Obama Does Understand War, Which is Perhaps Why He is Vilified by Warmongers

Eliot Cohen whines in the Washington Post,

Abraham Lincoln hated war as much as Barack Obama does. He saw so much more of it firsthand, lost friends in it and waged it on an immensely vaster scale than Obama has. And yet, almost exactly 150 years ago (Aug. 17, 1864, to be precise), he wrote this to the squat, stolid general besieging the town of Petersburg, south of Richmond: “I have seen your dispatch expressing your unwillingness to break your hold where you are. Neither am I willing. Hold on with a bull-dog gripe, and chew & choke, as much as possible.” And so Ulysses S. Grant persevered.

Therein lies the difference between Lincoln and Obama, which explains much of the wreckage that is U.S. foreign policy in Gaza and elsewhere today. Lincoln accepted war for what it is; Obama does not. The Gaza war is a humanitarian tragedy for Palestinian civilians caught in the crossfire. It is also a barbaric conflict, as leaders of Hamas hide their fighters behind children while baiting their enemy to kill innocents. But first and foremost, it is a war, a mortal contest of wills between two governments and two societies.

In his eager regurgitation of propaganda against the Palestinian people, Cohen tells us more about himself than about the President. Hamas is vile enough without the endless justifications of the killing of Palestinian civilians, especially children. Perhaps that's Cohen's primary objection -- that people are looking at the morality and proportionality of the conflict, rather than buying into the "Anything goes" attitude that he would have us ascribe to Lincoln.

For all of his warmongering, Cohen can't bring himself to explain why the President is wrong, or what he should have done differently -- other than, perhaps, endorsing "more war" as a one-size-fits-all solution to world crises. Cohen complains that the President doesn't give rousing speeches that cause the nation to rally behind wars in nations like Iraq and Afghanistan, or to rally behind new wars in nations like Syria and Libya, never mind that the reason that the public doesn't presently rally behind wars is the pathetic incompetence of the administration he served. Cohen has conveniently forgotten that the President ran in part on an anti-war platform, his rejection of Bush's war of choice in Iraq, and that since McCain's defeat the nation at large has consistently rejected those who favor Cohen's views. Let the next Republican presidential candidate run on a promise of more and larger wars, regardless of their impact on the U.S. economy and let's see how far he gets.

The President is palpably smarter and more thoughtful than Cohen, which could explain part of the difference, but I suspect that the larger conflict is in fact that the President prefers to prevent or end wars, while Cohen is happy to play the role of the useful idiot.

Is it Really Hamid Karzai Who is Confused?

Stephen Biddle and Michael O'Hanlon opine,

For most Americans, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s words and actions are difficult to understand and hard to accept. He often seems ungrateful for the efforts of U.S. troops, cavalier in his ideas of how to change the Afghan-NATO military campaign and irresolute in his commitment to the war effort. He has suggested that our troops stay out of Afghan villages even before Afghan forces are ready to handle security there. He has chastised NATO soldiers for occasional, and clearly unintentional, mistakes that led to civilian casualties. He has withheld a promise to give our troops legal immunity if they stay in his country beyond 2014. He has even equated the U.S. role in prolonging the war with that of the Taliban.

We are among those who wish Karzai would stop this behavior.

So far, nothing to explain Karzai's behavior, just a wish that it will stop. Insert obligatory 'wish' clip here:

Come on. It's not like Karzai's the new kid in town. He was selected to govern Afghanistan more than a decade ago. His predilections are well known and, at this point, even predictable. The authors explain,

Karzai is not, as some have claimed, crazy or a fool. He is confused.

Seriously, he was selected by the U.S. and put in charge of Afghanistan back in 2001. He's been presiding over as much of his country as the U.S. can control for more than a decade, he has access to local Afghans, the military, the CIA, U.S. political leaders, and... he's confused? If that's true, then he is fairly characterized as a fool. If he's no fool, it stands to reason that the people who are confounded by his actions are the ones best characterized as confused.

In his view, the world’s only superpower is surely able to defeat a ragtag force of Taliban guerrillas — if it really wanted to. In his view, the United States could surely force Pakistan to stop harboring Afghan Taliban insurgents — if it really wanted to. Yet Washington does neither. On the contrary, Karzai watches Americans look the other way while their logistical contracts are siphoned off to support the Taliban (albeit less so lately), and he sees Americans give billions of dollars in aid each year to their ostensible Pakistani tormentors. Karzai concludes that there must be some hidden reason for the apparent contradictions.

We could start by traveling back in time to 2002 or so, when people like Michael O'Hanlon were cautioning us that an invasion and occupation of Iraq would require a massive military force and many years to complete, then proceeded to cheerlead for military intervention. Somebody in the position of Hamid Karzai might look at the shift of attention and military resources from Afghanistan, the Taliban and the ungoverned regions of Pakistan, as evidence that the U.S. could have done more for Afghanistan and its immediate region but chose other priorities. The authors admit as much in their essay - while conveniently neglecting to mention O'Hanlon's own support for the Iraq war.

A president of a nation like Afghanistan might consider, "What happened to the last president of this nation, put in place by a foreign power, after that power's priorities changed," and be a bit... nervous. Particularly if he considers that during the last years of that president's rule, after withdrawal of the foreign power, the western world looked on and speculated, "How long can the Soviet puppet government last," with it eventually collapsing and being replaced by the Taliban, in early 2001 received significant U.S. financial support based upon their being anti-drug.

The message to Karzai, or anybody else in his position, is that they can only count on the U.S. to serve its own interests, and that once the U.S. withdraws they have to choose between staying in the country and trying to govern based upon their own political and military power, or getting out before another collapse. A lot of people in Karzai's administration seem focused on the latter approach - skim and loot as much money as possible, stash it overseas, and prepare for a very comfortable "life in exile". But if you give Karzai the benefit of the doubt, he is not so much trying to undermine the U.S. as he is trying to position himself to survive and govern once the U.S. withdraws - so again, if we're assuming Karzai is no fool, while we might prefer that he not engage in acts of self-preservation that conflict with U.S. goals for the region, and while we may prefer that he find other ways to prepare for the future, we should not find his actions to be confusing.

The authors concede that many of Karzai's "apparent contradictions are unintended byproducts of U.S. efforts to craft a nuanced policy". That is, a balance between the "limited" security interests of the U.S. in Afghanistan, vs. concerns about al-Qaeda. The authors don't mention that a stable Pakistan is considerably more important to the U.S. than a stable Afghanistan. By this point the authors are contradicting their earlier insinuation, that Karzai is inferring "hidden reason for the apparent contradictions" in U.S. policy, and are effectively admitting that the U.S. could do more to defeat Afghan guerrillas or to pressure Pakistan (or act unilaterally) to strike Taliban forces on the other side of the Pakistani border, but that the U.S. has other priorities.

In the author's words, Karzai "frequently elevate his domestic political interests above the needs of his alliance with the United States or of the war effort." That's not "confusion" - that's grasping the reality of the situation. To the extent that the authors are correct, that Karzai displays a level of emotional instability that is not helpful, it's reasonable to respond that his personality is no secret. Whether is outbursts are genuine or calculated, it's reasonable to infer that he does enough to advance U.S. interests to remain in power. The fact that he's engaging in actions that frustrate O'Hanlon and Biddle suggests that he wants to maintain that hold on power, rather than hopping onto the last helicopter out of Kabul when U.S. forces finally depart. Frankly, if you're concerned about the future of Afghanistan, you should be more concerned about a president who always bends to the will of the U.S., as odds are he's planning a future in exile and... if he's not, odds are you'll be dealing with his successor a very short time after U.S. forces withdraw.

The Republican Party Can No Longer Blame Bush

Okay, I'm really turning that line back on the political right, specifically those factions that have tried to turn the War in Afghanistan into "Obama's War" and the slow economic recovery resulting from the Bush-era economic collapse into "Obama's economy". No doubt, memories of Bush did play a role in holding some voters in the Democratic column where they might otherwise have supported a Republican contender.

Nonetheless, when I read something like this, I think it's fair to say that it was the Republican Party that lost this election, not Bush. It is fair to say that Bush caused damage and that the Republican Party has not recovered from that damage, but I don't think that damage rises to the level that it either cost the party this election or, with more responsible leadership, would have remained a significant issue four years out.

But in reality the more pressing problem is that Republicans are still a party badly damaged by the George W. Bush years. The GOP has traditionally held huge advantages on foreign policy and the economy. That advantage is gone now. And Mitt Romney was the wrong candidate to give the party a refresh on those issues, particularly when the gettable voters were downscale whites. It isn’t that Republicans aren’t reaching enough voters; voters simply don’t believe the GOP is competent to govern.

