Forget 9/11? Fuhgeddaboudit, Pal.

[by Mr.Hengist]

Now, me, I’m not big on anniversaries, not even my own birthday. Just not caring, is all. When I was a kid I looked forward to my birthday, sure – presents! – but as I got older, for a variety of reasons, I grew out of it. There’s no day I set aside for celebration or remembrance of anything anymore, and that’s just me. I’m not against this kind of thing but it doesn’t resonate with me.

That’s why the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has come and gone these blogging years without comment from me, although 9/11 marked perhaps the darkest days in my life and set in motion changes in me which were, for me, profound. It’s in the days leading up to the 9/11 anniversary that people reflect on that day and how we move forward. E.J. Dionne Jr. has phoned it in with his September 7th, 2011 column, “Time to leave 9/11 behind”.

As the title promises, the first line delivers:

“After we honor the 10th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we need to leave the day behind.”

It’s a familiar refrain, one I’ve read from Liberal pundits since, well, shortly after September 11, 2001. We shouldn’t use this as an excuse to make war, we’ve gone off-track, we need to understand that we were attacked because we’re hated, and with good reason, we need to make amends so the world will love us again and we’ll all live together in the world with harmony and respect for cultural diversity, and then unicorns will fart rainbows, blah blah blah, blah blah, blah.

Although the Liberal MSM never stopped airing the pictures and video of the planes hitting the towers (look, big explosion!), even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 they wouldn't air the pictures or video of the jumpers. Those were the victims above the inferno in the towers who jumped to their certain death rather than stay and succumb to the smoke and flame. What hell that must have been for those office workers that the better option was to jump from the top floors of a skyscraper. Not a few, either; surviving rescue workers described having to be exceedingly cautious when entering or exiting the towers to avoid being crushed by a random person falling from the sky, and how unnerving it was to hear the bodies thumping on the sidewalk every couple of minutes. Why the media embargo? While not graphic, they were horrifying, and they angried up the blood. Americans were, by and large, ready to unleash our war machine, but already the imploring chorus of restraint was stirring from the anti-war left, who saw us as having gotten our just desserts - Blame America First.

It only took a half a year or so for the focus to shift, as the Lefties knew that this war business wasn't going to treat them well. Modern Liberal Democrats are not the leaders you want in charge in a time of war, and they knew it, so on the whole they thought this 9/11 thing was taking domestic and foreign policy in all kinds of wrong directions. Like hamsters running the wheel for hours on end, they get tired and rest for a spell but soon enough they're back at it. It's their hobby horse and they're not getting off it, because we can't change policy until you people get over the hurt. So, like, it's sad & all, but can't you just leave it in the past? Besides which, you deserved it.

“As a nation we have looked back for too long. We learned lessons from the attacks, but so many of them were wrong. The last decade was a detour that left our nation weaker, more divided and less certain of itself.”

I’ll refrain from rebutting the arguments that Dionne neglects to make himself, but suffice it to say, he’s wrong, wrong, wrong. We learned valuable lessons from 9/11, and perhaps not well enough, and our response has left us stronger, not weaker. Hey, if Dionne won’t make the case against, I’m don’t have to make the case for.

“Reflections on the meaning of the horror and the years that followed are inevitably inflected by our own political or philosophical leanings. It’s a critique that no doubt applies to my thoughts as well. We see what we choose to see and use the event as we want to use it.”

I suppose it would be unfair to point out that Dionne, perhaps tellingly, focuses on how we choose to “use the event as we want to use it”, because in essence, I agree with this paragraph. Let’s just say, for now, that E.J. Dionne and I disagree on all the particulars.

“This does nothing to honor those who died and those who sacrificed to prevent even more suffering. In the future, the anniversary will best be reserved as a simple day of remembrance in which all of us humbly offer our respect for the anguish and the heroism of those individuals and their families.”
“But if we continue to place 9/11 at the center of our national consciousness, we will keep making the same mistakes. Our nation’s future depended on far more than the outcome of a vaguely defined “war on terrorism,” and it still does. Al-Qaeda is a dangerous enemy. But our country and the world were never threatened by the caliphate of its mad fantasies.”

Long have the Liberal-Left fervently implored us not to take 9/11 so hard. Let me start hitting a couple of the specifics here:

First of all, it’s arguable whether we place 9/11 “at the center of our national consciousness”, but if that’s the case then it is so for reasons which are far beyond the ability of anyone to simply wish it away. 9/11 will gradually diminish in importance as time stretches the distance between the now and then, but what Dionne and his ilk have either never grasped or simply wanted to make not so, is that it was an event on the order of magnitude of Pearl Harbor. It is both tiresome and insulting to hear from Dionne et al that we should just get over it. Not happening, not anytime soon.

Then there’s the part where he acknowledges that “Al Qaeda is a dangerous enemy”, but “our country and the world were never threatened by the caliphate of its mad fantasies”. I don’t think it’s necessary to belabor the obvious contradiction here, as these two ideas are mutually exclusive. What Dionne means - but apparently lacks the skill to put clearly - is that Al Qaeda will never succeed in reestablishing a caliphate. It's either clumsiness or intentionally intimating that, in some sense, we are really threatened by Al Qaeda.

In the sense that Al Qaeda will never succeed in their mad fantasies of a worldwide caliphate, Dionne and I agree. I wouldn't be entirely sure of their chances for a regional caliphate, nor would I take off the table the possibility of various other states in the being absorbed into the orbit of this yet-to-be established caliphate. At any rate, I wouldn't want to establish odds, as I think they're pretty long on even the most modest of their goals.

This is an entirely separate question from whether Al Qaeda is an ongoing threat. They are. A diminished, less capable threat, not to be underestimated, but pursued to the ends of the Earth and exterminated wherever they are, no matter how long it takes. Further, Al Qaeda is but one organization of many that are like-minded and equally dastardly. The point I'm driving at is that what Dionne wants is for us to go back to 9/10, and I'm here to tell you this a mad fantasy of Liberal-Leftists. They've probably got a better chance of realizing their fantasy than Al Qaeda does for realizing theirs.

“We asked for great sacrifice over the past decade from the very small portion of our population who wear the country’s uniform, particularly the men and women of the Army and the Marine Corps. We should honor them, too. And, yes, we should pay tribute to those in the intelligence services, the FBI and our police forces who have done such painstaking work to thwart another attack.”

I presume Dionne is preferentially giving shout-outs to the Army and Marine Corps based on casualty figures, but really, all of our armed service members have borne an extraordinary burden. One of the lessons we should have learned from the military engagements of the last decade is that our military is inarguably too small to do this without having to resort to extended tours of combat duty. Whether you support the war(s) or not, the presumption that we have the ability to fight such wars can no longer be taken at face value - or be relied upon as a part of our defense posture. If the possibility of going to war to defend, say, Taiwan or South Korea, is off the table because it would outstrip our capacity to effectively prosecute that third front, then that’s an excellent argument for augmenting the size of our armed forces because weakness invites attack. That lesson was, alas, not learned.

Still, it’s worth noting that Dionne doesn’t go the route of infantilizing our armed forces by talking about them as if they were children forced to go to war, or as bloodthirsty killbot murderers leaving a wake of devastation and suffering. I wish more antiwar folks were as decent as Dionne is here.

