Democrats & Liberals: Archives

As cities fell to the enemy, as the arteries of Iraq’s roads have hardened, and the situation has decayed, Bush has insisted that all we needed to do was stay the course. But as Von Clausewitz would clearly say, good policies make for good results. The results of Bush’s policies have gone downhill from the very start. There are some who call that pessimistic, some who believe that I merely express some irrational hatred. But I ask this: what are we supposed to judge the merits of our policies in Iraq by?

What cities have fallen? I must have missed the ‘retaking’ by Al Zarqawi’s forces of Bagdhad, or Mosul. Part of the problem here is that the preferred picture of Iraq by the left is so lopsided and shaded by politics that they see only what they want to see: Bush’s Vietnam. I hate to tell you but Iraq is not the total defeat you seem to want to believe it is.

We should judge the merits of the policies by their real result, not the CBS News/Dan Rather version of how the war is going. The elections in Afghanistan and this week in Iraq are huge. The invasion of Iraq as a continuation of policy and not merely as a caricature of capitalist imperialism, should be looked at strategically as part of the war on terror. As a theater of battle, and not the whole war.

As for the application of Clauswitz’s theories to the invasion of Iraq, I found this paper interesting reading. You might also take a look at some of Victor Davis Hanson’s writings about decisive battle and it’s role in Western Civilization.

Unfortunately, getting all three at once is creating incredible amounts of debt which will come back to haunt us, especially in the military sense.

That’s already happening, Stephen. Rather than roll back some of the tax cuts that disproportionately favor the wealthy, Bush has asked the Air Force and Navy to cut their budget by about $55 billion.

I hate to tell you but Iraq is not the total defeat you seem to want to believe it is.

What’s that!!? A caveat!!? Could it be that Bush’s most ardent supporter’s cocoon of blind faith is begining to crack? Are we witnessing the beginnings of a metamorphosis?

Look out, Eric. Disillusionment is pretty harsh. I hope you have a really good liberal support network. :)

Eric:

The city of Fallujah had a population of 200,000 before the war. The population now is 15,000. Even Fox News is starting to prepare her rightwing viewers for bad news. As you said, the coming Iraqi Elections are huge. Huge for whom remains to be seen.

All I know comes from reading the newspapers and talking to my friends. Lately there is a disconnect between the two. I will share one insight from a friend who has spent a professional life in the Middle East, especially Iran.

He tells me that the Iranians are the people in the Middle East most likely to succeed. They have old, pre-Islamic traditions to draw upon and are the natural regional power. This is the more interesting part. He says that the Shiites are the key to reform because unlike the Sunnis, they have a form of organized clergy. Remembering Ayatollah Khomeini, it didn’t seem obvious to me why this would be a good thing, but my friend explained that an organized clergy can discipline itself and learn from mistakes and many Shiites are coming to see the theocracy in Iran as a mistake. Ironically, putting the country through the purgatory of the rule by Ayatollahs my spare it the hell of unfocused Islamic extremism. Under the Ayatollahs, Iran developed an educated middle class and the population growth slowed. Both of these structural changes bode well for the future.

The U.S. probably cannot be allied with Iran any time in the near future, but we can reach a modus vivendi whereby we travel in the same direction in parallel, even if we snare at each other occasionally along the way. Iran lives in a very dangerous neighborhood and essentially has no friends. Some Iranians are coming to recognize this vulnerability. There were good strategic reasons why Persia cultivated good relations with the British and the Shah or Iran cultivated good relations with the U.S. Countries don’t have permanent friends or enemies, but they tend to have permanent interests. Iran might be the once and future American friend.

As long as they don’t build a nuke and stop supporting terrorist attacks, I can see that. I’ve worked with a few Iranian exiles and got similar stories.

Still, if Bush and the GOP leaders think they can continue to increase spending AND keep the tax cuts that disproportionately favor the wealthy - and they do, judging by the lack of budget control legislation in S.1 through S.10 - we’re all in trouble.

What cities have Fallen? Well, what cities have we been stuck for the last four or five months retaking: Fallujah, Najaf, and other territories. I know you like to blame the grim situation on the media, but it’s the facts themselves that paint the ugly picture. These are the merits.

There’s a real question here: how can you have lopsided coverage if there is not something of merit and substance to give weight to what you see as our side? If these things are real, then including them in a critique of policy is more than justified.

Your concept of balance is one dimensional, and it only takes its view of policy from a political standpoint. Clausewitz would tell you that’s a mistake, that there needs to be a unified viewpoint centered on winning the war, not whether or not one’s candidate is harmed by focus on the failures of his policies. The ugly fact is, Bush left cities in enemy hands for months on end, allowing our enemies there to have safe-haven from our admittedly brutal firepower.

Meanwhile, our enemy used those cities, used their open character to amplify their moral strength, their personnel strength, and the degree of training of those people set out into the field. It also allowed them to spread their infrastructure, spread their support.

Like a cancer left unchecked, Fallujah has spread the insurgency with its support, like a tumor spreading its disease to other organs. Like such a cancer, the removal of the original is a good thing, but something that is ultimately fruitless, as other tumors grow to take its place.

Once, about a month ago, Rumsfeld said you fight the war with the army you got, not the one you would like. He’s wrong. You fight the war with the situation you got, not the situation you would like. You respond to that situation, making the policies necessary to gain the object you wish to get. Anything, any theory that fails to achieve that end should be discarded. If it requires troops, you send in troops. If it requires armor, you get them that armor. Any policy that gets in the way of that, such as appropriations foul ups that send money to empty parade grounds rather than living troops, that concentrates on expensive weapons systems and defense plants at the expense of maintaining and recruiting troops, should be cast aside.

