quote:

While on the other side, the Dems have positioned themselves as the staunchest critics of surge in exchange for a short-sighted surge in the polls. To go back on it now would be admitting that General Betray Us was not, in fact, breaking faith with people of Iraq, although he may have risked the lives of our precious troops in the process (which is the proper role of an all volunteer military toward a defenseless civilian population, if you ask me). And over it all hangs this notion that our precious troops can do no wrong: the neurotic legacy of the Vietnam era, reiterated like a mantra, has the effect of preempting any close examination of the actual conduct of the war outside the Green Zone, where journalists once feared to tread. No, I'd say this conversation has not yet begun. [/hypothesis]

Well that's nice. The problem in Iraq, as most of us perceive it, is not with American politics but Iraqi politics. Since the Dems show little more evidence of bringing our troops home than Iraqi politicians show of adequately governing their nation... well, that's nice.

(Clarification request: can do no wrong as in prohibition or as in perfection?)

quote:

What, I ask you, is the point of pitting the strategy against the strategic goal? To portray it as an either/or dichotomy is kind of misleading, don'tcha think?

I think you grossly exaggerate. He doesn't "pit it against", he mocks claims that the surge deserves prime credit. As I recall, he mocks our years of ignoring the obvious, which made the strategic goal move ever further from plausibility, and he now mocks our claiming that 'the surge is working' when, from an Iraqi standpoint, the surge is not a surge but rather, a withdrawal. We're no longer blatantly making things worse.

Petraeus has his own prime time media access.

Let us reexamine that phrase:

"That happy funeral is the result not of brilliant U.S. counterinsurgency efforts, but of the determination of our newfound Sunni allies to exterminate the group."

He is giving prime credit where he believes prime credit is due. I agree with him. The credit goes to Iraqis' willingness to forgive and realign much moreso than our willingness to finally stop being fuckheads.

I think your perception that he presents it as an either/or dichotomy is a gross misreading on your part of a bit of grammar. Even as an either/or, he is still correct: without Sunnies deciding to become allies, to trust us after years of our proving ourselves dangerously inept, our ceasing to be dangerously inept would be for naught.

We stopped acting in a manner that made us appear worse than al-qaeda. This is not brilliant counterinsurgency. This is a last-ditch desperate what-have-we-got-lose strategic retreat by a commander-in-chief who was determined to do it his way.

It was the strategy of last resort. Please forgive him if he gives those suffering under our invasion the credit we'd like to take for ourselves. He hardly says we should stop doing what we're now doing in his article, does he? He does say we now have a window to make things better, yes?

His sole flaw, as I see you present it, is that he makes a few statements that do not adequately support your precise analysis of things, even though the overwhelming bulk of his article overwhelmingly supports your view on the matter.

Which is why I pick this nit so vigorously. You dig a hole in his skin to remove a momentary gnat.

ken, you and Robert Dreyfuss are obsessed with affixing credit or blame.

I understand his point. That's the part that seems "too bloody obvious to even acknowledge" to me. What I think is less obvious is further obscured by his grousing observations: that the surge is actually successful on it's own terms--eliciting the support of former insurgents--if not what you might expect in a more conventional war; not to mention, the resolution to a persistent quandary American culture has been neurotically engaged with since Vietnam; it's potential applications to the persistent challenge of terrorist tactics, &c. As I was saying above, when it comes to insurgencies, persistence is the name of the game.

To clarify, I think it's more important to understand the counterintuitive nature of the struggle than it is to assign credit or blame. I didn't say it was time to "crow like a rooster and unfurl the Mission Accomplished banner again." That would be the undoing.

quote:

Or did he not do this in previous rants on the topic?

No, he did not. But it's nothing personal to Mr. Dreyfuss, I never met the guy.