Hey, I wish for a lot of things.

“It was often said that terrorism could not be dealt with through “police work,” as if the difficult and unheralded labor involved was not grand or bold enough to satisfy our longing for clarity in what was largely a struggle in the shadows.”

Here Dionne constructs a straw man but doesn’t even bother to knock it down. Let me set it on fire by pointing out that one of the problems with using law enforcement to prosecute a war is that law enforcement is, by varying degrees, reactive rather than proactive. Without probable cause, how to apprehend suspects? How to obtain sufficient evidence to obtain the issuance of arrest warrants, and under what standard of law do we operate – ours, or the laws of a foreign country? To what degree to we constrain and expose our law officers by working with a foreign government in the investigation? By way of example, let me point out that when it was determined that Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan, the Bush Administration demanded he be turned over to us. The Taliban responded that, no, they would be doing no such thing, but they would consider extradition if we could present a case to an international court of law, and besides which, they had no idea where he was, although they would be happy to pass along any message we might wish to send him.

[Go back and read the rest of that last sentence now that you've stopped laughing at how the Taliban were demanding we persuade an international court of law.]

Further, law enforcement is subject to the legal constraints of a civil society rather than an effectively lawless badlands or an actual rootin’ tootin’ battlefield. In that kind of environment it is impractical to the point of being an impossibility to maintain the integrity of a chain of custody for physical evidence, and even the problematical nature of the reading of Miranda rights makes the notion of a legal battlespace, quite frankly, bizarre. Proverbially speaking, it’s bringing a knife to a gunfight, or in this case, an arrest warrant to a gunfight. OK, the FBI carries guns, but up against RPGs, AK-47s, IEDs and, well, you get the picture.

“Forgive me, but I find it hard to forget former president George W. Bush’s 2004 response to Sen. John Kerry’s comment that “the war on terror is less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement operation.”
“Bush retorted: “I disagree — strongly disagree. . . . After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States of America, and war is what they got.” What The Washington Post called “an era of endless war” is what we got, too.”
“Bush, of course, understood the importance of “intelligence gathering” and “law enforcement.” His administration presided over a great deal of both, and his supporters spoke, with justice, of his success in staving off further acts of terror. Yet he could not resist the temptation to turn on Kerry’s statement of the obvious. Thus was an event that initially united the nation used, over and over, to aggravate our political disharmony. This is also why we must put it behind us.”

What is obvious to Dionne in Kerry’s statement is left unstated, and it deserves to be fleshed out. I won’t do his work for him, but I will point out that intelligence gathering and law enforcement operations do not preclude warfighting as a means of confronting enemy conspirators and combatants. For a couple hundred years now, the U.S. has used all of these tools in the prosecution of war.

The disconnect between these two ideas – those of Kerry and W – is that W was responding to the unstated premise in Kerry’s statement: that we can use intelligence gathering and law enforcement to mitigate the threat of Al Qaeda without waging war.

The political disharmony Dionne laments is a direct result of the disagreement between these two ideological camps over this question. What’s more, that disagreement was fueled by the political calculus of Democrats who parlayed an issue of national security in order to get more political power, which is simply unconscionable.

I’m sure Liberals will take exception to that statement, but let me preempt their howls by asking this question: how else do you explain the promises of candidate Obama, which were very much in alignment with the spirit of anti-war Liberals, to the actions of POTUS Obama? From the continuance of warrantless wiretaps, to the dramatic expansion of drone airstrikes, and the extension of the Patriot Act, to the Libyan war, and so on, it seems obvious that POTUS Obama has fallen far short of the standards he set for himself. I’m not trying to use these reversals as a cudgel against POTUS Obama, but rather, to point out that, in reality, as POTUS Obama either knew or learned, our country is not well-served by prosecuting a war as if it were a matter solely for intelligence gathering and law enforcement.

While I'm at it, let me also point out how disingenuous the Left has been over these past years. Yeah, yeah, when W was in office, the Constitution was shredded, he thought himself a king, the republic was doomed, and America as we knew it was being destroyed by the evil Republicans, damn those soulless ghouls. The Left marched by the tens of thousands, they did, to stop the wars and take back America! When they did take back America, or at least the government - which, surprisingly, still existed, and still somehow allowed free elections - Democrats won all three branches of government and those very same policies were met with... muted grumbling. Only the far left still seems to be waving their pitchforks, but mainstream Liberals have given their guy a pass.

“In the flood of anniversary commentary, notice how often the term “the lost decade” has been invoked. We know now, as we should have known all along, that American strength always depends first on our strength at home — on a vibrant, innovative and sensibly regulated economy, on levelheaded fiscal policies, on the ability of our citizens to find useful work, on the justice of our social arrangements.”

I’ll defer to Dionne that “the lost decade” is a phrase used with some frequency in Liberal circles, but that phrase has no currency on the Right. At any rate, American strength is not dependent on the false choice Dionne presents. Our economy must be strong in order to have a strong national defense, and our national defense can only be strong if our economy is strong. We can’t have one without the other, but regardless of economic circumstances in our national defense we must wage war on those who wage war against us. It always pays to destroy our enemies, even though it costs us.

“This is not “isolationism.” It is a common sense that was pushed aside by the talk of “glory” and “honor,” […]"

… aaaand let me stop Dionne right here and call out this BS. Glory and honor were never used by the Bush Administration to justify warmaking; this is a shameless manufacturing of a lie to serve Liberal dissent. We did not go to war in Afghanistan or Iraq for glory, period. We did not go to war against Afghanistan or Iraq for honor, either. We did not go to war against Afghanistan or Iraq for treasure either, but I digress. Dionne would like to portray hawks and neocons as warmongers seeking glory and honor, but Dionne forgets that these are the facile accusations of the Liberal-Left, now so ingrained as to be taken as self-evident truths. Recall what I said above, about how accusations against their political opposition are first taken as a possibility, then as probably true, and from there a certainty.

“[…] by utopian schemes to transform the world by abruptly reordering the Middle East — and by our fears.”

Here Dionne is alluding to the neocon ambition of upsetting the apple carts of the undemocratic Middle East dictatorships and facilitating the emergence of representative republics. It’s a shame that POTUS Bush largely gave up on that ambition in his second term, but it’s somewhat encouraging to see the possibility of that dream coming to fruition in some parts of the Middle East today as a part of what’s being called the Arab Spring. You might think that current events would have Dionne thinking twice about calling such a scheme utopian, but, well, apparently not.

“While we worried that we would be destroyed by terrorists, we ignored the larger danger of weakening ourselves by forgetting what made us great.”

And what made us great? Glory? Honor? I’d like to address this statement but as it stands I can’t make heads or tails of it and I’m not about to flesh out his argument that isn’t made so that I can rebut it.

“We have no alternative from now on but to look forward and not back.”

We can do both, unless you can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Of course, Dionne has been arguing that we shouldn’t look back, not that we can’t, so this statement is simply empty rhetoric, and it’s just so very lame, but it does set up his final paragraph:

“This does not dishonor the fallen heroes, and Lincoln explained why at Gettysburg. “We can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow this ground,” he said. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” The best we could do, Lincoln declared, was to commit ourselves to “a new birth of freedom.” This is still our calling.”

