What's Good For America Isn't Necessarily What's Good for GM... Or the UAW

Tom Friedman has a nice piece in today's New York Times about how to create real political transformation in the Middle East. His key points:

Yes, there is an alternative to the Euro-wimps and the neocons, and it is the "geo-greens." I am a geo-green. The geo-greens believe that, going forward, if we put all our focus on reducing the price of oil - by conservation, by developing renewable and alternative energies and by expanding nuclear power - we will force more reform than by any other strategy. You give me $18-a-barrel oil and I will give you political and economic reform from Algeria to Iran. All these regimes have huge population bubbles and too few jobs. They make up the gap with oil revenues. Shrink the oil revenue and they will have to open up their economies and their schools and liberate their women so that their people can compete. It is that simple.

By refusing to rein in U.S. energy consumption, the Bush team is not only depriving itself of the most effective lever for promoting internally driven reform in the Middle East, it is also depriving itself of any military option. As Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, points out, given today's tight oil market and current U.S. consumption patterns, any kind of U.S. strike on Iran, one of the world's major oil producers, would send the price of oil through the roof, causing real problems for our economy. "Our own energy policy has tied our hands," Mr. Haass said.

The Bush team's laudable desire to promote sustained reform in the Middle East will never succeed unless it moves from neocon to geo-green.

This is certainly a worthy goal and I am all for it, but it is predicated on, what Dennis Miller once said, "more ifs than a Kippling piece."

UPDATE: See also this piece by Victor Davis Hanson. Particularly the mid portion and ending. The first part, however, was a bit of a head scratcher for me. The subtext of that section seems to me to be: build democracies and productive economies and leave us alone.

UPDATE II: UPDATE BOOGALOO: See also Anthony's post on this subject.

An Ideal, Not a Shift in Policy

In a press conference yesterday, President George W. Bush cleared up the intent of his Inaugural Address.

Q Sir, your inaugural address has been interpreted as a new, aggressive posture against certain countries, in particular Iran. Should we view it that way?

THE PRESIDENT: My inaugural address reflected the policies of the past four years that said -- that we're implementing in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it talked about a way forward. I think America is at its best when it leads toward an ideal. And certainly, a world without tyranny is an ideal world. The spread of freedom is important for future generations of Americans. I firmly believe that free societies are peaceful societies, and I believe every person desires to be free. And so I look forward to leading the world in that direction for the next four years.

Q Do you see it as a policy shift?

THE PRESIDENT: No, as I said, it reflects the policy of the past, but it sets a bold, new goal for the future. And I believe this country is best when it heads toward an ideal world. We are at our best. And in doing so, we're reflecting universal values and universal ideas that honor each man and woman, that recognize human rights and human dignity depends upon human liberty. And it's -- I'm looking forward to the challenge, and I'm looking forward to reaching out to our friends and allies to convince them of the necessity to continue to work together to help liberate people.

Prediction: We will shortly begin to see opinion pieces coming out with a general theme of "If only the Inaugural Address was a shift in grand strategy and was resourced properly, starting with a 100,000 ground force end-strength increase...."

Rorshach Realism Redux....

Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute has an interesting piece in today's Opinion Journal. He argues that:

Those who are skeptical of injecting issues of freedom, democracy and human rights into the conduct of foreign policy call themselves "realists," and they accuse their opposite numbers--the so-called idealists--of an almost juvenile enthusiasm. But a sober reading of the historical evidence shows that President Bush and his fellow idealists are more realistic than the "realists."

To begin with, the idealists are right about the possibility for freedom and democracy to spread across borders and cultures. In 1775 there were no democracies. Then came the American Revolution and raised the number to one. Some 230 years later there are 117, accounting for 61% of the world's governments.

