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Eloquently spoken Stephen,

This could’ve been the speech Bush gave following 9/11, instead of encouraging Americans to go shopping.

I’ve thought often about our ability to go into war, with what you describe as ‘…good knowledge of the terrain.’There is now a $50 million dollar bounty on the head of terrorist mastermind Al Zaqarwi - and no one is willing to even speculate why there are no takers.

In my estimation, the reason why American intelligence was so effective during World War II and the Cold War, was due to the unlimited number of agents who were of German, French, Italian, British and Russian lineage. In addition to their language fluency, they would have further knowledge and access enabling them to infiltrate the very center of the Third Reich, for example.

My impression is that our abysmal intelligence in this war on terror and in Iraq, is mainly due to the absence or lacking number of Arab Americans serving in our military. By recognizing this as the critical hindrance it is, the obvious option would be to enlist the help of our staunch Arab allies. Can you think of any?

I know that I have been stridently bucking the bi-partisan spirit in these comment threads, since Nov 2nd. However, I cannot just set aside examples of this administration’s intolerance, even when it comes to our national security.

Bert

You are right about our current lack of human intelligence, but we should consider the past. Much of the success during WWII and the Cold War was a success of code breaking and higher level analysis of complicated societal and military matters. We fooled ourselves into believing this was sufficient. It does work very well against battlefield enemies. That is how we defeated the Taliban and Saddam Hussein so quickly and were able to impose most of the losses on the enemy.

This kind of intelligence doesn’t work with intentions of individuals and small groups. The U.S. has poor intelligence networks of these kinds in the Arab world as you point out. The best are the Israelis, who have great area knowledge and both Jewish speakers of the local languages and Arab informants. The trouble is that the Israelis have their own purposes when they share intelligence with us. The Brits and the French also have a better network because of their colonial history, but it is getting old.

All that said, we are getting better fast. Iraq is causing us trouble, but is also providing recruits who have the requisite skills to understand and perhaps infiltrate terror organizations. The trouble with using intelligence networks is that you have to work with bad guys, who sometimes lie, cheat, steal and kill. One weakness of the U.S. has been it reluctance to work with these guys, sometimes for excellent reasons.

The parallels between Iraq and Vietnam are weak. In many ways Iraq is more dangerous for the U.S. There was little chance that the Vietnamese would project their power into the U.S. If we lose in Iraq, we can expect more attacks on the American homeland. On the other hand, we probably have a good chance of success in Iraq. Remember that Vietnam didn’t fall to an insurgency. The North Vietnamese regular forces, with artillery and tanks, conquered the South. The analogy is Grant taking Richmond, not little guys in black pajamas taking over. There is no equivalent power that can do this in Iraq.

Iraq could disintegrate into civil war, actually it may be in civil war already, it is just that Americans are doing the fighting. If elections are held in January, it may become more of a local problem. If the Sunnis don’t participate, maybe their countrymen will just treat them poorly. It would be ironic if their fight against the U.S. managed to push away the very power that was protecting them from the vengeance of fellow Iraqis. It would be nasty, but I am not sure it would be so counter to U.S. interests compared with what we risked with Saddam

I do not think it is enough to merely know our enemy. We must also know ourself, and work to make our nation invulnerable while the actions of our enemies make them vulnerable.

In ancient times, those skilled in warfare make themselves invincible and then wait for the enemy to become vulnerable.

Being invincible depends on oneself, but the enemy becoming vulnerable depends on himself.

Therefore, those skilled in warfare can make themselves invincible, but cannot necessarily cause the enemy to be vulnerable.

Therefore it is said one may know how to win but cannot necessarily do it.

One takes on invincibility defending, one takes on vulnerability attacking.

One takes on sufficiency defending, one takes on deficiency attacking.
Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Chapter 4

We all like Sun Tzu and everyone interested in strategy should read his book, but let’s not fall over ourselves in homage. Like any ancient philosopher, much of what he said has been overtaken by events and modified by later ideas. You also have to look at the results achieved by those who followed his advice. Chinese military was not particularly successful in the thousands of years following Sun Tzu. In fact, Chinese armies regularly took a beating from nomads from the north and west, some of whom like the Tang, Mongols and Manchus actually conquered and held the country. These guys were unfamiliar with Sun Tzu until after they conquered China. That is not to mention their notable lack of success against western armies during the 19th Century. The Boxers were well versed in the ancient philosophy and were absolutely routed by a small multinational force. The secret of Chinese success has been massive populations, not military prowess.

“One takes on invincibility defending, one takes on vulnerability attacking,” for example, is just not true.

As with many of the one liner philosophers, you can read a lot into what they say, sometimes more than they put there.

Jack-
On your first post:

All that said, we are getting better fast. Iraq is causing us trouble, but is also providing recruits who have the requisite skills to understand and perhaps infiltrate terror organizations.

Is there any hard evidence to support these claims of progress, Jack? You have to be hardnosed about these things. What I’ve heard about language trained agents in the FBI and CIA is abysmal actually. If you can raise my spirits on this, it’d be welcome news.

I am aware that intelligence sometimes requires interaction with bad, nasty people, and that by the nature of the job, you’re sometimes going with people who are greedy, selfish or lacking in one kind of virtue or another.

I would hope, though, than in our covert actions, we be cognizant of the value of not harming America’s reputation with our actions.

The parallels between Iraq and Vietnam are weak. In many ways Iraq is more dangerous for the U.S. There was little chance that the Vietnamese would project their power into the U.S. If we lose in Iraq, we can expect more attacks on the American homeland. On the other hand, we probably have a good chance of success in Iraq. Remember that Vietnam didn?t fall to an insurgency. The North Vietnamese regular forces, with artillery and tanks, conquered the South. The analogy is Grant taking Richmond, not little guys in black pajamas taking over. There is no equivalent power that can do this in Iraq.

The first sentence I totally disagree with. The parallels are pretty strong, in terms of the political situation. You’re right about the next couple of points, but then you just crash and burn on the last part.

I think your distinction is artificial and arbitrary to the circumstances. You’re right that the North Vietnamese army ultimately used conventional methods to conquer the country once and for all, but you should ask yourself how they ever got in the position to take over the country in the first place.

The GOP perpetuates for political purpose the myth that we lost Vietnam because we held back. Truth is, we lost it even when we didn’t hold back. We didn’t have a clear and accurate understanding of the motivations of each side, nor did we size up the South Vietnamese government properly. We never really sold our effort that well to the people we were supposed to defend, and the truth is, they never really asked us to defend them in the first place.

The government we defended was a relic of a feudal, colonially compromised past, one the Vietnamese collectively wanted to move past. We propped up that weak government, propped up an army that wouldn’t stand up and fight even in the face of national annihilation. If that wasn’t the case, then why did we end up putting 500,000+ soldiers into that country to fight their war? The side that is better motivated, better led and better in their understanding of the battlefield will win the war ultimately, even if it does not win any battles.

In the revolutionary war, our best army never won a single battle, but we won the war. Why? Because we could keep our soldiers in the field long enough to wait for the crucial final victories. The British had to keep an army in the field at great expense, in lands mostly hostile to them. We, on the other hand, knew the territory, had popular support, and could more or less live off our own resources. Force and heavy equipment only win wars when expense, circumstance, and logistics allow them to. If you can’t get your heavy artillery where you need it to be, you can’t use them to win. If your forces are exhausted, and their supplies are low, they can be the best trained, highest quality army in the world, but they’ll be defeated by a better rested, better supplied more mobile enemy.

Which leads me to your second post-
I guess Sun Tzu doesn’t quite jibe with your need to support Bush. It’s obvious that what I’m saying here is true and hits a nerve with you, and you just don’t want to admit that a Chinese man thousands of years ago had a better sense of war than your president does.

