Iraq and the "War on Evil"

"When you believe in things you don't understand, then you suffer. Superstition ain't the way."

-- Stevie Wonder

An October 14 story by Tom Raum of Associated Press proclaimed "Bush Keeps Revising War Justification." That's hardly news, but Raum makes a pretty good point about the neocon administration's shifting war aims.

Initially, the rationale was specific: to stop Saddam Hussein from using what Bush claimed were the Iraqi leader's weapons of mass destruction or from selling them to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.

But 3 1/2 years later, with no weapons found, still no end in sight and the war a liability for nearly all Republicans on the ballot Nov. 7, the justification has become far broader and now includes the expansive "struggle between good and evil."

That's about the size of it. The harder it comes to justify our woebegone war in Iraq, the more abstract the justification has become, and "evil" is about as abstract (and subsequently irrational) a reason to fight a war as there is.

The Good, the Bad, and the Manipulated

Some people believe in the concept of an abstract "evil," some don't. I choose not to, not out of any particular spiritual or moral conviction, but because belief in forces that exist beyond the physical universe leads to superstitious thinking and irrational actions.

We have much to fear from both nature and our fellow human beings, but that doesn't necessarily make either of them "evil." Lightning is not something that spiteful, malicious god-like creatures hurl to earth to make it a living hell. It's a natural phenomenon, and the more we understand lightning's underlying scientific aspects, the better we can learn to protect ourselves from it.

It's probably fair to say that all human beings have baser instincts, instincts that spring from our need to survive as individuals and as a species. Most of us learn to harness these base instincts in constructive ways that allow us to exist peaceably in society. A lot of us don't. Among those who develop anti-social behaviors, some end up in prison and some turn into monsters. It's easy to fall into thinking of a Hitler or a Stalin as being "evil personified," but to do so is to grant them a supernatural status that makes them virtually undefeatable. But, as history shows, the rest of humanity defeated both Hitler and Stalin, and it didn't do so with talismans or exorcisms.

Any time the word "evil" crops up in war propaganda, the intent is to throw irrational fear into the hearts and minds of a political leader's following. By frightening a populace into an irrational state, the political leader clears the way to act in any manner he wishes without having to give rational explanations for those actions to his followers.

Hence it is that any time young Mister Bush and his echo choir are pressed to give specifics on strategies or war aims, they shift to the "evil" meme, a meme so primal that it strikes a chord not only neoconservative's autistic religious right base, but in self-styled skeptical sons of the enlightenment like little old me.

That's the really scary part of all this. As much education and experience as I have in military and foreign policy issues, and in propaganda techniques, and as much effort and thought as I've put into deconstructing this administration's lunatic policies and rationalizations, they still at times throw enough oogey-boogey into me to make me want--if only briefly--to believe everything else they say and go along with whatever they want to do. That gives me a profoundly frightening perspective on the effect their manipulations must have on the portions of the population that are predisposed to believe and follow them.

So is it any wonder that when the Rovewellians throw doggerel like "If we withdraw before the job is done, the enemy will follow us here " into the Big Brother Broadcast, nobody in the "base" or even in the so-called "liberal media" bothers to ask "What does 'withdraw' mean?" or "What is the 'job?'" or "How will we know when the 'job' is 'done?'" or "Who is the 'enemy?'" or "How will the 'enemy' follow us here?"

The mouth breathers of the base are so brainwashed and brain dead from all the "evil" talk that they don't have capacity to imagine such questions, and the "liberal media" won't ask them for fear of being labeled part of the evil-doer axis and losing audience share to the Big Brother Broadcast (Fox News, AM talk radio, etc.).

It saddens me no end to see how far my country has turned from its original moral and intellectual principles. America's greatest founding fathers--George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine--were students and proponents of the 18th century Enlightenment Movement, a philosophy that sought to replace the superstition and tyranny of what we now call the Medieval Age with scientific methods, logic, and individual rights, dignity and determination.

Under its present neoconservative rule, America is headed back to creating the very kind of world it sought to change. When I was a kid, George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 were taught in American elementary and high schools as examples of the evils of Leninist socialism. Today, they reflect the basic tenets of American neoconservative capitalism. The very kinds of absolute powers King George III tried to impose on the American colonies are the very same sort of absolute powers President George III wants to exercise on the United States of America. And given the state of technology in our age, President George has more tools at his disposal to impose tyranny than either George the king or George the author could have imagined.

Democratic victories in the November congressional elections won't solve all of America's problems, but that's the best hope we have to keep our country from turning into the stuff of a futuristic dystopia novel. If the Republicans manage to keep control of the legislature, the best strategy I can think of for what's left of the enlightened segment of the American population is to take a page from Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451. Start memorizing your favorite books and stake out a cave to hide in before the Great Satan starts fire-hosing your home library with kerosene.

#

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Bob Herbert's National Service Draft: Good Intentions, Dire Consequences

Response to my piece from last Friday on Bob Herbert's campaign to make two years of national service mandatory for all U.S. citizens suggests that the idea is growing in popularity. I am convinced that a national service draft would be a profound disaster, and believe it's vital to point out the dire consequences that a universal conscription would produce.

