Um. Sorry to be sarcastic, but the first casualty has been pounded into the grave so early and often here that it's hard to take the T word seriously. Alternatively, I'd point to Message 20913482 , Message 20928063 , and Message 20933846 , three relatively straightforward accounts from the frontlines, which as near as I can tell pretty much tell the truth in albeit in a locally unpalatable form.
And to be even more irrepresibly sarcastic, the only good I see coming out of Iraq is that the mess there might, just might, keep W from messing things up even worse at home. Given the state of congress, might is very much the operative word there. An article relevant to both the "truth" issue and the domestic mess to come: washingtonpost.com
Meanwhile, back on the domestic terror front, we got this cute little story about the one true way to be spending our homeland security dollars:
U.S. Tells D.C. to Pay Security Expenses
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 11, 2005; Page A01
D.C. officials said yesterday that the Bush administration is refusing to reimburse the District for most of the costs associated with next week's inauguration, breaking with precedent and forcing the city to divert $11.9 million from homeland security projects. washingtonpost.com
I've posted way too many articles today, but you get one for the road, just because it seems to be pretty relevant to your own point of view. Personally, I try to always give W full credit these days , I was confused in the past but from now on it'll always be W's war to me.
Rumsfeld's Legacy: The Iraq Syndrome? washingtonpost.com
Edit: GST beat me to that one, Message 20930668 , but he didn't do the whole article, so here you go.
By Lawrence Freedman
Sunday, January 9, 2005; Page B04
Just as Vietnam became McNamara's War, Iraq has become Rumsfeld's War.
From the outset, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has inserted himself in almost every aspect of the campaign, from military strategy to postwar planning, and served as the war's public face. In doing so, he's claimed that one of the advantages of such centralized control was that there was a clear point of accountability.
Now he is being held to account and facing a formidable indictment: rejecting a top general's advice on the force levels that would be needed to restore order to Iraq after Saddam Hussein's regime had been toppled; dismissing State Department advice and plans on postwar reconstruction; failing to realize the seriousness of the early looting and chaos; supporting the disbanding of the Iraqi army without regard to the likely consequences of turning loose thousands of armed and angry unemployed soldiers; and inviting a public relations disaster by circumventing the laws of war to facilitate the indefinite holding and periodic torturing of prisoners. More recently, Rumsfeld has been rebuked for his dismissive treatment of soldiers anxious about inadequate equipment and for adding insult to injury by having a machine sign his condolence letters to bereaved families.
In countering these charges, Rumsfeld cannot complain that he was the victim of poor advice, because the only advice he appears to trust is his own. This was evident from the moment he arrived at the Pentagon and is one reason why comparisons with President Lyndon B. Johnson's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, are apt and illuminating. And just as McNamara left behind the "Vietnam syndrome," when Rumsfeld departs, his bequest may well be an "Iraq syndrome."
At first glance there appears to be little in common between McNamara -- the brash, relatively young, number-crunching corporate manager of the 1960s -- and Rumsfeld, the relatively old, former wrestler and veteran political bruiser of the 2000s. But they share some traits: When it came to the defense budget, both were leery of military advice, which they believed favored certain weapons programs for institutional as much as strategic reasons. And they carried their suspicions forward into operations, leading both to be accused of arrogance. Air Force Gen. Thomas White famously chastised McNamara's Pentagon for being full of "pipe-smoking, tree-full-of-owls" defense intellectuals, much as uniformed officers today disparage the intellectuals surrounding Rumsfeld.
The irony is that for three decades, American interventionists like those surrounding Rumsfeld have been laboring to overcome the Vietnam syndrome and its reluctance to get involved in overseas wars. And now, in their hour of seeming triumph, having waged a war that was largely supported by Americans despite the perils, these interventionists have much to fear. That's because whenever Rumsfeld finally packs up his office at the Pentagon, he will leave behind an even more burdensome Iraq syndrome -- the renewed, nagging and sometimes paralyzing belief that any large-scale U.S. military intervention abroad is doomed to practical failure and moral iniquity.
In 1991, two days before the Persian Gulf War ended, the first President Bush wrote in his diary: "It's surprising how much I dwell on the end of the Vietnam syndrome." For the elder Bush and others who saw the Vietnam syndrome acting as a drag on American foreign and defense policy, the best remedy was to show that the country had learned how to use force effectively. After U.S. forces had evicted Saddam Hussein's invading army from Kuwait, the president said, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."
The interventionists in the younger Bush's administration couldn't have wished for a better proving ground than another Iraq war, where they would demonstrate not only that the United States would have no trouble sweeping aside a third-rate army but also that it could use its military might to transform a country, not just contain it. This war would pursue the most ambitious foreign policy goals, replacing a dangerous and tyrannical regime with one that was both friendly and democratic.
Now, however, the optimism with which the administration entered Iraq in March 2003 has been severely dented. At best, current strategy promises to keep the lid on a grim situation, in the hope that the enemy will get exhausted before the American people do. At worst, the United States may be forced to withdraw, leaving a country embroiled in civil war and a haven for terrorists. A new standard for foreign policy debacles will then have been set, always to be invoked as the best argument for caution when contemplating the use of force.
Unlike Vietnam, a war of containment, Iraq was supposedly a war of preemption. So the Iraq syndrome poses an even more serious challenge to U.S. policy than the Vietnam syndrome did, because it calls into question not only the wisdom of intervention but the integrity of U.S. intelligence and judgment about what poses a direct threat to U.S. national security.