You field a number of separate jabs at Sun-Tzu. First is that he’s obsolete. Second, that his teachings were never that effective to begin with, third that the army’s of the West knew better than them, fourth that there’s some other reason for any victories China has, and finally that he’s a one-liner philosopher who can be reinterpreted to any purpose.

Your sheer variety of arguments demonstrates your desperation. I shall answer them one by one.

First, his work is taught to our commanders. Apparently our folks don’t think his work has been superceded by modern circumstances.

Second, China unified in the years after he wrote this work, so it wasn’t that harmful. One must also take into account:

-that some of his wisdom is in fact common wisdom among warrior cultures. Sun Tzu is just an example of a unique concentration of that knowledge in one document.

-that his work was not necessary taught or followed perfectly

-that no text, even followed, taught, and put to use perfectly can prepare one for all eventualities, and

-that other circumstances can make it impossible for the learning to be applied properly.

You must also realize that centuries passed with relative political tranquility in China. Between the dynasties you mention, hundreds of years passed. That compared with the turbulence and feudalism present in the European dark ages.

The third argument is dubious because technology is an unbalancing force in strategical thinking. But once people learn to take it into account and use it themselves, they are able to restore that balance. Just look at China’s opposition to us in the Korean War. You can speak of their main resource being human but that didn’t give them victory earlier in the century. When their technology became closer to ours, they proved formidable against us. The Japanese were the same way. We intimidated them in the 1870s, they proved a determined and capable enemy in the 1940s.

Your fourth reason reflects a profound underestimation of non-western cultures. All things considered, no country has the monopoly on wisdom or on military strategy. Iraq has not proved the cakewalk we thought it would be. Human beings, in general, are intelligent, and are capable of independent thought, regardless of what we wish were true.

Your fifth reason is dubious because those who understand his work do not do so from little quotes alone. I wrote my article have read The Art of Warfare up close and in depth. The themes and running notions in the work are pretty much as I have portrayed them. Hell, the man devoted an entire chapter to spies near the end of the work. That’s how important information is to him.

To denigrate him as a fortune cookie philosopher, as you essentially do, is to reflect an ignorance about what he wrote. He is not merely some ancient philosopher, but a man who understands the things that don’t change about war: the necessities of strategy, of decieving the enemy, the need to know the battlefield, and the necessity to shape your victory before you ever commit to the battle.

I’m sorry that you disregard such wisdom, just because it makes the president and his people look foolish, but hey, they didn’t have to commit the errors they did. It was their choice to go in light, to go in having not planned well, and to have anticipated victory without doing what was necessary to make it come to pass. The standard of wisdom cannot be a leader who has gained such mixed results, wasted so many opportunities.

Stephen

To work backwards through your post.

Sun Tzu

I read him and think others should too. I guess I didn’t make my point well. He originated many good ideas, but without modern interpretation, he is not much use. I object to the use of quotations from ancient philosophers to try to punch home a modern point. It sounds erudite, but rarely is. The ancient wisdom must be embedded in the modern point. I don’t feel this way because of president Bush. It is something I have believed for more than 30 years.

I feel the same about ancient western philosophers. I read most of the works of Plato – in the original Greek by the way – but I think very little of it applies to modern situations without interpretations.

The analogy is medicine or science. Even the very best physicians of ancient times would be less likely to cure you than a mediocre doctor from today. It is not that the modern guy is more eminent – on the contrary, but he stands on the shoulders of those who went before. We can quote Hippocrates, and learn from him in a general way, but we better not take the details of his advice seriously.

My point about Chinese military prowess only seemed to be a denigration of non-western powers if you wanted to find it. The invaders from the north and east were not western. My point was that China was not generally proficient as a military power and even weak or less advanced people commonly beat them. The western countries were only the last in the line. It was spectacular, however, when you think that puny powers such as Portugal, Holland or Britain, could project military might half way around the world to defeat Chinese forces.

Vietnam example

There are almost no parallels between Iraq and Vietnam other that the involvement of Americans forces. Let me tick off the lack of parallels.

Vietnam was essentially a single ethic country artificially divided by great powers
Iraq is a multi ethnic state artificially united by great powers.

The insurgents in Vietnam had overt support government continuous to the fighting and the support and protection of one of the world’s superpowers.
No superpower protects the Iraq insurgents. Shiites have the covert support of Iraq, but they are mostly set their power against the Shiites, who are the most anti American group. Syria is supporting the Sunnis covertly. This is more parallel to the 30 Years War in Germany than Vietnam.

Vietnam had a lot more people
Jungles surrounded Vietnam where U.S. satellites technology couldn’t see. There was a hinterland for the insurgents. Iraq is mostly desert, which can be observed.

Anyway, I could write about this endlessly. There are no close parallels. It would be stupid to try to play this like Vietnam.

Finally, Vietnam ended with an armed invasion. This isn’t spin, its just history. We will never know if the South would have fallen on its own. We have examples of survival in places like Malaysia or Central America. These places were tottering, but didn’t fall because there was no nearby country that could reasonably deliver the death blow.

One more factor. The insurgents – who are they? A Sunni insurgency can’t expect to rule the country. A Shiite insurgency will hit opposition among Sunnis. The Kurds have a strong hold on their own territory and are unlikely to give in to others. There is simply no Vietnam scenario here. You might get civil war. I am not saying this is a great situation, but it is not Vietnam. I can’t understand the constant, ahistorical references.

“One takes on invincibility defending, one takes on vulnerability attacking,” for example, is just not true.

Actually, it’s a very basic principle of martial arts from all cultures. Attacking leaves you open, which leaves you vulnerable to counterattack. Parry and riposte in fencing is one example of this. The opening for the riposte is created by the initial strike.

When a nation commits their resources in the field to pressing the offensive in one direction, they removes resources that could have been used to defend themselves from an attack coming from another side. This creates an opening through which an attack may be pressed. That is how this principle applies to warfare.

Jarin

This is a good example of how the one liner sounds erudite but doesn’t really say enough and at the same time says too much. What does it really mean? “Invincible” in defense, is hyperbole. Too many invincible fortresses have been taken. Since we were talking about Vietnam earlier in this thread, consider the example of Dien Bien Phu. It is ironic that the French hunkered down to force the enemy to strike at their strong defensive position, al la Sun Tzu’s invincible defense. The Vietnamese attacked more along the lines of Clausewitz. There is a proper time and place for everything and we can always find sage wisdom to back our desires, but one thing is usually true. You can’t win a war by being on the defensive and leaving the initiative to your enemies. Of course you take on vulnerability when you attack, but you also create it in your adversary.

We can’t fight terrorism by only being on the defensive. Our free society has millions of vulnerabilities. The bad guys need to be lucky only once.

Jack:

Invincible in defense is not hyperbole, it is an ideal to strive for. Yes, in practical implementation, there have been few if any truly invincible defenses. Is this reason to brush aside the concept as an ideal? In the history of mankind there have been few people who have lived their lives completely free of sin, yet last I checked the major religions of the world still promote sinlessness as an ideal, even if it is difficult to reach.

As for the battle you cite, the French did not follow Sun Tzu’s advice properly. They had written off certain areas (steeply forested hills) as impassible which were not, failing to defend those areas while the Vietnamese managed to haul scores of artillery up them. The Vietnamese attack is the perfect example of exploiting an opening in the defense of their opponent.

It is true that you cannot win a war solely by being on the offensive, however no one has been suggesting that. Certainly not Sun Tzu. But allowing your enemy to attack when you are ready for them, and can block that attack, is good strategy. As is counterattacking in the opening created by the failure of your enemy’s initial attack. Attacking yourself can create openings, as you suggest; but if your enemies can block your attack or avoid it, attacking will only create an opening in which they may attack us in return.

