[lit-ideas] Re: A Genuinely Useful Thought
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2007 14:49:43 +0900
Dear Lawrence,
I have never for a moment thought of you as a bounder, a dunce or a
drone. I believe, moreover, that if you were to do some digging in the
lit-ideas archives, you would find a number of points on which we
agree.
1. There are leaders of militant Islam who preach our death and
destruction. Yes.
2. There are followers of those leaders who will act on what they preach. Yes.
3. Those followers are increasingly dangerous in a world of accessible
weapons of mass destruction, by which I mean here, chemical,
biological and especially nuclear weapons. Yes.
4. We need to be on guard and be prepared to address those threats. Yes.
5. Addressing those threats may require the use of military force. Yes.*
*Footnote: I first heard these propositions in Bill Clinton's address
to the class of '98 graduates of the United States Naval Academy, of
whom my daughter was one, during their commissioning ceremony.
We have a lot of common ground here.
If, however, you ask me, was the U.S.A. right to invade Iraq, my
answer is no, both on moral and political and on military grounds. To
pour death and destruction on a whole people for the acts of a few is
categorically immoral. Politically it is stupid, since the predictable
outcome, especially among people much given to vendetta, is to swell
the ranks of the enemy. When the population you attack is, moreover,
only 25 million people out of a worldwide Muslim population that may
now be in the neighborhood of 1.6 billion (lots of potential recruits
for the enemy out there), that's political stupidity squared.
To, in addition, ignore the advice of military professionals who warn
that to occupy and secure the territory of the people in question you
will need two to five times the troops allocated to the project, and
to send the trooops you do send into harm's way, ill-prepared and
ill-equipped for anything except a straightforward army-to-army,
one-state-wins conflict is criminally incompetent.*
Add flagrant corruption and waste and a well-documented process of
recruiting civililians for the occupation that ignored useful
expertise in favor of political litmus tests (as if the whole exercise
were nothing more than another source of political pork, see _Imperial
Life in the Emerald City Inside Iraq's Green Zone-, by Rajiv
Chandrasekaran. Random House, 2006.). You don't have to be "a
Leftist" to be appalled. You can love America, be alert to threats,
recognize that military force may sometimes be necessary and still see
our adventure in Iraq as, to borrow a military term, "a total
clusterfuck."
------------
* In a recent assessment of the proposed "surge" in Iraq
(http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2132496.ece),
Wesley Clark writes,
"As for the US troops, yes, several additional brigades in Baghdad
would enable more roadblocks, patrols, neighbourhood clearing
operations and overnight presence. But how significant will this be?
We've never had enough troops in Iraq - in Kosovo, we had 40,000
troops for a population of two million. For Iraq that ratio would call
for at least 500,000 troops, so adding 20,000 seems too little, too
late, even, for Baghdad. Further, in a "clear and hold" strategy, US
troops have been shown to lack the language skills, cultural awareness
and political legitimacy to ensure that areas can be "held", or even
that they are fully "cleared". The key would be more Iraqi troops, but
they aren't available in the numbers required for a city of more than
five million with no reliable police - nor have the Iraqi troops been
reliable enough for the gritty work of dealing with militias and
sectarian loyalties. Achieving enhanced protection for the population
is going to be problematic at best. Even then, militia fighters in
Baghdad could redeploy to other areas and continue the fight there."
------------------------------------
You wanted some reality-based arguments.
Enjoy.
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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