Sometimes, I find that I can work my own thinking out most satisfactorily if I start writing… and then, that I will end up in places fairly different than where I started out from– or indeed, than where I might have expected to go. That’s something that has happened with the “Powell Doctrine” story that I started here yesterday, and have just concluded… and I’ve found out now that it’s not really centrally about the Powell Doctrine at all.
Oh well. That’s okay. That’s what life as a writer is frequently like. The problem, though, with being a blogger is that I’ve already “published” what I wrote yesterday… What I wrote today takes off from, and complements, that earlier post. But it ends up in quite a different place than I expected.
Luckily, this work is not at all wasted. It’s already started a good conversation down on that other post. Plus, I think I’ll take the two posts together and fashion them into a slightly more coherent essay for a dead-wood publication sometime in the near future… Anyway, enough of my introduction here…
Where we had gotten to in this story yesterday
is that our two intrepid plotters, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, had
decided that after 9/11 they had a unique opportunity to kill the “Powell
Doctrine” once and for all– but that to do so they needed to demonstrate
the power of the US military not just in Afghanistan but also in Iraq.
Now, read on…
It now seems pretty well established– from the books by Bob Woodward
and Ron Susskind, among other sources– that Che/feld had succeeded
as early as December 2001 or so in persuading George W. Bush of the
need to invade Iraq. But from the beginning they planned that this
military operation should be very different from the one that, just over
ten years earlier, had been successful in ejecting Saddam Hussein’s forces
from Kuwait. The 1991 operation had been a Powell Doctrine classic,
consisting of: (1) the amassing around the targeted theater of a military
force large enough to cope with just about any contingency; (2) the administration’s
pursuit of a steady and open campaign of political persuasion designed to
win strong support for the use of force from both the US public and the United Nations; and (3) the definition,
prior to the start of hostilities, of the precise political goals of the
operation– a definition that was worked out in conjunction with all allies
and endorsed by the U.N., and that formed the core of the “exit strategy”.
The operation that Che/feld planned from late 2001 on would be radically
different on all three scores. In particular, Rumsfeld wanted to
“prove” the efficacity of his favored force structure– one dominated
by light and very mobile forces that could be deployed anywhere around
the world with a minimum of lead-time. (Unlike the force
structure used in 1990-91, which took around eight months to assemble.)
Rumsfeld’s concept really was for a “stealth force”, one that could
pop up to threaten or attack a potential foe with an absolute minimum of
advance notice. It would also be “stealthy”, in his and Cheney’s
thinking, by virtue of the fact that it would be small enough that its
assembling could “slip under the radar” of too much scrutiny and oversight
by the US Congress and the US political class, in general. If this light,
stealthy force could achieve its political objective and all be shipped home
relatively quickly, they must have thought, why bother about going to all
the trouble of consulting with Congressional leaders, getting a highly specific
authorization for this operation from the Congress (something that would
also tip off DC-watchers everywhere else in the world as to what was afoot),
and doing all that hard work of public persuasion such as George Bush I
did in late 1990?
Plus, of course, by design the Che/feld force would be one that should
never be attached to anything as potentially constraining as a U.N. resolution
or the requirements of allies overseas. Allies could be taken on
board– but only if they were willing dupes, like the “Association of
East Caribbean Nations” that the Reagan administration hastily assembled
in 1983 to give a pathetic little political cover to his unilateral invasion
of Grenada that year. Or like Tony Blair.
Understanding the three dimensions in which the Che/feld force was,
by design, a “stealth” force is important because it was that extremely
lean force– or anyway, a slightly modified version of it– that occupied
Iraq in March 2003 and that then proved itself spectacularly incapable
of “winning the peace” there.
Rumsfeld would later notably say, “You go to war with the army you have,
not the army you want.” That was one of his most spectacularly mendacious
utterances! Firstly, the war was not one that “had” to be engaged
in at all– in particular, it could have awaited the assembling of just
about any force structure that Rumsfeld chose to use… In the terms
that realist power politicians understand, the “containment” of Saddam Hussein
was working. Second, the degree of Rumsfeld’s own intervention in the
planning of the force strucure for the invasion was extremely high indeed.
He didn’t just go to war with the army he “happened” to have on hand.