I read the paper, and having read Clausewitz, I pretty much agree with their assertion. Question is, do you? Who was it, do you recall, who was pushing the idea of shock and awe? Who was it who time and again eschewed overwhelming force in favor of supposedly paralyzing attacks and events instead? Clausewitz is so important as an author in military strategy because he doesn’t pull this B.S. on the “have-to’s” concerning the enemy- that is, the enemy has to admit defeat at this point, has to be feeling this that or the other. Instead of assuming the enemies state of mind, one figures out where the strength and the power of the enemy’s army is, and one concentrates force there.

I would venture that freedom of movement is the center of gravity for the insurgents. They can go where they please, for the most part, and we can’t. They can send our light, mobile forces racing all over the place, while they maintain relatively amorphous presence, moving only when moved upon, then moving back when the coast is clear. We must turn the tables on them, throw them into a situation where their movements are restricted, where our forces don’t simply fade away. That is the whole issue with troop numbers. Our current numbers do not allow sustained, presence. Occupations, by their nature are about crowding out the old system or any new rivals by the presence of a standing army, one that can keep law and order, that can quell rebellion at the grassroots. When we went in light, and failed to set up the proper law enforcement power and military control, we essentially sent them the message that we had either no capability to oppose lawbreakers and insurgents, or no will or care to do so. It is a signal we should have never sent.

In the end, your plan of battle must work below for it to work above. If you don’t win decisive engagements and battles at the lower levels, achieving broader aims will be beyond your means. They will push us until we push back, knock them off their feet, pin them, and knock them out. He tells us that our aim in war should be the destruction of the enemy forces. But that’s not necessarily the annihilation of troops. That’s destroying the will or ability to fight. As high as your body counts are, if you’re not convincing them fighting you is a bad Idea, and they are continuing to replace lost soldiers with new ones, you aren’t destroying the enemy forces.

However, Bush is doing a good job of that as far as we’re concerned. Troopwise, he’s deploying our forces to such an extent that we’re risking broken forces. Everybody’s flocking to the parts of the army least likely to see ground combat in Iraq, while those part of our forces that are seeing that kind of action are having serious trouble drawing in new recruits. He sent us in under false pretenses, depriving us of an unpoliticized, consensus-supported reason for going to war. He refused to acknowledge errors, even while the situation in Iraq grew progressively worse, and compounded that error by predicting victories over enemy morale and the insurgency that never materialized. Instead of trusting the American people to judge rightly the need for war, the meaning of the news coming from there, and the character of his own mistakes, he has wrapped his doings in a blanket of secrecy and obfuscation, increasing the sense that he is not being honest with the American people, that they can’t trust the man leading their forces.

This is how you destroy an army like ours.

We can only linger so long before Bush’s guns become empty and the butter melts, and we start really having to sacrifice to keep this war going. If we don’t get our act together, we will have to withdraw from another battlefield cloaked with the doublespeak of those unwilling to acknowledge a lost war. Believe me, that’s a shame I would gladly spare my generation.

Dear Mr. Daugherty,
I am a conservative who favors this war but I work hard to find serious debate from those who don’t. I have listened to those against the war give their reasons why they think President Bush made a mistake in invading Iraq. What I have a hard time finding is an alternative solution. Liberals that bash the President are a dime a dozen but finding one who works the problem through and comes up with an alternative solution is hard to find. If you can please follow up this column with one that offers solutions. I do not enjoy war, I actually have a cousin who is in Iraq now so I can relate to the personal side of things, however I honestly did not see an alternative solution to the short term problem of WMD and the long term solution to militant Islam. Please instead of being just another liberal who doesn’t like the president be a voice for improving things. A good idea to me is a good idea whether it comes from a conservative or a liberal. The problem is liberals haven’t come up with a good idea in a long, long time.

Sincerely,
Scott

And please, don’t respond that Kerry was the solution, cuz I’ll reach in there an cyber-slap you.

I think scott is asking about the future plans and not armchair quarterbacking after the facts.

Scott makes a good point. I know it is fun to criticize President Bush, but you have to consider what is at stake as an American and a civilized human being.

This is not an academic war. Real people get killed and real people have a lot at stake. An American defeat means real hell for many of the people of Iraq. Let’s not fool ourselves about the nature of the enemy. They are not analogous to the American colonists seeking independence from the British; they are not like the resistance fighters in World War II; they are not even like the N. Vietnamese fighting the French and Americans. The closest analogy to the current Iraqi resistance would be a Nazi remnant in an occupied country trying to reestablish their dominance with an admixture of religious zealots whose hatred for the modern world is palpable and often openly asserted. The tactics well demonstrate this. When they can’t kill Americans, they kill fellow Iraqis and they are willing to kill scores of innocent Iraqi bystanders to make a political point. Their despicable goal is to make the situation so bloody and nasty that civilized people will recoil and leave.

History is being made today by the choices people make. Despite the threats and violence, large numbers of Iraqis will vote in the upcoming elections. Those that don’t want democracy will boycott and try to intimidate others. We can’t let them succeed. Democracy has harsh principles too. One of them is that if you choose not to participate, you are giving your consent to whatever your fellow citizens decide to do. If 51% of the Iraqis vote, that is good enough. It will be the freest election in the Arab Middle East. Let the boycotters deal with that. In democracies, minorities have rights, but majorities rule the country.