Spiting Your Face

I want to believe that Bob Herbert's heart is in the right place, but on this issue, his head's in a place it wasn't designed to fit into. Here are some snippets from remarks he made in September 2005 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

I think that all Americans should do two years of national service. It does not have to be in the military. I'd love to see people out there in the community. You could work with the homeless, you could work with the poverty-stricken, you could do literacy work…

… So, that's the kind of national service that I'm thinking of. It would include the military as well because, obviously, you have to defend the country. But if you're going to fight wars, then you need to draw your warriors from a broader slice of the population than we're doing now…

…One of the reasons we are not more outraged about what's going on in Iraq is that there are not that many Americans who feel that they have a personal stake in what's going on in Iraq.

Let's be realistic. National service may "not have to be in the military," but it will be if Uncle Sam decides that's what he wants the national service to be. If everybody's eligible for a national service draft, everybody's eligible for military service. That means Uncle Sam can turn into Big Brother whenever he wants to, and build a military as big as he wants for as long as he wants to fight whatever perpetual wars he feels like fighting.

Even folks who would serve in non-military capacities would in essence be subject to something akin to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, under which Big Brother could ban all opposition to his wars and all other forms of dissent. Under a national service regime, virtually every citizen could be called to some sort of semi-active duty status, and every citizen's constitutional rights could be permanently stripped.

You think that couldn't happen? Take a look at what's happening right now. Thanks to the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, your President and your Secretary of Defense can declare you an "enemy combatant" and "disappear" you Joseph Heller style without so much as a by-your-leave from anybody.

A national service draft won't draw our warriors "from a broader slice of the population." It's true that most of today's rifle soldiers come from underprivileged and working class backgrounds, but guess what--that's where most of the rifle soldiers came from during Vietnam when we had a draft. Don't kid yourself into thinking we can have a "fair" draft by making it universal. Private Juarez will still be fighting door to door in some foreign hellhole while Second Lieutenant Bush passes out cocktails and peanuts on Air Force One.

If national service draftees work with the homeless, the poverty stricken, the illiterate and so forth, that will lead to all social, charitable and education organizations coming under direct control of the federal government. Do we not already have enough bloated federal bureaucracies? And do we not already have too much federal influence on what should be state controlled programs?

There Ought to be a Law

A national draft that extends beyond the scope of military service is arguably unconstitutional on two counts.

First, it doesn't appear to be allowed by Article I. Section 8 of that Article authorizes Congress to "raise and support armies" and "provide and maintain a navy." This, along with the legislature's power to "declare war" supports the constitutional legality of a military draft, but it's hard to find anything in the Constitution that supports the position that Congress can conscript citizens to work for the Red Cross or AmericaCorps.

More importantly, though, a universal conscription would make federal service a de facto condition of citizenship, and would clearly violate the Fourteenth Amendment's definition of a U.S. citizen as "All persons born or naturalized in the United States."

It follows that in order to establish a national service draft, we'd need to a) ignore the Constitution or b) write an amendment to the Constitution that expands the powers of Congress and redefines citizenship and the privileges and immunities that come with it under the Bill of Rights and elsewhere.

Either way, we'd be throwing the Constitution out with the junk mail, and pounding the final nail into the coffin of our cherished republic.

Kerosene on the Fire

I'm not sure where Herbert gets the idea that there's not enough "outrage" over what's going on in Iraq. Polls like the one taken by CNN in September 2006 indicate that opposition to the Iraq war has reached an "all time high," and even Fox News concedes that the "2006 Election Is All About Iraq."

If there's not enough outrage over Iraq to suit Herbert, it's not because most Americans aren't "sharing the sacrifice." It's because the mainstream media has allowed the Big Brother Broadcast (Fox News, AM talk radio, right wing publications like The Weekly Standard, etc.) to bully them into being "fair and balanced" on the subject. Young Mister Bush is fond of blaming the unpopularity of his Iraq misadventure on the "images of chaos and carnage" shown on the news networks. But think about it: when's the last time you actually saw a scene of chaos and carnage in Iraq on CNN, MSNBC, or any of the regular network's nightly news programs?

If Herbert honestly thinks a universal national service draft will help end the war in Iraq, he's as delusional as the neo-contrivers who started it. The populace can't control the actions of the state by becoming vassal to it.

Adopting Herbert's universal national service program wouldn't just make the United States look like Stalin's Soviet Union. It would make Stalin's Soviet Union look like Shangri-La.

And whether he knows it or not, by advocating a universal draft, Herbert is playing right in to the neoconservative agenda of selling the American public on the Orwellian notions that "war is peace," "freedom is slavery" and "ignorance is strength."

Wake up and smell the totalitarianism, Bob.

#

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

NYT's Bob Herbert Exploits the Troops

I know my position on this subject is controversial, and that some readers will be surprised to hear me say this, but I'm fed up with listening to how only the "few" are sacrificing in our war on terror, and of seeing high profile columnists like Bob Herbert of the New York Times echo chamber this diaper dialogue to support their pet agendas.

Few people feel worse than I do for our troops who have had to serve two, three or more tours of duty in a war zone thanks to our end zone fumbles in Iraq, and I can understand why some of those troops are starting to complain about it. But when I start hearing about how unfair it is that only the troops are sacrificing, that's where my sympathy ends.

What Did the "Volunteers" Think They Were Volunteering For?

