[lit-ideas] Re: Iraq and news

More Helprin, this time blasting Bush's incompetence and arguing that 
wars should be fought with fury.

His constructive suggestion for Iraq is in the next-to-last paragraph, 
and should also pop many people's gussets and chain armor. -EY

____
http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/fall2004/helprin.html

No Way to Run a War

BY MARK HELPRIN
Monday, May 17, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

Though America has condemned the cruelties of Abu Ghraib, they remain 
nonetheless a symbol of the inescapable fact that the war has been run 
incompetently, with an apparently deliberate contempt for history, 
strategy, and thought, and with too little regard for the American 
soldier, whose mounting casualties seem to have no effect on the 
boastfulness of the civilian leadership.

Before the war's inception, and even after September 11, the Bush 
administration, having promised to correct its predecessor's 
depredations of the military, failed to do so. The president failed to 
go to Congress on September 12 to ask for a declaration of war, failed 
to ask Congress when he did go before it for the tools with which to 
fight, and has failed consistently to ask the American people for 
sacrifice. And yet their sons, mainly, are sacrificed in Iraq day by day.

When soldiers are killed because they do not have equipment (in the 
words of a returning officer, "not enough vehicles, not enough 
munitions, not enough medical supplies, not enough water"), when 
reservists are retained for years, and rotations canceled, it is the 
consequence of a fiscal policy that seems more attuned to the electoral 
landscape of 2004 than to the national security of the United States. 
Were the U.S. to devote the same percentage of its GNP to defense as it 
did during the peacetime years of the last half-century, and the 
military budget return to this unremarkable level, we would be spending 
(apart from the purely operational costs of the war) almost twice what 
we are spending now.

The year-and-a-half delay between action in Afghanistan and Iraq 
mobilized the Arabs and the international left, weakened the connection 
with September 11, and prompted allies who would have been with us to 
fall away. The delay was especially unconscionable because it was due 
not merely to normal difficulties but to the aforementioned military 
insufficiencies and to indecision masquerading as circumspection. Once 
the Army and Marines were rolling, their supply lines were left 
deliberately unprotected, and are vulnerable to this day. Why? Why do 
the generals, in patently identifiable top-down-speak, repeatedly state 
that they need nothing more than the small number of troops (for 
occupying such a large country) that they are assigned? Why do they and 
the administration steadfastly hold this line even as one event 
cascading into another should make them recoil in piggy-eyed wonder at 
the lameness of their policy?

 From the beginning, the scale of the war was based on the fundamental 
strategic misconception that the primary objective was Iraq rather than 
the imagination of the Arab World, which, if sufficiently stunned, would 
tip itself back into the heretofore easily induced fatalism that makes 
it hesitate to war against the West. After the true shock and awe of a 
campaign of massive surplus, as in the Gulf War, no regime would have 
risked its survival by failing to go after the terrorists within its 
purview. But a campaign of bare sufficiency, that had trouble punching 
through even ragtag irregulars, taught the Arabs that we could be 
effectively opposed.

Mistakenly focused on physical control of Iraq, we could not see that, 
were we to give it up, the resultant anarchy might find a quicker 
resolution than the indefinite prolonged agony through which our 
continuing presence has nursed it. Seeking motivation after the fact, we 
decided to make Iraq a Western-style democracy, and when that began to 
run off the rails, to make Iraq the mere model for a Middle East filled 
with Western-style democracies. Of course, instead of a model to inspire 
them (of which they have many, such as Switzerland), what the Arabs need 
is first the desire, and then a means to overcome the police states that 
oppress them, neither of which a reconfigured Iraq, were it possible, 
would supply. Japan and Germany are often cited in defense of this 
overreach, but rather than freeze our armies in place and set them to 
policing and civil affairs as we fought through the Second World War, we 
waited until we had won.

Having decided to remake a country of 26 million divided into warring 
subcultures with a shared affection for martyrdom and unchanging 
traditions, the administration thought it could do so with 100,000 
troops. Israel, which nearly surrounds the West Bank, speaks its 
language and has 37 years of experience in occupation, keeps 
approximately (by my reckoning) one soldier on duty for every 40 
inhabitants and 1/13th square mile, and the unfortunate results are well 
known. In Iraq we keep one soldier per 240 inhabitants and 1.7 square 
miles. To put this in yet clearer perspective, it is the same number of 
uniformed police officers per inhabitant of the City of New York. But 
the police in New York are not at the end of a 9,000-mile supply chain 
(they live off the land at Dunkin' Donuts), they do not have to protect 
their redoubts, travel in convoys, maintain a hospital system, run a 
civil service, reform a government, build schools, supply electricity, 
etc. And, most importantly, they do not have to battle an angry 
population that speaks an alien language, lives in an immense territory, 
and is armed with automatic weapons, explosives, suicide bombers, and 
rocket-propelled grenades. Imagine if they did, and you have Iraq. 
Imagine if then the mayor said, "We don't need anything further, it's 
just a question of perseverance: Bring it on," and you have the Bush 
continuum.

Leaving out entirely our gratuitously self-inflicted inability to deal 
with major contingencies in Asia, this has been the briefest summary of 
mismanagement, a full exposition of which could fill a thick and very 
unpleasant book. But to these failings the left offers no better 
alternative, for if the right has failed in execution, the left's 
failure, in conception, is deeper.

<snip>


In the Middle East, our original purpose, since perverted by 
carelessness of estimation, was self-defense. To return to it would take 
advantage of the facts that the countries in the area do not have to be 
democracies before we require of them that they refrain from attacking 
us; that a regime with a firm hold upon a nation has much at stake and 
can be coerced to eradicate the terrorist apparatus within its 
frontiers; and that the ideal instrument for this is a remounted and 
properly supported U.S. military, released from nation building and 
counterinsurgency, its ability to make war, when called upon, nonpareil.

The Kurds and Shia of Iraq could within days assert control in their 
areas. We already have ceded part of Sunni Iraq: What remains is to pick 
a strongman, see him along, arrange a federation, hope for the best, 
remount the army, and retire, with or without Saudi permission, to the 
Saudi bases roughly equidistant to Damascus, Baghdad, and Riyadh. There, 
protected by the desert, with modern infrastructure, and our backs to 
the sea, which is our metier, we would command the center of gravity of 
the Middle East, and with the ability to strike hard, fast and at will, 
could enforce responsible behavior upon regimes that have been the 
citadel of our enemies.

In a war that has steadily grown beyond expectations, America has been 
poorly served by those who govern it. The Democrats are guilty of 
seemingly innate ideological confusion about self-defense, the 
Republicans of willful disdain for reflection, and, both, of lack of 
imagination, probity, and preparation--and, perhaps above all, of 
subjecting the most serious business in the life of a nation to coarse 
partisanship. Having come up short, both parties are sorely in need of a 
severe reprimand and direct order from the American people to correct 
their failings and get on with the common defense.


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