Baathists minorities accustomed to getting their way and religious zealots who despise democracy because it represents the rule of man have no legitimate claim to power. Let’s figure out how to defeat them, not flatter them by calling them the Iraqi people.

Liberal suggestions are welcome.

Scott-
We’ve been providing all kinds of alternatives. When we got whiff of Iraq, we said, stay on our first target. You ignored us, and even a year after the capture of Saddam, we have yet to capture the man we started hunting first. We told you what you’d need for this war: greater numbers of troops. Instead of acknowledging that, your people told the generals involved they didn’t know what they were talking about, and sent us in light. Even now, the ideologues in your party plan other wars, as the Army, Marines, Reserves and National Guard are stretched to the limits of their deployable manpower. We have been giving you advice all along, your people just have chosen not to take it.

That being the case, you should ask them first for new plans and alternatives, because they are the ones in control, and you are the ones that they’re supposed to listen to. At the same time, you should have been more open-minded about the nature of the situation there. Iraq was never a hotbed of militant Islam- quite the opposite. It was just the kind of secular dictatorship that the militants hated. They’re glad its gone, glad they now have the space. And of course, there were no WMDS for those nonexistent radicals to use.

In the end, most liberals have little need to apologize for our assessment of things. We can speak with hard, unequivocal words about the course of this war, about the things that have gone wrong. We have no need to dance around the errors we have committed, no need to hide from our record.

If you want improvement in this war, ask the people running it. Have them come clean with you, have them pose alternatives. They have privileged access to information, privileged access to the legislation. Stop asking us what you guys should do, and start doing it yourselves, regardless of whether you have to agree with us in order to do it.

Scott, let me just butt in with a quick rebuttal:

Stephen: When we got whiff of Iraq, we said, stay on our first target. You ignored us, and even a year after the capture of Saddam, we have yet to capture the man we started hunting first.

Stephen, we just upped the ante for OBL. He is still on our scope. How hard can it be to catch one guy? Apparently very hard. Yet, you have conspiracy wackoist who prefer to formulate Clancy-like stories about OBL working for us and impersonators making video shout-outs to all his peeps against the US. WTF?!?!

Stephen: We told you what you’d need for this war: greater numbers of troops. Instead of acknowledging that, your people told the generals involved they didn’t know what they were talking about, and sent us in light.

Bush is asking for another $80 billion more in funding for the war in Iraq and Afghansistan. We are under funded…we’ve acknowledged that. So comes the cries of the increasing deficit and ill-spending by the White House. ILL SPENDING!!! You libs are like wives who complain about never fixing up the house, and yet, bitch about always being broke.

Stephen: Even now, the ideologues in your party plan other wars, as the Army, Marines, Reserves and National Guard are stretched to the limits of their deployable manpower.

Then there is BACKDOOR DRAFT….might as well be the Call of Khtulu for democratic slanders.

Stephen: We have been giving you advice all along, your people just have chosen not to take it.

It’s always politics from the left and never a sound resolute as to where to proceed. Unless it involves domestic issues as to gay rights, abortion issues and minorities, you guys have no voice on matters of foreign policy and war on terror. And that is your fault, not the administration or right wing agenda.

Eric said: “The invasion of Iraq as a continuation of policy and not merely as a caricature of capitalist imperialism, should be looked at strategically as part of the war on terror. As a theater of battle, and not the whole war.”

Why? I see no reason to look at it that way save one, to defend a failed effort and policy. I am not in to justifying failure. You should not be either. It just leads to even greater failure. To love America is not to excuse her her errors, but, to grow and insure her errors are not repeated. Any competent parent knows excusing their progeny’s errors undermines their becoming the best they can be.

Stephen said: “We have no need to dance around the errors we have committed, no need to hide from our record.”

Excuse you, Stephen. But Congressional Democrats voted to go to Iraq. Any intelligent person having learned of Saddam’s survival skills and record would have deduced that he had gotten rid of his WMD long, long before they could be used as a smoking gun to justify his removal from power. Shame on you liberals for thinking your hands are clean on this issue of Iraq. Democrats did not think, they did not do their homework, they did not represent the American people’s interests doing the popular thing and voting to invade Iraq. The Dem’s in Congress were politcal whores, no better than Republicans.

War is evil. Democrats know that. Yet they did not work hardly at all to discover the truth, to question and examine intelligence and data, and to represent the people, BEFORE making their decision to back Bush’s play. I left the Democratic Party for just such reasons, (remember the 5 Trillion national debt?) and it pleased me that one of the two whoring political parties lost this last election.

I just can’t wait until the other whore loses too!

David, I never meant that we committed no errors. I meant that we don’t need to dance around it: we shouldn’t have consented to going into Iraq. We don’t need to wrap our error in layer upon layer of rationalization. Our hands are not clean.

Al-
I know full well who Osama works for: himself, and his twisted version of God. I’m merely saying that we should have taken care of him and his people before we did anything else. This is no conspiracy theory, this is what we should have done. We could have destroyed al-Qaeda while it was more centralized and made an example of it for all who would attempt mass casualty attacks on the U.S.

On the subject of money, we decry wasted moneyput aside for troops who need it, and we criticize a government that vastly underestimate what was needed to win the war, often in willful manner so that congress wouldn’t get sticker-shock on the price of the war (Come on, 1 billion for reconstruction for an industrialized nation the size of california?).