I'm not fond of chastising enlisted personnel for expressing their personal views, but Sergeant X agreed to be quoted in Herbert's October 12 column "Sacrifice of the Few," and Herbert saw fit to identify him by name. The column is nested behind NYT's Times Select firewall, but I'll give you enough snippets to illustrate my point.

Sgt. [X] remembers the time, not too long ago, when he came home on a brief leave from Iraq. He was walking through an airport, in uniform, and other passengers, spotting him, began to applaud.

“It was awesome,” he said. “They were cheering and clapping. It was great. But you know what? I said to myself, ‘That guy’s flying to Toledo on a business trip. This lady over here is flying off on vacation. Their lives are normal. But soon I’ll be getting on a plane to go back to the most abnormal place on earth.’”

What Sergeant X and Herbert don't seem to understand is that those other people's lives are "normal" because those are the lives they signed up for. Sergeant X was headed back to "the most abnormal place on earth" because he volunteered to be in the business of professional arms.

Like everyone else in the armed services today, Sergeant X was not drafted. When he volunteered to fight wars, did it not occur to him that he might actually have to fight one? And has it never occurred to Sergeant X or Herbert that America finances a robust standing professional force in peacetime so that if war breaks out, the professional force will fight it and the rest of America can go on with its "normal" life?

[Sergeant X is] safely home after serving three nerve-racking combat tours — one in Afghanistan and two yearlong tours in Iraq. He’s engaged to be married and will receive a degree soon from [a nearby] State University. His commitment to the military, which he made while still in high school…, will end in a few months.

But there is a definite edge in his voice, an undercurrent of bitterness, when he talks about the tiny percentage of the American population that is shouldering the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We’re nowhere close to sharing the sacrifice,” he said. “And it should be shared, because it’s only in that sharing that society will truly care about what’s going on over there."

The war in Iraq is the number one issue in American politics and "society" doesn't care about what's going on "over there?" As for "sharing the sacrifice," whom does Sergeant X think pays him twice a month, and spends $2 billion per week to "support" the war in Iraq, and financed his state university education and his fiancé's engagement ring?

Can We Share?

Herbert didn't let the interview end until Sergeant X endorsed one of Herbert's favorite mantras.

He said that if he could wave a magic wand, he would make some form of public service compulsory. “You wouldn’t have to join the military,” he said. “But there are many other ways to serve. You could work for AmeriCorps, or the Red Cross, or Homeland Security. You could do something. It’s about social responsibility. Especially in a time of war."

Much of the time, Bob Herbert's heart is in the right place, but on certain subjects he has his head cross threaded up another part of his anatomy, and his advocacy of compulsory national service is one of his foggiest notions.

Let's say we require every citizen between the ages of 18 and 20 to perform two years of national service. What are we going to do with all those kids, and how are we going to pay them? Do we not have enough bloated, ineffective federal government programs already? And how will having a bunch of underage drinkers getting underfoot at AmericaCorps or the Red Cross or Homeland Security help us win our war? Two words: it won't. Does Herbert honestly think it makes sense in wartime to keep an all volunteer military and conscript everyone else to hand out coffee and doughnuts at the USO? That sort of "sacrifice" wouldn't do the likes of Sergeant X any good, and it would horn in on Halliburton's combat coffee service contract.

I'm embarrassed for Sergeant X. He comes across in Herbert's column like he's in need of a prescription for grow-up pills. But my embarrassment for Sergeant X is nothing compared to my outrage at Bob Herbert for exploiting a dispirited young soldier to promote Bob Herbert's personal agenda.

Herbert does a grave injustice to the dignity of America's fighting men and women when he hands one a crying towel and turns on the tape recorder.

#

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

North Korea: More Foreign Policy Follies

According to an Associated Press report, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said young Mister Bush has told the North Koreans that "...there is no intention to invade or attack them. So they have that guarantee... I don't know what more they want."

Ah, U.S. foreign policy at its finest. We invaded a country that had no nukes (Iraq), we threaten to attack a country that has no nukes and says it doesn’t want any (Iran), but North Korea, a country that not only admits it has nukes but claims to have tested one and threatens to test more, them we promise not to invade or attack.

Rice also said that Pyongyang may be afraid that the U.S. will conduct an Iraq-style invasion of North Korea. But no, she said, "Iraq was a very special situation… Iraq was a desire to finally deal with a threat that had been there for too long."

Candy Condi has an odd sense of history and a seemingly inferior grasp of arithmetic. North Korea became a threat when it invaded South Korea in 1950. Saddam Hussein changed from an ally to a threat when he invaded Kuwait in 1990. The way I figure it, that means North Korea was a threat for forty years longer than Iraq was. You have to wonder what kind of Brave New Math the State Department uses to calculate these things.

Then again, you also have to consider that the Generation X neoconservatives who used to work for Condi on the National Security Council didn't think weapons of mass destruction were factors during the Cold War, and simultaneously blurted absurdities like, "Arms control, what's that?"

U.S Ambassador to the UN John Bolton said that the U.S. won't be intimidated by threats from North Korea. "This is the way North Korea typically negotiates by threat and intimidation," Bolton said. "It's worked for them before. It won't work for them now."

I don't know about that, Moustache Ride. We warned them not to develop nuclear weapons and they went ahead and did. We warned them not to test missiles and they went ahead and did. We warned them not to test a weapon and they went ahead and did that too. They're already slapped with so many sanctions that more sanctions aren't likely to make any difference in their behavior. And we've promised that we won't attack or invade them. I'd say threat and intimidation tactics are working out pretty good for them.

