The war they can't get right

I made the mistake of watching James David Robenalt's presentation on his new book The Harding Affair -- Love and Espionage During the Great War, carried on C-SPAN's Book TV, and it was problematic enough to prompt this post.

Now, for my sins, I am an obsessive student of the First World War. The gateway drug of the Second World War having become too mild for me, I moved onto the harder stuff. Garand M-1s wouldn't do it for me anymore, so I graduated to water-cooled Vickers-Maxim heavy machine guns. And it is the bane of anyone who knows anything at all about the First World War that it is very probably the war most freely pronounced-upon by people who are so far out of their depth on the subject, they wouldn't know a pikelhaube from a piccolo if they sat on one.

Unless the work is by the likes of Hew Strachan or Paul Johnson, or John Keegan or Victor Davis Hanson, it's a good policy to avoid 21st Century perspectives on the First World War. They're too often worse than useless. Your typical History Channel "In the Classrom" early-morning documentary which bears on the First World War will make some blithe assertion like that the generals thought trench warfare was a fine idea, and would make a great plan for winning the war. That's the kind of I-think-it-therefore-it-must-be-so-and-there's-no-need-of-checking-it that gets written up, passed through a layer or two of editors, and then passed off as a TV documentary on the First World War.

(That example is legitimate, by the way, though to save my life I couldn't think of the title of the thing. And in case you're wondering, the trenches were nowhere in the plans for the First World War; trench warfare was what happened when the lines stopped moving, and there was nowhere to hide from anti-personnel artillery shelling, long-range, high-powered rifle fire, and sweeping machine gun fire. The trenches weren't some general's idea for winning the war, they were a desperate resort to keep men alive. They weren't planned at all, they just happened when men were faced with the choice of digging a hole or not seeing the next sunrise.)

So I should have known better than to see what this James David Robenalt had to say on the subject. But I'm a sucker for C-SPAN's Book TV, so I watched a bit and promptly had my instincts confirmed by this novel piece of reasoning:

James David Robenalt: "When [then-President] Woodrow Wilson asked for
war, he says it's a war to make the world safe for democracy. And the
reason he says that is he believes democracies are inherently more stable
and less likely to go to war. [So far, so good.]

"[Then-Senator Warren G.] Harding disagrees. He thinks --
and how's this for a modern theme? -- he says, and you can find his
speech on the Senate floor, 'It's none of our business, to go tell somebody
else what government they should have. We should take care
of ourselves, and we really shouldn't be involved in regime change.'
[I take it that wasn't Harding's exact phraseology, which apparently
can be found somewhere on the Senate floor.]

"Now, who was right in that debate? History will tell
you. But I can tell you this: Russia became a democracy, for
about six months, and Wilson recognized them immediately, and he was
joyful. And six months later the Bolsheviks take over. [So
"Russia became a democracy", and the next thing you know, "the Bolsheviks take
over". And it's all the fault of that darn Wilson and his darn
democracy.] And you have Lenin and Stalin, and you know, what
happened in Russia.

"The Kaiser eventually abdicates. Germany becomes a democracy.
But they weren't ready for it. It was a weak democracy: the Weimar
Republic. Naziism comes about, Hitler comes about. [Another
straight line: "Germany becomes a democracy" then "Hitler comes about".]

"So it's a great debate about who was right in that debate about
regime-change. But it's a modern theme. I mean, it's the issue of
Iraq, revisited." [Just in case you hadn't worked out that he was talking about Iraq all along.]

So there you have it. The history of the 20th Century, according to James David Robenalt. Or, James David Robenalt's entry for most buffoonish argument ever made having to do with the First World War and its aftermath, being that it was democracy that gave us the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

According to this line of reasoning, Germany wasn't "ready for democracy" in 1919, though it demonstrably was ready for democracy in 1945, and if only we hadn't insisted on democracy for Germany 26 years "too soon", there'd have been no Hitler and no Second World War. Of course, several generations now, from the 1930s on, have blamed Hitler and the war on the less-than-total victory in the First World War, the ruinous, humiliating, and impossible reparations in the Treaty of Versailles, and the war costs and economic collapse. But James David Robenalt has a different idea: it was the democracy that did it.