As for the backdoor draft, we are facing, in fact have been facing a serious manpower shortage. Even the fact of the deployment of our reserves and national guard speaks to that. The last time that occured was durring the Korean War when the Chinese unexpectedly charged down the peninsula and nearly ran us out of South Korea. But now we are getting to the point where we are running out of combat ready divisions in those reserves and national guard regiments to send over to Iraq, and the volunteer army segment of that is doing no better. Deploying an army is not a thing done lightly or indefinitely. If you want fresh, healthy troops fighting our battles, this problem should merit serious attention from you.

As for resolve- Well, you don’t seem to have the resolve to challenge your own people to get this job done right. You’re all too willing to accept their excuses as victory slips slowly farther away. If you had real resolve, you would get your act in gear.

The U.S. military has adjusted its plans and behaviors to adapt to the insurgency. Elections, which many people predicted would be postponed, maybe indefinitely, are going on as scheduled. This war has been much harder and much costlier than we thought it would be, although causality figures are lower than most pre-war estimates. The actual war went more quickly and smoothly than estimates; the post war has been much more difficult. The blitzkrieg to Baghdad was a brilliant move that probably saved thousands of American and Iraqi lives, but in moving that fast it left pockets of resistance untouched. These grew into the insurgencies.

We can’t currently assess whether the invasion was “worth it.” On the plus side, we are rid of one of the world’s most odious regimes. Much depends on what comes next. If Iraq produced a reasonably free government, it will be a first for the Arab world and may begin a process that brings democracy to that benighted region. I will wait until after the elections to begin to assess success or failure. I don’t think we will know for a decade.

When Zhou Enlai was asked to assess the French Revolution, he said it was too soon to tell. This is way too soon to tell.

“On the plus side, we are rid of one of the world’s most odious regimes.”

And are likly replacing it with more of the same. With the Bush on Alawis jock as it were, people seem to forget that he’s esentially Saddam II. Not a nice guy.

We can’t really be that surprised though - this is really just par for our nation building course. I just hope I’m around long enough to see us invade Iraq again.

Jack-
Question: Are the elections going forth because the country’s been stabilized or in spite of that not being the case? Are they on schedule because its the smart thing to do, or because Bush wants it that way? Is the war costlier and more difficult because that’s just the way of things, or because the people who carried out this war left something out of the equation. You know, as much as I dislike the way Bush described this as a catastrophic success, it’s sort of apt, if you take it from Von Clausewitz’s view. Easy victories are not necessarily the most decisive. Sure, we probably saved more lives in the short term by going in light and lightning fast, but by doing so, we put ourselves in a position where we really didn’t expand our presence effectively. So, what allowed us to have a quick decision on taking out Saddam (well, duh, he’s out now) postponed the critical decision: (control of Iraq) Just removing Saddam didn’t put us in that position. It only took Saddam out of it. We could send assassins after every head of state in Europe and take them out of office, but that doesn’t mean we will have won control of the nations in question.

I want you to keep in mind, Jack, that I am not looking at this war from a historical context, and I hope that you will try to quit doing so yourself. Daydreaming about the praise of future generations is one thing. Earning it by what we do here and now is quite a different matter altogether. If we see polling places in flames across the country, a very important decision will have gone against us, and the first steps to civil war will be trod by the population. It is not to say that it isn’t right to bring a democratically elected goverment to Iraq, but rather to say that we’ve chosen an path to that which is a far riskier one than we should have accepted. If the train of Elections runs on time, but the Iraqi people don’t get on board, that’s it.

Even if it goes as planned, the question will be whether the insurgents treat this as the decisive moment we wish it to be. I would advise the Bush Administration to have plans ready, this time, for those possibilities.

We will know quite soon if they have become discouraged, or have become more set in their path. We should be looking now for indications of the success of our strategies, not waiting ten years from now, when we can do nothing to alter the balance of history.

Stephen

We will see next week how the elections work and then what develops out of them. I don?t expect the situation to be perfect, but it should move in the right direction. The very fact that it looks like we can hold an election on schedule is an indication of success. Many people doubted this would happen. This is an indication of the success of our strategy.

A couple of months ago on this blog I put my predictions for this ">http://www.watchblog.com/democrats/archives/001857.html”> election on the record. Nothing that has happened has caused me to change my mind. I expect that very soon my liberal friends will come to believe that they also predicted a decent outcome and then they will say everybody knew it.

The reason I try to take a longer perspective is because we can rarely judge anything while we are in the midst of events. Some of the best decisions look wrong at the time and vis-versa. The one that always comes to my mind is the intermediate range missile/nuclear freeze crisis of the early 1980s. All of the informed opinion seemed to be unanimous that Reagan was provoking a crisis that might end in a world war. Millions of Europeans marched against the crazy cowboy. Thousands filled New York?s Central Park to protest and call for a nuclear freeze. It turned out that Reagan was right. His critics were fabulously wrong. It took ten years to see that. Reagan earned the verdict of history and he was making steady progress, but people didn?t see it at the time.

Jack-
Careful about that long view! First, you’re assuming Reagan’s weapon’s buildup pushed the Russians anywhere, when the fact is their economy was cratering since the seventies. This is what the Sovietologists were saying was going on before Richard Perle’s red team came in and hyped up the Soviet Threat.

No view, long or short is minus some kind of subjectivity. If we’re lucky, that subjectivity colors our perspective rather than clouds it.