It’s nice that Dionne concluded his piece with a quote from that venerated Republican Lincoln, whom we all hold dear to our hearts, but the conclusion of his piece ends up right where it began, with Dionne lazily waving his arms, chanting, “Forget, forget, forget.”

So let me sum up my fisking with this:

9/11: Never Forget.

The Bare Cupboard of the EU Paper Tigers

[by Mr.Hengist]

It's been pointed out by many (and so asserted by me during my ’04 conversation with Noocyte) that the European militaries have been pared back past the point of their being useful allies in any significant conflict. This harvest of shame is the fruit of their folly in the war of the Euroweenies versus the Arsenal of Kleptocracy. In an article in the April 16, 2011 WaPo, we learn this:

“Less than a month into the Libyan conflict, NATO is running short of precision bombs, highlighting the limitations of Britain, France and other European countries in sustaining even a relatively small military action over an extended period of time, according to senior NATO and U.S. officials.”

Good grief, but there’s more:

“[…] the current bombing rate by the participating nations is not sustainable. “The reason we need more capability isn’t because we aren’t hitting what we see — it’s so that we can sustain the ability to do so. One problem is flight time, the other is munitions,” said another official, one of several who were not authorized to discuss the issue on the record.”

The problem of flight time is a function of their having to traverse relatively long distances from Allied airbases to Libyan targets. This has multiple effects on the campaign, all of them bad:

- Large quantities of expensive fuel are consumed,
- Wear & tear are put on aircraft, leading to increased maintenance costs and overall downtime, as well as hastening the point at which the aircraft will have to undergo overhaul.
- Fewer sorties can be flown overall because the strike craft spend so much time in transit.
- Enemy weapons can inflict damage on their targets in the meantime.
- Intelligence can become stale, and enemy targets can move out of area or into a protected space, like a residential neighborhood.

Would that they had carrier groups to park offshore, but of course, they don’t.

“European arsenals of laser-guided bombs, the NATO weapon of choice in the Libyan campaign, have been quickly depleted, officials said. Although the United States has significant stockpiles, its munitions do not fit on the British- and French-made planes that have flown the bulk of the missions.”

European airframes not compatible with American weaponry. How very stupid. What’s next? “We can’t put boots on the ground – our dainty stiletto heels will sink into the sand! Help us, Uncle Sam!”

“Libya “has not been a very big war. If [the Europeans] would run out of these munitions this early in such a small operation, you have to wonder what kind of war they were planning on fighting,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank. “Maybe they were just planning on using their air force for air shows.”

Perhaps a fresh salvo of strongly worded memos from the U.N. will do the trick, or it’s on to the big guns of U.N. binding resolutions!

Remember this the next time you hear a leftist indignantly whine about how U.S. military expenditures exceed those of our allies. Butterflies and rainbow unicorn farts do not win wars. It is our allies who have been underspending and are woefully unprepared.

Vectors

Care of the Belmont Club, comes this vid of a remotely-operated quad-rotor platform. Some truly impressive software enables it to execute maneuvers which are downright balletic in their nimbleness. Check it out.




This is some pretty extraordinary stuff, and begs the question of why the frack we don't have piloted vehicles with this sort of architecture. Their superiority over conventional high, open-rotor designs is obvious, in terms of maneuverability and range of safe operating environments. Four shrouded ducted fans could propel a vehicle, for example, through forest canopy in ways that would turn a conventional helo into a shrieking mass of falling metal and several high-velocity flying swords. Sure, you couldn't autorotate in the event of an engine failure, but you could probably compensate for the loss of one engine, and a ballistic parachute system would be simpler to implement than in a typical rotorcraft for catastrophic faults.

All that aside, the possibilities for reconnaissance and surveillance (not to mention kinetic urban engagements) are just as obvious. Armed with ordnance and/or cameras and sensors, one or ten of these little suckers would vastly increase the potential situational awareness of troops in complex areas of operation. They could scoot through windows or doors (or tunnel hatches), and scope out those pesky blind corners with the greatest of ease. Packing a grenade, they could be very effective in breaking the ice...


Of course, on that latter point, Richard Fernandez at the above-linked BC post has some things to say about the law of unintended consequences with respect to the current administration's efforts to close both prominent and clandestine facilities for the holding of captured baddies. In essence, by foreclosing on options for detention and interrogation of high-value targets, the emphasis has, perforce, moved decidedly in the direction of liquidation (everything must go!). Despite international hand-wringing on the "legality" of targeted assassinations via drone strike, there really is little alternative for dealing with those who draw breath all-but solely for the purpose of doing us harm.

Come hellfire or high-waterboarding, somebody is going to be offended by our efforts to defend ourselves against murderous miscreants. There is no simple solution to the dilemma. It is at least useful, however, to reflect on the distal implications of our decisions when it comes to fighting our  foes.

After all, as the video so clearly shows, thrust in any given direction must be balanced by opposing counter-thrust. We really don't have all that much room to maneuver.

Godspeed, and Good Hunting

[by Mr.Hengist]

Awesome: The USS New York has set sail on her maiden voyage to New York City, where she will be commissioned into the fleet on November 7th, 2009.

Mr. Zawahiri? Meet Ms. Miranda...

[by Mr.Hengist]

It's long been one of the defining ways in which hawks and doves have differentiated their framing of the post-9/11 world, with hawks arguing that 9/11 was an act of war as opposed to a criminal act. The differentiation between the two is neither academic nor semantic as it goes the to the heart of the ensuing disagreements between the two camps on the strategies employed by the Bush Administration.

The notion that doves would have us advise captured terrorists that they are entitled to Miranda rights has long been derided by hawks, and rightfully so. Acts of war are not covered by the American criminal code of law. Nevertheless, in accordance with their fantasies, POTUS Obama has reportedly instructed the FBI to issue enemy combatants a reading of Miranda rights - which apparently includes the right to remain silent.

I suppose this will give a rhetorical boost to their argument that harsh interrogation of detainees in the GWOT are inappropriate, but this is only a policy change and neither adds to nor subtracts from the bodies of law governing these detainees. Parenthetically, it's little wonder then that the Obama Administration thought it inconsequential to reveal our catalog of allowed interrogation techniques; Miranda gives these evildoers the option to simply opt out of talking.

At any rate, if the lawyer quoted in the Weekly Standard article is to be believed and these detainees may soon be prosecuted in United States courts of law, the logical extension of this policy change is to apply the U.S. laws regarding the sanctity of the chain of custody. Imagine a world in which U.S. Armed Forces are issued little plastic baggies into which they must drop and seal evidence. In a war zone. During a firefight. In the meantime, exploitation will have to wait, as these baggies are transferred to a stateside FBI crime lab or evidence room.

Does that sound insane? That's what hawks thought about reading Miranda to terrorists, and yet here we are. In fact, only a couple of months ago POTUS Obama assured Steve Kroft and the American people on "60 Minutes" that Miranda for detainees was ridiculous. As Hugh Hewitt would say, every Obama promise has an expiration date.

Pakistani Contingency Plan?

Last week I came across this story on the Fox News site, and I thought I would put it out there for consideration:

The United States has a detailed plan for infiltrating Pakistan and securing its mobile arsenal of nuclear warheads if it appears the country is about to fall under the control of the Taliban, Al Qaeda or other Islamic extremists.