As you say, the bad guys only need to be lucky once. Therefor, does committing all of our resources to attacking them on one front make any sense, when they attack us from many sides? Does this not create exactly the openings they need to be lucky that one time?

Before answering this question, it would be wise to consider that on September 11th, all of our civil air defense was committed to training exercises. This gave our enemies not one opening, but three. Almost four. If we had not committed all of our resources to the one objective of training, we would have had defenders in place who could have stopped the planes before they could be used as weapons.

Do you still think Sun Tzu’s advice should be ignored?

It is true that you cannot win a war solely by being on the offensive

My apologies, this is a typo, it should have said solely by being on the defensive.

I am not making myself clear. It must be my fault because I am pushing a tangent and not the main point.

I don’t think we should ignore Sun Tzu. What I object to when he (or any other ancient) is quoted as the final word. We should honor him and study him because he was among the first, but his understanding of the problem was primitive, simply because he didn’t have the benefit of subsequent experience.

The thing that bothers me most about Sun Tzu is how stylish he has become. I get sick of these books that pretend to apply his theories to everything. Yes I have read his book. Yes it is useful. But he is OBE’d. The aphorisms are simple and open to multiple interpretations. The one you quote is a good example. It reminds me of all those guys who claim that Leonardo da Vinci invented helicopters and submarines. Leaps of insight are important, but the real accomplishment comes from working through the details.

I don’t want to get too far into the theory of knowledge and invention, but I will mention a discussion I had with my son re. He proudly told me that he learned that Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. He named some obscure Frenchman a hundred years earlier. Actually, he was wrong, but for the wrong reason. Ancient Greeks invented the light bulb, as I recall in Hellenistic Alexandria. I would guess that a lot of other did too. The trouble was, it didn’t really work. Edison made a light bulb that actually worked and was useful. That’s why he “invented” it. (We could also argue who on his team actually did it) We can argue who came up with the idea. Sun Tzu is like the Alexandrian Greek; modern military is more like Edison and beyond.

Re terrorism

The terrorist used existing technology in novel ways. There was no way anyone could have reasonably anticipated the nature of the attacks. Imagine if the authorities had arrested a couple of these guys on September 10 for carrying box cutters. The ACLU would have been all over it. I am also convinced that our ferocious response threw the terrorist off their game and prevented further attacks. I don’t believe the lack of a follow up attack in the years since 2001 comes from the benevolence of the terrorists.

Jack-
I can only defend my usage. I do think these Art of War knockoffs are both too cute for their own good, and in some respects encourage ruthless behavior in fields where it isn’t really beneficial to be so belligerent.

I used Sun Tzu, in a sense, to say that certain problems of war are eternal: Knowledge, offense, defense, logistics, movement and whatnot. Technology, time, changes of civilization, and terrain only make the forms these problems take different.

There are always problems that haunt systems no matter what is done. In medicine, it’s the complexity and diversity of the human body. In Law it’s the indeterminate nature of language pitted against the use of that language to codify the necessary order of society. In economics, it’s poverty. In religion it’s hypocrisy and lukewarm belief.

I believe Sun-Tzu deals with some of the eternal problems of war, and some of those problems have cropped up in this war in a way the Administration has never admitted or dealt all that well with.

I believe the terrorists will do their best to work creatively around whatever defenses we put up. But that creativity, like all creativity, will take time, effort, luck, and quality execution. Put simply, I think we will never perfectly defend our country, but what we can do is defend it well enough that we force our enemies to do more to sustain their assaults than their resources permit. I know we can cannot prevent all terrorist attacks, but I think if we put our minds to it, we can prevent the great majority of them.

I too believe that our war against terrorism cannot be strictly a defensive one. But that sentiment does not excuse incompetence or negligence in the choice of our offensives. The last thing we need to do in any offensive war is to attack the wrong place, much less get stuck there as sitting ducks for terrorists who know we cannot help but try and put out every brushfire they create. They have the initiative, and can make us respond to them. We could go on the offensive ourselves, but we don’t have the soldiers to take on other problems without letting the fires of insurrection reignite where we just put them out.

The headline on my local paper is that many Iraqi parties, including the prime minister’s (a.k.a The Ally Who Must Not Be Criticized) are saying that if things continue as they are, they don’t think elections should be held.

Fact is, this administration wants the impossible: A victory in Iraq without the pieces arranged an in place. Will alone can not bring this about. We cannot wish Iraq into coherence and self-government. We have to get our ducks in a row, and prepare our victory before we declare it. We should not expect our brave soldiers to win a war for us that our administration is unwilling to lead us to victory in any workable way.

Support for this war will not win the war. Support for Bush will not win this war. Another year of just the same policies will not win this war. What will win this war will be the extent to which we can convince our enemies to lay down their arms. If you want go talking about Von Clausewitz, well then from what I’ve read of him, that is the definition of destroying the enemy forces- not annihilation, but loss of our opponent’s willingness or ability to fight them. I think the willingness to fight is what we have to work on first, what we should have worked on first. Unfortunately, Bush assumed something that wasn’t true: the inability to fight. So many people told him that insurrection was a real possibility, but they thought our final victory in Baghdad would make things clear.

Again and again, Bush has made the mistake of second guessing the Iraqi’s and Jihadis on when they would stop fighting, as if his thoughts on the matter amounted to a hill of beans. These people will not admit defeat until circumstances or second thought lead them to that, and our expectations of when that should occur don’t matter as much as theirs.

In the recent doco The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert Macnamara, one of the lessons was Empathize with your enemy That is, get into their heads. The failure of this administration has been a failure of imagination about how these people’s minds and cultures work, and these are not mistakes we can get by with, merely by getting back on our feet and dusting ourselves off. We need to better understand the battlefield, and in the future not enter into it ignorant about everything that matters. We will not win the war on terror by trying to remake the Middle East and the rest of the world. Instead we must remake our relationship with it, and do what’s been necessary and needed all along: persuading others of the need to do what needs to be done.

Jack,

In no way can I engage you in your obviously deeper knowledge of our intelligence capabilities, but I felt you missed my main, simple point.

Your insistence that we quickly defeated the Taliban and Saddam through ‘…success of code breaking and higher level analysis of complicated societal and military matters’, is the very definition of the term ‘a stretch’. The greater portion of the Iraqi army fled before engaging Coalition troops, and the Taliban’s expertise lends more to trafficking in heroin.

I sense your great respect for our nation’s intelligence community, however their continued failure mirrors that of the Wolfowitz Doctrine and it’s misguided preparation for reshaping the Muslim Middle East in America’s image.

It is not a problem of code breaking, military battle analysis or intelligence against a sovereign enemy, but understanding and engaging an enemy based on it’s culture, religion and history.

Jack:

For someone who is not saying Sun Tzu should be ignored, you certainly seem to be suggesting that his advice is obsolete and inapplicable to our current conflict. That would seem to indicate that you wish us to set aside his writing and look to more modern tacticians instead.

Would you similarly suggest our scientists set aside the foundations of physics, simply because Newton did not have the “benefit of subsequent experience?” Why should modern tacticians set aside the fundamentals of the art of war?

You continue merely to assert that Sun Tzu’s understanding of the problem of warfare is primitive and his conclusions are “overtaken by experience” or otherwise obsolete. Nowhere do you offer examples of new strategies or theories of warfare which are superior to the tactics he suggested. Nor do you illustrate in any manner how our understanding of “the problem” of warfare has significantly advanced compared to his. Without supporting evidence for your claim, these assertions of Sun Tzu’s obsolescence are merely your own opinion and carry no more weight than my own. On the other hand, I have backed up my assertions with concrete examples of how Sun Tzu’s stratagem is both logically valid and applies in the context of modern warfare which you have thus far been unable to contradict. I have even related it to the specific attacks which began this war on terror.