Every detail of its structure had been painstakingly negotiated,
by him, beforehand.
Woodward’s book Plan of Attack gives many details of how the
force size was negotiated between him and Gen. Tommy Franks, the Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Rumsfeld originally wanted a force of only
60 K. Franks wanted 400 K. In the end, the deal was struck at
140 K: more than three times closer to Rumsfeld’s figure than Franks’s
.
Rumsfeld’s insistence on using only a lean, stealthy force was matched,
as we know, by what can only be described as a criminal insouciance toward
the responsibilities of post-conflict (“Phase 4”) operations. Did he
honestly believe the assurances with which Ahmad Chalabi had been plying
him, to the effect that he had “thousands of supporters” throughout Iraq,
ready at a moment’s notice to take over the country? (And therefore
that the instantaneous dissolution of all existing Iraqi public-security forces
would not lead to mayhem, widespread looting, and sabotage… ?)
Or did Rumsfeld and the neocons with whom he had staffed all vital portions
of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) fundamentally not care
about whether mayhem engulfed Iraq?
Perhaps– and this is a charitable explanation– some of them did not understand
how bad things could get, and others did not care.
As we all know, the post-invasion mayhem in Iraq rapidly came nto engulf
not only the lives and hopes of the vast majority of the country’s long-opporessed
citizens, but also the US military force that Rumsfeld’s planning had inserted
into the country. And that, under international humanitarian law,
now found itself responsible for “running” the country.
… It is informative nowadays, in the opening days of 2006, to go back and
read some of the plaudits that were heaped on Rumsfeld by some of his admirers
back in April 2003. You can read one fairly good collection of them in
this Wall Street Journal article
by Greg Jaffe, helpfully archived by the OSD on its website for our edification…
The odious classical historian Victor Davis Hanson gushes: “By any fair standard
of even the most dazzling charges in military history, the Germans in the
Ardennes in the spring of 1940 or Patton’s romp in July of 1944, the present
race to Baghdad is unprecedented in its speed and daring and in the lightness
of its casualties.” And there’s this, which ominously enough comes
from Peter Pace, the Marines general who has recently taken over as Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “”If you can deliver five divisions anywhere
in the world in 90 days, might you have the same impact by getting three
divisions there in 30 days? Speed is a force enhancement.” (Let’s hope
Pace has learned a bit more about the real world since then?)
Warfare as a “romp”… An emphasis on speed at the cost of responsibility
for the succes of Phase 4 operations… Those were the qualities celebrated
back then in the “Rumsfeld Doctrine”. At the end of April 2003, the
Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon
was describing
the way Rumsfeld was viewed by many in Washington:
he is the most influential cabinet secretary since Kissinger,
the strongest defence secretary since McNamara [I have to put in my own
exclamation point here ! ~HC], the most creative battle strategist since
MacArthur, the most refreshingly blunt politician since Churchill. They also
suggest that the doctrine of overwhelming force espoused by Colin Powell,
secretary of state, will soon be replaced by a new Rumsfeld doctrine emphasising
high technology, special operations units and sheer brainpower to defeat
future foes.
O’Hanlon was at pains to dissociate himself from those views. (He also
wrote there: “America cannot leave Iraq immediately. That commitment alone
could consume a couple of divisions for at least a couple of years…”
)
The past three years have given us all vided a massively tragic illustration
of the fallout from Rumsfeld and Cheney’s criminally irresponsible approach
to war. American service-men and women have come home from Iraq in
coffins, on gurneys, and in that state of inner bedlam here called Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder. Our nation’s economy and its ability to provide the
basics of a decent life to its citizens have been reamed out by the sudden
need to pour nearly half a trillion dollars into the (actually, nearly hopeless)
effort to staunch the strategic and human setbacks being suffered in Iraq.
And in Iraq itself, as we know too well, a whole nation’s physical
and social infratsructure has been torn apart, and its shattered parts left
bleeding by the roadside.
… Which brings us to yesterday’s news– delivered by the administration
in characteristically “stealthy” fashion: that is, by a General in
distant Baghdad, on a day when Americans were still dozing– that the effort
to fund any more “reconstruction” in Iraq would now be summarily discontinued.
