Historians on the War

[posted by Callimachus]

A good, rollicking discussion here between Max Boot and Geoffrey Wheatcroft.

Needless to say, I'm mostly in the Boot camp, and find many of Wheatcroft's comments factually odd ("...deposing Saddam was specifically not the reason we were told we were going to war"), airily condescending ("Could I possibly have touched a raw nerve?"), and contradictory (After having quoted Lear's ""The worst is not, So long as we can say, 'This is the worst' " he then reacts to the title of Christopher Hitchens' column "How to Avoid a Bloodbath in Iraq" with "Hello? To avoid? To avoid what?").

As for Boot, here are some of his highlights:

The dreadful outcome in Iraq has seemingly validated the naysayers, of whom there were many before the hostilities started (though not nearly as many as you would think; a lot of prewar hawks have magically become birds of a different feather). It's all too easy to say, Why didn't the administration listen to those who warned that an invasion of Iraq would turn out to be a disaster? Perhaps because many of these critics were Chicken Littles who had been making dire predictions before every American military intervention of the past several decades. It is all too easy too forget how many seemingly respected voices warned of disaster before the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. While congenital optimists have been discredited by the recent turn of events in Iraq, congenital pessimists were discredited by the course of earlier wars. This helps to explain why the Bush administration didn't give greater credence to voices critical of the decision to invade Iraq. Explain, but not necessarily excuse.

Senior administration policymakers should have been able to listen to critics who had good ideas about implementation even if they disagreed with the fundamental decision to go to war. I am thinking in particular of people like retired General Tony Zinni, a onetime Central Command chief, who had prepared earlier plans for military action in Iraq and was happy to share his expertise with the administration. But he wasn't seriously consulted because he was seen as an enemy of the Bushies. There is a tendency in every administration to separate the world into "us" and "them," but it proved particularly costly in this case because the president and his senior aides failed to consider the full range of scenarios and to prepare for worst-case outcomes.

And this:

Since you want a clash, I'll oblige by taking exception to Geoffrey's casual slur: to wit, that this war was "dreamt up" by "zealots." I know this has become part of the accepted mythology, but is this really a helpful way to characterize such disparate and distinguished supporters of the invasion as Fouad Ajami, Peter Beinart, Paul Berman, David Brooks, Eliot Cohen, Ivo Daalder, Les Gelb, Vaclav Havel, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Martin Indyk, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, Bernard Lewis, Michael O'Hanlon, Ken Pollack, Dennis Ross, Natan Sharansky, Tom Friedman, George Will, Fareed Zakaria, and the editors of the Washington Post, Daily Telegraph, and Wall Street Journal? To say nothing of politicians like Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Jose Maria Aznar, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Michael Howard, William Hague, and John Howard. Are they all "zealots"? What about the overwhelming majority of Americans who supported the war when it began? More zealots? Or were the zealots only those people within the U.S. government who supported the war: the likes of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, George Tenet, Steve Hadley, and Tommy Franks?

I can't speak for my fellow "zealots" but as someone who supported the invasion—and who, unlike some others, is still willing to admit it—I have always assumed that "genuine democratic elections" in Iraq or anywhere else might well produce outcomes that were "highly unpalatable to Washington." After all, I'm far from happy with many of the actions taken by freely elected governments in Paris, Berlin, Ankara—and, for that matter, Washington D.C. Why should Baghdad be any different? The point that Geoffrey elides is: Was the pre-2003 status quo in the Middle East a palatable one? Obviously not, since it was this status quo that produced the 9/11 hijackers and numerous other terrorists and tyrants. And despite the terrible time we've had in Iraq in the past four years, I am still convinced that in the long run greater liberalization and democratization will change the region for the better. And I'm not the only one. Let me quote an article from the current issue of Newsweek:

"For all his intellectual shortcomings, Bush recognized that the roots of Islamic terror lie in the dysfunctions of the Arab world. Over the last 40 years, as the rest of the globe progressed economically and politically, the Arabs moved backward. Decades of tyranny and stagnation—mostly under the auspices of secular, Westernized regimes like those in Egypt and Syria—have produced an opposition that is extreme, religiously oriented and, in some cases, violent. Its ideology is now global, and it has small bands of recruits from London to Jakarta. But at its heart it is an Arab phenomenon, born in the failures of that region. And it is likely only to be cured by a more open and liberal Arab culture that has made its peace with modernity. Look for example at two non-Arab countries, Malaysia and Turkey, whose people are conservative and religious Muslims. Both places are also reasonably successful economies, open societies and functioning democracies. As a result, they don't produce swarms of suicide bombers. Iraq after Saddam presented a unique opportunity to steer history on a new course."

Which wild-eyed "neocon" penned the preceding paragraph? Doug Feith? Paul Wolfowitz? Bill Kristol? Actually it was none other than Fareed Zakaria, a famous "realist" who wrote a book ("The Future of Freedom") about the dangers of illiberal democracy. But even Fareed realizes that in a region as dysfunctional as the Middle East, a greater dose of freedom is needed.

War and War

[posted by Callimachus]

Perhaps it's reading too much history that prevented me from turning against the entire American Iraq experiment. There must be some explanation, because so many folks online who seemed to think like I did at the start of the thing have loudly, painfully, and repeatedly repudiated their earlier positions.

Not that history gives hope for a good outcome. Rather, history informs the initial decision to support the war; it stands like the angel with the flaming sword to warn you what you're doing.

When you support a decision to make war, you agree to let your country drop down a rabbit hole with no idea where you'll come out, except the certainty it won't be anywhere anyone anticipates at the start.

You accept that innocent civilians will be killed in batches, perhaps more of them than enemy combatants. That brave young soldiers will be maimed and crippled while cowardly old men will reap fortunes in armaments. Men will go mad in trenches and some of your own darling boys will wind up no better than monsters and murderers.

You accept that at home suspicions will be kindled, rights roughed up, institutions corrupted. That the people in despair are likely to turn to demagogues.

You accept that you'll acquire allies who are in some ways worse than your enemies. That your government will waste billions in that most wasteful of human activities, war. That it will acquire the incurable habits of a spendthrift.

You accept that reasons for being at war will shift over time once it begins (the only real reason for being at war once one starts being "not to lose it"), as will yardsticks for victory and strategies for reaching them.

That's just history talking at you. You don't wish this to be true. You fervently desire that, this time, it will be different. If you're a believer, you pray that it will be different.

But you accept that it might not be, and deep down, though you must not dwell on it, you know it likely will be as bad as all that. You just hope the country is strong enough to take it and set itself almost right again in the end.

I factored all that into my original, painful decision to support this war of choice by an administration I had little faith in. And though I share my former allies' horror at the way it has been progressing, I don't retract my initial support for the decision. You can't just send the war back because it's not the one you ordered.

Who Loses

[posted by Callimachus]

Andrew Sullivan rails against "The new meme from the right," which he paraphrases as "the American people - not president Bush - lost the war in Iraq."

And he reaches for one of his newfound friends on the anti-war left, Josh Marshall (who was against overthrowing Saddam even though he thought Saddam had WMD) in bolstering his view that this is "a sickening piece of denialist drivel."

As Josh puts it:

It really does seem as though the cardinals of DC punditry are constitutionally incapable of believing that George W. Bush has ever - in the real sense - gotten anything wrong or that they, the Washington establishment, has gotten anything wrong over the last six years.

All of which goes to show what happens to otherwise healthy minds when they spend too much time paying attention to "D.C. pundits." The idea that peoples, not presidents, win or lose wars is not "the new meme from the right." It's the old meme from history.

You don't pick up a textbook and read that the North defeated Jefferson Davis. Or that FDR defeated Japan. Or that the North Vietnamese defeated Lyndon B. Johnson. You get the idea. Like it or not, "the Americans lost" will be how it gets into the history books if those who slaver for American defeats get their way. [FWIW, I also don't think the jihadis will be running around firing their AK-47s in the air and shouting, "We defeated the Bush Administration (but not the American people)!!! Allah-hu akbar!"]