Finally, your statement about the impossibility of defending against the terror attacks ignores the actual timeline of events that day. We are not just talking about stopping the planes from being hijacked in the first place, we are talking about stopping their use as weapons. The very first plane hitting the towers may have been unavoidable, but after that the other planes should have been intercepted by military aircraft before they could strike and shot down if necessary. There was a 15 minute delay between the two planes striking the towers. Followed by a 30 minute delay before the plane struck the pentagon. Followed by another 30 minute delay before the last plane crashed in Pennsylvania. These are major openings in our defense that Al Qaeda exploited on 9/11.

Bert, Stephen and Jarin:

I am afraid I have made myself unclear to each of you in different ways by addressing side issues.

I reacted to Sun Tzu because so many people are quoting him out of context. I was annoyed at some people I know re that and not what you all said. Sun Tzu is like anything else that gets too popular. It spills into areas where it doesn’t really fit.

Bert

I respect the intelligence gatherers because I know how hard it is to do it right. I think we set an impossible standard for them. Most of what we know is conjecture, educated guesses. It has to be that way.

We have enemies who are trying to deceive us. They are also intelligent and they also learn from their interactions with us the way we learn from interactions with them. Just like in the case of two well-matched sports teams, we can’t really expect a blowout. But every time there is missed or misinterpreted intelligence, or a setback the public treats it as stupidity or even a crime. It is like complaining that the Green Bay Packers “allow” the other team to score a touchdown. It doesn’t mean the Packers are a bad team if the Redskins can score some points. It doesn’t even mean that they will lose the game.

The U.S. outmatches all its opponents in military power. We have come to take for granted that we can quickly dispatch the regular forces in places like Afghanistan or Iraq. These were not easy targets. Few countries in the world could have successfully defeated either and we did both almost at the same time.

The Iraqis (some at least) must have understood that they couldn’t stand against the U.S. A good strategy would have been to melt away and hope to win a political victory using guerilla warfare. That seems to be what they did. There is probably nothing we could have done about that. They simply refused to fight war the way we want. Returning to my sports analogy, they have scored some points, even a couple of touchdowns, but that does not mean they will win the game or that we have played very badly.

I think we have to define the parameters of victory. The best case is a democratic Iraq, at peace with its neighbors and friendly to the U.S., but we can settle for less. A reasonably peaceful Iraq, not hostile to the U.S. will probably suffice and if we are speaking in realpolitical terms, a portioned Iraq with a civil war that didn’t spill over too much into its neighbored might not by a terrible outcome. A Sunni/Shiite split might absorb the energies of erstwhile enemies of the U.S. I don’t advocate that outcome, but we accepted a similar defacto split in Bosnia and Kosovo. Anyway, I am starting to ramble onto tangents again.

Jarin

I just noticed your post that must have come in while I was writing mine above.

Why is Sun Tzu overtaken by events? Just try to apply what he said without modification. It is so clear this cannot be done that we don’t even think about it. There is a whole military science that has grown up since. It is like stopping philosophy with Plato or medicine with Hypocrites. I emphasize that I don’t say he is wrong, just very incomplete. The phrases you mention in your earlier post are evidence of that. “Therefore, those skilled in warfare can make themselves invincible, but cannot necessarily cause the enemy to be vulnerable.” Nobody can make himself invincible and making the enemy vulnerable depends on what you do too.” The history of warfare is largely the story of new paradigms to make the enemy vulnerable. You can stretch Sun Tzu’s statement to include all the things anyone could think of doing, but then it becomes meaningless as “buy low, sell high.” If you do that in the stock market, you will be rich, but it is not really useful advice.

As for stopping the 9/11 attacks, now it looks easy to understand; at the time it was not. We just weren’t ready for it. Nobody was thinking along these lines and anyone who says he really anticipated such an event is lying. Talking about the theoretical possibilities and really believing it are not the same things. Why don’t we ask Sun Tzu about that? He says, “Therefore it is said one may know how to win but cannot necessarily do it.” In this case I think the old guy has hit the nail on the head.

Jack,

I do not mean to imply that I am one of those placing most of the blame on faulty intelligence, and therefore those who gathered it. Let me be clear - I believe they delivered to the administration, evidence gathered due to their best effort.

They were scapegoated, period. To me, they were the Richard Clarkes’, Paul O’Neill’ and Colin Powell’s’ - raising unwanted doubts, refusing to omit caveats and refusing to take the blame.

I think we have to define the parameters of victory. The best case is a democratic Iraq, at peace with its neighbors and friendly to the U.S., but we can settle for less.

No disrespect Jack, but I find this thinking absolutely mind-boggling. The expectation’s bar continues to be lowered and lowered. I can now envision a scenario where not only do the 20% percent of Sunnis’ not vote, but the legitimacy of a new government recognized by the U.S. and who the Iraqi people see as their puppet.

The Iraqi Security Force numbers continued to be inflated, we turn control over and wash our hands of the mess. Shortly followed by civil war or an Insurgent’s coup.

Then on to Iran.

Jack-
Modification and interpretation are necessary, but there’s a point where you lose sight of the wisdom if you change it too far, or are too responsive to the fads of the modern day.

I look at Sun-Tzu as somebody who is trying to systematize an approach to war. He use aphorisms, but there are themes running throughout his work that people in your party would do well to pay attention to.

The fact is, the reasons for the Iraq war were more political than practical, and that has crippled the war, just as it crippled Vietnam. I think somebody once said that a country is most at peace when it is at war, meaning that when people sense they have a common enemy, they stop turning each other into the enemy.

Wolfowitz and others believed that regardless of whether Iraq was really involved, that we should attack them. Maybe in their eyes they were right, (especially when you follow Laurie Mylroie’s line that all terrorism against the United States was state-sponsored by Iraq), but the evidence never confirmed that theory, and in fact pointed in other directions.

It is only by relying on the more unreliable of reports, on the testimony of those who had a vested interest in seeing us go to war with and remove Saddam, and by politically manipulating the various intelligence agencies that they were able to come up with a convincing case (albeit mostly false). This was a war they badly wanted but that the country hardly needed.

Opportunity cost, an economic term, is the word I’d use to describe the problem that comes of this. The price of this unnecessary war is that we are now committed to this action in a way that degrades our ability to act elsewhere in a military fashion. Some of these opportunities will be restored to us once the mess in Iraq is dealt with (or, God forbid, abandoned), but some opportunities will not be recoverable. That could include the opportunity to catch Bin Laden. That may include raising sufficient defenses to prevent the next catastrophic attack. That may include being able to wage a necessary military war with Iran without enacting a draft. That may include intervening militarily in Sudan or other countries at all.

In short, this war has tied us down, like Gulliver in Lilliput.

The point of my post is that there are consequences to the way this war was started and executed that extend into the practical realm, and may very well lose us the war, especially if we don’t admit the nature of our situation, and do what needs to be done. Sun-Tzu’s words simply illustrate that the gathering of good intelligence and the openness of the commanders to the true nature of the situation and the enemy are both crucial basic parts of any war effort. With that I implicitly critique an administration that gathered intelligence with an agenda rather than a true big-picture view of the world in mind. I implicitly critique an administration that did not even plan for the most obvious of necessities in the war, even when told to do so by experts in the field. I implicitly critique an administration that cut out people from presenting us with a good plan to win the peace in Iraq, but whose political differences with the masterminds were more important than the quality of their work.

Of course, now it’s explicit. I think this administration cares more about right-thinking than it does right doing. They are more concern about avoiding criticism for their mistakes and rationalizing their bad policy than they are about fixing those things. In short, this administration is more concerned about the image of the war, and about sugarcoating the realities of this war for the American people, than they are about fixing it.

