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Old Jan 13th, 2007, 12:27 AM        \\\VDH///
January 12, 2007
The Surge Gamble
All eyes now turn to Baghdad and Sadr City.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

This was not Churchill, not FDR, and not JFK Wednesday night, and there was not quite enough about winning and victory — but the content was still good enough.

Many of us were skeptical of a surge/bump/increase for an obvious reason: Our military problems in Iraq have been tactical and strategic (too-slow training too few Iraqis, arrest/release of terrorists, too many targets off limits, patrolling in lieu of attacking, worry over our own force protection rather than securing the safety of Iraqi citizens, open borders with Syria and Iran, etc.) — and not a shortage of manpower.

So the increase — no one knows whether the 20,000 number is adequate — could make things far worse by offering more targets and creating more Iraqi dependency if we don’t change our operations. But if the surge ups the ante by bringing a radical new approach on the battlefield as the president promises, then it is worth his gamble.

All the requisite points were made by the president, almost as if were quoting verbatim Gen. David Petraeus’s insightful summaries of counterinsurgency warfare — an Iraqi face on operations, economic stimuli, clear mission of clearing terrorists out of Baghdad, political reform, a “green-light” to go after killers — while addressing the necessary regional concerns with Syria and Iran.

Will these “benchmarks” work? Only if the Maliki government is honest when he promises that there will be no sanctuaries for the militias and terrorists. So when the killing of terrorists causes hysteria — and it will, both in Iraq and back here at home — the Iraqi-American units must escalate their operations rather than stand down.

The American people will support success and an effort to win, whatever the risks, but not stasis. We saw that with the silent approval of Ethiopia’s brutal rout of the Islamists in Somalia, and our own attack on al Qaeda there.

The subtext of the president’s speech was that our sacrifices to offer freedom and constitutional government are the only solution for the Middle East — but that our commitments are not open-ended if the Iraqis themselves don’t want success as much as we do.

But why believe that this latest gamble will work? First, things are by agreement coming to a head: this new strategy will work, or, given the current politics, nothing will. Second, the Iraqis in government know this time Sadr City and Baghdad are to be secured, or it is to be “see ya, wouldn’t want to be ya,” and they will be on planes to Dearborn. Finally, note the pathetic Democratic reply by Sen. Durbin, last in the public eye for his libel of American troops (as analogous to “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others”). There was no response.

Durbin simply assumed credit for the Bush policy of deposing Saddam, fostering democracy, and then blamed the Iraqis and said enough was enough. Not a word followed about the effects of a rapid withdrawal. In other words, the Democratic policy is that anything good in Iraq they supported, anything bad they opposed. And they will now harp yet do nothing — except whine in fear the surge might actually work.

So where does that leave us? All eyes now turn to Baghdad and Sadr City and our courageous Americans fighting in them. If they are allowed to rout the terrorists, all will trumpet their victory; if we fail, President Bush alone will take the blame.

In other words, as in all wars, the pulse of the battlefield will determine the ensuing politics. So let’s win in pursuit of victory, and everything else will sort itself out.

©2007 Victor Davis Hanson



That was the shortest thing I've ever seen him write.
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mburbank~ Yes, okay, fine, I do know what you meant, but why is it not possible for you to get through a paragraph without making all the words cry?

How can someone who obviously thinks so much of their ideas have so little respect for expressing them? How can someone who so yearns to be taken seriously make so little effort?!
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Old Jan 13th, 2007, 12:37 AM       
I used my speed reading to read and disregard this :/
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Old Jan 13th, 2007, 12:38 AM       
Welcome to Canada
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mburbank~ Yes, okay, fine, I do know what you meant, but why is it not possible for you to get through a paragraph without making all the words cry?

How can someone who obviously thinks so much of their ideas have so little respect for expressing them? How can someone who so yearns to be taken seriously make so little effort?!
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FartinMowler FartinMowler is offline
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Old Jan 13th, 2007, 12:42 AM       
We are the most empathetic nation on the planet, not a bunch of rubes.
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Old Jan 13th, 2007, 12:43 AM       
Sure you are.
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mburbank~ Yes, okay, fine, I do know what you meant, but why is it not possible for you to get through a paragraph without making all the words cry?

