On the Ground in Anbar Province

I've posted links once or twice to Michael Yon's reports from Iraq. Another independant journalist who's been taking time on the ground out in the provinces over the last several years in Michael J. Trotten. Someone turned me on to him a few weeks back, and over the last few days I've been slowly (they're long posts) working through his dispatches from Ramadi, which used to be second only to (if nor surpassing) Fallujah as a "no go" area.

Anbar Awakens Part I: The Battle of Ramadi
Anbar Awakens Part II: Hell is Over
Al Qaeda Lost

One of the officers Trotten spends time with notes an ironic truth: the tribalism which originally made Anbar so resistant to American forces (and allowed Al Qaeda in Iraq to make the area their base) is actually what's made it possible to now make the area significantly more peaceful than major urban areas like Bagdad. Once the sheiks turned around, the tribes followed them, and there's not a great deal of mutual trust between the American officers in the area and the shieks. More urban areas have weaker tribal ties, leaving the playing field more open for sectarian and ideological strife.

In the above poster, it took me a while to realize: those are AK-47s melting down at the bottom. The modern equivalent, I guess, of swords being beaten into plowshares.

Did the World "Change Forever"?

One of the frustrations for those seeking surety from science is that the observational method of modern science does not tell us how the universe works -- it tells us how the universe appears to work so far, where we happen to be at the moment. Thus, when we say, "According to the law of gravity, two objects are attracted to each other by a force equal to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them" what we actually mean is "Up to this point, in all situations that we've observed, it appears that objects behave that way."

With our ability to deduce patterns, we all fall victim from time to time to false assumptions that what we've observed lately is universally the case, not just in relation to physics, but to everyday life. My cat is convinced that when I come down from putting the kids to bed, he will invariably received canned cat food -- not realizing that if his store of cans in the pantry has run out I simply can't provide him with any. Back during the internet boom, I imagined I could keep my sales job at the web company I worked for until I was ready to move and trade up to something higher paid -- until the day we all arrived for shift and found the door locked.

I recall back, in the days following the 9-11 attacks, various co-workers saying over and over again, "It will never be the same. The world changed for ever on 9-11." This was usually roughly the same people who said, "I could never imagine anything like this would happen."

Well, of course, it could happen. Indeed, Tom Clancy readers and action movie fans had been steeping themselves in even larger terrorist attacks for years. But a great many people didn't bridge the gap from imagining such things to actually thinking they could happen.

Our country has been fortunate enough in the last century that we have built up a lot of "natural laws" in our heads, based on what has been rather than what must be. There hasn't been a major war on US soil for nearly 150 years. Our economy hasn't collapsed in 80 years. We haven't been invaded in 200 years. We've never suffered a military coup. With the exception of 9-11 and the OKC bombing, terrorism has virtually never happened in our country. The list goes on. In a discussion of poverty in the US a while back, someone demanded with rhetorical irony, "What do you want to tell the working poor, that they're better off than people in Haiti?"

Perhaps that's not a helpful thing to tell people struggling to pay the rent and keep the lights on, but at the same time, we forget all to easily that in the history of the world Haiti is more normal than we are.

So while I've moved states and jobs since 2001, and lost track of my old coworkers from that period, I can't help imagining that to a great extent, the world that changed for them back then has mostly changed back. People tend to expect that tomorrow will be like yesterday, and being ever-ready is more work (and perhaps more depressing) than most people are actually up for. So it is in all times...

Reading the Signs

Michael Yon (who is spending some time reporting from Fallujah on how things are currently going in Anbar Province) writes about the signs that platoon level troops and higher level commanders have a good game on:

Many people know the old adage about restaurant kitchens: to know if the kitchen is clean, check the bathroom. The same holds true for Soldiers, only it calls for checking windows. If you are going on a combat mission and Soldiers have not cleaned all their windows to a sparkle (during times when it is possible to do so), do not go with them. Soldiers with dirty windows are not watching for tiny wires in the road, nor are they scanning rooftops. They are talking about women, football, and the car they will buy when they get home. I will not go into combat with Soldiers with dirty windows.

I also look at the state of their weapons and ammunition. Does the machine gunner have lubricant? Before going out with them, does someone tell me what to do if there is any drama? Or do they just drag me into combat like a sack of potatoes? It’s usually very simple. A platoon sergeant will say, “Sir, you stay next to me and do what I tell you, we’ll probably get you back alive.” Although there are always exceptions, most of the Soldiers fall into the “ready, prepared and alert” category.