I find that the easy willingness to believe that the Sahawa phenom is practically an accident, a lucky accident that fell in the laps of the coalition, rather than the result of the inevitable disillusionment with fundamentalist assholes and chaos and a sustained, patient counterinsurgency program by our best-run element of the occupation forces (MNF-West) to be the best evidence yet that neither of you know a damned thing about the topic.

Cheers.

I'm an artist by training; just reaching for a world-view.

Cheers!

quote:

Originally posted by the_Etruscan: Good question. I'd define a win as atonement for our arrogance in the estimate of the Moslem world--but most of all for the introduction of AQ into a country where they once feared to tread. The least we can do is take al Q in Mesopotamia with us when we leave; remove the accelerant to sectarian friction and let 'em sort out the rest. But the worst we can do is to allow sectarian violence to jump the border and spark a region wide, Islamic Wars of the Reformation.

That would be decent of us, surely, but I don't see that taking AQ with us does much strategically toward our intent in going to this war. It seems to me that what the Republicans wanted all along was to begin to franchise democracy in more difficult areas of the Middle East. If that is the goal, then merely "cleaning up" the mess we made does not seem like enough. I believed, before this war began, that the Republican Party as a whole had a long term plan to reformat the Middle East and this was the first step in the new campaign. If that is the case, then leaving, may not be the solution. At least in the pursuit of that goal. However, being as we've made a glaring debacle of the place, perhaps it is the only solution that is viable for right now.

I still think that the US wants something more out of the war than for it to be over. At least the leaders of said country do. This brings me to my next point.

quote:

We're on the wrong track strategically (instinctively) and it can only get worse with climate change without a significant course correction. And I'm speaking of the US public here; 3,000+ dead and 40,000+ maimed makes counter ins. an expensive lesson for the military, but strategic goals must be communicated across the social spectrum to the extent the whole spectrum is involved--now more than ever.

Here I think you are expecting too much of people as a group. I do not see how the complexities of Counter Ins. can be conveyed in such a way as to unite vast swathes of people. Here or anywhere else. The public has always been rallied by the simplest of dogma and Manichean polarization. This is good, that is not. I don't see how policy can make the quantum jump from World War Two style rallying cries around the evil Jap and Nazis too a far more nuanced explanation of how to win your enemy by making them your friend and thereby make him your enemy’s enemy as well. It doesn't code itself into the sound bite, the slogan, the easily digestible bit of moral certitude.

The internet helps disseminate the more complex, certainly, but it is so disconnected to a central hub of reasoning at this point as to remain largely unutilized as a place for said dissemination. For every explication on a serious topic the next post has a 'Win One for the Gipper' attitude that revels in the simplistic "clash of civilizations" as you point out.

As for Saladin, yes, he was a good chap. But then the crusaders went and killed a bunch of his men and so he decapitated a bunch of theirs and they both became violent, committed to the bloody end.

The difference being that Islam at least preserved some of its integrity at home.

Nevertheless, any aggressor, such as the West in this case, seems to naturally provoke like response in the enemy being invaded. As the Muslims finally too turned to genocide against Croatia in the Yugoslav wars. And made a very bloody contribution to the morass of degradation those years incurred.

The point being, war is seldom able to be contained within the idea under which it is undertaken.

That is where the infallibility of the troops comes into play. They fall under the subjugation of their own instincts toward madness in a field replete with it.

You open up a can of war and you get Abu Grab and Haditha and everyone is shocked. Didn't you all read the instructions on the bottle?

quote:

ken, you and Robert Dreyfuss are obsessed with affixing credit or blame.

"The only part I disagree with are the parts where the author refuses to acknowledge the role of counterinsurgency in enabling it to happen." -Etruscan

Mah own seff:

"I can also throughly understand why someone in Dreyfuss' position would not bother mentioning it... after loudly denouncing our former 'counterinsurgency/victory' strategy (or lack thereof) since probably before the war commenced?"

Yo seff:

"No, he did not. But it's nothing personal to Mr. Dreyfuss, I never met the guy."

