Arthur Herman, in "How to Win in Iraq - and How to Lose," Commentary, April 2007, pages 23-28, takes the familiar position that the war in Iraq is being won militarily, but that the politicians may snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As Herman puts it, "if the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis still continues and is showing signs of improvement, the battle for the hearts and minds of Congress, or at least of the Democratic majority, seems to be all but over."
Herman then takes up an extended discussion the war in Algeria (1954-1962), and the work of David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. I have, by the way, just finished reading Alistair Horne's classic history of the Algerian war, A Savage War of Peace, which was first published in 1977, and which was reissued in 2006 with some new notes and material. Many of the details of the incidents to which Herman alludes in this article are described at length in Horne's work.
Herman is quite correct that the French army, with the use of such principles as concentration of force, defeated the FLN (Front de Liberation National), and its military arm again and again. In particular, the Morice line, named after a French Minister of Defense, closed the border with Tunisia, and prevented the ALN from reinforcing the suffering cadres in the wilayas.
Some of these principles are, as Herman says, important in the context of Iraq. Some of the steps taken by General Petraeus have applied some effective measures to the problems of defeating and eliminating certain anti-government or anti-American forces. The fact that Iraq lacks an equivalent of the Morice line to prevent infiltration of personnel and weapons from Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, is the source of many of the problems the American forces face in Iraq.
Herman takes the position that the war in Algeria was, in the end, lost because left-wing politicians in France forced the government to abandon a victorious army just as the war was won. He also mentions the similar example of Vietnam. And so, he concludes, there is a terrible danger that "feckless politicians" may pull the plug on the Army's latest initiative in Iraq before it has had a chance to work.
I have a couple of problems with this sort of article. The "stab in the back" theme has been trotted out ever since the American Revolution. (Cornwallis had the war just about won, but the Ministry wouldn't send any more troops after he suffered a temporary setback at Yorktown.) The most famous "stab in the back" was that administered to the German army in 1918 by the liberal (and Jewish) politicians, who betrayed the soldiers and the Kaiser. The story of the stab in the back gained a certain credibility from the fact that the German army surrendered while still occupying large sections of France and Belgium. The German public did not see how shattered the military was after the ultimate failure of the last great German offensive in March, 1918, and the Allied attacks later that year. Moreover, Germany's allies had gone under, the blockade had driven the German population to near-starvation rations, and the increasing numbers of American soldiers and Marines, who could not be matched by fresh levies of Germans, all meant that the Germans must inevitably lose.
Vietnam is an interesting case. There are many people who feel that political interference caused many problems during the war. Certainly a case can be made that the Tet Offensive of January 1968 was a defeat for the Viet Cong. I would argue that Tet was a terrible defeat for the U.S. military in Vietnam, and its political leadership on the following counts: First, it was obviously a terrible surprise to everyone in Saigon, betraying the failure of military intelligence after seven years of continuous presence in the country. Second, the Vietnamese forces were must stronger than any of the MACV estimates would have led one to believe. This was not only another intelligence failure, but cast doubt on (at least), previous reports of numbers of the enemy killed, of the success of the interdiction of reinforcements and supplies through Laos, and of the reliability of South Vietnamese (ARVN) forces. Third, it demonstrated that the Vietnamese were not going to give up.
It has always been the case in warfare that, under certain circumstances, the winner is the side that refuses to concede defeat. In the days when the winner of a battle was determined by which side controlled the battlefield at the end of the day, the side which was too stubborn to retreat could end up claiming a victory. One can argue, for example, that, had General Joseph "Fighting Joe" Hooker not retreated after the battle of Chancellorsville, that fight would have been recorded as a Union, rather than a Confederate victory.
Horne makes the point that the FLN never changed its goals, never backed away from its demands, never conceded anything. In the end, the war in Algeria was too expensive. It was preventing the modernization of the French army and economy, it was diverting too much energy and manpower away from Europe, and the game was simply not worth the candle for the French. Certainly, from the time the Algerian war ended, France entered upon a period of rapid economic growth and modernization.
In the end, the dictum of Clausewitz is still with us: War is the continuation of politics by other means. The idea that one can have a military victory and a political defeat is nonsense. The only way to have that appear to occur, is if the military has been misinformed of, or has misunderstood, the political goals. It is the accomplishment of those goals, not military advances and retreats, which denotes victory.