Have we lost the will to win this fight. Definitely. Whose fault is that? Plenty of blame to go around, and Bush and his friends have their share. But the consequences will be there for all of us. And I'm haunted by the possibility that, as in Vietnam after Creighton Abrams took over the war, we've lost the will to fight it just about the time we made every possible mistake and finally learned what to do that could win it.

No war in American history was worse begun, more wastefully waged, and as incompetently managed as the Civil War -- on both sides, and yet the will of the peoples on both sides of the line kept the armies inspired and alive. Until one collapsed in exhaustion. With determination and unity and belief in itself, little Plataea can hold off Sparta and Thebes combined and plucky England can grind down mighty Spain. Without it, the vastest empire on earth can burst like a puff ball.

Gee, Mr. Wilson

[posted by Callimachus]

Another reminder of what now seems doomed to be forgotten, at least until the real history books get written: The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam in 2003 was a convergence of American idealism and tempered realism:

It was not naive idealism, it should be recalled, that gave birth to Bush's diplomacy of freedom. That diplomacy issued out of a reading of the Arab-Muslim political condition and of America's vulnerability to the disorder of Arab politics. The ruling regimes in the region had displaced their troubles onto America; their stability had come at America's expense, as the scapegoating and the anti-Americanism had poisoned Arab political life. Iraq and the struggle for a decent polity in it had been America's way of trying to extirpate these Arab troubles. The American project in Iraq has been unimaginably difficult, its heartbreak a grim daily affair. But the impulse that gave rise to the war was shrewd and justified.

The administration's calculated gamble, of course, was to guess that the American people were too stupid or selfish to support such an effort either in geopolitical realistic or idealistic terms, and to sell it to them instead as a matter of imminent danger from WMD.

And that seemed like a good guess in 2003: The concensus of intelligence from at home and abroad was that surely something dirty would turn up after you chased Saddam out of his squalid palaces and threw open the blinds and took a look around.

[Those who profess indignation at the fact our intelligence was so wrong are either disingenuous or have been entombed in a clamshell for the past 65 years; no nation in history has sacrificed more of its capital and its principles to espionage and covert action and gotten less in return for it. But in this case it wasn't just us. Even the most vocal European opponents of the war in 2003 accepted Saddam probably had something up his sleeve.]

And even if by some surprise nothing fresh and nasty did turn up, that surprise would be a non-issue for most folks if the emergent Iraqi nation was felt to be steering toward a thriving and peaceful destiny.

To crib a phrase: There are lazy presidencies and there are lucky presidencies, but there are no lazy, lucky presidencies.

The Rebirth of Dishonor

[posted by Callimachus]

The anti-war side, exhilarated by election victories and waving its mandates, is talking about what it wishes to accomplish in Iraq in reality, not just in pipe dreams.

It's not the proposals themselves that so revolt me -- the practical possibilities of what can be proposed are as limited as they were before the election.

It's not even the fact that whatever is being proposed is a mask for the immaturity of a desire to simply run away from Iraq as fast as our Humvees will carry us. Similar proposals in the mouths of the current White House administration were a mask, too: A mask for "buy more time till we think of something or else a miracle happens."

It's the accompanying attitude that reveals what will be accepted with a shrug and a smile, what will be overlooked and buried in the footnotes.

As in this post by the Democratic half of Balloon Juice. Almost casually, amid the formulations, is this glib, cheerful toss-off line:

Retreat is a risky maneuver so let’s do it right.

As though the perception of America's spinelessly losing a war to deadly anti-modern enemies will have no consequences for the American military or the rest of the world. As though letting the ghouls torture all the Iraqis who believed in America's promises will be a negligible side-effect of a maneuver no more difficult than an elementary school fire drill. The Kurds? No one to blame but themselves, it seems:

The latest poll: Iraqis overwhelmingly want the US to leave. That includes a solid majority of both the Shia and Sunni communities. Kurds, of course, gambled on the US protecting their separatism forever and would like to see us hang around a bit longer.

