Ms. Marr's testimony, conveniently linked by ShilohCat in atranaya.org , is serious and sober. I would cross - reference it with a couple things I've posted in the past. First, the long Langewiesche piece on US troops in Bosnia from the Atlantic, Peace is Hell theatlantic.com . Previously excerpted in #reply-18443072 , this one really gives me great trepidation when people talk about the ease of occupation in post-war Iraq. A different clip, from the beginning:
But the lieutenant was a worrier. He brought up the subject of empires, Roman, Spanish, British. He recognized an important difference between those dead empires and this new Pax Americana. The old empires were direct exercises in territorial domination, cultural subjugation, and the extraction of wealth. In contrast, the American reason for being in a place like Bosnia, though perhaps based on calculations of national self-interest, is to a large degree altruistic. The United States goes in, enforces the peace, helps to fix things up, and leaves—or that's the intention, even if, case by case, things have never quite worked out that way. With his ground-level view of the process, the lieutenant was uncertain that these interventions could be sustained in the long run. He told me he had heard that one way to kill a tiger is to distract it from so many different sides that it tries to run in every direction at once.
It wasn't surprising that the image had stuck in his mind. He was patrolling the streets of an obscure little town at a time when the fighting force he represented—the U.S. military—was the most powerful in the world, prepared to wage even simultaneous wars, yet was also worried about the burden of low-risk assignments like this one. Since 1989 the United States has engaged in only two significant fights: the Gulf War and the air action against Serbia, both of which turned out to be almost too easy. The Pentagon complains that the number of its overseas "deployments" has tripled in recent years, neglecting to mention that many of the missions are minuscule, and consist of sending off just a few instructors or engineers. If they're camped in a hotel for long enough, it counts. Still, the worry about overextension is real, and it reflects one of the stranger ideas of our time—that for the American military the apparently trivial problem of peacekeeping has recently proved to be more difficult even than waging war.
A couple links away from that article, there was this:
Midnight in Sarajevo theatlantic.com
Containing this creepy little possible foreshadowing of one way things can go way wrong:
Stampi, a friend from Sarajevo who had come to pick me up in Croatia, just shrugged his shoulders when I expressed surprise that there were no snowplows or even traffic policemen along the route. "The government does nothing," he said matter-of-factly. "It was different before."
"When?" I asked.
Stampi looked at me for a moment, his usually impassive face for once expressing almost exaggerated bewilderment. The question was too obvious to merit a response. But he gave one: "In Tito's time, of course."
I also remember Jack Matlock's review of Pollack in the NYT nytimes.com
:
In sum, Pollack is not convincing when he argues that deterrence (or deterrence plus some vigorously enforced containment measures) is a more risky course in the long run than invasion. An invasion would be trumpeted by many in the Islamic world as an attack on Islam. Never mind that this would be a lie; it would be widely believed and might well increase the number of misguided youths placing themselves at the disposal of Al Qaeda or other instruments of suicidal terrorism. If many Muslims concluded that the attack was against Islam, Arab governments supporting the United States could be threatened by domestic violence.
Muslim outrage could also make it much more difficult to keep the nuclear materials now in Pakistan out of terrorist hands. The Pakistani public has been encouraged to consider its nuclear weapons ''Islamic bombs.'' President Pervez Musharraf seems to be making a serious effort to bring Islamic fanatics under control, but most likely their sympathizers still infest his government. Even a successful invasion of Iraq could have the perverse effect of increasing the threat we had tried to eliminate. While Saddam Hussein can, with determined effort, be deterred, Osama bin Laden and his like cannot.
Most of Pollack's analysis is thoughtful and balanced, particularly that dealing with the Arab world. Therefore, it is unfortunate that in his final chapter Pollack damages his argument by rhetorical excess. He goes so far as to equate policies of containment and deterrence with the appeasement of Hitler in 1938. In fact, containment and deterrence are opposites of appeasement. Such misplaced comparisons smack of hysteria, and damage Pollack's credibility.
Um. Pollack may have been reading too much FADG when he wrote that chapter, or maybe it was just the wider dissemination of the Godwin's Law meme that got to him, the "appeasement" line has been flogged to death in far wider circles, I'm sure. Flipping back to Fallows' Atlantic article, The Fifty-first State theatlantic.com , it looks like he, also, is somewhat unimpressed by the tireless demonstration of Godwin in the wider world:
I ended up thinking that the Nazi analogy paralyzes the debate about Iraq rather than clarifying it. Like any other episode in history, today's situation is both familiar and new. In the ruthlessness of the adversary it resembles dealing with Adolf Hitler. But Iraq, unlike Germany, has no industrial base and few military allies nearby. It is split by regional, religious, and ethnic differences that are much more complicated than Nazi Germany's simple mobilization of "Aryans" against Jews. Hitler's Germany constantly expanded, but Iraq has been bottled up, by international sanctions, for more than ten years. As in the early Cold War, America faces an international ideology bent on our destruction and a country trying to develop weapons to use against us. But then we were dealing with another superpower, capable of obliterating us. Now there is a huge imbalance between the two sides in scale and power.
Yeah, well, whatever. His next paragraph also seems somewhat in line with my view of the world, demonstrating I guess that Fallows is at his heart a sneering appeasing leftist cheese eater, or something:
If we had to choose a single analogy to govern our thinking about Iraq, my candidate would be World War I. The reason is not simply the one the historian David Fromkin advanced in his book A Peace to End All Peace: that the division of former Ottoman Empire territories after that war created many of the enduring problems of modern Iraq and the Middle East as a whole. The Great War is also relevant as a powerful example of the limits of human imagination: specifically, imagination about the long-term consequences of war.
A WWI analogy not mentioned there is the war-by-railroad-timetable inevitability that set in there once mobilization started. Creeps me out.
The Fallows article is really good background reading, worth another look for anybody who really wants to think about this stuff instead of taking potshots at the French. One more bit:
Providing even 25,000 occupiers on a sustained basis would not be easy for the U.S. military. Over the past decade the military's head count has gone down, even as its level of foreign commitment and the defense budget have gone up. All the active-duty forces together total about 1.4 million people. Five years ago it was about 1.5 million. At the time of the Gulf War the total was over two million. With fewer people available, the military's "ops tempo" (essentially, the level of overtime) has risen, dramatically in the past year. Since the terrorist attacks some 40,000 soldiers who had planned to retire or leave the service have been obliged to stay, under "stop-loss" personnel policies. In July the Army awarded a $205 million contract to ITT Federal Services to provide "rent-a-cop" security guards for U.S. bases in Bosnia, sparing soldiers the need to stand guard duty. As of the beginning of September, the number of National Guard and Reserves soldiers mobilized by federal call-ups was about 80,000, compared with about 5,600 just before September 11, 2001. For the country in general the war in Central Asia has been largely a spectator event—no war bonds, no gasoline taxes, no mandatory public service. For the volunteer military on both active and reserve duty it has been quite real. |