How can someone who obviously thinks so much of their ideas have so little respect for expressing them? How can someone who so yearns to be taken seriously make so little effort?!
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Old Jan 15th, 2007, 03:59 PM       
I hate doing point by point rebuttals of opinion pieces, (too many unqualified assertions and red herrings) but I'm gonna do it anyway:

"Many of us were skeptical of a surge/bump/increase for an obvious reason: Our military problems in Iraq have been tactical and strategic (too-slow training too few Iraqis, arrest/release of terrorists, too many targets off limits, patrolling in lieu of attacking, worry over our own force protection rather than securing the safety of Iraqi citizens, open borders with Syria and Iran, etc.) — and not a shortage of manpower. "

Most of these "tactical" and "strategic" military problems aren't such at all. Even if we could train a a whole nation of Iraqi young men in four weeks, it wouldn't keep them from maintaining whatever factional loyalty they have (fleeing combat, abrubtly switching sides mid-battle, demanding the release of insurgents from their chosen faction because US troops got "the wrong guys"). As for targets being "off limits," how is that anything other than a political problem stemming in part from a carte blanche policy towards the Iraqi government by the Bush admin.? "Patrolling in lieu of attacking"? Attacking what? The big building with the sign reading "Insurgents." Our intelligence gathering or our propaganda needs to be enhanced before we can start sending in those Bob Kerrey quiet guys who got 1500s on their SAT's and 0 on their personality tests to start kicking down doors and wasting motherfuckers. As for force protection, yeah, I'll give him that one, but if inevitable public backlash or costs doomed this war from the start where the fuck was VDH? Finally, Iran and Syria. I'm sure there's been an infusion of manpower and material from those countries, but Iraq already had all that, the hate and the guns, left over from the now-defunct fourth-largest military in the world.

"So the increase — no one knows whether the 20,000 number is adequate — could make things far worse by offering more targets and creating more Iraqi dependency if we don’t change our operations. But if the surge ups the ante by bringing a radical new approach on the battlefield as the president promises, then it is worth his gamble. "

I'm one of those people who is actually more conservative when I'm gambling with someone else's money, but that's just me.

"All the requisite points were made by the president, almost as if were quoting verbatim Gen. David Petraeus’s insightful summaries of counterinsurgency warfare — an Iraqi face on operations, economic stimuli, clear mission of clearing terrorists out of Baghdad, political reform, a “green-light” to go after killers — while addressing the necessary regional concerns with Syria and Iran. "

Like the last paragraph, not too much substance to address here.

"Will these “benchmarks” work? Only if the Maliki government is honest when he promises that there will be no sanctuaries for the militias and terrorists. So when the killing of terrorists causes hysteria — and it will, both in Iraq and back here at home — the Iraqi-American units must escalate their operations rather than stand down. "

Benchmarks are what you're supposed to arrive at when what you're doing is working.

"The American people will support success and an effort to win, whatever the risks, but not stasis. We saw that with the silent approval of Ethiopia’s brutal rout of the Islamists in Somalia, and our own attack on al Qaeda there.

The subtext of the president’s speech was that our sacrifices to offer freedom and constitutional government are the only solution for the Middle East — but that our commitments are not open-ended if the Iraqis themselves don’t want success as much as we do."

Here he threatens the once-treasonous act of "cutting and running." Is he suggesting that the only effective stick we have to use against the Iraqi government is threatening withdrawal from the country?

"But why believe that this latest gamble will work? First, things are by agreement coming to a head: this new strategy will work, or, given the current politics, nothing will. Second, the Iraqis in government know this time Sadr City and Baghdad are to be secured, or it is to be “see ya, wouldn’t want to be ya,” and they will be on planes to Dearborn. Finally, note the pathetic Democratic reply by Sen. Durbin, last in the public eye for his libel of American troops (as analogous to “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others”). There was no response."

Yes, yes he is. Stunning.

This is probably the dumbest paragraph. Apperently he gives even less of a shit than he let on earlier in the piece whether this makes everything worse.

If the Iraqi government gets it's way, most of the operations will be against Sunnis. They will be weakened against the Shiites who terrorize them and attempt to drive them out of their neighborhoods, and will turn ever more to al-Qaeda.

I'd really rather now just post my own thoughts on this shit. If VDH can do it, why can't I?

Saddam deployed the army to get these same factions under control, the Stalinist aspects of the state were almost all linked to the use of the army as a giant military intelligence unit on Iraqs own population. An ordinary western style army, with a small cutting edge combat force and a giant support trail on it doesn't even remotely come close to intersecting with the police and human intelligence bits that seem to be needed of an army tasked to keeping a lid on Iraq.

It's not only that peacekeeping training is no longer the focus the way it was for dealing with other theatres, the army arrived, then deployed itself for force protection and concentration and left the rest to fuck off and die. The US army has a different idea of what risk is and how best to avoid it than many others and particularly the British army. Walking around in the open and treating each attack as an individual case needing witness reports and an investigation (something they have recently started to do for US casualty cases) exposes the troops to danger in one way, but is generally more effective at eliminating single operators behind many attacks - that kind of attitude to things. Setting off this death blossom of rifle fire, killing everything that runs and hoping they get lucky (and adding the dead up as likely insurgents) was always a completely fucking ridiculous way of dealing with this, it produces the same reaction as excessive police shootings as it does anywhere else. Riots first, and if the response is kept solely to broken bones and live fire a genuine insurgency will typically emerge out of that. Saddam turned his army into the russian model political/military intelligence machine to deal with it. The US has had, well, no approach, very little none at all til recently other than self defense and bullshit PR exercises. This approach may have simply been used too long for any new decisions to be made in the minds of Iraqis about the role of the US in their country.

