The Fantasy of a Residual Force in Iraq

One of the comments I frequently hear is that the Obama Administration should somehow have convinced the Maliki government to enter into a new status of forced agreement that would have kept a residual U.S. force in place in Iraq for years, perhaps forever, with the express or implied argument that such a residual force would have somehow overcome sectarian tensions within the country and prevented a renewed civil war. Many of those making the argument fail to mention the fact that the withdrawal date that was followed by President Obama was negotiated by President Bush. I appreciate Tom Ricks' position on a residual force, specifically that although he had thought it would have been a good idea at the time, if possible, in retrospect it would have been a costly mistake -- with the present sectarian warfare, U.S. forces would have required significant reinforcement, or would have had to withdraw from combat, with either of those outcomes being worse for the U.S. than leaving the conflict to the incompetent hands of the Iraqi army.

At the time the Obama Administration was attempting to negotiate a new status of forces agreement, the American public didn't want to keep combat troops in Iraq, the Iraqi public didn't want our forces there, and the Maliki government also wanted the U.S. out. The argument that President Obama could have used his powers of persuasion to maintain a significant presence of U.S. troops, despite the opposition of everybody affected by the decision, is an interesting one, but to me it exists only in the realm of fantasy. There's nothing surprising about ethnic tensions in Iraq, nor that the actions of the Maliki government have worsened ethnic tensions.

It's reasonable to infer that if Maliki foresaw this type of breakdown and renewed civil war, to the extent that a U.S. military presence would have prevented the problem he would have wanted U.S. forces to remain. Given his administration's secular favoritism, cronyism, and incompetence in its management of the Iraqi army, it's reasonable to infer that one looming factor in his wanting U.S. combat forces out was that they might delay or prevent the implementation of his plans -- plans to reward his cronies and advance a sectarian form of government. Nothing about Maliki should have been a big surprise by the time U.S. combat forces left Iraq, so where's the evidence that Maliki would have changed his mind, upsetting the Iraqi people and alienating his friends in Iran, had Obama said "pretty please", perhaps "with sugar on top"?

Contrary to the apparent beliefs of the fantasists, I don't believe that the U.S. presence would have delayed civil war forever, or even for more than a couple of years (if that). Why not? Because Iraq experienced a civil war during active U.S. military occupation, with essentially the same parties fighting it out. The war, occupation and "surge" put a band-aid on the civil conflict, covering a festering wound. It would have taken true commitment to the cause for a central government to even partially heal that wound and, if we're honest, the Bush Administration knew from the earliest days of Maliki's governance that the Maliki was not the man for that job.

For some of the advocates of a residual force, such as John McCain, the position seems rooted in traditional wars between nation states. The U.S. is involved in a war and, when the war ends, it leaves a significant military presence in the nation where operations occurred in order to secure that nation from a potentially or overtly hostile neighbor. McCain apparently sees no distinction between wars between nation states and civil wars, despite his own experiences in Vietnam both during and after the war. Suffice to say, there's an enormous difference between maintaining a military force that is supposed to keep a lid on civil unrest and ethnic tensions, and one that sits near a border to intimidate a neighboring nation out of trying to cross that line.

Other than dragging the U.S. back into an Iraqi civil war, something few other than perhaps John McCain would actually favor, what would have been the benefit of a residual force? The best case scenario seems to be that the U.S. presence would have delayed the inevitable, but the worst case scenarios that Ricks describes seem far more likely.

Sorry, No, Pseudo-Conscription is Still a Bad Idea

Dana Milbank has jumped onto the bandwagon of those who think that the cure for "kids these days" is some form of conscription.

As I make my rounds each day in the capital, chronicling our leaders’ plentiful foibles, failings, screw-ups, inanities, outrages and overall dysfunction, I’m often asked if there’s anything that could clean up the mess....

But one change, over time, could reverse the problems that have built up over the past few decades: We should mandate military service for all Americans, men and women alike, when they turn 18. The idea is radical, unlikely and impractical — but it just might work.

But, even if we incorrectly assumed that the military wanted universal conscription, it's not even slightly realistic to have every 18-year-old serve in the military. While Milbank refers to Switzerland, in which "sons of bankers and farmers alike do basic training for several months and then are recalled to service for brief periods", none of the proponents of conscription are suggesting a similar approach. They instead prefer a period of a year or several years in which the young person is forced to participate in some sort of nebulous national work program that may (but probably won't) involve military service.

What we would end up with, at best, is what Milbank describes later in his editorial, based on his notion that "the structure is less important than the service itself",

My former colleague Tom Ricks proposes bringing back the draft in the United States but allowing for a civilian national service option — teaching, providing day care and the like — for those who don’t want to join the military.

Ricks' proposal was bad, as well, but at least he attempted to explain how it might function. The notion is that we are going to fix the nation's problems my making people take people away from their academic studies or jobs for a year or two, and compelling them to work in daycare centers or equivalent vocations? Seriously? And note the disdain for teaching as a profession - it's presented as something a random high school graduate can do, and roughly equivalent to working in a daycare center.

Milbank agrees with my past assessment that the cost of such a program would be huge. "Staggering" might be a better word. But he insists,

But so would the benefits: overcoming growing social inequality without redistributing wealth; making future leaders, unlike today’s “chicken hawks,” disinclined to send troops into combat without good reason; putting young Americans to work and giving them job and technology skills; and, above all, giving these young Americans a shared sense of patriotism and service to the country.

There is little reason to believe that Milbank's draft would overcome growing income inequality. The type of job skills that marginal high school graduates (or drop-outs) could develop through such a program would likely leave them qualified for low-paying jobs. Even for those who serve in the military, if you consider the difficulty that many veterans presently have finding employment, why does Milbank believe that those who are conscripted and serve for less time will fare better?

Without redistributing wealth? Sorry, but a program that takes a "huge" amount of government revenue and applies it to a year or two of national service would certainly be "redistributing wealth". There's also more than money at stake. For 18-year-olds who plan to attend college, you're delaying their entry into the workforce by at least a year (assuming the program is only a year long). For 18-year-olds who are employed, you're costing them their jobs. For 17-year-olds who would otherwise have job prospects, you're ensuring that employers won't consider them for anything more than temporary positions. That is, there's a tremendous opportunity cost imposed on the young people who are conscripted into the program - perhaps not wealth redistribution in the classic sense, but nonetheless imposing a genuine financial harm on those drafted into the program.

I'm not clear on why Milbank believes that this service, even if we pretend it could all be military service, will result in fewer military mobilizations. Milbank references "chicken hawks", the term applied to people like Dick Cheney who fastidiously avoided service during their youth but had no compunction about entangling the U.S. in wars. But where's the evidence that veterans, once in office, are any less hawkish than non-veterans? Veterans got us into the Korean War and Vietnam War, the first Iraq War, and any number of lesser conflicts. John McCain is a veteran, yet he's one of the most hawkish members of the Senate.

As for "putting young Americans to work and giving them job and technology skills", how would that work? Yes, the military involves a lot of job and technology skills, but often not the sort of skills that fit well with the modern civilian workplace. It's not clear how many of Milbank's conscripts would achieve similar skill sets, as their terms of service would be shorter. Beyond that, Milbank mentions... teaching and daycare. A young adult can already work in a daycare center straight out of high school, and in some cases before they even graduate. While it might be possible to create a small, focused program that allowed high school graduates to develop cutting edge skills, the sort of blunderbuss approach Milbank favors all-but-ensures that most participants will gain very few skills that would benefit them in a subsequent job, save perhaps at the bottom end of the job market.

Oh yes, and "above all", giving "young Americans a shared sense of patriotism and service to the country". I can't help but think of my uncle who, unlike many of the chicken hawks to whom Milbank alludes, insisted upon joining the military and upon combat duty despite a physical condition that would have allowed him to either avoid service or bide his time behind a desk. If anything, his patriotism was bated by his experiences, and the schisms within his unit made it anything but the sort of happy melting pot that Milbank seems to envision. Milbank's vision seems oddly in line with what you see in Vietnam, where conscripts may find themselves in a civilian uniform, working behind the front desk of an army-owned hotel... or cleaning the rooms. But there's little reason to believe that conscripts assigned to random, menial employment would feel much of a connection with those outside of the daycare center where they work, or that those who obtained more prestigious assignments or ranks would view them as equal. And last I checked, Vietnam's government was not one I envied.

Milbank later adds, "Gun-rights groups would cheer an armed citizenry", but where does that even come from? Milbank cannot seem to maintain a consistent thesis as to whether the conscripts would be performing military service, or whether they would be working in daycare centers. Perhaps he imagines that all conscripts will go through military basic training before being shipped off to work in daycare centers? It's hard to tell what he has in mind.

Milbank notes, "an article published by the libertarian Cato Institute argued that compulsory service 'can be a pillar of freedom,'" but fails to note the inherent tension between "libertarianism" and conscription, or for that matter between freedom and conscription. A libertarian might endorse bringing real meaning to the "unorganized militia", with the government providing broad opportunity for citizens to avail themselves of military training within that context, but let's not pretend that conscription is a libertarian ideal or that a libertarian with his head screwed on correctly would confuse it with "freedom".

I'm not particularly concerned that yet another pundit has endorsed a type of service he personally eschewed as a cure for the nation's ills, although I remain amused by arguments that boil down to, "The best way for young people to develop a set of values similar to my own is by being conscripted into a type of program that I, personally, avoided." There's no chance that universal conscription will become law. However, I do think that much of the hand-wringing about kids these days, and about how to provide better opportunities for young people who have more than their fair share of obstacles to overcome, could be channeled into a voluntary service program, a "bridge year" or two in which participants could be matched with suitable peer groups, and dispatched to communities where they could perform productive work and develop genuine job and leadership skills. But I guess that sort of idea isn't as fun to kick around. Besides, while conscription is something the government would have to impose, for somebody who is positioned to actually generate the necessary money and attention, proposing a "bridge year" program might invite the response, "Great idea, what are you doing to bring it to life?"

National Service for "Our Kids".... Again?

For reasons I can't quite fathom, Thomas Ricks wrote an essay arguing for a national service requirement for all young adults, and the New York Times published it. Thomas Ricks offers an informative blog, The Best Defense, through Foreign Policy Magazine. He's capable of informed comment on a variety of important issues relating to the military and national defense. I am thus surprised both by the superficiality of Ricks' argument on national service for high school graduates, and by why the Times would publish that essay instead of something more clearly within Ricks' established sphere of authority.

Ricks proposes a "revived draft" involving three tiers of service,

1. Eighteen months of military service, not involving deployment but instead focused on mundane tasks such as "painting barracks, mowing lawns, driving generals around, with "low pay but excellent post-service benefits, including free college tuition."

2. A non-military option involving "slightly longer period and equally low pay," performing such tasks as "teaching in low-income areas, cleaning parks, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, or aiding the elderly". After two years participants would qualify for "tuition aid".

3. Opting out - with the consequence being a complete loss of eligibility for government programs, "no Medicare, no subsidized college loans and no mortgage guarantees".

Already, numerous problems appear. By offering significant benefits to those who choose the military without any associated risk - in fact, the proposed service sounds like a cushy cakewalk as compared to what Ricks has in mind for those who don't choose that option, and that's before you consider the shorter term of service and free tuition - you will flood the military with applications. Perhaps that's what Ricks intends, and he wants the military to have first pick of who can participate in its program, but there's only so much need - most applicants would be turned away.

That would put the military in a privileged position in terms of picking and choosing who would receive the most cushy forms of "service" and get the biggest benefit from service. Ricks suggests that this could be done by lottery", but I expect the military would want to be able to vet applicants before they even qualified for the lottery. And although I would like to believe that the military would approach the issue with a commitment to fairness and equality, I somehow believe that children of privilege would end up getting preference for admission and plum assignments. Also, given the significant privilege Ricks would provide for the military service, losers of the lottery would cry foul - "Expand the program," "This is discriminatory," "Do you have any idea who my father is"....

There's another issue: If all teens are required to participate in the "draft", kids who would enlist directly into the military will be stateside, "painting barracks, mowing lawns", etc., instead of being deployed. Perhaps Ricks would propose a fourth option - satisfying the national service through active duty enlistment? Would ROTC count as completion of the national service requirement, as if you remove the economic incentive to participate in ROTC while in college I suspect you would see a significant drop in participation by students who, having done their 18 months of barracks painting, were already getting free tuition. Five tiers, then?

Now compare what a person performing military service might do (painting barracks, mowing lawns) to what Ricks imagines an 18-year-old in non-military service might do (teaching in low-income areas, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure). I'm not aware of any reform movement that believes that 18-year-old kids are suitable classroom teachers for inner city schools, and the skills required to rebuild "crumbling infrastructure" are not modest. It appears that Ricks wants to privilege military service over non-military service, but he does not appear to appreciate the level of skill required by some of the tasks he would assign under the civilian program.

Finally, the libertarians. Government programs are funded through taxes, sometimes through dedicated taxes. If people who opt out are excluded from Medicare (and Social Security?) will they have to pay FICA? Even assuming, fifty years down the line, the "disqualified" individuals haven't achieved enough political clout to vote themselves back into Medicare, it's unlikely that we're going to tell retirees to die in the streets because they didn't participate in a public service program in their youth. Also, frankly, the potential loss of Medicare benefits is not likely to have much of an impression on an 18-year-old - Ricks has to appreciate from his experiences with the military how many 18-year-olds think, and it's not their robust abstract thinking skills and careful planning for the future that makes them appealing targets for military recruitment.

Ricks also presupposes that the participants in the national service program will be unmarried and will not have children. While I grant that marriage rates for 18-year-olds are low, there are plenty of older teens who are married, and even more who have children. And the same type of issues that arise with 18- and 19-year-old enlisted personnel will arise with older teens "drafted" to work on military bases. You will have single parents, you will have married couples, you will have program participants who become pregnant during their service, and you will have children to deal with. Let's also not forget about drugs and alcohol.

Some participants will also have medical issues and disabilities - unless we create yet another tier of (non-)service, allowing people to avoid service while remaining eligible for public benefits based upon their medical conditions.

Ricks seems to approach older teens with the eyes of a drill sergeant - that with enough discipline and oversight they can be made to work as a team, to comply with behavior codes, and to largely fall in line. Ricks appears to believe that a similar level of compliance can be achieved among teenagers, including many who would not be able to handle actual military discipline, in contexts that have high stakes and would necessarily involve a lot less oversight. It would be difficult to replicate the techniques used by the military to achieve unit cohesion, and peer pressure to comply with behavioral codes, even for those people whose service was performed on military bases. The idea that you could create such order and discipline in a gargantuan civilian program, offering everything from meals on wheels to daycare to public school teaching, is absurd.

And for housing, if the best idea Ricks can offer for accommodating hundreds of thousands of teenagers who are participating in the civilian public service program is that we should be "imaginative", "For example, V.A. hospitals might have space", why don't we admit up front that this is a non-starter? Ricks doesn't do much better in terms of the military side, suggesting that we might house "conscript soldiers on closed military bases". Reopen closed bases so that conscripts could paint the barracks, mow the lawns, and drive generals around closed bases? I'm not seeing the benefit.

Rick's basic lack of understanding of the civilian side of the equation is betrayed by his belief that governments could save money by having conscripts in the civilian program - who would have to be housed, fed and clothed by the government - performing tasks like "cleaning parks". I'm not sure how dirty the parks are out where Ricks lives, but around here they're pretty clean. And perhaps Ricks sees this as a purely federally funded project - although the cost per man-hour to the federal government would be substantial, local governments would pay nothing or perhaps at most pay for the supervisor who tells the teens what do do. However it's difficult, really impossible to imagine that the cost per man-hour for a "national service" worker would be less than that paid to the same individual (but with better screening for job skills and task completion) hired as a temporary summer worker or through a private contractor. It's also difficult to see how the program would actually contribute to character growth - what benefit the individual participant would gain that they wouldn't get from any other job.

Also, as Ricks notes, we're talking about more than 4 million 18-year-olds per year, so about 8 million in service at any given time. Ricks suggests "$15,000 plus room and board" for the civilian side, with the military side being better paid - let's say another $12,000 for room and board - $216 billion, and that's before we consider administration, infrastructure, transportation, supervision, medical and dental care.... Lets also assume that 25% of participants will qualify for free college, 50% qualify for a 50% tuition subsidy, and 1/3 of eligible individuals take full advantage for an average of three years each... and further, to save costs, the benefit covers only tuition and only up to the amount of a typical state college... that's another $42 billion or so per year. We're easily looking at a $300 billion per year commitment. I expect that the education cost will be considerably higher as eligible participants are targeted by the same sort of predatory private colleges that rake in huge profits while underserving G.I.'s.

Ricks' continues his argument with a statement that is shockingly wrong:

Imagine how many local parks could be cleaned and how much could be saved if a few hundred New York City school custodians were 19, energetic and making $15,000 plus room and board, instead of 50, tired and making $106,329, the top base salary for the city’s public school custodians, before overtime.

That's akin to confusing the compensation and skill set of a private with that of a sergeant major. Ricks should have been clued in by the fact that the original source behind his two-year-old link was a "scoop" from the "New York Post". Ricks is confusing the top compensation for a supervisor, somebody who not only manages employees but may have environmental certification, and has the necessary skill to maintain and repair boilers, heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, electrical systems, elevator service and maintenance, sewage system maintenance, and potentially dealing with hazardous or infectious waste.

The job that Ricks is confusing with that of the "custodian engineer" is the job of "cleaner" - and in New York City the "15,000 plus room and board" Ricks is offering doesn't sound like it would offer cost savings over the $18.13 per hour (reduced by 15% during the first two years of service) presently paid to cleaners. Moreover, who does Ricks imagine will train and supervise the "energetic" 18-year-old cleaners if not the custodian engineers presently charged with the responsibility of hiring, training and supervising that category of worker?

I will grant, if a typical high school student enters the civilian program with the level of skills you would expect of a high school graduate, and completes it with the ability to Ricks seems to believe that participants in the national service program will be able to service boilers, repair elevators, engage in heavy demolition and infrastructure repair, and the like, that would be quite the achievement. The problem is, Ricks appears to believe that significant numbers of teenagers will possess those skills when they enter the program.

Part of Ricks' goal is to weaken public sector unions:

The savings actually might be a way of bringing around the unions representing federal, state and municipal workers, because they understand that there is a huge budget crunch that is going to hit the federal government in a few years. Setting up a new non-career tier of cheap, young labor might be a way of preserving existing jobs for older, more skilled, less mobile union workers.

It's not clear either why Ricks believes that government workers are unaware of the ongoing budget crunch, or what concessions he believes they should make.

How does Ricks imagine that older, more skilled workers will be protected, or have their incomes preserved, by having their fields flooded with "cheap, young labor"? Further, after two years of service when they're pushed out of their jobs, what does Ricks imagine that those "cheap, young" laborers will do? Their jobs will go to the next round of conscripts, there will be little demand in the marketplace for the skills they developed, and the few available jobs will be flooded with applicants with an associated reduction in how much those jobs pay. Everybody goes to college, even if normal market forces would have led some to choose other paths perhaps more suited to their skills and interests?

Ricks suggests that the most important consideration is that a "draft" might make the nation think twice about entering a war,

But most of all, having a draft might, as General McChrystal said, make Americans think more carefully before going to war. Imagine the savings — in blood, tears and national treasure — if we had thought twice about whether we really wanted to invade Iraq.

Except I can see no evidence from any nation, at any time in history, that a draft has preventing a nation from going to war. And given the non-military nature of Ricks' draft - even if you're in the military you're assigned to stateside support roles, not to anything that might put you in the line of fire - I would not expect such a draft to create any meaningful public pressure to avoid war.

As a thought exercise, thinking about possible national service programs, their costs and benefits, can be an amusing way to spend some time. But

Strategizing Without Overthinking

Tom Ricks is continuing to emphasize a nation's limited ability to achieve strategic clarity before going to war:

These notes I get from military officers demanding clarity of goals and stated strategic purposes puzzle me. The nature of war is ambiguity and uncertainty. I worry that such demands are really a fancy form of shirking.

Ricks believes that the intervention was a necessary and appropriate for humanitarian reasons. If you accept, as he does, that but for President Obama's decision to proceed with the intervention "we would indeed probably now be looking at Benghazi as [President Obama's] Srebrenica", you can state that your goal is to stop that from happening and that, although you haven't given much thought to how you might extricate the U.S. military after the intervention, the cause is sufficiently urgent to justify the risk and expense of a long-term military commitment. But you should be prepared to explain either how you anticipate extricating the military from its commitment or that it's an open-ended military commitment.

The President has, in my opinion somewhat belatedly, spoken on the intervention:

The U.S. "exit strategy" as such appears to be to try to hand off as much responsibility as possible for the continued military intervention to "our NATO allies", which seems to translate into Britain and France. The President states that we're "offering support to the Libyan opposition"; but that appears to be an understatement. It isn't clear to me what degree of regime change is going to end the intervention, but it does seem clear that the present goal is to send a very clear message that it won't end while Qaddafi remains in power.

Juan Cole, a proponent of the intervention, has penned an "open letter to the left" that overlooks, in my opinion, both the fundamental reasons to be concerned about the commitment and that those concerns should not be presumed to be borne of political ideology or to be predicated upon anything other than a reasonable analysis of the situation, its knowns and unknowns.

Among reasons given by critics for rejecting the intervention are:

1. Absolute pacifism (the use of force is always wrong)

2. Absolute anti-imperialism (all interventions in world affairs by outsiders are wrong).

3. Anti-military pragmatism: a belief that no social problems can ever usefully be resolved by use of military force.

Cole admits that almost nobody fits into his first category. The question thus becomes, as Scott Lemiux suggests, how representative are his second and third categories and why no mention of other possibilities? You can reject the notion that this is somehow an exercise in imperialism - you can even reject the concept that U.S. imperialism would be a bad thing - and accept that some problems can be addressed, if imperfectly, through military force, while nonetheless questioning the wisdom of a specific military venture. As John Casey notes, Juan Cole supported the war in Iraq. The circumstances of the action in Libya and the magnitude of the intervention to date are markedly different than those the U.S. faced in deciding whether to enter the Iraq War, but between the underestimated difficulty of that war and the duration and cost of occupation, it's not unreasonable to worry about getting sucked into something much more complicated than what was initially suggested as a planned "no fly zone".

In retrospect, while looking at the same facts, it's possible to argue that George H.W. Bush's decision to end the first Gulf War while leaving Hussein in power was either one of the most cowardly acts of a modern President or one of the most insightful. You can take the position that to depose Hussein would have split the coalition and, although Hussein's defeat would have been inevitable, would have required a massive investment of money, cost a lot of lives, and would have required a lengthy military occupation. Actually, that's the position that George H.W. Bush's administration took - and while you can argue "It still would have been worth it," on the whole they were correct. You can also argue that his approach - supposedly being duped into letting Hussein militarily crush a Shiite uprising, then trying to lock Hussein in a box while his country suffered - created a great deal of human suffering while effectively shifting responsibility for "finishing the job" to a future President. There's truth in that critique, as well. It's not a phenomenon unique to the Presidency, but sometimes no matter what choice you make "you can't win". (And "if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.")

Some advocates of intervention make an assertion that, between the improvement in Qaddafi's military position, his rhetoric about taking revenge against those who rose against him, and now-documented facts about his military strategy (e.g., indiscriminately shelling the occupants of rebel-held cities) we were on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. That the rapid shift of facts on the ground necessitated immediate action. That, unlike situations like Rwanda in which air strikes would have been useless to stop the violence and a full understanding of the situation is said to have come too late for a meaningful intervention, air strikes actually could stop the advances of Qaddafi's forces and stop the shelling of and potential slaughter in major civilian centers. I expect that will be the case the President lays out tomorrow. I also expect that the delay in the President's making a speech is that he didn't want to address the public before there was a firm plan for a hand-off of responsibility for the continued intervention, or perhaps with the hand-off already a fait accompli.

Juan Cole writes,

Assuming that NATO’s UN-authorized mission in Libya really is limited (it is hoping for 90 days), and that a foreign military occupation is avoided, the intervention is probably a good thing on the whole, however distasteful it is to have Nicolas Sarkozy grandstanding.

Let's assume that at the end of 90 days Qaddafi is out of power and neither his successor nor the rebel factions are actively engaged in warfare. How is military occupation avoided? If the country remains divided, would you not expect the national government to at some point seek to unify it? How will reunification occur, and why should we expect in the absence of any form of occupation that it will be peaceful? Why should we not be concerned that each side will violently purge its territory of anybody it believes is loyal to the other side? If those questions cannot be answered, Cole is with Ricks - the situation was urgent enough to intervene without having an exit plan - but he's using a theoretical 90-day time table to avoid admitting the possibility that the incursion could turn out to be much more complicated and much more long-term than NATO hopes. While it's true that the worst-case scenarios almost never come true, on the whole it seems to me that the "candy and flowers" faction doesn't fare much better. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

Shoot First, Ask Questions Later?

Compare and contrast David Brooks:

More important, the nations have not really defined what they hope to achieve.

Is the coalition trying to depose Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi? Are coalition forces trying to halt Qaddafi’s advances or weaken his government? Would the coalition allow Qaddafi to win so long as he didn’t massacre more civilians? Is it trying to create a partitioned Libya? Are we there to help the democratic tide across the region?

And Max Boot:

FOR weeks, I’ve argued that the United States and our allies should impose a no-fly zone over Libya and mount airstrikes to stop Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s advance against the embattled rebels. Last week, the United Nations Security Council authorized precisely those actions. Over the weekend, missile strikes began.

I should be elated, right? Instead, I can’t stop worrying about everything that could go wrong.... The question is whether this will be enough to stop [Qaddafi's] attacks....

Will the rebels be able to root out Qaddafi loyalists? If not, are we prepared to use Western ground forces? So far President Obama has ruled out that option, which runs the danger of a protracted stalemate. Colonel Qaddafi could simply cling to power, while international support for the whole operation frays.

Even if Colonel Qaddafi steps down — an outcome that I believe we must now seek but that hasn’t been declared as a formal aim — the problems hardly end.

That is, even if you're an informed, ardent supporter of the intervention and would support it as a unilateral military venture, there is no reason to believe that that you'll have any sense of what happens next. As Tom Ricks recently stated,

As for the American military, let's knock off the muttering in the ranks about clear goals and exit strategies. Fellas, you need to understand this is not a football game but a soccer match. For the last 10 years, our generals have talked about the need to become adaptable, to live with ambiguity. Well, this is it. The international consensus changes every day, so our operations need to change with it. Such is the nature of war, as Clausewitz reminds us. Better Obama's cautious ambiguity than Bush's false clarity. Going into Iraq, scooping up the WMD, and getting out by September 2003 -- now that was a nice clear plan. And a dangerously foolish one, too.

Granted, Bush's approach could have been an "exit strategy" had he been prepared to admit on September 1, 2003 that his strategy was a complete failure, accept defeat and go home. But as Ricks suggests, I don't think many people would accept that as a good exit strategy.

I'm nowhere near as pollyannaish about war as Max Boot - the stuff that he worries about after wars start is stuff I believe should be addressed beforehand. Even granting that the strategy may have to change, or may turn out to have been misguided, I believe that absent extraordinary circumstances the U.S. should not enter a war of choice without a clear strategy. (For wars of choice, can such extraordinary circumstances ever arise?) If you can't form a coherent strategy for achieving your desired goals, you need to reconsider either your strategy or goals before committing to war.

At the same time, as Ricks suggests, no matter how well-constructed the strategy and plan for invasion and occupation, it's war. Some element of the best laid plan will turn out to have been wishful thinking and anticipating the end game will inevitably involve a lot of luck.