Rossputin.com Rational Thinking About Our World

A reader named John sent me a comment which I felt required a reply despite his ignoring the clearly-noted fact that the post he initially responded to was not written by me. So, in italics below is his comment, followed by my response to him. For those who consider themselves experts in military history, I would appreciate any feedback (whether you agree or disagree with me).

Mr Kaminsky,

I'll confess to jumping straight from your piece about our current dilemmas in Iraq and the piece about Vietnam. Put it down to what my daughter charitably describes as Halfzeimers. However, since they essentially seemed mirror images of each other although about equally misconceived adventures separated by forty years, I assumed the Vietnam piece was also written by you. No doubt the views expressed by both of you about these two uncannily similar debacles are sincerely held. Unfortunately, they are completely wrong.

This in itself wouldn't be very important, but inasmuch as they are just another couple of small voices contributing to a postponement of the inevitable day of reckoning in Iraq, they are actually damaging to the long term term interests of the USA and deserve comment. Why does this unreality persist? Is it simplistic nationalism, domestic political considerations, hubris, machismo, the Israeli interest, insularity? It's hard to tell. What is certain is that it takes no account of empirical evidence, rationalism, global strategic realities, the true national interest, or human nature.

These are all concepts dear to me as someone who has spent his life soldiering, when I smelt the odd dead body, and in banking, much of it in the middle east, when objectivity about information, money and motives were fundamental to success. I'm not going to rehearse all the reasons why and how we have turned two entirely separate, serious, but manageable regional problems (containing Hussein, and Islamic fundamentalism and its terror tactics) into a global debacle for US interests that is probably likely to last for a generation and could signal the start of our long term relative decline. Our paramount concern now should be to extricate ourselves from this mess asap and contain the consequences which will be ugly.

Don't bother sending me pages of exhortations to victory, or even more ridiculous metaphors about Hitler and Chamberlain, just ask yourself a couple of questions. Over the past six years has the global power, prestige and influence of these four countries increased, or decreased: China, the USA, Iran, Russia. Secondly, have forces been released in the middle east that have already cost us our primacy in the region and perhaps even threaten the long term position of Israel.

John E

John,

I understand the sort of people and arguments that you believe are insular and unrealistic. I know some of them, too, but I believe I'm not part of that crowd. I am certainly not the "exhortation to victory" type. You can judge for yourself.

The main lesson I saw from Viet Nam was similar to the lesson of pointing a gun at someone: Don't do it unless you're willing to shoot him. I am far from a Viet Nam expert, and I do not claim that we could have "won" in Viet Nam. What does seem clear to me from Viet Nam is that the politicians let political decisions influence what should have been purely military decisions.

The US (Bush and Rumsfeld) made the same mistake in Iraq by not sending enough troops early on, in my opinion, and by not increasing troop levels sooner when that became clear. On a separate note, it seems that the biggest mistake made by the US in Iraq was when Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army entirely and sent people who could possibly have been leaders of a civil society (and I use that term loosely) to become leaders of the insurgency.

As a general matter, it seems to me that Democrats only support wars where we have no national interest, like Bosnia or Somalia, and don't support wars where we do have a national interest, like Kuwait or either World War. It is incredible to me how slow we were to get into WWII after the disasters we could have prevented in Western Europe by Wilson's spinelessness.

I believe that going into Iraq was the right decision, but that the Administration bungled every important decision after the initial short military encounters. Had I known they would have done it they way they did it, I might not have supported the war. I would suggest to you the book "America's Secret War" by George Friedman, if you're interested. It is non-partisan, pure analysis, by the guy who runs Stratfor. I find his argument interesting and convincing. (I hope he writes an update as well; I imagine it will be fairly scathing if he does.) His argument is essentially that the US had to do something and we had a list of choices, all bad, so selected the least bad one. Again, the way it has been executed makes it far less clear that it was the least bad choice.

Before I make my final point, let me take a stab at your question: The global influence and prestige of China, Russia, Iran, and the US. China is clearly up, because of their economic power. Russia is neutral or down, because of their declining economic power, their lack of military influence, and their return to despotism while the countries which could be most influenced by them (i.e. their immediate neighbors) are tending toward democracy and capitalism, and even toward membership in the EU. Iran is up temporarily, and mostly regionally. The West is somewhat afraid of them because most of the West does not know how to deal with an enemy that only understands brute force. In a battle between the UN and a country like Iran, Iran will win every time. And the political idiots in much of Western Europe continue to believe that the UN is still the answer. And the US is down, but not as much as you believe. Or at least, our influence is not down as much as you believe though clearly our popularity is. But survival is not a popularity contest. In the past these sorts of confrontations were unnecessary because geography protected us. But in the days of airplanes (as weapons as well as for transportation) and the miniaturization of very dangerous weaponry, our distance from those who hate us is much less protection than it used to be. That is why actions like Iraq will occasionally be necessary. I just hope they are infrequent and better-executed than Iraq has been.

Where I most strongly disagree with you is in your statement that Islamic fundamentalism would have been more likely to leave us alone, or less likely to target Israel, had we not gone into Iraq.

That argument does not fit with the reality of either 9/11 or of Hezbollah's obvious long-term preparation for an attack on Israel.

The history of Islam is a history of violent conquest and religious imperialism. They do not need us as a foil to find those goals interesting. It is in the nature of the religion. Our actions make some modestly good P/R possible for them, but is not fundamentally (pun intended) important to their aims.

Indeed, one of the primary reasons to go into Iraq was to demonstrate to the rest of the Muslim world that we would not tolerate their historic aggressive behavior, either toward us or toward Israel. Again I stress that Bush and Co. have done a terrible job with Iraq; what I am describing here was the initial thought process behind the strategy. And the strategy made sense. But we have done such a bad job there that the strategy has, at least to this point, been of limited success. There has been some degree of Saudi Arabia cutting down its support for fundamentalist madrases. Libya voluntarily gave up its nuclear program.

But at the same time there is no doubt that Iran's boldness in trying to acquire nuclear weapons is in part due to their seeing us stretched thin in Iraq and believe (almost certainly correctly) that we do not have the capability or will to have any sort of real war with them. We do certainly still have unmatched aerial attack capacity, but when push comes to shove my guess is that the Israelis are going to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, with or without us. My small bit of hope is that the people of Iran, despite their hatred of Israel and lesser (despite what you see on TV) hatred of the US, will see the precipice over which the insane Ahmadinejad is taking them. With some luck, Khameni will die soon, and the recent election results show some interest by the Iranian people on moving away from the politics of Sharia. Iran has one of the youngest, most literate, and most highly educated populations in the Middle East. It is truly a tragedy that the US has the relationship with Iran that it has. If there is any way to keep them from gaining nuclear weapons without having to do great damage to the country, I hope we take that path. It is a much more important country than Iraq. I hope they save themselves from what they will reap if they keep sowing the politics of the hidden imam and of erasing Israel.

Iraq and Viet Nam are not mirror images of each other, despite some similarities. I do not know whether we could have won in Viet Nam, though I do know that military leaders were kept from making the proper decisions by politicians. And we did the same in Iraq. At this point I do not think we can "win" in Iraq, but I do think we can avoid losing. It will take much smarter leadership on our side, as well as strong and non-partisan leaders in Iraq to stand up to people like Al Sadr who want to keep the country as destabilized as possible, running on an Iranian payroll. I don't know if the leadership here or there is up to the task, but for the sake of the US and the Middle East, I hope they are.

Thanks for the conversation,
Ross