Glenn A Knight
In my study
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9 comments:
Glenn:
I'm not sure I understand your interpretation of Clausewitz, or perhaps I don't understand where you take your interpretation.
If we agree that war has both a political and military aspect to it, I don't wee why "(t)he idea that one can have a military victory and a political defeat is nonsense."
If I give my generals a military mission, and my diplomats a corresponding political mission, why is it "nonsense" to imagine the former might succeed in their assigned goals while the latter might fail? If the military succeeds, and the diplomats fail, wouldn't it be exactly the case that I had a military victory and a political defeat?
I take Clausewitz at what I take to be his position: War is always and everywhere a means to a political end. War is never an end in itself; if it becomes an end in itself that is mere barbarism.
Therefore, a military "victory" which does not result in a political victory is not a victory at all. It is merely a successful exercise in murder.
To put it in the context of Herman's article, the purpose of the French Army's efforts in Algeria, under General Challe and others, was to force the FLN to come to terms with the French government - to negotiate terms of a settlement which would meet a number of the political goals of the pied noirs, the Army itself, and the French state. However many mujahidine were killed, the Army never succeeded in forcing the FLN to accept French political goals.
Glenn,
"Therefore, a military "victory" which does not result in a political victory is not a victory at all. It is merely a successful exercise in murder."
If an enemy refuses to come to terms with you politically, regardless of your use of force, then I would suggest that a "successful exercise in murder" is the military goal.
In the rare cases where an enemy will not surrender regardless of their loses the only choice is to eliminate them entirely. The Spartans in the battle of Thermopylae would be an example of this. They refused to come to terms with the Persians and their entire force was destroyed.
If you are prepared to go to war over an issue how do you determine the number you are prepared to kill to obtain your objective? 10,000 is okay, but 100,000 is not? I would suggest that if it is important enough to go to war for you should be prepared for the potential of having to kill the enemy to the last man if he will not surrender to your terms.
The Persians slaughtered the Spartan force to the last man at Thermopylae, but they lost the war. The military victory did not lead to winning the war. Eventually, the Athenians and the Spartans, and their allies, defeated the Persians.
In most cases, I would submit, your goal involves the continued existence of the population of the opposing state, if only because you need someone to work the fields after you've conquered the territory. If, for example, the Normans had slaughtered the Saxons to the last man, England would have been useless to William the Conqueror.
The point to politics is to get people to do things that are in your interest, that benefit you. Even if the means to get them to do that is war, the purpose is still to get them to do what you want. Dead men make lousy servants.
I watched a documentary called The Fog of War last night. It is a series of interviews with former Defense Secretary and World Bank President Robert S. McNamara. McNamara got into the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. We burned over 100,000 civilians to death in a single night and destroyed 50 square miles of Tokyo. We also firebombed a number of other cities; the destruction was far worse than that caused by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The point was not to kill Japanese for the sake of killing Japanese. The point was to make them surrender before we had to invade the home islands. And we did. Eventually the Emperor surrendered, and we've had positive dealings with the Japanese ever since.
To pick another example, in the American Civil War, the political goal was the preservation of the Union. To preserve the Union, we had to destroy the Confederate armies, so that the Confederate states would have to recognize the authority of the Federal government. Now, every Confederate soldier we killed was going to make it that much harder for the people of the South to accept Union rule. So, ideally, we needed to kill as many Confederates as we had to, in order to break Lee's army, and not one man more. So look at how Grant handled the surrender at Appomatox; we could have killed a lot more Confederates, but we gave them a chance to surrender, and they took it.
And so those eleven states are still part of the Union, although, since they all voted for George Bush twice, I'm not sure that's worked out as well as Mr. Lincoln hoped.
Glenn:
You posted on the arguments of Arthur Herman, and wrote: “And so, he concludes, there is a terrible danger that "feckless politicians" may pull the plug on the Army's latest initiative in Iraq before it has had a chance to work.”
You then objected to the idea of the, as you phrased it, “‘stab in the back’ theme”, and stated that a war must meet political objectives, and if it does not, the war is just plain lost. You hadn’t yet – in your original post – gone as far as to call it murder. I inferred you were suggesting that soldiers (and citizens) can have no legitimate argument if they believe that objectives attained by their nation’s arms are subsequently squandered by their political leaders. I agree that if you give the military the job of implementing a political solution, and the military fails to do so, then the military does not necessarily have a just complaint about being “stabbed in the back”. On the other hand, if you instruct your military – as we did at the beginning of the Iraq invasion - to destroy another nation’s army and depose its head of state, if it successfully does so then the military has by definition achieved its objectives. It has been victorious.
