"Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason--cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason--must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense."
Young Man's Lyceum address
Springfield, Ill.
Jan. 27, 1838
Iraq: Yes, Mr. Snow, We Should Have Known
Posted 2:17 p.m., February 16, 2007
|
There is an old Civil War story about a Confederate officer on horseback, sword brandished, the long feather in his dashing hat waving in the breeze like Captain Ahab's dead arm. The officer, drunk on dreams of gallantry, apparently lost touch with the moment he was actually occupying. Facing a solid wall of Union infantry and hoping to rally his decimated troops, he recklessly rode forward, screaming, alone.
It's said that the sight was breathtaking, even hypnotic—as glorious as a Southern gentleman might have desired. Many a Union man gasped at the sight, some even cried as the foolishly brave grey-coat thundered forward on his mount. A few Union officers cried out, "Hold your fire! Hold your fire," not wanting to destroy the mystical beauty of this strange, galloping apparition. But it was no use. This was mechanized war. All trace of Napoleonic glory had long ago been burned away, in the muzzle flash of a million infantry muskets. The officer and his horse went down, shredded in a merciless hail of minie balls.
Yet we can understand that officer's lunacy. The lessons of war are hard won, and as has been often said, armies tend to operate as if they were fighting their previous conflict, not the one they are actually in. In the 1860s, armies fought stupidly, as though war remained mired in the Napoleonic era—only 40 years past—with its massed troops holding long pike spears. The casualty rate of the Civil War was increased by a rate that is impossible to calculate, because commanders stubbornly required troops to "mass their fire"—fighting shoulder to shoulder—rather than to adopt today's tactic of spreading out.
The officer on horseback simply had an old-fashioned notion of what is meant by honor, courage and bravery, in the context of modern war. In short, he died in the name of long-dead chivalry.
Chivalry had no place in the Civil War, the first truly modern war. Its weaponry was almost as accurate and destructive as the weapons used in, say, Korea or Vietnam—lacking, really, only magazine cartridges, encased explosives and air support. By April 1861, bullets that previously flew as wildly as bumble bees were now being spit out of rifled muskets, accurate at a thousand yards or more. Civil War commanders eagerly adopted the new weaponry, but adopted very slowly the changed tactics those weapons required.
They simply didn't know any better. For the most part, the tactical lessons of the Civil War would have to wait for a new generation of officers, and the next war.
That's because there simply was no precedent for the Civil War.
The same cannot be said of Iraq.
Which is why what White House press secretary Tony Snow had to say yesterday was possibly the dumbest thing he has said yet, even as it was stated with enough confident bluster to convince a good number of wishful-thinking people.
A reporter had asked Snow about newly released military documents from 2002 that indicate the U.S. government believed that, by now, there would remain in Iraq a mere token U.S. force of 5,000 soldiers, and that those would be sufficient to stabilize the country. "What went wrong?" the reporter asked. Snow gave an astonishing response: "I'm not sure anything went wrong." Then he waxed historical.
"At the beginning of the Civil War, people thought it would all be over at Manassas. ... The fact is, a war is a big, complex thing. And what you're talking about is a 2002 assessment. We're now in the year 2007, and it is well-known by anybody who has studied any war that war plans immediately become moot upon the first contact with the enemy."
--Tony Snow
White House press secretary
press briefing
Feb. 15, 2007There is just enough truth to what Snow says here to cloud over the obfuscation. A fighting force's best laid plans always are laid to waste by the enemy's best-laid plans. True enough. Many thought the Civil War would be decisive and brief. Again, quite true.
But it is also true that, had the U.S. Army of, say, 1858 taken stock of the new, modernized weapons in its armories and war-gamed the battlefield tactics that these weapons would facilitate, the war might have been conducted in a much different way. The Civil War's horror was preordained only to the extent that its commanders were ignorant of what was likely to come. And that, unfortunately, is something they simply didn't have either the information or the imagination to foresee.
The Bush administration might have lacked imagination. But it had access to plenty of information, which it chose to ignore.
There were many illustrations of the kind of war this one was likely to turn into on the shelves of every military library, not to mention Amazon.com. How otherwise to explain the rather sad accuracy of predictions I made in 2004 about where this war likely was headed? I'm no military genius. I'm just a regular civilian who reads.
The fact is, despite the ready claims of the president and his defenders, much about the likely outcome of this war should have been, could have been, and was predicted. There are many histories written about the British incursion into Iraq, which ended miserably. The Future of Iraq project produced a 13-volume set of predictions about the likely course of a war and suggestions to create a good outcome. All ignored.