On the command level, there are other indicators. In counterinsurgency, as our Vietnam veterans will vouch, press has both strategic and tactical influence. Commanders who are afraid of the press or who cannot handle it cannot win this fight. They are often the same people who alienate Iraqis. I remember one captain who had allowed his men to ransack an Iraqi home, much later shouting in my face while his lip quivered with anger, “You are a piece of shit!” He could not handle having press around, and resented the very air they breathed, and he made sure they knew it. Of course anyone whose idea of winning is to bully Iraqis would not want media around. I watched him for months as a study in how not to do certain things. Tactically, he was competent and knew how to win the gun battles, but he was incompetent and inadequate for counterinsurgency.

Dealing with the press is just a reality, like the weather. We would never put a commander in the field who refused to make plans for fighting in the cold or heat. Although it’s just a reality, cold weather, for example, could destroy a unit overnight if they had not prepared for it. As with the weather, the press also influences the enemy. Cold weather freezes everyone’s toes; bad press stalls progress. In either instance, he who is better-suited and more adaptable has a supreme advantage. There was a time when many of our enemies in Iraq were beating us in the press, both their press and ours, but now that is changing.

If all reporters knew as much about the military (and put as much work into doing good reporting) as Yon, I'd be a little more optimistic about that last line. But for all that the mainstream press makes a good punching-bag for conservative pundits, I don't doubt he's right that good ability to deal with the press is essential to being a good commander in Iraq these days.

Wise War vs. Just War

Burrowing back through a chain of links the other day, I found myself on the blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, on there I found a post which quoted a post by "a poet and humanities professor" who had written on "Why I don't 'Support The Troops'":

The phrase is a cliché & buried in the cliché are a pair of pernicious ideas: 1) That individual soldiers are without moral, existential, responsibility for their acts; 2) that to argue the Iraq war is wrong, misguided, ill-conceived, badly managed, stupid, indecent, horrifying, & damaging to U.S. interests is to somehow wish harm to 'the troops.' Each 'troop' is a moral agent & though we make certain allowances for individuals acting under military orders, one of the benchmarks of civilization is that we hold soldiers to a moral standard of responsibility. ... I hate the war & I understand those fighting it to be participating in an immoral undertaking; that does not mean I wish them harmed. On the contrary, I wish that they would come to their moral senses.

(His original blogpost is linked to on the Chronicle post should you wish to read the rest.)


Now first off, while I strongly disagree with this guy, I think there's a basic consistency to what he's saying. If one believes that the war in Iraq is clearly and obviously wrong at a moral level, than one necessarily believes that it is sufficiently wrong that the troops should realize that and make known or act on their realization. (This doesn't mean I agree with or even respect his position all that much -- but given his assumptions he's being consistent.)

Two things struck me reading this, the one following upon the other.

First off, I found myself wondering if the author supported "doing something" about Darfur. It seems terribly fashionable right now -- one of those rare occasions on which the fashion of the world seems to have things right. However, while I myself would strongly support "doing something" about Darfur, I often wonder if those who call for such things have thought much about what "doing something" would require.

Our experiences in Bosnia and Rwanda have both underscored the difficulties of intervention which does not seek to decisively defeat one side of a "situation". One either tries to place oneself between the warring parties and ends up (if one has the courage to stay put) absorbing the blows of both, or (if as on key occasions in both Rwanda and Bosnia, the peace keepers are ordered to step back when things get hot) one simply ends up herding all the victims into one place and thus making them easier to wipe out. Nor did the approach of high-altitude-bombing-as-peacekeeping seem to be very successful, unless someone out there considers bombing the Chinese embassy a success...

If we were to intervene in Darfur and be any use, we would essentially have to do the same sort of thing we're currently engaged in doing in Iraq: try to identify the small bands of bad guys causing trouble and then kill or capture them. Why exactly would doing this in Darfur be so much more PC than doing it in Baqubah Province I'm not entirely clear. But I do have a theory: Liberals and conservatives in our current body politic are often typified by different feelings as well as different ideologies. I think that the idea of invading a country and getting rid of its brutal dictator seems inherently "bully-ish" and "mean" to people of a sort. However, swooping into an equally foreign, sovereign country to protect the weak from the strong (especially if there are no stated political objectives of getting rid of the regime that allowed this to occur in the first place) is seen as noble.