What's It Oil About?

In the Rose Garden yesterday, Mister Bush talked about North Korea's successful "nucular test" and how it constitutes a threat to international stability. Ho-hum. But perhaps his most notable statements regarded his "staying the course" Iraq posture. He said that the Islamic "caliphate" wanted to be able to take over Iraq and use oil as an economic weapon, which means that he's openly admitting now that his administration's U.S. Middle East strategy is, and always was, about oil.

That brings us back to what was really different between Iraq and North Korea, and what's different between North Korea and Iran. Though the Bush administration has consistently used the specter of a mushroom cloud over an American city as a tool to gain support of its pitiful policies, it really couldn't care a tree hug less if another tinhorn or two has a fistful of nukes. What the neoconservatives really worry about is control of the balance of global energy. That's why they want so desperately to hang on in Iraq. It's also why they want to paint Iran as a bigger threat than North Korea.

The Balance of Electrical Power

Among what I describe as the "upper tier" political entities in the Next World Order series, energy has supplanted military force as the premier tool of trans-national power. These days, firepower is far less important than the kind of power that turns on electric lights and fuels industrial growth. That's why Iran and Iraq have become such critical factors in the present global power struggle and why North Korea, despite its possession of nuclear weapons, is little more than a tic on a dog's tail.

The neocons thought they could cheaply and easily grab control of the balance of the world's oil reserves by invading and controlling Iraq. As we have seen, that plan fell out of the sky like a lead zeppelin, and created a gaping vulnerability for America's adversaries to exploit.

China, the rising hegemon on the block, has formed an energy coalition with Russia, Iran, and Venezuela that seriously threatens to chop the western nations' control of the energy market off at the knees, and if they succeed, they'll have done so without firing a single shot. And there's a good chance they'll pull it off, because as strategists go, the Chinese and their allies read Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, while Dick, Dubya, and the rest of the neocons are still struggling to grasp the basic concepts of Dick and Jane and My Pet Goat.

See Spot Poop

In his landmark novel on World War I titled The General, C.S. Forester likened the British high command during "The Great War" to a group of simpletons trying to pull a screw out of a floor with a claw hammer, never imagining that the task could be easily accomplished with a screwdriver.

I'd like to think that if we handed a screwdriver to the mouth breathers and kindergarten kids in charge of the United States, they'd use it to extract us from the hole they've drilled us into, but I suspect they'd just use the tool to drive the screw in further.

Poop, Spot! Poop! Right on Mommy's carpet!

Good boy!

Spot remover? What's that, Dude?

#

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Wednesday Preview: Fighting Them Over There (Part III)

(This is the final installment in a three part series. Parts I and II discussed how "fighting them over there" became the American way of war, and how it has turned into a broken paradigm. Part III examines the strengths and limitations of today's U.S. power projection force structure.)

Despite what young Mister Bush and the neoconservative echo choir keep telling you, the oceans actually do still protect America and "they" can't actually follow us "over here." Nobody has an army big enough to invade and occupy the U.S. or a navy large enough to transport an army that size, and even if somebody did, we could put their army and navy on the bottom of the ocean before it got halfway across.

Here, There and Everywhere

Yes, America is vulnerable to long-range ballistic missiles and to terrorists and other evildoers who sneak across the borders, but that's been true for quite some time, and those aren't the kinds of threats we can counter with conventional military force.

U.S. conventional forces are designed to operate overseas, either as permanently forward deployed enclaves like the ones we have in Europe and Asia or as home based expeditionary forces that can deploy forward from the U.S. in both peacetime and wartime. This combination of enclave and expeditionary forces gives America an unprecedented capability to deter or fight wars in virtually any strategic corner of the globe.

With notable exceptions like Vietnam, this scheme worked out fairly well for us in the post-World War II era until the Bush administration waltzed out its Preemptive Self-Defense doctrine. Any time you commit expeditionary forces to overseas wars, you upset their normal deployment, training and equipment maintenance cycles. When you start fighting optional wars, you're exacerbating the situation, especially when a war planned to last three months stretches beyond three years. Thus it is that while the 140,000-something troops in Iraq are only a small percentage of the total force strength, the Iraq misadventure has stretched our land power services thin, if not to the breaking point. You have to rotate troops in and out of the theater of war to keep from wearing them out, and you still have to maintain the strategic enclaves elsewhere.

Home and Away

As a global power projection force, you have to be ready to fight anywhere, any time and at whatever conditions exist at the scene of the fight. None of America's active or potential military adversaries have to do that. They only have to project significant conventional force a limited distance from their borders and shores, so they only have to equip and train to a finite set of combat operations, and their logistics requirements are relatively simple.

Limiting their military operations to home field also gives U.S. adversaries an inherent asymmetric advantage. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we have seen how loosely organized, low-tech guerilla forces can kneecap a highly evolved land force, but asymmetric dynamics also occur in air and naval warfare.

You don't need a fleet of high tech fighter jets to counter air attacks. In fact, most of the "evil world" has gone to air defense postures that rely on lower cost, ground based anti-air artillery and burying the stuff they don't want bombed so deep that bombs can't get to it. And you don't need capital ships to whack an aircraft carrier if you can put it out of action with a coastal anti-ship missile battery that you can set up on the back of a dune buggy.