American intelligence sources say the operation would be conducted by Joint Special Operations Command, the super-secret commando unit headquartered at Fort Bragg, N.C.

Stratfor's George Friedman's America's Secret War had described the wrangling between Washington and Islamabad on the matter of their nukes in the months following 9/11, and the pressures which the US placed on Pakistan (mainly through overtures to its bitter foe India) to allow US operatives into Pakistan to work with the Paki military on securing those weapons. I remember thinking at the time that this was also a splendid opportunity to characterize in detail the location and nature of that arsenal, against a future need to deny them to any Jihadi-friendly elements of the Pakistani military and the ISI. This was another of those things which I was grudgingly comfortable not knowing about in detail, owing to the extreme sensitivity of the matter. It was a pretty big leap of faith, but I was reasonably confident that the Bush Administration took these things seriously enough to be working diligently behind the scenes, and to have a plan in the hopper in case the unthinkable were to occur.

I have no such faith in the seriousness of the Obama Administration. However, I do place a great deal of faith in the capabilities and focus of our Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) forces. If there is a way to neutralize those nukes and keep them out of the hands of extremists, then this is the bunch that will pull it off...so long as their hands are not unduly tied by an irresolute and ideologically-blinkered C in C. In fairness to the Obama Administration, the article does sound this hopeful note:

JSOC is made up of three main elements: Army Delta Force, Navy SEALs and a high-tech special intelligence unit known as Task Force Orange. JSOC was instrumental in Iraq in finding and killing Abu Musab Zarqawi, the deadly and most prominent Al Qaeda leader in the Middle East.

There is speculation in the intelligence community that a secondary reason for Army Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal being named the next commander in Afghanistan is that he headed JSOC in 2006-08 and is read-in on its contingency missions in Pakistan.

I'd also had a feeling that Gen. McKiernan's replacement with Gen. McChrystal was related to the crucial role that Special Forces would play in the Af-Pak theater. Mainly, I saw this as the function of SF operators in the recruitment and training of indigenous assets, as well as intelligence gathering and assorted covert ops. However, the potential, in extremis, for deploying SF units in the service of taking Paki nukes off the table for Islamists demands a level of expertise on-site which Gen McChrystal would be able to bring. This may have been one of the sub rosa motivations for replacing the the very capable Gen. McKiernan so soon after he'd assumed his post.

As uncomfortable as I am with the idea of a nuclear-armed Pakistan, I stronly hope it does not come to that. It would enflame Pakistani nationalism and anti-Americanism to a very dangerous degree, and we would have to get it absolutely right the very first time. But if the alternative is losing track of even one nuke (or even critical components thereof), then the risk would be eminently worth taking.

Exam Week (UPDATED)

And the Global Tests keep on coming.

In addition to the Iranian bluster, the North Koreans' big splashes, Russia's rearmament plans, and a host of others, we can now add this to the growing pile of gauntlets at President Obama's feet. The fact that these Somali pirates have now seized an American-flagged merchant vessel could be a game-changer in the US' response to these on-going challenges to the lawful conduct of trade on the high seas. It could create just the opportunity to deploy the considerable resources of the US' intelligence-gathering and other tactical capabilities to a degree which might not have been justified when it was other nations' ships which were getting jacked (though I personally feel that such justification has existed all along, since it is in the US' interests to protect trade, even if it is not its own vessels which are involved...yes, Mike, I know you don't agree with this!).

The way to pass this test is to assemble a Delta or DEVGRU team, gather real-time intel about the status of the vessel and its assailants and captives, and strike, hard and fast, while the iron is hot. Ideally, this would be followed by gathering and swiftly acting on the products of interrogation of any pirates who survive the engagement, and striking at the base from which these brigands operate. Longer term, dummy merchant vessels (or real merchants, with SF operators on board) should randomly ply these waterways, with satellite and (armed) UAV support. That would put a badly-needed caution to these miscreants, and show the world that the USN is anything but a paper boat.

I await any evidence that the current Administration possesses the vertebrae for this.

Maybe Obama will manage to Sparknote this one in time to seem less of a doormat (you know, those things on which people wipe their shoes...which is a damn sight worse than having them thrown at you).

UPDATE: Well, that was quick! Looks like the military didn't need to get involved in this one at all. Instead, it appears that a bold and alert crew saw and seized an opportunity to re-take their vessel. If indeed one of these pirates is in custody, then this was a very bad day for their ilk (I expect counterinterrogation training is not high on the list of skill sets for these jagoffs).

Bravo to the valiant crew of the Maersk Alabama!


UPDATE 2: This article from the CSM nicely lays out the issues and the stakes with regard to this incident. Meanwhile, my thoughts go out for the speedy return of the good captain.

Iraqi Air Force Looks to Add Talons

Via Strategy Page comes this bit of news on the development of the Iraqi military. Specifically, the Iraqi Air Force (IAF) is looking to add a squadron of American F-16s to their fledgling foray into potential battlespaces along the Z-axis:

The Iraqi Air Force has convinced the government to spend $1.5 billion to buy a squadron of 18 F-16 jet fighters. The U.S. is inclined to cooperate, and sell Iraq the 96 F-16s Iraqi Air Force wants to eventually purchase over the next decade.

As the article points out, the US has a fairly large number of F-16s available for export, a number which is apt to increase as the USAF fields new airframes (unless, of course, the Obama Administration continues to target air superiority as an expendable indulgence...). When you factor in the training and support infrastructure which would accompany these sales, it adds up to a pretty penny. In return, the Iraqis would go a long way toward closing one of the main gaps (another being logistics) in their military's ability to function completely independently of Coalition forces.

This story strikes me as a promising sign of the increasing benefits which stand to follow from the economic and political development of the nation of Iraq as a partner in the critical region of the Middle East. The sale of arms to a government which uses them responsibly (the jury for which, I'll grant, is settling in for long deliberations...) solidifies that partnership, and portends other favorable trade arrangements (and no, I'm not just talking about oil). I am seeing little cause to dampen my decreasingly guarded (but never unexamined) optimism about the favorable trajectories (PDF) of the Iraqi State, society, and economy.

As Iraq becomes increasingly able to mind its own security (including patrolling its own airspace), using its own resources (or duly purchasing those of others), it inches ever further toward the full expression of its national sovereignty. While it will take a lot of very profitable trade to even begin to defray the raw costs of OIF for the US, it is gratifying to see what may be remembered as the beginnings of that long journey. A free and prosperous Iraq stands to offer much to the region and to the world, and many of those benefits are difficult to quantify in these early stages. It is certainly too early to tell whether Iraq will escape the trap so many of its oil-rich neighbors have fallen into, and will use its petro-lucre to diversify its economy and develop its human capital, rather than using it only to buy the expertise it fails to nurture at home.

I know: a long way to go from the proposed purchase of a few fighter jets. What can I say...I'm pretty tired (which is often accompanied by a tendency to free-associate), and still pleasantly burnt from a certain recent thread. Still, it perked me up a little.

The New Yorker, thy name is Yankee Doodle

[by Mr.Hengist]

Think Progress has an EXCLUSIVE! Seymour Hersh wrote an article in The New Yorker in which he claims that VPOTUS Cheney considered a proposal to... No, wait, I won't spoil it, just read go read it after you've put down your beer. And, yes, this is so an EXCLUSIVE for Think Progress - they hit the web with it before The Nation, The Progressive, and Utne Reader could read the article for themselves and go squirrely. At any rate, it's The New Yorker which put a feather in it's cap (and called it Macaroni).

