[lit-ideas] Re: Iraq and news
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 23:53:12 -0500
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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