Does this count?

quote:

The Bush administration's strategy in Iraq today, as in the invasion of 2003, is: Use military force to destroy the political infrastructure of the Iraqi state; shatter the old Iraqi armed forces; eliminate Iraq as a determined foe of U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf; build on the wreckage of the old Iraq a new state beholden to the U.S.; create a new political class willing to be subservient to our interests in the region; and use that new Iraq as a base for further expansion.

To achieve all that, the President is determined to keep as much military power as he can in Iraq for as long as it takes, while recruiting, training, funding, and supervising a ruthless Iraqi police and security force that will gradually allow the American military to reduce their "footprint" in the country without entirely leaving. The endgame, as he and his advisors imagine it, would result in a permanent U.S. military presence in the country, including permanent bases and basing rights, and a predominant position for U.S. business and oil interests.

quote:

The war in Iraq was not a "mistake." It was a deliberately calculated exercise of U.S. power with a specific end in mind – namely, control of Iraq and the Persian Gulf region. It was illegal and remains so. It was a war crime and remains so. Its perpetrators were war criminals and remain so. Its goals were unworthy and remain so.

Few Democrats, and almost no Republicans, have been willing to challenge Bush's war on these terms, however. Neither have most of the Bush administration's so-called mistakes truly been errors: the brutal dismantling of the Baath party and the dissolution of the Iraqi armed forces, widely castigated now as "mistakes" by many Bush critics, were meant. They were thought out. They were planned with purpose. They, too, were deliberate actions aiming at U.S. hegemony in Iraq.

Nor is the war simply, or even largely, a "failure." As cruel and brutish as it is, it is grinding its way toward its goal. Victory for the United States in Iraq, as evidenced by the recitation of bad news I cited earlier, is by no means certain. But it is far too early to call it a failure either. To do so at this stage is Capra-esque. It assumes that bad guys don't win. But sometimes they do. And on Iraq, the jury remains out.

quote:

Let me now admit to having second thoughts on this matter. I no longer am convinced that the U.S. adventure in Iraq is lost. There is no guarantee that the Bush administration cannot succeed in its goals there. The only certain thing is that success – what the president calls "victory in Iraq" – will come at the expense of thousands more American deaths, tens of thousands more Iraqi deaths, and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Indeed, this war would have to be sustained not only by this administration, but by the next one and probably the one after that as well. For over three years, the United States has supported a massive military presence on the ground in Iraq, while taking steady casualties. It may be no less capable of doing so for the next two-and-a-half years, until the end of Bush's second term – and during the next administration's reign, too, whether the president is named John McCain or Hillary Clinton. At least theoretically, a force of more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers could wage a brutal war of attrition against the resistance in Iraq for years to come. Last week, in a leak to the New York Times, the White House announced its intention to leave at least 50,000 troops in Iraq for many years to come. Last week, too, the son of the president of Iraq (a Kurd) revealed that representatives of the Kurdish region are in negotiations with the United States to create a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq's north.

quote:

So who believes that the Iraqi resistance can fight on indefinitely against the combined might of the U.S. armed forces and American-supported Shiite and Kurdish armies as well as militias, especially with ongoing American divide-and-conquer efforts that involve blandishments offered to the less militant wings of the insurgency?

quote:

I find that the easy willingness to believe that the Sahawa phenom is practically an accident, a lucky accident that fell in the laps of the coalition, rather than the result of the inevitable disillusionment with fundamentalist assholes and chaos and a sustained, patient counterinsurgency program by our best-run element of the occupation forces (MNF-West) to be the best evidence yet that neither of you know a damned thing about the topic.

I find your willingness to believe what you just wrote about the two (or three?) of us evidence you wear your hat too low and too tight.

@kenmeer,
I didn't want to get involved in a circular debate over who deserves more credit for an alliance ...it takes two to tango, always. But a closer examination of Dreyfuss' position reminds me that it's not so much his arguments I am reacting to here, it's yours. What he might fairly be accused of glossing over, you radically overstate. I did mention that I found the original article to be refreshingly non-partisan (aside from my pet peeve), didn't I?

