He’s got better qualifications than I to understand what’s going on.

President Bush really didn’t understand what he was implying when he spoke about Vietnam to the VFW.

There, too, was a war that we entered under false pretenses and should have avoided like the plague. It was won militarily, yet lost, since, politically, it could not possibly be won.

Tom

A good question, but one that is completely unanswerable until we have common measure of success. Absent that, the real question is “who decides what success is?” Is it the military leaders, the President, or the median voter on Nov. ‘08?

One of the common talking points in this debate is that “we fight them over there, so we don’t fight them here.” If we treat that as the measure of success, then the Iraq war has been wildly successful–there have been no attacks on US soil since the invasion of Iraq. By such a measure, the Iraq occupation should be continued indefinitely.
Of course, most people outside of the Vice President’s office are suspicious of that theory because it doesn’t add up. If there is a sizable group of people in Iraq that are drinking bin Laden’s KoolAid, why are they killing other Iraqis instead of Americans?

Another possible measure of success is stability. That is, once the violence settles down to a certain level, we declare victory and head home. Having a goal of stability raises the question: what is the source of instability?

If the violence is being caused by anti-American insurgents, then we must stay the course. Because their message of intolerance and hate should not be appealing to citizens of a democracy (even a messy one), as we kill them, their numbers should dwindle and the violence will abate. The fact that we have been killing them and that the violence has not abated is not proof that there is no anti-American insurgency because Iran and Syria have an interest in supporting such an insurgency. But, the idea of an aniti-American insurgency is still hampered by the fact that Iraqis are killing each other more than they are killing Americans.

Alternatively, if the violence in Iraq is being caused by an internal struggle for power (which I believe is clearly the case), then continuing the status quo doesn’t make sense. In a power struggle, the fighting continues until a clear winner emerges. That means that increased violence suppression will be used as time-out to organize for the next round of fighting.

Which is what I think we are seeing. Most telling is the fact that the elected Iraqi government isn’t doing anything, at least in it’s official capacity. This suggests that the individual members of the Iraqi government know that the actions of the government are essentially meaningless. However, their lack of official action doesn’t mean they are doing nothing. Being in the Iraqi government gives the members access to the Americans, access that could be valuable in currying favor with “unofficial” sources of power. If someone will eventually emerge the winner, it is best to be in their good graces.

Of course, if we are witnessing a power struggle (or if you must, a civil war) then the instability will continue until a winner is determined. We’d be better off leaving the country, or at least the cities, and letting them fight it out. Alternatively, we could pick the winner by arming a strong man.

Ok, returning to the original question, what if we kill the insurgency, or the power struggle is resolved, or whatever, and Iraq becomes “a stable economy, an Iraq working toward Jordanian-like democracy (which most will accept because the vast majority of people don’t know what that means) and our traditional allies back in the fold?”

Well, I guess that in that case, the doubters will lose in ‘08, George Bush will be vindicated in the history books, and everything will be peaches and cream.

I’m not holding my breath.

Looks to me like a tactical military victory isn’t going to make a bit of difference to the eventual outcome. We’re going to lose, the big question is going to be who gets the blame.

Tom

The biggest problem for the Army right now is dealing with the two current rules of deployment:

No more than 15 months/soldier in theatre without a break.

No less than one year between tours.

While the troops doing the actual work are getting battle hardened, there’s a limit to how much you can stress soldiers before they get brittle. If the officer (or more importantly, the NCO corps) begin leaving at the ends of their enlistments, you could have a real problem, especially if the administration continues to rattle its sabres at Iran and Russia.

I was talking to the young Army ROTC fellows on the Quad today and watched them trying to hand out flyers during Quad Day. They said that it was the worst day in their experience–damn near no one was taking their information. We chuckled to each other and said, “no surprise, huh.”

Tom

I’m skeptical about whether or not the surge works. I believe that having more troops there works better than having fewer troops there for keeping our boys alive, but I’m not convinced it is getting us any closer to a point where we aren’t occupying Iraq. My guess is that Hillary’s advisers anticipate the credibility Petraeus will have and are trying to position her in the center for the emerging debate when the GOP + Petraeus manages to change the story.

If Iraq ends up being seen as a success, whether real or imagined, it will fuel the more interventionist of the neocons into a pre-emptive attack on Iran. Those aircraft carriers are certainly rusting in the Gulf and, as Napoleon said, “You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.”

Realistically, it would be expected that the surge would do well militarily–I’m pretty sure that I made no statements to the contrary. You see, it works either way.

If our enemies are stupid, they come out and their shock troops are killed while our presence in country serves as a recruitment tool within Iraq and other Islamic nations. If our enemies are smart, they meld with the populace and we declare victory and go home.

In that second case, as soon as a future Democratic congress is strapped for money and cuts the funding for the resulting Iraqi government, the bad guys come out of the woodwork and take over the country, just as in Vietnam. (I know that the parallel’s aren’t 100%, since we’re not actively fighting Iran, but it’s close enough for government work.)

From a moral and ethical standpoint, however, whether the surge works or not is irrelevant. The United States should not be fighting pre-emptive wars. It puts us in the position of being an aggressor nation or an empire-builder and, historically, both of those types of countries fall hard.

Tom