This historic transformation in the norms of governance has not occurred at a steady pace. Rather, it has accelerated. Just over 30 years ago, the proportion of democracies was about half of what it is today. These years of rapid transition have been dubbed democracy's "third wave" by the political scientist Samuel Huntington. The wave metaphor, however, gives the impression of an inevitable ebb. But each of Mr. Huntington's first two waves left the world considerably more free and democratic than it had been before. And there is no telling how long a democracy wave will last. The first continued for 140-odd years; the second, for just about 15. The world could all go democratic before this "third wave" is spent.

Moreover, there is the factor of example and momentum: As the proportion of democracies rises, it will become harder for the remaining authoritarians to hold out. The skeptics ridicule President Bush for declaring his ultimate goal to be the end of tyranny. But today probably no more than 20% of the world's governments could rightly be called by that name, whereas once the proportion was vastly higher. Why shouldn't that 20% go the way of the others?

…

Some skeptics warn that democracy may not prove to be a cure-all for terrorism. Perhaps, but the record so far shows that democracies rarely produce wars or terrorism, and at a minimum we can predict confidently that we will have less of both as democracy spreads.

Others warn that to recklessly overthrow benign dictators will pave the way for less benign radicals. But there is no need to simply topple regimes: Our goal will surely be incremental change. And our key method should be to strengthen indigenous democrats through moral, political and material support, so they can be the agents of peaceful political transitions.

Still others make the reverse argument, saying that if we don't move single-mindedly for regime change then we are not sincere. But, democratization cannot be the only item on our diplomatic agenda. There will be other pressing issues like security and economics. The test of President Bush's
sincerity is not whether he pursues freedom to the exclusion of everything else, but whether he insists on including it consistently among our priorities.

A foreign policy that makes freedom a touchstone will of course entail some self-contradictions and hypocrisies and doubts about our sincerity. The same was true when President Carter elevated human rights to a new prominence. Nonetheless, in doing so he changed the world for the better and
advanced America's interests. It was embarrassing when President Carter fawned over the Shah of Iran and the Communist dictators of Poland, Romania and the USSR. But where are those men now, or the governments they headed?

Despite the skeptics, all historical evidence suggests that democracy can indeed spread further, that America can serve as an agent of its advancement, as it has done all over the world, and that democracy's spread will make the world safer. And for those who doubt that President Bush is earnest about his campaign for freedom, I refer them to Mullah Omar or Saddam Hussein.

Meanwhile, John O'Sullivan, the editor of The National Interest, has a very good piece in today's Chicago Sun-Times. His key points, to me at least, are:

Imagine, for instance, a revolution in Saudi Arabia. Rebels have seized key positions in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dahran, issued a manifesto establishing a Revolutionary Salvation Council, and promised to hold elections within six months. But our intelligence suggests that key figures on the Council are linked to anti-American terror networks.

Do we (a) intervene on their side in the hope of influencing the new regime? (b) intervene on the side of the present royal despots? Or (c) let events take their course? If we do (a), then we are true to our democratic rhetoric but we probably replace a pro-American despot with anti-American ones. Both the other options make us look hypocritical. And the third makes us look weak as well. It is almost needless to add that option (c) is the one Jimmy Carter actually chose when the Shah of Iran
was threatened with the Islamist revolution of 1979 that created the present terrorist state.

Or take a different kind of tragedy. Imagine a revolt of oppressed Sunni Muslims in Syria who cite the president's speech as their inspiration and appeal for American intervention. Reports arrive that they are being shot out of hand.

One assumes we would not intervene on behalf of the Syrian despots. But which of the other two options above would we choose? Almost certainly we would choose to do nothing -- or to issue appeals for restraint which amounts to much the same thing. That at any rate is what we did when the Iraqi Shiites rose up against Saddam Hussein in 1991 in the hope that America would come to their assistance. As a result, the Shiites were slow to trust us in both the invasion of 2003 and in its political aftermath. What goes around comes around.

Neither America nor any other country, however idealistic, can be expected to intervene militarily against its own interests or when it has no real interests at stake. And it is immoral as well as unrealistic to encourage others to rebel by promises of intervention we cannot keep.