This in turn brought to mind something about the question of when waging war is right that I've been turning over in my mind for some years. Back when I was trying to get into the Air Force Academy (mid nineties) Bosnia was still the war of the day, and not a popular one with many conservatives. The argument was not so much that trying to end the fighting there was in inherently bad idea. Rather, the claim was that going in with no clear objectives would neither serve our interests nor help the locals.

In the process of thinking that over, I tentatively came to the following conclusion: there are many occasions when a head of state (whether king, congress or president) might be wrong to enter into war for a host of reasons (unlikely to succeed, situation might be resolved by other means, none of that country's business, etc.) and yet the aims of the war itself might in fact be good, and thus not unworthy of individual soldiers' efforts.

This is where I think the author above goes clearly over the line in suggesting that our soldiers in Iraq need to come to their moral senses and refuse to serve. Clearly, one can have reach varying conclusions as to whether or not it was the business of the US to invade Iraq. One can argue as to whether the aims we are trying to achieve are worth the suffering that has resulted from the destabilization of the region. (On the same principle, one could could question whether overthrowing communism was really a good idea in some countries, given the suffering that has resulted in the power vacuum created.)

However, it does not seem to me that one can reasonably content that getting rid of Hussein's dictatorship and defeating the Al Qaeda and radical Shiite/Iranian militia groups which have been causing trouble since are not inherently worthwhile things to strive to achieve by force of arms. Without denying that there have been individual wrongs done (some of them pretty appauling) by some individual soldiers and groups of soldiers at given times, the actual things that they are striving to accomplish on the ground on Iraq seem to me to be pretty clearly good.

It seems to me that this may be particularly important to keep in mind in some of the conversations that go on in Catholic circles about the morality of the war, where the phrase "unjust war" is thrown around a lot. In the context of the moral theology in question, a war might be "unjust" in the sense that -- given proper weighing of the proportionality between suffering likely to occur, the good being sought, the likelihood of success, etc. -- it is determined that declaring war would not be a right decision for the ruler to make. However, this is not necessarily the same thing as the war actually being waged to achieve unjust aims.

This, I think, is where the changes some people have made in the weight that they assign likelihood of success and proprotionality of good sought versus suffering caused have got ahead of the terminology that is traditionally used. And I think it would be a good thing for people to keep in mind in regards to such debates.

Why I Still Support the War in Iraq

The 4th of July often serves not only as a time to celebrate the Declaration of Independence, but also as a chance for people to air their current dissatisfactions with the country's course. I tend to keep things pretty quiet on the overt political front, but after seeing one too many "I'm patriotic too, even though I'm disgusted with our adventurism in Iraq" remark, I thought I'd break my usual rule.

It's now a bit over four years since American forces rolled into Iraq and brought an end to Saddam Hussein's 24-year dictatorship. (When I went to look up the years of his reign just now in Wikipedia, I noticed that I was less than a year old when he came to power -- and since most soldiers in our army and that of Iraq are younger than I am, that gives you a bit of a feel for the magnitude of the change that came on Iraq in 2003.)

For a variety of reasons, things continue to be a big mess over there -- though whether things are getting better or worse at the moment is frankly a bit hard to tell. Good high level analysis is hard to find -- and indeed, such analysis is hard to do while events are still going on and outcomes are unknown. At the ground level, some very good reporting is being done by a few people. (See especially Michael Yon's reporting on the current work being done to root out Al Qaeda forces in Baqubah here and here.) However, on the ground reporting does not a comprehensive picture make.

Without question, a lot of grave mistakes have been made in Iraq by the current administration, by the military, and by the state department. Nothing could make diving into the millenia-old resentments of the cradle of civilization easy, but I'm sure that there are a number of occasions where, if we had done better in creating order and supporting the right home-grown movements (and suppressing the right ones more quickly and thoroughly), we could have prevented things from having got as chaotic as they have.

That said, I can't help continuing to consider the overthrow of Hussein as a positive thing. One of our bit mistakes, I think, was resting the justification for the war so heavily on the WMD question. I don't doubt that US leaders were convinced that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical weapons (indeed, Hussein may have been a victim of his own bravado in this regard -- intentionally having given the impression that he had more and more dangerous weapons than he actually did) however even in the light of the Al Qaeda threat, I don't think that these presented enough of a threat to justify a war on their own. I'm sure that there are plenty of other places that terrorists could get hold of sarin or mustard gas or a number of other nasty substances.