And, according to this line, those Communists who'd been attempting revolution in Russia for decades before 1917 and finally had the complete societal collapse they needed to seize power, only managed it because Russia had "become a democracy" for "about six months" in 1917. I have to say, this Russia point looks to me like it goes beyond mere specious argument, to inventing an alternate history which may more conveniently be shoehorned into a potshot against the democracy project of the Iraq War. At what point in the First World War, and in what conceivable sense, did Russia "become a democracy"? That could only refer to what is called the Russian "Provisional Government" of 1917, but the the whole business was chaos from start to finish, the Provisional Government never did get around to holding the national elections which were its principal raison d'etre, and when finally those elections did come to pass, after the October Revolution, Lenin's Bolsheviks wound up the runners-up and without the electoral mandate or legislative votes for their Soviet totalitarianism, so Lenin dissolved the Constituent Assembly after all of one day, and the rest is history. 

And even if Russia had "become a democracy", the argument here goes that, if only the czar had stayed on and showed 'em who's the master, and Wilson hadn't got his "democracy", those Bolshies would never have gotten their little experiment off the ground. Just think, the Robenalt argument goes: no Soviet Union, no Stalin, no Cold War, if only Russia hadn't "become a democracy" for "about six months" in 1917.

Again, since just about the time of the Russian Revolution, it has been understood that the imposition of Communism in that country had everything to do with the mass national revulsion against the old system which had brought the nation to utter ruin, even unto starvation. The strain of the war brought things to breaking point, and the situation was seized on by the Communist faction called the Bolsheviks. And by "old system" I refer to the czarist regime of decades and centuries previous, not some half-imaginary six-month "democracy" in 1917.

I would dearly love to see Christopher Hitchens, who happens to be an authority also of the Bolshevik Revolution, take his rapier to that it-was-all-democracy's-fault line of historical argument.

Now I am no head-shrinker, but I don't think head-shrinking credentials are requisite in order to diagnose the condition of which that argument is a symptom. I'd reckon that it would never have occurred to James David Robenalt to argue that democracy caused the Soviet Empire and Third Reich, before the Iraq War. And I'd reckon that James David Robenalt altogether despises that war and the arguments for it -- particularly the argument that the democratizaion of Iraq sets the model for reform in the region which is our only hope for settling this business once and for all, and that democractization turns enemy to ally -- or if not an affirmative ally then at least a mostly-decent state not routinely invading some neighbor or gassing some unloved domestic minority or fostering hostile alliances or building up unconventional arsenals for the next big dust-up.

I'm just old enough, in fact, to remember a time when that kind or argument was much more likely to be found on the Left than on the Right. But then came 9/11, and the man whom history handed the decision of what was to be done about it happened to be George W. Bush. In what may be the sole deviation of President Bush from Candidate Bush, George W. Bush became arguably the greatest practicing believer in the democracy-makes-peace argument since 1919, and inarguably since 1945. I had my own Road-to-Damascus at about the same time, and became a zealous convert myself, at least for the duration of this war. And for a naive moment I assumed that the elite and the Left, if there's a distinction, would at the very least not oppose that democratization cause. But no. Because democratization necessarily meant war and occupation, and because it had become U.S. policy, and not only that but Bush Administration policy, the elite and the Left turned in one motion to positively demonizing democratization -- condemning it in such terms that anyone might have thought Bush wasn't trying to democratize Iraq but reinstitute slavery -- as if democratization were some grievous historic sin.

And after several years of that, the likes of James David Robenalt comes along and concocts the novel argument that Iraq-style democratization brought the Nazis in Germany and the Soviets in Russia, and all that followed. Funny that no-one thought to make that argument in the 90-odd years since the end of the First World War. And it's hardly as if the rise of Naziism and the rise of Bolshevism haven't been much speculated on in that time.

This book of James David Robenalt is supposed to be about a love affair involving Warren G. Harding, which ought to win some award for wringing 416 pages out of possibly the world's least-interesting historical love affair. But anti-Iraq-War-ism radicalizes, drives to extremes of argument, and infects even the driest historical romance. I won't pronounce on the rest of the book -- though I have to say I got a distinct whiff of German-sympathizing off this Robenalt -- because there's no way I'd look at 416 pages of this, much less pay to look at it.

One almighty push in Iraq

Two days after the last of 28,000 American reinforcements had arrived in Iraq, the independent war correspondent Michael Yon e-mailed a brief dispatch, observing, "This is a very serious offensive kicking off in Iraq. ... Nobody that I am seeing realizes just how big this is." Five days later, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno explained, "We are beyond a surge of forces, and we are now into a surge of operations."

No-one would guess it from the war coverage or the pronouncements of U.S. congressmen, but what is underway is the largest Coalition offensive since the end of major combat operations in 2003. The 11th-hour operational surge, officially named Phantom Thunder, was launched without notice or fanfare, on the same day as the U.S. Armed Forces announced the troop surge complete: June 15.