I’ve been thinking more about the shape of this story since I started writing
it here yesterday. Having gotten this far, I now think the big theme
here is more “the end of the Che/feld Doctrine” than it is the possible reinstatement
of the Powell Doctrine. More on why the Powell Doctrine can’t simply
be “reinstated” later, I hope.
In a strong sense, of course, the Che/feld Doctrine met its demise as long
ago as the summer of 2003: at the point when it became clear that
the quick extraction of most of the US forces from Iraq that Che/Feld had
planned on would not, indeed, be possible. Yes, I am sure the two old
guys had all along planned for some kind of non-trivial follow-on force to
remain inside Iraq, in the big new “enduring” military bases that would replace
the ones that they exited from, so quickly that summer, in Saudi Arabia.
But those remaining soldiers would, in their view, have had more of
a regionwide strike and deterrence function, rather than having to do very
much to actually run things in Iraq. But by then, they had dissolved
the Iraqi security forces, and all Chalabi’s promises re his claimed thousands
of followers had been proven quite illusory…
So those “lean and brainy” US forces in Iraq suddenly found themselves having
to run the country. Darn! Not what Che/feld had been counting
on, at all. There were many reports and rumors at the time that they
had other plans for them… Iran? Syria? … Those plans all
had to be put on hold. And the US Congress then had belatedly to be
appealed to appealed to, in the first of an increasingly groveling series
of requests to start producing all the money required to fund the occupation
of Iraq. They were so lucky, of course, that (unlike George Bush I)
they were living in an era of Washington-as-one-party-state.
So what we’ve seen in Iraq since the summer of 2003 has been a definite modification
of the Che/feld Doctrine. The biggest modification? That the
mission came to revolve around that task so much opposed and hated by Che/feld:
“nation-building.”
… Yesterday we learned that the administration has decided not even to
proceed further in any meaningful way with that task. I concluded,
and I still think rightly, from that announcement that they were fundamentally
changing the nature of the commitment they were making in– and even more
crucially, to— Iraq. Also, since it now looked quite prepared
to discard even the fig-leaf of a claimed commitment to “reconstruction”
with which it had hitherto tried to justify its presence in the country,
the US military looked poised to undertake a fairly large-scale (if still
not yet) withdrawal of its presence from most of the country.
My first conclusion further to that was that, with
the death-knoll thereby being tolled for the Che/feld project in Iraq,
the essentially conservative approach to the use of force in international
affairs embodied in the Powell Doctrine was thereby being re-instated. But
on reflection I now think the situation in Iraq, and globally, is much more
fluid and open-ended than that. Plus, it is quite likely that it is
now impossible– for a host of technical, geopolitical, and domestic-political
reasons– for any US government simply to reinstate the Powell Doctrine.
After all, the cataclysmic series of events that have shaken not only
the Persian Gulf region but also the whole world system over the past three
years cannot simply be erased from everyone’s memory, at home and abroad.
Here in the US, I sincerely hope we can muster the political resources to
build a new movement for accountability in our government’s conduct of international
affairs– and most particularly, in affairs of war and peace. It is
of the utmost importance, it seems to me, that never again should the US
Congress be allowed to fall asleep on the watch and simply, zombie-like,
pass the kind of broad, war-enabling legislation that it passed so rapidly
in October 2002. This is not a partisan point to make. I have
no particular hope that the Democratic Party as a whole can ever live up
to the responsibilities required of a true opposition party, though some
luminaries within it did do so in October 2002. Since then, the movement
for accountability in war-and-peace affairs has come almost as much from
some wise voices in the GOP as from the Democratic Party.
Internationally, meanwhile,back in 2002-2003 many of the world’s governments
seemed unwilling to do anything serious to try to hold Washington back from
the disastrous path it took. (Though I do still give credit to the
French and German governments of that day which truly, it seems to me, acted
as the kinds of good friends who try to prevent their friend from taking
disastrous action.) Some governments perhaps actually shared the Bushites’
war goals. Many other friendly governments were either so cowed by
US power and promises, so sympathetic with the degree of US traumatization
after 9/11, or so eager to remain as US lap-dogs that did almost nothing
to hold the Bushites back from their course. Woodward quoted Cheney
as referring to a “slipstream effect” that the US could create, simply by
moving forward boldly on its own, an act that would of itself (and almost
independently of their own volition) tend to pull many other governments
along behind it. Other governments, less friendly to the US and wiser
about the real risks of foreign “intervention”, were perhaps quite happy
to see the Bushites proceed with their invasion of Iraq…
So now, three years later: no “slipstream”, and indeed a US whose power and
profile on the world scene has been seriously diminished since 2002. That
diminishment, moreover, looks set to continue for some while yet.
