop up its position of global pre-eminence, the quality of senior American military leadership has seldom risen above the mediocre. The troops are ever willing, the technology remarkable, but first-rate generalship has been hard to come by. ...
Franks asserts that ‘there’s never been a combat operation as successful as Iraqi Freedom’. Only the narrowest definition of success makes that claim sustainable. In fact, the tangible benefits accruing from America’s victory over Saddam Hussein have been few. In a sense, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 bears comparison to Germany’s invasion of Norway in 1940 or its lunge into Yugoslavia the following year. At the moment of execution, each seemed to affirm impressions that the German military juggernaut was unstoppable. But once the dust had settled, it became apparent that neither victory had brought the Nazi regime any closer to resolving the main issue. Each had saddled the Wehrmacht with burdens that it could ill afford to bear.
Then there is the almost forgotten matter of Afghanistan. The aim of Operation Enduring Freedom had been to ‘squeeze into extinction’ the terrorists and terrorist-sympathizers present in that country. By the end of 2001, Franks declares, ‘we had accomplished our mission’. But this is palpable nonsense. To be sure, the us intervention in Afghanistan damaged Al Qaeda and ousted the Taliban regime - hardly trivial accomplishments. But Operation Enduring Freedom came nowhere near to destroying either organization. Of equal moment - although the point receives scant attention in American Soldier - both Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar managed to elude the forces that Franks commanded. Three years after they first arrived us troops find themselves engaged in an arduous, open-ended effort to maintain even the most tenuous stability. They will not be going home anytime soon. In Afghanistan, General Franks no more accomplished his mission than did the younger von Moltke when he took the German army partway to Paris in 1914. Franks wrote American Soldier in hopes of securing his place in history. But in both Iraq and Afghanistan, history appears to be moving in directions not helpful to his cause. (my emphasis)
In the Current History article, Bacevich also discusses realistically the consequences of Bush's torture policy and other breakdowns of law and discipline in the armed forces:
Sadly, in the dirty war that Iraq has become, a number of American soldiershave behaved in ways that have undermined the administrations liberation narrative. This is a story in which the facts are as yet only partially known. But this much we can say for sure: after the revelations from Abu Ghraib prison and the credible allegations lodged recently by Captain lan Fishback regarding widespread detaim abuse in the 82d Airborne Division, and with other accounts of misconduct steadily accumulating from week to week, it is no longer possible to pass off soldierly misbehavior as the late-night shenanigans of a few low-ranking sadists lacking adequate supervision. Unprofessional behavior in the ranks of the American military may not have reached epidemic proportions, but it is far from rare. (my emphasis)
He argues, "The US military may well be teetering on the brink of a profound moral crisis".
Its roots are not exclusively in events and decisions of the Bush administration. But the Bush Doctrine, in particular its applications in preventive war on Iraq, has pushed it closer to such a crisis.
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