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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Let me also say before the tomatoes start flying and you question my own patriotism or tune out because you think I have my own partisan views that I also believe that the popular and dominant criticism of the war on terror is wrong. We are a year later and for whatever reason, there has not been a terrorist strike against the United States nor a major one against Western interests in the world. You have to give the administration credit for what it has achieved. That is, if it has achieved this. Which is to say that maybe a major terrorist attack on American interests over the past year was not in al-Qaida's calendar. The strikes have always been spaced out by a couple of years. We just don't know. What is more, Rumsfeld and Cheney and others say that though they believe that the war on terror has been successful, they also are certain that there will be a major terrorist attack on the United States in the future. So their assurances aren't very comforting.
I'm going to try to put two hats on now at the same time: the policy wonk know-it-all hat and the typical American citizen hat. Policy wonks, of course, aren't supposed to have emotional or visceral reactions; they are merely supposed to be able to see things through a lens of consequences for American interests. And typical Americans aren't supposed to have policy preferences when it comes to national security. Typical Americans are supposed to pledge allegiance and stand behind their president and elect their representative in Congress and hope that the checks and balances work. Of course it is more complex than that, but you get my point.
So, what I find difficult with both hats on is that I take all of the evidence about Iraq -- the nature of a regime that I've actually had the opportunity to see first-hand and experience in more than eight weeks in country, Iraq's violation of its solemn treaty obligations prior to the invasion of Kuwait in using chemical weapons against the Kurds and Iran, its cynical and evil evasion of its treaty obligations relating to nuclear nonproliferation, its illegal development of grotesque biological weapons, its unprovoked invasion of not one but two neighbors, its shooting missiles during the Gulf War not only at Israel, but also at Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, and Qatar; its record of war crimes and genocide against the Kurds, its own people, and then against the Kuwaitis, whom it claimed were its own people; its signing of yet more cease-fire and disarmament obligations in 1991 with no intention of honoring those agreements, its unmistakable support for international terrorism ...
I look at all of this evidence and history, and the policy wonk in me ponders not just the question of Iraqi evil but also what our obligation is under international law, what the implications for us and the rest of the world are if we carry out our policy of uniliteralism or preemption. I ponder the impact, short- and long-term, of military action on our coalitions and our allies. I think about the strategic position it will put us in the Arab world. I calculate military and civilian casualties, put odds on the likelihood of success, think through the messiness of occupation and democratization.
And I can't help but feel cynical about the fact that we are going to war to enhance the economic interests of the Enron class. The policy wonk position over-analyzes and dispassionately examines sorties and ground divisions and cruise missiles and targets and capabilities and equipment failure rates. It gets muddled in the details and loses all sight of the visceral and the emotional. Yet.
Yet when war skeptics or Bush administration opponents argue that the son is merely atoning for the failures of the father, when they say that the administration hasn't given inspections a "chance" to work, when they condemn the notion of preemption or unilateral action, when they say it is all about oil, my answer to them is this: So are you saying that if the administration did give inspections a chance to work and they didn't work that you would be writing editorials saying: "Now that the administration has given inspections a chance, we support war"? I think the answer is no. Are you saying that if the U.N. crafted some resolution, no matter how vague, consenting to the use of force in order to implement Security Council resolutions, that you would sign up for war? The answer I think for them is still no.
Not only are these arguments disingenuous, but they are also lacking in any knowledge of history. This is the same crowd who argues that we should avoid or shrink away from war because of long-ago disproved arguments: that weapons won't work, that the Iraqis are some efficient killing machine, that too many civilians die in war. There are some who will never support war. Those I respect. But there is also a huge segment of the American elite who don't support war because it is Republican war, and that is twisted.
In the past decade, the world has experienced at least two more major modern wars: in Yugoslavia and now Afghanistan. These, like the Gulf War, were war dominated by a new form of military power, air power. Despite the changes in war that have been demonstrated now in three wars, the orthodoxy, including evidently that of the Bush administration and of Gen. Tommy Franks' Central Command, is that magnificent armies with stunning maneuvers won the Gulf War. Many even in the national security community remain convinced that air power alone could not achieve NATO's goals in Yugoslavia, that it was only the "threat" of a ground war that finally convinced Milosevic. The official line these days is that air power facilitated the success of a combined special operations and proxy ground war in Afghanistan. As Gen. Franks said recently about Afghanistan: "The sure way to do work against the enemy is to put people on the ground." In short, our way of modern war is just not war.
Peoples and nations have been fighting wars -- we don't even need to say ground wars -- as long as peoples and nations have existed. To most people, "real" war is ground war, so much so that we don't even use the term ground power. The "field" commander is automatically assumed to be a ground officer. Modern air power defeated the Iraqi army before the front lines were ever crossed by coalition armored and mechanized divisions in 1991, Yugoslavia was exhausted by repeated bombing in 1999, the Taliban were toppled and al-Qaida routed from their caves by bombs. Sure it is true that airplanes can't occupy a country, that not as many things are ever destroyed as pilots and analysts claim, that intelligence isn't good enough to find biological and chemical weapons or Scuds, that the bad guys got away from Kandahar and Tora Bora.