But that does not mean we cannot take lesser steps -- imposing trade penalties on regimes that jail and torture dissidents, offering a safe haven to despots who agree to go quietly, giving training and technical assistance to free media in authoritarian states that permit some freedoms -- to assist gradual movement toward greater freedom. Promoting democracy in those ways is eminently realist in a world of rapid change. Such a policy, however, must place equal weight on the promise of democracy and the qualification of gradualism. Indeed, the "senior administration official" realized something the president did not: In the grammar of international politics, the qualifications are the main point.

Now, first off, as I alluded to in the last piece, I think there are more distinctions than a simple realist-idealist dichotomy. Muravchik proves this for me with his call for democracy promotion in ways other than regime change -- in this way he and O'Sullivan are actually arguing similar themes, but with obvious differences in scale. O'Sullivan is spot on with his emphasis on qualifications. Not all democracies are built alike and similar governance does not guarantee similar interests. Finally, the "democratic peace hypothesis" still is operating based on "a relatively small-N sample size" -- in the lingo of academic political science. In other words, once everyone is able to live in a nation-state where they can vote for candidates in contested elections and where ethnic or religious minorities have some semblance of protected rights does not necessarily mean that war and warfare go away as arbiters of economic, cultural, and diplomatic differences.

UPDATE: See also Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria's excellent four-part analysis here.

Rorshach Realism

Much ink has begun to flow over the "true intent" of President George W. Bush's Inaugural Address. In particular, the "muscular ideational realists" (my term to get around the label debate on "neo-conservatives") seem to think that the speech was meant as a massive sea change in American foreign policy. Others, particularly "international realists" -- as opposed to "nationalist realists" (note to self: expand on these categories later) -- see it more as a long-term intent statement.

Of the muscular ideational realists, David Brooks of the New York Times and Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment on International Peace's positions are illustrative. According to Brooks:

Two years from now, no one will remember the spending or the ostrich-skin cowboy boots. But Bush's speech, which is being derided for its vagueness and its supposed detachment from the concrete realities, will still be practical and present in the world, yielding consequences every day. With that speech, Bush's foreign policy doctrine transcended the war on terror. He laid down a standard against which everything he and his successors do will be judged.

When he goes to China, he will not be able to ignore the political prisoners there, because he called them the future leaders of their free nation. When he meets with dictators, as in this flawed world he must, he will not be able to have warm relations with them, because he said no relations with tyrants can be successful. His words will be thrown back at him and at future presidents.

American diplomats have been sent a strong message. Political reform will always be on the table. Liberation and democratization will be the ghost present at every international meeting. Vladimir Putin will never again be the possessor of that fine soul; he will be the menace to democracy and rule of law.

Because of that speech, it will be harder for the U.S. government to do what we did to Latin Americans for so many decades - support strongmen to rule over them because they happened to be our strongmen.

Kagan, for his part, notes:

Bush still asserts that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one." But in his inaugural address he has taken a step beyond that. In this third phase he has grounded American foreign policy in universal principles, in the Declaration of Independence and what Lincoln called its "abstract truth, applicable to all men at all times." The goal of American foreign policy is now to spread democracy, for its own sake, for reasons that transcend specific threats. In short, Bush has unmoored his foreign policy from the war on terrorism.

This is where Bush may lose the support of most old-fashioned conservatives. His goals are now the antithesis of conservatism. They are revolutionary. But of course -- and this is what American conservatives have generally been loath to admit -- Bush's goals are also deeply American, for the United States is a revolutionary power. Bush has found his way back to the core, universalist principles that have usually shaped American foreign policy, regardless of the nature of the threat. "The great struggle of the epoch [is] between liberty and despotism," James Madison asserted in 1823, and Americans from the founders onward have viewed the world in terms of that struggle.

Many will take a cynical view of Bush's latest pronouncements, and cynicism is an understandable response. Truman's 1947 declaration that "It must be the policy of the United States to support free
peoples" was soon followed by close ties with Spain's fascist dictator, Francisco Franco. Kennedy's inaugural pledge to "pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty" did not keep him from supporting friendly dictators in Latin America. And when Reagan announced a "global campaign for freedom" in 1982, he had the Soviet bloc in mind, not Ferdinand Marcos, Augusto Pinochet or the military junta in South Korea.