This, essentially, is the situation we'll face if we try to pop a can of spank on Iran, and when the smoke clears enough to let the sun through, there's a good chance that our sterns and tailpipes will shine a lot redder than theirs do.

Fighting Another Day

America's force grew into World War II through mass conscription and mobilization of the country's industry to produce machines of war. Today, we don't have time to build a force required to fight any given conflict. Maintaining a large, ready professional force in peacetime not only profoundly affects our economy, it also dictates constraints on the types of wars we can fight.

Militarily, we could absorb a significant amount of attrition in World War II because we knew we would shrink the force back down at the end of the conflict. Now, we can only sustain a limited amount of attrition because the force that's fighting today's war may have to turn around and fight another one just like it tomorrow.

Thanks largely to the technology of our weapons and systems, we've managed to cut personnel combat casualties profoundly since World War II days. But like so many things in warfare, our advanced technology is a double-edged sword, a strength that is also a weakness. The more advanced the technology of any given "thing," the more the thing costs. The more the thing costs, the fewer things you can afford to have, and the less you can afford to lose them. And the longer you expose the things to a combat environment, the more of them you stand to lose--either to cheaper, lower tech counter measures, accidents, or plain old wear and tear.

The biggest factor in personnel attrition these days is retention. The vast majority of the guys drafted for the duration of World War II had no interest in making a career of the military, knew that the war wouldn't last indefinitely, and knew that when it was over, they would go home.

In order to maintain a standing professional force like the one we have now, you need to keep enough of your best enlisted and officer personnel around long enough to make a vocation out of it. If your best and brightest and most dedicated people spend three or four years in a theater of war in their early service lives, they'll start asking themselves, "How many times will I have to do this if I stay in for twenty years or more?" Too many of your best and brightest will walk out the main gate at the earliest opportunity to pursue normal lives, and down the line you'll wind up with a "professional" corps of senior noncoms and officers who aren't the best, are less than bright, and no sane person's idea of "normal."

Which, by the way, is pretty much how the force we were left with after Vietnam looked.

When's It "Over" Over There?

Unlike World War II, today's armed conflicts don't begin with formal declarations or terminate in choreographed surrender ceremonies aboard the decks of battleships. Now, "losing" is not option, "victory" cannot be defined and the "enemy" is all but impossible to identify.

When hegemonic America goes to war, unless it has a very clear end-state strategy, it will be embroiled in that war for a long, long time. And our present strategic situation once again proves the wisdom of the ancient Chinese General Sun Tzu's admonition that "There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare."

There may also be no instance of an empire that didn't fail to learn that the military power that established it was not sufficient to sustain it. It pains me no end to point this out, but the military might that brought America victory in the Great War, the Good War, and the Cold War failed to defend us from the 9/11 attacks, is not accomplishing our strategic objectives overseas, and has not made us safer at home.

As I've described it before, our current strategic situation is a goat rope tied in Gordian knots and wrapped around a Moebius strip. The debate over what America's proper force structure should be will go on until brown cows give chocolate milk, but I firmly believe that the real solution to our conundrum is enlightened leadership--the kind of leadership that understands that while armed force is a vital tool of national power, its ability to achieve the strategic aims of a sole global superpower is profoundly limited.

Sometimes "fighting them over there" accomplishes little more that giving "them" an opportunity to give you a bloody nose.

You can't lose your front teeth in a bar fight if you stay away from the bar.

#

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Fighting Them Over There (Part II, with North Korea Update)

Cross posted at the front page of My Left Wing.

(Part I discussed how "fighting them over there" became the American way of war. Part II will begin to explore how the "over there" policy has become a broken paradigm.)

Over the course of the 20th century, America developed an "over there" war machine. Unlike the great powers of Europe whose conventional forces were designed to protect their borders or project power slightly beyond them, U.S. force posture focused on deterring or fighting conflicts in far flung strategic corners of the earth, either through permanently station enclaves (such as our Cold War land and air forces positioned in western Europe) or through forces that could rapidly deploy from the homeland in response to short notice crises (naval and long reach, strategic air power assets).

Mixed result proxy wars like the Korean and Vietnam conflicts aside, our "over there" Cold War strategy worked pretty well. We won it after all. In theory anyway, or at least as well as we can judge any war to have been "won."

But just as World War I led to World War II, and World War II led to the Cold War, we now find ourselves in a new struggle against old adversaries, and by following our 20th century paradigm we're ceding the advantage to foes that we thought we'd vanquished.

The balance of military power is now so tilted in America's favor that nobody else is bothering to compete in a symmetric arms race with us. Why should they? They don't have to come "over here" to defeat us in a toe-to-toe clash of arms. All they have to do is sucker us into going "over there" and take them on in wars we're not designed or doctrinally organized to win.

And who's reaping the benefits of our woebegone foreign entanglements in the Middle East? Let me count the adversaries: China, Russia, Iran, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and everybody else who doesn't like us (which at this point is pretty much everybody but "us," and "we" have mixed opinions about ourselves).

They are Smart, We are Strategic Creatures of (Bad) Habit

In a 2003 Proceedings article titled "Invasion of the Transformers," I illustrated how Donald Rumsfeld's "military transformation" movement hasn't given us a force structure significantly different from the one we used to defeat the Germans and Japanese.