Iraq being the dominant issue in American public life, the biggest offensive in four years might at least be known to the American people, not just to obsessive followers of military matters. But Phantom Thunder has had less coverage and discussion than the "DC Madam" case. War coverage reliably recounts Coalition and civilian casualties, but not enemy body counts; and whatever explosion the insurgents intended for the evening news that day, but not Coalition operations, much less Coalition successes.

Phantom Thunder is a sort of re-invasion of nearly all Iraq's trouble areas, the insurgent strongholds in Baghdad and the "Baghdad belts" stretching into four surrounding provinces. The objective is to kill, capture, or scare off the insurgents -- mainly al Qaeda in Iraq and the Shiite "Mahdi Army" militia -- and occupy their territory long after, denying them the opportunity to return. This supported by new efforts to strangle insurgent supply lines, as by closing traffic on the Tigris River and policing a double-cordon around Baghdad itself.

In past, when the Coalition has moved in, many insurgents have simply moved on. So these attacks are simultaneous, to help end the unwinnable game of insurgent "whack-a-mole," and the Iraqi Army has occupied some of the more likely destinations for insurgents on the lam.

The cutting edge in Congressional critiques of the war is the "withdraw and fight" school, which declares the policy begun in earnest only weeks ago a failure, and advances an alternative which ironically is precisely the pre-surge policy associated with former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The critics recall that policy as "gross mismanagement of the war," but proceed to endorse its principles: a "small footprint," or minimal American presence, an emphasis on training Iraqi troops, and shepherding American soldiers on bases isolated in safe areas, with limited excursions into trouble spots.

That happens to be the story of the first four years in Iraq. It made good sense as a way of limiting Western involvement and promptly passing power to the new government and Iraqi people, and it may even be a fine idea again if Iraq is successfully pacified. But four years of that very policy did not pacify Iraq, and the surge policy is a recognition of that.

Calling for training the locals at this point is a bit like saying Microsoft ought to try making operating systems. The president made training for Iraqi forces a staple of his re-election campaign three years ago, and the Coalition has done quite a lot of it, to the point that the Iraqi Army is today as large as Britain's.

And as for holding down troop levels and holing up on safe bases, that left territory effectively unoccupied, so that blocks and quarters and cities fell to the insurgents. The new policy puts American soldiers on the streets, and in greater force, to take back and hold territory, and to make the GIs a fixture in the communities.

This is Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency philosophy, drawn from French Algerian Lt. Col. David Galula, that the civilian population can never be an ally -- giving life-saving information or war-winning intelligence -- if they live in fear of the enemy. Once the people are convinced that the Coalition is serious about driving out, and keeping out, the insurgents, then the good information pours in.

There will be a draw down, both in numbers and in mission. There will have to be. The idea was never to run a protracted policing operation on sweltering foreign city streets, but to hand off to a democratic Iraqi government. All sides want a draw down, including the Administration that ordered the increased deployments and expanded operations. It was in part the Administration's desire for a homecoming once the initial mission was complete that wound up enabling the insurgency, as street-level occupation was forgone, allowing insurgents an opening.

The issue now is what is to be done before that inevitable draw down: Complete the first concerted effort to pacify Iraq in four years, or call the whole thing off before the results are even in, and let the chips fall where they may.

It just might be that the soldiers win on the ground, in one almighty push, while the press and politcal class oppose not only their deployment but their cause, and deny any prospect of victory.

Andrew W. Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Before this history is set in stone...

"I am heartsick when I think of the mismanagement of our army.... There never was such a shambling, half-and-half set of incapables collected in one government before or since the world began."

That was the hard judgement of a United States Senator on the conduct of the war by the U.S. Administration; only, the senator was Maine's William Pitt Fessenden, the war was the American Civil War, and the Administration was President Abraham Lincoln's. History has been much kinder than the distinguished senator from Maine to Lincoln and his men.

George H.W. Bush was booted from the White House after a single term, derided as a loser: "Stick a fork in him, he's done," etc. In the 1990s he was recalled as a failure for not "rolling on to Baghdad" and "finishing the job" in Iraq, and soulless for abandoning Iraq's Shiites to Saddam Hussein's bloody enforcers. Yet today he is venerated as the wise statesman, prudently averting the hornet's nest of Iraq, and his former detractors are liable to say, "I always liked him." Evidently not enough Americans truly did "always" like him, or he would have had that second term.

Harry Truman is today as uncontroversial a past president as any, and recently ranked seventh-greatest. In his last year in the Oval Office, however, Truman scored the lowest presidential approval rating yet registered by the Gallup Poll: 22 percent. The Korean War, which was truly Truman's war, launched without even consulting Congress, cost 2.8 million lives all 'round, only to end in stalemate. International Communism made its greatest advances under Truman's watch. And the man now beloved and admired by partisans on both sides was unwanted as a candidate in 1952 by his own party.