That’s a lousy way to approach a war.

Whatever time you are in, certain things remain true. Supplies, preparation of good plans, adequate planning, support from citizens gained by honest means, knowledge of terrain, knowledge of the enemy, support or at least neutrality of the citizenry- all these have been, are, and will be advantages regardless of the incidental details of the war. These principles are among those that form the center of Sun-Tzu approach, which is why thousands of years later, his work is still taught. Modern Weaponry changes the shape of the battlefield, not its inherent problems.

What happens Jack is that both sides evolved their offense and their defense to suit the new technology. When aircraft carriers came into their own, they knocked destroyers down a rung, because they could inflict damage on an enemy that a Destroyer couldn’t. The invention of the cruise missile created another change on top of that. Submarine warfare added another wrinkle to things. What technology does is change what kind of attacks, defenses, tactics, and strategies are used. It does not change the inherent core of what makes a strategy work or not work. Nobody worries about a walled city anymore. We worry about what happens when we have to fight in the confines of a city instead.

I think Sun-Tzu, informed about the nature of that kind of warfare would direct us to treat the streets and buildings as a kind of terrain. So, of course, knowledge of that terrain would be advisable.

Of course, it is good to get other people’s opinions on things, but what’s not good, in the end, is to buy into these people who say the nature of warfare has changed totally, for one reason or another. The reality is, the problems of war remain fairly consistent once you account for the changes in culture and technology

Bert & Stephen

Don’t you guys ever sleep? I wrote my last post late last night and already there is a response.

Bert

We change our expectations with the situation. You say that the Iraqi people see as a puppet. What Iraqi people are those? It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no such thing as the Iraqi people. There are three big groups, plus a several smaller ones and a great deal of mutual animosity. The Sunnis (20% are eager to have them and the Kurds (20%) will go along if their regional status is protected. Most of the trouble we are having in Iraq comes from the Sunnis, who also were Saddam’s power base. What do we (the U.S.) owe these guys? If they don’t participate, they will not have a say in the government. What will they do that they are not already doing now?

I feel some U.S. responsibility for the Kurds, who suffered from our perfidiousness in the past and have proven their bona fides over the last decade. The Shiites probably can take care of themselves in a new Iraq. We are left with people who are already engaged in armed conflict against us. I think it is incumbent upon them to shape up. You can criticize me as cynical and maybe even nefarious, but we can make this much less an American problem by holding elections and letting their fellow countrymen deal with the problem in ways we probably can’t.

Stephen

Nobody is happy with how the conflict has evolved. But this is the nature of war and politics. The U.S. made some serious mistakes, but those mistakes were within the margin of the mistakes leaders make in war. It is always possible that we won’t achieve our objectives. The question is what do we do now? Do we continue to push for a optimal solution or do we accept something else. I really don’t know what we should do. But I think we should agree on some kind of criteria.

What is the optimal end state? What is good and what is acceptable? And how much does each cost to achieve. Keep in mind that the situation in Saddam’s Iraq was horrible. People who use the pottery barn analogy forget that the place was broken – shattered – before we went in. It was just taped together by the brutality of Saddam Hussein.

Jack-
Your margin appears to include anything and everything up to:

*Not getting human confirmation by our agents on intelligence about WMDs.

*Pushing a case for war with serious problems that were known by high-level officials to be the case, yet were repeated anyhow.

*Pushing aside detailed plans for reconstruction and the postwar situation because the authors did not share the insanely over-optimistic belief that Chalabi could waltz into Iraq and take over the government for us.

*Ignoring any number of studies and sometimes their own previous analysis that an invasion of Iraq would occasion an extended occupation and bitter resistance from the locals.

*knowingly invading without sufficient troops to seal the borders and sit on trouble spots.

*Disbanding the Iraqi Army and throwing out many Baathists out of government without vetting them for the possibility of rehabilitation, thereby creating a shortage of qualified administrators and a surplus of resentful soldiers and leaders willing to take sides against us.

*Distracting our country with an unnecessary war from an all too necessary pursuit of Osama Bin Laden and his compatriots.

*Sending a large part of our forces into combat without sufficient supplies and armor, and with training that does not prepare those soldiers for combat in Iraq.

*Facilitating policies which encouraged torture of prisoners which was intentionally meant to be shocking to Muslim sensibilities.

I could go on. These aren’t minor screwups, these are crucial strategic errors that have complicated and perhaps eliminated our chances of winning this war in a way that doesn’t bring further shame on our country.

You can go on rationalizing all those things, but for me, rationalizing all that would be an acceptance of actions that have put Americans in greater danger, and yielded the political advantage to our adversaries. We may win some battles in the short term by being this blindly belligerent, but we will not win the war on Terrorism.

Stephen

I know it violates conventional wisdom, but I just don’t see the war going as badly as you do. When I recall the prewar predictions of tens of thousands of American deaths, oil wells ablaze, the Arab street overthrowing friendly governments etc. One of your examples, “Sending a large part of our forces into combat without sufficient supplies and armor, and with training that does not prepare those soldiers for combat in Iraq.” We conquered the country in weeks. I don’t know how much better prepared we could have been, since we routed the Iraqi forces faster than anyone thought possible.

I also don’t see the current situation is so bad compared with what it could be. We will probably be able to hold elections over 80+% of the country that will almost certainly produce something better than Saddam Hussein. We could have done much better, but we also could have done a lot worse. Against an ideal outcome, we didn’t do well; against the real world alternatives, it was not bad. We got rid of an evil and dangerous dictator, a sworn enemy of the United States and a sponsor of terrorism. That is a great accomplishment. The question is not whether or not it was a good thing to do; the question is whether it was worth the cost.

I will wait to see what happens in a year or two before I make a final judgment. If the situation is good by then, it won’t matter that we went into Iraq for the wrong reasons. If the situation is bad by then, it would not matter if our reasons had been impeccable.

The other question I continually ask is where do we go from here? Sure, we should ask how we got here and learn from our mistakes and I can assure everyone that we are doing that. I myself attended a daylong seminar on Iraq: what went wrong and what went right. Everyone is doing it. Let’s consider the past and move ahead to a better future.

Beyond specific analysis, there is no point in recriminations. Right or wrong, George Bush is president for he next four years. Blaming him will change nothing.

Jack-

We conquered the country in weeks. I don?t know how much better prepared we could have been, since we routed the Iraqi forces faster than anyone thought possible.

I think we should consider that things went better there than we really deserved them to go. The troops faded away, rather than standing and fighting us. Baghdad was yielded to us with only a few effective, bloody “thunder runs”. But that victory, while not deceptive, was certainly not complete.

Save me the heroic speeches about what we did, because we never finished the job. The great irony to the transfer of sovereignty is that we were giving control of the country to the Iraqis which we never had ourselves.

In the end, we still complain here because something can be done, and sufficient public outcry might get it done.

Jack,

I find it very telling that you are alone in this comment thread, genuinely defending the Iraq invasion. Obviously, the rest of your like-minded brethren felt it only necessary up til a Nov. 2 deadline.

I never said the US was a puppet. I said that any new government seen to be aligned with the Coalition, would be perceived as their puppet in the eyes of many Iraqis.

Against an ideal outcome, we didn?t do well; against the real world alternatives, it was not bad. We got rid of an evil and dangerous dictator, a sworn enemy of the United States and a sponsor of terrorism.

This is what I called ‘Revisionist Rationalization’, when it was used multiple times to justify the invasion.

What Iraqi people are those? It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no such thing as the Iraqi people.

Bush’s campaign rhetoric never identified different ethnic tribes, it was always the ‘Iraqi people’. How they wanted the freedom we were bringing to them, and how these insurgents did not represent the vast majority of the population.