But presidential rhetoric has consequences. Contrary to his initial instincts, Reagan wound up pulling the rug out from under those friendly dictators, propelled by his own publicly stated democratic principles. Bush may be thinking about Iran and some Arab dictatorships, not China. But the next time China locks up a dissident, or Vladimir Putin further curtails Russian freedoms, people will remind Bush about his promise that "America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains."

I believe Bush understands the implications of his universalist rhetoric. In Ukraine, Bush chose democracy over his relationship with Putin -- a first example of a paradigm beyond the war on terrorism. In Asia, too, we may be on the threshold of a strategic reevaluation that places democratic allies, not China, at the core of American strategy.

From the international realist position see former head of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department and current president of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard N. Haass's op-ed in today's Washington Post. In particular:

Promoting democracy can also be useful as one component of the campaign against terrorism. Young men and women who are more involved in their societies and less alienated from their governments might see more reason to live for their causes than to kill and die for them. With luck, they might choose to become teachers rather than terrorists.

But there are more reasons to conclude that it is neither desirable nor practical to make democracy promotion the dominant feature of American foreign policy. The bottom line is that while the nature of other societies should always be a foreign policy consideration, it cannot and should not always be the foreign policy priority.

To begin with, democracies are not always peaceful. Immature democracies -- those that hold elections but lack many of the checks and balances characteristic of a true democracy -- are particularly vulnerable to being hijacked by popular passions. Post-communist Serbia is but one illustration of the reality that such countries do go to war.

It is also difficult to spread democracy. It is one thing to oust a regime, quite another to put something better in its place. Prolonged occupation of the sort the United States carried out in Japan and West Germany after World War II is the only surefire way to build democratic institutions and instill democratic culture. But as Iraq demonstrates, the rise of modern nationalism and modern methods of resistance means that such opportunities will be rare, costly and uncertain to succeed, despite an investment of billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

So, what position is more convincing? For me, I tend toward the Haass line. (For the record, I like to think that I am somewhere between the muscular ideational and international realist perspectives -- leaning more toward the latter.) I found this portion of the Inaugural Address most salient:

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary. Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own. America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.

The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America's influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America's influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom's cause. (Emphasis added.)

In other words, this is the President's intent and it provides some underlying guidance for the conduct of American foreign policy, but that does not mean that it is dogma that should and must drive every course of action. I have always thought that Walter A. McDougall, author of Promised Land, Crusader State and Freedom Just Around the Corner (full disclosure: he is also a Senior Fellow at the FPRI), made a convincing argument about the muscular ideational realist position by way of a discussion of that perspective's views of Reagan Administration foreign policy in a piece that he wrote in response to William Kristol and Robert Kagan's Foreign Affairs piece "Toward A Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy." McDougall wrote:

Having thus set the stage with a less than accurate historical backdrop, Kristol and Kagan move on to define their neo-Reaganite foreign policy. Now that the “evil empire” is vanquished, they write, the U.S. must aspire to exercise a “benevolent American hegemony.” For never has the U.S. had such a golden opportunity to promote democracy and free markets abroad, while Americans themselves “have never had it so good.” Hence, the “appropriate” goal of the United States should be “to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible.” The authors dismiss those gloomsters who warn of imperial overstretch or the danger of conjuring enemies, and call instead for a sharply increased U.S. defense budget “to preserve America’s role as global hegemon”; measures to enthuse the American people, perhaps through some form of military conscription; and a bluntly moral foreign policy that aims at “actively promoting American principles of governance abroad.” After all, the revolting alternative would be to pursue business as usual with authoritarian states such
as China, and such “Armand Hammerism should not be a tenet of conservative foreign policy.”