The Republican Party has long held undeserved advantages on... I think it's more fair to call it "the military" as opposed to foreign policy, and on the economy. Past Republican Presidents did a good job portraying the Democratic Party as "tax and spend", while running up record deficits. They did a good job portraying the Democratic Party as "weak", while committing the U.S. to foreign military escapades that were of questionable value to national security, with sometimes disastrous results. Bush didn't depart from that formula - he simply kicked it up a notch.

But that's still not why the Republican Party lost. The Republican Party lost because it chose to nominate Mitt Romney. I'm certainly not convinced that any of the other declared candidates would have won, at least once the few who displayed any signs of "paleoconservatism" were drummed out of the pool, but let's recall a few things: Bush dreamed of an ethnically inclusive Republican Party. When he ran for office he favored immigration reform, albeit of a somewhat watered down nature. Senator John McCain was a champion of the DREAM Act. John McCain responded to anti-immigrant sentiments in his party by abandoning any support for immigration reform. Mitt Romney predictably tried to come down on multiple sides of the issue, but was not credible. And the Republican Party lost votes as a result - vote losses that cannot be blamed on Bush.

You want a party that is credible on foreign / military policy? Even though he chose to endorse President Obama, Colin Powell is still a Republican. No, I'm not saying run Powell, and I'm well aware of the positions taken by his critics, but I am saying that there are Republicans that continue to have credibility with the public. It was not the Democratic Party that chose to marginalize that faction of the Republican Party.

Obama did not really propose anything new on the economy or foreign policy fronts, but he did make contraception, rape, and Roe v. Wade a large part of this campaign. He constantly portrayed Romney as a man with “the social policies of the 1950s.” Apparently this worked.

I'm sure it played a role in President Obama's advantage among women, but again that's not something you can pin on Bush. G.W. ran as an unapologetically pro-life candidate, and implemented a lot of policies that made the pro-choice crowd angry, but he knew where to draw the line. He didn't come across as the type who wanted to ban contraception or who would make crackpot statements on sexual assault, and I don't think he would have left any ambiguity about where he stood on those issues. Romney tried to dance around the issues, and I doubt that anybody was left satisfied - the social conservatives he was attempting to appease, or the women who questioned whether he would stand up even for their right to access contraception.

The "back to the 1950's" issues, let's recall, arose in no small part from the statements of Tea Party candidates. In many ways the Tea Party is a reinvention of a certain bloc of Republican voters, but it was the Republican establishment and right-wing media that chose to amplify their voice and power. That helped the Republicans gain seats in 2010, but appears to have contributed to their loss in 2012. It definitely contributed to some of the Democratic victories in the Senate.

So let's say this: Right now it is fair to say that the economy is struggling back from collapse, and that the present economic conditions are in significant part an echo of the Bush Administration's mistakes, but that it would have been at least theoretically possible to have a more robust recovery had the President advanced (and if the Republicans would have allowed) certain recovery measures that were not tried, or were not strengthened when they proved inadequate. Right now it is fair to say that the echo of G.W. Bush played a role in why the public is suspicious of the Republican Party on foreign / military policy and economic issues, and probably contributed to the line-up of candidates from which Mitt Romney was deemed "the most electable".

But from this point forward, it's ownership time. It's Obama's job to keep the nation on a path to recovery. It's the Republican Party's job to find a candidate who is credible on foreign policy and economic issues. (As was obvious some months ago, Jeb Bush was already seeing the handwriting on the wall and has long been positioning himself to be that candidate four years from now.) Acknowledge his actual contribution if appropriate, but from this point forward the only politician who is entitled to say "It's G.W.'s fault" is Jeb, if he cannot get his own quest to be President back on track.

In Other Words, Obama's Advisors Weren't Roger Cohen?

Roger Cohen usually writes better stuff than this. After acknowledging that President Obama has accomplished quite a lot, despite Republican obstruction, Cohen rattles off a list of issues in which he had hoped the Obama Administration would have taken different action, or in which he disapproves of its initial approach, and complains:

There is only one star in the galaxy at this White House and his name is Barack Obama. Everyone in the Sun King’s court has drunk the Kool-Aid.

The failure of hope, the absence of profound change, has much to do with the Republican obstructionism that has helped keep unemployment above 8 percent. But it is also related to Obama’s refusal to entertain a real team of rivals, to place around him big characters with big ideas who would challenge his instinct for cautious politics and foreign policy. And so a transformative election failed to produce a transformative president.

Cohen complains that he cannot think of an individual on Obama's team that compares to Nixon/Kissinger, Carter/Brzezinski, Reagan/Schultz, or George H. W. Bush/Baker. I think that Cohen only mentions Secretaries of State, along with Cohen's list of complaints, betrays the real issue - Cohen wishes that the Obama administration had taken a different or more forceful tack on certain foreign policy issues. Worse, Cohen argues that Obama did pick somebody who could have replicated that dynamic, but that although "a superb secretary of state" she chose to acquiesce to the White House "for various reasons (her future is very much ahead of her)" - the "various reasons" apparently being Cohen's belief that acquiescence better serves Clinton's future plans.

In short, Cohen's big complaint is that Obama picked a "superb" candidate who, for all he knows, confronts and challenges the President behind-the-scenes, but that he did not fire her for having a lower public profile than, say, Kissinger or Baker, or for taking their disagreements public? More than that, what does Cohen believe would have been accomplished by more public debate, discord or disagreement between Obama and Clinton?

Further, although Cohen gives no credit to Bush, most of the foreign policy issues of which he complains have existed during each of the administrations he mentions. When he complains in relation to Iran of "tired old carrots and sticks", he should stop to consider how the approach got "tired" - we have been at odds with Iran, after all, for decades. If Cohen recalls his history, our relationship with Iran was considerably more rocky under Carter/Brzezinski, when the Shah was toppled and the occupants of the U.S. embassy were taken hostage. Is Cohen joining the advocates for war on Iran, because if not rather than complaining he should be telling us what the Obama Administration could have done that would have fixed a problem that none of the aforementioned dynamic President/Secretary of State duos were able to resolve. Is he advocating a return to the "Nixon/Kissinger" approach of imposing and propping up leaders like the Shah?

Similarly, Cohen complains "half-steps on Israel and Palestine", as if the issue can be resolved in a vacuum. Were things better under "Nixon/Kissinger" when the occupation was permitted to continue indefinitely and the annexation of Palestinian lands began in earnest, or with Egypt's 1973 invasion of the Sinai? Even if that invasion led to the Camp David Accords and a cold peace between Egypt and Israel, did any of the policies of Carter/Brzezinski slow settlements or result in the creation of two states? How about Reagan/Schultz? Did the more aggressive polices of Bush/Baker result in the cessation of Israeli settlement of Palestinian lands? What about the efforts of President Clinton, who is not credited with a "dynamic duo" relationship? Good, bad or indifferent? And if you look at the real world and see Prime Minister Netanyahu in control of the Knesset, a man who has absolutely no interest in negotiating for peace, what is it that Cohen imagines that Obama could do - even if we ignore the fact that Cohen's "dynamic duo" presidencies often accomplished little to nothing, or moved the cause backward, under more favorable circumstances?

Cohen complains, that on "Egypt, [Obama] toyed with preserving Mubarak ad interim before the tide became irreversible." Mubarek became President of Egypt following the assassination of Anwar Sadat back in 1981. Thirty years in power, mostly under Cohen's "dyanmic duo" Presidents. Which of them "toyed" with the idea of removing Mubarek from power?

Cohen's lament continues, "On Syria, he has in essence dithered." As opposed to what? Invading? Seriously, for the complaint to be credible Cohen needs to identify both what a better approach should have been and why it should be better. It's easy to say that Obama has "dithered", but there are very good policy reasons for not increasing the U.S. role in the Syrian conflict. Using a loaded word like "dither" sheds no light on whether or not the Obama Administration is pursuing sound or unsound policy.

Finally, "On Afghanistan, domestic politics dictated the agenda, at a cost in American lives." That's a loaded, conclusory statement, not an argument. When you go to war, whatever your policy, there will be "a cost in American lives". The closest thing Cohen offers to a substantive point is the quote of a former State Department official who complains that the war in Afghanistan should be a "marathon" and not a "sprint" - which implies that Cohen would continue that war indefinitely. Does Cohen believe that an indefinite "marathon" of a war in Afghanistan would carry no "cost in American lives"? Frankly, the line is nothing but a cheap shot.

The most substantive argument Cohen offers is that "Marines will gather at Camp Lejeune, N.C., to receive the [Presidential Unit Citation (PUC)] award ... he should indeed present the award himself". A third of his column is in support of that argument, yet he can find no space to substantiate any of his foreign policy complaints.