Particularly damaging for the Bush administration is the allegation that it finds itself in the current mess because it ignored the basic lesson drawn from Vietnam. McNamara (and the aides Colin Powell once called the "slide-rule prodigies") came under attack for failing to leave the conduct of any military campaign to the generals. The conservative critique goes one step farther: Rather than accept the brutal but compelling logic of overwhelming force, McNamara and his top aides placed unwarranted confidence in rarefied academic concepts of graduated response.
But this time, the meddler-in-chief is Rumsfeld. As another Thomas White, fired by Rumsfeld as secretary of the Army in May 2003, complained in an interview on PBS last August, Rumsfeld "micromanages, overcontrols, can be intimidating, almost abusive. He tends to stifle communication, overworks things that he ought to delegate."
But what should the role of the defense secretary be? In a book called "Supreme Command," published just before the Iraq war, Eliot Cohen, a member of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board and a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, challenged the post-Vietnam view that civilian leaders, once they define their objectives, should step back and let the military professionals work out the best way to meet them. Cohen argued that successful war requires civilian leaders who are prepared to challenge military judgments. For civilian interventionists, Cohen's book was refreshing, because during the 1990s it was the uniformed officers, many of them Vietnam veterans like Secretary of State Powell, who had become cautious about sending American soldiers off to war in Somalia, the Balkans or the Middle East.
The principle of civilian participation in operational decisions should really not be controversial. If it has become so, it is because civilian-military relations have acquired an adversarial character, for reasons that go deeper than Iraq.
With the Cold War at its most tense, the Kennedy administration found military views as reckless as they were confused. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK's generals dismissed all policies other than an invasion of Cuba as tantamount to appeasement. To the civilians, it seemed that the generals did not really want to accept responsibility for military operations, because they always presented stark alternatives -- either the massive use of force, if necessary including nuclear weapons, or nothing at all. When they were urged by Kennedy to prepare for a more subtle counterinsurgency campaign in Vietnam, their enthusiasm was well contained. They saw little point in a "hearts and minds" campaign and, when given the chance, they reverted with some relief back to "search and destroy."
After Vietnam, the military steered as clear as possible from operations that depended in any way on winning over local populations. If there were to be future wars, they insisted , only overwhelming force should be used (a view that came to be associated with Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff). Indeed in doctrine, training and contingency planning, the military's dominant focus was major war. The Persian Gulf War was taken as confirming the validity of this approach. By contrast, the painful withdrawals from Beirut in 1984 and Somalia a decade later were seen as demonstrating the folly of getting drawn into messy civil wars.
These events, along with the wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, encouraged the view that the best way to keep popular support for operations was to keep casualties to a minimum. This meant that force protection was the first priority in any operation, and this could be achieved if the U.S. contribution was confined to air power. The Army was for proper wars; lesser operations such as peacekeeping were best left to allies or, in the case of counterterrorism, to the CIA.
When Rumsfeld took over the Pentagon, he did not disagree with the Army's reluctance to get involved in nation-building, but he was still exasperated. During his first term as secretary of defense under President Gerald Ford in the mid-1970s, he had been an early enthusiast for what was called even then the "revolution in military affairs," looking to combine new information technologies with precision munitions as a means of gaining a comparative edge in regular war. He was appalled to discover how much the forces were still fixated on preparing for big wars and purchasing high-profile weapons platforms rather than developing smaller, nimbler forces geared to the actual contingencies he thought they were likely to face.
Rumsfeld's "transformation agenda" put him on a collision course with the generals. Rumsfeld followed his instincts and initially could claim vindication in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both cases, the problems came as the wars took on a more irregular character. In Afghanistan, much of the al Qaeda leadership, including Osama bin Laden, managed to get away, and in Iraq a swift occupation gave way to a protracted and bloody insurgency.
More troops on the ground would have helped. For postwar Iraq, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki made the case for a deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops. Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, famously observed that he found it "hard to conceive" that it would take "more forces to provide stability in a post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army." He was sadly mistaken. He and Rumsfeld accepted claims that the Iraqi people would welcome the Americans as liberators and showed a remarkable lack of prudence or even curiosity about the ways in which the invasion could turn sour.
Rumsfeld's management style has left him with few supporters and vulnerable to the charge that everything that has gone wrong in Iraq is because he ignored military advice.
Rumsfeld's fault lay less in his readiness to challenge military views -- which often deserved challenging -- but in asking the wrong questions. It is certainly not the case that if only military advice had been followed in Iraq, everything would have been well. In reality the blame for the morass should be shared, for the fault also lies in the U.S. military's insistence on preparing for wars they would prefer to fight rather than those they might need to fight.
The shortage of troops, which meant that they were spread too thinly, aggravated a problem that had deeper roots. U.S. training and doctrine provided little preparation for the demands of irregular war, and the importance of thinking through the local political consequences of military engagements. Instead it was the domestic political consequences of American casualties that made force protection such a priority and led to a cavalier attitude toward Iraqi casualties.
The starting point for the American troubles was that in the process of liberating the Iraqi people, U.S. forces killed far too many of them. When combined with Abu Ghraib and Rumsfeld's tendency to dismiss in an off-hand, "stuff happens" way any criticisms of the developing mayhem in Iraq, it is not surprising that Arab skepticism about U.S. intentions has grown.
Iraq is not an experiment that future U.S. governments will care to repeat. For the moment, even this administration is unable to repeat it, because there are no ground forces to spare for major campaigns elsewhere. Unless it proves possible to gain the upper hand against the insurgents, a bungled war will leave the United States weaker and not stronger. The confidence in American power that led to war being initiated without direct provocation has been shaken. Whenever the possible use of force is raised again, assurances will be sought that this will not be "another Iraq." And future interventionists will worry about how to shake off the Iraq syndrome.
Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College London, is the author of "Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam" (Oxford University Press). |