To all that I would say, first, that “benevolent hegemony” is a contradiction in terms. Such a self-conscious, self-righteous bid for global hegemony is bound to drive foreign rivals into open hostility to the U.S. and make our allies resentful and nervous. Secondly, the authors' argument again ignores the historical record, which demonstrates that U.S. diplomacy has been most successful when it weighs in against would-be hegemons such as Germany and the Soviet Union for the purpose, as John F. Kennedy said, “to make the world safe for diversity.” But Kristol and Kagan would have us arrogate to ourselves a hegemony for the purpose of making the world over in our image. Thirdly, there is a huge difference between promoting democracy for the purpose of undermining an aggressive dictatorial enemy, and turning some authoritarian country into an enemy because it is laggard in embracing American values.

Which methodology did Reagan employ? Clearly the former one, and if you are inclined to doubt that, just try to imagine a secret staff meeting in which Reagan, Alexander Haig, Caspar Weinberger, Bill Casey, Richard Allen, Fred Ikle, Richard Perle, and Richard Pipes— tough-minded strategists all— indulge fantasies of a U.S.-policed Wilsonian New World Order? No, Reagan’s genius lay in his recognition that freedom-fighting rhetoric backed (unlike Jimmy Carter’s) by military strength and deft geopolitics is a mighty weapon of war against tyranny, but not any sort of utopian blueprint. If anything, Reagan was remarkably cautious about interventions abroad, as evidenced by the fact that he sent forces abroad fewer times in eight years than Clinton did in four. Yet Kristol and Kagan would have us believe that the purpose of Reagan’s campaign to bring down the Soviets was to supplant their ideological hegemony with one made in the U.S.A.

Prediction: Muscular ideational realists will continue to point the address as evidence that American grand strategy has shifted. International and nationalist realists will point to it as more of underlying context about American society that helps shape strategy. All three schools will continue to fight it out and look to and point to every foreign policy pronouncement to argue that their position is in the ascendence, stuck in neutral, or declining. This cycle will then drive more debate and pronouncements.

Troubling New Development

If true, this, see also here, is troubling. It is sometimes forgotten that the PRC has a fairly sizeable Muslim population -- 1-2% of 1,298,847,624 is a lot of people. As post-9/11 screening procedures for people from Muslim countries became more strict, the Padilla and Reid cases pointed to a shift in tactics to test and probe security using non-Arab individuals.

Mars & Merriam(-Webster)

Michael Keane, the author of the forthcoming Dictionary of Modern Strategy and Tactics and a lecturer at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, had an interesting piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. The piece discusses the importance of language and word choice in war time.

This got me thinking about Anthony’s post “On Defining War.” Merriam-Webster’s defines “war” as:

Pronunciation: 'wor

Function: noun

Usage: often attributive

Etymology: Middle English werre, from Old North French, of Germanic origin; akin to Old High German werra strife; akin to Old High German werran to confuse

1 a (1) : a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations (2) : a period of such armed conflict (3) : STATE OF WAR b : the art or science of warfare c (1) obsolete : weapons and equipment for war (2) archaic : soldiers armed and equipped for war

2 a : a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism b : a struggle or competition between opposing forces or for a particular end c : VARIANCE, ODDS 3

Going a step further, “warfare” is defined as:

Pronunciation: 'wor-"far, -"fer

Function: noun

Etymology: Middle English, from werre, warre war + fare journey, passage -- more at FARE

1 : military operations between enemies : HOSTILITIES, WAR; also : an activity undertaken by a political unit (as a nation) to weaken or destroy another

2 : struggle between competing entities : CONFLICT

Now one may quibble with the American “bastardization of the Queen’s English,” but it seems to me that warfare is a more suitable term for most of the struggle’s occurring today. Even if one accepts Van Crevald’s interpretation of Von Clausewitz’s primary trinity (and I happen to think that Anthony’s analysis of Van Crevald is spot on), I think that there are two factors that undercut the “non-state actors trump Westphalia” argument. First, non-state actors or “super-empowered individuals,” or whatever you want to call them, are tied to time and physical space that makes them very similar in most regards to previous state-based actors. Second, and most important, “super-empowered individuals” have a desired political end-state based in terms of a quest for power, cultural factors, or economic desires -- and generally a blend of all three -- that make them similar to states.