Lastly, you can count on me to be loudly blaming Bush when things go wrong in Iraq. Your side unabashedly vilified my candidate, predicting doomsday scenarios if elected and lied that he was a threat to our troops.

But far worse, will be claiming to have saved a country from a brutal and murderous dictator, then walk away while it descends into civil war chaos.

Bert

I will defend American actions in Iraq because on the whole I believe they were right. I wasn’t defending them because of George Bush and that is why I didn’t give up on November 2. I see lots of mistakes and miscalculations. I bet if we both made a list of failures and problem, we would mention many of the same things – and my list would be longer. I know I personally made many assumptions that didn’t come to pass. But as far as I can tell, nobody got it right. The opponents of the war talked about catastrophic results that have not happened. Even proponents were too pessimistic about the war itself and too optimistic about the aftermath. I remain optimistic about the final outcome. I have lowered my expectations, although not I would consider an acceptable outcome. I think it is hard to argue with the achievement of ridding us of Saddam. The Arab Middle East is the only region where democracy has failed to take hold anywhere. Even if we fail to achieve immediate success, it is very likely that our upsetting “stability” will have some beneficial effects.

But I think we have to figure out what to do now. Recriminations are rarely the best way to make progress, especially because we have (are stuck with from another point of view) the same leader that got us this far and changing leadership is no longer an option.

I hope and believe that President Bush will help foster a stable, reasonably democratic Iraq. I think it is ironic that almost everyone else is working against that AND working against their own stated goals. Outside our coalition, the world community is helping very little. The insurgents are trying to make it as difficult as possible for the U.S. to pull out and transfer authority to Iraqis. I would say it was childish, if it wasn’t so serious.

Let’s do a thought experiment. In our experiment, Bush really screwed up and the situation in Iraq is disastrous. What should responsible people do? They should help and mitigate the consequences not be gleeful that “Bush is getting what he deserves.” In the end George Bush will be among the least affected by a failure in Iraq. He can’t be reelected. He retains the option of pulling out before the job is done, and much of the public will applaud – as they did in Vietnam. He could even emerge with an enhanced reputation by running off. Who will suffer most are the Iraqis and their neighbors and the Europeans who live nearby and need the oil. They will pay the biggest price for a Bush failure and should most ardently pray for his success.

The problem with using Saddam’s deposing as your justification for this war is threefold.

First, the military expedition to do this was justified and made urgent by the charges (WMD and conspiracy with al-Qaeda). Otherwise, the response of the average American would have been that we had bigger fish to fry than this loser dictator.

Second, the victory against him was greatly insufficient to produce the result we sought, the peaceful transition of Iraq to Democracy. Bad as Saddam was, we didn’t come halfway around the world to leave a worse tyrant or a more chaotic situation in our wake, which unfortunately, we stand a good chance of doing. We are stuck in Iraq until we do those things that solve our problem there, or which occasion our withdrawal as actors in the region.

Third, his deposing has not brought soldiers out of Iraq, as it was supposed to do. Our objective is yet unachieved, and so our people remain there, and continue to get killed.

The mere removal of Saddam and the Baath party from power is not the entirety of the moral or strategical objects of our war there. The other part, yet unfulfilled, is the establishment of an elected, potent government with sovereign control of it’s territory. If we fail at that, the claims that Saddam’s removal was an overriding good will be recalled with bitter hollowness.

You mentioned earlier that Von Clausewitz had a different angle on things than Sun Tzu did, and that’s true. But there is still reason to pause within his pages. Read the third chapter of the first book in his work On War, and you will find a sentiment quite close to what many democrats believe: bold actions are no replacement for intellectual integrity in one’s command of the soldiers underneath you.

He too expresses the sentiment that when one pulls off a sophisticated military objective and defeats the enemy without utterly destroying their forces, one should still be ready for things to go badly, and not be caught with your dress saber when your adversary has a sharpened sword, in his words.

He also cautions, as many of us do, against obstinancy, where the only reason to oppose somebody is mere feeling, not careful consideration of the facts or situation.

I think you should ask yourselves what the Iraqis and the jihadis think they have to gain by removing our presence. I think you should ask yourself how long they expect us to stay when they turn up the heat. I really doubt they are trying to exclude us from the region just because they like having it tough. I also doubt they think their methods will fail in the end. We can’t simply look at their motivations and simply discount them as wrong and stupid. We need to understand and manipulate those motivations to get what we want. Otherwise, we will be fighting two wars, a foreign war of attrition and an anti-occupation rebellion. and they will win theirs long before we win ours.

We are in Iraq in the current situation. We can’t go back and do anything differently. I see some good and some bad in our situation, but it IS our predicament (if that term is better) whether we like it or not. There is nothing to be gained by talking about what we should have done or not.

I still ask, so what do we do now?

We are in Iraq in the current situation. We can’t go back and do anything differently. I see some good and some bad in our situation, but it IS our predicament (if that term is better) whether we like it or not. There is nothing to be gained by talking about what we should have done or not.

I still ask, so what do we do now?

Jack-
I take the attitude that we can correct some of our more reversible errors and be clear headed about future errors of this kind, if we continue to pay attention to the issues surrounding this war. If we try to bury it, try to repress it, try to spin and rationalize, the errors will come back to haunt us both in the long and short term. To me, it is a matter of bringing back to Earth, an adminstration that has yet to acknowledge the difficulties of the war they’ve decided to prosecute. Bush lets the chain of command and his office insulate him from too much of the bad news, too much of the dissent out there in both civilians and military circles, and too much of what’s really going on in the world. Because of this, Bush treats as easy and necessary things he might know were much more difficult, or perhaps not so productive otherwise.

There needs to be a reality check. Deciding not to do certain things may be one consequence, but it may not. Instead, the consequence might be that the complexity and uncertainy of what he seeks to do is match by the planning and open-mindedness to do things right.

I do so hope we win Iraq, and don’t pull out with our tail between our legs. My aim is to prevent the president from reducing us to that, to give us more and better options.

But as long as certain elephants in the room are not acknowledged, certain errors will not be corrected, because those corrections would be an implicit signal of the fact errors were made. How do you bring in more troops, even if you need to, if you’ve told everybody more troops weren’t needed. How do you reschedule elections when necessary, when your message has been they would be on schedule? If Bush had been more realistic, more honest about the situation we got ourselves into, he wouldn’t be in such a jam trying to dance between necessary changes in policies, and preserving the appearances of the rash promises and unrealistically optimistic appraisals he’s given.

Jack wrote:

The Arab Middle East is the only region where democracy has failed to take hold anywhere.

This is like saying Southeast Asia is the only region where Christianity has failed to take hold anywhere.

The opponents of the war talked about catastrophic results that have not happened.

I know it violates conventional wisdom, but I just don?t see the war going as badly as you do. When I recall the prewar predictions of tens of thousands of American deaths, oil wells ablaze, the Arab street overthrowing friendly governments etc.

I also want to address these blatantly disingenuous claims (or the attempt to create hysterical naysayers) by those defending this invasion. I knew that Afghanistan would be a cakewalk, just as I was certain Saddam’s forces would scatter en masse before we reached Baghdad. And might I add, that I was confident that the invasion of Fallujah would turn into the Pyhrric victory it appears to be, contrary to what the news media chose to report. I’d sure like to see examples of these assertions, if possible.

As Stephen has proven in his recent comment posts, he still finds it important to respectfully detail the numerous miss-steps that have resulted in an ever increasing dire situation.

I, on the other hand, am the cynical, bitter member of the Kerry Minority, who plans to keep launching verbal Molotov cocktails at this administration, at every opportunity. You need to realize Jack that there are many like me, who feel that this is no longer their country - therefore, feeling no responsibility for what the Bush Red State America does.