The Army War College's study on reconstructing postwar Iraq, published nearly two months before the invasion, stated in very certain terms what would likely happen if the Iraq War was undertaken without careful planning and sound strategy.
"To be successful, an occupation such as that contemplated after any hostilities in Iraq requires much detailed interagency planning, many forces, multi-year military commitment, and a national commitment to nationbuilding."Recent American experiences with post-conflict operations have generally featured poor planning, problems with relevant military force structure, and difficulties with a handover from military to civilian responsibility.
"To conduct their share of the essential tasks that must be accomplished to reconstruct an Iraqi state, military forces will be severely taxed in military police, civil affairs, engineer, and transportation units, in addition to possible severe security difficulties.
"The administration of an Iraqi occupation will be complicated by deep religious, ethnic, and tribal differences which dominate Iraqi society.
"U.S. forces may have to manage and adjudicate conflicts among Iraqis that they can barely comprehend.
"An exit strategy will require the establishment of political stability, which will be difficult to achieve given Iraq’s fragmented population, weak political institutions, and propensity for rule by violence."
--U.S. Army War College report,
"Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario,"
Feb. 1, 2003
The recent release of the 2002 military papers does nothing more than to reiterate what the U.S. government knew very well. To coin a ribald phrase, Tony Snow simply has his head up his Manassas.
Recently, one particular book, Alistair Horne's "A Savage War of Peace," has received a great deal of attention for containing particularly cogent lessons about America's experience in Iraq. Again, to contradict Mr. Snow, it contains information and insights that were readily available well before "first contact with the enemy" in Iraq. In fact, the book was first published in 1977.
The book is too dense to go into in detail. But it gives a harrowing depiction of France's war against Muslim nationalists in its colony of Algeria, a fight that began shortly after World War II. It's not a perfect analogy. The Battle of Algiers was purely a struggle for national liberation, while Iraq is that, a jihadist movement, a clan war, a religious sectarian struggle and probably a whole lot more.
Nevertheless, Horne sees three important and instructive parallels between the two conflicts.
- First, once Algeria's rebel militia realized it could not beat the French head on, it took to attacking the country's police force. The result was a deadly loss of morale among the police, and an accompanying shift in tactics by the French toward reflexively protecting Algeria's cops. Iraq's insurgents have used that tactic from the very beginning. Many among the Iraqi police have abandoned their posts as a result, and others have actually joined the insurgency, perhaps viewing that as the safer alternative.
- Second, the insurgents in Iraq, just as in Algeria, are the beneficiaries of porous frontiers. The French were unable to pursue its enemy across international boundaries into safe havens in Tunisia and Morocco without stoking a wider conflict. Iraq's insurgents are using Syria and Iran in the same way, leading to the dangerous possibility that the U.S could blunder into a wider war, particularly with a strengthened Iranian state.
- Third and finally, the issue of torture has arisen in both cases. The French brazenly applied torture in the Algerian War, which according to Horne is the factor that led most directly to France's ultimate defeat, because it led to a collapse in support by the French population and the world at large—the French, it emerged, were employing the same interrogation methods France had condemned during its occupation by the Nazis. Abu Ghraib has had the same effect in Iraq. President Bush himself recently mentioned prisoner abuse at the facility as the gravest mistake of the war.
Perhaps worst of all, the conflict, while giving Algeria its ultimate independence, left the country with a fractured society and weak governing structure. That has left Algeria in an almost constant state of armed struggle, and made it a hotbed of jihadism since the war ended in 1962. That, too, is a likely outcome in Iraq.
The president's supporters are quick to criticize anyone who spends all their time looking backward at past blunders instead of forward to a solution in Iraq. Fair enough. But in this case, the president's press secretary cast a long and faulty glance back at history to press his case. He deserves to be called out on it.
-- Kevin Featherly
|
In memory of Laird Brooks Schmidt , a Twin Cities community treasure--and member of my church--who died on Veterans Day 2004 at the age of 80. Laird was the midnight-to 6 a.m. overnight host for KSTP-TV in 1978-79, where one critic described him as local television's "freestyle delphic oracle." Unfortunately, Laird's ability to communicate mostly had been robbed from him by his disease by the time I met him, so I never really got to know him. But I have become close to his dear, incredibly talented wife Beverly, and I offer this little shrine to Laird in her honor as well as his.
"The Variety Show," Cable Access St. Paul (circa 1988), segment 1.
"The Variety Show," Cable Access St. Paul (circa 1988), segment 2.
|
NEW KEVROCK TUNEAGE! Spotlight on The Huge. Click here
Visit the Kevblog archive.
About Kevin Featherly
Copyright 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 -- Kevin Featherly