Let me relate to you a disturbing thought. What if the insurgents are allowing the polling places to be set up to raise the body count when they start their offensive on the election?

You cannot be blamed for hoping, but we must be prepared for unfavorable outcomes. Better to be pleasantly surprised by a positive outcome, than unpleasantly suprised by bad outcomes.

“We will see next week how the elections work and then what develops out of them. I don?t expect the situation to be perfect,

Funny! This seems to be your mantra regarding elections…

“but it should move in the right direction.”

Oh _should_ it now? And Why is that? Because Neo-con wishes always come true? How the hell can you believe that things are moving in the right direction when practically nothing has done so in Iraq since ‘Shock and Awe’ gave way to Utter Disaster and Complete Failure?

“The very fact that it looks like we can hold an election on schedule is an indication of success. Many people doubted this would happen. This is an indication of the success of our strategy.”

Rather than a successful strategy, I’d have to say the situation looks to be a pale shadow of what a true democracy is supposed to be.
The Iraqi people still don’t know Who or What the Hell they’re voting for! The names on the ballots are secret for the most part, and there are an estimated 111 political groups and movements who will be listed on those ballots! Huge numbers of people will not vote, either because they fear for their lives, or because our troops could not get close enough to secure their regions.
Considering all that, in my opinion, On Schedule really doesn’t mean a fecking thing.

No matter what happens in the Iraqi Elections, the Bush Administration will declare it a success. To do anything else would be to admit that the US was beaten. Hell!!! If Bahgdad erupts in flames and the entire city burns down with thousands dead, I fully expect Bush to go on TV and say that at least the rest of the country got to vote!!!

For Your Information:

Bill Clinton invaded Kosovo with the right amount of forces and with international support. Do you know how many US Troops got killed in Kosovo? Nearly none. Do you know how much money the US spent in Kosovo? Nearly none. Why? Because Clinton used DIPLOMACY to get someone else to pay for it!!!!

Kosovo = SUCCESS
Iraq = FAILURE

Adrienne

Yes, waiting for the elections is my mantra now. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to speculate about an event whose result will be known in a matter of days.

Elections are a necessary, but not sufficient step in a favorable solution to the Iraq problem and - yes – we have to see what develops out of them.

Stephen

I am not referring to the fall of the Soviet Union, although (to once again use the phrase) Reagan was a necessary but not sufficient cause of that.

The nuclear freeze movement would have prevented deployment (or the threatened deployment) of allied missiles in Europe to counter Soviet missiles already deployed. Reagan played to strength, much to the horror of the peace first crowd. The result was that the Soviets backed down and we were able to eliminate a whole class of weapons. It is usually a bad idea in negotiation to give up all your options at the start. That is essentially what the anti-nuke people wanted to do. Reagan was smarter and it worked. But the protested and gnashing of teeth were fantastic, even worse than criticism of President Bush today, if that is possible.

Aldous

I supported President Clinton in Kosovo, but not everyone did. The Kosovo action specifically did not have UN approval. It brought protests all over the world. The Russians were livid. It nearly cracked the NATO alliance. And even though it took place IN Europe, the U.S. flew almost all the missions. In the midst of Kosovo, many people were calling it a failure. A good book about that is “War in the Time of Peace” by David Halberstram.

After an intervention is successful, everyone gets on board and forgets they were ever against it. BTW that is also one of my mantras, because it is true.

It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to speculate about an event whose result will be known in a matter of days.

You just inspired me to publish my speculations here. :)

A good book about that is “War in the Time of Peace” by David Halberstram.

Another good book is “Waging Modern War” by Gen. Wes Clark,

One of the most interesting parts of the book, in my opinion, is the Preface to the Paperback Edition where just before the recent Afghan war, Clark is talking to a senior member of the administration who tells him, “We read your book - no one is going to tell us where we can or can’t bomb.”

Clark continues, “This represented an unfortunate misreading of the lessons of the Kosovo campaign. Whereas in the popular view, the allies hindered the bombing, the actual truth is virtually the opposite: allied target approvals made the overall impact of the strikes far greater than if the United States had acted unilaterally. The real lesson of Kosovo is this: to achieve strategic success at a minimal cost, a structured alliance whose actions are guided by consensus and underwritten by international law is likely to be far more effective and efficient in the long run.”

Jack-
Much as you would like to make this a question for historians, the trouble is history is already making itself felt. The security problems, as caused by previous events, are complicating the outcome. Do we have the security in place to prevent trouble? Are we prepared for a negative outcome? There are so many specific questions I would ask if I knew to ask, and I hope our people have asked those questions of themselves now, and worked out some solutions. Maybe we, as spectators can afford to percieve things from a historical perspective, but those in the field and those who are directing policy do not have that luxury.

I hope very fervently that we have things worked together there, and I would be happy to have my fears prove unfounded. But so far, I have been disappointed. On weapons, on the insurgency, and on the other important issues of this war, Bush has proven mostly wrong.

Was he right on weapons? No, they weren’t there. Was he right about the terrorists? No, they did not have access to the country until we removed Saddam’s security apparatus. Was he right about the Iraqi response? No. Iraq’s government disintegrated rather than sloughed off the regime, and the people were not half as enthusiastic about our arrival as the Neocons told us they would be. Was he right about the troop numbers? No, the very fact of the deployment of the Reserves and the National Guard to Iraq demonstrates the insufficient numbers. Was he right about the security situation? No. His policies allowed porous boarders with powers not exactly allied to ours, in addition to a lack of on-the-street-corner law and order, leading to an extraordinary degree of freedom for bandits and terrorists. Were they right to support Ahmed Chalabi and listen to his intelligence? No.