Fortunately, the people who won’t accept the election outcome are not governing the country and with those sorts of attitudes won’t be for a long time. I kinda proves the electorate made the right choice.

If you really thought Afghanistan would be a cakewalk, you were misinformed. The fact that it did turn out the way it did doesn’t mean it had to turn out that way. I recall all the angst over this. Take a look at this article as a scholarly example.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20011101facomment5771/milton-bearden/afghanistan-graveyard-of-empires.html

I was busy countering disinformation re both Afghanistan and Iraq. If I had told people before the war that we would conquer Iraq with only a couple hundred Americans killed, nobody would have believed me. It is very easy in hindsight to predict. And that is what you guys are doing.

I keep on asking for suggestions for the future and keep on getting predictions of the past. Okay, you don’t want to help Bush by giving suggestion. I doubt he is reading this, but just in case, you can keep your advice. What do you think will happen in Iraq in the next six months or a year?

I will give my short answer, so all may check on me later on. I expect to be wrong in details, but right on direction. You can hold me to it.

Iraq will hold the elections on schedule. Most of the country will vote, although there will be sections where voting is impossible. There will be violence, but less than anticipated. A coalition of Shiites and Kurds will win and set up an unstable coalition. They have effective control over more than 80% of the country, including almost all the oil wealth. Terrorists continue sporadic attacks. The Iraqi authorities will occasionally respond with excessive force, which will upset the chattering classes, but gradually reduce violence. Everybody claims that they predicted this relatively good outcome and liberals attack the Iraqi government for not being democratic enough or inclusive of all points of view. Pundits point to potential problems and complain that the economy and organization are not up to Swiss standards. But it actually works well. Media attention drains away from Iraq. Academics will begin to develop complicated theories proving that this outcome was inevitable and that George Bush somehow actually slowed the wonderful process.

And this “Red State America” concept is just bogus. Bush won a majority of the American people’s vote. Even in “blue states” millions of people voted for Bush. It is the Kerry vote that is concentrated. Eliminate the bay area, and Bush wins California. Without Philadelphia, he wins Pennsylvania and so on. You don’t have blue states; you have blue cities. And in red states, you also have blue cities. And in blue cities, you have red precincts. The blue/red looks cool on maps, but anyone who lays out his election strategy based only on that will be a loser (& probably a Democrat).

Fortunately, the people who won’t accept the election outcome are not governing the country and with those sorts of attitudes won’t be for a long time. I kinda proves the electorate made the right choice.

I wonder what you will think four years from now, or eight years after the fact. Will Bush’s second term be good, bad or indifferent? At this point, the quality of that choice is not clear at all. If you weren’t so concerned about liberal bias and pessimism, you could perhaps have read all the facts that are making my side of thing uneasy about how well we’re doing

Fact is, we never conquered Iraq. conquest would require actual, full control, a control we never got. You know, you’re thinking what we’re sayign is disinformation when much of what we right is well documented facts and quotations. I mean, the thing about a few hundred deaths in Iraq, I’d actually say most people expected Gulf War level casualties. You just want to think everybody was taking the extreme estimate, because then we would be irrational, and you wouldn’t have to argue rhetorically with us.

It’s beautiful that you want suggestions from us now. We’ve already given them to you, time and again. I feel like Jim Carrey in Liar, Liar, called by a habitual criminal looking for a defense lawyer, who then gives the unfortunate crooks some very cogent advise:

Stop breaking the law, a*****e!

Well my advice would be similarly blunt:

Stop relying on bad information, genius!

I mean, really, this most common of Democrat complaints is the simplest piece of advice we can give you.

Iraq will hold the elections on schedule

Is that a good thing? Schedules are nice so long as you’re finishing the work, otherwise they are the cause of undue haste and failure.

Most of the country will vote, although there will be sections where voting is impossible. There will be violence, but less than anticipated. A coalition of Shiites and Kurds will win and set up an unstable coalition. They have effective control over more than 80% of the country, including almost all the oil wealth. Terrorists continue sporadic attacks. The Iraqi authorities will occasionally respond with excessive force, which will upset the chattering classes, but gradually reduce violence.

Violence, but less than anticipated. Sporadic attacks. Will occasionally respond with Excessive force. Gradually reduce violence. That paragraph reeks of wishful thinking. When has wishful thinking counted for anything in this war? To quote R.E.M., If wishes were trees, the trees would be falling.

I mean, really, the time has comde to face up to what’s really happened.

Jack,

Right now, I’m keeping a single mental list of those commenters who respond in a predictable fashion, to my latest WB post - and you’re first on the list. What do they have in common? One, making assumptions as to my motivation, and two, not bothering to read the numerous links I provided.

However, I did read the Foreign Affairs link you provided, and found a short detailed historical review of skirmishes in Afghanistan involving colonial powers. Yet, the potential hazards related comes nowhere close to predicting carnage on the scale of the Invasion at Normandy.

One consistent source of Iraqi info not filtered thru Fox News first, is a recommendation of Juan Cole. He has the same kind of credible analysis as the NYTimes’ Tom Friedman. I’d be very interested to see your assessment Jack.

The line coming from the Pentagon is that Insurgent violence is contained within the so-called Sunni Triangle - not so. Unfortunately, one needs to dig deeper and well beyond the boundaries of the US media, to find credible evidence to the contrary. Are we to believe that the continued slaughter of Iraqi Security recruits is not having a chilling effect? You can, if reports of massive desertions ahead of missions into Mosul or Samara do not reach you.

My prediction? The Insurgents have 8 weeks lead time to fan out to key Iraqi cities to set up and plan co-ordinated attacks on those preparing to register or set up polling places. It will not take many brutal attacks to intimidate the population outside of Shiite dominated areas. Not given guarantees of oil revenues and autonomy, the Kurds will opt to not face violence.

A legitimate Shiite dominated government will be recognized only by the U.S., and the ranks of Iraqi forces will soon follow. Enter Chalabi with his influence and money, plus the ability to corral the opposition.

Last, Bush’s popular vote has shrunk from 5 million to 3.3 million, with recounts and certifications to go. 60% percent of Americans believe abortion should remain legal with no changes to Roe v Wade.

Oh but, I’m sorry. You and the Evangelical Right have your mandate.

First of all, Jack. There were some pundits on both sides spouting worst-case scenarios. That doesn’t mean anyone thought the worst case would actually happen.

And that’s an interesting vision of the future of Iraq. Here’s another one from Hosni Mubarak to Sen. Bob Graham before the invasion:

A war will be seen in the streets of Cairo and Damascus as an attack on Islam; there’s no way to avoid it… You do not understand the consequences of your actions. If you succeed militarily - and you will - and if Iraq were to become a democracy, it would almost surely elect a religious extremist government. You will end up with another ayatollah as the head of the government. And that election could cause a cascading throughout the Middle East. The result of your actions, whatever their intentions, could well be two or three more Irans. Is that what you want?

Uncanny. I’m going to go out on a limb and say the election will also go as Mubarak predicts, even to having an ayatollah (al Sistani) running the country. It will be interesting to see if he’s right about one or two other secular Middle Eastern governments (I suspect he was talking about Egypt and Jordan) falling.

I’m also going to predict that the constitution that gets adopted next year will be based on Shariah law and women will have no rights.

I was conviced before the war that a unilateral invasion wouldn’t get us the result we wanted. If I had been the only one who felt that way, I’d be feeling pretty Cassandra-like right now. Since most Americans felt an invasion without the UN would be a bad idea, I’m just one of the faceless majority.

Bert

It is an interesting association – “You and the Evangelical Right”. Most people who voted for Bush were not Evangelical and some Evangelicals voted for Kerry. Besides, what is wrong with Evangelicals? They seem to be generally law abiding, hard working citizens. I am not an Evangelical, but the way. I was brought up Polish (i.e. Catholic) but am not a churchgoer.