Doesn't it almost give you a wistful longing for the Cold War?

COIN Chameleon

Via the WSJ comes this very thought-provoking editorial by Ann Marlowe, about the perils of assuming that the precise set of COIN tactics which have all-but prevailed in Iraq can be transplanted to Afghanistan with any expectation of similar results. It's a lovely, tight little piece which I hope is widely read (or is based on widely-known ideas). For example:

Afghanistan's problems are not the same as Iraq's. Its people aren't recovering from a brutal, all-controlling tyranny, but from decades of chaos and centuries of bad government. Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, is largely illiterate and has a relatively undeveloped civil society. Afghan society still centers around the family and, for men, the mosque. Its society and traditions are still largely intact, in contrast to Iraq's fractured, urbanized and half-modernized population.

As I have previously written, Counterinsurgency (COIN) is a very subtle bit of business, the very essence of adaptability and flexibility. The core of it is a detailed understanding of the host nation's population dynamics and threat/asset profiles, guided by a warrior sociologist's study, analysis, intelligence (in both senses of the word), and real-time intuition.

Some might claim that the success of the COIN doctrine in Iraq was a too-good-to-be-true confluence of historical and socio-cultural factors which made Iraq atypically ripe for successful application of the Petraeus/Nagl/Odierno style of COIN operations. Alternately, one might argue that the demonstrable success of that style of operations in Iraq means that it can be successfully exported to other AOs with little change (as Obama and his people seem to be suggesting). Both of these analyses would be shallow and unhelpful.

Arguing that Iraq was uniquely well-suited for COIN ops is like arguing that the distance of the Earth from the Sun is uniquely well-suited for the emergence of life. The argument dissolves in a puff of tautology on even a casual examination: In both instances, the setting and the set emerge together, and artificially parsing them into cause and effect is an exercise in intellectual laziness. The particular type of COIN theory which emerged to handle the situation in Iraq looks as it did, beyond general parameters, because it was designed for Iraq. Before the Coalition arrived, Iraq existed, with all of its alliances and fractures and subtle loyalties and resentments. It was these dynamics which informed the design of the particular applications of COIN doctrine, just as that doctrine evolved together with the dynamics which it influenced. Similarly, although the distance from the Sun has remained more-or-less constant (though solar output has varied over time...), and formed the initial conditions for life to emerge (i.e., allowing liquid water to be stable on the surface), that life has also acted to regulate the conditions on the planet to maintain a homeostatic balance which continues to be favorable to life. To suggest that the success of the Surge was a matter of blind luck as to the conditions in Iraq is akin to arguing that the uncanny suitability of the Earth for organic life must be evidence of Intelligent Design.

Of course, as Marlowe's editorial proposes, it is equally foolish to assume that the particular constellation of force structures and tactical configurations which worked in Iraq could have 'scalable' results in Afghanistan. The primacy of the tribal (or even 'lower')-level social unit, coupled with the geographical and ethno-social isolation of widely-distributed sub-groups in almost extraterrestrially remote and rugged terrain militates against the kinds of urban-level operational philosophy which took root so relatively readily in post-Saddam Iraq. Further, the very active and destabilizing effects of the Pakistani military and intelligence machinery in abetting a relatively thriving Taliban/AQ presence, safe across the border within a beleaguered, nuclear-armed, twitchily sovereign nation defies any facile comparisons with even Iran. For Obama to continually carp on the idea that he can graft the relatively heavy force-footprint model of COIN operations which worked for Iraq onto Afghanistan smacks of the sort of shallow, opportunistic "me-too-ism" which so typifies his foreign policy style, particularly with regard to military matters.

The simple point is that a species of COIN strategy does need to be applied to Afghanistan...but it must arise out of a careful synthesis of multiple, far-flung threads of data and wisdom pertaining specifically to Afghanistan, where it will shift its shape into something more adapted to its surroundings. When it comes to COIN, this is a feature, not a bug:

Counterinsurgency is not one-size-fits-all. While there are best practices, they must be applied in a nuanced way. In poorly governed countries where insurgencies are likely to arise, the solution may vary from valley to valley.

It shouldn't be hard to see that adding men, helicopters or projects is not always the solution. But then, a would-be commander in chief who announces his prescription for Afghanistan before setting foot there has a lot to learn about America's top job.

Of course, for Obama to pontificate about what sorts of strategies and tactics should best be applied within Afghanistan is revelaed to be an even sillier exercise when one remembers that the head of CENTCOM, within whose Area of Responsibility (AoR) lies Afghanistan, is none other than David Petraeus himself. Talk about teaching your grandmother to suck eggs! For Obama to pose for the cameras as a man standing boldly ahead of the curve on the application of a policy he less-than-presciently opposed, and presume to dictate to one of that policy's chief authors is the very height of chutzpah.

The complexity of the tasks which await us in the Af-Pak theater is simply too daunting to entrust to strutting greenhorns and shallow thinkers.

Memorial Day, 2008

Over at The Belmont Club (one of my very favorite blogs), I found this post on an article at the Clairmont Institute's site, regarding the "American mind for war." On this Memorial Day (or what's left of it at this hour), it got me thinking about the dynamics among the American public and the military which serves and discomfits it.

The article is actually a review of the book The Echo of Battle: The Army's Way of War, by Brian Mcallister Linn. Sounds intriguing, and I have placed it on my (absurdly long and rapidly growing) queue. In brief, the American Mind for War holds that the mass of the American public jealously guards the highly desirable quality of its peacetime life and, though quick to anger, is generally loath to surrender the comforts of that life to the horrors of war. Once drawn in, however, the author contends that the US' wars have tended to unfold in describable ways:

Because of this American mind for war, America's conflicts have fallen into two broad types: professional wars and citizen wars. Professional wars were small wars fought by the volunteer standing military, in which professionals were left alone to do their job. Citizen wars, on the other hand, drew in the American public—through conscription, mass voluntary enlistment, or direct attacks on the population—and thus had to be won quickly. That is not to say the American mind for war is amoral, but rather that morality, like so many other aspects of American thought, is pragmatic. If wars can be won by bombing military targets with as few casualties as possible, Americans will seize the chance. If wars can be won by capturing capital cities or winning decisive battles without involving civilians, wonderful. But if not, the American mind for war dictates that attacks grow steadily more devastating to enemy armies and then enemy populations until they have no choice but to give up the fight. The sooner the war ends in victory, the better-for everyone, but especially for us. It is brutal logic, but logical nevertheless.

If the circumstances of Vietnam and the current conflict have created disaffection among Americans, it is because they violated the American mind for war. The draft made Vietnam a citizen war, but the United States could not ramp up the brutality because of the threat of escalation to a conventional or nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The conundrum of Vietnam short-circuited the American mindset for warfare so totally that it sent spasms of discontent through American society and culture that can still be felt, well beyond even strategic after-effects like the Weinberger/Powell Doctrine and Vietnam Syndrome.