Emphasis added. The more fools them, eh? "WE never promised you anything. You just THOUGHT that we were serious this time. You lose. So don't go blaming me, pal. Now run along and play nice with your new al-Qaida overlords." [Shorter alternative answer: "We're the Democrats. We never promised you shit."]

As in 1975. At least in 1991 we left them with air cover. No indication in the Balloon Juice post that even that will be forthcoming when the Democrats rule America's foreign policy.

Nothing was so shameful about America's experience in Vietnam as the leaving of it. The failure to honor the obligation to defend it. Nothing left me more bitter in 1975 than the abandonment of those hill tribes and urban civil servants who had been cultivated by the U.S. powers since the early 1960s. At least when the German armies retreated on the Eastern Front they let their client peoples ride with them rather than leave them to the cossacks' long knives.

And here we go again. The Americans had no particular interest in the Kurds in the 1970s, except as part of its deal with the Shah of Iran to build him up overnight into a bulwark of stability in the region, a buffer against the Kremlin, and a replacement for the British military power being withdrawn from the Persian Gulf.

In other words, it was part of a fatal and lazy effort to shirk superpower responsibilities by hiring a proxy utterly unfitted to handle a sudden injection of money and power.

When the Shah flipped on Iraq, and discovered he could win turf disputes by strong-arming a deal at the negotiating table, he dropped the Kurds like a hot potato and the Americans let him. The results are the ones hinted at in Saddam's recent trial. Mass graves still are being discovered.

Here is what the new anti-war realists are going to sound like in a few years. Here is Henry Kissinger's best effort to explain away America's first betrayal of the Kurds:

They claim "misleading promises to the Kurds," as if that suffering people had been triggered into fighting Iraq by our representations to them. The fact is that when the US decision to support the Kurds was made in July 1972, the Kurds had already been fighting Saddam's oppression for several years. They were supported by Britain, Iran, Israel, and neighboring countries. Nixon was asked to support them in 1972 when the Soviet Union, disappointed in Egypt, began to pour arms into Iraq beyond the capacity of the Kurds' existing sponsors to match. Without our help, the Kurds would have been destroyed earlier —- that was our real choice.

Judt next asserts that we "abandoned" the Kurds. The fact is that in 1975 when the issue of expanded support came up, it was for $300 million and two Iranian divisions at the precise moment that Congress was cutting off all aid to Vietnam and Cambodia. Does Judt believe such a request would have succeeded? The Shah did not and threw in his hand. It is possible to argue the practical issue; to elevate it to a moral assault is at a minimum inappropriate.

Emphasis added. Realpolitik at its ugliest. Leave morality out of it, please. We're just doing what has to be done for the greater good. And don't ask us to think about what that means. Leave honor and responsibility out as well. Blame it all on someone else. And just shrug and say, as you walk away, "without our help, you would have died even sooner."

Get used to it. It's back.

The Other Way of War

[posted by Callimachus]

The contractors' work in Iraq was a bid to wage war as it has never been waged before. And as, alas, now that it is failing, the attempt likely never will be made again.

It was a continuation of the war that began in April 2003 and did not end with the fall of Baghdad, only changed form.

It was a creative combat, a constructive war. It brought the best skills Americans have -- the ability to fix things, to make things, to build systematically -- into Iraq. Instead of bombing schools, we raised them up out of the dust. And bridges, and power plants, and pipelines, and sewage treatment plants, and docks. It was the tape reel of a modern war played in reverse. There is a broken building, then the U.S. comes, then there is a working factory.

Make no mistake, this was war. The contractors, my friend included, were soldiers on the front lines. The reconstruction of Iraq was a tactic for victory, and its goal was to crush and humiliate a deadly foe. As combat with bombs and bullets unleashes the darker sides of human nature, constrained by military codes, in service of a political end, so this employed the best qualities in people, including their sense of doing good, making the world better, to the same purpose.