There's apparently a possibility that hasn't occurred to Cohen - that the reason Obama and Hillary Clinton don't butt heads on the issues he lists is because, having carefully considered the facts and options, they agree that the present approach is best. No need for secret wars in Cambodia, no benefit in threatening Netanyahu with a loss of loan guarantees, no gain in invading Iran to deal with our disagreement with that nation's government, no need to fantasize that the indefinite occupation of Afghanistan comes at no cost in lives or treasure or will suddenly bring about an enlightened transformation of that nation....

That is, you don't need "Sun Kings" or "Kool-Aid" to recognize that Cohen doesn't necessarily have the better argument on these issues, nor should you overlook the fact that when given the opportunity to write a substantive criticism of the Obama Administration's policies he chose to forgo that approach in favor of a personal attack.

Why Aren't "They" Grateful?

What is new about the following: A powerful nation invades and occupies a weaker nation, imposes some form of western-style law and order, western-style governance, all at the point of a gun. Then when the occupied people act in a manner that suggests that they are not grateful for "everything we are doing for them", the people of the occupying nation respond with surprise. How can they not appreciate our lifting them out of their ignorance, constructing roads, giving them the opportunity to live lives more like ours?

But the fact is, even if this is correct, people don't like to be subject to foreign military occupation. The fact is that living under military occupation does not feel like living under enlightened governance - it feels like, you know, foreign military occupation. It may seem obvious to us that our intentions are good, that capitulation is the best option for the occupied people and their fastest path out of occupation, and that we are making an enormous sacrifice for the good of the occupied nation, but that's not how occupied people view occupation. Nor is it how our nation would view an occupation even if the occupying power credibly promised to end poverty, balance the budget, fix the roads, and put every American into a productive, well-paying job while cutting taxes for the rich. Because, you know, foreign, military, occupation. And if they said, "Trust us - as soon as we're done which, if you capitulate, shouldn't be more than a few years, we'll leave you with an indigenous, democratic government under a new and improved Constitution," what are the odds we would believe it?

Without arguing that the comparison is entirely fair, this essay reminded me of this poem.

The United States and its allies have given the Afghan people every chance they could possibly have wished for to step up and be part of the modern world. If [internecine] tribal warfare is more important to them than forming a nation, who are we to tell them it isn’t? If they prefer feudalism and local warlords to democratically elected leaders and the rule of law, who are we to tell them they have to act like us? If they would rather have their hoary superstitions and magic books instead of running water and [penicillin], who are we to force them to enter the modern world, kicking and screaming?

vs.

Take up the White Man's burden --
The savage wars of peace --
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Certainly it's not fair to suggest that the essay shares the same colonial mindset in which Kipling was immersed, or Kipling's projection of race onto a clash of cultures. But it's a similar reaction - why aren't they grateful? Why can't they see and appreciate everything we're trying to do for them? Why don't they realize that the violence of occupation is their collective doing, not ours, and that they will benefit from capitulation? But truly, would we act differently? One of those wacky aspects of human nature is that we seem to prefer, collectively, to suffer under domestic repression than to be "liberated" by a foreign occupying power. Once liberated, people want the liberator to leave. Although an occupation may be necessary to effect the liberator's goals, and may in some cases be objectively better than what came before or is likely to come after, occupation breeds bitter enemies.

When Israeli troops first invaded southern Lebanon in 1978 to drive out the PLO and create a "buffer zone" to prevent attacks on northern Israel, Shiites welcomed Israeli soldiers with rice and flowers. But that honeymoon did not last long, and Shiites were soon fighting the Israeli occupation. The Shiites turned out to be more formidable enemies of Israel than the PLO.

When we criticize or find incomprehensible the mores of an occupied nation, how far removed are we from similar conduct? How much different were the men of fifty years ago who saw it as a social good to lynch civil rights leaders, or boys who didn't show proper respect for white women? How much different are we from the German people, before or after the Nazi era, even if we fervently believe that something akin to happened in that dark period could never happen here? How long did it take us in the "global war on terror" to turn our collective backs on the concept that we are an enlightened society that adheres to the rule of law, that we treat our prisoners with respect, that we offer Due Process, that we disdain torture.... Why is it easy to believe that riots in response to the accidental burning of a holy book is evidence of depravity of an occupied nation, but so difficult to accept the possibility that the collective impact of occupation and the imposition of a corrupt, incompetent government, no matter how well-intentioned, have created a simmering resentment in which the burning of the holy book is more accurately seen as a proverbial "last straw"? Why is it that when occupation forces commit atrocities we can easily dismiss them as aberrational, while the actions of individuals within the occupied nation are often perceived as evidence of their collective depravity?

The idea of transforming Afghanistan - a tribal culture, proud of its long history of repelling and defeating invaders, with a population that is largely impoverished and poorly educated, with ethnic divisions that would make it difficult to form a universally accepted government in the best of times - should never have been perceived as something that would be either easy. As much as we might try local outreach, to try to explain our beneficence and good motives,

We came to install a democratic government and present the Afghan people with an opportunity to reconstruct civilization and re-enter the community of nations after decades of brutal internal conflict, Soviet invasion, and xenophobic theocracy.

To the Afghan man on the street, how different does the U.S. occupation look as compared to the Soviet occupation? How different does the Karzai government look as compared to the Najibullah government? To us the differences may be vast and obvious. To them? I'm thinking, not so much.

When we get into the realm of the transformation of culture - education that includes girls, allowing women to work, allowing women the choice of having their faces, even their hair, uncovered, hospitals that treat women alongside men, perhaps even allowing women to treat male patients.... It's easy for us to say that resistance to such progress is parochial and backward, but such clashes of culture can be the most obvious signs of foreign occupation and can overshadow less obvious signs, let alone the stuff that's simply not visible to the man on the street or simply not comprehensible to a village elder with a third grade education and strong religious beliefs that he feels are under active attack. Many of the things we have attempted in Afghanistan in the name of enlightened, progressive western thought are the same things that the Soviets attempted in the name of "godless communism".

Nation-building, to the extent that it has been tried, is largely oversold. If the occupied nation had the fundamental building blocks of a modern society prior to the occupation, some form of parliament, courts and a professional judiciary, a professional civil service, it stands a chance of emerging from occupation as a modern society. But the west's track record of transforming a society without that foundation into a functioning capitalist democracy through military occupation is abysmal. When you want to implement changes that require a generational shift in thinking, you should expect that your occupation will last for at least a couple of generations.

Things You Can't Say About Afghanistan

Tom Ricks offers a list of "19 true things generals can't say in public about the Afghan war".

Honestly, some of them are common sense - even if a general wants to make a political statement about a military venture, he shouldn't have reached that rank without internalizing the limits on what he can say while in uniform. If you want to become a critic of a war, retire first. Some of the points seem a bit tendentious - more an assertion of controversial opinion than statements of fact. But on the whole, despite so claims such as "the exit deadline is killing us", the overwhelming majority of the "truths" suggest that we aren't achieving our goals, that we don't know how to achieve our goals, even if we could articulate goals and ways to achieve them the goals would be arbitrary and we wouldn't have any meaningful way of measuring progress, and despite the sense that bad things might happen after we depart all we're doing by staying is forestalling the inevitable. Case in point:

We don't know why we are here, what we are fighting for, or how to know if we are winning.

I understand why generals (along with members of the military in general, and pretty much every person in the country) want to "win",¹ and that an updated version of "victory with honor" will still be chalked up as a loss in our column, but if a decade into the game the generals are as confused and conflicted as the list suggests it is difficult to view remaining in Afghanistan as an attempt to "win" as opposed to an unwillingness to face reality.
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1. Excessive scare quotes, perhaps, but the concepts of what constitutes "truth" and what it would mean "win" within this context are not as well-defined as the terms themselves would suggest.

Ross Douthat: "Don't Know Much About History"

After writing a pretty decent column (save for his inability to state an opinion) on the lack of a case for military intervention in Libya, Ross Douthat follows up by falling flat on his face. President Obama, he tells us, "has delivered a clinic in the liberal way of war", with the issue not being an unwillingness to go to war but that he wants to go to war "in the most multilateral, least cowboyish fashion imaginable."

In its opening phase, at least, our war in Libya looks like the beau ideal of a liberal internationalist intervention. It was blessed by the United Nations Security Council. It was endorsed by the Arab League. It was pushed by the diplomats at Hillary Clinton’s State Department, rather than the military men at Robert Gates’s Pentagon. Its humanitarian purpose is much clearer than its connection to American national security. And it was initiated not by the U.S. Marines or the Air Force, but by the fighter jets of the French Republic.