Unfortunately, the last decision most of them made was that the US has little positive role to play and that it does little to intervene for their protection. The raw total percentage rate of support for US presense is misleading in one way, in that everywhere they are deployed in strength they are rated poorly - not at the nearly evenly split of the whole country, but by 60 plus and over percent negative. That is not good if you are going to try and sell these people an idea of a national direction and policy using the army as the salesman, noone is going to want to buy, and, well, they haven't been, they've instead reverted to people like themselves who they trust, all of whom have quite different ideas on what is to be done. Once you have ten thousand guys with hundreds of thousands to millions citizens behind them per side, with a couple of dozen splits between them, you are getting beyond the point at which this can be tracked without reverting to ye olde fasioned police state, or turning the american armed forces into the military intelligence beast that seems to inevitably come out of very dirty occupations. If you suddenly were able to magically transport every actual real live trained cop in the US to iraq and somehow brainwash them into wanting to stay it might not even be enough to deal with the kinds of numbers of trained operatives now running around and killing each other.

Personally I think the war was lost by mid 2003, past that it was only going to go one way, a bunch of dummies had set the whole thing up so that as many different parts of the system would poke as many people in the eye as possible, as often as possible, and got rid of anyone with the temerity to suggest doing things differently. This was then all left to rust and the problems were denied and and passed on for a very long time. We are now at the point with this Rube Goldberg machine of stupid where everyone subjected to it has tetanus and severed limbs and is really pissed off at the designer. I don't think there's much useful to be done at this point, at least directly. Getting a couple of internal and external iraqi proxies up to act in the US's interests is about as much as can be usefully done now, and you don't need the whole fucking foot part of the military there for that. Leaving would be bad, though, huh?

Is victory going to look like half the country in refugee camps and the other half dead or deported?
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Old Jan 15th, 2007, 10:14 PM       
Alright... You've got a lot of stuff here, and I understand what it takes to put out a large and thoughtful post regarding a topic you have very strong feelings about, so I'm not going to pick it apart piece by piece, mostly because I'd like you to keep up the good work.

I think this needs a good, healthy debate. I sure as hell don't want to attack you and discourage that...

In that light, I'm not going to respond at all to your rebuttal of the article itself, and I'll only pick out certain bits of your own opinion to comment upon or question...

Quote:
Originally Posted by derrida
Saddam deployed the army to get these same factions under control, the Stalinist aspects of the state were almost all linked to the use of the army as a giant military intelligence unit on Iraqs own population.
I will comment that this is not necessarily the style of a Communist regime as much as it is the style of any authoritarian or dictatorial regime. The origins of this argument, with regard to our situation in Iraq, finds it's roots in the (what I consider to be) somewhat racist theory that Arabs require rule by force to be kept in line. I reject that entirely, though I understand the underlying sentiment as it can be described to be something along the lines of: They have been oppressed for so long that they can't be expected to switch over to Western style Democracy overnight...

Previously, I have used the analogy of the battered spouse to describe Iraq, and I've come to like it. Think of the relationship between a citizenry and it's government as a marriage. It's certainly a relationship of a very intimate nature, right? The marriage between Iraq and Saddam Hussein has finally ended, and Iraq has found a new suitor... a proper gentleman, in fact... but one could hardly expect that Iraq is adequately prepared to transition right into this new relationship, one based on modern, liberal principles, without a few hiccups, right?

I am not trying to diminish the very real loss of life and human suffering involved here, though I think it's very important to understand the importance of this stage of the process. Were Iraq your new fiancée, you would gladly pay for the therapy... in this case intensive... required to prepare her for the wonderful life you plan to give her.

Given her history of abuse, she is totally not prepared.

Quote:
Originally Posted by derrida
An ordinary western style army, with a small cutting edge combat force and a giant support trail on it doesn't even remotely come close to intersecting with the police and human intelligence bits that seem to be needed of an army tasked to keeping a lid on Iraq.
Actually, our typical military up until this point has been oriented toward confrontation with some sort of equivalent force, not what we face in the War on Terror. You are close to describing what we are headed toward, but imagine the Navy and Air Force constituting just a quarter of our total military power, still fulfilling the role of indisputably the world's most unstoppable force, and the Army and the Marines bulked up into what you could get away with calling a nation-building and police force the likes of which the world has never seen. The SysAdmin force that transitions a failed state into something more integrated into where the rest of the world is going.

That is where this is headed. There will be bleed-through and mission-creep, and the latter force will need the support of other modern nations, but this is the eventual goal of what they call "transformation."