Even Winston Churchill was famously tossed out on his ear by British voters while the Second World War was still unfinished, informed that he was no longer Prime Minister while representing his country at the war's last summit meeting. He was largely responsible for such catastrophes and debacles as the Gallipoli campaign in the First World War and the Norway expedition in the second. Detested in the 1930s as a blinkered imperialist and warmonger, his career to 1939 earned the biography title, A Study in Failure. And today Churchill is universally understood to be certainly the greatest statesman of the 20th Century, and one of the great figures in all history.

The initial conventional wisdom in these cases proved to be passing. Some distance and subsequent developments changed the perspective entirely. On Iraq, the conventional wisdom has been written and re-written several times already; there is no reason to believe it must necessarily be fixed where it stands today.

At the time of the 1991 Gulf War, the conventional wisdom was that the war was won, Saddam Hussein defeated. That wisdom shifted as the 1990s progressed, and the troubles and military skirmishes with Saddam Hussein continued, to the thinking that the war had been aborted half-finished. By 2005, the conventional wisdom had undergone a third revolution, to the current certainty that removing Saddam Hussein's regime and replacing it with a democracy was wrong, and Iraq ought to be left to its own devices.

So if the past 16 years are anything to go by, and if the conventional wisdom in its present iteration is heeded and Iraq is abandoned to the jihadists and Iranian proxies, we can expect a new conventional wisdom to form sooner or later, that leaving Iraq was disastrous, and why, oh, why did we not stay on and finish the job when we had the chance?

Iraq and conceivably also Afghanistan may indeed take a dishonourable place in history even after the dust has settled and partisan passions have dimmed, and the leadership may remain villains and scoundrels even in their obituaries. Vietnam and the Johnson and Nixon Administrations are the obvious cases in point, although even there, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon have benefitted somewhat from more recent reappraisals. But the Vietnam War cost 54,000 more American lives than Iraq has, lasted eight years longer, was fought by a draft army instead of volunteer professionals, lacked the context of the 9/11 attacks, and of course ended in defeat. And no, Iraq and Afghanistan are not lost just yet.

"The government has conceived the war wrongly from the start, and no-one has more misconceived it than the Prime Minister himself." The sentiment has been repeated countless times in the past few years on the prosecution of the present wars, but those were the words of British MP Aneurin Bevan in 1942, three years into the Second World War. Even "the good war," the valiant, brilliant, unstoppable crusade, seemed in the darker hours much more like a disaster and a lost cause. The view from the middle of a war is not the clearest.

Andrew W. Smith / Andrew Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

America in the Mideast, two centuries ago

The famous first line of the United States Marines’ Hymn -- "From the Halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli" -- for all its familiarity, invokes some obscure history. "Halls of Montezuma" is a poetic rendering of Chapultepec Castle, iconic battle site of the Mexican-American War, and "shores of Tripoli" alludes to an even more estranged past. "Tripoli" is a bygone name for Libya, and was the scene of the first foreign war of the United States, over two centuries ago.

The First Barbary War must have seemed a quaint episode for most of the intervening 202 years. But today, five-and-a-half years deep in a major Mideastern intervention, the story has new relevance.

No longer under the protective Union Jack, American ships were not covered by British tribute to the Barbary states.

Those were Morocco and the Ottoman provinces of the North African coast: Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, or approximately current-day Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. A large part of the Barbary economies consisted of threatening and attacking shipping, taking hostages and slaves, and collecting ransom and tribute for peaceful passage through the Mediterranean. The racket was enforced by Barbary pirates or "corsairs", who operated officially on behalf of their governments.

This was seen by many Americans -- particularly the new president in 1801, Thomas Jefferson -- as an intolerable injustice, but the Congress dutifully allocated millions for Barbary tribute and ransom: 20 percent of the federal budget in 1800 alone. Then, in 1801, Pasha Yusuf Karamanli of Tripoli demanded an outrageous increase in America's Tripolitan tribute. That tore it. The United States refused to pay Tripoli at all, and Tripoli declared war.

It was for just such a state of affairs that President Jefferson had dispatched a naval contingent to the Mediterranean, which proceeded to blockade the city of Tripoli and escort American shipping through Tripolitan waters.

The other Barbary states had seconded Tripoli's declaration of war, but Algiers and Tunis thought better of that following the show of strength and resolve, and some "gunboat diplomacy" in Tangier harbour persuaded Morocco to sit out the war.