I can only think of this as something that is good for the real, longterm
interests of the US citizenry. Maintaining our government’s hegemony over
the lives of the 96% of humankind that are citizens of other countries is
not a project that is destined to help us flourish as a national community.
As with this fateful adventure in Iraq it will bring coffins and woundings
back into our communities while ratcheting up the degree of hatred and estrangement
felt toward us by much of the “other” 96% of humanity.
The Powell Doctrine was the doctrine that dominated in US official thinking
from the end of the Vietnam War, through the end of the global Cold War,
and down to 2003. It was a doctrine that aimed at winning and then,
after the end of the Cold War, perpetuating US global hegemony in a fairly
“smart” way (and it was pretty successful in doing that.) I don’t
want to see it reinstated; and more to the point I think that in the present
world-political climate it is highly unlikely that it will get reinstated.
As the US government proceeds with the reduction (and hopefully ending)
of its troop presence in Iraq one of the main tasks of the global peace movement–
both within and outside the US– will be to start a real conversation with
all sectors of US society about how to undertake a radical drawdown of the
global structure of our country’s armed forces so they are more appropriate
to our real role in the world and much better integrated into broader structures
that pursue the legitimate security goals of the whole of humanity, not just
the claimed goals of some portion of the US citizenry. Important sectors
of our country’s political elite– Messrs Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their acolytes
and cohorts– have amply demonstrated to the whole world over the past three
years that they simply cannot be trusted with the kind of over-blown, extremely
dangerous weaponry that the US currently commands. The rest of us need
to demand accountability, demobilization, and a turn toward the real demands
of human security not the fevered imaginings of the weapons-makers.
My personal view of blogging is that blog entries are closer to software components than to newspaper /magazine articles.
That is, Orwellesque changes are OK as far as I am concerned – if the author knows what he wants to accomplish.
For example, NR made quite a hype of forcing Krugman to publish corrections to his NYT articles on election problems in 2000 / 2004. But from blogging prospective, this bickering makes no sense. When readers / testers find some holes, blog author simply publishes the next release, etc.
Just my $0.02 🙂
I still hate this reference to Powell as having a “doctrine”. It would be better called a Montgomery doctrine or a Kitchener doctrine. Powell has nothing of his own. Everything Powell holds out has been filched.
I’m also not comfortable with the idea that countries did not stand up against the war. My country, South Africa, did so, and still does so. We have been against that war since long before it started, we have said so all along, and it’s all on record.
Dominc, you’re quite right about SA and a number of other countries (incl. Mexico and Canada) that held out as opponents of the war all along. Actually, nearly all African, Latin American, and Asian countries, come to think of it. I do need to refine that portion of the writing.
That’s why I say that the knowledge generated here is “social” knowledge. Because you guys make me think and re-think.
I’ll carry on calling it the Powell Doctrine for now, however. (1) It’s is more commonly called that here than it is the Weinberger Doctrine (or Kitchener or Monty.) (2) He proudly claimed it as his own (though with attribution to CW.) Anyway, the name is only incidentally important– except inasmuch as Che/feld must have loved seeing him squirm as he implemented their policy designed to skewer it (and him)…
Wiki makes it clear that Powell’s Doctrine was tailored specifically for the Gulf War in 1991. That is, it is based on the assumption that the conflict is essentially blizkrieg, taht is, short term regular strike. As for long term guerilla war is considered, it is completely out of this picture.
So, it worked perfectly in Iraq in Spring 2003. But then guerilla war started in Iraq which made PD completely irrelevant.
Can PD work no against Iran and N.Korea? The answer is pretty much certain no.
— US Army has no capacity to fight a number of wars simultaneously: in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Iran, in N.Korea.
— Both Iranian and N.Korean armies are no match for the US Army, but they are much stronger than Hussein’s in 1991. In addition, N.Koreans are raedy to strike S.Korea and, possibly, Japan.