War as a term of art and as a phrase with very specific meaning in international law, however, is best left as a descriptive for inter-state conflicts. Warfare is better used for wider applicability in intra-state, inter-state, and even non-purely military conflicts.

The Deer Hunters... or Fox Force Five

Apparently 5 of the 8 suspects arrested for storming the British House of Commons over the Hunting Bill in September 2004 were former or current (Territorial Army... no, apparently not one of Gareth Keenan's charges) members of the Special Air Service. According to the Times Online:

Eight men were arrested following the incident — in which five of them were shown live on television confronting Alun Michael, the rural affairs minister, and berating MPs.

The stunt was initially thought to be the work of amateur protesters who made a mockery of lax security. It led to a major safety review and the appointment of a new parliamentary security chief from MI5. The police, who are understood to have spent more than £1m investigating the incident, have now uncovered the special forces backgrounds of the protesters.

One friend of the men said: “It just shows how passionately people feel about this issue that men who were prepared to sacrifice everything for their country, and have put themselves in very difficult situations, are prepared to go to these lengths.”

Now I don't want to make young Anthony go apoplectic, but here is yet another example of what dedicated and sufficiently trained individuals can do. These guys had no weapons and embarrassed supposedly "recently upgraded-security" in order to get on the floor. If they can do it, then chances are al Qaeda or a similar group can do the same; particularly if they are granted safe havens (as was the case in Afghanistan prior to October 2001 and in Fallujah from April 2004 to November 2004) to dedicate significant spcial training to individual and collective tasks.

....Even if this SAS angle is just a planted story to make MPs and Britain feel better about the breach, it still speaks poorly to security conditions.

Budget-Centric Warfare

Much ink has been spilled over the past week (see here and here) about the the plans to shift defense modernization funds from the U.S. Air Force and Navy to help to pay for the modularity programs of the Army and to help contribute to President Bush's desire to cut the federal deficit. In the pereceived zero-sum game of the military budgetary process the Air Force and Navy, and to a lesser extent the Marine Corps, see this shift in funding as nothing less than a virility test.

Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg.com (sorry, no link could be found, I accessed this through the Early Bird) notes that James Roche, the Secretary of the Air Force, vows to try to reverse cuts to the "sacred cow" F/A-22 fighter program. He reports:

The Pentagon proposes F/A-22 cuts totaling $10.5 billion and 96 aircraft through 2011. The cuts wouldn't start until fiscal 2008, leaving intact Air Force plans to request 25 planes in 2006 and 27 the following year.

``The budget cut was done because the president's properly dealing with deficits,'' Roche said. ``It could be restored if we can make the case that requirements justify more than the number that this budget would yield.''

Roche said the F/A-22 cuts were pushed by Pentagon officials during a quick review last month that sent the military services ``scrambling'' to cut billions of dollars from a long-range spending plan that was largely settled in early October.

``There was a lot of `Geez, this comes at the last minute and we really haven't had a chance to analyze lots of things,''' Roche said. ``There was debate within the Air Force as to what we should be offering up.''

As subcontractor contracts for this aircraft are spread across 43 states the day may not be lost yet...

While some may refer to this shift in budgetary priorities as "reactive transformation," the truth of the matter is that changed budgetary requirements are necessary to provide the most useful means to fulfill our strategic ends. The F/A-22 is a means and if Al Qaeda et al were developing and fielding stealthy, long-range, ultra-high quality dogfight aircraft, then perhaps the Raptor would be a very useful means in executing the GWOT. Present circumstances, and I would argue future trendlines, however, demand that reorganizing the Army into modular Units of Action is much more important.