The current war is disconcerting in its own ways, because the precipitating incident on 9/11 did draw the civilian population into the war. Then the initial rhetoric from just about everyone about the Global War on Terrorism linked the conflict to great citizen wars of the past, and the American public became engaged emotionally. Yet the country did not mobilize in any meaningful way. Whatever their feelings about Afghanistan and Iraq, the citizenry never felt the pain of separating from their peacetime lives. The military has fought the war with the professional force that has kept the brutality to a minimum—probably even to the extent that it has hampered their fighting effectiveness. This feels like citizen war, but it is being fought like a professional war, which drives the American mind for war half-mad [emphasis added].

Many opponents of this War (whether referring to particular theaters of operations --like Iraq and Afghanistan-- or to the Long War as a whole) often observe that the general population is not being asked to sacrifice, and conclude that this is a cynical manipulation by power brokers in the Bush Administration. The reasoning goes that, if this were truly a meaningful National pursuit, then they would have been called to do more than live their lives, go shopping, etc. Since they are not being called to do so, then, the War must be seen as an attempt to quietly hijack the Republic in the service of some shadowy nefarious ends (typically involving the "Military-Industrial Complex"), while lulling the populace into a false sense of normalcy, deviously annealed by periodic injections of fear.

It seems to me that a far more parsimonious explanation for the way this War is being conducted is that our highly professional, all-volunteer military is judged to be quite sufficient for the tasks at hand, and that their efforts on our behalf are best served through the preservation of a free, prosperous, vibrant society at home. Much as Vietnam was prevented from ramping up to a Total war (in the mold of WW2) by the threat of confrontation with the USSR, so this Long War's potential escalation is checked by the fact that the success of Western Civilization itself amounts to a powerful strategic weapon in the clash of ideologies in which we are engaged. Any escalation which undermines that success and the example it provides for the people who labor under the yoke of our foes' dark visions effectively removes that weapon from our arsenal, and so makes victory more difficult to attain. We have tasked our professional military with shouldering the bloody burdens of liberty, while we tempt our enemies with its fruits.

And, with extremely few exceptions (disproportionately trumpeted by a hostile press), the members of that military have hoisted that burden with a professionalism and grace and humanity which cannot help but be noticed by any with clear eyes to see. So effectively have the warriors of our conventional military and Special Operations Forces interdicted and crushed and generally thwarted the murderous designs of our foes, that we can continue to enjoy the luxury of peacetime prosperity here at home (and make no mistake: temporary economic slowdowns aside, we are fabulously prosperous by any reasonable calculus). Some mistake this peace for the norm, and rail against those who would pierce it with rumors of war. They have the luxury to do so because others toil to keep the monsters at bay.

As I sit in my little slice of the American Dream, clicking away on my shiny new laptop, I choose, rather, to take these moments to reflect on the immense debt I owe to those who man the ramparts in my stead. Self-sacrificing but not stupid, patriotic but wide awake, they place their bodies between myself and those who would see me dead or enslaved. It hardly seems adequate to tap some appreciative words on this keyboard, or to buy them a beer, or to proudly volunteer some of my professional time, or to answer back whenever I hear them maligned. But, since they are off doing all the heavy lifting, I suppose this will have to do for now.

5/27/2008 9:27AM - Edited for clarity and flow.

Supporting the Unsupportable

Yet another denizen of the elitist Left has let the mask slip from their veneer of mawkish "Support for Our Troops." Recent comments by alleged author Stephen King offer a glimpse into the extent of the contempt in which some of the beneficiaries of our Nation's hard-earned freedoms hold those who bravely volunteer to uphold those freedoms in the most hostile places this side of Berkeley. King's lame attempts to lend some nuance to his statements do little to extricate his foot from his mouth on the topic.

Clearly, this is not the first time we have heard this line of 'reasoning.' John Kerry earned the harshest criticism for his comments in October 2006, which suggested that not doing your homework and doing poorly in school would leave you no option but to become "stuck in Iraq." Kerry, of course, is a highly decorated veteran when it comes to casting aspersions on the US military, even when it is the truth which earns a Purple Heart in the process. This, coming from a man who was once a hair's breadth away from becoming Commander In Chief of the very folk whom he has held in such low regard (and it appears that the feeling was mutual).

It is not at all surprising that the "anti-war" movement should cleave to this narrative. Vintage Viet Nam protesters still have a hard time reconciling themselves to the collective shame of having spat on returning soldiers, and shouted "baby-killer" at physically and emotionally wounded citizens returning from horrific battles for which a great many of them did not voluntarily enlist. Any proper post-modern peacenicks are likely to have a hard time feeling righteous and sensitive with that kind of joo-joo clinging to them.

So much better, then, to shift gears and portray our military as being composed of poor, undereducated, deluded innocents, malevolently manipulated into the prosecution of an unjust war by unscrupulous power brokers for the sake of their shadowy Corporate overlords. Why revile when you can condescend? You can see how this approach kills multiple birds with one stone: you get to protest the projection of American power abroad, attack globalized capitalism, bash Bush, and still feel good about protecting the rights of the oppressed.

The trouble is that it simply doesn't hold any water. In order for this narrative to sustain any scrutiny, it is necessary to posit that our all-volunteer military is substantially composed of people whose educational and intellectual and demographic characteristics would render them more amenable to manipulation and deception than the general population. At the very least, it must be shown that enlistees have few options besides a stint in the military, for want of the opportunities which a more elevated station in society would afford them. Alas, there does not appear to be any there there, as this study by the Heritage Foundation shows quite clearly. To wit:

In summary, the additional years of recruit data (2004–2005) sup­port the previous finding that U.S. military recruits are more similar than dissimilar to the American youth population. The slight dif­ferences are that wartime U.S. mil­itary enlistees are better educated, wealthier, and more rural on aver­age than their civilian peers.

Recruits have a higher percent­age of high school graduates and representation from Southern and rural areas. No evidence indicates exploitation of racial minorities (either by race or by race-weighted ZIP code areas). Finally, the distri­bution of household income of recruits is noticeably higher than that of the entire youth population.

And what are these relatively affluent, well-educated people doing in the face of an allegedly unjust and irrational foreign policy? It appears that they are enlisting and re-enlisting in droves. Such data make it rather difficult to sustain the argument that anyone with an ounce of intelligence would see through the pack of lies being fed to them by some Machiavellian cabal of Corporate-kowtowing Neocons. Instead, we see (if we care to look) a dedicated group of rational actors, freely choosing to put their skills and blood on the line in the service of a cause which they are eminently qualified to discern and defend.

Of course, one of the primary characteristics of Liberals and "Progressives" is the quality of looking at the world not as it is, but as they feel it should be. When one is in the habit of subordinating the observable reality to a set of idealistic abstractions, it is only a matter of time before one or the other has to give. In the battle between the Is and the Ought, though, the smart money will predict that it is the former which will make the Stand.

COIN Toss

In this blog, I've made repeated references to Counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy and its applications in Iraq and elsewhere in this Long War. Although I've linked the fascinating Counterinsurgency Field Manual, by General Petraeus et al. (which I consumed as part of my rather eccentrically-conceived notion of my citizen's due diligence in preparation for Petraeus and Crocker's testimony before Congress last September), I am enough of a realist --if you'll pardon the expression-- to not expect less loony folk to actually read the book.