— Both Iranians and N.Koreans are perfectly ready to fight guerilla war after their inevitable regular defeat. In addition, Iranians have strong influence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon.
1. Wiki on PD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_doctrine
2. Wiki on Gulf War: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990/1_Gulf_War
Powell has gotten off much too easy.
I was listening on the radio (BBC) this evening to an ex-State Department official being interviewed as to why reconstruction money for Iraq was being stopped. He said that support for the war was declining, and in effect that a further bill could not be got through Congress. I already thought this was the reason.
I was genuinely astounded to hear this being said out loud by someone close to the Bush administration (the BBC doesn’t ask genuinely neutral people for reactions, always representatives of the administration).
Anybody can do the sums: US congressmen, the Jaish al-Mujahidin, or Ayatollah Sistani. No reconstruction means triple zero per cent chance of bringing the Iraqi people round to accepting the continued presence of US troops. There wasn’t much chance before, but it was more than nothing. No acceptance by Iraqis means no permanent bases: you can’t keep bases for 50 years among a permanently hostile population. Even the British did better than that.
Actually I think this is good news for Iraq. It gives some hope of an end to the dreadful nightmare they are living through.
I was listening on the radio (BBC) this evening to an ex-State Department official being interviewed as to why reconstruction money for Iraq was being stopped. He said that support for the war was declining, and in effect that a further bill could not be got through Congress. I already thought this was the reason.
I was genuinely astounded to hear what is in effect an admission of defeat being expressed out loud by someone close to the Bush administration (the BBC doesn’t ask genuinely neutral people for reactions, always representatives of the administration).
Anybody can do the sums: US congressmen, the Jaish al-Mujahidin, or Ayatollah Sistani. No reconstruction means triple zero per cent chance of bringing the Iraqi people round to accepting the continued presence of US troops. There wasn’t much chance before, but it was more than nothing. No acceptance by Iraqis means no permanent bases: you can’t keep bases for 50 years among a permanently hostile population. Even the British did better than that.
Actually I think this is good news for Iraq. It gives some hope of an end to the dreadful nightmare they are living through. That is what is lacking in Iraq today: hope that things will get better. people seem to me to be waiting for something to change.
Sorry for OTP, but I can’t help gloating a little over Jack Abramoff’s guilty plea. The dominos are falling fast and hard.
If our Republic is saved, much of the credit will be due to career prosecutors in the Justice Department who truly believe in the rule of law, and are willing to take on the criminals who currently control the Republican Party and its support networks. The amazing thing is how quickly these gangsters are crumbling under the pressure.
Obviously, this is not La Cosa Nostra we are dealing with, even though Abramoff’s Miami casino deal did allegedly involve members of the Gambino family, and got at least one guy killed. These Republican criminals are not street-hardened thugs with a death-before-dishonor code of loyalty to their tribe. They are mostly pampered children of privilege like Abramoff (Beverly Hills High School), taught to place their own material comforts above any social duty. They are squeamish about any sort of contact with the lower classes, and deathly afraid of serving hard time in a penitentiary (for good reason). Consequently, they turn on each other like starving rats, the minute they realize their money and political connections aren’t going to extricate them from the justice system. Then while pleading guilty, they get all weepy and pledge to spend the rest of their lives doing God’s work.
A fitting subtitle for some future book about this cesspool of greed and corruption might be: a report on the venality of evil.
‎The operation that Che/feld planned from late 2001 on would be radically ‎‎different on all three scores. In particular, Rumsfeld wanted to “prove” the efficacity ‎‎of his favored force structure– one dominated by light and very mobile forces that ‎‎could be deployed anywhere around the world with a minimum of lead-time.‎
I think what helped Rumsfeld and other doing so the fact is US ‎got ‎more troops in ME, there were vast expansion and well established bases after ‎‎1990. This is clear ‎if we count the bases in Arabian Gulf in Doha, Bahrain ‎Oman, and Saudi in ‎addition to logistic support by more countries in the region like ‎Yemen Egypt and ‎Morocco .