One hopes that this shifting of budgetary requirements on the fly, in order to deal with economic* and military realities continues. Furthermore, the President should push for an idea he presented in his "A Period of Consequences" speech at the Citadel when he was a candidate back in 1999, to wit:

...I will expect the military’s budget priorities to match our strategic vision – not the particular visions of the services, but a joint vision for change. I will earmark at least 20 percent of the procurement budget for acquisition programs that propel America generations ahead in military technology. And I will direct the Secretary of Defense to allocate these funds to the services that prove most effective in developing new programs that do so. I intend to force new thinking and hard choices. (Emphasis added.)

* While power, as IR theorists note, is fungible, without economic power it is more difficult to generate military means.

I don't appreciate your ruse, ma'am *

Dr. Joseph Caddell, an instructor of history at the North Carolina State University at Raleigh, has a new Strategic Studies Institute monograph worth checking out. In Deception 101-- Primer on Deception he compiles a useful examination of pros and cons of the use of deception in military operations across several levels of analysis. In particular, his warnings about the misuses of deception in a democracy are worth pondering. Read the whole thing.

Quasi-Non Sequitor: Perhaps it says something about my chosen profession, but I have always been fascinated/frightened with John Allen Mohammad's defense attorney's claims that he (read: JAM) orchestrated the entire DC sniper attacks as a strategem of unrelated attacks in order to conceal his true aim: the murder of his ex-wife in order to gain sole custody of his children. Applied to warfare this could cause severe headaches: multiple, non-connected, acts of seemingly random violence that use deception and obfuscation to hide the true objective until it is too late. This grows more worrisome in the current/emerging operational environment where multi-directional, sychronized swarming operations become more feasible.

* Delivered by Kevin Smith's sophomoric, yet brilliantly funny Randal Graves character from Clerks.

Well, We Warned You They'd Be Irregular...

Before you read this, read Anthony's Cost Benefit Nit-pickery.

There are any number of reasons I think Clifford May is wrong, but I'm not going to spend too much time on my Sunday afternoon to detail them. Briefly:

First it is true that Zarqwari was in Iraq prior to the invasion. It is tough for me to understand the destruction of Fallujah, for instance, in terms of a GWOT-related anti-Zarqwari campaign. I can just about wrap my head around it in the terms of the larger bring-democracy-to-Iraq war (as clumsy as it is) but had we focused on the destruction of Zarqwari instead of the liberation of Iraq, I gotta believe we could have been a bit more creative in developing appropriate courses of action that would have been successful in the GWOT sense without being quite so, er, expensive. Moreover, we've done Zarqawi a huge favor in terms of career progression by going at it this way, not to mention the small matter of an Iraqi insurgency that's got us tied down right now

Second, as I mentioned, I suspect that close to exactly none of the jihadists he is using today were in Iraq before the war. He's got a recruiting challenge, but he's making it work. We read a lot about suicide bombers in Iraq. What is their origin? Are they Iraqi? No? Well, where are they coming from, then?

Third, - and May misses this completely - Zarqawi is targeting Iraqi security forces as a way of targeting the U.S., but I bet from his standpoint it will prove to be more effective, death for death. Target U.S. forces and we might lose our will and pull out. More likely we'll set our teeth. Target Iraqi forces, however, and a few things might happen:

a) The Iraqis are unable to stand up their own security forces, which in turn keeps us engaged longer, with bleeds us of spirit, blood, and treasure longer too. If he targets U.S. forces, it is a battle of attrition, which at this rate we can sustain. We have enough troops to stay the course, if by stay the course you mean continue to die in twos and threes. However, we're basing a lasting success on the establishment of security through the use of Iraqi security forces. If Zarqawi targets Iraqi forces, we are unable to establish the level of security the new regime will require to take root and grown. As May quotes Zarqawi: "[Americans] are an easy quarry, praise be to God. We ask God to enable us to kill and capture them, to sow panic among those behind them.” Right. Well it certainly appears we're in the wish fulfillment role here. Keep us around by keeping the Iraqis off balance and you can keep attriting us - and by happy coincidence, allow the Iraqi insurgents to attrit us as well.