Subsequent events, including misjudgments by the conqueror’s government officials or occupying commanders, unforeseen events, actions of additional players, and plain, old nasty surprises can certainly make such victories Phyrrhic, or turn them into actual defeats of policy. That’s why I wrote: “If the military succeeds, and the diplomats fail, wouldn't it be exactly the
case that (we) had a military victory and a political defeat?”
You seem to be rejecting this concept – even in theory - with your comment: “Therefore, a military "victory" which does not result in a political victory is not a victory at all. It is merely a successful exercise in murder.”
Firstly, I think murder is an act identified by intent. That is, one must intend to murder in order for one to commit murder. There are many forms of unlawful homicide, including those that stem from recklessness or disregard, but you have to willfully and unlawfully kill a person in order for the act to be murder. You can certainly determine at some future date that a previous act had indeed met that definition, but I don’t see how you can decide that an act committed in good faith in the past, since it did not achieve the objectives hoped for, can now be re-defined into an act that was wrongfully intended in the first place.
Secondly, I don’t think you are addressing the comment – maybe I made it badly – that if you split an objective into two parts (in this case military and diplomatic) and assign the parts to two different individuals, how is it not possible that we may be able to discover that one individual succeeded in his part while the other failed. If it is possible – and it surely sometimes is – then the military could with justice claim they have done their job and the policy makers and diplomats did not do theirs.
Further, if the military does its job in the belief they are fighting for just and noble aims, and the political or diplomatic leaders subsequently refuse to follow through on those aims, why would the military not have a right to believe – since it would be true – that their work was at best wasted and at worst actually perverted?
I’m not even talking about a particular war here, not Vietnam, Algeria, or Iraq. Do you not think it is possible that a military can win, and then a government can immediately thereafter lose, the objectives sought by a war? That’s what I’m trying to ask.
I would agree that, in Iraq, the military was given a set of objectives that ran up to April 2003, that those objectives were to defeat the Iraqi army and to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein, and that the military accomplished those objectives. At that point, as I told a number of people at the time, we could have declared victory - Hell, it was a victory, and left.
From a number of things I've read, that is exactly what many of the military expected. Knock over the statue of Saddam, get back on the bus and head for Kuwait on the way home.
If you like, we can call that Iraq I. We won Iraq I, in that the military did what was necessary for the accomplishment of the political goals. Insofar as the stated goals were to get rid of the Iraqi army, overthrow Saddam, and assure ourselves that Iraq would neither give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists nor threaten Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, we had nailed all of those goals.
It is totally unclear to me, and I haven't seen anybody speak clearly and unambiguously to this point, whether the administration had a second list of goals, which they didn't bother to tell anyone, including the military, until after we won Iraq I, or whether they only decided to rachet up the objectives after Iraq I turned out to be relatively easy.
Either way, a second set of political goals for Iraq has emerged. One could argue that the military was largely irrelevant to those goals, was the wrong instrument to carry out those goals, was neither trained nor equipped to carry out the new mission, and was not allowed to participate in the planning of those goals (not until recently, at least.) In any event, it's pretty clear that there was a radical change in the nature of the mission. Let's call this Iraq II.
So far, although we have killed a lot of Iraqis, we haven't accomplished the political goals of Iraq II. Moreover, I'm not at all sure that you can accomplish those goals by killing people. Military "victories" may not be contributing to political progress. That may be in part because the political people have not been exploiting the situation properly. In fact, I would say that the Bush administration has mismanaged the political side in a number of ways, not least by having unrealistic expectations of the political efficacy of military action.
All that said, the point here is that the military cannot give you a political victory. They can only give you a military victory, and that's pointless if it doesn't accomplish a political goal. That isn't to say that the military aren't doing their jobs well, though, frankly, we've had a number of incompetent commanders in Iraq, but they there hasn't been a coherent policy to provide guidance for which military actions were needed.