In World War II, we had armor, artillery, and infantry. We had aircraft carriers, surface combatants, and submarines. We had bombers, fighters, and reconnaissance aircraft. We had air and surface lift, air and amphibious assault, and special operations.

What do we have now that is so different? Computers? They're just the electronic progeny of the abacus. Cruise and ballistic missiles? Unmanned aerial vehicles? They're fighters, bombers, and reconnaissance aircraft flown by silicone monkeys. Satellites? They're balloons that don't explode in a vacuum. Information and intelligence? Command and control, synergy, net-centric warfare? Basic forms of these concepts and technologies have been around since Sun Tzu was a sergeant. Coordinating force effects is coordinating force effects, whether you do it with computer networks or smoke signals. Sure, the stuff we have now runs faster, jumps higher, and stops on a smaller dime than the stuff we had in World War II. But all we really have done is trade our cheap-o P.F. Flyers for high-dollar Air Jordans.

Is it any wonder, then, that the same kind of force we built to go abroad and defeat the German Wehrmacht and the Imperial Japanese fleet isn't so swift at fighting an enemy whose main weapons are box cutters and water bottles?
And what military "geniuses" have convinced so many people that directing a 21st century force against a 17th century adversary "over there" makes us safer "over here?"

Over Where?

I hear on the morning news that North Korea went and pushed the button down last night.

This illustrates a key problem with trying to work military solutions in too many "over theres." We're bogged down in land conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which had nuclear weapons. We're threatening to strike Iran, which doesn't have nuclear nuclear weapons, says it doesn’t want to have any, and even if the Iranians are lying, they're five to 10 years away from having nuclear weapons.

North Korea, which not only admits it has nuclear weapons but just tested one to see how loudly it would go bang--well, we don't have much of a military option on the drawing board for those guys. We're relying on China to put the cuffs on North Korea, but China's committed to keeping Kim Jong Il in power so they don't wind up with millions of North Korean refugees on their hands. China's also likely to put the kibosh on any UN sanctions aimed at Iran because, among other reasons, it wants Iranian oil.

Would China go for sanctions on North Korea? It might, but what good are sanctions on a country that's already the world's most isolated nation?

Our best option may be to encourage Kim to keep testing his nukes until he runs out of them.

Do you think he'd fall for that?

Young Mister Bush just announced that world leaders are united in their commitment to a "nucular" free Korean peninsula. The U.S. is committed to diplomacy, he says. Lots of glittering generalities, lots of facial tics.

Gee, you'd almost think that this time Bush understands he's blown it.

(Part III will discuss how being "over there" creates vulnerabilities that America's adversaries have learned to exploit.)

#

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Fighting Them Over There (Part I)

(This is the first in a three part series.)

Young Mister Bush has been boasting of late that we're on the "offensive" in our so-called "war" on terrorism. What Bush and his key advisers don't seem to understand is that "offense" in warfare isn't always a good thing. In fact, by fighting them "over there," in their home field, and on conditions that they dictate, we've actually handed "them" the initiative.

The Yanks are Coming

World War I was the first major overseas continental land war sold to the American people with a "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" mantra. In his 1917 address to Congress, President Woodrow Wilson persuasively argued that "civilization itself" seemed to be "in the balance," and that by entering the war on the side of England and France, America would make the world "safe for democracy." Other propaganda described the carnage then taking place in Europe as "the war to end all wars." Subsequent events have shown that The Great War did not secure the future of civilization, or make the world safe for democracy, and it sure as God's green apples didn't "end all wars." (By the way, if you think Wilson's "civilization in the balance" and "make the world safe for democracy" rhetoric sounds strangely contemporary, you're right. The Rovewellians are good, but they're not terribly original.)

Termination conditions of World War I laid the groundwork for World War II, which led to the half-century long Cold War and the dirty little "third world" wars like Korea and Vietnam that accompanied it.

America's experience of war in the 20th century left it with a belief in the notion that by continually fighting wars overseas, it could keep war from coming to its shores and borders. That may have been true to some extent until the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed. At that point, the elder Bush promised his constituency a "peace dividend" and exhorted America to become a "kinder, gentler nation."

We Got Your Thousand Points of Light Right Here, Mister

But then our pal Saddam Hussein--whom we had backed in the Iran-Iraq War when H.W. was vice president under Ronald Reagan--turned on us and invaded Kuwait. H.W. made a fairly short job of driving Hussein back to his own borders, but the dream "peace dividend" dream was already going up in smoke. The American military-industrial-congressional complex was already firmly in place, and its echo chamberlains in the neoconservative cabal were in its camp.

President Dwight Eisenhower's admonition in 1961 about the growing influence of the U.S. arms industry is fairly well known, but it's worth repeating:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

And yet, even after we had trounced Saddam Hussein, the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) insisted that America needed to "…increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future…"

America has been on a wartime footing since 1941, mostly justified by the "fighting them over there" meme. And just how much good has fighting them over there actually done us? More than fifty years after the Korean War, we can't get a handle on North Korea. Vietnam doesn't pose an immediate threat to U.S. security, but then again it never did. Our proxy incursions into our backyard in Haiti and Grenada did little good. Fidel Castro still holds power in Cuba. Reagan's power play in Lebanon was a bust, as was Clinton's escapade in Somalia. Bush senior's incomplete "victory" over Iraq led to the prodigal son's Operation Iraqi Freedom bungle.