Anyway, I didn't want to dominate the thread with my longwinded POV on counterinsurgency and culture clash, I just wanted to explain where I'm coming from since I think it has been a source of confusion in the past.

Dreyfuss, OTOH, while I still have points of contention, is framing the issue in an altogether different context. For instance, I have been taking it for granted, for the sake of argument, that whatever geo-strategic vision the neo-cons had for the region has been effectively derailed--that we are, in fact, going home, if things go well, leaving Iraq to its sovereignty (and oil). Just for the sake of argument.

Could? Should? Will? Won't? All these questions merit consideration. My one conviction is that whatever you latch onto, the world will prove you wrong.

So I have been speaking strictly in terms of salvage operations, while Dreyfuss is still aiming at the Great Game, or Cheney's ambition to remap the Middle East. I don't want to see Cheney's evil plot come to fruition either, but the lengths Dreyfuss is willing to go to see it reversed makes my hair stand on end.

For instance, while perusing the article you linked, I came across a line of reasoning that featured large in whatever I read before that informed my initial bias.

quote:

You hear it in the argument that, although the war was wrong, we now have a moral obligation to stay and prevent civil war. You hear it in the argument that the United States must be strong against the threat of global "Islamofascism," and that by leaving Iraq we will hand Al Qaeda and its allies a victory. There are other variations of the same, but all of those who make such arguments (while criticizing Bush for his alleged incompetence and mismanagement) end up arguing that the United States has no choice other than to stay.

In my discussions with them in recent weeks, several have brought up Colin Powell's absurd argument about the Pottery Barn rule: if you break it, you own it. Well, yes, we broke Iraq, but we don't own it. (In fact, the Pottery Barn itself has no such rule. If you mistakenly break a piece of pottery in one of its stores, you aren't actually liable.) We have absolutely no moral imperative to stay in Iraq. We have a moral imperative to leave – and to apologize.

Does one moral imperative exhonerate the other? That's very uncomplicated. What I remember disagreeing with (in the only other article I've read by him) was basically a hypothetical on possible outcomes to the civil war, in the event that we simply bugged out (prematurely, this was several months ago), and I was mainly impressed by the cold-bloodedness of his calculations, for a liberal. I'm not sure he understood just how cold-blooded they were, but there is a whiff of the ideologue in his capacity to conscience any manner of human bestiality so long as it doesn't wear the uniform of Western imperialism.

Not sure if he still feels that way, in light of the more recent article, "If so, that's perverse." in his own words, but maybe that accounts for the grousing.

I dunno, time will tell. If not for sectarian violence (the cycle of vendetta's, so gruesomely described in The NYer article), he wouldn't have an argument from me. But Dreyfuss' eagerness to gloss over that little inconvenience (who's being Capra-esque now?) makes me think he's got the ideological blinders on.

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
That would be decent of us, surely, but I don't see that taking AQ with us does much strategically toward our intent in going to this war. It seems to me that what the Republicans wanted all along was to begin to franchise democracy in more difficult areas of the Middle East. If that is the goal, then merely "cleaning up" the mess we made does not seem like enough. I believed, before this war began, that the Republican Party as a whole had a long term plan to reformat the Middle East and this was the first step in the new campaign. If that is the case, then leaving, may not be the solution. At least in the pursuit of that goal.

Screw that goal.

quote:

However, being as we've made a glaring debacle of the place, perhaps it is the only solution that is viable for right now.

All hail Discordia.

quote:

Here I think you are expecting too much of people as a group. I do not see how the complexities of Counter Ins. can be conveyed in such a way as to unite vast swathes of people. Here or anywhere else. The public has always been rallied by the simplest of dogma and Manichean polarization. This is good, that is not. I don't see how policy can make the quantum jump from World War Two style rallying cries around the evil Jap and Nazis too a far more nuanced explanation of how to win your enemy by making them your friend and thereby make him your enemy’s enemy as well. It doesn't code itself into the sound bite, the slogan, the easily digestible bit of moral certitude.