The Americans defeated a Tripolitan corsair; the Tripolitans captured an American frigate with its 300 crewmen; the Americans launched five bombardments plus a failed fireship attack against Tripoli; and the war settled into a stalemate.

After nearly four years without resolution, American tactics were radically revamped. William Eaton had a plan.

Eaton had been U.S. Consul to Tunis, and was uncannily like Lawrence of Arabia over a century later: fluent in Arabic, a maverick, and wont to "go native", adopting the Arab dress.

Eaton advocated "regime change", in contemporary parlance, though of the pre-1945 sort, replacing a hostile strongman with a more agreeable one. A pretender to the throne was found -- the pasha's brother, Hamet -- and an assortment of Marines and mostly-Muslim mercenaries totaling about 500 started the 500 mile march from Egypt to Derna in Tripoli.

There, Eaton's men were outnumbered 10 to 1, but the U.S. Navy controlled the harbor, and after a coordinated naval bombardment and overland charge, Eaton captured the city, albeit with a musket-shot to the wrist.

The campaign halted awaiting supplies and reinforcements for the push to the capitol. But the support never arrived. Instead, Eaton received orders to withdraw. Eaton's expedition had given the United States new diplomatic leverage, and the pasha had negotiated. The American prisoners would be released, the U.S. government would pay $60,000 but no further tribute, American shipping would be free from Tripolitan piracy, and the pasha would remain securely on his throne.

The other Barbary states followed suit. But regardless of any pesky diplomatic commitments, Algerian corsairs resumed their attacks on American shipping only two years later, and Barbary piracy resumed generally once America became preoccupied with war much closer to home by 1812. In 1815, the United States was back at war along the Barbary coast, and this time, the fix would be permanent.

202 years of dizzying change notwithstanding, there are some striking parallels with today.

As early as 1785, then-diplomat Thomas Jefferson had tried to cobble an international coalition to confront Barbary piracy, and if America is hard-put for allies today, it found exactly none two centuries ago.

Contrary to the isolationist argument against today’s Mideastern intervention – that the United States was founded to be an isolationist republic, free of "foreign entanglements", in George Washington’s phrase – America has been here before. Thomas Jefferson himself was an interventionist, and on the Mideast, no less.

The war followed a newly-familiar pattern: early success, stalemate, tactical revolution, then aborting the mission in favor of a partial solution.

Tripoli does demonstrate that, faced with several years of stalemate, the United States can overhaul its tactics and break through; but the next step of abandoning the project absent a final resolution, if also repeated in Iraq, may also mean returning to fight another day.

Andrew W. Smith / Andrew Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle -Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

War by Committee, or Commander

“War by committee” is not just a figure of speech. The Continental Congress managed the Revolutionary War literally by committee, and by all accounts made a sufficient hash of it that when the Constitution was crafted in the Revolution’s wake, the new presidency was invested with the power of waging war.

But Congress was also constitutionally empowered in matters of national defense, to authorize and fund war. So, Congressional anti-warriors looking to withdraw from Iraq could move to either repeal their authorization of the war or de-fund the mission. Congressional attempts to determine troop levels or areas of operation, and even to specify which of their enemies the troops are allowed fighting, would seem to be pushing things constitutionally, and, in any event, would draw a presidential veto.

If Congress were to rescind its Iraq Resolution of 2002, the motion would assuredly be vetoed upon arrival at the White House. Congress could override a presidential veto with a vote of at least two-thirds in both the House and Senate, but the Congressional anti-war bloc is still far from that two-thirds threshold in either chamber.

And the de-funding option presents Congress with a Catch-22. Failing to undo its authorization of the war but halting payment for the on-going operations would place Congress in the position of leaving troops in the field but denying them the wherewithal to fight or even defend themselves. The number of Congressmen prepared to cast such a vote at present does not amount to 51 percent.

Plus which, for all the popular discontent over the war, support for simply de-funding it is in the single digits, according to an April 13 CBS News poll: 9 percent.

Congressional antagonism toward war efforts and war-time presidents is practically as old as the institutions themselves. As the president is commander-in-chief, and as the presidency and Congress are so often held by different parties, Congress can easily wind up as the anti-war branch of the U.S. government.

Only eight years ago, President Clinton launched the Kosovo War with NATO, but without Congress. Twice, a declaration of war resolution was rejected by Congress, as was even an authorization for the on-going air campaign. 26 Congressmen challenged the president’s war in court as unconstitutional for lacking Congressional authority. Nonetheless, Congress actually over-funded the war appropriation and authorized the use of U.S. troops for the post-war occupation.