In other words, the Obama Administration followed about 99% of the strategy followed by George H.W. Bush in the first Gulf War, the liberation of Kuwait. Build as large a coalition as possible, get U.N. approval, have both French and Arab military involvement, etc. For that matter, it's not far off from where G.W. was in launching the war in Afghanistan, which involved troops from many nations, or in his effort to get both U.N. and Congressional approval and to build as large a coalition as possible for his adventure in Iraq. When Douthat purports,

This is an intervention straight from Bill Clinton’s 1990s playbook, in other words, and a stark departure from the Bush administration’s more unilateralist methods. There are no “coalitions of the willing” here, no dismissive references to “Old Europe,” no “you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”

He misses the point. G.W. wanted to go to war in Iraq with the same type of coalition he was able to muster for Afghanistan, and the same type of coalition his father was able to muster the first time around. The notion of the "coalition of the willing" was meant first to convey that the U.S. was not actually acting alone, and presumably to attempt to shame or otherwise influence those nations that decided not to join the war effort. As Colin Powell put it in 2003,

We now have a coalition of the willing that includes some 30 nations who have publicly said they could be included in such a listing.... And there are 15 other nations, who, for one reason or another do not wish to be publicly named but will be supporting the coalition.

The existence of a coalition was important to G.W. - his administration repeatedly bragged about the number of nations that were involved.

Douthat tells us that the "liberal" way of war... coalition-building that "spreads the burden of military action, sustains rather than weakens our alliances, and takes the edge off the world’s instinctive anti-Americanism" (um... this "instinctive anti-Americanism" is the relative unpopularity of the U.S. in the Muslim world? Because I've not found the developed world to be anti-American in any sense that's meaningful here - as illustrated by the actual coalitions that went into Iraq the first time around, and went into Afghanistan after 9/11. Douthat may not get out much, but when I've been overseas or south of the border people have been able to distinguish "America" from "the current President and his foreign policy.") Douthat announces,

But there are major problems with this approach to war as well. Because liberal wars depend on constant consensus-building within the (so-called) international community, they tend to be fought by committee, at a glacial pace, and with a caution that shades into tactical incompetence. And because their connection to the national interest is often tangential at best, they’re often fought with one hand behind our back and an eye on the exits, rather than with the full commitment that victory can require.

So a "conservative" war would look like Ronald Reagan's liberation of the tiny island nation of Grenada, but not even slightly like Ronald Reagan's intervention in Lebanon? And just like in every war since WWII, Republican Presidents would take a no holds barred approach to war - which is why we bombed the Red River dams in North Vietnam and took a "nuke 'em till they glow" approach in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And my, how can we forget the tactial brilliance behind Nixon's "victory with honor" in Vietnam, or G.W.'s total victory over insurgencies in its two wars - at least if a Republican starts it, no U.S. war will ever again last as long as the Vietnam War, right? And that's why President Obama has defined a clear exit strategy for the present intervention in Libya? Please, Ross, tell us more.

These problems dogged American foreign policy throughout the 1990s, the previous high tide of liberal interventionism. In Somalia, the public soured on our humanitarian mission as soon as it became clear that we would be taking casualties as well as dispensing relief supplies.

Somalia? So George H.W. Bush's decision to send troops into Somalia is an example of "liberal internationalist intervention"? Just like the first Gulf War (which as we know involved many months of diplomatic and tactical build-up)?

In the former Yugoslavia, NATO imposed a no-flight zone in 1993, but it took two years of hapless peacekeeping and diplomatic wrangling, during which the war proceeded unabated, before American air strikes finally paved the way for a negotiated peace.

Okay, so Douthat's argument here is that the U.S. should have gone "cowboy", unilaterally invaded and occupied Yugoslavia, and that the end result would have been a faster, stronger peace?

Our 1999 intervention in Kosovo offers an even starker cautionary tale. The NATO bombing campaign helped topple Slobodan Milosevic and midwifed an independent Kosovo. But by raising the stakes for both Milosevic and his Kosovo Liberation Army foes, the West’s intervention probably inspired more bloodletting and ethnic cleansing in the short term, exacerbating the very humanitarian crisis it was intended to forestall.

So, again, the answer would have been a unilateral military invasion, to heck with diplomacy and military coalitions? Seriously, did somebody else write his column last Monday? I'm familiar with the arguments made by factions on both the political left and right that intervention in Kosovo was misguided, counterproductive and illegal. But I fail to see how Kosovo supports Douthat's present notion that it's better to go full cowboy. And that's before I consider that, despite Douthat's sniveling about their liberalism, the outcomes of the interventions in the former Yugoslavia came about in far less time, at far lower cost, and much more in line with U.S. interests than G.W.'s still unfinished war in Iraq.

Douthat complains that members of the coalition going into Libya have different goals, and different conceptions of what military action might look like. Well, no kidding. Given that Douthat was implying that Europeans tend toward "instinctive anti-Americanism" and make a habit of "carping at the United States from the sidelines", he should be the last person to expect a U.S.-European coalition to be of one mind, and when you throw in the Arab League you're pretty much guaranteed that you're going to have open dissent on some of your strategic and tactical decisions. Is Douthat arguing that it would have been better to tell the Arab League, "Sorry, we're not interested in your participation or opinions," and tell the French, "Sorry, but we're not interested in having you share the cost and burdens of this war, or put your pilots' lives at risk when we can instead send in our own jets"? If not, does he even have a point? Wait... I guess the following is his point:

And the time it took to build a multilateral coalition enabled Qaddafi to consolidate his position on the ground, to the point where any cease-fire would leave him in control of most of the country.

Okay, so Douthat believes that the Obama Administration should have intervened more quickly in a war that, a mere week ago, Douthat was telling us didn't warrant U.S. intervention, in order to prevent Qaddafi from potentially prevailing in a civil war that Douthat didn't deem relevant to our nation's interests, because that's what any good "conservative" would have done? Well then, take it away Speaker Boehner:

The President is the commander-in-chief, but the Administration has a responsibility to define for the American people, the Congress, and our troops what the mission in Libya is, better explain what America’s role is in achieving that mission, and make clear how it will be accomplished. Before any further military commitments are made, the Administration must do a better job of communicating to the American people and to Congress about our mission in Libya and how it will be achieved.

That's right - the Republican position is basically that the President didn't spend enough time debating intervention, explaining the goals of the intervention and how they would be accomplished, involving Congress in his decision-making process, or articulating an exit strategy. If the official Republican position is that Obama is being a cowboy, does that mean that Douthat is wrong, does it mean that Boehner wants to imperil the intervention by causing the type of delay and committee-based decision-making that Douthat decries even though he would support the action were the President a Republican, or does it mean that within the context of Douthat's conceit the Republican Party is even more squishy and liberal on war than the Democratic Party?

Update: Did some sort of memo get circulated: "Depict Obama as a multilateralist, and tell people that's bad"? Because today David Brooks is on the case, raising a lot of the same points as Douthat.

Yet today, as an impeccably crafted multilateral force intervenes in Libya, certain old feelings are coming back to the surface. These feelings have been buried since the 1990s, when multilateral efforts failed in Kosovo, Rwanda and Iraq.

In the context of the first Gulf War and Kosovo, it would be interesting to know how Brooks defines "failure". Perhaps as, "Succeeding in achieving the stated political and military goals"? And this is to be compared to the rousing success in the second Iraq War, with "success" defined in a similarly counter-intuitive manner? As for Rwanda, the reason intervention failed to stop the slaughter in that nation was because it didn't happen. Funny thing.

Beyond that, Brooks offers the platitudinous observations that a truly multilateral operation requires the involved parties to agree on certain key issues, and that disagreements can arise. He suggests that multilateralism can result in "obsess[ion] about the diplomatic process and ignore the realities on the ground" - I would love to hear about the unilateral wars that neither involved concern about diplomacy nor overlooked any realities on the ground - I doubt Brooks could produce a single example. And, oh no, people are overlooking "the realities" in Libya:

Who are the rebels we are supporting? How weak is the Qaddafi government? How will Libyans react to a Western bombing campaign? Why should we think a no-fly zone will protect civilians when they never have in the past?

The sort of tough questions to which we had solid answers prior to every unilateral military intervention in our nation's history? Where's the reality-based community when you need it? And wow... multilateral military ventures are slow to adapt to changing circumstances? So he's saying that, unlike unilateral ventures, the nations in a multilateral venture might be inclined to declare "mission accomplished", ignore the facts on the ground, and stubbornly adhere to failed policies until they're on the verge of total failure? Fascinating stuff.

