Bacevich on Iraq

Not surprisingly, I agree with Andrew Bacevich:

Look beyond the spin, the wishful thinking, the intellectual bullying and the myth-making. The real legacy of the surge is that it will enable Bush to bequeath the Iraq war to his successor -- no doubt cause for celebration at AEI, although perhaps less so for the families of U.S. troops. Yet the stubborn insistence that the war must continue also ensures that Bush's successor will, upon taking office, discover that the post-9/11 United States is strategically adrift. Washington no longer has a coherent approach to dealing with Islamic radicalism. Certainly, the next president will not find in Iraq a useful template to be applied in Iran or Syria or Pakistan.

According to the war's most fervent proponents, Bush's critics have become so "invested in defeat" that they cannot see the progress being made on the ground. Yet something similar might be said of those who remain so passionately invested in a futile war's perpetuation. They are unable to see that, surge or no surge, the Iraq war remains an egregious strategic blunder that persistence will only compound.

The case for the surge, and the war more generally, has long been bound up in a failure to think coherently about purposes and objectives. If, instead, you throw a bunch of troops into the mix, have them do a bunch of stuff, see what happens, and then define in retrospect whatever it is they're accomplishing as the purpose of the mission, then, sure, new tactics are working. When our old tactics were aimed at having our troops wander around the desert and kill armed Sunni Arabs, we succeeded in doing that. Switch tactics to helping to train and equip these very same people, and now we're succeeding at doing that. But what are we trying to accompish?

Comments

Matt's really *much* better at being a "token foreign policy columnist" than a "token Latino columnist"...

Posted by RKU | January 20, 2008 4:32 PM

But Bacevich makes another point -- that one of the main purposes of "teh SURGE!!!(tm)" among its promoters was aimed at U.S. domestic politics: to divert attention from the post-2006 election pressures (and post 'Iraq Study Group' pathetic pleading nonsense) and make it politically impossible to even speak of troop reductions.

That worked, and it worked overwhelmingly. I don't think the main promoters of teh SURGE!!!(tm) care whether or not it went well in Iraq. It effectively put the administration's domestic opposition to sleep.

...In only one respect has the surge achieved undeniable success: It has ensured that U.S. troops won't be coming home anytime soon. This was one of the main points of the exercise in the first place. As AEI military analyst Thomas Donnelly has acknowledged with admirable candor, "part of the purpose of the surge was to redefine the Washington narrative," thereby deflecting calls for a complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces. Hawks who had pooh-poohed the risks of invasion now portrayed the risks of withdrawal as too awful to contemplate. But a prerequisite to perpetuating the war -- and leaving it to the next president -- was to get Iraq off the front pages and out of the nightly news.

At least in this context, the surge qualifies as a masterstroke. From his new perch as a New York Times columnist, William Kristol has worried that feckless politicians just might "snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory." Not to worry: The "victory" gained in recent months all but guarantees that the United States will remain caught in the jaws of Iraq for the foreseeable future...

Why do people keep thinking that people like the Kagans or Bill Kristol or Dick Cheney care in the slightest that Iraq will really get 'better' apart from whether or not Iraq policy gets them whatever it is they want?

Posted by El Cid | January 20, 2008 4:36 PM

But what are we trying to accompish?

Same as what the war objectives were on the day we invaded in 2003.

Eliminating effective, organized domestic opposition in this country to the Glorious Revolution -- not oil, not democracy, not WMD's, not human rights, not even revenge for 9/11 -- was the goal of the operation.

Cheney and company saw an opportunity to do a Mulroney on the Democratic party, but first they would need a war.

The Iraq escapade wasn't anything but the world's most expensive campaign commercial to begin with, it delivered in 2002, and in 2004, and with McCain the GOP nominee, it might still work, especially if the Democrats can be persuaded to be complicit in their own destruction.

Posted by Davis X. Machina | January 20, 2008 4:48 PM

The real legacy of the surge is that it will enable Bush to bequeath the Iraq war to his successor...

And we can safely assume that his successor, whoever he or she may be, will never go before the American people and plainly, clearly, baldly explain that we are shoulder deep in shit because of the previous administration. Should that successor be a Republican, the reasons are obvious. Should that be a Democrat, the reasons are less clear.

Posted by Roddy McCorley | January 20, 2008 6:27 PM

"But what are we trying to accomplish?"

Nothing less than the wholesale transformation of the nation-state system that has been in place, more or less, since the Peace of Westphalia.

That the goal is unachievable, the means laughably inadequate, and the perpetrators incompetent -- these are mere details.