Was it wasteful? Of course it was. Most bombs dropped miss their targets, most bullets fired fail to strike an enemy. Are these things considered wasted when the battle's won?

This was a war that ought to have rallied those who dislike militarism but haven't gone completely off their heads. It was a better way to win. It was consistent with America's values. It could have worked. It ought to have worked.

Those who deride it publicly now may be sorry, privately, when the next round comes, that it did not.

Because now we are all the more likely, after the next calamity, to fight back under Bin Laden's terms. To him, this all is a simple clash of civilizations, a total war, and a fight to the death.

You Would Weep

[posted by Callimachus]

A little more than 200 years ago, a bombastic U.S. agent named William Eaton (today he would be special op) led a handful of U.S. Marines, several hundred foreign mercenaries scraped from the taverns and brothels of Alexandria, and a pack of hired bedouins in a march across a desert that hadn't been crossed in force since classical times. They captured Tripoli's second largest city, then defended it against counter-attack and won a tremendous victory.

The tyrant of Tripoli had captured a U.S. warship and enslaved its 300 sailors. When they died in captivity, the Bashaw Yussef threw their bodies to the dogs in the street. The Jefferson administration wanted them free. America in those days had not entirely forgotten what "honor" meant.

The White House approved Eaton's mission, but didn't expect it to succeed. Until then, the only thing the Marines had going for them was a Washington, D.C., marching band which the citizens loved but the violin-playing Jefferson despised. Instead, he trusted the wily diplomats, who played the game the European way. Headlines in the administration mouthpiece newspaper blared "Millions for Defense but not a Cent for Tribute," but secretly Jefferson authorized ransom for the sailors.

So with a rival for the Tripoli throne, Hamet Bashaw, in tow, Eaton and his rag-tag army surprised everyone, Jefferson included, and conquered the city of Derne. It provided a line for the Marine song every boy used to know:

From the halls of Montezuma
To the shores of Tripoli
We will fight our country's battles
on the land as on the sea.
First to fight for right and freedom ...

And so on. It also provided the curved Memeluke sword on the Marine dress uniform that still commemorates what was, no matter what else, a glorious and honorable victory.

But the Marines' victory, when it came, was almost an embarrassment to the administration, since the diplomats were working things out smoothly with the tyrant, agreeing in principle, haggling over prices. They made sure Eaton and his followers never had a chance. The administration not only paid ransom, it accepted a treaty with a clause that set a going ransom rate for U.S. prisoners, thus encouraging the pirates to try to take more of them.

Worst of all, it sold out every honest ally the U.S. had in Libya. All the North Africans and Bedouins who had cast their lot with the Americans, all the residents of Derne who had helped the Americans defend it, the Arab women who had slipped between the lines and warned Eaton of their enemies' plots and plans, were left to their fate. Everyone knew the town would be looted and the inhabitants massacred when the Americans left. Eaton wrote from Derne to a friend describing his feelings when he read the diplomatic order to withdraw the American forces and the details of the deal that had been cut:

You would weep, Sir, were you on the spot, to witness the unfounded confidence placed in the American character here, and to reflect that this confidence must shortly sink into contempt and immortal hatred; ... but if no further aid comes to our assistance and we are compelled to leave the place under its actual circumstances, humanity itself must weep: The whole city of Derne, together with numerous families of Arabs who attached themselves to Hamet Bashaw and who resisted Yussef's troops in expectation of succour from us, must be abandoned to their fate -- havoc & slaughter will be the inevitable consequence -- not a soul of them can escape the savage vengeance of the enemy.

When the Associated Press opens a "news" story with the clause, "In a somber, pre-election review of a long and brutal war ..." you know we're going to drop it, we're going to "leave the place under its actual circumstances." You know there's no power of influence in Bush's White House that can cut past that, even if he decided now, too late, it was worth really trying.

Thanks to a pusillanimous political class, an attention-deficit public, an inept administration, and a malice-blinded media, we are going to leave.