Brooks tells us that when multinational forces attack or invade a country, its "defenders will be fighting for land, home, God and country". With unilateral interventions, he thinks the defenders will put down their arms and throw ticker tape parades for the invaders? Hey... that worked for us in Iraq and Israel in Gaza, right? Or is he under the impression that unilateral military actions only occur in the context of two (Godless?) nation states fighting in a third state's territory.

Brooks also repeats Douthat's claim that multilateral interventions involve slow build-ups (because you can apparently teleport military hardware into a war zone, no need even for a staging area, if you act unilaterally).

Update 2: Apparently Douthat's extensive discussion of unilateral action vs. multilateral action and associated criticism of the President's approach was irrelevant to the point he was trying to make. His intent "was to push back against the conceit that the form of a war can vindicate its strategy — that what matters most in warfare is whether you’re 'part of U.N. Security Council approved action'" with approval of the Arab league and the idea that a White House claim of "multilateralism is sufficient to prove that our Libyan venture is far more responsible than the invasion of Iraq".

He again strips the "coalition of the willing", as well as G.W.'s many efforts to get explicit UN sanction for war (before declaring that he was authorized under existing resolutions) from history in order to tell us that, for Iraq, "it’s easy to imagine a more multilateral invasion ending in even greater disaster". Were he to examine the facts he might realize that the reason G.W. wasn't able to build a larger coalition was that the nations that refused to join thought the war was a terrible idea - deferring to the larger international community, including the rest of the world's significant military powers, would have kept the U.S. out of that war. So, once again, his disregard of history undermines his point.

Obviously I'm not going to take issue with Douthat's present argument that "the more important question... is not whether this war is multilateral but whether it is wise", but if that was intended to be his point he sure did a good job of hiding it behind his "irrelevant" gripes about the problems caused by multilateralism. One would think that a column discussing the wisdom of war might include words like "wise", "unwise" or "wisdom".

Looking for Political Solutions in All the Wrong Places

David Ignatius offers his latest musings on the war in Afghanistan, "willpower" and the magic man who comes in the form of General David Petraeus, and pretends that he has a number of insightful questions for General Petraeus. His questions, though, center on how General Petraeus will implement political solutions to Afghanistan's problems. Um... David? Not his job. It may well be that the questions are the right ones to ask, but it doesn't help to ask them to the wrong person.

You Gotta Know When to Fold 'Em

In discussing Iraq, David Ignatius presents what is fundamentally an illogical statement:

America has spent so much blood and treasure in Iraq that it would be wrong to walk away completely, however attractive that may seem politically.

Many a gambler has lost his shirt following that philosophy. Painful as it may be to admit, it's important to develop the perspective and maturity to recognize when you're throwing good money after bad. It's not difficult to lay out a case for why we should continue to support Iraq and try to help it become a stable democracy, but "We've lost so much money and blood that it would be wrong to stop gambling" isn't it.

Ignatius comes close to invoking the gambler's fallacy - "After a losing streak this long, I must be on the verge of winning so I have to keep rolling the dice" - but he doesn't actually suggest that continued investment will bring about success. His editorial page boss, using the craven tool of the unsigned editorial, isn't as reticent. President Obama, it's suggested, should make "winning" in Iraq and Afghanistan his "top mission". What does it mean to "win"? How long will it take? What will be the additional cost in dollars and lives? You won't get answers to those questions from Fred Hiatt and his editorial board. But why would you expect them to care about such trivialities - let's throw out timetables and commit blood and treasure until we win, whatever that means.

Meanwhile, Matt Miller offers something of a mea culpa - although he believes the Iraq War would have been justified had Iraq in fact had WMD's (never mind that the Bush Administration chose not to let inspections continue to potentially resolve that question in the negative, and leaving aside the question of how Iraq's WMD's would directly threaten U.S. interests), if he "could turn back time" knowing that no WMD's were present he would oppose the war. His comments highlight how having firm dates for troop withdrawals may help:

Politicians rarely admit they're mistaken (as our surge-opposing president and vice president proved again this week).... I'm hoping for the best, in the spirit the president urged Tuesday night, though he can't admit he fought the surge that's created the chance for a happier ending.

The chance for a happier ending began with the Anwar Awakening. It seems more than fair to say that the surge built on that, and has resulted in a level of stability that has kept the window of opportunity open for considerably longer than anybody expected. But it's not clear that Iraq's factions and political leaders are any more willing or able to take the opportunity now than they were three years ago. On one side are those who benefit from the occupation and have little incentive to negotiate as long as U.S. armed forces have their backs; on the other side are those who expect to benefit from the withdrawal of U.S. armed forces and have little incentive to make larger concessions while the occupation continues when they expect to be able to make much smaller concessions (or make no concessions at all) after the occupation ends. The responsible drawdown of forces, and that seems like a fair characterization of Obama's decisions, may be what it takes to break that stalemate.

Thanks to Michael Gerson, It's All So Obvious....

All we have to do in Afghanistan is "win then negotiate". (Um... but wouldn't that be appeasement?)

Gerson's editorial, as you might expect, is useless. It tells us why we should "win" - because if we don't there is no question but that the girls and women of Afghanistan will suffer horribly in at least parts, and more realistically in most or all of the country. But he ignores both the present reality, that girls and women continue to suffer horribly in parts of Afghanistan despite a massive military presence, the cultural factors that have created and will perpetuate that reality, and a history in which the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and gave girls and women many rights that they enjoyed right up to the end of Soviet occupation, and the fact that desire for victory is not a strategy.

I'm not sure whether Gerson is simply sharing the Kool-Aid served up by his former boss - that the war is about the rights of women, with the implication that its success be measured by the progress of women in Afghan society - or if he's also drinking. Certainly, the more you learn about the plight of women under the Taliban, the more horrifying the conception of allowing that type of oppression to recur. But the sad reality is that Bush's strategy for Afghanistan appears to have in fact been to keep enough troops present to avoid overtly losing that war before the end of his presidency. His administration recognized that the best way to keep the public engaged and supportive of that war, and the one in Iraq, was to contend that a principal goal of the wars was to advance civil rights for women and for marginalized ethnic groups and, as Gerson continues to argue, that negotiation or withdrawal would lead to horrors for those groups. It's hard to argue with that. The problem is, as they say, it's easier said than done.

The position advanced by Gerson - we must "win" - tells us nothing either about how we might win or what a victory might look like. It did provide Bush with convenient cover for his strategy of perpetuating a war that he seemed to have lost interest in demonstrably winning - but there's a world of difference between advancing and solidifying the rights of women and minorities, and giving them lip service when your only real goal is to avoid revealing your war strategy as an abject failure.

Gerson also parrots the inevitable argument of proponents of indefinite occupation - that the groups that are resisting occupation are simply waiting us out, and even if they give lip service to our goals as part of a negotiation aimed at getting us out of their country they'll revert to their actual policies the moment we're gone. But that doesn't distinguish this occupation from any other. Unless you're going to follow the model of an occupying power that is going to dig in, force cultural change, and remain in occupation for the decades - perhaps generations - it takes for the occupied people to incorporate your culture, you can expect that the occupied people will return to many, most, and perhaps all of their own cultural traditions once allowed to do so. When we talk about the Russian Jews or Chinese Catholics, we talk about the indomitable human spirit. Just because you don't like the Taliban's religious or cultural beliefs doesn't mean that they're any less sincere or deeply held. For that matter, Gerson apparently believes that it's only the Taliban that oppresses women, while many non-Talibani warlords have historically done exactly the same thing and continued those practices even after the Taliban was deposed.

Similarly, we can look at our own nation's history. Gerson is probably aware of the U.S. civil war and its nominal end of slavery. He is probably aware that it took more than a century for overtly racist laws and policies to be ended in many southern states. He may be aware that racism lives on in this country and that there remains a population of people who argue that African Americans are socially or genetically inferior, sometimes both. Perhaps he's forgotten that women didn't have the right to vote in this country until 1920. Even in the western world, effecting cultural change can be painfully slow.

Perhaps Gerson's not aware of the fact that even long-term occupation doesn't guarantee that a group opposed to the occupation won't rise in power after the occupation ends, either to rebel against the government or to form a secessionist movement. Perhaps he missed how several European nations reverted to ethnic conflict, even dividing into separate nations, after the fall of the Soviet Empire. Perhaps he missed the ugly ethnic rivalries present in many nations of the post-colonial world, including Iraq. Closer to Afghanistan... no, make that in Afghanistan... perhaps he missed the collapse of the government left behind by the USSR when it ended its occupation. Perhaps he's never heard an Afghan speak with pride about how his nation has never been successfully conquered. Perhaps he is also unfamiliar with the concept of blowback. Perhaps he missed how Israel's efforts to defeat the PLO led to its ill-fated occupation of Southern Lebanon, and turned Hezbollah into its enemy, or how its efforts to marginalize and defeat the secular PLO in the occupied territories led to the rise of Hamas.