Still, unless one has at least a passing familiarity with COIN doctrine and its practical applications in Iraq, then one is in danger of seeing "The Surge" as little more than a shallow attempt to bolster what had been a demonstrably failing strategy by simply throwing more troops at the problem. This is most emphatically not the case, though --as usual-- you'd never know it by relying solely on the MSM as a source. In point of fact, the Surge in troop levels was only the most visible aspect of what was clearly a fundamental shift in strategy, one which has been paying tremendous dividends...and just in the nick of time!

I recently encountered a couple of articles which present some very vivid pictures of COIN doctrine in action, and I thought I'd take a few moments to share them.

The first is an article from the Small Wars Journal, by Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen, who is currently serving as special adviser for counterinsurgency to Secretary of State Rice. It is a wonderful insight into the thinking behind COIN tactics and strategy, organized around a set of "commandments" for military units rotating into an AO where insurgents compete for the public's cooperation. I simply cannot do it justice in a short summary, as it is so pithily written, filled with nuggets like these:

Counterinsurgency is armed social work; an attempt to redress basic social and political problems while being shot at. This makes civil affairs a central counterinsurgency activity, not an afterthought. It is how you restructure the environment to displace the enemy from it. In your company sector, civil affairs must focus on meeting basic needs first, then progress up Maslow’s hierarchy as each
successive need is met.

This is about as far from the "whack-a-mole" strategy which had previously been employed (and to which those like Barack Obama would have us return) as can be imagined. The crucial element in successful COIN operations is the intimate understanding of the host nation's society on as fine-grained a level as possible, such that the subtle signs of opposition or cooperation can become apparent and insurgents' tactics anticipated and interdicted. It is the kind of warfare which becomes possible when one's military is a highly trained and professional force of volunteers, versus a mob of conscripts.

Kilcullen's article is targeted at the level of Company commanders, and very skillfully addresses the concerns of those who must organize the activities of that number of fighters. At a much finer level of resolution is this article, by Captain Craig Coppock, US Army. It is a remarkable document which yields a wealth of practical insights into the day-to-day activities of a counterinsurgent operating at the level of the platoon or individual rifleman. The stress is clearly on the formation of intimate connections with the local population. It is by taking the time to establish relationships and gather extremely detailed data on the fine points of the AO ("Area of Operations") that the individual soldier, Marine, etc. is able to "get inside the enemy's planning cycle," and anticipate the next attack.

Readers who have never served nor intend to serve in the military (like myself) may wonder why I am directing their attention to articles which are so clearly aimed at those brave souls who choose to pursue a career in service of their country. The simple fact is that, as I have previously stated, most of us looking in from the outside will tend to have little to no idea of what it is that our military actually does on its various missions. If there is one idea that COIN operators must internalize and eternally apply, it is that a lack of understanding can lead to serious mistakes. The fact that such mistakes do not tend to be fatal for the rest of us the way they can be for those who are more directly in harm's way does not make it any less crucial that we try and minimize the number of conclusions we reach with incomplete or distorted information. Whether it is knowing which house to strike, based on information gathered from locals whose trust a soldier has painstakingly cultivated, or knowing which candidate should get our vote, based on a comprehensive and deeply-considered evaluation of well-sourced information, the consequences for our Nation and for the world in which it exists can be just as weighty.

One of the pieces of advice in the Coppock article is to vary one's patrolling habits, and so avoid predictable patterns which an alert enemy can exploit. Similarly, an over-reliance on established habits of thought and ideology are ripe targets for cynically manipulative operatives of political campaigns (to say nothing of advertising agencies and criminals). Taking the time to think inside of unfamiliar spaces can insulate us against such sneak attacks. It rewards the (considerable!) effort that it requires with the satisfaction of knowing that one has outmaneuvered even the most wily of adversaries. And so, as it goes for COIN, so does it go with citizenship and liberty as a whole:

Embrace counterinsurgency. It is not the cut and dry direct action fight that we all trained for. It is a thinking man’s game. You must outsmart your enemy. Do not get discouraged when you do not see immediate results. Some areas will be more resistant than others. This is not a reason to write the AO off as a lost cause. You just have a lot of work to do. Start small, start safe. Changing the dynamic of a neighborhood takes time.

Totten on Fallujah

In this City Journal article, linked from his main page, Michael Totten provides a nice overview on the status and stakes in this notoriously troubled city in Anbar Province. Fallujah and its fiercely independent tribes have presented would-be conquerors with a thorny problem for centuries; even Saddam's tyranny "succeeded only in renting the tribes around Fallujah, not buying them."

Fallujah, most of you will recall, was the site of the horrific burning and mutilation of four Blackwater contractors in 2004. It was the site of an abortive attempt by Coalition Forces to wrest the city from the grip of a motley assemblage of terrorists and insurgents in April of that year, followed by a more successful (but still incomplete) pacification attempt that November. Its name became synonymous with an intractably hostile operational environment.

Since the emergence of the Awakening Councils and the implementation of Gen. Petraeus' counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy and its supporting Surge, the tides have turned dramatically in Anbar Province in general and in Fallujah in particular. It's quite spectacular, really, just how profoundly the picture has changed there; Coalition Forces have gone from complaining about an almost unimaginably dangerous climate, to complaining about boredom and an excess of invitations to tea with solicitous locals.

This, however, is not to say that all is and shall remain roses in the City Of Mosques. Here is where Totten really shines; he is able to portray the very dramatic progress on the ground, while enumerating the substantial challenges yet to be conclusively faced.

The Marines’ final mission is the make-or-break mission, as all final missions must be. The third battle for Fallujah will be decisive. After the Americans leave, the city will either transform into a relatively normal backwater that nobody cares about—or tear itself apart. If Fallujah goes, Baghdad goes, and all of Iraq will follow.

A particularly pessimistic U.S. Army soldier I met in Baghdad last summer was certain that Iraq was too dysfunctional and conflict-wracked to be fixed. “Iraq will always be Iraq,” he said. Fallujah, likewise, will always be Fallujah, and Fallujah is difficult. One should not be starry-eyed at the news of its “awakening.” The city is not yet open to the modern world and its ways. Only desperate necessity granted Americans a reprieve from Fallujah’s fear and loathing of outsiders, which it now directs at Baghdad, Iraq as a whole, and international as well as local jihadism. Jeffersonian democracy has not yet come to the banks of the Euphrates.

That said, Fallujah’s worst days are likely behind it. “The al-Qaida leadership outside dumped huge amounts of money and people and arms into Anbar Province,” says Lieutenant Colonel Mike Silverman, who oversees an area just north of Ramadi. “They poured everything they had into this place. The battle against Americans in Anbar became their most important fight in the world. And they lost.”

Again, like Michael Yon, the particular genius of Totten's writing is his ability to report on progress without lapsing into cheerleading, and about challenges, setbacks, and outright disasters without collapsing into histrionics. The simple truth is that nothing in Iraq is truly simple. If our goal was to perform a kind of alchemy whereby Iraq would become some sort of clone of a Western-style Democracy over the course of one American election cycle, then we would be better off taking the Democrats' advice and packing it in straightaway. The task before us is to thread the needle between an unobtainably Utopian feat of social engineering, and a pointlessly "realistic" installation of a business-as-usual thugocracy which would be more amenable to the strings of an American puppeteer.