These are the strings of nos that make me very concerned for our nation’s policies, not just because our leaders seem to be fairly incompetent, but also because it has been the pattern of behavior of this administration not to reverse policy when it indicates error.

I am tired of relying on good luck to prevent disaster in this war. We must deal with these problems in this time and place, not after history has rendered its verdict. If it turns out that the Administration was right, I’ll feel better, but until then, there is a long string of failures and failed assumptions that justify my skepticism, in addition to strategical concerns about the wisdom of leaving the decision in the hands of the Iraqis, rather than resolving it earlier by our own means.

You have to look to the goal you have in mind and try to look forward to what the situation will look like ten years from today. Otherwise you can’t see the forest for the trees. The Bush administration, like all administrations made mistakes, some serious, others less. Saddam was clearly a threat to the peace of the region. He didn’t currently have WMD, but would have been able to reconstitute them when sanctions came down. There was little support for continued sanctions in the world community. As the oil for food program demonstrates, the sanctions were quickly eroded. We did invade Iraq, so we don’t know what would have happened if we had made different decisions. The situation today could be better or it could be worse. Judging by his past behavior, every time Saddam felt confident, he did something stupidly aggressive. He would have felt very confident if he managed to stare down the U.S.

Looking to the solution ten years from now certainly doesn’t stop anyone from working now to bring those solutions. On the contrary, it helps you do the right thing rather than the expedient thing and helps you resist vicissitudes of daily events. When you look ahead, you rely less on good luck.

I try to take a longer view, because that is the one that really counts. If you were to look at surgery, cutting through muscle and bone, shedding blood etc. it makes no sense unless you look at the situation you hope to have later.

There are many things that decision makers would have done differently. But we are in what we are in now. I don’t discount all the mistakes, but I do believe that in spite of the mistakes our action will produce a result that will be better than the probable alternatives if we had done nothing.

What cities have Fallen? Well, what cities have we been stuck for the last four or five months retaking: Fallujah, Najaf, and other territories.

Zarqawi holds no cities. To say so is to fundamentally misrepresent the situation.

Essentially the media template for this war is Vietnam. The ‘insurgency’ is the TET offensive. Which beside being a total defeat for the enemy was turned into a total defeat for the US by the media. A prime example of how viewpoint and what a foreseen outcome can ultimately achieve. After all we all knew that we couldn’t win in Vietnam, right? Self fulfilling prophecy.

Part of Clauswitz’s theory is bringing the enemy to a decisive battle, force on force. Obviously guerrilla warfare seeks to avoid this. In so much as the insurgency is allowed to coalesce in places like fallujah they are vulnerable to being found and watched and ultimately destroyed. In order for an insurgency to succeed they must have a base of support among portions of the populace. They must also avoid detection.

You seem to skirt the course of action you would have preferred for Bush and Rumsfeld to take rather than let the insurgents coalesce in Fallujah. Fighting insurgency is not the same as fighting an army. No amount of US troops will be enough to isolate and destroy the kind of insurgents you believe exist. The troops we need are the Iraqi’s. They have the numbers necessary and the intelligence to isolate them.

When I read the news and hear the reports I see an enemy that is on the run. An enemy charging that all Iraqis are infidels and anyone who votes must die. I see an enemy that is increasingly desparate to prove that the US will cut and run. That US troops are on the verge of being broken. This is not only the voice of Zarqawi, ironically it is the voice of Barbara Boxer and Ted Kennedy, who are essentially demanding that we ‘withdraw from another battlefield’ so that the charges of being ‘cloaked with the doublespeak of those unwilling to acknowledge a lost war’ can be proven to be true. “Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam.”

The former President Bush forecasted what is occurring now in Iraq. His reason for not occupying and “finishing the job” during Desert Storm was that it would be a tactical nightmare.

Eric wrote:”When I read the news and hear the reports I see an enemy that is on the run.”
Yes Eric that is what guerrillas do.”
I am curious as to the source of information that those that support this war rely on.

I recommend reading National Geographic, which
Details the amount of light crude left in this earth and not being distracted by this rube of a reason for entrenching our Men and Women into a hornet’s nest.

Jack-
We should be looking at things with an eye to the future, but that is simply a matter of choosing what things we do before we do them, not selling short on a systematic, pragmatic approach to what you do. Also, we should sensitive to the limits of our future perspective. Even Wolfowitz was ruling out a march to Baghdad at the time of the Gulf War, for example.

Sanctions couldn’t last forever. You’ve got my agreement there. But I recall our supposed allies in the neighborhood did more to violate those sanctions at greater profit to Saddam Hussein than our rivals at the UN did. They were pipelining the stuff straight from the place. Regardless, our invasion was foolhardy, considering the level of the threat posed, and it’s absolute lack of immediacy.

If we are to take your side’s current version of events at face value (there being so many versions to chose from), and assume that five years from the lifting of sanctions, Saddam would have WMD capability, that means that we could have waited upwards of several years to a decade before Saddam became any kind of a threat. Seeing as how al-Qaeda remained quite an active danger to this country, Dealing with that group where we had good confirmation of their presence would have been the better idea. And most people who knew the subject knew this, and considered Iraq a bad target.