Whether or not he tried, even as he provided a link to the actual story, Gerson couldn't quite bring himself to be honest. He argues that, when asked about the possibility of settlement with the Taliban, CIA Director Leon Panetta responded that they're not truly interested in reconciliation. In fact, Panetta was speaking broadly of "insurgent groups". Gerson's notion that this means the U.S. should double down, committing even more troops and money to defeat insurgent groups who show no interest in sincere negotiation after being on the receiving end of the longest war in U.S. history might, perhaps, make a more thoughtful person wonder if a military victory can be achieved. Such a person might question whether massive military actions, injuries and deaths to civilians, the overwhelming presence of foreign occupying forces, and the effort by those forces to redefine local culture might not be an effective mechanism to force a monumental shift of Afghan culture. Or whether it's reasonable or feasible to wipe out an enemy that has sufficient support within the community that its fighters can fade into the civilian population when they want to hide from occupying forces. (Has Gerson read nothing about the Vietnam War?)

With due respect to Gerson's emphasis on human rights, that apparently commenced with the U.S. occupation, perhaps he should spend some time explaining the policy positions of the pre-9/11 Bush Administration. Does Gerson agree that women's rights should take a back seat to the war on drugs? That they don't merit mention when we're talking about eradication of opium poppies, but for some reason must be front and center in any discussions that are intended to end a bona fide, shooting war? It's easy to endorse the human rights conception of the war in Afghanistan, which is why the Bush Administration pushed that conception of the war, but if you look at the Bush Administration's actions it's difficult to view its professed interest in the plight of Afghan women as anything more than spin. Gerson started penning speeches for Bush in 1999 - he must know that history. For that matter, he must be aware of how hard Bush pushed (or should I say didn't push) Saudi Arabia to improve its treatment of women.

Some fair questions for Gerson:

• How, exactly, is he defining victory in Afghanistan?

• How long will it take to achieve that victory?

• What will be the cost in both dollars and lives?

• Are there any U.S. strategic interests that he deems more important than human rights for the Afghan people and, if so, what are they?

• What should the United States do if it finds a way to achieve all of its military and security objectives in Afghanistan, but with the trade-off being that it does nothing to alleviate the plight of women?

• What level of human rights would Gerson find sufficient - for example, does he envision a U.S. military occupation that lasts until Afghanistan treats women in the manner of the United States? In the manner of Saudi Arabia?

• What if the generals to whom Gerson insists we must defer find that, to defeat the Taliban, the U.S. must ally itself with warlords who don't share the Taliban's religious zeal but treat women in the same manner as does the Taliban?

As Gerson also contends that we're now "winning" in Iraq, it's also fair to ask - if we apply the measure of his former boss, how are we actually doing? Or is he changing the measure of what victory is supposed to look like as a matter of convenience to his present argument? If I may be concrete, if we were to assume a full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, should we expect the post-victory Iraqi government to support or oppose Iran's nuclear program, and on what evidence?

Joseph Farah.... Ya Gotta Love It.

Shorter version:

Back when I was resting my posterior in my office chair, but in full support of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I ridiculed those who protested against the wars. Now I'm convinced that "mistakes were made" and wonder, as my posterior remains ensconsed in my desk chair, where are those protesters I used to ridicule "now that we really need them", and why aren't they trying to stop these wars?

What Farah misses, of course, is that the anti-war movement was there when, in his present conception, we really needed it. If he thinks protests will help now, nothing is stopping him from organizing them.

His attempt to recast the wars he full-throatedly supported as "Obama's Wars" doesn't alter historic fact, but if others buy his distortion it should be pretty easy for him to round up some protesters. Perhaps he can start with his good friends, the Birthers.

Don't Say Anything Bad About the Magic Man!

Throughout recorded history there have been people who, whether self-declared or declared by others, are deemed indispensable - they're magic men, without whom a business, a nation, perhaps the world is doomed. Occasionally there's a kernel of truth to the claim, and a business can falter when a skilled leader quits or dies. But even then in most cases the business carries on and, when it doesn't, the fault is usually because the "magic man" neglects to engage in succession planning. Beyond that, death remains a constant. "Magic," indispensable men have always died, and yet the Earth continues to spin on its axis.

It's not particularly surprising that somebody like David Brooks romanticizes our nation's political leaders as various incarnations of magic men, and even less so that he does the same for military leaders. But I still found his argument in defense of media self-censorship to be surprising. Not that Brooks would believe in or endorse self-censorship in the name of protecting the rich and powerful, but that he would so readily admit that to be his estimation of what constitutes good, responsible journalism.

The reticent ethos [in which journalists didn't report facts harmful to the rich and powerful] had its flaws. But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

Another scalp is on the wall. Government officials will erect even higher walls between themselves and the outside world. The honest and freewheeling will continue to flee public life, and the cautious and calculating will remain.

David Brooks seems to personify what he views as a "good journalist" - eager to please those in power, and the first to censor out of his column anything that might embarrass or jeopardize future access to one of his sources. Never mind that he's putting himself in a category of journalist that is happy to repeat without attribution attacks and innuendo about others obtained from their carefully cultivated, flattered and protected stable of "insiders".

Brooks is also eager to brand General McChrystal as an irreplaceable magic man, never mind that he has already been replaced. The offense is not that the general displayed contempt for the civilian leaders working in Iraq and of the Vice President, and reportedly spoke poorly of the President while on the record with a reporter from Rolling Stone. That's forgivable as "kvetching" or "venting". The place to find offense is that a reporter, having observed military officers making unprofessional comments while on duty and on the record would dare to report the facts.

But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him.

From what I have heard about General McChrystal, including his carefully calculated leaks to force the Obama Administration's hand on its Afghanistan war policy, it seems reasonable to infer that he's a very competent soldier and officer. The position of general is highly political, and for McChrystal to reach his rank despite his tendency toward the impolitic suggests that he must be good at his job - otherwise I suspect he would still be a colonel. But at the same time he's not a magic man, his policy has not been playing out as he had projected, and he is responsible for his lapses in judgment and for failing to squelch similar lapses of judgment by his staff.

Brooks appears to believe that the sin is on the part of the reporter - that it was perfectly reasonable for the general to assume that the reporter would act as Brooks would prefer, treating him as a magic man whose words should never see print lest they derail a glorious career (not to mention cutting off a high level source). Brooks admits that McChrystal would have to be blind to fifty years of history to have assumed that his remarks would not be reported, so as defenses go it's a weak one. But it comes through, loud and clear, that Brooks himself would prefer his romanticized era of media self-censorship and believes that he, personally, would have killed any part of the story that reflected badly on McChrystal.

Brooks isn't particularly careful with his facts. He claims, "[McChrystal] had outstanding relations with the White House and entirely proper relationships with his various civilian partners in the State Department and beyond," despite the fact that McChrystal's own comments suggest a poor working relationship with pretty much every civilian leader save for Hillary Clinton - and insofar as there is evidence, whether you call it "venting" or "kvetching", the facts suggest that McChyrstal's comments reflect reality. Brooks also accuses the reporter who broke the story of making "the kvetching the center of his magazine profile," suggesting at best that he hasn't read the article and at worst that he doesn't care about the facts when he's defending a powerful figure. The "kvetching" would better be described as the addition of colorful anecdotes to a long article with a much broader focus. It was not the Rolling Stone article that led to McChrystal's resignation, but the manner in which mainstream commentators and pundits responded to the "kvetching".

I haven't been following the commentary very closely, but I have yet to find commentary by a retired military officer who either defends McChrystal's conduct or dismisses it as "no big deal." Brooks may not be comfortable with the fact that the U.S. military has civilian leadership, but some people actually do regard respect for the constitutional role of the Commander in Chief to be relevant to both military discipline and our system of government. It was not a reporter who "took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him" - McChrystal is responsible for his own fate.

Going back in time to the period of journalism that Brooks romanticizes,

During World War II and the years just after, a culture of reticence prevailed. The basic view was that human beings are sinful, flawed and fallen. What mattered most was whether people could overcome their flaws and do their duty as soldiers, politicians and public servants. Reporters suppressed private information and reported mostly — and maybe too gently — on public duties.

The culture of reticence, of course, worked to protect the rich and powerful. The not-so-rich and not-so-powerful did not enjoy similar immunity. A political figure might have a health problem that could cause many to question whether he could properly serve in elected office, and reporters would leave the story alone. But if a less powerful rival were to have a similar affliction, or were caught in a scandal, it was fair game. B-list actors were called out and blacklisted for drug use and affairs, while A-list actors largely enjoyed media immunity.