I sometimes read links, but usually not. I figure this is an opinion journal. I read your opinion, not those of others. I did read the latest link and found the opinion of someone else. It was well written and interesting, but this guy’s opinion. I personally don’t like to provide links, since I think my arguments should stand on their own – or not. I have started doing it as sort of footnotes when I want to indicate sources of information etc. It is rarely the case in our discussions that we disagree about settled facts. It is the interpretations that are in question and that is something a footnote really can’t prove. A thousand people agreeing on the righteousness of their speculation doesn’t make it true.

All others,
Returning to Iraq

The situation in Iraq is not great. If we knew then what we know now we would have done things differently. But we didn’t. You make decisions based on the information you have now, not the information you have later.

The Bush Administration was unusually clear in its goals and purposes. While Clinton National Security Strategies talked in general terms about the desirability of engagement and the spread of democracy, Bush was specific in threats and possible responses. I will provide some links here for your reference (they don’t “prove” my points. You can decide if they are helpful in your understanding.)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/counter_terrorism/counter_terrorism_strategy.pdf
http://usinfo.state.gov/is/Archive/2004/Oct/19-666897.html
http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itps/0702/ijpe/ijpe0702.htm
http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html
http://usinfo.state.gov/mena/Archive/2004/Jun/02-409858.html

You might consider that the Administration made mistakes, but what they did was part of an overall strategy that was well thought out and reasonably public.

So where do we go from here? We are committed in Iraq and we have an obligation to the people who are cooperating with us. As I have written before, we should protect the Kurds and work to secure Iraq for all innocent people. But those opposing us can go to hell. It is ironic that we seem to care more about the future of Iraq than most of the insurgents. If elections result in under representation for Sunnis who refuse to participate and are fighting Americans, it is a serious problem, but more a problem for them than us. They are already up in arms they can no longer threaten what they are already doing. Perhaps we should give them what they ask for and withdraw to a safe distance. Maybe their countrymen can deal with them more expeditiously than we can. Our liberation of Iraq offers liberty. We can’t make everybody take it and it will take time.

Remember, even in countries of E. Europe with some history of democracy, well-educated people, western contacts and generally peaceful populations, democracy and free markets are still a work in progress fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin wall.

The trouble with this:

The situation in Iraq is not great. If we knew then what we know now we would have done things differently. But we didn?t. You make decisions based on the information you have now, not the information you have later.

is that we had much of the information that now discredits the motives and means used in this war before it even started. Everybody focuses on how Tenet called the beginnings of the case a slam dunk. But what about Bush’s response? Did he question his assertions that the Iraq situation needed military intervention? No. But worse than that, he started from the position that it was necessary.

To you that might not be a problem. To this country, though, it might be.

Whether one believes a war is justified and necessary, or not, the opposite case can always be true. But there is an organizational difference between war and peace. It is much easier to maintain peace than to engage in war. Once one starts putting the pieces on the board, that is an investment towards conflict, and a risk of one’s reputation as a power. Turning aside at this point not only risks the loss of face, but also of strategic advantage. If the war one is heading towards is problematic at best in strategic terms, then one is faced with a nasty dilemma.

When one starts from a position of advocating a war, one starts down that path early and one has fewer options for departing from it henceforth. The path that place peace before war preserves strength so long as we do not forsake war or military intervention when it’s necessary. But most of the time, it’s the right path, by the very nature of things.

I had an epiphany the other day: War is a mistake. Don’t get the idea that I believe no war can be the right thing to engage in. What I mean is that war is what things come to when one side or the other fails to resolve problems in a non-destructive fashion. It is the failure of reason, of our instinctive avoidance of killing our fellow human being, distilled into an agressive, destructive act.

What makes war tenable at all is that war is not the only mistake. In fact, practically everything we do is filled with error. But, by our nature, we correct ourselves, keeping things within safe bounds. We sublimate approaches we feel with spin things more wildly out of control. But we are not perfect, and our errors sometimes pile on one another until peaceable means become just as mistaken or more so than aggression or war. Sometimes, we need the sword to cut the Gordian knot.

Trouble is, war causes more problems than it solves, most of the time, and those situations are years in the correcting.

It is most preferable that we not make the first mistake, be the first folks to be so caught up in our errors that we resort to making that first error to break the peace that preserves us from other problems.

You will note that I don’t advocate an arbitrary end to the war. That may change, if I get the sense one day that we have no hope of correcting the situation by remaining in the war. But that day is a long way off in my opinion. Right now, I believe, that as much as the solution to Iraq may be tougher than having left it alone in the first place, it is not as much of a mistake as leaving the war unresolved.

There is a dichotomy at work here: Republicans, as a party, seem to believe that the key to winning this war is in support of the president’s policy and strategy. The question, though, is whether all that bad PR really has more to do with the continuation of the problem than other parts of the situation.

From what I can tell, we have problems enough to explain our poor performance in this war without having to scapegoat the media or the liberal opposition to Bush’s policies. These explanations for our crappy situation, however, mess with the sacred cow notion of the Republican mainstream: that Republicans are superior defenders of their country. In practical terms, this is one of the worst run wars I’ve ever seen. Because this poses a political risk for the Republicans, they will not admit to the problems. Because they will not admit to the problems, they won’t do what it takes to resolve them. This is the narrow ledge the Republican party has lead us onto with this war.

And it couldn’t happen at a worse time. This is a day and age were we needed to be more agile in our defense of this country, not having our ass in a sling trying to clean up a mess we never had to make in the first place.

I strongly disagree that peace is easy to maintain. That is the attitude that, paradoxically, created great wars. There is an interesting book re by Donald Kagan that sums up many of the world’s great conflicts and how they happened. And we Americans should remember things like Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

I also don’t think we will see the war in the same terms a year from now as we do today. I am more optimistic than you are. I guess neither of us has any reasons beyond faith, so I won’t go into it again.

Stephen et al

I really think we are done here. You all have made many good points, but I think what lessons you take coming out of this depend on the worldview you had going in, and there we differ.

Jack-
Peace when possible. I’ve never been that much opposed to military action, when we had good reasons to back our use of our firepower. Unfortunately, your side has too many people who are quick on the trigger because they’ve never had to fire a shot in anger in their lives.

It’s easy to believe that war is all full of righteousness and glory, and that we can confront a world of tyrants and make them change their ways. Unfortunately, the coin of blood buys many things, and included among them is the anger of those who survive the soldiers and innocent people we kill. We can’t beat a path through the Middle East without it beating right back at us, sooner or later.

With peace always comes the option of war. With war, the option of peace is not available until the object of the action is attained. While peace is not always easily maintainable, war is often altogether too hard to stop. While peace the child of many fathers, war is a bastard orphan all its own.

If we knew then what we know now we would have done things differently. But we didn’t.

Oooh… Jack you’re way too well informed to say something like that. We had generals, and even Powell, saying we didn’t have enough troops to secure the country. We had Senators screaming that there was no plan for democratizing Iraq. We had the administration’s own economists contradicting the administrations cost estimates. We had people screaming that the Defense Department was the wrong governing authority for post-war Iraq. And on and on.

Thanks for those links Jack. I just got through reading them, and it’s interesting trying to reconcile the plans with the actions. For example, Pakistan is disseminating nuclear material and expertise, and they’re clearly not doing everything possible to eliminate terrorists from their country, yet Bush is sending them billions in military and financial aid.

I guess it just looks like the administration doesn’t have a plan.

I belive that the truth will set you free. Because for the fact, there are many lies. That are going around in the world today. At least telling the truth even if it’s wrong. The people will know how u feel and you will have alot of grief off your chest.