Easily Distracted

Which actually makes me feel again the appreciation for William F. Buckley that I’ve felt from time to time. Norman Podhoretz, on the other hand…

Continuing still further on some of these questions.

If the answer to the question, “What is the declared aim of the United States in Iraq?” is, “The establishment of a stable liberal democracy”, that’s not a sufficient answer. Because it doesn’t say how important that aim is, about what kinds of predictive standards we could use to judge whether it was being achieved, and whether or when we might judge that it had failed to be achieved.

This isn’t a war aim like “the unconditional surrender of the military and government of an enemy” or “taking and holding a particular territory or resource”. The achievement of those aims speaks for itself. This objective is different.

If the answer is, “Any and all prices are worth paying for this objective, and there is no predictive standard for failure which will be acceptable,” then that’s a laughably Green-Lanternish or pony-seeking answer. There’s no point in an ongoing conversation at that juncture.

I’m equally interested, however, in a tough and specific public conversation about what the forces fighting American troops in Iraq see as their aims. I don’t assume that state or political actors are rational, or have a transparent understanding of their own interests: they’re just as enmeshed in cultural, institutional and historic frameworks as anyone else.

But if I were an insurgent leader in Iraq who had a Machiavellian cast of mind, I might see the situation this way:

1) If I were associated with the Mahdi Army or other Shi’a militia groups or political associations, and I were strongly allied to and in conversation with the political leadership in Iran, I might well want US troops to remain in Iraq, off-balance and tied down enough so that they don’t interfere much with my activities, but not aggravated enough by my own activities that they make me an urgent target. Why? Because I can’t imagine a greater gift to the Iranian leadership than the embattled presence of US troops in Iraq. What better guarantee against a military attack on Iran could you ask for? If US troops are barely able to hold the situation together when Shi’a militias are only providing them with lower-level resistance, then the threat of a coordinated all-out resistance from both Shi’a militias and the Shi’a political and religious leadership in Iraq is a serious one. Beyond that, keeping US forces a bit off-balance while holding out hope for strategic partnership is also potentially a great way to use US military power to indirectly (or even directly) shore up Shi’a control of the central Iraqi state. If the US were to leave, then it would fall directly to more militant Shi’a interests to suppress or control Sunni communities and institutions, a much dicier business. But you don’t want to give the US an free hand, either, which means occasional flexing of muscles and keeping US forces under pressure.

2) If I were associated with al-Qaeda (or whatever we want to call the ‘foreign’ or international Islamicist militant presence in Iraq), then the presence of US troops is a godsend. It gives me a nearby target that I can hit with great persistence for big propaganda and mobilization benefits. It’s not just their presence: the fact that US troops are occupiers who have tortured prisoners, directly or indirectly caused the deaths of many civilians, and so on provides a propaganda victory before the insurgents have to do anything. Beyond that, however, almost anything these insurgents do while the US remains is a win-win situation. Keeping pressure on US forces, tying up US resources? Makes it harder to exert power in Afghanistan and Pakistan, let alone other possible theaters of operation. Killing US troops? Military and propaganda value. Spectacular acts of mass killing? Makes the US look feeble and unable to provide security, as long as the US is there and promising to stop such acts. Losing some of my own forces? Big deal, they’re dumb, young, idealistic volunteers from all over the world. More where they came from. This group isn’t in it for the sake of Iraqis, so they have no need to care whether or not Iraqis would like the US to withdraw. Of course, if the US withdraws, this group also satisfies a war aim–that’s a major embarassment for the US, roughly like the Soviets leaving Afghanistan. But there’s no particular reason to want the US gone.

3) Sunni nationalist insurgents. This is the only group that I can see has a genuine, sustained interest in a US withdrawal, and whose military and political actions might, in a clear-headed or calculated sense, be directed strongly at that objective. But at the same time, this group might well be interested in a political settlement, which is maybe what is starting to happen right now, because they might be able to leverage US desperation for some kind of stability in Iraq into a disproportionate allocation of state power or resources, something they probably can’t achieve on their own with military power if the US withdraws. On the other hand, the only way to buy that favorable settlement is to demonstrate the ability to inflict serious damage on US forces, and to continually remind the US of that capacity if there’s any sign it’s being taken for granted.