Granted, it doesn't ping the amygdala with the same percussiveness as beating the ol' war drum, but in the long run it helps to have reality on your side. There is the evidence of comparison between the Rumsfeld doctrine and the surge. Emergent military paradigms are necessarily counterintuitive, alien to tradition, but still they change the rules and set the pace, and those who are slow to catch on are its victims.

Furthermore, what I'm angling at with all these historical references is to suggest that these ideas already have cultural resonance for us. Somewhat buried, perhaps, but all the ingredients are there if we care to examine the roots of the culture. In my experience, the vocabulary of chivalry--big ping effect words like honor and cowardice--has always had a powerful effect on the imagination of right-wingers.

quote:

As for Saladin, yes, he was a good chap. But then the crusaders went and killed a bunch of his men and so he decapitated a bunch of theirs and they both became violent, committed to the bloody end.

The difference with Saladin was that he showed magnanimity after, not before, all that bloodshed. When the crusaders entered Jerusalem, they were said to have waded up to their horse's ankles in blood. And when Saladin finally had them in his power... he sanctioned the Christians who had lived there before, and to the crusaders simply said, "Now go home." It's a sneak attack: the novelty of the idea lends it impact, it exploits the element of surprise.

quote:

The point being, war is seldom able to be contained within the idea under which it is undertaken.

Ah, the old thesis. This must be the place for it. Okay, roll out the barrel...

quote:

That is where the infallibility of the troops comes into play. They fall under the subjugation of their own instincts toward madness in a field replete with it.

You open up a can of war and you get Abu Grab and Haditha and everyone is shocked. Didn't you all read the instructions on the bottle?

Hmm. If memory serves, the reason things were allowed to degenerate to that state in the first place was that a lot of Americans took the attitude, "Well, war is hell. That's what happens." It was thought there was no alternative, so for four years the US public shrugged its shoulders when, all along, the insurgency was being fueled by resentment for our systematically failing to treat the civilian population with a modicum of human dignity (+ a little gadfly called AQ).

I'm not saying there isn't some truth to what you're saying. Of course, war leads to chaos, why else would everything about military regimentation be designed to maintain order for as long as humanely possible? But that's not all there is to it. My question, what is the utility of thinking that way? reducing it to one aspect? If that is the only prescription you put on the bottle, the patient is likely to feel cheated when a wiser adversary takes advantage of their dumb animal nature and herds them like cattle, on the battlefield.

"All warfare is based on deception." - Sun Tzu

quote:

Hmm. If memory serves, the reason things were allowed to degenerate to that state in the first place was that a lot of Americans took the attitude, "Well, war is hell. That's what happens." It was thought there was no alternative, so for four years the US public shrugged its shoulders when, all along, the insurgency was being fueled by resentment for our systematically failing to treat the civilian population with a modicum of human dignity (+ a little gadfly called AQ).

Hmm. If memory serves, the reason things were allowed to degenerate to that state in the first place was that a lot of Americans took the attitude, "Well, war is hell. That's what happens." It was thought there was no alternative, so for four years the US public shrugged its shoulders when, all along, the insurgency was being fueled by resentment for our systematically failing to treat the civilian population with a modicum of human dignity (+ a little gadfly called AQ).[/quote]

I think it has less to due with embracing what happens and more to do with porosity and SLR digital cameras.

The public was largely outraged after Haditha and Abu Grab, clearly they expected different from "US" soldiers.

quote:

Screw that goal.

Is there a goal that would have brought the country to this war that you would have supported?

I myself think it's plausible, though unlikely, that the goal I surmised might have come to some fruition years and years down the line by way circumstances related to the war, though not attributable to said goal precisely.