However, Hussein had been living on borrowed time ever since 1991 -- when we should have got rid of him. He was without question providing money and resources to terrorist groups, and specifically was subsidizing suicide bombings.

And to be blunt (I think a little more bluntness could be used in these discussions at times) Mesopotamia has always been strategically key to the region. Given that we found ourselves under serious threat from forces springing from the Middle East, and given that the government in Iraq had been in a state of semi-war with us for the last twelve years, and continued to cause trouble and try to get around the UN imposed sanctions (and take advantage of the Oil For Food program to bribe other countries with oil money, and starve Iraqi civilians by directing the money received to other purposes) I think there were plenty of reasons to finish the job and get rid of Hussein's government.

The job our country took on -- trying to encourage the creation of a stable and fairly just representative government rather than simply setting up colonial rule or a puppet dictator (as most countries in our position would have done 30+ years ago) -- is by no means an easy one. We're lucky to be paying as small a price in blood and gold as we are. However, I can't help thinking that it's an essentially honorable and worthwhile task. I hope we succeed.

Does Noise Indicate Heat?

It seems that Joseph Leiberman ruffling quite a few feathers among his former fellow Democrats with a speech he gave the other day where he stated:

There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism....Some of this wrong-headed thinking about the world is happening because we're in a political climate where, for many people, when George Bush says 'yes,' their reflex reaction is to say 'no.' That is unacceptable.

Unsurprisingly, this upset a number of liberals, including Jonathan Chait of The New Republic, who reacted to Leiberman's comments this way:

Lieberman is simply making a classic conservative error. Yes, most American liberals devote more energy to opposing domestic conservatism than to opposing foreign totalitarianism, even though the latter is vastly worse. Lieberman's mistake is in assuming that this is because liberals think Bush is worse than bin Laden. In fact, it's because our society aggrees that Islamist extremism is evil, but it doesn't agree that the Bush administration is very bad, so we spend most of our time debating the point of contention. Likewise, American conservatives spent more of their time complaining about American liberals than complaining about Islamist extremists. This doesn't mean they think Nancy Pelosi is worse than bin Laden.

So the first thing that struck me reading this was: Is it indeed the case that most American conservatives spend more of their time opposing liberal domestic policy than supporting anti-Islamist foreign policy? Rather, it seems like some of the complaints that have been coming from the social conservative end of the spectrum lately are essentially that a certain portion of the conservative voting coalition are willing to accept significantly more liberal domestic polity so long as they are assured of a strong foreign policy.

No, I think Chait brushes this one off rather too easily. If I was to make a pair of broad generalizations (with the understanding that broad generalizations are invariably subject to notable specific contradictions) it would be that many in the broader conservative movement have become so fixated on the threat of Islamic extremism and terrorism that they have been willing to mostly let domestic issues slide, while movement progressives seem to be increasingly convinced that the conservative movement is different from Al Qaida only in degree, not in kind. (And perhaps even more worrying, since it's closer.)

This ignores, of course, whole sub sections of both ends of the political spectrum. There are strongly anti war (whether out of pacifism or isolationism) factions at the socially or economically conservative end of the spectrum. And there are a relatively tiny number of liberal hawks.

But speaking in broad brush terms, the degree of excitement that candidates who are "tough on terror" but liberal on a host of social, governmental and economic issues have managed to inspire on the conservative side seems to suggest a widely held feeling that the war on terror is the biggest priority. Meanwhile, the increasingly mainstream (and apparently sincere) use by liberal authors of terms like "Christofascist" to describe an increasingly wide swath conservative America seems to suggest that the blood fervor for a culture war on home ground is primarily found on the left right now.

Should Republicans Lose to Win?

Jonah Goldberg had and interesting piece on National Review Online last week, where he toyed with the question of whether it might in some sense be better for the overall conservative goal of winning the War on Terror if a Democrat won in 2008. Now, before anyone goes for Jonah's jugular, let me emphasize "toyed with":

There is an idea out there. Perhaps not a fully formed one. Perhaps more like the whisper of one gusting like a sudden draft through the rafters of the conservative house, causing some to look toward the attic and ask fearfully, "What was that?"

This wisp of a notion is simply this: Maybe a Democrat should win in 2008.

Personally, I don’t believe in this poltergeist, at least not yet. But every now and then, I must confess, I do shiver from its touch.