The Vietnam War was a constitutional chess match between the legislative and executive branches. President Kennedy began the American intervention without Congressional authorization. The operation became full-scale war under President Johnson when he orchestrated Congressional approval for the escalation, which Congress revoked seven years later.

During the Nixon Presidency, Congress invoked its power of the purse to de-fund “combat operations” in the region, although by that stage the American military effort had effectively ended. Of more practical consequence was Congress’ de-funding of the native resistance in South Vietnam and Cambodia, which assured Communist victories and the exodus, abuse, and slaughter of literally millions who had opposed the Communists, or were deemed anti-Communist, in those countries.

The president exploited his power of shifting Congressional defense allocations, to fund operations in Cambodia and Laos which Congress had not provided for, and Congress exploited its power of ratifying treaties, to void agreements the President had negotiated with North Vietnam.

Two decades earlier, President Truman went to war in Korea citing a United Nations resolution and bypassing the Congress. In the 1950 midterm elections only months later, the president’s party lost 52 seats in the House and eight in the Senate. Divisions in the new Congress precluded a concerted legislative challenge to the war, though there was rancorous rhetoric enough. And when the great Gen. Douglass MacArthur gave his immortal Farewell Address after rebelling against Truman so flagrantly that the president was compelled to dismiss him, it was to a rapturous U.S. Congress.

President Wilson had campaigned in 1916 on keeping America out of the First World War, only to lead the nation into the war and institute a draft the following year, and a scant six days before the Great War ended in November 1918, the President’s party went from majority to minority in both the House and Senate, the latter having the Constitutional responsibility for ratifying treaties. So when the post-war Versailles Treaty -- which was very largely the doing of President Wilson and which included American membership in the League of Nations -- came before the hostile U.S. Senate, it was rejected. Twice.

And that is to say nothing of the constitutional confrontations over war before the 20th Century.

With the return to a Congress and presidency divided by party after last year’s midterms, Capitol Hill and the White House have assumed their accustomed adversarial roles, though there are some more novel twists this time around, like the House Speaker arrogating an executive diplomatic role in the Mideast. The balance can always tilt, and politics never stands still, but realistically, Congress today has little chance of reversing the Iraq policy in this latest showdown between the legislative and executive.

Andrew W. Smith / Andrew Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia
Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

New Sheriff in Baghdad

The war coverage remains dominated by the most superficial “exploding car of the day” stories, and half of Washington uninterestedly insists that nothing has changed, but the new Iraq plan is being implemented.

The plan is reductively referred to as the “troop surge”, but simply adding soldiers would not amount to a plan.

At least 24,000 new U.S. combat troops have been committed to Iraq, at last count, plus about 5,000 support troops. The surge stands to strengthen the Iraq deployment by nearly a quarter, to about 160,000. Only two-fifths of the extra soldiers are in-country as yet, and the full complement is not expected to arrive until June.

The plan those troops are to enforce is drawn from four years’ hard experience and historic counterinsurgencies.

Gen. George Patton famously took a dim view of “paying for the same real estate twice,” and the plan takes that to heart. American forces have in past fought very hard to clear insurgent strongholds and then withdrawn, on the understandable thinking that the American and Iraqi people both want American troops drawn down, and that the Iraqi forces and government should assume their country’s administration as soon as possible. But the effect has been to allow jihadists and militiamen to return unopposed once the Americans have left. Hence the new “clear, control, and retain” policy, sweeping insurgents and weapons out of an area, then patrolling it vigorously to deny it to the enemy.

A century ago, as part of the British plan that finally won the guerilla Boer War, a grid-and-blockhouse system was devised. That “quadrillage” principle was later adopted by the French in Algeria, and now the Americans in Iraq. Baghdad has been divided into 11 sectors, with 70 “Joint Security Stations” now planned for housing American and Iraqi forces. The stations are being built in as little as three days. The sectors divide responsibilities for the entire city into manageable blocks, and the stations give the troops a permanent local presence and handy safe havens.

The French campaign in Algeria in the 1950s and ’60s was lost politically, in France, but French forces had by the end turned the tide militarily, and one of the policies credited for that was the mixing of French troops with the locals. Likewise, American troops are now moving off insular Forward Operating Bases and into the Joint Security Stations in civilian communities, with Iraqi forces, to foster cooperation and develop a working knowledge of the country on the most local level.

Four-star Gen. David Petraeus has assumed command of Multinational Forces Iraq, and, as the biographical line goes, has literally written the book on counterinsurgency: “Field Manual 3-24”.

Economic stimulation is to be increased, as in infrastructure programs, to employ the locals in hopes of occupying the more opportunistic trouble-makers.