When I look at any possible endgame, I see two powerful and important antagonists that would just as soon see American troops remain, not as allies but as targets. So here’s another area where even if we set aside moral concerns and political differences, you could make a plausible argument that withdrawal frustrates rather than satisfies some of the US’ antagonists in Iraq.

To keep a conversation rolling along on a single major point, I want to look at the claim that the history of counter-insurgency in South Africa, the Phillipines and Malaysia supports the tactical and strategic conduct of the current Iraq war by the United States.

Analogies: can’t live with them, can’t live without them. They’re how history achieves much of its relevance, but it’s also easy to surgically extract a single part of a historical case to support a contemporary argument when the larger historical context might argue otherwise. (Or might suggest the relative distance instead of comparability between a particular past moment and the present.)

So are these three cases good comparisons to the current war, and do they support an argument that the current American approach can produce a victory where victory is defined as a “stable liberal democracy” of some kind or another?

1) South Africa: the South African (Boer) War, 1899-1902. I can see its appeal as an analogy for a supporter of the current war in Iraq. A large imperial power (the British Empire) confronts the small ruling elite of two states (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) by invading their territory. The two sides fight a conventional war in which the smaller group turn out to be relatively well-armed and tactically skilled, which results in the lumbering and unprepared imperial army getting kicked around pretty hard in the early stages of the conflict. The ruling party in London is forced onto the political defensive by the poor performance of their troops. But the difference in resources is too great, and the formal conflict ends in the partial surrender of the Afrikaner republics within a year. However, many Afrikaners turn to guerilla warfare, with considerable success. The British Army adopts harsh counter-insurgent methods, including the confinement of women and children in camps so as to deny the insurgents their base of support. This further erodes popular support for the war in England. However, the counter-insurgency eventually results in the grudging formal surrender of most of the partisans.

Unfortunately, there’s a bit more to the story than counter-insurgent tactics, as there is with Iraq, and it is there that the analogy has to live or die. The first question is, “Was the war necessary for the fulfillment of vital national objectives for the United Kingdom?” The second question is, “What were its short-term and long-term consequences of the war for the national and imperial interests of England?”

On the first question, the South African War practically invented anti-colonialism in the 20th Century, largely because many contemporary observers, including a significant number of people we today would regard as economic conservatives of some kind of another, saw the war as a hugely expensive liability. Certainly it’s a good case of a war which came about not as the result of careful, prudential calculations of vital national interest but as the result of manipulations by a small number of parties with highly particular personal and institutional investments in the situation. The Afrikaner republics posed no meaningful security threat to British power, even had they allied themselves more closely with Germany. Gold had a different economic significance than it does today, due to its relationship to currency values, but imperial control over goldfields was in no way necessary (nor, as we’ll see, did it last). South Africa today would be a very different place if the war had not been fought, but I don’t think that the British Empire would have been terribly different. And that’s the unit of our analogy: the United States now compared to some past imperial or hegemonic power fighting a distant insurgency. If the investment of blood and treasure changes some place far away, but that change is in no fashion necessary or vital for the power spending those resources, what’s the point?

More potently, how about the results? Were the harsh tactics of the late part of the South African War a tactical and strategic triumph that commend themselves as models for the current conflict? They did produce a formal surrender by insurgents, after all. But the result was most certainly not a liberal democracy, at least not in a way that has a happy relationship to the present. Having extricated themselves from an unpopular and apparently fruitless war, what did the British do? They basically handed sovereignty over South Africa back to the local white population on terms that favored Afrikaners. Moreover, they agreed more or less as a condition of imperial withdrawal to hugely strengthen the power of whites over African, South Asian and mixed-race populations, who were the vast majority of the population of South Africa. The 1913 Land Act, which alienated most of the land of the country for the use of the white minority, was a direct consequence of the South African War. Apartheid after 1948 was a direct consequence of the war, in particular the final settlement of the war.

The analogy here is not to a stable liberal democratic and unified Iraq. A far better comparison would be a conclusion to the war in which the United States finally agreed to hand power back to the Sunni minority, gave the new state economic, juridical and military tools for suppressing Shi’a, Kurdish and Turkmen populations and called that a victory, even though it leads to decades of suffering and repression as well as the creation of an authoritarian state supported by a small minority of a large territory. If that’s victory, give me defeat, thanks.