The idea goes something like this: If you believe that the war on terror is real — really real — then you think it is inevitable that more and bloodier conflicts with radical Islam are on the way, regardless of who is in the White House. If the clash of civilizations is afoot, then the issues separating Democrats and Republicans are as pressing as whether the captain of the Titanic is going to have fish or chicken for dinner. There’s a showdown coming. Period. Full stop. My task isn’t to convince you that this view is correct (though I basically believe it is), but merely that it is honestly and firmly held by many on the right and by a comparative handful on the left.

And that’s the problem: Only a handful of people on the Left — and far too few liberals — see radical Islamists as a bigger threat than George W. Bush. Which is why if you really think that we are in an existential conflict with a deadly enemy, there’s a good case for the Democrats to take the reins. Not because Democrats are better, wiser or more responsible about foreign policy. That’s a case for Democrats to make about themselves and certainly not one many on the right believe. No, the argument, felt in places we don’t talk about at cocktail parties (vide A Few Good Men), is that the Democrats have been such irresponsible backseat drivers that they have to be forced to take the wheel to grasp how treacherous the road ahead is....

A couple things struck me about the strand of thought that Jonah is describing.

First, while I think that the (in-aptly named, I believe) War on Terror is serious business and a serious threat to civilization (the prospect of jihadists ending up armed with poison gas, bio-weapons or nukes is not the least bit funny) there's a certain alarmism that strikes me as stemming from lack of historical perspective.

The tides of Islam were a major military threat to Western Civilization for most of the 800+ years from the time when Charles Martel (or in the vulgar tongue: Charlie the Hammer) stopped the Umayyads from extending their Spanish holdings into France till Don John of Austria defeated the Turkish fleet at Lepanto in 1571, marking the beginning of the Ottoman Empire's gradual decline, which slowly turned the Islamic world's reputation in the West from that of a feared enemy to that of an exotic and charming backwater suitable for the collection of objects d'arte and for colonial administration.

That the West for the last four centuries vastly outpaced Dar al Islam in regards to political and technological development did not, however, de-claw the tiger. If anything, it made it resentful. Nor has the culture of the West become more amenable to the ideals of the Koran. Indeed, the modern West must look rather more an enemy than medieval Christendom did, if that is possible. I doubt that the mullas of the middle ages and renaissance saw and feared signs of creeping Westernism among their faithful. Thus, while the presence of infidel kingdoms was always offensive, the modern West must seem a greater threat.

All of which underlines that I do think that the 'War on Terror' is serious business. But I don't think it's new business. Nor do I see it as likely that it will be "won" in any permanent sense in the foreseeable future, short of actions too terrible to contemplate. The best I can envision is that Dar al Islam will achieve sufficient economic prosperity and theological stability that the forces within it which emphasize the "greater jihad" (the internal struggle for one's own perfection in holiness) over the "lesser jihad" (the spread of the faith by means of war) will be able to suppress the forces which prefer open war.

Which in turn brings me back to the question of whether uniting the country in its prosecution of the "War on Terror" should be such an overwhelming consideration in the coming election cycle that conservatives shouldn't mind seeing Hillary or Obama in the white house, if that means that most of the liberal half of the political spectrum will learn that fighting and winning the war is important.

I don't think this line of thinking works for two reasons:

First, I think that even more important than making sure that the West is not defeated ("winning" in the final sense doesn't look like an option to me in the near term) is making sure that the West is something worth saving. There are some very deep open questions right now in America as to what constitutes life, marriage, education, freedom, responsibility and how our religious and philosophical ideals should relate to our public lives. Certainly, the 'culture war' will not be lost in one fell swoop with the entrance of a liberal presidential administration -- but I don't think that losing a battle becomes a good thing simply because it isn't losing a war.

Secondly, I have serious doubts as to whether a liberal president (whom we shall assume for the sake of argument would soon realize that prosecuting the War on Terror was in fact highly important) would actually prove a focal point for uniting the American people in that fight. Rather, I think that we'd see much more vocal isolationism (both political: "it's a local Middle Eastern issue" and moral: "they only hate those godless liberals, it's not our problem") from the more extreme elements of the right, while the liberal base would remain split between those who don't mind a war so long as it is quick, easy and not led by Bush, and those who are against it no matter what.

The only thing that would bring about an FDR-era-like unity would be an attack so severe that 80% of the country would temporarily unite in seeking redress. (And even during WWII, there was more domestic political wrangling than the popular imagination seems to think.) And that temporary unity (as was seen after 9/11) could be achieved under either party -- a Democrat is not required.