Brooks may believe that the politicians protected by that system were, for the most part, in government "because they sincerely want to do good", but there's no reason to think differently of the less powerful people who were regarded as fair game for the media. We're still not working on a level playing field - the mainstream media sat on inflammatory stories about GW's military service (or lack thereof), of Clinton's affairs, of Edwards' love child, and now we find of Al Gore's supposed mistreatment of a masseuse. There are reasons for that reticence, good and bad, but less public figures get a lot less benefit of the doubt, and a lot less media worry about fallout from the publication of possibly false, inflammatory stories to their careers.

No, nobody wants to be raked over the coals by the media. Yes, that's a factor that keeps some people out of public life - even if they don't have skeletons in their closets, some people are put off by the idea that the media will nonetheless be poking through their closets for skeletons, real and imagined. But sometimes the public really does have a right to know, and it's not better to go back to an era that was even more skewed in favor of the rich and powerful than what presently passes for media analysis. We may lose a magic man from time to time, but in hindsight the magic will usually be revealed as an illusion and the world will keep on turning.

Cutting Afghanistan Into Pieces... With Honor?

No surprise here.... Henry Kissinger has crawled out of the woodwork to warn us of the perils of abandoning a "war forever" approach to Afghanistan:

We have a basic national interest to prevent jihadist Islam from gaining additional momentum, which it will surely do if it can claim to have defeated the United States and its allies after overcoming the Soviet Union. A precipitate withdrawal would weaken governments in many countries with significant Islamic minorities. It would be seen in India as an abdication of the U.S. role in stabilizing the Middle East and South Asia and spur radical drift in Pakistan. It would, almost everywhere, raise questions about America's ability to define or execute its proclaimed goals.

Does that sound an awful lot like Kissinger's laundry list of reasons for why we had to stay in Vietnam? And yet after U.S. forces withdrew his parade of horribles did not come to pass. Yes, the consequences were horrific for the allied Vietnamese we left behind. But it was in fact Vietnam that brought an end to the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and despite being one of the five remaining communist nations on the planet (Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, China, and North Korea) it now welcomes tourists from the U.S. and is a trading partner. (Kissinger should perhaps think long and hard about the list of the five remaining communist nations, and contemplate whether all of them would still be communist but for the policies and interventions he favored.)

In many ways Kissinger is engaged in the same exercise that others engaged in before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, presenting apocalyptic hypothetical scenarios of what could happen if the U.S. proceeded with the wars. Yes, we could get the worst case scenario. But we could get something that looks quite different and, let's be honest, the accuracy of Kissinger's prognostications have historically been abysmal, including in relation to the Iraq war.

The people who deserve credit for their predictions are those in the first Bush Administration who advised Bush the Elder that having accomplished our military goals for Iraq it was best to depart as opposed to toppling Hussein's regime and getting bogged down in endless war. No doubt, there were some extremely ugly consequences to that decision, which Bush the Elder was willing to accept. Where was Kissinger when the "candy and flowers", "it'll be a cakewalk" crowd got the ear of Bush the Younger, and talked him out of wars that focused on narrow military objectives and into "regime change".

Don't get me wrong, I have long held the position that top-down democratization of a nation without either a democratic tradition or institutions was unlikely to succeed. It's much easier to impose a steel-fisted tyrant, with or without a velvet glove. Russia's experience indicates such a tyrant is unlikely to maintain his hold in Afghanistan absent significant outside military support. But let's pretend that Karzai's regime were about to flower into a progressive democracy. Is it not self-evident that the military commitment necessary to support and nourish a nascent democracy would be far greater than that needed to support a tyrant? To look at it another way, western powers have a long track record of imposing, supporting and otherwise backing various leaders in the post-colonial era. When we compare the number of flourishing democracies that resulted to the number of tyrannical regimes, how do things stack up?

At the start of the Iraq War, CWD and I had several discussions about the Bush Administration's approach, why it was unlikely to succeed even if it abandoned its grandiose ambitions to simultaneously attempt shock therapy-style privatization on the nation, how building democracy at the local level would make sense, and why that would not be acceptable to the Bush Administration. There are no state secrets in any of that. What was amazing is how we were supposed to take seriously the "it'll be a cakewalk" crowd - the idea that post-war occupation could be done on the cheap, and that Bush's hand-selected proposed leaders for both Iraq and Afghanistan would be welcomed by willing, grateful nations with showers of candy and flowers.

So now, as the Afghan War becomes the longest in U.S. history, Kissinger wants to take a bottom-up approach to reinventing its government. Or perhaps it's "start at the bottom and stay there," with regional warlords kept in check with the perpetual placement of U.S. occupation forces, as opposed to by a national government or military. Many of those local governments would look like, no, they would be the Taliban. Many others would be non-Talibani, but would take an approach every bit as oppressive to the rights of girls and women. War advocates seem to flip-flop between "We can't leave because it will be horrible to women," and "We really can't do much even if we stay" - for most of them the human rights side of the war has always been an argument of convenience, not belief. Kissinger, on the other hand, isn't making a human rights argument and makes no argument that his ideas will result in democratization - his record suggests that he has interest in neither.

The difference between the Afghanistan of days gone by, in which local warlords ignored, imperiled, and even overthrew a central government, while trying to amass as much wealth and power as possible, and the one that Kissinger envisions is... well, his warlords would apparently behave themselves. Beyond that, Kissinger's ideas sound a lot like what one might read in an annual report, were Afghanistan a corporation....

A regional diplomacy should seek to establish a framework to insulate Afghanistan from the storms raging around it rather than allow the country to serve as their epicenter. It would also try to build Afghanistan into a regional development plan, perhaps encouraged by the Afghan economy's reported growth rate of 15 percent last year.

Kissinger's notion that the U.S. would be less able to engage Iran, as opposed to more able, were its military not bogged down in a perpetual Afghan war, is laughable - and should the U.S. withdraw from Afghanistan I would not be surprised if he's one of the loudest voices arguing "Don't bring them home when Iran's right there, next door, waiting to be invaded." His fear seems to be less that Afghanistan might devolve into chaos, or that it might again provide safe haven for international terrorists, and more that a competing power might manage to take control of the nation and its resources.

Republican Concern Trolls on the Afghanistan War

"But if the war in Afghanistan is winding down starting next July, we won't be able to use it as a campaign issue when attacking President Obama."

After all, whatever the facts on the ground and despite the Republican Party's history both of abject failure and lack of ideas on how to do better, it's better to have war forever, at immense cost to both Afghanistan and our own nation, than to have one less issue with which to attack the incumbent President.

Depersonalizing "The Enemy"

A few years ago, Richard Cohen personified the mindset that Bob Herbert finds so troubling. After explaining how he supported the Vietnam war until he was drafted, "no longer felt it was winnable" and he "did not want to lose my life so that somehow defeat could be managed more elegantly", Cohen drew a parallel to Iraq:

[O]riginally had no moral qualms about the war. Saddam Hussein was a beast who had twice invaded his neighbors, had killed his own people with abandon and posed a threat - and not just a theoretical one - to Israel. If anything, I was encouraged in my belief by the offensive opposition to the war - silly arguments about oil or empire or, at bottom, the ineradicable and perpetual rottenness of America.

On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. The United States had the power to change things for the better, and those who would do the changing- the fighting - were, after all, volunteers. This mattered to me.

"Therapeutic" presumably meaning, "I thought it would make me feel better."

It was only when Cohen decided that the Iraq war could be lost that the numbers of U.S. soldiers dying for that cause started to concern him. The number of Iraqis (or Vietnamese) dying, before or after Cohen's change of heart on the war - either war? Apparently not a consideration. Continuing his theme from the earlier column, Cohen writes:

There are so few [war dead] - so few that in total for Iraq and Afghanistan we cannot even approach some individual battles of the Civil War or World War II, during which more than 19,000 Americans died at the Battle of the Bulge alone. In eight years, about 5,300 American service members have died in the two wars we now are fighting, the vast majority of them in Iraq. In that period, more than 250,000 Americans died in traffic accidents.

Cohen contrasts the changes in our society, the ability to see each war fatality as an individual and movement away from religious faith, to the experiences of "our enemies":

The ability to individualize -- no more Unknowns -- has undoubtedly changed America. We remain a religious nation but not as we were in the Civil War, when the dying tried to take comfort from the certainty -- it's true, isn't it? -- that a better life awaited them. Religion has lost that sort of mystery. Ministers have less authority. Dying has become harder.

In contrast, our enemies take religious solace in their own deaths. It is not that they don't value life; it's just that they don't value this life.