But, I don't see the goal as one that need be undertaken as I think there are forces of emergent history that will, without turning the place necessarily into a democracy, will likely have an outcome that is fairly amenable to America's desires though not the goals mentioned.

I have a question to all out of curiosity:

Did you think the surge would work or not and why?

As I recall I thought it was a bit too little too late. I thought increasing troops was a good idea but didn't think that 20K was enough or that they would be given the time they needed to do the job.

Perhaps this is still up in the air.

As to whether or not it has "succeeded" do you think it has?

It seems to me it has had a positive impact, so yes. However, I believe that if we had left sooner, the war had a fairly even chance of beginning to burn itself out in at least one area.

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
I have a question to all out of curiosity:

Did you think the surge would work or not and why?

*****

It seems to me it has had a positive impact, so yes. However, I believe that if we had left sooner, the war had a fairly even chance of beginning to burn itself out in at least one area.

I thought it would fail. We invaded the country with too few people and we've gone about brutalizing them ever since. Even if someone disagrees with the term 'brutalize' the tactics we've employed have done nothing to endear ourselves to the locals.

Every scandal like Abu Ghraib and Haditha is another nail in the coffin of the war for hearts and minds.

Building permanent military bases, trying to push the transitory government into signing deals handing massive influence of their primary resource and the largest embassy in the world do us no favours.

The surge can never work if the people are against us. We don't know the cultures and we can't tell the difference between a Saudi, an Iranian or an Iraqi walking the street in Baghdad - if the locals won't work with us we're just firing at shadows.

***

The impression I've gotten from what I've read is pretty much this:

After four years of ethnic violence, intimidation and displacement most of the ethnic cleansing has already happened. Shi'a and Sunni factions mostly control their own neighbourhoods and they have to go out of their way to find someone from the other group if they want to kill them.

If they've lived in a neighbourhood where the majority of people were from a different sect they've probably grabbed what they could carry and left. Either just the neighbourhood or the country altogether.

At some point these people are going to want to go home. When that happens the violence may well start up all over again.

There was like violence that you predict when Muslims, Croats and Serbs returned to their homes after the Yugoslav Wars.

quote:

But a closer examination of Dreyfuss' position reminds me that it's not so much his arguments I am reacting to here, it's yours. What he might fairly be accused of glossing over, you radically overstate.

Well then, where's my friggin Pulitzer, dangit!

quote:

I'm not sure he understood just how cold-blooded they were, but there is a whiff of the ideologue in his capacity to conscience any manner of human bestiality so long as it doesn't wear the uniform of Western imperialism.

I suspect he does. I think the logic he espouses in such statements as that which you quote is: Get our dick out of the whirring blender NOW! (if not sooner)

quote:

In my experience, the vocabulary of chivalry--big ping effect words like honor and cowardice--has always had a powerful effect on the imagination of right-wingers.

Ah, but mostly when it involved killing others and sacrificing some of our own troops. Honor and cowardice in terms of, say, ethical transnational corporate behavior, pingeth not or very little.

quote:

ou open up a can of war and you get Abu Grab and Haditha and everyone is shocked. Didn't you all read the instructions on the bottle?

Hmm. If memory serves, the reason things were allowed to degenerate to that state in the first place was that a lot of Americans took the attitude, "Well, war is hell. That's what happens." It was thought there was no alternative, so for four years the US public shrugged its shoulders when, all along, the insurgency was being fueled by resentment for our systematically failing to treat the civilian population with a modicum of human dignity (+ a little gadfly called AQ).

All these things you mention were already on the label in 2003. Especially the shoulder shrug.

War IS deception, especially of one's home population.

quote:

The surge can never work if the people are against us. We don't know the cultures and we can't tell the difference between a Saudi, an Iranian or an Iraqi walking the street in Baghdad - if the locals won't work with us we're just firing at shadows.

Sort of a sidenote: the above reads like le Carre. Straightforward logic and data followed by a hammerblow of poetry. Beautiful.