If a positive use of the analogy is meant to claim instead that post-1993 South Africa is the good liberal democracy that the South African War helped to produce, then to quote John McEnroe, “You cannot be serious”. By that standard, I could defend the Mongol invasion of Europe as a great idea because it helped to spread the Black Death which in the end led to the consolidation of capital and land that was a probable precursor to early modern capitalism in Europe which led to my having an iPod. Thank you, Genghis Khan, for my big-screen TV.

Analogy requires some kind of causal proximity if it’s meant to be a guide to matching good policies with immediately good outcomes.

So in the case of South Africa, was the war a necessary expense of lives and resources from the standpoint of the occupying power? No. Did harsh counter-insurgent tactics lead to a good outcome that compares well to the declared standard for American victory in Iraq? No.

2) How about the Phillipines?

First, was the war necessary for American interests? Not in any way that I can see, even from the narrow standpoint of defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War (which I’d also argue was an unnecessary conflict, but that’s a different argument). I think the writing was on the wall for Spanish imperial control over the Phillipines by 1897, despite Aguinaldo’s agreement to go into exile. It was already the beginning of the end.

What would Filipino nationalists have made of the Phillipines without American involvement? Whatever that Filipino state might have been it’s hard to imagine how anything they achieved could have interfered in even the slightest way with American national interests in 1898. Or, for that matter, how that counterfactual state could have served American interests, either.

But the US did get involved, for what in the most charitable interpretation could be said to be accidental reasons or by other interpretations because of mendaciousness and raw militarism, and became the target of a protracted insurgency. Again, as in South Africa, there was a formal surrender by one faction of nationalist leaders, but much of the war went on for longer; in Mindanao until 1913. Harsh counter-insurgent tactics, including the use of concentration camps and torture, gradually sapped strength from the insurgency, at the cost of many Filipino lives–usually numbered between 300,000 and almost a million. Over 4,000 American soldiers died in the conflict.

So what did that achieve? A stable liberal democracy that would not have come about but for the American intervention and but for the use of harsh tactics? Well, let’s take a look around the region. Was the 20th Century political history of the Phillipines after the end of American occupation (1946) markedly different from the political history of the rest of South and Southeast Asia, to the point where we can say that American occupation and the use of harsh counter-insurgency produced a noticeably different and preferable outcome? Preferable to the 20th Century political history of Indonesia? Singapore? Thailand? Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia present some complexities in terms of their comparability, and Malaysia proper (though Singapore is tied up in that) we’ll get to in a minute. Ok, looks much better than Myanamar, I guess. But otherwise? The Phillipines is mainly remarkably for how similar its political history after 1946 has been to regional neighbors who were not occupied by the United States at the end of the 19th Century, and did not have to engage in a protracted nationalist insurgency against it. In other words, counter-insurgent tactics in the Phillipines had the main military result of eventually getting the insurgents to quiet down their activities, but achieved no political or economic aim worth their price save getting the United States out of a situation that it had no business being involved with in the first place.

3) Malaysia. I know the least about this example, but it strikes me as being complicated by its historical emplacement within the Cold War. Did England need to engage in counter-insurgent struggles in Malaysia? Your answer to that will depend on how you judge most Cold War struggles of a similar nature. I’m at least willing to consider that those struggles were necessary or important in some global sense (in a way that occupying the Phillipines or fighting the Afrikaners were not).

Were the tactics employed by the British necessary for achieving a proximate political outcome that was positive which is also potentially analogous to the declared war aims of the United States in Iraq? Yes, arguably. The other two analogies seem either inappropriate or to actually indict American tactics, but I can see this argument a bit better.

Some important differences. . The insurgents were internationally isolated (unlike similar groups elsewhere in Southeast Asia and unlike at least one faction of insurgents in Iraq today). The insurgents were highly concentrated geographically. They were mostly of a single ethnic group (Chinese) who had previously been denied political and civil rights, and one of the important tactics of the British and Malaysia counter-insurgency forces was simply to convincingly promise political inclusion and enfranchisement to the Chinese minority. The British were considerably less slow to appreciate the nature of the conflict and were considerably more attentive to the need to favorably connect with the population early on in the struggle, and if you think that you don’t get a “do-over” as far as that kind of effort goes, you could say that it doesn’t matter whether you understand this point later on: you have to do it right from the outset. More importantly, British armed forces had a lot of prior involvement with the country and a lot of strong connections to the local troops and leadership fighting against the guerillas.