Finally, on murder, if you kill someone merely for the sake of killing them, that's murder. I don't care if you were under orders: the Nuremberg trials clearly established that obedience to orders is no excuse for criminal actions. The only way you can justify the killing that goes on in war is if it is intended to accomplish a political objective. If, as seems to be the case, we have killed many people in Iraq merely as part of our "force protection" efforts, those have been murders.
There is, of course, another whole topic here. Have you read Kevin Phillips' book American Theocracy? Phillips claims that our "noble aims" in Iraq were to seize the Majnoon oil fields and turn them over the Exxon Mobil. That didn't work out because the government could never go public with that as a goal, for fear of upsetting their evangelical Christian buddies who thought we were in a holy war.
It is also the case that, as with the Bay of Pigs (the best parallel I can think of right now), we totally misunderstood the manner in which the Iraqis would react to the fall of Saddam Hussein. Therefore, there was a false assumption that we didn't need either to manage the political scene in any detail, or provide nearly as much security assistance as we have, because the Iraqis would just organize themselves into a nice peaceful country, something like Switzerland, in a couple of weeks.
Finally, here's food for thought. What if the military "leaders", like General Myers, had said to President Bush that, having accomplished the set of goals they had been given initially, they were not going to accept any scope creep? Mind you, Bush made sure that the military leaders he had were either spineless, like Myers and Pace, or morons, like Tommy Franks, so it was unlikely that anyone would have stood up to him. But they could have tried saying no.
Glenn:
I reject the idea that killing people that attack you is murder. The fact is a jihadi is much more likely to survive surrendering to an American military member than to the member of any other group on earth. We kill them in battle, and generally either they start the battles, or we strike at organized groups of them - our declared enemies - while they are in areas they believe are safe.
You mention Iraqis we have killed, but neglect to mention any number of Saudis, Kuwaitis, Syrians, Egyptians, Somalis, etc., among those we have killed. In the case of the foreigners, if they decided to come to Iraq specifically to kill Americans, that is their fatal choice and I hardly think it’s reasonable to consider it murder when we kill them instead. In the case of Iraqis that we kill, we are in Iraq with the permission of the sovereign government of Iraq, and under terms that allow our troops to both defend themselves with lethal force, and to find and engage groups that have organized themselves to attack us. It’s not even clear to me that most of the attacks we actually initiate are not coordinated with the Iraqi government. If I and some of my gun-nut friends decided to wage war against the American government in Pennsylvania, I doubt you would call it murder if government forces attacked and killed us. I have to suspect you only style as ‘murder’ the analogous proceedings in Iraq because of your opposition to the Iraq policy, and not due to the nature of the acts themselves. The Nuremburg comments are inflammatory and beneath you.
As far as conspiracy theories that posit that the aims of the Halliburton boogieman was only frustrated by the fantasies of the Christo-fascist boogieman, where the hell did that come from? It is at best wild innuendo that would require any response to attempt to prove a negative, and to engage in the discussion is to concede the idea a seriousness I would expect you try (and undoubtedly fail) to demonstrate before I responded with anything more than distain. That’s Daily Kos stuff, and I’m here because you’re running a serious blog.
I agree there has been some combination of poor planning, incorrect assumptions, bad execution, leadership that was not up to the tasks assigned, and/or policy-makers that were unrealistic and possibly foolish. I doubt any of us are going to get the straight of it for some time but we are not – and have not been – in Iraq as murderers, nor did we need the excuse of giving oil to Dick Cheney’s buddies to make the decision to attack Iraq.
This discussion is going far afield of where it started, and in a direction far from that which I thought it would take. (Don't many of our discussions go that way?) Part of that is certainly my fault, and, in an effort to get back on track, I'd like to retract, clarify, or otherwise modify some of my remarks.
First, I should not have brought Kevin Phillips into the argument. I read American Theocracy this summer. It's an interesting book, but Phillips has some real problems with the Bush family. I have not read his previous book, American Dynasty, but I gather it was pretty much an attack on the Bushes, and some of American Theocracy is obviously based on what he came up with for American Dynasty.
I, too, dislike conspiracy theories. While some of the connections and influences Phillips describes no doubt exist, I don't think he makes the case that there is a real conspirac, or that the war in Iraq is a product of that conspiracy.
Moreover, while it may be a fact that Dick Cheney has profited by the war, through his ownership of Halliburton stock, I don't think for a minute that he fomented this war for his personal profit. I think that Mr. Cheney, like Mr. Bush, genuinely believed that Iraq was a threat to American security.
