http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200603240726.asp
Hard Pounding
Who will keep his nerve?
If I could sum up the new orthodoxy about Iraq, it might run something like
the following: I supported the overthrow of the odious Saddam Hussein. But
then the poor postwar planning, the unanticipated sectarian strife and
insurrection, the mounting American losses, the failure to find weapons of
mass destruction all that and more lost my support. Iraq may or may not
work out, but I can see now it clearly wasnt worth the American effort.
Aside from the old rehash over disbanding the Iraqi army or tardiness in
forming a government, three observations can be made about this
readjustment in belief. First, the nature of the lapses after March 2003
is still the subject of legitimate debate; second, our mistakes are no more
severe than in most prior wars; and third, they are not fatal to our cause.
Consider the most frequently alleged errors: the need for more troops; the
need to have restored immediate order; and the need to have had up-armored
vehicles and some tactical counterplan to improvised explosive devices.
In none of these cases, was the manner of the solution all that clear-cut
especially since on the first day of the war the United States was trying to
avoid targeting civilians, avoiding infrastructure as much as possible, and
waging a supposed war of liberation rather than one of punitive
annihilation.
Had we brought in another 200,000 troops to secure Iraq, the vast increases
in the size and cost of American support might not have been commensurate
within an increased ability to put down the insurrection, which from the
beginning was decentralized and deliberately designed to play off larger
concentrations of conventional patrolling Americans the more targets the
better.
The insurrection broke out not so much because we had 200,000 rather than
400,000 troops in country; but rather because a three-week strike that
decapitated the Baathist elite, despite its showy shock and awe
pyrotechnics, was never intended, World War II-like, to crush the enemy and
force terms on a shell-shocked, defeated, and humiliated populace. Many of
our challenges, then, are not the war in Iraq per se, but the entire paradox
of postmodern war in general in a globally televised world.
And if the point of Iraq was to stress Iraqification and avoid too large
an American footprint in the Middle East, then ubiquitous Americans may have
posed as many problems as they solved with two or three Green zones rather
than one. Instead of drawing down to 100,000 we might now be talking of
hoping to keep below 300,000 troops.
Past history suggests that military efficacy is not so much always a
question of the number of troops but rather of how they are used.
Especially large American deployments can foster dependency rather than
autonomy on the part of the Iraqi security forces. Each month, fewer
Americans are dying in Iraq, while more Iraqis are fighting the terrorists
as it becomes clear to them that some enormous occupation force is not on
its own going to save the Iraqis democracy for them.
The looting should have been stopped. But by the same token, after the
statue fell, had the U.S. military begun immediately to shoot looters on
sight and that was what restoring order would have required or carpet
bombed the Syrian and Iranian borders to stop infiltration, the outcry would
have arisen that we were too punitive and gunning down poor and hungry
people even in peace. I fear that 400,000 peacekeepers, given the rules of
postbellum engagement, would have been no more likely to shoot thieves than
would 200,000.
We forget that one of the reasons for the speed of the American advance and
then the sudden rush to stop military operations as was true in the first
Gulf War was the enormous criticism leveled at the Americans for going to
war in the first place, and the constant litany cited almost immediately of
American abuses involving excessive force. Shooting looters may have
restored order, but it also would have now been enshrined as an
Abu-Ghraib-like crime a photo of a poor hungry thief broadcast globally
as an unarmed victim of American barbarism. We can imagine more Highway of
Death outrage had we bombed concentrations of Shiites pouring in from Iran
or jihadists from Syria going to weddings and festivals in Iraq.
Throughout this postmodern war, the military has been on the horns of a
dilemma: Dont shoot and you are indicted for being lax and allowing
lawlessness to spread; shoot and you are gratuitously slandered as a sort of
rogue LAPD in camouflage. We hear only of the deliberately inexact rubric
Iraqi civilian losses without any explanation that almost all the Iraqi
dead are either (1) victims of the terrorists, (2) Iraqi security forces
trying to defend the innocent against the terrorists, or (3) the terrorists
themselves.
Legitimate questions arise as to whether America army is too small, or
whether requisite political support for military operations is too
predicated on the 24-hour news cycle. But all those are issues transcending
the war in Iraq. In retrospect, up-armoring humvees would have been wise
from the very outset so would having something remotely comparable to a
Panzerfaust in 1943, more live than dud torpedoes in 1942, or deploying a
jet at the beginning of the Korean War that could compete with a Russian Mig
15.