Meanwhile, the absence of security preserves Zarqawi's freedom of action, both within the Iraq area of operations, and in terms of any other global endeavor he might be contemplating (which I personally think is more based on wish than on capability, but that's for another post).

b) The Iraqis might just be the ones who lose their will and link the killing of their people by jihadists to the presence of Americans. To make the killing stop, they may well draw the conclusion that the U.S. needs to get out, ready or not. Or

c) With the Iraqi regime unable to provide security, normal everyday Iraqis who had not been initially motivated to pick up arms may see joining the Iraqi insurgency as a viable option.

Anthony! Please!

Just a moment while I mop up the coffee I've spewed across my desk.

I've never met Anthony in person, but on the strength of his writings I consider him one of the keenest minds and most informed people with whom I correspond. I regret that I'm unable to keep pace with his blogging.

I've never met Clifford May, either, but on the strength of his writing, I generally consider him a dolt. With a capitol D. Just so that's clear.

And so it surprises me that Anthony would let something as ridiculus as this Clifford May statement slide:

Indeed, defeat in Iraq would be much costlier than was America's retreat in Vietnam. Ho Chi Min never sent agents to hijack planes and slam them into American office buildings.

Yeah? Well, neither did Iraq.

But this is not really about Anthony's post, which is as high quality as ever. It just tripped a reflexive response in me. Let's just resolve to never let something as that stupid slide by, even if you're going on to make another, more important point.

Maybe I'm being oversensitive here, but when you see something like that linking Iraq and 9/11, I've gotta slap it down. Saddam, depending on which account you believe, managed to squirrel away something like $21 +/- Billion-with-a-b from the UN Oil-for-Food program and he wasn't even able to buy a freakin' clue. Not one clue. $21B of unreported, untraceable cash, and his desire for WMD never advanced beyond a couple of "weapons-related-programs" haflheartedly pursued in a couple of basements. Oh sure, he intended to make WMD just as soon as the sanctions were over, and just as soon as he could finish the last chapter in his romance novel... Honestly, it's not like those sanctions were keeping him from buy the illegal stuff he needed anyway. Don't get me started.

But on to May. As I mentioned before, Tony Cordesman points out (pdf file) that only about 5% of the enemy in Iraq are foreign jihadists. These people have been recruited to take advantage of the huge target of opportunity we have presented them. Do you really think the rest of the 95% of the enemy, the Iraqis we're fighting in Mosul, Fallujah, Samarrah . Tikrit, Baghdad etc etc etc was coming to get us? Uh, sorry but no. Those Iraqis who might have had such a desire were pretty much included in that deck of cards of the most wanted, and we've done a pretty good job at scooping those guys up.

If, as some would have you believe, the Iraqi fighters are a finite number of die-hard Baathist regime holdovers, then what explains this:

The number of attacks on U.S. and allied troops grew from an estimated 1,400 attacks in September to 1,600 in October and 1,950 in November. A year earlier, the attacks numbered 649 in September, 896 in October and 864 in November.

How do attacks increase like that if there is not an increase in attackers? And how is there an increase in attackers if the enemy is a finite number of Baathists whom we're killing by the truckload?

Anyway, it's not to say that 5% are not effective - certainly the attack on the Dining Tent in Mosul and recent targeting of Iraqi security forces are prime examples - but these people traveled to Iraq to take advantage of the situation we've created.

And while I'm on this subject, why is the absence of major attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11 presented as evidence that President Bush's campaign against terror is working? I mean, by that metric, the Clinton administration was twice as effective, even though their counter-terror policy was either minimal or counterproductive, depending upon your source. And don't tell me yes, but the attack on the USS Cole or the U.S. Embassies yadda yadda yadda. Roger - got it. But those were done by regional cells the likes of whom are now furnishing recruits for Zarqawi in Iraq. Maybe it is easier to kill them in Iraq that to hunt them all over the globe. The problem is, we've brought them to Iraq to have this battle and they're killing Iraqis by the busload in the meantime.