While respecting and co-opting existing social structures, we must facilitate the emergence of a State which will allow those structures to evolve. That means winning the respect and trust of the tribes, for they have formed the skeleton of a social compact among peoples whose views of any external authority --foreign or domestic-- have been quite understandably jaundiced for centuries. It is only when the tribes feel enfranchised and empowered that they will allow their shields to drop enough to acknowledge the legitimacy of any authority beyond Sheiks and clan affiliations. The coalescence of the Iraqi state quite simply has to emerge from the bottom up, for any top-down imposition of State control will inevitably evoke the specter of conquerors and tyrants from living memory down to the dim vaults of history.

It is this last point which I fear the Democrats of this country are dispositionally unable to recognize. Then again it is not surprising that a group of people for whom the top-down imposition of Governmental Initiatives is viewed as a panacea for all social ills should be chronically unable to see the existence –let alone the value– of social processes which arise from the bottom up. Thus the de facto reconciliation which is going on all over Iraq cannot help but be seen as irrelevant (when it is seen at all) because it is not the result of earnest deliberations by progressive-minded legislators, duly deploying a proper bureaucracy in the service of a comprehensive Program. So when Clinton and Obama and their legislative brethren on the Left side of the aisle prattle on about unmet benchmarks (albeit less so in recent days), they reveal a fundamental misreading of Iraqi society. They are stuck on statism.

This is why it is so imperative that independent reporting like Yon's and Totten's be required reading for those who struggle to develop a comprehensive understanding of Iraq's true status and its standing in our larger endeavors. As ever, I do encourage you to Read The Whole Thing and, if you feel it has been of value, to navigate over to Michael's site and make a donation to his on-going contributions to this vitally important conversation.

Why Not Study War Some More

(orig. Posted 4/10/08, on MySpace)

OK, so here are some more responses to the Petraeus/Crocker testimony before the Senate and House. Mainly, they boil down to the notion (not a new one for me, mind you, but driven home with fresh force) that most people do not have the faintest understanding of the military, its mission, methods and mindset. As I’ve repeatedly groused in the past (and doubtless will do in the future) the activities of our military in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere tend to be presented in the most superficial and tendentious manner imaginable...when those activities are presented at all (i.e., "good news is no news").

Thus, you’ll get reports about "violence" and Casualty Numbers, entirely unaccompanied by any reporting of what the military was actually doing at the time (routine patrol? hot-fire engagement of armed terrorist cells? IED blast while en route to build or repair another school/water treatment plant/medical clinic?), how people were killed/wounded (firefight? roadside bomb? sniper?), which people were killed (enemy vs. coalition forces), and, perhaps most importantly, whether or not the objectives of any given operation were achieved.

In other words, all you get from the Body Count Media is a vague sense that a lot of mayhem is happeing, with no clear point, and with no end in sight. Sound familiar?

As I try and assess what is going on in any given theater of our military’s operations (and those of our allies), there are a few sites to which I go to try and gain a broader perspective than would be available to me in the MSM.

On the principal that it is generally best to go straight to the horse’s mouth, one could always go to several sites sponsored by the military itself, such as the Pentagon/DoD’s web site, as well as the site for the Multi-National Force, Iraq. I know, I know, I can hear you now: "Why should I dignify those jingoistic Government Propaganda sites with any of my time?" Uh-huh. In case I haven’t been tediously clear by now, I am not proposing that you single-source anything. However, it is useful to begin with a sense of how the military is presenting its goals and methods and progress and setbacks (yes, they do report setbacks), before going on to compare those narratives to other sources and drawing your own conclusions.

Speaking of going straight to the horse’s mouth, over the last few years, there has been an explosion (pardon the pun) of "Milblogs." This is just what it sounds like: people in the military, frequently on active deployment, blogging right from their AO ("Area of Operations"). This is an unprecendented opportunity for the rest of us to have a glimpse --free from the editorial priorities of those who "report from the front" -- of what our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines are thinking and experiencing. These can be very frank and earthy (as you’d expect), so not always safe for work!

Trouble is that there are so many of them, and not all of them are especially interesting or edifying reading. A good place to start is on Milblogging.com, where you could go to the "Top 100 Favorite Milblogs" section (scroll down a bit). A couple of my own faves are: Blackfive, the Mudville Gazette, and Acute Politics.

I have found these to be a useful reality check against the overly bleak (from the Left) and overly rosy (from the Right) reports of our military’s morale and performance. Some of these blogs can be very critical of the government and its policies (leading to some stunningly wrong-headed and thankfully short-lived efforts to shut them down).

Now, I did deliver a doubly-deserved diss to the frequently fatuous flatulence of most "embedded reporters" (Credit: brave enough to ride along with our troops through the scrum. Demerit: not brave enough to deviate from the "It’s All Going To Hell" narrative their editors demand). However, they are most decidedly not created equal. There are at least two independent reporters who ride along with our military though the very thick of it, and who write with an eloquence and objectivity which is simply unmatched in MSM World. They are Michael Totten and Michael Yon. Their articles tend to be long, and highly detailed and lush with striking photos. I highly recommend them. Also, if you do like what you see, I encourage you to drop a little something in the tip jar (PayPal), as this is what finances their journalistic trips for the most part, and thus keeps them free from the editorial biases of the big News Outfits. I’ve contributed and consider it money very well spent.

Pulling back the focus from the grunt’s-eye view to the broader strategic picture, there are a number of sites which I have found to be indispensible. Here they are, in no particular order:

The Long War Journal, edited by Bill Roggio and published by the non-profit Public Multimedia, Inc. It offers wide-ranging reports and editorials and podcasts covering all theaters of the Long War, from Indonesia to Minnesota to Paris, to the Middle East. Tight, efficient writing and well-sourced reports make it an invaluable resource for keeping track of the twists and turns and victories and setbacks in the Global Conflict in which we are engaged. It may also prove useful for those of you who are still trying to decide if we are engaged in any such thing!

By the by, Bill Roggio is also a contributor and co-founder of the recently-launched Iraq Status Report page, which is meant to serve as a "one-stop shopping" site for the good, bad, ugly, etc. on Iraq. It is rapidly becoming my favorite site for an initial daily pass at the news from Mesopotamia. So far, so highly recommended (and I’ll let you know [like how I talk as if anyone is actually reading this? Wacky fun.] if it drops in quality or veers too sharply in a supportive/critical direction).

Threats Watch is another highly useful site. From their "About" page:

ThreatsWatch.Org was established in 2005 as the means to disseminate information on national security threats in an accessible, interactive and contextually aware form. In 2007 ThreatsWatch.Org became the web-based publication of the Center for Threat Awareness (CTA), a 501(c)3 tax-exempt corporation whose mission is to increase public awareness of threats to national security and liberty.

Its daily briefings and "Rapid Recon" sections are especially useful in tracking evolving threats and responses.

Global Security.org is a dizzying trove of information on matters of...well...Gobal Security. It can be a bit overwhelming, but eminently worth bookmarking due to its value as a research site. How they manage to make such a staggeringly comprehensive resource available for free (as opposed to Stratfor) is a mystery to me, but I’m grateful.

OK, I’m up on a hard break here, so I’ll let this be. I’ll likely be back to update this post sometime.