At this point in the American experiment, "fighting them over there" is making us less secure, both physically and economically, "over here." And we're paying a ludicrous premium for buying into the "over there" myth. According to Jane's, the authoritative source on military matters, the U.S. now spends as much on defense as the rest of the world combined.

If irony were still alive and with us, it might chuckle at how America clings to a means and way of power that has proven to be so inconclusive and counterproductive over such a long period of time.

And the great military philosophers Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz are surely spinning in their graves over how history's most powerful nation continues to place its "best-trained, best-equipped" military in situations that favor its opponents.

(Part II will discuss how our "over there" policies expose U.S. forces' vulnerabilities to its adversaries' strengths.)

#

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Related Articles:

Wars and Empires

In an Arms Race with Ourselves

U.S. Foreign Policy: Standing Up, Breaking Down, Coming Apart at the Seams

Remember the big "crackdown" that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ordered in Baghdad back in June?

It's cracking up.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

In the second month of a security crackdown in the capital, U.S. military casualties appear to be rising, even as deaths among Iraqi security forces have fallen, according to U.S. military sources and analysts.

Military "experts" suspect the disparity between U.S. and Iraqi casualty trends may be partly because Iraqi police forces have grown in strength.

If the Iraqi police forces have "grown in strength," it sure isn't because the Iraqi Army is helping them out. 4,000 Iraqi Army troops refused to participate in the Baghdad operation.

And if Iraqi police are gaining strength, it isn't the kind of strength we want them to have. The Associated Press reports that Iraqi authorities have taken a police brigade out of service because of its complicity with death squads. Random members of the brigade (roughly 700 strong) are being investigated for ties to militias. U.S. military spokesman Major General William B. Caldwell said that the brigade will undergo "re-training."

The kind of "re-training" it will take to fix that brigade's problems involves a long wall and lots of blindfolds and cigarettes.

Lessons Unlearned

Meanwhile, back in the other quagmire, Jane's reports that NATO members of the International Security Assistance Force will attempt to quell the rising militancy in Afghanistan in part by "supplying the fledgling Afghan army with substantial amounts of surplus equipment and arms."

Land o' Goshen. Talk about inefficiency. Why doesn't NATO cut out the middleman and give the weapons and equipment directly to the Taliban?

Over in the Lebanon goat rope, two days after Israeli Defense Forces withdrew from south Lebanon, Hezbollah leaders announced that their weapons threatening Israel will remain along the border between the two countries. Muhammad Fanish, a Hezbollah minister in the Lebanese government, says that his organization "will never give up its arms."
The new United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has authority, according to UNIFIL spokesman Alexander Ivanko, "to act forcefully when confronted with hostile activity of any kind."

However, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) will take the first actions in any cases of hostile activity. Now, the LAF operates under control of the Lebanese government, which in part consists of elected Hezbollah ministers. Any hostile activity it responds to will have been committed by Hezbollah. How many senior LAF officers do you reckon are part of Hezbollah? I'll bet a mortgage payment that the number is greater than one. Any takers?

And is anyone surprised that the European Union is considering an aid program aimed at "upgrading" the LAF?

Elsewhere…

U.S. forces gather to strike a country that doesn't have nuclear weapons and says it doesn't want any (Iran) while the U.S. all but ignores a country that admits it has nuclear weapons and says it wants to test them (Korea).

Fallow the Leader

Under the misrule of the neoconservative cabal, America's global leadership has never been so inept or impotent. Our ship of state is bow down in a sand dune, and even our cabin boy Britain is about to jump over the side. It's easy to take heart that American diplomacy may improve given the reports that John Bolton's bid for confirmation as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations is dead, but I'm not counting my chickens yet. Remember when Karl Rove was about to be indicted over the Traitor-gate affair?

The Bush administration resembles nothing so much as a cheesy summer horror flick. Just when you think the monster has been rubbed out of the picture, it comes back to life again. And again. And again…

And unfortunately, even after (if ever) we manage to rub out the neoconservative monsters, we'll still have to cope with the horrible situation they've created.

#

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Related articles:

The Next World Order Series

Wars and Empires

Neocon Ralph Peters: Kill! Kill! Kill!

I once again find myself aghast at the illogical warmongering rhetoric of Ralph Peters. Retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel Peters is a novelist and an essayist whose columns appear in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post. He is also a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the neoconservative think tank that talked America into its present woebegone war in Iraq.

In his latest piece for the Armed Forces Journal titled "The hearts-and-minds myth," Peters argues, "Sorry, but winning means killing."

As to the proper course to take in our present "war" on terror, Peters says:

We need to grasp the basic truth that the path to winning the hearts and minds of the masses leads over the corpses of the violent minority. As for humanitarianism, the most humane thing we can do is to win our long struggle against fanaticism and terrorism. That means killing terrorists and fanatics.

Peters is right to the extent that war involves killing, and that killing people is not the method of choice for getting them to like you.

But like so many of his neocon cronies, Peters neglects to mention that when you make two or more terrorists for every one that you kill, you're going to have to kill a heck of a lot of people to "win." In fact, you'll have to kill darn near every one of "them," whoever "they" are.

And what will you have "won?"