Posted by Invigilator | January 20, 2008 6:34 PM

Once again, mainstream critics of the Iraq war can only bring themselves argue that it's too difficult and inconvenient for Americans:

"Such success comes at a cost. U.S. casualties in Iraq have recently declined. Yet since Petraeus famously testified before Congress last September, Iraqi insurgents have still managed to kill more than 100 Americans. Meanwhile, to fund the war, the Pentagon is burning through somewhere between $2 billion and $3 billion per week."

Seriously? The "cost" of the surge is 100 dead Americans? Not the massive spike in Iraqi deaths that followed it, the creation of a new flood of refugees (50,000 per month)? If America were to "win" this war, that would mean successfully tearing apart a third-world country and destroying its native resistance through a combination of bribery and slaughter.

Here's what Iraqis think about the effects of the surge. But who cares about them?

Posted by Mick | January 20, 2008 7:40 PM

Of course, permanent bases for long-term strategic use has been the goal og teh operation from the start. And a goal that many Dems went along with (and still hope to acomplish).
More time equals more time. The Army (and especially the Air Force) is NOT leaving.

Posted by M. Carey | January 20, 2008 10:00 PM

Not to be too materialistic, but somewhere down the road we might wish we still had that trillion dollars or so we borrowed from Asian and oil-exporter central banks and spent in Iraq. (that includes both current costs and future equipment replacement and medical/pension costs).

Posted by Fabius Maximus | January 20, 2008 10:03 PM

McCorley (@6:27 p.m.) is right. The strongest taboo in democratic states is announcing to the world that the policies and practices of one's predecessor regime were wrong, calamitous and just plain evil. Even a Kucinich administration wouldn't do that. More's the pity.

Posted by Henderstock | January 20, 2008 10:56 PM

Well, I don't know whether I really agree with this.

It's a little like with monarchies. Usually the new king doesn't want to say too many negative things about his predecessor, even if he really disagreed with his policies. After all, it's usually his own father we're talking about.

But then, every now and again, things get really, really bad, and there's not merely a change of kings but a complete change of dynasties. When that happens, the new king doesn't merely say a few nasty things about the people in his predecessor's regime, but actually has them all publicly executed.

Somehow, I have a growing feeling that America may be approaching a change of dynasties...

Posted by RKU | January 20, 2008 11:16 PM

Why do people keep thinking that people like the Kagans or Bill Kristol or Dick Cheney care in the slightest that Iraq will really get 'better' apart from whether or not Iraq policy gets them whatever it is they want?

Speaking of which, does it come as a surprise that the WaPo also published yet another disinfo piece by Kagan and O'Hanlon? Because it is the WaPo, after all. Any guesses about what K & O'H have to say about their project? Any guesses about how often they mention the ongoing Sunni buy-off as a factor in the "success" of the "surge"?

Posted by sglover | January 20, 2008 11:25 PM

I can't wait until the new Iraqi nationalist coalition government - which is being worked on as we type here - dumps Maliki, orders the US out, and when the US doesn't go, starts a "surge" of their own with all the main Shia factions and all the Sunni insurgents united in driving out the US once and for all - with full Iranian support.

Oh, the US is leaving all right - either all at once in an evacuation or in body bags. The US will not be in Iraq more than another 12-24 months tops.

Anybody who thinks the Iraqis are just going to sit there and let US troops wander around shooting them for the next 100 years just hasn't got a clue. Just about everybody in Iraq has had it with the US - the Kurds, the Shia, the Sunnis, the clerics, the guy on the street - everybody except maybe Maliki - and he isn't sure whether he should be obeying Iran or the US on any given day.

The war is OVER. The US lost. End of story - except for the evacuation or the final dying.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 21, 2008 3:12 AM

I remain unconvinced that we need a "coherent approach to dealing with Islamic radicalism." It inflates the importance of coherence in foreign policy, and exaggerates the problem of islamic extremism itself. While I wish that we did engage more rationally in our affairs-it would be nice of our decisions made some kind of sense that wasn't constantly spun about by the ever changing winds of politics-it is a mistake to conflate that with, say, having some grand and impossible strategy to deal with Middle Eastern affairs. I'm tired of the pretense that we are locked in some kind of world-ending struggle with militant muslim fundamentalists. 9/11 was terrible, but if this is really all we have to worry about in the contemporary scene of national security, we should be thanking our lucky stars. It wasn't that long ago that we were courting apocalyptic annihilation with the Soviets. We are safer now than we were during the Cold War-and yet no one seems to actually feel that way. Maybe the threat of a nuclear holocaust is simply more civilized a thing to imagine than having one's head chopped off. Scary as the latter is, it's nothing compared to the former.

Posted by gerontion | January 21, 2008 11:11 PM