Quote:
Originally Posted by derrida
It's not only that peacekeeping training is no longer the focus the way it was for dealing with other theatres, the army arrived, then deployed itself for force protection and concentration and left the rest to fuck off and die.
That is a sentence fragment.

I will say, though, that "peacekeeping training" hasn't really ever been the focus of the American military...

Quote:
Originally Posted by derrida
The US army has a different idea of what risk is and how best to avoid it than many others and particularly the British army. Walking around in the open and treating each attack as an individual case needing witness reports and an investigation (something they have recently started to do for US casualty cases) exposes the troops to danger in one way, but is generally more effective at eliminating single operators behind many attacks - that kind of attitude to things.
That sounds like a kind of description of the second force of our soon-to-be military force. Yes, this is the kind of plan that will be most effective at maintaining order and security in a newly freed nation.

Quote:
Originally Posted by derrida
Setting off this death blossom of rifle fire, killing everything that runs and hoping they get lucky (and adding the dead up as likely insurgents) was always a completely fucking ridiculous way of dealing with this, it produces the same reaction as excessive police shootings as it does anywhere else.
Enter the "Leviathan" force: Massive bombings and Special Operations. This is cutting the head off the snake. True, without a second, larger, kindler and gentler force, it seems a bit counter-productive and excessive...

Another goal of transformation is to draw the line decisively between these two missions and to learn to use them appropriately. You don't seem to be doing that very well... Try.

Quote:
Originally Posted by derrida
Riots first, and if the response is kept solely to broken bones and live fire a genuine insurgency will typically emerge out of that. Saddam turned his army into the russian model political/military intelligence machine to deal with it. The US has had, well, no approach, very little none at all til recently other than self defense and bullshit PR exercises. This approach may have simply been used too long for any new decisions to be made in the minds of Iraqis about the role of the US in their country.
Again, try to view what's happening in the light of what might not be entirely insane and indefensible. Do you really think the men and women we have working as soldiers over there would be so committed to their missions were their jobs as ill-defined as you are presenting them?

Quote:
Originally Posted by derrida
Unfortunately, the last decision most of them made was that the US has little positive role to play and that it does little to intervene for their protection. The raw total percentage rate of support for US presense is misleading in one way, in that everywhere they are deployed in strength they are rated poorly - not at the nearly evenly split of the whole country, but by 60 plus and over percent negative.
Ok... consider for a moment that the places our forces are deployed in force are the places that dislike what we are trying to accomplish the most. How is that misleading again? What we are trying to do is provide the security and stability required for Democracy, Liberalism and Pluralism to grow into a state that can attract enough Foreign Direct Investment that it can blossom into a place where unemployment and income numbers start to approach those of Brasil, Malaysia or China. Please, consider for a moment the intentions of those that would oppose that.

Quote:
Originally Posted by derrida
That is not good if you are going to try and sell these people an idea of a national direction and policy using the army as the salesman, noone is going to want to buy, and, well, they haven't been, they've instead reverted to people like themselves who they trust, all of whom have quite different ideas on what is to be done. Once you have ten thousand guys with hundreds of thousands to millions citizens behind them per side, with a couple of dozen splits between them, you are getting beyond the point at which this can be tracked without reverting to ye olde fasioned police state, or turning the american armed forces into the military intelligence beast that seems to inevitably come out of very dirty occupations. If you suddenly were able to magically transport every actual real live trained cop in the US to iraq and somehow brainwash them into wanting to stay it might not even be enough to deal with the kinds of numbers of trained operatives now running around and killing each other.
Ok, Mr. Negative.

I hope I've already addressed all that.

Quote:
Originally Posted by derrida
Personally I think the war was lost by mid 2003, past that it was only going to go one way, a bunch of dummies had set the whole thing up so that as many different parts of the system would poke as many people in the eye as possible, as often as possible, and got rid of anyone with the temerity to suggest doing things differently. This was then all left to rust and the problems were denied and and passed on for a very long time. We are now at the point with this Rube Goldberg machine of stupid where everyone subjected to it has tetanus and severed limbs and is really pissed off at the designer. I don't think there's much useful to be done at this point, at least directly. Getting a couple of internal and external iraqi proxies up to act in the US's interests is about as much as can be usefully done now, and you don't need the whole fucking foot part of the military there for that. Leaving would be bad, though, huh?

Is victory going to look like half the country in refugee camps and the other half dead or deported?
No, victory is when we can leave without Iraq, a country whose citizens have just begun to vote that they want something more like what we, Europe and Japan have, falling apart completely.

Care to suggest how else we might achieve that?
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mburbank~ Yes, okay, fine, I do know what you meant, but why is it not possible for you to get through a paragraph without making all the words cry?

How can someone who obviously thinks so much of their ideas have so little respect for expressing them? How can someone who so yearns to be taken seriously make so little effort?!
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