More Blood
Michael Ledeen says the real problem in Iraq is we're not killing enough people:
Anybody who's spent time with Iraq veterans has heard complaints about the short leash attached to our military. Every now and then a story surfaces that gives a bit of detail, in which our soldiers mutter that they're forced to put their lives at even greater risk because they often are forbidden to initiate action.
Ledeen is right, of course, that rules of engagement are crucial. And he's right, too, that many Iraq vets are upset that the current ROE fail to maximize the safety of US forces. Which is a natural response. If I were being deployed to a war zone, I would want my ROE to maximize my safety, too. On the other hand, if I wanted to bring stability to a foreign country, I would want foreign occupation/peacekeeping troops to act with great restraint in their use of firepower. In practice, one winds up compromising. You get ROE that are far less restrictive than what you'd see for a civilian police force, but still substantialy more restrictive than troops are going to be happy with. So soldiers, not-unreasonably fearing for their lives, break the rules now and again. But it only takes a handful of incidents to completely poison relations (think of the NYPD's problems with African-American New York then add language and religious barriers, automatic weapons, mortars, and heavily armored vehicles) and you're in the shitter.
In principle, one could get this balance right and things like the new Counterinsurgency Manual have a lot of operational advice in this regard. The larger point, however, is that you're putting troops in an intrinsically difficult situation. If you send 130,000 people someplace dangerous for years, incidents where someone errs on the side of personal safety and winds up killing local civilians in a way that doesn't seem justifiable to the local community are all-but-inevitable. They're also lethal to the mission.
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Ledeen and the rest need to come to terms with the fact that you cannot unscrew the pooch. Absent acceptance and admission, there's not much there for Ledeen to offer: he's committed to describing a world that doesn't exist.
Unfortunately, there may be a cohort coming home from Iraq with the conviction that they could've won if they hadn't had to fight with one hand tied behind their back. This time, unlike in Vietnam, I hope we'll have the sense to ignore them.
However, comments like what Ledeen is reporting actually make me glad most of our soldiers are spending their time cooped up on the FOBs rather than out in the neighborhoods, where they could hurt someone.
You know, I just read over that Ledeen thing again, and suddenly had to ask myself: wait - is he talking about fragging officers?
I think "Sir! No, Sir!" may have made too strong an impression on me.
Well ... as they pointed out on "News and Notes" yesterday, a large part of the problem that causes our troops to get into trouble, both in terms of getting killed and in terms of killing innocent civilians is just the language barrier.
The troops were trained to fight a war, not keep the peace. Does a straight up soldier need to know the lingo? Maybe not. Would you want to deal with officers of the peace who don't know English? Ummm ... that would be a problem, nu?
And yet, evidently even many of the translators for our troops either don't speak English well enough for our troops to understand them and/or they don't actually speak the common dialects of Arabic in Iraq. So is it any wonder that mistakes happen?
Compounding the fact, of course, is what the media likes to call "cultural insensitivity" but that's really the wrong way to approach it and is part of the problem as it assumes Iraqis are these bizarre furriners to whom our boys and girls simply could never relate -- so no wonder problems happen. Example: Iraqi people don't like soldiers barging in on their homes. Hmmm ... how would 'Murkins respond to that? We have a problem 'cause soldiers don't follow the Golden Rule, nu?
The headline for this post should be "Bloodier, Please".
Ledeen is an insufferable ass. His 'strategy' presumably is to kill all adult males and sell the women and children into slavery. Next destroy the infrastructure so that not even one stone is lying on another, then sow the ground with salt.
He has been something of a kibitzer on the fringes of power for years now. He played a bit part in Iran/Contra, after which he should have realized his fifteen minutes of fame were up and faded away gracefully. Anyone who trusts his judgement plainly has even worse judgement than he does.
The safest Rule of Engagement: nuke 'em till they glow.
Once we rule out genocide as a foreign policy, it's just a question of degree.
Besides, we aren't actually in Iraq looking to kill people. We're in Iraq to teach them how to rule themselves. Why can't neo-cons get is right?
When you station 120,000 heavily armed 19-21 year olds, trained to kill and destroy, in a completely alien and mostly hostile culture where they don't even speak the language, I don't think any new "Counterinsurgency Manual" is going to stop you from alienating the local population.
Ledeen is a deep-dyed moral and political idiot. He genuinely believes that by putting the lives of American soldiers at a higher premium, and those of Iraqis who get in the way or have the wrong beliefs at a lower one, we can serve American interests in Iraq. Yglesias as so often gets it exactly right: there is a dilemma here, to one side of which Ledeen is entirely oblivious, and there's a conflict of interest between the American soldier's in his staying alive and Iraqi's interest in doing likewise. Also between the American's short-term interest in blasting away and staying alive here and now and the long-term effects that has in making his situation yet more dangerous by antagonizing Iraqis.
I suppose nobody should really be surprised what a great fool Ledeen is. At bottom, he holds political-moral views shared by but a small fraction of the world's population and he would employ our super power to kill all the rest who don't see it his way. A temptation to which the citizens of the hegemon in a unipolar world should be more resistant but understandably aren't.
Chalabi definitely wants American troops to stay in Iraq -- even though he had a lot of horror stories about the way the U.S. military is operating "with total immunity and impunity."
"American soldiers," he said, "are breaking into people's homes and are arresting and detaining Iraqi citizens without charges. Even if they run over an Iraqi and kill him they will not be charged with a crime, because they are above Iraqi law."
...
But his other objective, which he told me he was planning to discuss with both Rumsfeld and Cheney, is to change the way U.S. troops are operating in Iraq. "America," he said, "has a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which governs how U.S. forces operate inside a sovereign nation, with over 100 countries. But the Bush administration refuses to have one with Iraq -- and, as a result, the U.S. Army is operating outside the law. Rumsfeld feels that a SOFA will tie the hands of the U.S. military and not allow it to fight the insurgency. Of course, the lack of such an agreement has the opposite effect since it causes great resentment towards the U.S. among the Iraqi people."
http://tinyurl.com/sgz9h
What is the goal of US presence in Iraq, winning the war or extending life expectancy of US military personnel? Is American war effort in such a sorry shape because of a high level of American casualties? Is that why US is losing this war? I wouldn't say so. The number of American dead is rather low and I don't see how cutting it even further would help to achieve a victory. From what I can see, the opposite is true, it is very difficult to fight an enlightened war of civilization with a bunch of trigger-happy cowards (and, according to Ledeen, whiners) who are ignorant and frankly don’t care about finer points of what America is trying to accomplish in Iraq.
Don't overlook the fact that allowing more American danger does not mean we'd win.
Anybody who IS a vet (which rules out that fuckwit Ledeen) would have known that the grunts would be in exactly this position, in which every day they'd face the happy choice between their own safety and a hearts'n'minds disaster. Ledeen's comment is, as usual, classic, grade-A chickenhawkery. Why isn't the little shit walking patrols in Baghdad?
For Ledeen and the rest the war is a success. I always knew they wanted us in Iraq permanently, and now we finally see the mechanism for keeping us there revealed: The Saudis are threatening us if we leave. Ledeen wanted a Sunni-Shia war, with a coalition states arrayed against Iran and Syria, and Israel with a free hand.
One problem is our military has been trained for conventional warfare, not counter-insurgency. I have read that Viet Nam war was so traumatic that the military decided it was never going to fight an insurgency, and refused to include counter-insurgency training.
That matters because in a conventional war you just try to kill as many enemy soldiers as possible, the idea being that if you kill them faster than they replace them, eventually the balance of forces becomes unequal enough that you can overrun the enemy or get them to surrender. But that doesn't work fighting an insurgency because the total number of enemy forces is small and lightly trained, and so can be quickly replaced. And furthermore it is hidden among the general public, so if you tell your soliders to kill the maximum number every day, invariably they will shoot a lot of civilians, which in turn leads many of them to join the insurgency.
The only approach that works is slow and careful, with lots of time spent making friends with the civilians so that they will eventually decide to stop supporting the insurgents. Alas, in Iraq we don't have one half the number of troups needed to do this.
I think it should be repeated - often - that Mr Ledeen and his associates, William Kristol, the Kagan brothers, Ken Adelman, both Elliotts (Abrams and Cohen) and John Bolton are first and foremost as PNACers subscribing to the Yinon strategy, which was developed in the 1980s to serve the purpose of elevating Israel to a militarily and politically dominant position in the Middle East by destroying the social and political cohesion of the Arab states surrounding it.
While it is in the US strategic and economic interests to militarily dominate the region so as to secure the resources of the area and deny them to economic challengers such as Russia and China, only a fool or a dastard would believe that Ledeen is advocating the US interests when urging more death and destruction in Iraq.
He is urging actions that are serving Israel's best interests. As an Aerican citizen, and as a veteran, I find it troubling that our government is heeding his demands.
Ledeen's best mates, politically, are Ahmed Chalabi and Manuchar Ghorbanifar. Both are widely believed to be Iranian intelligence assets. Ledeen has argued vigorously for a US policy that has put pro-Iranian Shia rulers in charge of Iraq, whilst vitiating the US's substrategic deterrent posture. He is now arguing for increased violence against the Sunni insurgents.
Anyone see a pattern?
The reason we have lost this war is clear as spring water to me from perusing the 'comments'. Our troops are fine, its the AMERICAN PEOPLE who will lead us to defeat. Why we have lost our will to lead in the world can be found in the comments from our effete, pampered, spoiled, unchallenged weeinies of the 20 & 30-nothing persuasion. Generation Cheese. Florid examples abound here.
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