So, that's red herring number one out of the way. Enough with the conspiracy theories. (Which also applies to the theories that Iraq was somehow connected to the September 11 attacks. It's pretty obvious that Al-Qaida and Saddam mixed like oil and water, and that most of Al-Qaida's support has come from individual Saudis, many of them connected to bin-Laden by family ties.)
Second, the use of the term murder was inflammatory, and that was a mistake on my part. I certainly did not intend to say that American soldiers in general are committing murder. Rather, I include the American fatalities among those who have been unjustifiably killed.
One of the problems with the "self-defense" arguments is that it depends upon two judgments. One is about the sequence of events, and the other is about the situation. That is, we invaded Iraq. We did not invade Iraq in self-defense, but rather chose to attack Iraq to prevent future problems. (Or maybe it was self-defense. More on that later.) Given that we invaded Iraq, one can argue that any Iraqi is justified in trying to drive us out. On the other hand, if an American soldier is being fired on by an Iraqi, he isn't going to refrain from returning fire on the ground that he ought not to be in Iraq.
Joseph Heller's Catch-22 puts this rather well, when he says that the real enemies are the anti-aircraft gunners trying to shoot down your plane. After all, if you weren't trying to bomb their country, they wouldn't - they couldn't - shoot at you. The real enemies are the guys who ordered you to fly over Rumania and drop bombs on it.
So, let's drop the whole thing about murder. It was hyperbolic, and I should not have used the word.
Moreover, I can certainly see, at least in theory, that a situation could exist in which a military victory, which was sufficiently decisive to have brought about a favorable political settlement, could be squandered by poor management on the part of the diplomats and politicians. That isn't what happened in the cast of the First World War; it isn't what happened in Algeria, although Arthur Herman would like to say that it was; and it isn't what's happening in Iraq.
I think that the Iraq war illustrates a fundamental difference of opinion in government about acceptable reasons for undertaking military action. The problem a lot of people have is this: If the war was undertaken to remove the threat that Saddam Hussein would somehow use weapons of mass destruction against us, then, once we knew that threat no longer existed, our justification for military action was over. Note that, from my point of view (I can't speak for anyone else here), it doesn't really matter whether there were no WMD, and the government lied about it, or whether there were none, and the government really believed that there were, or whether there were such weapons, or programs to development them, and we have now eliminated those weapons and programs. We attacked Iraq to remove the threat to the United States of weapons of mass destruction. The one thing we are sure of about Iraq now is that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction, and no means of attacking us with such weapons. So, there is no reason for us to be in Iraq.
If there is no good reason for us to be there, then it doesn't really matter if we're "winning" or "losing." It doesn't matter whether the Iraqi government is a democracy or a military dictatorship. We removed the problem, and it's time to go home.
Obviously, there are other views. As far as I can tell, and I've read a lot of this stuff, the Bush administration has never articulated a clear, believable reason for any U.S. soldiers to be in Iraq in 2007. Nor, at any point since April 2003, has the President or anyone else articulated what "victory" would look like, and how we can accomplish that. As far as I can tell, the military is simply the wrong instrument to accomplish the goals we seem to have in Iraq.
There's something basic that neither the article nor the comments have considered: A condition of victory is know what you get if you win. It could well be that this was the key to the Vietnam debacle; no one could explain to the American people-- or to the military-- the conditions that would have to be met to indicate victory.
For that reason, everyone simply extemporized. In the early days, we seem to have been protecting a weak ally against communist expansionism; at the end, we were apparently fighting to retrieve our POWs.
Something similar seems to be happening in Iraq. No one can state explicitly what our goal is. Originally, we seem to have been seeking to eliminate WMDs; now we simply seem to be waiting for the Iraqi government to become sufficiently stable to assert its sovereignty. Or maybe we're trying to stop Iran from dominating the region. Or maybe we're trying to prevent the Islamist extremists from following us home, whatever that might mean.
In any event, how can we know if we've won until we know what winning would look like? Absent an answer to that question, any discussion about whose fault losing might be is irrelevant to everyone-- except to the neoconservatives.
For them, fixing blame early and often will be vital as they strap on their gear and continue the struggle in the mean hallways of the conservative think tanks they'll all soon be working for.
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