‎
Having said that the sanction on Iraq and Iraqi for 13 years slip Saddam regime from Iraqi support ‎‎, this make more easy scenario for Rumsfeld to go ahead with his plan.‎
George Packer In his book “THE ASSASSINS’ GATE” which he blamed Rumsfeld ‎‎and Cheney as he put it
‎ “their neo-conservative thinking that led to our miserable lack of planning. By ‎‎their own beliefs, the whole purpose of the war was the post-war reshaping of Iraq, ‎‎yet as State Department and Pentagon officials raised warnings about the intractable, ‎‎costly lessons learned by the Clinton White House in Bosnia and Haiti, they were shut ‎‎up by hard-liners Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.”‎
‎http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkxODMmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTY4MzMwNTkmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk3‎‎
But other see George Packer differently “Packer mimics investigative reporter Bob ‎Woodward’s style”‎
‎http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.23528/pub_detail.asp‎
I see what you mean Helena. One more protest and I’ll stop. It’s just that this hollow man Powell wants a respectable reputation which he by no means deserves.
The idea of overwhelming force for a limited objective would not be surprising to the ancient Persians, let alone the Romans, but now this cheap trimmer wants it dressed up and sold to posterity as the “Powell Doctrine”.
Humbug. I rest my case.
Alastair’s: Actually I think this is good news for Iraq. It gives some hope of an end to the dreadful nightmare they are living through. … I agree (cautiously). I don’t think it’ll be a stright line from here to nirvana for Iraqis; but this development makes the route to– okay, perhaps not nirvana, but at least an acceptable condition of life– shorter than it would otherwise have been.
I am really sorry, my post from January 3, 2006 04:56 PM turned out to be really dirty, grrr… Updated version is 2006-01-03 On Powell’s Doctrine
In my younger days, I too tried to invent a Stealth Force. This was in the early ’80s, around the time I got into the Political Science racket in college, before I became an embittered subversive. It’s embarrassing to admit, but consider how little more sophisticated the thinking of Rumsfeld and gang was.
My idea was, to save the US from being bankrupted by the Cold War, we would dismantle all our heavy divisions in Europe, force the Euros to handle their own ground defense, and come up with a force based on the 1st AirCav in Vietnam. It would use several thousand VTOL transports (I know, I know, they never worked out). Since there was little doubt our F-15s would wipe out the MIGs of that era and establish air supremacy, the VTOLs could get where they needed to. (Matthais Rust later proved it was easier than I thought.) In case the Russians invaded Germany, we would send the whole force to, now get this, Warsaw. The Poles were already itching to revolt, and they showed in ’44 how stubborn they were. And it would be their last chance to save themselves from a Soviet conquest of all Europe. Once our guys landed in Warsaw, they would be behind a hundred Soviet divisions, right on their supply lines. My research on the Soviet Army indicated that it was very vulnerable to any supply disruption while on the offensive – their tanks can’t go very far without breaking. The entire system would collapse as the tanks ran out of fuel and parts, and the Soviets’ allies deserted.
What I can’t recall is what I figured would happen when the Soviets panicked and decided to nuke everyone. Which is sort of like the problem with all these clever guys (Powell and Rumsfeld both) trying to make war more acceptable to a democracy. It’s like Col. Hackworth’s idea to create a US Foreign Legion of mercenaries trading absolute obediance for the prize of US citizenship, on the grounds that we wouldn’t hesitate to use them if necessary. On the one hand, it’s tempting to think of what a really rich, advanced country could get away with militarily, but on the other hand, it’s the road to madness. America was better off in the Cold War with a less effective military than it could have had, and would have been even better off with an even less effective one, because we wouldn’t have gone into Vietnam.
“trying to make war more acceptable to a democracy”
What democracy? If this were a democracy, President Gore would never have invaded Iraq.
There was nothing wrong with your idea about letting the Soviet army roll through and then attacking their supply lines. This strategy (without the VTOLs) was successfully employed by the mujehadin agains the Soviets in Afghanistan, and is still being pursued to great effect by the Iraqi resistance. They just blew up a convoy of tankers today (or maybe that was yesterday).
I don’t know if Bush really cares how Iraq turns out. I think he just like blowin’ stuff up. It’s envigoratin’ – kinda like clearin’ brush!
Well, John, I guess Bush’s innovation was getting rid of the democracy, thus solving the acceptability problem. Still, it was important for Rumsfeld & Cheney to sell the idea of a “cakewalk”. Even semi-authoritarian states, I guess, have to make up fairy tales about war on the cheap these days.