Here, Cohen is speaking of people valuing their own lives. Cohen only values the lives of our soldiers when he has given up on the cause for which they are dying, and there's no sign that he cares at all about the lives of casualties on the other side - soldier, civilian, man, woman, child. Despite that, I expect he's at least as confused as Thomas Friedman on why the people of Afghanistan and Iraq (and, historically, Vietnam) aren't sufficiently grateful for our efforts.

In Iraq, no one knows the number of suicide bombings - thousands of them, certainly.

If we're going for the "us and them" theme, it's fair to ask, how many suicide bombings occurred in Iraq before the U.S. invasion? In the nation's entire pre-invasion history, the number is zero.

Cohen is either ignorant of, or willfully ignoring, the history of modern asymmetric war in which suicide bombing is not exclusively an Islamic or Arab phenomenon. (For all I know, Cohen thinks the Tamil Tigers were Arabic.) The Vietnamese used suicide attacks against French tanks. The Japanese used suicide attacks against our ships during WWII. But as I'm sure some part of Cohen knowns, it's so much easier to ignore facts and history, and to instead demonize and depersonalize "the enemy":

There is really no such thing as an American suicide bomber. We don't extol the bomber and parade his or her children before the TV cameras so that other children will envy them for the death of a parent. This is odd to us. This is chilling to us. This is downright repugnant.

See how awful "they" are? All of "them"? How different "they" are from "us"? The entire Arabic and Persian world reduced to a uniform, ugly stereotype that conveniently coincides both with the regions Cohen wishes to militarily attack and with his his complete disdain for their casualties?

By Design, Not By Accident

When it comes to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Bob Herbert is upset that there's so little shared sacrifice, and many vocal proponents of the war have no interest in putting themselves on the line.

The idea that fewer than 1 percent of Americans are being called on to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and that we’re sending them into combat again and again and again — for three tours, four tours, five tours, six tours — is obscene. All decent people should object.

* * *

The air is filled with obsessive self-satisfied rhetoric about supporting the troops, giving them everything they need and not letting them down. But that rhetoric is as hollow as a jazzman’s drum because the overwhelming majority of Americans have no desire at all to share in the sacrifices that the service members and their families are making. Most Americans do not want to serve in the wars, do not want to give up their precious time to do volunteer work that would aid the nation’s warriors and their families, do not even want to fork over the taxes that are needed to pay for the wars.

I recognize that Herbert's intimate experience with war was in an era during which we had a draft, while now we have a volunteer military. Sure, you can question how voluntary the military becomes once "stop-loss" policies kick in, or that some people choose the military out of economic need rather than out of a desire to become soldiers, but those arguments are peripheral to the issue of shared sacrifice. Even during the days of the draft, the children of the wealthy and connected could find ways out of service, or ways to avoid putting their lives on the line, so the sharing of the sacrifice was still not particularly egalitarian.

But more to the point, the military has switched to "all volunteer" both because it makes for a better military and because our nation's political leaders recognize that it's easier to fight wars without calling on the general public to share the sacrifice. In that earlier era, the student Herbert found who called for a "full-blown counterinsurgency effort, which would likely take many years and cost many lives" could easily have been a kid named Dick Cheney. In fairness to the Dick Cheneys of the world, and call it selfishness if you will, if not wanting "to serve in the wars" means "not wanting to get shot at on a battlefield" it's arguably evidence of sanity. The "shared sacrifice" imposed in the era of the draft was coercive.

I believe, actually, that a lot more Americans would volunteer to help support the families of deployed troops if they had a sense of how they might do that. I also believe that our government should spend more attention (and money) on reintegrating troops back into society post-combat. Without making excuses for anybody who "goes off the deep end" after their return to the U.S., there's an enormous transition to be made from being in combat to being back with your family - and even bigger if your family isn't there to support you. I spoke with a veteran of the Afghanistan War who described how he was greeted by his mother upon his return home, and knew the moment he saw her that his wife had left him - with an empty house and an empty bank account. He commented that it took about two years to transition out of the combat mindset, and to get back into a state of enjoying a "normal life" that initially seemed boring. By way of support, the military should have offered him more than a pat on the back on his way out the door.

But I digress. Herbert nails it here:

The reason it is so easy for the U.S. to declare wars, and to continue fighting year after year after year, is because so few Americans feel the actual pain of those wars. We’ve been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan longer than we fought in World Wars I and II combined. If voters had to choose right now between instituting a draft or exiting Afghanistan and Iraq, the troops would be out of those two countries in a heartbeat.

The political leaders who started this war, and the political leaders who want to continue the wars, don't want that type of pressure. So they continued a system carefully constructed by their like-minded predecessors - no pressure on us means no pressure on them.

Too Easy

I recently speculated,

I suspect that Obama will order an approach that he believes will improve the situation in Afghanistan, but with the idea of wrapping up major military operations by mid-2011. At that time he can begin withdrawing troops without fear of a Najibullah-type collapse of the Karzai government before the election. His Republican opponent will have to decide if he wants to run on a platform of re-escalating and perpetuating the war, or effectively endorsing Obama's policies - and I suspect that in a national election there's a lot more danger to a politician who does the former.

Early excerpts from President Obama's speech confirm,

Taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.

I wouldn't go so far as calling it the "easier option", let alone a "tragic mistake". The tragedy will be if, even with another two years, we're still looking at "Taliban lite" as an "acceptable" outcome. Further, few people (and fewer Obama supporters) are going to be happy with the policy. But just as it wasn't difficult to anticipate a policy that is timed around the election cycle, even if the decision proves to be correct, it's not unfair to view it as something of a cop-out, or at least as being politically safe.

The Perils of Democracy

When I watch the Obama Administration forming its policy on Afghanistan, I'm reminded of the Bush Administration (and, well, every administration I've seen in my lifetime) - Push back the date for decisions that may cause blowback such that any negative consequence, that is anything that might hurt the incumbent President in the polls, occurs after reelection (or after his successor takes office).

I suspect that Obama will order an approach that he believes will improve the situation in Afghanistan, but with the idea of wrapping up major military operations by mid-2011. At that time he can begin withdrawing troops without fear of a Najibullah-type collapse of the Karzai government before the election. His Republican opponent will have to decide if he wants to run on a platform of re-escalating and perpetuating the war, or effectively endorsing Obama's policies - and I suspect that in a national election there's a lot more danger to a politician who does the former.

This is hardly unique to the U.S. - there are issues around the globe that could be resolved if elected leaders spent less time worrying about getting reelected and more time worrying about what's truly in the best interest of their country and countrymen. And no, I'm not calling for the abolition of democracy - a cure far worse than the disease. And I would probably be arguing against human nature if I were to ask politicians to treat the public as if it has the knowledge, respect and maturity to accept that it can take years to see the benefits of good policy choices, and that a significant short-term price tag (figurative or literal) can be a small price to pay for those benefits.

Alas, I'm dreaming of a world without lobbyists, and in which people would treat the notion of "Sarah Palin, 2012" as a joke, and where it would be laughable to conceive of people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck as thought or opinion leaders. I don't mean to single out the political right, but it's difficult to think of a current "thought leader" or "political leader" on the left who offers so little substance yet is taken seriously by the media and the majority of the members of a major political party. People are people, and history tells us that the political left is far from immune from the dubious charms of similar "leaders".

In the Washington Post's tepid "America's Next Great Pundit" contest, a Nobel Prize winning scientist asked why our nation doesn't make an effort to separate science from partisanship, recreating the Office of Technology Assessment to try to "help Congress arrive at a common starting point for complicated legislation". Why not? Because the facts, or scientific consensus, frequently aren't politically convenient. Consider, for example, the British Government's decision to appoint a genuine scientist to advise it on drug issues, only to be embarrassed when he pointed out that much of the hysteria surrounding ecstasy and marijuana were exactly that. So he was fired.

Armed conflicts pose a similar problem, with proponents of war eagerly declaring any action with which they disagree to be a sign of weakness, empowering the enemy. We of course see that in pretty much every pro-war analysis of the War in Afghanistan. And, as Roger Cohen's column on Israel-Palestine implies, it's an argument that can lead to self-destructive behaviors that drag out a problem to the point that the best and easiest solutions may no longer be viable. When things are going well, the politicians respond to the popular sentiment that "Things are going well so why do we need to make any sacrifice," and when things aren't going well they respond to the sentiment, "Why do they deserve anything?" And the problem drags on for years, decades, potentially even for centuries.

As the experience of Britain in the Republic of Ireland indicates, the form of government can change dramatically without any significant impact on how the government responds to a serious issue, problem or conflict. Perhaps it's true that we get the government that we deserve - small-minded, foolish, vengeful, irrational, selfish, short-sighted... just like all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time.