The good people of Iraq will have to stand and face the bad people of Iraq and many other lands, on their own. It always was going to have to be them who won this war, not us. We went to Iraq to lose, to be told to go home. It was the only way to make the place what we wanted it to be: A strong, free, prosperous, and law-abiding country ruled transparently by its people. The question was, whether we would stay long enough to help build that country and receive its orders to depart, or whether it would be jihadis and thugs -- sorry, "insurgents" -- who would force us to leave too soon.

That answer is becoming clear. There will be consequences. The Kurds will feel them. But so will we. Weakness displayed before a weaker enemy is an invitation to further disaster. Just read Bin Laden.

What Went Wrong

[posted by Callimachus]

Spirit of America has always, to me, represented the best of what we went to Iraq to do. It is independent of the military, but works closely with it. It has a high sense of spiritual mission, but is not faith-based. Soldiers and marines in the field initiate the ideas, civilians contribute the funds, and the organization makes it happen.

Of all the charitable donations my wife and I have made the last three years, probably more has gone to SoA than any other destination, unless it be Mennonite Central Committee. Two years ago, I think it was, I asked those who would not be offended by the request to, instead of buying me a Christmas present, donate the amount they would have spent to one of two SoA causes. One of them was the one here described in Ramadi:

My main question back in Ramadi was “how can we help?” That’s the same question I arrived with at Camp Pendleton last week.

In our meeting, as he has many times via email, General Mattis thanked Spirit of America and our donors for supporting the Marines’ efforts to stabilize and bring some improvement to Iraq. He said our support was far beyond any expectations they had. And, he talked quite a bit about the women’s sewing centers for which SoA provided sewing machines. ...

The sewing centers were a particularly high impact project in Gen Mattis’ view. They included day care, computer training and, of course, the ability for women to sew and make some money to support themselves. They also included a “tips” line where an Iraqi woman could make a call to report insurgent/terrorist activity. General Mattis said he knew the “tips” line was used and, although no one can know how many lives were saved, it had an impact. I’ve heard many similar stories, when a small act of kindness led to assistance or information that could save lives.

And for a time it worked. But not for long enough.

Unfortunately, like many symbols of progress, the sewing center in Ramadi was attacked and destroyed by insurgents (it was bombed at night when no one was working there). Gen Mattis thought the sewing center in Habbaniyah was still operating but the Marines had not visited it in some time.

A pile of rubble. Well, my old junior high school is a pile of rubble now, too. It had a motto over the door: "Enter to learn, go forth to serve." I still remember that. The school building is gone, but not its lesson. And its destruction in that case was not much of a lesson, but, perhaps, in Ramadi, women and men walk past the rubble and the twisted machinery every day and remember the choice, the forking path of their nation's future.

Perhaps. Or perhaps it is just a lot of rusted metal and cinder-dust. Did the tip line have anything to do with the "insurgents' " demolition? Who can say? Any more than we can really be sure, without evidence, it was insurgents and not, say, jealous husbands, who blew the thing up.

Was it wise to include a tip line in the whole project? Some would say it wasn't. But there's an argument to be made, too, that the successful path for Iraq up and out of its own prison would have to include not just economic opportunities but a deliberate rejection of the thuggish and backwards goals of the insurgents.

... It was very clear that our sticking by him and his men and women, offering support through thick and thin, meant a great, great deal to him. General Mattis also talked about the difficulty of rebuilding and humanitarian projects in Iraq today. The level of violence is such that the desired linkage between “good deeds and good results” is sometimes broken. Nonetheless, these good deeds do bridge gaps and help improve relations.

I'm now reduced to hope, then, that it all was for something. Some in the military will come home and know that there really was a homefront that was trying to work with them to the best of its ability, and it wasn't all camped out with "Peace Mom." And in Iraq, the story will never be on Al-Jazeera or on CNN, but maybe a few people in that community will remember the Americans came there to do something for them. And they'll pick up the pieces on their own.