But ok. One potentially plausible analogy, two that don’t work at all. How about other potentially comparable 20th Century cases of harsh counter-insurgency methods similar to what the United States is employing now? Algeria, the Mau Mau Rebellion, Indochina (French and American), various past and continuing struggles in Latin America from Colombia to Nicaragua? Rhodesia? Do any of those shape up favorably for the United States? Not particularly. On the other hand, are there any successes at all out there for societies facing protracted guerilla warfare or civil conflict? Not many, but I think I’d venture one thought: most of the sustained long-term resolutions come down to a political settlement, not to the use of intense military power and harsh repression by a foreign occupier.

As far as analogy goes, if you’ve only got one comparable case that shakes out in your favor, and a whole bunch that don’t, I’d say that’s not an encouraging sign.

One more thing to consider. I would say that all examples of guerilla wars against imperial occupiers from before 1945, and maybe even some of the conflicts of the early Cold War, are bad comparisons from a technological standpoint. The force multipliers available to early 20th Century European and American armies in relationship to non-Western guerillas were enormous; the resource disparity between cutting-edge industrial powers strongly tied into global networks and preindustrial insurgent political structures with almost no access to global resources was also huge.

In the case of the Phillipines and the late part of the South African War, imperial powers removed a large proportion of the civilian population into protected concentration camps. Is that even possible in economic and structural terms for the current American occupation in Iraq? (Leaving aside the political consequences on the international and local level.) I’d say not. On the other side of things, it’s possible for insurgents in Iraq to impede the operations of a much larger and better equipped imperial army in a way that was not possible before 1955 or so. Cheap powerful explosives and automatic weapons combined with a ready supply of martyrs adds up to force equivalency in many respects, even before you get to the normal advantage of guerillas versus occupiers (they can vanish into the population while the occupier remains exposed and vulnerable). So the United States isn’t even able to carry out some of the tactics suggested by these analogies. Which leaves only arbitrary brutality, which is not really a tactic in any respect. Or genocide, which is a far darker domain of analogy.

I’m trying to keep a clear head about the current political news from a number of directions, and that sometimes keeps me from dumping a quick rant in this space and hitting the post button. However, I also think that there isn’t much of a space left in this society for any kind of reasoned discussion of the major issues of the day among the punditry and intelligentsia.

There a few people out there who support the current administration and its policies, including its conduct of the war in Iraq, who can at least be said to have a consistent, philosophically coherent basis for that support. This is not much of a compliment, given that most of the consistent arguments for that support are repellant to me and I think to most Americans, not just “liberals”. For example, you could argue that the time has come for unrestrained executive power in the United States and that most constitutional protections and balances are outmoded luxuries. You could argue that the United States needs to act like a brutalist imperial power in order to preserve its own narrowly construed national interests, that we need the 21st Century equivalent of Roman crucifixions and punitive massacres. You could argue on behalf of a fundamentalist Christian putsch over the government and culture of the United States because of a belief that God Himself demands it. These are all consistent views that I would oppose with all my heart and mind, but at least it would make sense for someone holding them to look at the current situation and give it a thumb’s up.

Mostly, it’s something grubbier and more depressing. People who argue that perjury is a grave crime against the rule of law, until it’s their own guy getting caught. People who have two completely different standards for reasonable judgements about evidence: absurdly stringent when the political opposition seems to favor a claim, promiscuously loose when it’s a case that favors their own perspective. People who have one view of what constitutes unwholesomely “political” interference with good governance when it’s the other guys (or some “corrupt” regime in the Third World) and another view when it’s the home team.

I don’t know what to say in those kinds of conversations any longer. I can’t just keep coming back to them with faith and hope that men and women who have the capacity to think clearly and behave ethically will eventually reconcile their political commitments with some kind of consistently held standards. All I need is even a small sign that this could happen to keep thinking it’s worth it to look for a way to talk. But I’m precisely the chump that I have been accused of being if I continue to agree that (for example) perjury is indeed a serious crime, and that Bill Clinton’s perjury was a serious issue if all that gets is derisive laughter when it’s time for others to pay off their own prior declarations of serious, serious concern with that crime.