Kristol's Dogs of War

Peters is a luminary in the stable of neoconservative military commentators who are still trying to cover their sixes for getting America entangled in Iraq. Bill Kristol, PNAC co-founder and publisher of The Weekly Standard was one of the first neocons to throw Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld under the proverbial bus when things started going south in Iraq, saying in December 2004 that our soldiers "deserve a better defense secretary than the one we have."

Kristol seldom mentions that Rumsfeld was onboard the PNAC when it crafted the Iraq invasion policy, and that the PNAC was on board with Rumsfeld's vision to "transform" the Army into a lighter, faster force (see PNAC's Rebuilding America's Defenses, published in September 2000).

Kristol, Peters, and other PNACers like Robert Kagan and Charles Krauthammer are scrambling to save their beloved ideology. They pictured an American global hegemony established and sustained through armed force. History's best-trained, best-equipped military's failure to achieve America's national aims in Afghanistan and Iraq should proven their vision delusional, but these guys are tenacious--the dreams of megalomaniacs die hard.

So it's no real surprise that the neocons, desperate to prove that armed conflict can yet be salvaged as an effective instrument of national power, are egging America into another war with Iran. In a saner age, by this point, the neocon PNACers would have been booed off the stage. Unfortunately, the autistic right is still listening to them, and actually taking them seriously.

Neoconservative punditry is following a predictable formula: ludicrous comparisons of the "war" on terror with World War II, fear and hate rhetoric, sloganeering, bandwagonning and, most importantly, blaming their past failures on the usual scapegoats--sissy "defeatists" the "hostile" liberal media, the Clintons, etc.

All of which masks the underlying principle of neoconservative strategy and policy: Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!…

One would think that having vanquished Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the dreaded Soviet Union, America could think of a better strategy to serve its interests than one that can be summarized in a single word.

But one has to remember that our policy "think" tanks are infested with the likes of Ralph Peters, and they still have the ear of the most powerful man in the world--PNAC charter member Dick Cheney.

#

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Related article: The PNAC Paper Trail

Fools and Fanatics and Iraq

More "good news" from the "central front."

Remember that "stand up, stand down" thing young Mister Bush told us was going to be our way out of Iraq? Well, it isn't working. In fact, training Iraqi security forces may be making things worse.

As Thomas E. Ricks noted in Sunday's Washington Post:

…the Iraqi side of [the stand up, stand down] equation is almost complete. Training programs have developed more than 300,000 members of the Iraqi army and national police, close to the desired number of homegrown forces. Yet as that number has grown, so, too, has violence in Iraq. The summer was worse than ever, with July the deadliest month in three years, according to U.S. military data.

With Iraqi forces unable to quell the insurgency, sectarian violence, civil unrest, Hobbesian quagmire and whatever else you care to call it, U.S. troop levels will need to stay at roughly 140,000 until at least next spring, Ricks reports.

Play Us Again, Uncle Sam

Just because the strategy isn't working doesn't mean the administration plans to change it. After all, why start abandoning failed strategies at this stage of the game? The only thing that's going to change is the spin (and that's not really a change either, is it?).

Military officers and other experts interviewed in recent days said that the Iraqi training program has worked but that its success is undercut by the lack of strong Iraqi political leadership. "You fix the government, you fix the problem," said an Army battalion commander who has seen hard fighting near Baghdad this summer.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld landed squarely in this camp recently. Referring to numbers of trained Iraqi forces, he told a reporter: "If we look at it one-dimensionally like that, there's no answer to the question, because the problem is not a military problem. In fact, the reality is that it's a political governance problem, and it's a governmental problem, and it's a problem of reconciliation."

Rumsfeld better be careful with that kind of talk, or he's going to get a whole lot more people asking why we're applying military power to a problem that isn't a military problem.

General John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, told PBS's Jim Lehrer last week that, "we're making good progress" in the training of Iraqi troops.

And yet, according to Ricks, some "experts" believe that "standing up" a Shia-dominated security force is adding to the violence in Iraq, and driving a greater reliance on local militias to provide security.

Two U.S. officers who have served in Iraq told Ricks they fear that all the U.S. military is doing is (Ricks's words) "training and arming Iraqis to fight a looming civil war."

End of the Innocents

This certainly isn't the first time America has tried to contain violence by arming thugs to achieve a desired political solution. Backing Stalin to fight Hitler blew up in our faces, as did backing Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, as did backing bin Laden against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, history doesn't repeat itself, but it sure rhymes a lot. Our "stand up, stand down" strategy in Iraq sounds a heck of a lot like our mistakes of the past, and once again, we're conforming to Benjamin Franklin's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

And by continuing to accept the nonsensical propaganda exhorting it to "stay the course," America's behavior brings to mind a quote of the great satirist Voltaire: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

Of course, Mister Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their echo chambermaids have never tried to sell their absurd talking points on the basis of logic. Their ability to sway public opinion in favor of their policies and strategies has always been their steadfast "belief" that they're doing the right thing and it's producing "success." Never mind that "believing" the moon is made of green cheese doesn't make it so, and that calling bull manure "chocolate ice cream" doesn't make it cold.

The 20th century logician Bertrand Russell said, "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

Amen, Brother Bertrand. Let us pray that come November, we the people of the most powerful nation in human history have the wisdom to reject the fools and fanatics who have led us down the primrose path of neoconservative militarism.

What's the best way to get out of a quagmire?

Get out of it.

#

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.