The importance of eyewitness accounts of high level officials working off of Laurie Mylroie’s theory of al-Qaeda being a Iraqi intelligence front comes in here. Fact is, we had Bush officials insisting on an picture of international terrorism shared by few who knew the subject. That is to say, Bush’s response to terrorism, in seeking out Iraq as a source, represented not only a mistaken course in the War on terror, but in fact a delusional one. They see al-Qaeda as an organ of state terrorism, not the parasite of failed states and dysfunctional Arab societies.

By alrights, there shouldn’t have been a confrontation with Iraq to begin with, unless Saddam decided to act out. This Iraq war was a surgical mistake, to co-opt your metaphor, and one that left the real problem not only unsolved, but also aggravated by the effects of our botched surgery elsewhere.

Don’t get this idea that we don’t want a proactive policy here in the democratic policy. We just think you’re being proactively foolish, with the stakes high and the time to do what’s necessary to prevent the next American encounter with the terrorists is limited. To think that time is on our side is to forget that eight years of time were not on the side of the people in the towers, the planes and the Pentagon.

Eric-
The insurgents, Zarqawi, Moqtada al-Sadr, who gives a crap. They were able to make the greatest army in the world fear to travel simple roads. We’re actually doing more airlifts to avoid putting convoys through this territory. Regardless, we are losing control of territory, and regardless of whether any one entity controls it, our goal of political control over the nation is made most decidedly problematic if our soldiers or the Iraqi’s officers cannot travel freely and impose authority a their own pleasure. That is our object, and the insurgents are doing a good job of frustrating it. And we’re letting them.

I must say, the right is too obsessed with winning media victories. Our reporters aren’t deciding how effective our military strategy is. I mean, tell me, just how are they hindering our policy there? To believe your side of things, two questionable leaps of logic are required.

One, we must believe that at once our soldiers believe more than ever in the war, yet are being deprived of the morale to fight it. Two, we must accept the idea that our media is having a greater effect on the soldiers than their situation at the point of their deployment. In corollary to that, we must believe that the reporting of the mistakes is more important than the mistakes are, despite the profoundly important elements that those errors compromise.

To summarize your argument is the triumph in your own mind of image over substance. I would say that you are creating more friction by denying what plainly obvious, and creating worse deficits of morale by not dealing with the facts on the ground. Of course, that would mean responsibility on the part of the administration, and a shift in policy. But however much we need a shift in policy to win this war, such a shift in policy is an admission of error of great political cost.

In speaking of self-fulfilling prophecies, you should take note of greek mythology. How many times does some idiot trying to avoid dealing with some terrible fate end up setting up the very fate they sought to avoid?

We’re not fated to lose, by any means, but we are fated to deal with certain issues by the nature of the campaigns we take on, issues we may in our inexperience or arrogance disregard. If we keep an open mind, we may be able to acknowlege what we failed to discern at first, and work to correct the mistakes and misunderstandings. If not, events will carry on with a vicious kind of momentum against us. The greatest weakness is the one fear keeps you from acknowledging and transcending.

Having completed Von Clausewitz’s work, I know he speaks of decisive battles, but my impression is that for him the decisive nature has little to do with scale or ease, but everything to do with whether the enemy must admit defeat and cede the victory in the campaign. Time and again, Bush has promised that an event would be decisive. Time and again, the insurgency has not only maintained its fighting spirit, but escalated the fight continuously since summer 2003. Does he have it right this time? Perhaps. But I doubt it.

As for coalescing in cities, I think you miss the disadvantages that we accrue by having an enemy mass in a city. First, it’s urban warfare. Cities are the ultimate broken ground, walls, roofs, ceilings, etc. all serve to reduce our ability to surveil and control huge segments of territory. Our casualities and those of the innocent increase because of our lesser awareness of the situation.

You may see an enemy on the run, but I think you miss the point: Guerilla warfare is warfare on the run. They aren’t seeking to win every engagement. All they have to do is keep their people in the field long enough to outlast ours. Americans have proven their willingness time and again to persist in the fight. Nobody questions our persistence. But we are proving the limits of our military, to our great disadvantage. Our deployments are at their limits, our funding of this war eating huge holes in our budget. The enemy has learned the weaknesses of our vehicles, and is exploiting them to devastating effect.

These are real problems that need real answers, not the scapegoating of media and dissenters in response to bad news.

Stephen

Let me be clear. If I was president and could go back in time and change behavior, I would certainly do it. There were lots of mistakes made. But based on what the situation looked like then, I still do not believe decisions were unreasonable.

There are a three of big pitfalls of revising the past.

1. We know what worked and what didn’t.
2. We always assume an alternative would have produced a better result.
3. Information now available becomes so completely integrated into our thought process that we cannot even remember what it was like before.

Clausewitz talks about the fog of war and friction. Our hindsight eliminates the fog and we don’t take into account friction and just bad luck in our revised scenario. It is a much easier game to play.

Speaking of games, you can sometime learn from them. I used to play a computer game called Civilization. I wasted many hours, but did learn a few things. In this game, you can go back in time (if you saved earlier stages) and correct mistakes or try other strategies. Usually, you do better when you do this. After all, you can predict the future. But when you make changes, you create a different scenario. Different things happen and sometimes the consequences are worse.