Another example. Saturday, a Marine corporal testified at a trial at Camp Pendleton that:

a) his unit and others were told to “crank up the violence”, which they took to mean increasing the frequency and ubiquity of beatings
b) he saw nothing wrong with killing a random Iraqi man and framing him as a jihadi because “of the way they live, the clans, they’re all in it together”, that the Marines he knows basically view all Iraqi men as insurgents
c) that the Marines employ a procedure that they are formally trained to use at Camp Pendleton called “dead-checking”: if they enter a house and there’s a wounded male inside the house, they kill him without any further investigation and without taking him prisoner.

I can hear the political ripostes already. The guy testifying has been accused of crimes (though he’s not on trial in this particular instance), so he’s a bad egg and atypical, plus isn’t it a good sign that there’s a trial at all? Well, maybe there’s nuances to policy that aren’t coming out in the testimony. Besides, from a certain point of view, isn’t it right to view all Iraqi men as possible insurgents? Doesn’t “dead-checking” make good military sense?

I’m not going to go into moral hysterics here. I’m simply going to suggest that if you’re engaged in a counter-insurgency with the alleged end goal of creating a stable and reasonably liberal and democratic state that brings together three different religious/ethnic groups under a single government, when it becomes clear that these kinds of actions are normal military doctrine, the conflict is over and you lost. It doesn’t matter any longer whether or not withdrawing is going to be a disaster. Of course it is going to be a disaster. The key point is that there is no way to win the conflict once even a significant proportion of your troops view the entire male population as the enemy and are capable of acting on that belief. If your troops are arbitrarily beating, framing, killing, harassing the population, it doesn’t matter if the insurgents are also killing, torturing, or abusing the population. When ordinary people are caught in between an insurgency and a counter-insurgency that both abuse them, but the latter is composed of foreigners who don’t speak the language or know the culture, then the latter lose on points, period. The only way the foreign occupier can win is by being markedly, definitively, unambiguously better than the alternative. We maybe could have been, but we’re not at this point and there’s no way to get back to that, no matter what anyone tries to do to salvage the situation.

As for whether this Marine is an isolated case, I guess that’s where I’m thinking it’s time to stop the coy political dancing around evidence. At this point, there’s plenty of reason to think that while this soldier’s views are articulated in extreme ways, he’s probably giving a fairly good description of ordinary practices and attitudes among many serving in Iraq. More importantly, even if such practices and beliefs are not the official doctrine or are held by a relative minority of soldiers, I think it’s safe to say that this is how many Iraqis perceive the occupation to operate.

This is not the fault of the soldiers, either. This is the consequence of a botched, unwinnable occupation that has been run with zero foresight or vision by a crew of naive idealists and swaggering bullies.

I’m willing to table potentially debatable moral arguments if that buys an honest consensus discussion about some kind of agreed-upon standards about war objectives, about when we would all know that the war wasn’t worth it or was lost, about methods, purposes, aspirations. Or about what we’re entitled to expect from our public servants in terms of their political or partisan even-handedness, their commitment to their office before their party.

I’m not saying those moral claims aren’t important to me: they’re vital. Precisely because I believe in the spread of classic liberalism–something that at least some of the backers of the war professed to support as well–I know that those moral claims can’t be tabled indefinitely. Liberalism requires the rule of law, respect for the sovereign rights of the individual, responsible and transparent government.

It’s hard for me to put those commitments aside. Why should I? What’s the good of refraining from unrestrained polemic at this point? Almost none of the supporters of the war in the public sphere or the conduct of the Bush Administration have ever been willing to commit to clear, transparently declared standards for what would represent victory and what would represent defeat, what would be a mistake and would would be a success, what government should try to do and what it should not try to do. The yardstick has been infinitely adjustable. Or it gets set way out in Absurdistan, where every political wish comes with ponies and Green Lantern-level willpower always wins the day. So what’s the point? Who would be at the political table to have that conversation honestly?

I’m going to go on calling things as I see them. If I think I was wrong about something I thought or said earlier, I’m going to say so. I’m going to be as skeptical as I can manage about my own claims and commitments. But none of that is a politics at this point: it’s just a personal aesthetic, a quirk, a habitus. It’s not a public conversation that I feel myself to be part of, with some precious, treasured exceptions.

We can’t get back to any kind of consensus politics until people who have made mistakes are prepared to admit them. Without caveats, without evasions, without double standards. That goes for the war in Iraq. It goes for attempting to turn the government of the United States into a personality cult driven entirely by the objective of structurally locking in partisan advantage for the foreseeable future. It goes for most of what has happened in the last six years.