The problem with my Warsaw idea is that there’s a hundred things that could have gone wrong with it in practice that I couldn’t have known about. By throwing 50,000 of our best troops five hundred miles behind enemy lines using gadgetry I was creating a situation that could have gone as badly as Khe Sanh (they survived but accomplished little) or as badly as Dien Bien Phu (total disaster). Democracy or not, the American people don’t like gambling with their boys. Look at the institutional personality of our Army, essentially forged by U.S. Grant and his bloody slog through Virginia, abondoning the faint-hearted maneuver warfare attempted by McClellan. Since then our Army has always worked best by being conservative, relying on massive long-range firepower and great logistics to suffocate opponents. Grant and Eisenhower were all-American generals. MacArthur and Patton were the opposite, exponents of big-gamble maneuvers who also were not exactly friends of democracy. The movie “Patton” cleverly implied there was something un-American about a general who studied, and loved, war enough to come up with brilliant maneuvers. Maybe that’s because our isolationist lobe warns us that a small, mobile Army led by elitists will one day cross the Rubicon and overthrow the Republic.
Which brings us back to Rumsfeld & Cheney, doesn’t it? (Minus the competence.)
super390, I think the key thing to always remember about Bush/Cheney is they want total control over all aspects of anything they are involved in. They are not the least bit interested in what anyone else thinks, and they would rather risk catastrophic failure than share decision making power. A light, maneuverable force of highly trained professional soldiers with a narrow, vertical command structure is just the sort of tool they would want to carry out their “foreign policy.”
Whether they succeed or fail in foreign wars is not as important to them as eliminating any potential incubator of domestic opposition. America is the real prize, super390, not the Middle East.
John, I absolutely agree. I’m on the lookout for signs that President Junior will bring the Army & Marines home to finish the destruction of democracy. I’ve long felt they were too worn out to use in an Iranian invasion, but now I wonder if the ordeal they were subjected to in Iraq was meant to weed out all the ones who would not obey a Presidential order to massacre Americans. The Washington Post ran a story about why so many troops in Iraq are willing to re-enlist. It mentioned a GI who said all he had to know how to do for a paycheck was pitch a tent and shoot a rifle. Another talked about the military being “almost like a big brother” helping him negotiate modern life. It sounds increasingly like, to put it in an ugly way, a redneck Army of racist and religious fanatics, throwbacks to the age of Kings, men untouched by the 20th Century. Very Guatemalan. The militarization of national disaster planning is also a concern.
But if he’s going to use them for that, he better do it before a third of them are incapacitated by the mysterious illnesses they will share with Gulf War veterans.
Helena,
You wrote:
>>”Or did Rumsfeld and the neocons with whom he had staffed all vital portions of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) fundamentally not care about whether mayhem engulfed Iraq?
Perhaps– and this is a charitable explanation– some of them did not understand how bad things could get, and others did not care.”Helena,
You wrote:
>>”Or did Rumsfeld and the neocons with whom he had staffed all vital portions of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) fundamentally not care about whether mayhem engulfed Iraq?
Perhaps– and this is a charitable explanation– some of them did not understand how bad things could get, and others did not care.”< From what I can glean from those (few) who actually made it to a perch on the walls of those inner sanctums was that you just "believed" in the whole enterprise ("a mini-America will just spring up on the eatered sands") or your were politely (sometimes not so politely) excused from any further discussion/planning/authority in the matter. Oh, and Jim Wilkenson's (sp?) name keeps turning up like a bad penny in all of these discussions. In any case, sounds very much like what COL Pat Lang has disucussed in previous writings ("Drinking the Kool-aid"). Those entrusted to lead were so faithful in themselves that oppostion or even questioning the assumptions was not tolerated. (Ironic given Che/feld's conintuous battle agains national security professionals in the guise fo questioning the professional's assumptions!) The whole stinky history will come out one day. And I don't think it will read too much differently than Thucydides' discussions about Athens' Syracuse (mis)Adventure. SP
Yes, SP, you have a good point. I should have mentioned the huge role played by the need for all the implementers of the policy to be (or act as) “true believers”. That’s certainly what you see from the political echelon– but thank God not yet all the uniformed military– inside this country.