The scenario critics of the Bush administration are playing is not realistic. The assume the advantages of the situation in 2002, when Saddam was sort of cooperating, but forget the costs – that the U.S. was keeping an unsustainable troop presence in the Gulf, that sanctions will killing 50,000 Iraqi children a year (according to UNICEF), that U.S troops stationed in Saudi to counter Iraq were provoking terrorists attacks, and that Saddam was working hard – and succeeding – to get out from under sanction. If you go back in time and face that situation, even if you know about the WMD, the choices are still not good.

Jack-
Revising the past? Look, when I get up in the morning, I don’t have to forget that we started this war based on the idea of a immediate terrorist attack. You have to tell yourself that we went in with the main objective of free Iraq, which, while maybe closer to the administration’s actual motive, is not the stated motive Americans were given so we would come to consensus on the war.

You’re saying hindsight. You’re saying that the hypothetical alternative could be worse. You’re saying we aren’t able to dial ourselves back to remember how much we really knew.

There are three pitfalls of rationalizing the Bush administration’s behavior.

1)They politicize intelligence and planning. They were told these things would happen, but they shoved aside those who did not buy their theories, who did not agree with their assessements, who did not provide them with evidence to support their assessments. In their egotism, they have failed time and again to separate the discourse and its needs from that of their politics. They have this belief in their own righteousness, their own exceptionalism, and they will not let little things like facts get in the way of their command of the situation.

2)This arrogant view of themselves precludes their admission of error. This means they continue to pursue alternatives along the lines of their views, often waiting extensively for the hoped-for vindication. They do this rather than recognize the depth of the problems involved, and act in a timely manner. Which means-

3)They reject the new integration, and treat the new situations as degenerated versions of the old, which need simply a more committment and will from their side.

You’re right in that wars are easier to refight from retrospect, but the notion of clear hindsight is being used to create an artificial fog of ambiguity over the errors of the Administration. Effectively, you’re saying that because nobody can know everything, the errors of the Bush administration were inevitable. But that runs into a problem: Nobody can be completely ignorant, either, and the indications are that the Bush administration was confronted by the potential negative consequences of their actions beforehand, and did not give the due respect to that. We do not get to go back in time, but we do have those who review the records of the past, the state of the present, and the signs of the future, and make pretty good assessments of what might happen.

The Bush administration failed to approach Iraq with an open mind, with a selfless attitude necessary in wise leaders. They took it personally when people did not follow their line. To them, loyalty to the ideology, to their assumptions was more important than other obligations. Regardless of whether they felt that through their ideology, they fulfilled those obligations, the fact is, their own mindset has hamstrung their appreciate of our situation.

It scares people like me that people like them are in charge of our foreign policy. It’s like riding a bus driven by a madman, unable to get off. The choices were never ideal but I know there were better choices available to us at the time, and if we fail to learn from experience, or to demand correction from those who stray into error, we only serve to rationalize ourselves into furth failure.

When confronted by error in your video game, you were likely not content to settle for a continuation of it, but instead sought to improve things, even if no strategy lacked for some element of error. The fact that we are doomed to make mistakes is no reason to to be lax about correcting them.

Jack, you’re forgetting that the sanctions and the troop presence were intended to get Saddam to allow inspectors unfettered access to Iraq. It worked.

By 2003, the IAEA had verified that Iraq had no nukes or nuke programs, and all the UNMOVIC reports pointed to verifying no WMD within a couple months. At that point, WMD monitoring teams would have been put in place, sanctions scaled back to only include things that could be used to manufacture WMD, and the troops would have been drawn down or removed. The full force of the UN could even have been enlisted to force fair elections. Mission accomplished - congratulations President Bush.

You’re making the mistake of extrapolating from 2002, rather than March, 2003.

“The full force of the UN could even have been enlisted to force fair elections.”

This is said in jest, right? What makes you think the French, Russians and Chinese, not to mention the Arab league would be enthusiastic about that anyway? In a free and fair election, the Shiites win and the Kurds are junior partners, then, now and forever. The Sunni Arab states are not going to love this now and they wouldn’t love it in our hypothetical either. And when Saddam lost through fair elections, the French and Russian lose their lucrative contracts. We would find no support for the idea.

If I extrapolate from March 2003, the U.S. backs down. Saddam is glorified and confident. The Russians and French continue to help him. He becomes a much greater force. We have to deal with a strong Saddam right about now after he strong-arms some of his neighbors. Meanwhile all the peace activists have demanded that the U.S. return Iraqi sovereignty by not having no fly zones and Saddam has been able to punish our friends the Kurds. Everyone blames the U.S. for supporting Saddam (by not getting rid of him). We are pretty much in the same boat, but it cost us and our friends more to get there.

Jack-
Don’t extrapolate from 2003, do it from 2002. Bush unfortunately committed us early to regime removal before we even had good evidence of the things we said we wanted to remove them for.

This is what I’m talking about in terms of the politicizing of intelligence. We get into real trouble when we end up searching for the facts to justify things after we make the decision.

Look, no containment of Saddam would be perfect, but it’s a lot easier to continue containment when you’ve not poked holes in it yourself. Bush poked holes in it, I think, only to discover at the last minute that there wasn’t anything worth going to war for that the inspections would find.

You can’t keep your options open forever, but you can at least keep them open until the facts you find out give you good reason and backup for whatever course of action suits the situation best. Otherwise, the political traps will keep on coming, and you’ll be weighing your political survival against America’s security interests.

If I extrapolate from March 2003, the U.S. backs down… blah, blah, blah.

Well, Jack. looks like we’ve taken this one as far as it will go. You’re wrong, I’m right, and Neither of us is going to change our minds.

It’s been interesting. :)