So again, the proper question is not whether there were tragic errors of
judgment in Iraq but to what degree were they qualitatively different from
past errors that are the stuff of war, to what degree were they addressed
and corrected, and to what degree did their commission impair the final
verdict of the mission?
Instead of this necessary ongoing discussion, we are left with former hawks
that clamor ad nauseam for the secretary of Defenses resignation as a sort
of symbolic atonement for their own apparently collective lament that the
postwar did not turn out like the aftermaths of Panama, Kosovo, Afghanistan,
or Gulf War I. All that angst is about as helpful as perpetually damning
Turkey for not letting the 4th ID come down from the north into the Sunni
Triangle at the beginning of the war.
It is often said we had no plan to deal with postwar Iraq. Perhaps. But the
problem with such a simplistic exegesis is that books and articles now pour
forth weekly from disgruntled former constitutional architects and
frustrated legal experts who once rushed in to draft Iraqi laws, or angry
educationists and bankers whose ideas about school charters or currency
regulations were not fully implemented. Somebody apparently had some sort of
plan or the legions that went into the Green Zone in Spring 2003 wouldnt
have been sent there immediately in the first place.
Yes, we had zillions of plans alright but whether they were sufficient to
survive the constant and radically changing cycles of war is another matter,
especially in a long-failed state plagued with fundamentalism, tribalism,
chaos, insurrection, and Sunni, Shiite, and Baathist militias whose
leadership had been routed rather than its military crushed. The best
postwar plans do not work as they should when losing enemies feel that they
wont be flattened and a successful attacker feels it cant really flatten
them.
In March 2004 perhaps our initial manner of enacting the plan train the
Iraqi security forces, craft a consensual government, and put down the
terrorists was thwarted by our inexperience and naiveté. But by March
2006, the identical plan seems to be working far better precisely because,
as in all wars, we have adapted, modified, and nuanced our way of fighting
and nation-building, as American fatalities decrease and Iraqis step up to
fight for their freedom.
Nothing in this war is much different from those of the past. We have fought
suicide bombers in the Pacific. Intelligence failures doomed tens of
thousands not 2,300 at the Bulge and Okinawa. We pacified the
Philippines through counterinsurgency fighting. Failure to calibrate the
extent of Al Zarqawis insurrection pales before the Chinese crossing of the
Yalu.
Even our current clinical depression is typically American. In July 1864,
Lincoln was hated and McClellan and the Copperheads who wished a cessation
of war and bisection of country canonized. Truman left office with the
nations anger that he had failed in Korea. As George Bush Sr. departed, the
conventional wisdom was that the budding chaos and redrawing of the map of
Eastern Europe would prompt decades of instability as former Communists
could not simply be spoon fed democracy and capitalism. During Afghanistan
by week five we were in a quagmire; the dust storm supposedly threatened our
success in Iraq in the manner that the explosion of the dome at Samarra
marked the beginning of a hopeless civil war that lost Iraq.
The fact is that we are close to seeing a democratically elected government
emerge, backed by an increasingly competent army, pitted against a minority
of a minority in Zaraqawis Wahhabi jihadists.
While we worry about our own losses, both human and financial, al Qaeda
knows that thousands of its terrorists are dead, with its leadership
dismantled or in hiding and most of the globe turning against it. For all
our depression at home, we can still win two wars the removal of Saddam
Hussein and the destruction of jihadists that followed him and leave a
legitimate government that is the antithesis of both autocracy and
theocracy.
Syria is out of Lebanon but only as long as democracy is in Iraq. Libya
and Pakistan have come clean about nuclear trafficking but only as long as
the U.S. is serious about reform in the Middle East.
And the Palestinians are squabbling among themselves, as democracy is
proving not so easy to distort after all a sort of Western Trojan Horse
that they are not so sure they should have brought inside their walls. When
has Hamas ever acted as if it has a "sort of" charter to "sort of" destroy
Israel? We worry that Iran is undermining Iraq. The mullahs are terrified
that the democracy across the border may undermine them as if voting and
freedom could trump their beheadings and stonings.
Ever since 9/11 we have been in a long, multifaceted, and much-misunderstood
war against jihadists and their autocratic enablers from Manhattan to Kabul,
from Baghdad to the Hindu Kush, from London and Madrid to Bali and the
Philippines. For now, Iraq has become the nexus of that struggle, in the
heart of the ancient caliphate, rather than the front once again in
Washington and New York. Whose vision of the future wins depends on who
keeps his nerve or to paraphrase the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, Hard
pounding, gentlemen; but we will see who can pound the longest.
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