And the issue of the foreign underwriters of Iraq’s insurgency is no longer being neglected. The borders with Syria and Iran have been closed as need be. The United States is engaging Iran diplomatically for the first time since the founding of the Islamic Republic -- at the urging of the Iraqi government -- and at the same time, squeezing Iran financially, confronting Iranian elements in Iraq, and adding a second aircraft carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf fleet.

The plan focuses on Baghdad for the obvious reasons that it is the capital, largest city, most mixed city, and the scene of by far the most bloodshed, but – so to speak -- as the new sheriff has come to town, the bad guys have gotten out of Dodge. The Baghdad elements of al-Qaeda in Iraq particularly have shifted to neighbouring Diyala province. Baghdad must be the priority, but the trick will be seeing that gains there are not offset by setbacks elsewhere.

Iraq’s largest militia, the Shiite “Mahdi Army” of Muqtada al-Sadr, has largely disappeared without a fight, and Sadr himself has fled to Iran. The worry is that, by simply dissolving, the militia will survive the push and return to fight another day. But if American and Iraqi forces hold the territory surrendered by the militia, there may be no opening for a return. And if the Sunni threats to the Shiite community are similarly dealt with, that would eliminate one of the rationales for Shiite militias in the first place.

One wonders why all this was not done much earlier, but the situation was not always so bad, and the idea was to “stand down”, certainly not to expand the U.S. presence and mission.

The plan is smart, the stakes are immense, and all that is asked of those of us who “sleep peaceably in our beds” is time for the plan to either sink or swim.

Andrew W. Smith / Andrew Smith, Tulsa, OK and Cape Sable Island, NS

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Taking the Short Way to the Grammys

The timing and location were important: the eve of war, and overseas.

There is an American tradition that “politics stops at the water’s edge”, that an American speaks only as an American, not as a partisan of one side or the other, once he or she leaves America’s shores and makes a representation to the outside world, especially at war time. I’ve never appreciated the importance of that, since the outside world has full access to the partisan and dissenting opinions within America, and besides, Americans can say whatever the spirit moves them to, and opinions of the likes of the Dixie Chicks should be of no more significance than the two cents’ worth of any three people you’d land behind in a checkout line.

Also important was the sort of folks who tend to populate country music fandom: patriotic and traditionally-minded Americans. Some obscure punk group with an America-hating fan base wouldn’t have warranted mention if they had prattled on onstage about their disdain for the President, regardless of timing and location, or even four-lettered verbiage.

But, overseas and on the eve of war, the Dixie Chicks front-woman Natalie Maines remarked of her troupe’s “embarrassment” at hailing from the same state as the President -- which seems to me to be a quite superficial way of expressing opposition to a war policy -- and the country crowd didn’t exactly cotton to it. Now the Dixie Chicks have made practically a second career of their pity party/self-adulation, in song and film and interminable television appearances.

And then came the 2007 Grammy Awards.

The Dixie Chicks’ “Not Ready to Make Nice” is neither good music nor particularly popular, and it doesn’t qualify for recognition on some other grounds like “pioneering a new sound”, “influencing other artists”, or some such thing. It is musically plain and drab, and otherwise indulgent, narcissistic, bitter, humorless, petty, and preachy. But it somehow won the Grammy for “Best Song”, erasing any doubt about how these awards shows work.

The best song of the past year was certainly “Crazy”, by the new British pop outfit Gnarls Barkley. It stamped itself on the year in a way no other pop song came close to doing. It was hypnotic, a tour de force vocally, completely original and a stand-out from the typical fare, and wildly popular. The video was so influential that the Grammy Awards broadcast itself aped its Rorschach Test-style motif. And yet “Crazy” was not included among the nominees for Best Song. “Not Ready to Make Nice” made its dubious way onto the list, and took the easy, “Crazy”-free path to victory.

Despite its musical or creative deficiencies, “Not Ready to Make Nice” is laden with the sort of politics and partisanship which the good people of the entertainment business go for, and that evidently counts for quite a lot.

The best country album was clearly Carrie Underwood’s debut, Some Hearts. It was far and away the best-selling country album of the year and for half a decade (since the Dixie Chicks’ last pre-kerfuffle album, as it happens) , it has churned out no fewer than four Number 1 hits, and yet it was not included even as a nominee in the Best Country Album category. That the best-selling country album in years, with four tracks hitting Number 1, was excluded from the choices for Best Country Album of the year, must necessarily have been a conscious decision, not some oversight or plain tough luck. That conspicuous omission left the Dixie Chicks’ Taking the Long Way with an open field, unmolested by any pesky competition, and it wasn’t such a long way after all to a second Grammy.

Grammy Awards winners are chosen by the music “industry” itself, from the musicians to the producers, who typically incline toward Dixie Chicks-politics, and their choice of the Dixie Chicks for Best Country Album and Best Song can only be taken as a political statement. Mouth the right politics and you might even pick up a Grammy or two, provided the Grammy masters prevent your stiffest competition from consideration alongside you.

The Grammys are a standard-bearer among the ridiculous, pompous, fraudulent awards shows; self-congratulatory, mutually-reinforcing, rarely meritocratic, and rarely able to recognize true greatness that makes the mistake of only doing well, not doing well by the sensitivities of the entertainment elite.

Oh, yes, and the Dixie Chicks’ acceptance speeches were the most indulgent and self-absorbed of the night. True to form.

The Iraq Push - "Retreat by any name would do nothing to end this war"

This war should have been wrapped up and the soldiers shipped home in one piece long ago, but here we are.

No matter how necessary and overdue the cause, no matter how swift and clean the invasion, and no matter how sizable a downpayment on future security a sustainable democracy in Iraq would be, the post-invasion phases have been too long, too costly, and the patience of the American people is at bottom.

Americans cannot remain unmoved after watching fellow Americans die, a handful at a time, on their news every day for nearly four years, when the cause seems so beyond hope, and when the arguments against the war are pop culture, while the arguments for it are to be found in occasional, ignored speeches, unread opinion journals, and obscure think tanks.

After Americans’ discontent with the status quo was registered in the recent Congressional elections and the timid Iraq Study Group recommendations managed to disappoint everyone, the message was taken that no marginal tweaking of the Iraq policy would suffice anymore.

The problem in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, is security. Without that modicum of security, the nation cannot function and progress. There are political problems, especially governmental collusion with Shiite militias. There is also corruption, especially among the Iraqi police, not disbanded and rebuilt after the war like the Iraqi Army. But the fundamentals are strong: The people have converted to democracy, and the change could even be irreversible. What is needed most is security, and that takes soldiering.

More soldiering is unlikely to be easy or popular, but it is possible. The Washington Times reports that 50,000 extra combat troops are available for deployment to Iraq, and the Commander-in-Chief still has two years and an authorization of force.

It deserves mentioning that Iraq has not followed a straight line from initial success to current despair. The fascists at the heart of so much Mideastern conflict have been captured or killed. Western forces have gone undefeated militarily. The Kurdish north and much of the Shiite south have become functioning free societies. Iraq's economy has somehow managed to thrive. And the Iraqi people have voted massively and enthusiastically in three national elections, even at risk of death, demonstrating that they do in fact want this democracy and need only the security and good-faith leadership to make it work.

The temptation is to imagine that picking up and leaving Iraq, and Afghanistan and the Mideast generally, would be the end of it: No more strife, no more military funerals, no more smouldering rubble and body counts on the news. But retreat by any name would do nothing to end this war. The war will continue with Western troops in the field or back home on their bases.

Jihadists bent on killing Westerners would be free to pursue us elsewhere, including in our own countries. Taliban slave-masters would be free to bludgeon the Afghan people back into their old nightmare. Sunni militants who have known little else but killing Shiites and Kurds would be free to see how far they get against a vengeful 80 percent of the country unrestrained by Western forces and influence. And Shiite Iranian agents would be free to butcher their way toward remaking Iraq as the Greater Islamic Republic of Iran.

Quitting wars prematurely, leaving the enemy to fight another day and neglecting to fix the countries at the source of the trouble, has become something of a new Western tradition, and solves nothing.

Once the Russians had been dispatched in the Soviet-Afghan War, the West abandoned Afghanistan to the Mujahideen who later formed the Taliban and al Qaeda which we fight today. The 1991 Gulf War was halted without excising its source, which left the job to the 2003 war that bleeds on today. The Somalia intervention of the early '90s was aborted at the first upset, and today the country is a battlefield falling into and out of the hands of the al Qaeda-allied Islamic Courts Union, Somalia's own Taliban. Even the troubles with North Korea, not to mention the grinding misery of its people, are the result of the West settling the Korean War with a stalemate leaving the North under the Communist government that today detonates third-rate nukes and fires erratic ballistic missiles.

We are free to continue our new tradition of committing to wars and then abandoning them unfinished, negating the sacrifices of our volunteer soldiers, but by now we ought have no illusions that quitting will bring peace to anyone but the enemy.

If we cannot muster the will for this, when all that is required of us is to maintain moral support for historically small military commitments of our professional fighting forces, then we really are the craven, decadent paper tigers the jihadists think we are.

Andrew W. Smith / Andrew Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia