by publius
Fred Kagan’s recent screed is hardly worth the effort. It’s not even an argument — it’s an attempt to shore up conservative support by demonizing liberals (or “hyper-sophisticates,” as he calls them). Like many other neoconservatives, his foreign policy vision is conceptually reactionary in that it’s rooted in hippie hatred and ressentiment. To the extent there’s an actual argument lurking in there, it’s classic Green Lantern Fallacy — our only obstacle to success is a lack of will.
I did, though, want to address Kagan’s claim that war critics are essentially rooting against our military:
The antiwar party rather gleefully seized upon recent Iraqi Security Forces operations against Sadr’s militia and other illegal gangs as proof of this — the general glee with which the antiwar party has greeted any setback in Iraq is extremely distasteful and unseemly, whatever domestic political benefits they believe they will receive from those setbacks. Even if one believes that defeat is inevitable and withdrawal necessary, no American should take pleasure in the prospect of that defeat.
Pretty distasteful stuff. Not only is this “stab in the back” rhetoric venomous and nasty, but it’s not true. War skeptics feel very strongly that our current policy is wrong, dangerous, and a tremendous waste of both blood and money. The events in Basra tended to support these arguments in particularly relevant ways. Thus, airing these criticisms — even passionately — is hardly “glee.” In Kagan’s defense, it’s easier to rationalize criticism as military hatred, particularly if your Iraq commentary has transformed you into an object of national ridicule. But that doesn’t make the claim any more accurate.
But just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that he’s right. Let’s assume there are substantial numbers of progressive Americans actively rooting against the effort in Iraq. If anyone is to blame for this unfortunate state of affairs, however, it’s the administration and its pundit cheerleaders such as Kagan who have — from Day 1 — treated the war as a partisan weapon.
This is a serious point. There’s a reason that successful wars require bipartisan support. When wars are conceived and maintained as purely partisan affairs, then the fates of political parties become intertwined with the fate of the war, thus creating horrible incentives. As a result, rooting against the war — while extremely distasteful — becomes rational for the anti-war party.
To be clear, I morally and emphatically reject this point of view. While I may disagree strongly with the war, I root for success whatever the domestic effects. But that said, you can see the rationality of the boogeymen Kagan describes. The fate of America’s two primary political parties — because of the White House’s deliberate polarization strategy — now turns on the success of the war. For instance, in 2002, the GOP consciously and loudly integrated the Iraq War into its election strategy. It did the same thing in 2004. Had the war gone well, we can all agree that the military success would have been eagerly used by the GOP (including Kagan) to bash Democrats for a generation. Thus, Bush’s polarization strategy forced progressives to root for military success while simultaneously knowing that success would result in the decimation of their political party. That’s not a choice people should have to be making.
(On an aside, the same thing has happened with Petraeus. Republicans have been so eager to use him for political purposes that criticism of him becomes politically rational for the Democrats.)
The larger point is that, when war is required, we need to go to war as a country. Bundling the war with domestic politics not only undermines the mission itself, but creates poisonous divisions at home. In fact, I’m starting to increasingly fear the “Weimar hangover” (i.e., the domestic effects of withdrawal). As this week’s hearings illustrate, the administration’s strategy is to stall and kick the can to the next administration. When we inevitably withdraw (particularly if it’s a Democrat), it will be easy for the ultra-nationalists to adopt a “stab in the back” narrative that will further poison the domestic well.
The trick I think is to convince sane conservatives not to join them. Specifically, whether the “hangover” develops depends on whether fact-based conservatives remain focused on the facts or fall under the sway of the “blame the traitor liberals” narrative that Kagan is already pushing.
Bring out the classics: “…the great triumph of their generation: forcing the U.S. to lose the Vietnam War….”
Ah, yes. It wasn’t the North Vietnamese, and the Chinese, and Soviets, and the South Vietnamese, and the Laotians and Cambodians, who had anything to do with the U.S. losing the war.
It wasn’t the lack of any kind of competent or remotely not overwhelmingly corrupt, South Vietnamese government, that had anything to do with the U.S. and the Southern regime losing the war.
It had nothing to do with Vietnamese nationalism. It had nothing to do with the quite insufficient number of South Vietnamese willing to fight and die for the regime, despite millions doing so over decades, heroically at times, and despite those who genuinely sought a democratic independent Vietnam.
And it had nothing to do with the the overwhelming majority of the U.S. citizenry having long turned against the war, and being unwilling to let more thousands of U.S. soldiers and civilians die to put off the fall of the South Vietnamese regime, by the time of Nixon.
“Peace with honor” had nothing to do with it.
And it had nothing to do with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s conclusion by 1969, if not earlier, that a negotiated withdrawal, and almost certain ensuing collapse of the South Vietnamese regime, was the only possible end, and the only priority was to make sure there was a sufficient “decent interval” between the U.S. military withdrawal, and the end of South Vietnam as a nation.
No, none of these things are worth mentioning when mentioning why the U.S. lost the Vietnam War, let alone any of the many other reasons: it was the damned hippies who lost us the war.
Traitors. Liberals. Commies.
But I repeat myself.
Yeah I second that. First paragraph – “the ‘left’ sold us out in Vietnam”; second paragraph – “Neville Chamberlain”
What a joke of a ‘scholar’ and human being this guy is. Historically and morally illiterate.
But just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that he’s right. Let’s assume there are substantial numbers of progressive Americans actively rooting against the effort in Iraq. If anyone is to blame for this unfortunate state of affairs, however, it’s the administration and its pundit cheerleaders such as Kagan who have — from Day 1 — treated the war as a partisan weapon.
I don’t know about this tactic publius. I think your point here is correct but I have a feeling it will only piss off people who don’t already believe it. Hopefully I’m wrong.
The reason I’m suspicious is that this argument still operates within the frame that feelings matter: you’re trying to tell war supporters “hey, even if all those liberals really do hate the troops, that’s OK because Bush improperly politicized the war”. If someone still thinks the war is a good idea at this point, I can’t imagine that they’ll be able to clear the mental hurdle of “those liberals want us to lose”. Group identity and loyalty are powerful things and mere rationality doesn’t stand much of a chance against them.
I think a better argumentative tactic would be to push the fact that feelings don’t matter and that it is bizarre and pathetic to obsess about the random feelings of strangers. Alternatively, you could push the notion that it is hard to know what anyone really feels and that usually when people try to guess at other’s feelings or motives, they guess wrong.
The beauty of attacking the “ZOMG! librulz haz bad feelingz in their heartz!” meme is that it appeals to a masculinity ethos that is a major part of the militarism culture in which so many war supporters live. Real men don’t give a rat’s ass about the feelings of strangers, they care about actions, so why is this Kagan loser losing his marbles over the fact that some people have feelings he doesn’t like?
I find the idea that I want us to fail — that I don’t care about the Iraqi people having a stable government — a mortal insult. Like the idea that I don’t care about the troops.
This isn’t the right place to say this, but then there isn’t a right place, really: two more men from Andy’s unit (which had 11 soldiers in all) were killed Sunday, when their vehicle hit an IED. My thoughts are with their families, and with the other members of the MiTT.
In the days before Andy was killed, people tried twice to put IEDs where his unit might drive over them. The first time they found it before driving over it; the second time, they disrupted people who were trying to place it.
I know that I might have no right to ask this, having put this in the middle of a political thread, but: go ahead and debate the war, but please don’t use these deaths while you’re doing it. Thanks.
One of my senior-year college instructors was a man who had held a very powerful position in the military before he ran into something and was put out to pasture at my state school. He gave me a ‘C’. After the military released him from service, he took a management assistant job to at some regional garbage incinerator to supplement his pension. Ha ha.
But he had a saying that sticks with me:
“You don’t wrestle with a pig. You’ll get dirty and the pig will enjoy it.”
The Islamic world in general and Iraq in particular is one big pig. If we want to maintain our values system, we need to establish a strict business relationship with the men who control the oil. They don’t want us in their backyard. Speaking for myself, I don’t want them in mine.
Unfortunately, I do not believe that a democratically elected President, be it McCain, Obama, or Clinton (or Gore), will have the strength to leave and face the images. We’ll be in Iraq until the grown-ups cut up the credit card.
Thoughts and prayers with those and their families who will be making the sacrifices that our weakness demands.
Not only does using war as a partisan weapon create screwed up incentives for those of us now, more importantly it unbalances incentives for making a good decision to go to war in the first place.
The single greatest failure in our path into war wasn’t problems with intelligence or any military decision. it was that no one, journalists and Democratic leadership alike, had the desire or ability to demonstrate how politically motivated the decision to go to war was.
In the late 90s, a bombing strike ordered by Clinton created wall-to-wall “wag the dog” stories in the press. Where were these journalists in the fall of 2002?
motivated should’ve been manipulated… sorry.
I should have said: in this picture, one of the men who was killed is standing at the left. The other joined the MiTT after the picture was taken.
Brick Oven Bill: I’m sitting in the middle of the Islamic world at the moment. The people I have met are wonderful, decent, kind people. They are immensely hospitable, honorable, and decent.
Some Muslims, obviously, are not. They have Osama bin Laden. We have Tim McVeigh, the people who kill abortion providers, etc. But it’s just as wrong to generalize about Muslims based on bin Laden as it would be to generalize about Christians based on the people who kill abortion providers, or veterans based on McVeigh. That is to say: completely wrong.
Hilzoy;
My Swedish Grandfather was a social worker who worked in Pakistan in the 1950s. My Dad spent his teens there. Got the picture of the herders on the wall. I’d like to think they made a difference. I’d like to think that you’ll make a difference.
I decided to read the texts after 9-11. They were not what I had expected. I wish you the best and admire your work. Take care and I’ll buy you lunch when you get back to the northeast. Stay safe.
First off, what hilzoy said.
The idea that there are more than a tiny handful of Americans of any political persuasion who want our military to fail for any reason is grossly insulting both emotionally and intellectually, and is just plain wrong.
Regarding the politics of it (prefaced by IMHO for all of this):
When you combine the current self-identification of the right as pro-war and the left as anti-war (see note*) with the natural tendency of people to rally around the flag in wartime the result is an asymmetric politics of war and a perverse incentive system (note: I do not mean to imply that either the right as a whole or individuals are compelled to act on these incentives or are lacking in other motivations) such that starting a war becomes a political win-win for the right no matter what happens subsequently:
1) If the war goes well, then anyone on the left who was not sufficiently supportive of the war can be branded as a coward and a demonstrably poor judge of events, hence their opinion should never be trusted again.
2) If the war does not go well, the right can trot out the Dolchstoßlegende and make political hay smearing left-wing opponents as traitors. Right-wing opponents of the war (e.g., Pat Buchanan in the case of the current Iraq war) are either ignored or redefined as left-wing on a case by case basis.
These conclusions do not apply if a war is started by a Democratic administration (e.g., Kosovo ), for reasons that make no logical sense but are derived from the prevailing media stereotype that the right is realistic and tough, while the left is weak and idealistic.
There is a further perverse incentive: it costs less political capital to start a war than it does to conclude one on any basis other than victory. This is probably because in the past long wars have (all other factors being equal) been won by the nation which is most determined to hang on to the bitter end, so a rational (i.e. historically grounded) approach to winning wars combines with the irrational psychology of sunk costs to make it very difficult to decide when to stop.
Consequently the anti-war side has to expend all or most of the political capital it can muster just trying to stop a war, which is an opportunity cost preventing other issues (taxation policy, spending on infrastructure, business regulation, environmental policy, etc.) from being addressed, not to mention the fiscal cost which undercuts domestic spending.
Thus the pro-war side gains a net political advantage from even a failed war, blocking the anti-war side from making headway on other issues. The pro-war side on the other hand does not seem to pay a comparably large political cost for starting a war, but instead is left free to continue with their domestic agenda undisturbed, perhaps because war and domestic issues are compartmentalized in the public mind at the beginning of a conflict.
In this sense wars are like a political option-ARM mortgage where the pro-war side gets to pay the bill for the first couple of years at an artificially low rate, and then hands the bill over to the anti-war side to pay when a rate reset looms and costs explode. This will never stop until the electorate demonstrates that the political cost for starting a war is greater than the cost of ending one.
I don’t expect this kind of change in popular attitudes towards the cost of war to happen so long as we have a volunteer Army (not that this is the only reason for it). I think maybe it is time to consider bringing back the draft, and restructuring our military to make best use of a core of long-service professionals (i.e., today’s volunteers) supplemented by a larger body of draftees, perhaps with many of the latter serving in a civilian corps which is tasked with infrastructure (re-)building and emergency response tasks.
While we are at it, we might want to consider devoting some large fraction of our military manpower to being trained and equipped for mainly emergency response, peacekeeping, constabulary, and COIN tasks, while the other fraction is preparing for high-intensity conflicts against a conventional military adversary. Recently we seem to have been swinging back and forth between these endpoints as a function of whichever conflict has the focus of our attention right now, rather than recognizing that we really need to be able to address both of these very different challenges, potentially at the same time, and this really will require two different kinds of Army.
(note* the current stereotype in US politics that right-wing = pro-war, left-wing = anti-war is a historically contingent association which post dates 1945 and especially 1968 in its origin. I don’t mean to imply that it was always so or will remain thus indefinitely, nor to deny that a significant number of individuals depart from this stereotype.)
When we inevitably withdraw (particularly if it’s a Democrat), it will be easy for the ultra-nationalists to adopt a “stab in the back” narrative that will further poison the domestic well.
The trick I think is to convince sane conservatives not to join them. Specifically, whether the “hangover” develops depends on whether fact-based conservatives remain focused on the facts or fall under the sway of the “blame the traitor liberals” narrative that Kagan is already pushing.
It’s too late to think this won’t happen, assuming that a Democrat gets us out, and probably even if it’s a Republican. Even if you can convince any “fact-based conservatives” to focus on those facts, unless they actively reject it, every time it comes up, it won’t matter. This is what happened with Vietnam, even though the moderate, rational conservatives didn’t use the DFH trope, and would likely agree that it was false if asked, it still exists in modern America, and shows no real sign of abating. The majority of conservatives will gladly operate under the rubric that wins them elections, and even the “fact-based” ones will gladly take the tacit benefits even if they don’t use it themselves.
Better to find ways to address it now instead of later, manage the narrative before it manages us.
First off, I don’t like the Kagans and their neo-conservative ideology, no arguments there. Calling people with anti-war leanings “traitors” is un-American and dangerous to a proper democracy.
Second, speaking as just one military guy, an upsetting thing with regards to policy debate in America about the Iraq war is how heavily politicized it is. When Huffington Post runs a picture of McCain and Bush made up of soldiers KIA in Iraq, that’s just disrespectful. It shows a certain callousness to the deaths of their fellow countrymen/countrywomen in that they would turn it into a political agenda. That’s just one example.
A lot of this has to do with the cultural problem that America as a whole is disconnected from the military. We usually are hiding on bases in the States or deployed overseas. The current conflicts are paid for on credit, and the only time the public is going to get razzed is when oil prices go up or breaking news interrupts American Idol.
So, really I guess most of my bitterness stems from my generation’s apathy about current events. I’m a traditional conservative with libertarian values, and I’m glad there is people being critics on the Iraq war, as it’s necessary for proper discourse. I’m also here to dispel a lot of stereotypes about the military as uneducated rubes and yahoos, so that our small community of vets isn’t marginalized. So feel free to ask me any questions.
But no the problem with the war on the American side isn’t so much broad public debate, but rather just a lack of awareness.
Whether you want to troops to fail realy depends on what you think they are trying to achieve:
If you believe they are on a probably doomed mission to bring true democracy to Iraq – then of course you want them to succede not matter how pessimestic you are as to their chances of success
If you believe they are on a mission to capture Iraqi oilfields for a quasi imperialistic USA, well, I don’t see why you should want them to “succede”.
And if you think the likely outcomes of “success” are somewhere in between – then clearly you might be somewhat ambivelent.
Guys these are not football teams – these are other peoples futures, including Iraqis. If American success has no benifit for Iraq and Iraqis why should you wish for American “success”.
LT Nixon: When Huffington Post runs a picture of McCain and Bush made up of soldiers KIA in Iraq, that’s just disrespectful.
That’s a fair point.
It shows a certain callousness to the deaths of their fellow countrymen/countrywomen in that they would turn it into a political agenda. That’s just one example.
This is not. Yes, I can agree that using the photos in this way will certainly be perceived as disrespectful by some at least of the families of the servicepeople, and that their feelings have a right to consideration.
But, to target the artist with “a certain callousness” when Bush and Cheney are the ones who got those 4000 US servicepeople and over a million Iraqis killed in the service of their political agenda, and who ignore and deny these deaths because ignoring and denying works better for their political agenda than acknowledgement – that kind of misses the point.
In fact, at a guess, though I didn’t see it, that was the point of the artwork.
publius wrote, “it’s not even an argument.”
That’s exactly true. It’s an appeal to emotion, to primitive, visceral feelings. The proper response is “show me the evidence for this ‘generalized glee’.”
This war vexes me deeply. I want to say that Bush violated one of the fundamentals of statesmanship by not uniting the nation behind the war to begin with. But that apparently isn’t true. Most of the public–as far as I am aware–bought into the administration argument for war. It comes as no surprise, to people who opposed the idea of attacking Iraq from the very beginning, that the whole enterprise turned out to be a disaster and that therefore the public has turned against it.
But because I view the war as ill-conceived and illegitimate, not to mention morally corrupt, does that mean I have a vested interest in Iraq “being” a disaster? It’s an awful question, but not without merit. On the one hand I don’t want Bush to be rewarded for a depraved decision to pursue unprovoked aggression. On the other hand, ongoing mayhem in Iraq serves no one–in the entire world–with the possible exception of arms dealers.
But no the problem with the war on the American side isn’t so much broad public debate, but rather just a lack of awareness.
I’m down with that 100%. And I believe wholeheartedly that if our news media wasn’t so grotesquely distorted by the motivation for profit the public would never have swallowed Bush’s sales pitch for invading Iraq.
If a disaster in Iraq would lead to Chain-Eye-ism to be discredited forever then that would be about the only positive outcome I could imagine (without saying that it is worth the life of a single decent being) but unfortunately I believe two things to be true:
1.Disaster in Iraq is inavoidable (as a result of applied Chain-Eye-ism).
2.This will not kill the beast but at best send it into hiding for a short while.
The zombies of GIs and dead Iraqis raising from their graves to take revenge on those responsible is, alas, just the domain of horror movies.
I’ve tried to stay out of this one for the most part because I reflexively tend to take one side. I realize though that it is an emotional more than a rational response. Realization doesn’t make it any easier though. It’s a struggle to push the emotional components back. I can manage to do it but the emotional aspects remain there in the background – and they never stop looking for the opportunity to leap back to the front, trampling over reason on the way. I couldn’t manage it at all if not for the example of principled lefties such as hilzoy and many others here.
So while the rational part is in control for a moment (I think): It’s only natural for people to look for and highlight events that support their position. Its human nature and it’s an even stronger impulse in pundits of all stripes. It’s not “glee” as in “I’m glad this happened”, but there can be a somewhat disagreeable “I told you so” smugness to it. And that opens the door for the other side to seize on it as an example that supports their position (look at the dirty smelly troop hatin’ hippies). Then the chorus joins in and says Amen and round and round we go…
OCSteve: I’ve tried to stay out of this one for the most part because I reflexively tend to take one side.
As Publius said: “The trick I think is to convince sane conservatives not to join them.”
And you are a sane conservative.
it’s a war where winning leaves us back where we started – even if Bush’s stated goals (ever-shifting, and widely assumed to be not worth the effort) came to pass, we’d be no safer than we were before the invasion (less so, probably). what does it matter to the average American, other than a “U! S! A!” sense of pride, if we win or lose?
and it’s a war the cost of which we do not all suffer – the death toll is relatively small; deliberately, there is no draft; and the financial costs have been deliberately deferred. for average Americans, this war is without immediate effect or cost. there are no WWII-style massive outpourings of civic effort to keep our war machines running – no rationing, no war bonds, no draft; there are no propaganda posters in hallways; there are no popular war songs, no movies glorifying The Cause. people are disconnected from the war. there is no common cause, no united front. it’s just another activity Bush is failing at.
and again, this is for “most” people – the dead leave families and friends who feel the cost directly, but there are so few, compared to other wars.
the one place discussion of this war gets passionate though, is in a context where emotions and distrust already run high: politics; it’s easy to use this war – again, one few of us experience directly – as another thing to beat your political opponent with. the Kagans can air their Vietnam-ear grievances; Sullivan can ironically accuse the coastal elites of treason; the GOP can use it to call opponents of being in league with “the terrorists”; etc.. they benefit from keeping the war as abstract as possible for most people.
if we had to pay even just the financial costs today, instead of deferring them indefinitely, support for the war would evaporate instantly. a draft would kill it for good.
LT Nixon, it’s great to get to read the views of a thoughtful conservative and military guy on a left-leaning blog.
I know you mentioned the Huffington Post’s picture just as an example, but there is just no comparison between a blog and Kagan, who helped come up with the surge strategy. The rot of politicization and domestic enemy-hatred in lieu or rational thought goes right to the core of the GOP, but not to the Democratic Party.
Also, I don’t see the stereotype you describe– “the military as uneducated rubes and yahoos”– as at all widely held. I hope you stick around to comment a bunch, but not because there are bad stereotypes that need to be dispelled.
I don’t really like this publius post so much, because I frankly don’t like to entertain the idea that it might be rational to “root for failure” in the occupation. It means a lot of people die, we’re worse off, and Iraq’s worse off. I wish that the fantasy version of Iraq had come true. I (wrongly) supported the invasion initially, but I think this cartoon sums up the views of most of its opponents pretty well.
If one believes that:
a.) The Iraq war/occupation is an illegal, imperialistic enterprise.
b.) The presence of US forces in Iraq does more harm than good, i.e. more people are killed/harmed due to the occupation, less people would be killed/harmed if the US withdrew.
c.) There is no chance that the decision to withdraw will be reached anytime soon, i.e. the situation in Iraq will remain roughly as it is and McCain will be elected or Obama/Clinton do not really withdraw.
Then it is not wholly irrational or immoral to wish for the US troops to fail and the situation to get worse rather than better in the short term, since the only hope for withdrawal lies in the politicians responsible for the continued occupation being forced by either a gradual worsening of the situation or some truly cataclysmic event to change their minds on this.
OCS, it’s not like every other utterance from supporters of the war, with regard to the successes of the surge, hasn’t been “I told you so.” For example, the comments of Rep. Hunter at yesterday’s House Armed Services hearing.
One could look at the archives and see that I was saying this four years ago, but I think the President missed a very important opportunity when that Rove memo about how the war would be good for Republicans — and the President’s reelection. The President could have publicly fired him: there’s no room in this Administration for anyone who plays politics with the lives of the men and women of our armed forces. This is not a Republican war, it is an American war.
This attitude would not have actually changed the underlying political facts — success in war is good for the incumbent — and it might well have led to a reelection of Nixon/Reagan blow-out proportions. As ever, though, Admin thinkers prefer 50% + 1 to reaching across the aisle for the 70% they can easily have by dropping the politics of resentment.
that should be Rove memo . . . was discovered.
I mostly agree, publius, but don’t think it’s fair to place 100% of the blame for polarizing the war on the GOP. The Michael Moore/Sean Penn types made a contribution, as did the Zell Millers and Joe Liebermans of the world. The GOP deserves about 90% of it, though.
As someone who thought the whole thing was a hare-brained idea from the beginning, I can attest to feeling the pangs of “I told you so” schaudenfreude when things went badly. I don’t think that’s rooting against the troops, so much, as rooting for the blame for the debacle that has cost so many of them their lives to be pinned squarely and unequivocally on the people who deserve it, e.g., the people who pushed the war, Republicans and otherwise, but mostly Republicans, who deserve to be electorally clubbed with it for the forseeable future.
Conservatives root for policy failures all the time. Their glee when a policy ‘fails’ (affirmative action, busing, sex education, unemployment benefits, etc.) is proclaimed loudly and obsessively.
Therefore, they are traitors. Q.E.D.
Thatlefturn:This will never stop until the electorate demonstrates that the political cost for starting a war is greater than the cost of ending one.
One way to do this is to increase the actual costs of starting a war, which then transform into political costs. One way to do that is to make it harder to start one by reducing the size and reach of our armed forces by a significant extent, closing our overseas bases and bringing the troops home from Germany, Italy, Qatar, South Korea, Japan, Iraq, Cuba, and some of the dozens and dozens and dozens of other places where we have stationed troops on others’ soil, such that starting something like the Iraq war requires a draft. Then the nation can sit up and see if it is really worth it.
There’s a reason that the founding fathers wrote into the constitution that congress shall have the power “To raise and support armies” and then limited that with “but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years.” Standing armies are bad.
novakant, I agree with you on (a). I don’t see a convincing argument for (b), though. Even if our presence is doing more harm than good, it doesn’t follow that our absence would do more good than harm. As unproductive as our occupation has been, by far the most likely outcome if we withdraw precipitously seems to me to be the degeneration of Iraq into feuding pseudo-states, followed by civil war, followed by Kurdish secession and the likely Turkish intervention that would provoke, followed by an Iranian intervention on behalf of the Shi’ites, followed by God knows what kind of hellish regional chaos. As badly as the scalding lid of the pressure cooker is burning us as we hold it on, and as unlikely as it seems the boil is going to die down, letting the whole thing blow strikes me as an even worse alternative.
One of the big themes of the New Testament is that God doesn’t much care what you claim about yourself. He cares about what’s in your heart, and about what you actually do. Jesus said that some of those who say “Lord, Lord” to him will go to hell for their betrayal of his commands, and that some who don’t acknowledge him or publicly show any respect for his authority will go to heaven for doing what he commanded we all do for each other. Paul added the complicating factor that making a big show of the right things for the wrong reasons won’t help much, either, not if you’re trying to hide an absence of actual good intention. Jesus’ parables and the stories of his encounters with others in the gospels are full of this: the good men and women are the ones who do good, not those who talk holy.
Many of us aren’t Christian, but all the major figures in the administration except Rove make much of their faith, and it’s a good standard even in secular terms.
The administration came into power determined to make war on Iraq, and lied about it. Bush and Cheney authorized massive surveillance programs long before 9/11, while ignoring warnings about terrorism left over from the Clinton’s staff.
Once the 9/11 attacks did happen, the administration lied about the risks to those heroic men and women who did the rescue work in New York and at the Pentagon, and continues to do so. And Cheney immediately seized on the attacks to use as justification for public war planning against Iraq. Osama bin Laden, the actual mastermind behind the attacks, was never more than an afterthought to them, and just a few years later Bush admitted that he scarcely gave bin Laden a thought.
A whole series of bogus claims came and went leading up to the war, and given the chance to prove their claims about Hussein’s dangers, the administration failed every time. People with a reputation for honor sold it out to advance the campaign. It was all a sham anyway. There was literally nothing Hussein could have done to appease the war machine, with plans being made all the time Bush was insisting that the matter was open to discussion. But all the planning in secret didn’t include anything like a plan for helping Iraq’s people get back on their feet once the war was over, just arrangements for administration favorites in business to get rich various ways, and the designated head of post-Hussein Iraq was known to the administration to be an agent of the Iranian government. Furthermore, all of this was coming at the expense of effective fighting in Afghanistan, culminating in letting bin Laden go so that troops could be sent to Iraq instead.
The administration committed troops to the fight without reliable gear or training – there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction, but if there had been, our troops would have suffered and died en masse, because they weren’t anything like protected against the weapons the administration claimed were there. Whenever the Democrats tried to establish sensible criteria for troop readiness, Bush threatened to veto them, and all Republican Congresspeople fell in line at vote time, whatever independent talk they might engage in between votes.
The moral scandal of institutionalized torture justified by the most specious of claims about law and in deliberate rejection of all informed advice about effective interrogation is its own sin. And again, every Republican fell in line while Democrats tried to do anything about it.
The administration has fought every effort to investigate corruption and fraud in the war effort. It spent years trying to hide any sign of the human cost – when a TV news program proposed to give a respectful reading of the names of the dead, the administration’s allies tried to shut the whole thing down. Nor will the administration authorize a tally of the dead and wounded of Iraq, leaving it to independent groups, whom it then condemns and lies about. Meanwhile, the administration hides the financial costs of the war by shortcutting the usual budgeting process, while slashing spending on soldiers’ and veterans’ families and the troops’ own medical needs. When Democrats propose spending enough to meet these needs, the Republicans in Congress and their supporters in the media fight them every single time, and act as though facing the costs means hating the troops.
But tell me, who is actually acting to get troops properly equipped and trained, ready for battle? Fighting our country’s actual enemies? Their families provided for when away, and their injuries treated? Their efforts supported by efforts to build the rule of law and justice in the countries where they fight?
Jesus said that those that said “Lord, Lord” but ignored his commandments would go to hell. I say that those who say “troops, troops” but will not support them with truth or competence can go to hell, too. Real respect for the hard work that is armed service is coming from those who opposed the war in the first place, and who in the second place have tried to see it conducted by high standards of law and justice. And it makes me crazy sometimes to see just how easily people fall for the “troops, troops” lie. But then the spiritual ancestors of the “troops, troops” shouters are exactly those who thought they could fool the son of God, too.
Lieber ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende, as we say over here.
(Better a terrible end than terror without end*)
*doesn’t completely transport the vibes, and original does not imply terrorism
don’t think it’s fair to place 100% of the blame for polarizing the war on the GOP. The Michael Moore/Sean Penn types made a contribution
Just out of curiosity, what sort of opposition to the war would you have regarded
as nonpolarizing? A bad decision to go to war ought to be polarizing, for heaven’s sake!
there can be a somewhat disagreeable “I told you so” smugness to it.
In a perfect world, doubtless we’d find a way to remind you that you were wrong, and that you need to correct your mistakes, and that you need to avoid making the same mistakes in the future, and that you ought in the future to listen to the people who were right, rather than those who were wrong, without sounding smug. We’re only human, though.
What Gary Farber said. No occasion for surprise: the updated dolchstosslegende has been in the works since the anti-Blix campaign, “Old Europe” and freedom fries.
One way to do that is to make it harder to start one by reducing the size and reach of our armed forces by a significant extent, closing our overseas bases and bringing the troops home from Germany, Italy, Qatar, South Korea, Japan, Iraq, Cuba, and some of the dozens and dozens and dozens of other places where we have stationed troops on others’ soil, such that starting something like the Iraq war requires a draft. Then the nation can sit up and see if it is really worth it.
Some of these deployments can and should be drawn down/ended (and in fact, that’s been happening in places where they’re no longer needed, such as western Europe). But in other places they’re still necessary. As much resentment as there is of the U.S. presence in South Korea, for example, if you ask Koreans a majority will say they don’t want U.S. troops to leave as long as Kim Jong Il poses a threat. Ask Japanese and most of them would rather have the U.S. provide deterrent defense for them than bear the cost themselves. The military being the proverbial hammer that makes every troublesome situation look like a nail is a real problem, but that doesn’t mean that having no standing military is necessarily a better alternative. If we’d done what you suggest in, say, 1999, we’d have really been up a creek on Sept. 12th, 2001, having to mobilize an entire armed forces from scratch with which to attack Afghanistan. Standing armies may be an evil, but at least to some degree they’re a necessary one.
Before the invasion, Iraq was controlled by a brutal dictator. The US, for moral reasons, has been unable to duplicate Hussein’s level of control. It raises the question, can there be stability in Iraq without a brutal dictator?
If we’d done what you suggest in, say, 1999, we’d have really been up a creek on Sept. 12th, 2001, having to mobilize an entire armed forces from scratch with which to attack Afghanistan. Standing armies may be an evil, but at least to some degree they’re a necessary one.
not to get too “we had it coming”… but without a standing army, we wouldn’t have troops in Saudi Arabia (or anywhere else in the M.E.), which would’ve taken one of OBL’s chief complaints off the table. there might not have been a 9/11. without a standing army, we’d be less inclined to use it here there and everywhere.
But in other places they’re still necessary. As much resentment as there is of the U.S. presence in South Korea, for example, if you ask Koreans a majority will say they don’t want U.S. troops to leave as long as Kim Jong Il poses a threat. Ask Japanese and most of them would rather have the U.S. provide deterrent defense for them than bear the cost themselves.
While I’m less sure with respect to South Korea, my answer to both is “too damn bad.”
And what cleek and Bruce Baugh said.
If critics had warned Napoleon on the infamous March to Moscow that his tactical successes were nice, but he was overextended and didn’t have the resources to continue his campaign – it would not have meant that they were rooting for the Russians.
Saying “I told you so – now, will you LISTEN next time?” wouldn’t have been rooting for the Russians, either…
Just out of curiosity, what sort of opposition to the war would you have regarded
as nonpolarizing? A bad decision to go to war ought to be polarizing, for heaven’s sake!
Yeah, I’m with you. I was protesting against the war on my college campus in 2002/2003, and just as outraged as any liberal about having my patriotism impugned for questioning the wisdom of it. That said, I do think it was possible to oppose the war passionately without stooping to “Bush-is-the-new-Hitler” talk, and in my opinion, a responsible person should have done this.
but without a standing army, we wouldn’t have troops in Saudi Arabia (or anywhere else in the M.E.), which would’ve taken one of OBL’s chief complaints off the table.
Two points – 1.)given the Israeli/Palestinian situation, our support for corrupt Arab despots, etc. I doubt it would have made a difference in Al Qaeda’s beef with us. 2.)If we’d had no troops in Saudi Arabia, Saddam’s excellent adventure in 1990 might very well have resulted in him invading it, which could have caused all sorts of even worse problems, including but not limited to regional war and an oil-shock induced global economic meltdown. Again, just because the solution wasn’t perfect doesn’t mean it wasn’t better than the alternatives.
When Huffington Post runs a picture of McCain and Bush made up of soldiers KIA in Iraq, that’s just disrespectful. It shows a certain callousness to the deaths of their fellow countrymen/countrywomen in that they would turn it into a political agenda.
Do you think it’s similarly disrespectful for Bush and his minions to justify staying in Iraq so those 4,000 “won’t have died in vain”?
Also, what Jesurgislac said above: It isn’t even controversial that Bush and McCain have politicized this war all to hellandgone, and even Petreus still won’t say whether the debacle in Iraq is enhancing our security, so it’s hardly unfair to point out that these American lives have been sacrificed on the altar of Republican political ambitions. I’m sure that isn’t a comfortable thought, but it’s curious that your problem seems to be with those who point it out, rather than those who use the military for political ends.
It’s not “glee” as in “I’m glad this happened”, but there can be a somewhat disagreeable “I told you so” smugness to it.
Steve, you are a sane conservative, so I’m glad you recognize the perversity of the DFH’s being right being used to somehow undercut their credibility.
Waking up, I see that I put this comment there, intead of below my first comment in this thread, where I either intended it, or it does as well or better, as regards how and why the Vietnam war ended.
“These conclusions do not apply if a war is started by a Democratic administration (e.g., Kosovo ), for reasons that make no logical sense but are derived from the prevailing media stereotype that the right is realistic and tough, while the left is weak and idealistic.”
Which isn’t in the least incompatible, of course, with Bob Dole voicing the classic Republican line, as the Republican presidential nominee in 1996, that World War I, WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, were “Democrat wars.”
And it’s true that Wilson, a Democrat, took the country to war, as did FDR, as did Harry Truman, and as did — although the American roots started with Truman and Eisenhower — JFK and LBJ in Vietnam.
Wilson fought for democracy, and FDR told us of the Four Freedom. Truman created the infrastructure to contain and withstand communism. JFK and LBJ, no matter how misguided, took up that banner. Jimmy Carter began the subsequent rebuilding of our military.
But Democrats aren’t tough, and aren’t willing to fight wars. (For better or worse.)
Sure, that’s accurate.
italics off. Sorry.
Drat, never post before coffee. End of italics!
Italics, begone!
OT- I agree with Atrios.
We invaded Iraq, either to remove a gathering threat against us, or to insert a model democracy in the middle east, take your pick.
We defeated and then disbanded the Iraqi military, tried and hung the principals of its government, and killed its leader’s sons.
We crushed the infrastructure of the country, and are just beginning to restore it to its pre-war capability.
We have sustained a military occupation of that nation for five years, in the face of significant armed resistance.
Our casualties, as bitterly as we do feel them, have been, frankly, fairly light. Especially when compared to the cost in lives to the Iraqis. As financially costly as the war has been, we will likely absorb it without extraordinary sacrifice.
After five years, we are considering making an orderly withdrawal, because our continued presence there may no longer be helping things all that much. The Iraqis have to sort out their own fate at this point, it’s not clear that our contribution is constructive anymore.
If we do leave, and the worst happens — civil war, internecine bloodletting on a large scale — the greatest consequence to us going forward is likely to be that we will pay more for gas.
If you have a loved on the service, you’ve paid a high price. Higher than you deserve to. Otherwise, this war is something that has largely happened on the TV.
No American city lies in rubble. Barring servicepeople, no American citizen has been killed or physically harmed in any way. Again, barring servicepeople, noone has as much as missed a meal.
When I flip the switch, the lights come on, and when I turn the tap, the water runs. Gas and oil cost more, which is inconvenient, but they are available in whatever quantity I care to pay for.
It’s only in the mind of someone like Kagan that withdrawal from Iraq at this point can be described as a ‘defeat’. We’ve failed to completely impose our will on the nation of Iraq, but I don’t think that’s the same thing.
While I’m less sure with respect to South Korea, my answer to both is “too damn bad.”
So instead of tying Kim Jong Il up by placing him in a situation in which overt aggression against his neighbors is impossible because he damn well knows it’d be suicidal going up against the most powerful military in the world, you’d let him take a crack at the much smaller and weaker South Korean military (which he very well might – his father did, after all), and thus possibly let millions of South Koreans – people living in a modern democracy, not to mention a key cog in the global economy – suffer invasion by a totalitarian dictator, an event that would also greatly hurt U.S. economic and political interests even leaving aside moral considerations? What ever happened to championing liberal values?
Are you intent on proving the GOP charge that Democrats are weak and irresponsible on national security?
CC: …it’s not like every other utterance from supporters of the war, with regard to the successes of the surge, hasn’t been “I told you so.”
rea: In a perfect world, doubtless we’d find a way to remind you that you were wrong, and that you need to correct your mistakes, and that you need to avoid making the same mistakes in the future, and that you ought in the future to listen to the people who were right, rather than those who were wrong, without sounding smug. We’re only human, though.
I’m not trying to justify anything here. Just offering a personal perspective on how this type of thing can be misinterpreted.
I don’t think that’s rooting against the troops, so much, as rooting for the blame for the debacle that has cost so many of them their lives to be pinned squarely and unequivocally on the people who deserve it, e.g., the people who pushed the war, Republicans and otherwise, but mostly Republicans, who deserve to be electorally clubbed with it for the forseeable future.
Word. I’d add the pundits and warmongering morons like Kagan, who have been wrong about everything with disastrous consequences, but are still treated as “serious” even as they polish up their loathsome Dolchstosslegende.
Kagan’s screed is not unique to Kagan. It is the politics of conservative hate, even if you have to make up the facts to support the story line.
That is why the crap since the 70s about liberals selling out the US “victory” in Viet Nam is such a staple. These are people who hate first and make up baloney second in order to give it a gloss.
And unfortunately there is no polite or nice way to deal with such ideology. Kagan is vile and unprincipled, and it does no good to soft pedal the response to the moral depravity of fomenting hate as an ideological tool.
Xeynon – I’m perfectly willing to be convinced that the only thing (or the major thing) keeping North Korea from invading South Korea is the presence of US troops in the latter. If that’s the case, then they can stay.
But the idea that US troops need to stay in Japan because the Japanese prefer that we pay for their security is ludicrous.
So instead of tying Kim Jong Il up by placing him in a situation in which overt aggression against his neighbors is impossible because he damn well knows it’d be suicidal going up against the most powerful military in the world, you’d let him take a crack at the much smaller and weaker South Korean military (which he very well might – his father did, after all), and thus possibly let millions of South Koreans – people living in a modern democracy, not to mention a key cog in the global economy – suffer invasion by a totalitarian dictator, an event that would also greatly hurt U.S. economic and political interests even leaving aside moral considerations?
We don’t necessarily need to have the US Army in a position to be overrun in order to deter North Korea. Leaving aside the possibility that removing the US forces might reduce Kim’s paranoia — not that I’d bet the farm on the prospect — an ironclad defense treaty like the one we have with NATO would do the trick. If KJI understood that any invasion of SoKo would be regarded as an attack on the US, the way the NATO mutual defense treaty works, hey presto, you have your deterrent without the ongoing troop presence.
What ever happened to championing liberal values?
Since it isn’t necessary to maintain an overt military presence in SoKo in order to defend it, doing so or not has nothing to do with “liberal values.”
Are you intent on proving the GOP charge that Democrats are weak and irresponsible on national security?
As we can see, the GOP will make that charge regardless of the reality.
Two points – 1.)given the Israeli/Palestinian situation, our support for corrupt Arab despots, etc.
again, much of this support is military, made possible by our standing army and perceived willingness to use it.
almost nothing about US foreign policy would be the same, if we didn’t have that big army to swing around. all of our relationships would be different – some better, some worse; but all would be different.
2.)If we’d had no troops in Saudi Arabia, Saddam’s excellent adventure in 1990 might very well have resulted in him invading it, which could have caused all sorts of even worse problems, including but not limited to regional war and an oil-shock induced global economic meltdown.
maybe, maybe not. and again, if we didn’t have an army to use on a whim, there would be huge shifts in the political dynamics of that region. it wouldn’t be 1990 but without the US pushing Iraq out of Kuwait, it’d be a whole different region.
OC Steve:
I’m not trying to justify anything here. Just offering a personal perspective on how this type of thing can be misinterpreted.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the reaction you are describing is the result of “misinterpretation.” Since 2002 when war talk first started, war advocates have been demonizing war opponents as unpatriotic, etc. in order to politicize the cost of war opposition. War supporters have been actively encouraged by the war advocates to think these ugly things about the war opponents.
If as a conservative you reflexively feel these ugly pangs, which seems to be what you are describing it your post, perhaps those feelings are the result of manipulation by those you trusted with regard to the decision to go to war. Perhaps they are the intended result by those war advocates who urge you to make your decisions based on their principles of hatred.
I get the sense that right-wingers enjoy watching the US military kill and get killed because it satisfies their desire for war porn and satisfies their wet dreams of “victory” and “honor.”
But then that’s a petty observation.
This, Bruce Baugh’s 08:53 AM, is an example of why I worship him like a god — almost — and also provides an example of why I admire some Christians, as Christians, greatly, despite, you know, some unfortunate history (and my atheism).
LT Nixon: “A lot of this has to do with the cultural problem that America as a whole is disconnected from the military. We usually are hiding on bases in the States or deployed overseas. The current conflicts are paid for on credit, and the only time the public is going to get razzed is when oil prices go up or breaking news interrupts American Idol.”
I agree; the military/civilian split is a very bad thing indeed, and I mostly blame civilian culture, and to some degree some elements of of the left I regard myself as part of.
All I can say is that I try to do what little I can about it.
OK, I call foul. Aside from this being perhaps the longest sentence I’ve ever read, it’s promoting a total straw man argument.
Ask anyone who’s served on the DMZ. Our current forces in N. Korea are a speed bump. They are no more capable of stopping the North than the South Korean forces.
That most powerful military in the world would have to deploy to either defend or liberate S. Korea. Unfortunately they are a little bit tied up right now.
cleek:
I don’t know if the point is really about standing armies per se, but about an all volunteer army that ends up being used like mercenaries by the Cheney’s of the world (they volunteered for it!).
You can have a standing army created as a result of a draft or other form of compulsory service, and not have the current political problem in which the burden of going to war is not borne by the citizenry in general. I think this factor, as noted already by Gary, has more to do with the politics of opposition to the Iraq war than any other factor — people had no expectation of suffering from the war, and were therefore more easily committed to war.
The fear of standing armies as of the time the Constitution was drafted was based on models that existed at that time for standing armies, which were basically private armies for the benefit of the monarch, and the soldiers were not drawn from the general citizenry. The concept of a citizen army resulting from a draft was not the European model in 1789 — it first appeared in the following decade as a product of the French revolution (levee en masse).
Also, US troops in Japan are stationed mainly in a region (Okinawa) with people that are considered by many Japanese as “not really of us”. So, there may even be a “benefit” of US troops misbehaving (mild form of the old French custom of dragonnades, so to speak).
A credible threat towards North Korea concerning aggression towards the South would probably do the same job as stationing troops there. I doubt that US infantry would actually be the force to repell a Northern invasion at the start anyway.
As for resentment towards US troops that would have to be seen in context. From Germany I know that people love to complain about US garrisons but on average don’t actually want them to leave (although West Berlin may be a special case. Railing strongest against what you love most is a trademark). So, if public opinion is used as an argument one would have to look closely, whether it is true sentiment or just facade (that can go in both directions).
Petty, stupid, and a useless generalization. Not to mention insulting in exactly the same way that hilzoy is insulted.
Puzzling why you chose to post it, though, after you’d realized that it was petty. Maybe you were striving for extreme irony, in which case please disregard this entire comment.
Ask Japanese and most of them would rather have the U.S. provide deterrent defense for them than bear the cost themselves.
That depends on which Japanese you ask. The ones who bear the burden of hosting Americans (primarily in Okinawa, which hosts 75% of the US bases in Japan) have made their desire to have Americans leave clear any number of times. Current government policy is to pour money into Okinawa. Furthermore, goverment pressure on the media has prevented widespread reporting of protests, for example here.
The recent case of a Okinawan 14 year old has not generated some protests, but not in the way the 1995 incident, which forced a revision of the SOFA agreement, did.
But the idea that US troops need to stay in Japan because the Japanese prefer that we pay for their security is ludicrous.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s sufficient reason either, and in the case of Japan, I’m willing to concede that Kim may not be enough of a clear-and-present danger to justify our continued presence. It’s open to debate. I don’t think it’s an open-and-shut case to pull them out, though – the vast majority of troops stationed in Japan are either Air Force or Navy, and hence could readily be deployed to defend SoKo as well.
an ironclad defense treaty like the one we have with NATO would do the trick. If KJI understood that any invasion of SoKo would be regarded as an attack on the US, the way the NATO mutual defense treaty works, hey presto, you have your deterrent without the ongoing troop presence.
Maybe. The thing is, SoKo is a small place, and if we had no troops whatsoever in the region, and no standing military anywhere to move there posthaste, the North Koreans could quite possibly overrun it by the time we got our act together. If they control the entire peninsula, all of a sudden the overwhelming superiority of our military isn’t such an advantage anymore. The 50,000 or so troops we have stationed there are a speed bump – you’re right, Dave – but that’s all they need to be, because they’re enough of an obstacle that they’d prevent Kim from achieving any kind of quick victory before we could bring in reinforcements.
Since it isn’t necessary to maintain an overt military presence in SoKo in order to defend it, doing so or not has nothing to do with “liberal values.”
As to whether it’s necessary, see what I said above. Re: liberal values, though, I was responding to what I felt was a rather flippant remark by Ugh that at least came across to me as evincing a lack of concern for our democratic allies.
I don’t know if the point is really about standing armies per se, but about an all volunteer army that ends up being used like mercenaries by the Cheney’s of the world (they volunteered for it!).
true.
i suppose i was assuming a standing army is a handy tool for Cheneyism. if we had to man the army from scratch every time we wanted to use it, it would be less handy and therefore less tempting to use.
Xeynon – I’m perfectly willing to be convinced that the only thing (or the major thing) keeping North Korea from invading South Korea is the presence of US troops in the latter. If that’s the case, then they can stay.
But the idea that US troops need to stay in Japan because the Japanese prefer that we pay for their security is ludicrous.
IIRC the stationing of US troops in places like Japan (post-1952 in Japan’s case) originated in part as a Cold War counter-proliferation measure, the idea being to suppress the desire of US allies and clients to acquire nuclear weapons of their own for deterrence purposes. These deployments may have outlived their usefulness in this regard, or not. Would things be better or worse on the Korean peninsula today if South Korea possessed their own nuclear arsenal? What if the Japanese felt the need to follow suit?
Lieber ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende
Ironically this was one of the main underlying arguments in making the case for war, so I’m not sure if it’s wise to use it in making the case for ending the war – it might come back to haunt you.
Personally, I don’t know what to think anymore on this issue, but I do know that we have an obligation towards the 2-5 million refugees/displaced and I think we should focus on what can be done to help them.
Someone may have mentioned this above and I missed it, but Kagan’s statement that oil prices rose during the Iraq-Iran war in 1980-88 is transparently false. Historical oil prices are, like everything else these days, incredibly easy to find on Google. So I looked them up. Oil was selling for $37.42 in 1980 as the high prices brought on by the energy crises of the 70’s were beginning to wane. They declined every year thereafter (the years of the Iran-Iraq War), hitting $14.87 in 1988. These low prices put a huge strain on the Soviet Union at the same time that Reagan was ratcheting up the pressure on them by raising our defense spending (in the Reagan myth anyway, which of course contains a few grains of truth). They also put a huge strain on oil companies (I know, boo-hoo) and tens of thousands of jobs were shed. Auto manufacturers and consumers took advantage of these low prices by respectively manufacturing and purchasing ever-larger vehicles.
But anyway, Kagan just flat lied about something he felt was worth a bullet point in his published piece. This utterly cavalier disregard for the truth runs through his entire piece and everything he’s written. It is shameful that the right believes that it has no obligation to the truth.
you’d let him take a crack at the much smaller and weaker South Korean military
It’s a little OT, and I’m not up on these things as much as I might once have been, but my general impression is that the ROK army is a pretty tight outfit.
I think they have about 500,000 standing and about 5,000,000 in reserves. We have 30,000 folks there. Maybe it makes sense for us to be there, maybe not, but I don’t think we’re the thin line holding back a North Korean invasion.
My general impression is that it’s the North playing defense, rather than the other way around. At least, at this point. I could be wrong.
In any case, IIRC the ROK army has a pretty solid reputation as a tough, competent force.
The fear of standing armies as of the time the Constitution was drafted was based on models that existed at that time for standing armies, which were basically private armies for the benefit of the monarch, and the soldiers were not drawn from the general citizenry. The concept of a citizen army resulting from a draft was not the European model in 1789 — it first appeared in the following decade as a product of the French revolution (levee en masse).
The problem we have now is that increasingly sophisticated military technology and the training requirements imposed are driving us from a 19th – 20th cen. style of mass conscription based citizen army back towards an 18th cen. long-service professional army.
The European 18th cen was the period of “cabinet wars” which were started and stopped by elite decision makers with little input from the population as a whole. This is what Washington, et. al. were warning us against.
Democracy and mass conscription are related to each other – it is no coincidence that Democracy replaced other forms of government during the era of mass infantry warfare. To the extent that we are exiting that era, our politics may become less democratic over time.
SoKo is a small place, and if we had no troops whatsoever in the region, and no standing military anywhere to move there posthaste, the North Koreans could quite possibly overrun it by the time we got our act together. If they control the entire peninsula, all of a sudden the overwhelming superiority of our military isn’t such an advantage anymore.
Oh, yeah, our military would be helpless in the face the NKors controlling the entire peninsula. Right.
Presuming that the US gets to maintain a standing Navy and Air Force — the latter isn’t provided for in the Constitution, but bear with me — it’s silly to suggest the US would not be able to retaliate against North Korea for invading, even short of the nuclear option, and KJI knows it.
I’ll note you didn’t address my suggestion that the removal of US troops might lessen KJI’s paranoia.
The 50,000 or so troops we have stationed there are a speed bump – you’re right, Dave – but that’s all they need to be, because they’re enough of an obstacle that they’d prevent Kim from achieving any kind of quick victory before we could bring in reinforcements.
As you said, maybe — and then again, maybe not. In any case, though, you’ve hardly established that the presence of US troops around Seoul — which you concede aren’t enough to stave off an invasion by themselves — is any more effective a deterrent than anything else the US can muster. I too am willing to be convinced that they are, but so far you haven’t delivered.
The concept of a citizen army resulting from a draft was not the European model in 1789 — it first appeared in the following decade as a product of the French revolution (levee en masse).
The first point here may be correct, but I think the second is not.
The idea of a citizen defense force based on universal obligation goes back a very, very long way, at least in the English common law tradition that our politics derives from.
I could be misunderstanding the history here, but my take is that this goes back at least to the Assizes of Arms of 1188. That itself is often seen as a revival of an even older tradition, reaching back to Alfred the Great’s hundreds.
It’s possible to see a historical line when there really isn’t one there, but in this case I think there is a very long, even ancient, common law tradition of obligatory military service by common citizens.
To the extent that we are exiting that era, our politics may become less democratic over time.
I agree with this completely.
Did any of us have a choice about the war being turned into a partisan thing? The whole reason Bush et al *could turn it into a partisan* weapon was that *invading Iraq* only made sense as a strategy from a wholly republican perspective. As a progressive Democrat I did not then think (and have not now changed my mind) that it *made sense for us as a country* to bomb an innocent civilian population, to engage in pre-emptive war, to present false evidence to the UN, or to invade and try to occupy a fragile state–whatever the ostensible purposes. From a purely patriotic and selfish standpoint all these things seemed utterly wrongheaded, to me. There was no argument that Bush could make to me then that made these make sense. And in fact he *didn’t* argue that these things made sense for me as an American citizen. He split the country rhetorically into people who would benefit from the war and people who wouldn’t and he very specifically claimed to be going to war for all those “real” american citizens who were republican and who supported a violently militarist and imperialist solution to america’s problems–whether oil or 9/11.
I couldn’t sign on for that project because it was a profoundly unamerican project (to me) but I’d say I wasn’t even asked to sign on. This whole “you support the troops” or you “don’t support the troops” thing which the right keeps pushing doesn’t make any sense to me. No one asked me if I supported the war–no one was interested–and frankly my support or lack of it in the form of tinkerbell like enthusiasm for the soldiers as fighters in Iraq is neither here nor there. As an american citizen and a taxpayer and voter I would put my “support” for the troops over any republican I could name since I happilly support the funding, equipping, and medical care our soldiers and their families need–something that our own govenrment and the republican party do not. If I don’t support any particular deployment I am no more “against the troops” than I am “against cardiologists” when I suggest, mildly, that a heart operation is not needed for a patient with appendicitis.
aimai
“As much resentment as there is of the U.S. presence in South Korea, for example, if you ask Koreans a majority will say they don’t want U.S. troops to leave as long as Kim Jong Il poses a threat.”
Pew, 08.22.03:
Nov. 24th, 2004:
June 8th, 2004:
July 6th, 2006:
Another account:
“…if you ask Koreans a majority will say they don’t want U.S. troops to leave as long as Kim Jong Il poses a threat.”
What cites do you have on that, please? Thanks!
Incidentally.
“As much resentment as there is of the U.S. presence in South Korea, for example, if you ask Koreans a majority will say they don’t want U.S. troops to leave as long as Kim Jong Il poses a threat.”
I have a comment regarding this being held in the trap. Please someone to release? Thanks!
I think they have about 500,000 standing and about 5,000,000 in reserves. We have 30,000 folks there. Maybe it makes sense for us to be there, maybe not, but I don’t think we’re the thin line holding back a North Korean invasion.
Every South Korean male aged, I believe, 20 or 21, is a member of the military. They’re not all in combat-ready brigades, though. Broadly speaking, however, you’re correct – they do have a large and well-trained army, and we aren’t responsible for the bulk of the defense of the ROK. NoKo’s army is much larger, however (upwards of 1 million standing), so they would still need our help in the event of an invasion.
My general impression is that it’s the North playing defense, rather than the other way around. At least, at this point. I could be wrong.
I think that’s correct – but I’d argue that’s the whole point. If Kim’s too busy playing defense to attack anyone, we can wait until he dies and someone hopefully more liberal replaces him.
The problem we have now is that increasingly sophisticated military technology and the training requirements imposed are driving us from a 19th – 20th cen. style of mass conscription based citizen army back towards an 18th cen. long-service professional army.
A very good point. Conscript armies aren’t really very good at fighting today’s war.
Oh, yeah, our military would be helpless in the face the NKors controlling the entire peninsula. Right.
Presuming that the US gets to maintain a standing Navy and Air Force — the latter isn’t provided for in the Constitution, but bear with me — it’s silly to suggest the US would not be able to retaliate against North Korea for invading, even short of the nuclear option, and KJI knows it.
Yeah, of course we’d be able to retaliate. And we’d eventually be able to win. The thing is, at what cost? Millions dead on each side, minimum – Seoul is located less than 100 km from the border. If keeping 50,000 troops in South Korea provides an additional deterrant to prevent a war, isn’t that a pretty small price to pay?
I’ll note you didn’t address my suggestion that the removal of US troops might lessen KJI’s paranoia.
I agree with you that there’s reason to doubt this. Firstly, if our 40,000 troops aren’t really the decisive factor in the ROK’s defenses, then by the same token they shouldn’t be any cause for concern about an invasion on his part. Secondly, Kim’s a Stalinist dictator – paranoia is his whole M.O. and the way he clings to power. Nothing we can do will change that.
I think the best policy on North Korea is to keep it on a tight leash and make sure it doesn’t disseminate any nuclear or other weapons until somebody more amenable to change than Kim comes into power. There’s room for some carrots in that approach, more than the Bush administration has been willing to offer IMO – but keeping troops in the south is fine as the stick part of the strategy.
Ack… sorry about those italics. Too late at night…
Better.
italiexo!
Yeah, of course we’d be able to retaliate. And we’d eventually be able to win. The thing is, at what cost? Millions dead on each side, minimum – Seoul is located less than 100 km from the border.
A fact that isn’t changed by keeping 50,000 American troops stationed there. Indeed, your “speed bump” argument pretty much presupposes that garrison getting wiped out, delaying the NKors enough to prevent them taking, say, any more of the peninsula than up to Pusan. Which simply adds that 50,000 cost to the millions dead on each side, while doing nothing that you’ve established to prevent it.
It’s the “millions dead on each side” — which would surely include KJI from a dedicated effort to decapitate the regime — that deters him. You still haven’t established how our presence there is any more of a deterrent than an ironclad, NATO-style defense pact.
If keeping 50,000 troops in South Korea provides an additional deterrant to prevent a war, isn’t that a pretty small price to pay?
But you haven’t established that keeping 50,000 troops in South Korea does in fact provide an additional deterrent to prevent a war. I think we’ve had enough of justifying military policy based on dubious hypotheticals and assertions.
dmbeaster: If as a conservative you reflexively feel these ugly pangs, which seems to be what you are describing it your post, perhaps those feelings are the result of manipulation by those you trusted with regard to the decision to go to war. Perhaps they are the intended result by those war advocates who urge you to make your decisions based on their principles of hatred.
Not exactly. I reflexively jump to the defense of the military at any perceived slight. I have to be careful not to take someone’s apparent satisfaction at being proven right by events to be satisfaction with the actual events.
The American troops in South Korea have a political function more than a military one. They are not so many as to have a strategic impact, that is, the North can hardly consider them a menace given the balance of forces on each side. On the other hand, they represent America’s commitment to defend the South in the event of an attack, which is why the Korean government would not want them to leave.
A treaty–which I’m sure already exists–does not at all provide the same kind of reassurance. Both North and South might calculate that, in the absence of American troops, a rapid surprise attack might conquer the South before the US has the time to join the fight decisively. Washington would then be faced with a fait accompli. Washington might well decide not to try to reconquer Korea from an opponent with nuclear weapons.
The fact that a Northern offensive would have to drive through 50,000 US soldiers, on the other hand, would make it almost inconceivable politically that America would not join the fight with conviction, as we saw at Pearl Harbour.
The fundamental guarantee of deterrence is that American blood would be spilt with Korean.
Sounds as if we definitely need to start withdrawing from South Korea, doesn’t it?
“Xeynon – I’m perfectly willing to be convinced that the only thing (or the major thing) keeping North Korea from invading South Korea is the presence of US troops in the latter. If that’s the case, then they can stay.”
I’m not convinced that we’re doing much to stop it. South Korea has an excellent army, would win in a fight with a North Korea not supplied by China, and has completely different ideas about how NK diplomacy should be dealt with than we do.
We should withdraw all of our troops from there immediately or in short order. South Korea doesn’t need our guarantee, and whether the actual number wanting us out is just below 50% or just above it, it is far too many people to be stirring up resentment for no good reason.
Although I dunno when my longer comment will show up, released from spam prison, I have to point out that there are 28,500 U.S. troops deployed to South Korea, not this “50,000 troops” number you guys keep throwing around.
And the phrase you want is “trip wire.”
And of course the approval rating of almost (if not all of) our entire government being what it is, perhaps we should throw the lot of them out and start afresh.
I actually wasn’t thinking of that when I said we ought to get out of Korea, FWIW.
Great. I not only can’t even post a single link, I can’t repost the same sentence with no link.
My point was that there are 28,500 is the current number U.S. troops deployed to South Korea, not “50,000 troops.”
Also: “trip wire” is the cliche of choice.
I have to be careful not to take someone’s apparent satisfaction at being proven right by events to be satisfaction with the actual events.
That’s well said OCSteve.
“Sounds as if we definitely need to start withdrawing from South Korea, doesn’t it?”
One way to look at it is that it’s 28,500 troops very badly needed in Afghanistan.
And thanks to whomever, Seb or Slart, Slart or Seb, for releasing my 11:43 AM comment.
South Korea has an excellent army, would win in a fight with a North Korea not supplied by China, and has completely different ideas about how NK diplomacy should be dealt with than we do.
I’m sure that that the Korean government is not nearly so sanguine about the possibility of war as you are. “winning” has little meaning when the South has so much more to lose. It’s domestically and diplomatically useful at times to distance themselves from the US, but I can’t imagine them ever wanting to be left to their own devices. Nor can I imagine the US pulling out of Korea; America has fought three major wars to establish itself as the dominant power in Asia. Korea is very much the pivot on which the Sino-American balance of power teeters.
OCSteve: In case it’s not obvious, I’m responding to things like “Not exactly. I reflexively jump to the defense of the military at any perceived slight.” with an effort at retargeting a bit. This is something I learned about in dealing with depression and mood problems rising out of my autoimmune hangups. Sometimes it’s not feasible to just outright stop a reaction, but it can be feasible to notice it coming out and turn it a bit. Conscious thought can discipline emotional reactions even without altogether turning them off, and this is fortunate. 🙂
Cite:
“Nor can I imagine the US pulling out of Korea….”
Keeping Osan, and the 51st Fighter Wing, and relying on ROK Army and Marines to defend it, but reducing our troop commitment to that, maybe (or not) Fleet Activities Chinhae, the Marine guards at the embassy, and maybe a few other tiny bits and pieces — DIA, NSA, COMINT support in general, etc. — wouldn’t be “pulling out,” but would free up 2nd Infantry Division.
the Marine guards at the embassy???
The point is that you need ground units to be the ‘trip wire’ — you call it a ‘cliche’, but it’s not an aphorism, it’s been a cornerstone of the American projection of power since WW2. It would have been much more useful in a military sense in the 1950s and 60s to move all those units in West Germany far back from the front lines, given that they might well have been wiped out in short order should the Red Army start rolling. But then the West German government is not going to be very confident that, push comes to shove, you’re going to spill your boys’ blood to save someone else’s bacon.
Dead American soldiers: US public demands vengeance!
Dead Koreans: meh, terribly sad, but it’s not really our fight is it?
Or if not Iraq, we could at least redeploy them (with apologies to liberal_japonicus) to Okinawa.
Which is just a stone’s throw from Iraq, I hear.
The division you’re now seeing in the US command is between those, like Petreus, whose military and political careers are now staked on success in Iraq and, on the other side, those who are greatly concerned that Iraq is debilitating their ability to maintain commitments elsewhere, such as Korea. These are the commanders who talk about the army ‘being broken,’ and they’re horrified by suggestions that America should pull out of hard-won positions in places like Korea in order to keep feeding a war they see as a lost cause, a mistake, and a total side-show to the nation’s long-term and established strategic posture and global interests.
I happen to agree with them. If anything, you should be taking people from Iraq and putting them in Asia.
Do you think the killing in Iraq is going to slow down if we pull out, byrningman? Why are actual dead Iraqis worth less than potential dead Koreans?
Why are actual dead Iraqis worth less than potential dead Koreans?
We have forces in Iraq now, and there are hundreds-of-thousands dead Iraqis. I don’t think deterrence is working in Iraq.
In case it’s not obvious, I’m responding to things like “Not exactly. I reflexively jump to the defense of the military at any perceived slight.” with an effort at retargeting a bit.
Given the efforts of this Administration and its minions (like Kagan) of framing criticism of Administration policy and incompetence as “slights on the troops,” retargeting of this sort is probably wise.
“The point is that you need ground units to be the ‘trip wire’ — you call it a ‘cliche’, but it’s not an aphorism, it’s been a cornerstone of the American projection of power since WW2.”
Yes, it has been.
We’re now in the 21st century, though, long past the post-war period. Are you saying that if the the 51st Fighter Wing, and Osan air base, as well as the DMZ, Seoul, and much of the ROK army, get overrun, that the U.S. won’t respond identically as it would if we had 2nd Division sitting there as well?
As we all agree, the current forces, or the forces we had there 40 years ago, weren’t sufficient to repel a full-scale North Korean attack, or anything close. Our strength now lies in our missiles, air power, space power, naval power, and the overall deterrent effect.
If North Korea did roll across the DMZ tomorrow, and set about firing all their artillery and missiles, and the like, the South would be devastated, tens, if not hundreds, of thousands would be killed, and there’s be nothing we could do about a major ground counter-attack, in the sense of significant roll-back, for many months.
So why, exactly, beyond tradition, is keeping elements of 2nd Division, to the tune of ~24,000+ troops, going to make a critical difference?
But for the record, two hours ago:
It seems to me that 2nd Division is needed more urgently in Iraq, but I’m just in my chair here, in need of buying jammies.
Do you think the killing in Iraq is going to slow down if we pull out, byrningman? Why are actual dead Iraqis worth less than potential dead Koreans?
Well for starters, I don’t think such a pullback would cause a war in Korea, so I’m not especially worried about dead Koreans. It would, however, represent a significant shift towards China replacing the US as the hegemon in East Asia. For all that Iraq has cost the US, it hasn’t yet required it to start trimming back the strategic hegemony steadily built up over the past one hundred years.
Of course you could argue that it would be the US’ interests to trim back its commitment in any case. I would sympathetic to this argument, but surely it’s better to do so in a measured and deliberate way, rather than being forced to do so by the situation in Iraq.
Likewise, in Iraq, the US will be forced to pull out some troops by next year whatever happens–if we believe what the military authorities tell us at any rate. Surely it’s better to do so now than wait until you absolutely have to. Pulling troops out has no political impact when everyone knows you have no other choice. If Bush and Petreus cared about what happens next year, they might tell the Iraqi government they are pulling out 40k now. Instead, the both know they’re gone next year, so they’re just thinking very short-term.
In other words, in both Iraq and on a global scale, US strategic choices are currently completely reactive. Even if it sucks in the short-term, surely it’s better to start being proactive again.
“The point is that you need ground units to be the ‘trip wire’ — you call it a ‘cliche’, but it’s not an aphorism, it’s been a cornerstone of the American projection of power since WW2. It would have been much more useful in a military sense in the 1950s and 60s to move all those units in West Germany far back from the front lines, given that they might well have been wiped out in short order should the Red Army start rolling. But then the West German government is not going to be very confident that, push comes to shove, you’re going to spill your boys’ blood to save someone else’s bacon.”
A trip wire for what? I understood, and completely agreed with the concept when we were trying to keep Russian or Chinese proxies from acting on their behalf by invading Western countries during the Cold War.
But we aren’t in the Cold War now.
North Korea isn’t a proxy for a larger Communist government.
South Korea shouldn’t be any more confident that we would spill our boy’s blood if North Korea invaded them than anyone else should be. Which is to say that in a Kuwait-like situation, if the international community could be roused to South Korea’s defense, that would be great.
It is very clear that for an enormous plurality, if not an outright majority, of people in South Korea, the US presence causes a lot of resentment. There is no longer any strategic reason to stoke that resentment. So we shouldn’t do it.
Equally important, South Korea wants to take a dramatically different diplomatic tact with North Korea than we do. They should be free to persue that (in my mind foolish direction) if they want to. We can’t really let them do what they want when we have our troops on the line but I see no more substantive reason to interfere with their desires.
“It seems to me that 2nd Division is needed more urgently in Iraq, but I’m just in my chair here, in need of buying jammies.”
Argh, I meant Afghanistan!
I blame Douglas Feith.
So why, exactly, beyond tradition, is keeping elements of 2nd Division, to the tune of ~24,000+ troops, going to make a critical difference?
Well, I can only say it again: their role is not military, it’s political. Deterrence is based on perception.
But you seem to understand this, since you quote the Korean president making this exact point, so i guess I’m not sure what you’re position is exactly.
Yes it is political. But why? I fully understand what we *used to* get out of the political statement. It was that large Communist countries couldn’t use North Korea as a proxy to attack a South Korea.
That was good. I supported that kind of political/military statement.
But now that North Korea is NOT a proxy for a larger country (much less a larger country that we have grave ideological differences with) what is the political statement that requires those troops?
It seems to me that 2nd Division is needed more urgently in Afghanistan
Gary,
How much of a strategic reserve does that leave us with, if something unexpected happens in another part of the world. I agree about the need to reinforce our troops in Afghanistan, but I’m getting very nervous about what happens if our ground forces are completely committed to existing conflicts with nothing in reserve.
But now that North Korea is NOT a proxy for a larger country (much less a larger country that we have grave ideological differences with) what is the political statement that requires those troops?
Sebastian,
I think part of the political aspect is that the extension of the US strategic deterrence umbrella to friendly countries like Korea may have been understood to be an implied context for the nuclear non-proliferation regime we’ve worked hard to put in place. If we withdraw that umbrella, South Korea may need to re-evaluate whether their continued participation in this regime is in their long term best interests. That could trigger a nuclear arms race in East Asia which I think everyone recognizes would be a bad idea. Having NK claim a sort of backyard nukes program is bad enough, but the situation could get worse.
Ah, I see that there was an actual noncontradictory explanation for your apparently inconsistent position. Thanks for clarifying.
Which is not to say I agree, just that I now understand what you were trying to say.
Probably it was unwise of me to casually dismiss actual Korean casualties even while seeming to dismiss possible future casualties. I didn’t mean to do that.
“But you seem to understand this, since you quote the Korean president making this exact point, so i guess I’m not sure what you’re position is exactly.”
I think I understand Lee Myung-bak’s political position reasonably well, and why he takes this line, and why he wishes the U.S. to take his line.
I don’t see that: a) this means the U.S. should automatically take Lee Myung-bak’s line; and b) that there’s any contradiction between supporting “the mere presence of the U.S. forces in Korea” and those forces being as I outlined, the 51st Fighter Wing, and Osan air base, a platoon or company of MPs, maybe, and a few other residual forces as I described.
Why, exactly, I repeat, are these not a sufficient deterrent, other than tradition? I repeat the question you did not respond to: are you saying that if the the 51st Fighter Wing, and Osan air base, as well as the DMZ, Seoul, and much of the ROK army, get overrun, that the U.S. won’t respond identically as it would if we had 2nd Division sitting there as well? Do you believe that Kim Jong Il believes the U.S. would respond differently? If so, why?
I’m sure, after all, you recall just how few troops we had in the ROK when North Korea invaded the first time, which is to say zip and nada.
North Korea attacked across the 38th Parallel in force “in the pre-dawn darkness of Sunday, 25 June 1950.”
But we still counter-attacked, ASAP.
OCSteve wrote:
I reflexively jump to the defense of the military at any perceived slight. I have to be careful not to take someone’s apparent satisfaction at being proven right by events to be satisfaction with the actual events.
Where do you think that reflexive jump comes from? Why do perceived slights to the military seem to require more defense than slights to other institutions? Isn’t your reflexive jump (which is widely shared) crucial to the perverse incentive system ThatLeftTurnInABQ describes?
“I think part of the political aspect is that the extension of the US strategic deterrence umbrella to friendly countries like Korea may have been understood to be an implied context for the nuclear non-proliferation regime we’ve worked hard to put in place. If we withdraw that umbrella, South Korea may need to re-evaluate whether their continued participation in this regime is in their long term best interests.”
That is a lot of what-ifs, especially considering that South Korea had a secret nuclear arms program even while it was under our umbrella.
It seems to me that the nuclear question is beyond our control. It will depend mostly on the perception about Chinese ability to rein in North Korean stupidity. If the Chinese can keep North Korea from being crazy, South Korea and Japan won’t nuclearize. If they can’t, South Korea and Japan will nuclearize.
The same goes with Chinese pushiness in general. If the Chinese look like they are getting bellicose, Japan can get have nuclear weapons in a couple of months (and that is probably an understatement) and South Korea is the same.
In none of the scenarios I can see is the tripwire an important facet (either way) of the nuclear policy.
I’d guess it’s because OCSteve has been (or still is) in the military, and sees some of those slights trickling down onto him.
“How much of a strategic reserve does that leave us with, if something unexpected happens in another part of the world.”
I’m not arguing with those saying we should proceed with drawing down combat units in Iraq.
Also:
But mostly: keep withdrawing units from Iraq over the next year.
I’d guess it’s because OCSteve has been (or still is) in the military, and sees some of those slights trickling down onto him.
OCSteve, like all of us, is (or was) part of many groups. I have the distinct impression that perceived slights to other groups that OCSteve has belonged to in the past would not trigger the same sort of response. But that’s just speculation on my part. So OCSteve, would you feel the same way regarding slights against people from upstate NY, or slights against computer professionals, or slights against people that live in PA, or slights against consluttants?
I’d guess it’s because OCSteve has been (or still is) in the military, and sees some of those slights trickling down onto him.
Ah, I didn’t know that. That’s understandable — most people tend toward unreasonable defensiveness of institutions they’re in — but, as I noted, OCSteve’s gut-level defensiveness is very widespread, including among conservatives who are not and have never been in the armed forces.
Giblets on the cost of the war…ON THE MOON!!
Re: the Green Lantern Fallacy. I find it hope-making that the current Green Lantern is shown as exceptionally powerful because he is an artist, and thus has extra *imagination* to go with his will.
I tend to be defensive against blanket criticisms, because I have fairly frequent contact with people in the military, and nearly all of them are people I respect a great deal.
But that’s just me. I can’t speak for anyone else.
That is a lot of what-ifs
Understood and agreed. This stuff was never an exact science even during the Cold War, much less now. I file this away under the category of If-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-try-to-fix-it. The Korean peninsula and NE Asia more generally have been pretty stable for the last few decades (considering the circumstances), and it seems like we have enough problems on our hands in other parts of the world already, so I can understand why inertia has carried us this far without an re-evaluation.
or slights against consluttants?
Is this a typo, or an empirical test?
🙂
I find that the sensitivity toward “slights” against the military tend to reflect certain cultures/ethnicity/race. There are many vets in Puerto Rican and Black communities and families; however there is not the same type of nationalistic investment in those communities. The “blood and soil” crowd tend to view the military differently than former colonized folks. I do believe there is a difference between patriotic and nationalistic. Call me a romantic.
Doctor Science: Where do you think that reflexive jump comes from? Why do perceived slights to the military seem to require more defense than slights to other institutions?
I don’t have personal ties to a lot of other organizations. I didn’t give years of my life to other organizations. I didn’t loose close friends in other organizations (training accidents, not combat).
I mean I suppose I might reflexively defend the University of Maryland someday – but the situation has never come up.
Isn’t your reflexive jump (which is widely shared) crucial to the perverse incentive system ThatLeftTurnInABQ describes?
Probably. All I can do about that is to recognize it and try to account for it – as I’ve tried to explain here (not very well I guess).
I’m sure, after all, you recall just how few troops we had in the ROK when North Korea invaded the first time, which is to say zip and nada.
Exactly. Don’t you see that this is exactly why the presence of American troops in South Korea has such significance now? Pyongyang and Moscow believed that the US was leaving South Korea out of its zone of containment in East Asia, that is why Stalin finally gave Kim the go-ahead to attack. Of all possible countries to be discussing, Korea is the most clear-cut case of the essentiality of unambiguous commitments. Only a respectable number of boots on the ground constitutes such unambiguity.
The general staffs of countries like South Korea take their security doctrine very seriously. I’m not sure if you’re serious about “leaving a platoon or the embassy marine guards,” but as regards air bases etc., they don’t really mean squat in terms of a political commitment, if for no other reason that planes can fly away very quickly. Can you imagine their reaction if you walked into a meeting with them, and with nice shiny powerpoint slides showed them how some aircraft and troops in Japan etc. could really protect them just as well? They don’t give a rat’s about deployment times etc., they want several thousand GIs at least in harm’s way, so if the bullets start flying there’s no possible way the yankees might pull out and leave them hanging.
As someone else pointed out, the entirety of US strategic hegemony on a global level is predicated on such commitments. Regionally, the South Koreans might be tempted to get nukes, or both South Korea and Japan might in time be tempted to cozy up to China, something US strategic planners have nightmares over.
Globally, deterrence rests on credibility. If that credibility were lost in just one place, the house of cards starts to collapse. Heck, it’s for that reason some argue that Vietnam War was still worth it, for if for no other reason it shored up the US deterrence posture.
Doctor Science, you’re behind the times. There are now many current Green Lanterns, and the artist character is no longer the star of the series or considered exceptionally powerful.
How this impacts the North Korean situation remains unclear, but will no doubt be resolved in an expensive crossover event.
The Korean peninsula and NE Asia more generally have been pretty stable for the last few decades (considering the circumstances), and it seems like we have enough problems on our hands in other parts of the world already, so I can understand why inertia has carried us this far without an re-evaluation.
On the contrary, along with the Indo-Pak dispute, East Asia is the most dangerous, most important place in the world, and promises to be for a very long time.
The 21st century is very much about East Asia. I would be astounded if Washington were to weaken its hand by withdrawing voluntarily from Korea.
Don’t you see that this is exactly why the presence of American troops in South Korea has such significance now? Pyongyang and Moscow believed that the US was leaving South Korea out of its zone of containment in East Asia, that is why Stalin finally gave Kim the go-ahead to attack.
that was 50 years ago. all of those people are dead. right?
This entire article sets up a false proposition (that those opposed to the war revel in Iraqi catastrophe) as a means of not discussing the choice that most opponents of the war favor, and that is, planned withdrawal. By avoiding this discussion Kagan doesn’t have to admit that the majority of American people now side with those who opposed the war all along. Much better to just continue impugning their patriotism.
Turb: I have the distinct impression that perceived slights to other groups that OCSteve has belonged to in the past would not trigger the same sort of response. But that’s just speculation on my part. So OCSteve, would you feel the same way regarding slights against people from upstate NY, or slights against computer professionals, or slights against people that live in PA, or slights against consluttants?
slights against people from upstate NY – Somewhat. We’re typically thought of as rubes. Many of us are and are proud of it. But yes I’ll reflexively defend the rubes against the city-folk.
slights against computer professionals, or slights against people that live in PA, or slights against consluttants – Not so much. I’ll join you in slighting any of those groups (with glee).
Look – I’ve already said it’s emotional and not rational. If you’re looking for some kind of explanation that makes sense – well there is none. And we’ve had the conversation before. The best I can do is to be aware that it is there and that it colors my opinions.
“They don’t give a rat’s about deployment times etc., they want several thousand GIs at least in harm’s way”
Do you have a particular range of numbers in mind, then?
Presumably it’s not 37,500, where we were not so long ago, or some larger number.
You haven’t said the current ~28,500 aren’t sufficient.
Would ~12,000 do, in your opinion?
~8,000? ~4,000? ~2,000?
And if the the 51st Fighter Wing has no deterrent value, I take it you’re find with us withdrawing it from South Korea?
And I’m going to keep trying here: I repeat the question you did not respond to: are you saying that if the the 51st Fighter Wing, and Osan air base, as well as the DMZ, Seoul, and much of the ROK army, get overrun, that the U.S. won’t respond identically as it would if we had 2nd Division sitting there as well? Do you believe that Kim Jong Il believes the U.S. would respond differently? If so, why?
someotherdude: “The “blood and soil” crowd tend to view the military differently than former colonized folks.”
Might there be an excluded middle that consists of neither group?
Is it possible to respect members of the U.S. military, and a role of the military, and still be against colonialism, d’ya think?
“Globally, deterrence rests on credibility. If that credibility were lost in just one place, the house of cards starts to collapse. Heck, it’s for that reason some argue that Vietnam War was still worth it, for if for no other reason it shored up the US deterrence posture.”
Yes, we fought the Vietnam more or less solely for that rationale, after all.
Yet U.S. credibility survived quite adequately after the worst happened, nonetheless.
It’ll survive a complete failure in Iraq, if it should come to that, too. Will that credibility be worse off? Sure. Is it vastly worse off now than it was in 2002?
Do I even have to answer that?
And will U.S. military/diplomatic credibility yet survive the worst possible outcome in Iraq?
Yeah, it will. And so will we.
Why do perceived slights to the military seem to require more defense than slights to other institutions?
Could it be that they put their lives on the line regardless of political persuasion? Maybe? Just a thought.
Somewhat random thought:
clearing off my desk and ran across an email from a friend regarding a purported WaPo contest (not sure of that) to take any word from the dictionary and alter just one letter and supply a new definition. A few seem apropos:
Dopeler Effect (start of the war): the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter wehn they come at you rapidly.
Karmageddon (Korea): It’s when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, and then the Earth explodes, and it’s a serious bummer.
Bozone (all of us): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
And just in time for April 15:
Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
I repeat the question you did not respond to: are you saying that if the the 51st Fighter Wing, and Osan air base, as well as the DMZ, Seoul, and much of the ROK army, get overrun, that the U.S. won’t respond identically as it would if we had 2nd Division sitting there as well? Do you believe that Kim Jong Il believes the U.S. would respond differently? If so, why?
I’ve actually not really discussed anything but that issue over several posts. If you don’t understand the issue by now, I’m sorry that I have not been able to explain it in a more clear-cut manner.
that was 50 years ago. all of those people are dead. right?
I think you’re joking (sorry, but I’m not sure anymore). In any case military doctrine, being inherently conservative and cautious, evolves very slowly, and is naturally informed chiefly by a country’s recent strategic history. Since WW2, the USA has been the guarantor of South Korean security. Among the benefits for the USA are bases in an economically vital part of the globe, and the fact the such protected countries (S. Korea, Japan, Germany) don’t then feel the need to develop and deploy strategic nuclear deterrents of their own. Strategic nuclear weapons being the only conceivable substantial threat to the United States territory and population, deterrent their proliferation is one of the cornerstones of American grand strategy (as is the case for nearly every nuclear power — N. Korea and Pakistan seeming to be two exceptions).
Hey, if we really think that the only benefit to having lots of US soldiers in Korea is precommitting us to fight in the event that NK attacks, why do they need to be soldiers? I mean, if they’re just going to be hostages anyway, why can’t the US government set up a scholarship to pay for 20,000 students to get free college educations in SK every year on the condition that if things go bad, they won’t get any special airlift out?
Wouldn’t dead kids have just as strong an emotional value as dead soldiers if all we or the South Koreans care about are hostages? I mean, kids probably cost less, they can’t be used to gin up any wars in the middle east, and the education and cross cultural experience seem like huge wins.
I only half kidding. This whole idea of planning to sacrifice soldiers to signal precommitment feels rather wrong.
Where do you think that reflexive jump comes from? Why do perceived slights to the military seem to require more defense than slights to other institutions? Isn’t your reflexive jump (which is widely shared) crucial to the perverse incentive system ThatLeftTurnInABQ describes?
Just to clarify something, in the earlier comment of mine that Doctor Science is referencing here, I was arguing about the asymmetric politics of wartime with regard to the majority of the electorate who do not have friends or family serving in the military. That is one reason why I think we need to bring back the draft, to recreate a sense of shared risk when these decisions are being weighed.
Yes, we fought the Vietnam more or less solely for that rationale, after all.
I beg to differ. Logevall’s Choosing War is perhaps the best recent presentation of alternate explanations (and one which I personally find more convincing).
Could it be that they put their lives on the line regardless of political persuasion? Maybe? Just a thought.
Indeed. In that regard, the military is very unlike fire and police departments. I can’t tell you how many times fire fighters have told me that they won’t rescue people from homes that have election signs for the wrong party on the lawn.
This whole idea of planning to sacrifice soldiers to signal precommitment feels rather wrong.
OK I really need to stop procrastinating and do some work now, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that these guys are there as martyrs to the policy of deterrence. In fact, the assumption that US commanders might want to save those guys would suggest that they would hurry to reinforce, resupply and otherwise support as quickly as possible, thus instigating the escalation and full-hearted commitment to S. Korea’s defense that the Koreans would like to see.
cheerio
Sarchasm?
How this impacts the North Korean situation remains unclear, but will no doubt be resolved in an expensive crossover event.
Posted by: trilobite | April 10, 2008 at 04:11 PM
NERDDDDD!!!! (Those crossovers always suck me back in!!!!)
Is it possible to respect members of the U.S. military, and a role of the military, and still be against colonialism, d’ya think?
Posted by: Gary Farber | April 10, 2008 at 04:21 PM
No doubt, I guess what I’m trying to say is this: I find that, in my family and the communities I work within, one does not have to begin each criticism of the governments/THE STATE’s use of the military with pronouncements about “respecting the troops” or genuflections about military service. It seems to be, that it is already assumed unless otherwise stated, that these feelings exist.
I think it is a testament to the skill of the Republican propaganda machine to fuse the decisions of government bureaucrats and right-wing politicians with the soldiers on the ground. Now if I could get them to convince folks that criticizing my irresponsible acts are tantamount to killing kittens and puppies, I could get away with murder.
I wrote “rationale,” not “reason.”
I don’t know that I have any disagreement with Logevall, having only read summaries, but I don’t know that I disagree with this by Jeffrey Kimball, either:
And so on.
As someone else pointed out, the entirety of US strategic hegemony on a global level is predicated on such commitments. Regionally, the South Koreans might be tempted to get nukes, or both South Korea and Japan might in time be tempted to cozy up to China, something US strategic planners have nightmares over.
Globally, deterrence rests on credibility.
Cozy up to china and do, what? And WTF are we deterring these days? The only thing I can see that we are possibly deterring is North Korea invading South Korea. Is China really going to invade Taiwan in the absence of US deterrence?
And, quite frankly, at the rate we’re going “US strategic hegemony on a global level” is going the way of the dodo in my lifetime, if not by 2025.
I say this with very many Marines, Navy, and a West Point graduate in my family, alone. Let alone the folks in the community.
Slarti,
Yes, it was sarcasm.
I think you’re joking (sorry, but I’m not sure anymore).
no, not really.
the goals of Stalin and Kim Ill-Sung don’t really seem relevant as reasons why we need troops in SK today.
Are they really fncking beating the Iran war drums again?
I wonder if they have concluded that there’s no way McCain can win the election, so they’ll bomb Iran to cause a regional conflageration that will plunge the world economy into stagflation, thus ensuring they re-take the White House in 2012.
Of course, every time I’ve fretted that they’re going to bomb Iran I’ve been wrong.
Turb: Indeed. In that regard, the military is very unlike fire and police departments. I can’t tell you how many times fire fighters have told me that they won’t rescue people from homes that have election signs for the wrong party on the lawn.
Come on Turb. You and I have got down into the dirt a few times. No one diss’s the FD or PD in a discussion like this. For many of us, those are the two occupations most often held up to that level.
OK – on preview (it is your friend) I see Slarti already asked and you said yes – sarcasm. Cool. I do like you and I don’t want to have to go all Upstate NY on your *ss… Listen close and you can hear that banjo…
I’m surprised this went less remarked on, but:
Uh, the fact that the Japanese would prefer that we do something they don’t want to do themselves hardly makes our continued deployment “necessary.” And until and unless the Japanese get the right to vote in our elections, I’m manifestly uninterested in how they want us to spend our money and military resources.
As to the rest, Bruce Baugh sums it up pretty well, and cleek says a lot of what I’m thinking throughout the thread.
Oops, forgot this:
What was the size of the standing armed forces on Dec. 6, 1941? What was it on Dec. 8? How many enlistees did we get right after Sept. 11?
And although this is surely going to make me a pariah among some, perhaps having to take the time to decide whether “attacking Afghanistan” was itself the correct response to 9/11 — especially given how swimmingly that has gone, Iraq or no Iraq — might actually have been a good thing.
“What was the size of the standing armed forces on Dec. 6, 1941? What was it on Dec. 8?”
But, Phil, Operation Torch, the first major U.S. operation of the war, didn’t happen — because we weren’t capable of making it happen — until November 1942, and wasn’t a disaster because landings were largely unopposed, against the French.
When we faced real resistance, German resistance, at Sidi Bou Zid, it was a disaster: “By this point, the U.S. forces had lost 2,546 men, 103 tanks, 280 vehicles, 18 field guns, 3 antitank guns, and an entire antiaircraft battery.”
It was a crushing defeat for the U.S., because the Army was too green. After a year.
The discussion above about ramp up times to operational effectiveness in WW2 seems to miss one vital point: it doesn’t matter how big our military is if both our civilian and military leadership are too stupid to appreciate the military’s limitations. Small size is, after all, nothing but another limitation. If our army was twice as big as it was in 2003, does anyone think Iraq would have gone differently for the first few years? I don’t. We still wouldn’t have had enough infantry, military police, and people who gave a damn about counterinsurgency. We would have just saturated the country with more teams focused on eliminating the enemy at all costs, blowing stuff up and (at best) antagonizing the civilian population. When your problem is an insurgency, making your high intensity warfare army bigger just speeds up the rate at which you fail.
The problem here is that the civilian leadership can’t come to grips with the fact that our military is quite limited and that our military leadership can’t shut down their can-do-anything happy talk internal monologue long enough to sensibly advise the civilian leadership. That problem will continue to exist whether our military consists of 10,000 or 10,000,000 soldiers.
The discussion above about ramp up times to operational effectiveness in WW2 seems to miss one vital point: it doesn’t matter how big our military is if both our civilian and military leadership are too stupid to appreciate the military’s limitations
and it misses another: nuclear weapons and near total air superiority.
the need to quickly mobilize huge numbers of troops is greatly reduced by the fact that we and our closest allies are perfectly capable of obliterating any country that would try anything like a full-on invasion. nobody is going to invade the US or any of its allies.
in this day and age, a large standing army is an offensive weapon. nukes handle the defense completely.
we don’t need hundreds of thousands of soldiers and trillions of dollars in weapons unless we plan on using them. we could get by with a much smaller army – and everyone on earth would probably be better for it.
If we rewrite U.S. military doctrine, and realistically threaten to drop nukes in a first strike — it’s always been U.S. policy to not renounce the right to do this, to be sure — sure.
But, you know, there are reasons that we’ve never actually nuked any invaders or anyone else, be it after South Korea, Tibet, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Afghanistan, or any other act.
Do you really think relying on nukes or nothing is a wise policy?
we don’t need hundreds of thousands of soldiers and trillions of dollars in weapons unless we plan on using them. we could get by with a much smaller army
Nevertheless, current US strategic doctrine is to maintain a level of military expenditure so immensely beyond that of any single possible rival of coalition of rivals that they will be discouraged from even trying to compete. In effect then, you spend those trillions of dollars on weapons so that you don’t have to use them.
That’s the theory anyway. Britain’s Dreadnought program pre-WW1 is probably the most oft-cited precedent, but hopefully things don’t turn out that way.
Do you really think relying on nukes or nothing is a wise policy?
It’s funny actually, history seems to be repeating itself. In the 1950s, relying on nukes was basically exactly what Ike wanted to do. He thought it was nice and cheap. JFK instigated the next major inflation of peacetime military spending under the mantra of ‘flexible response,’ i.e. having the conventional forces to allow for a greater array of options between capitulation and armageddon. Carter started the next boost, and the current administration has done it yet again. The basic cause of the rate of expenditure now seems to be that no hard choices are being made; the political climate is amenable to spending enough money to try to do everything.
russell:
I did not mean to imply that the concept of the large citizen army never existed prior to the French levee en masse. It was rarity in military history, but it clearly did exist on prior occasions. From the point of view of our founding fathers and the fear at the time of standing armies, the recent history with which they were familiar did not involve armies based on the general citizenry. Standing armies in that era tended to be quasi-mercenary that served as the tools of despots, who as a rule did not trust arming the general citizenry.
Even the English had a free-booting tradition for armed service.
Side note: the best libertarian commenters (folks like Jim Henley and IOZ, who are real for true libertarians) have been remarking for a while now that a democracy that finds itself engaging in counter-insurgency is just about certainly fighting the wrong war. That makes sense to me, and the further the Iraq mess goes, the more it seems like a good criterion. If you have to suppress the native population, it’s hard to see how you’re going to get self-determination out of it, at a minimum, and even the best-prepared counter-insurgency activity involves doing some awful things to people whose primary crime is resisting occupation.
If we rewrite U.S. military doctrine, and realistically threaten to drop nukes in a first strike
huh ?
i intended to say that nukes make a good deterrent against anyone else trying a first-strike against us; not that nukes make for a good offense.
But, you know, there are reasons that we’ve never actually nuked any invaders
we haven’t nuked any invaders (in the sense i thought i was clearly using) because there haven’t been any. nobody has invaded the US since the early 1800’s. and now that we have nukes, the odds of anyone doing so are pretty much nil. it was foolish to try invading the US before; now it’s suicide.
…or anyone else,
and now i’ll assume i’m misreading you. Hiroshima is the most humbling place i’ve ever been.
Do you really think relying on nukes or nothing is a wise policy?
as a deterrent? sure.
maybe this will help…
i’m envisioning a far less expansive and meddlesome military. a kind of military that might make a paleocon isolationist happy: purely defensive, not interested in policing the world, propping up one dictator over another, etc.. we don’t need 500,000 ready-to-go troops for that.
—
Nevertheless, current US strategic doctrine is to maintain a level of military expenditure so immensely beyond that of any single possible rival of coalition of rivals that they will be discouraged from even trying to compete.
right. and i’m saying that doctrine is wasteful and dangerous.
aye, I think I agree.
cleek: in this day and age, a large standing army is an offensive weapon. nukes handle the defense completely.
But if our only possible response to anything is a nuclear strike… what if on 9/12 our only options were (a) do nothing or (b) nuke Afghanistan?
I mean I’m not sure that I disagree with you, but nukes are no deterrent to some folks. I’d prefer to have some option between shrug it off and Armageddon.
OCSteve: But if our only possible response to anything is a nuclear strike… what if on 9/12 our only options were (a) do nothing or (b) nuke Afghanistan?
What if on 9/12 the only options the US had were (a) play with a rubber duckie (b) get drunk?
I’d prefer to have some option between shrug it off and Armageddon.
Well, it would probably have been more effective to go after the people actually responsible for the attack on the US on 9/11, rather than launching all out war on Afghanistan.
But the Bush administration has always been more for style than substance.
What Jes said. “No gigantic standing army” does not equal or imply ” no army.”
What if on 9/12 the only options the US had were (a) play with a rubber duckie (b) get drunk?
Obviously I’d go with (b). 😉
Anyway I think my point stands. Should we really have gone after AQ or the Taliban with nukes?
Obviously I’d go with (b). 😉
Brussel sprouts martini to you too.
Should we really have gone after AQ or the Taliban with nukes?
No more than we should go after Bush and Cheney with nukes or an army. Criminals are not defeated by military means.
Brussel sprouts martini to you too.
Ack! Blah! Spit spit…
Criminals are not defeated by military means.
I seem to recall that we indicted OBL and requested his extradition around ’98. Didn’t seem to work out all that well given what happened after that…
Look – I’m not up to invading any more countries – really, I’m not. But you either have a standing military or you do not. There isn’t some economy version that is just big enough to handle whatever may come up but not big enough to tempt the civilians in power to do stupid things.
I suppose we could have put a few battalions of NG troops on chartered airline flights, politely requested permission to land in Kabul, then went to the Hertz counter and rented as many jeeps and SUVs as they had on hand…
I seem to recall that we indicted OBL and requested his extradition around ’98.
I seem to recall that the US attacked Afghanistan with 75 cruise missiles on 20th August 1998, thus making it highly improbable that the government of Afghanistan would consider equably any request for extradition from the US.
Of course, had the US been willing to present evidence of Osama bin Laden’s involvement in September 11 to the government of Afghanistan – a normal first step in extradition – we might even now be watching reruns of The Trial of Osama bin Laden on US Five.
But you either have a standing military or you do not. There isn’t some economy version that is just big enough to handle whatever may come up but not big enough to tempt the civilians in power to do stupid things.
Granted. The problem is when you have a broken electoral system that ensures that civilians can get into power and do stupid things, unchecked, with your military. A small standing army run by a democratic government is – I say this in the strangled tones of a pacifist forced to admit an unpleasant fact – probably an unavoidable necessity, and the advantage of democracy is supposed to be that if you do anything too stupid, you get voted out next time. Bush doesn’t have that check: and nor will McCain.
I suppose we could have put a few battalions of NG troops on chartered airline flights, politely requested permission to land in Kabul, then went to the Hertz counter and rented as many jeeps and SUVs as they had on hand…
Well, I and others did wonder why the US wasn’t either sending an undercover team for the purpose of kidnapping Osama bin Laden and taking him somewhere where he could be formally arrested and charged: or – more practically – why the US was not dealing with the Taliban to get them to hand over Osama bin Laden.
As we got to know the Bush administration better, we realized that it was because bombing the bejasus out of Afghanistan was the most popular thing to do, and gave a nice booster to moving the US into war with Iraq. As for actually arresting Osama bin Laden, well… his family wouldn’t like it, and the bin Ladens and Bushes are friends.
OT – I can haz impeechmint now?
I can haz impeechmint now?
ooh George, your deniability is so… plausible.
It’s funny actually, history seems to be repeating itself. In the 1950s, relying on nukes was basically exactly what Ike wanted to do. He thought it was nice and cheap.
Right. And as I recall, when he promised to use them at the first sign of Soviet aggression, the Soviets promptly called his bluff by crushing the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Nuclear strikes entail such horrific moral, geopolitical, and environmental costs that they’re pretty much unthinkable even when forceful retaliation against a bad actor is necessary. Hence there’s a very good reason to have other deterrents in our arsenal. Are you really prepared to argue that, say, nuking Baghdad would have been a better response to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait than the Gulf War was? Or that we should have nuked Belgrade to end the Yugoslav civil war or the Kosovo conflict?
If you have to suppress the native population, it’s hard to see how you’re going to get self-determination out of it, at a minimum, and even the best-prepared counter-insurgency activity involves doing some awful things to people whose primary crime is resisting occupation.
I agree with you Bruce. The thing is, we’re now fighting this war now whether we should be/want to be or not. The salient question is not whether it’s the right war, but how we get out of it without making a bad situation worse.
it was foolish to try invading the US before; now it’s suicide.
I think byrningman was pretty clearly talking about people invading U.S. allies, not just the U.S. itself.
i’m envisioning a far less expansive and meddlesome military. a kind of military that might make a paleocon isolationist happy: purely defensive, not interested in policing the world, propping up one dictator over another, etc.. we don’t need 500,000 ready-to-go troops for that.
If you’re not interested in the U.S. policing the world, somebody else would be all too happy to do it for us (China, looking in your direction). As many beefs as I have with American foreign policy, if there’s going to be a global hegemon one way or the other, I’d vastly prefer that it be us. Who would you rather have taking the global leadership role,
a liberal democracy with longstanding if imperfect commitments to freedom and human rights, or a hyper-nationalistic, oppressive one party dictatorship?
What Jes said. “No gigantic standing army” does not equal or imply ” no army.”
I wouldn’t call an all-volunteer standing army of 500,000 drawn from a total population of more than 300 million “gigantic”. Note that the size of our armed forces has been significantly reduced since the end of the Cold War, as well.
OT – Not so long as CBS is still happy with the euphemising of “Harsh Interrogations” and puts torture in scare quotes.
Xeynon: Who would you rather have taking the global leadership role, a liberal democracy with longstanding if imperfect commitments to freedom and human rights, or a hyper-nationalistic, oppressive one party dictatorship?
When you put it that way, Xeynon, definitely the former. The United Kingdom will therefore step forward to resume our global hegemon role, while the US, a hyper-nationalistic, oppressive one party dictatorship, can bloody well step down.
More seriously, “policing the world” is what the UN is supposed to be for: the US is, at the moment, the key obstacle to this, as under no circumstances is the UN allowed to police the US or American allies.
Well, I and others did wonder why the US wasn’t either sending an undercover team for the purpose of kidnapping Osama bin Laden and taking him somewhere where he could be formally arrested and charged: or – more practically – why the US was not dealing with the Taliban to get them to hand over Osama bin Laden.
1.)How about the fact that Afghanistan is a very big, very rugged place and we didn’t have any idea where in it he was hiding? It’s not like he sent his video messages with neatly stamped return address in Kabul or anything.
2.)Uh, the U.S. did try to negotiate with the Taliban. The invasion didn’t happen until a month after 9/11. As I recall, during the interim Bush tried to negotiate with the Taliban, up to an including “give up bin Laden and in exchange we won’t invade you”. Mullah Omar refused. The fact that he did so, knowing that it would result in a military invasion that was sure to topple his government and quite possibly result in his own death, demonstrates pretty conclusively that the Taliban would not have ever willingly surrendered OBL.
OT – Not so long as CBS is still happy with the euphemising of “Harsh Interrogations” and puts torture in scare quotes.
I should have linked the ABC version which at least uses torture in the headling (but still with scare quotes).
How about the fact that Afghanistan is a very big, very rugged place and we didn’t have any idea where in it he was hiding?
My point was that if you couldn’t locate Osama bin Laden with a small team, you really couldn’t do it with a fullscale invasion.
)Uh, the U.S. did try to negotiate with the Taliban.
Uh, no. The Taliban kept repeating that they wanted to see the evidence: the US kept repeating that Osama bin Laden should be handed over or they’d attack. This is not negotiation. Negotiation is when both sides come to the table prepared to discuss, concede, and agree. The US was threatening aggressive war, not negotiating.
You know that things are getting wierd when it’s me that’s advising y’all to step…away…from the nukes.
I don’t think nuclear weapons play into any of our global conflicts currently in progress, or even any of them that are brewing. If North Korea elects to attack South Korea in force, and nuclear weapons are not employed, we will not use them.
IMO, of course. But we haven’t used nuclear weapons in over six decades, and I don’t think we’re in any hurry to break that streak.
Careful, there; someone’s talking points are getting trampled.
Slarti, I’d think it was obvious: if you really, really want to capture Osama bin Laden, the way to do it was to say quietly, under the table, to the Taliban: “Look, we want to help you rebuild your country, and we want to put this man on trial. Here’s our evidence for believing him to be the person ultimately responsible for a terrorist attack that killed thousands. We guarantee that once he’s in our hands we will hand him over to an appropriate neutral authority to be held in custody till he’s tried. Help us get him, and in return, what help do you want for reconstructing Afghanistan?”
Sure it would be a deal with the devil: but it’s not as if the US hasn’t offered concessions and help and recognition to other repressive governments, and on the plus side, thousands of Afghans killed in the US attack wouldn’t have died, the US might actually have done something to help Afghans going hungry, and where violence couldn’t change the Taliban’s mind on human rights issues, moral suasion by means of aid might have had a better long-term effect – certainly, it couldn’t have had a worse one.
That people in the US were spontaneously getting bellicose and looking around for some crummy little country to throw up against the wall and show who’s boss, was fairly obvious – I was hearing pro-war comments from friends online who were no more pro-Bush than my coffee mug. But this could have been directed into more productive channels.
Well, maybe.
i’m just gonna go ahead and quote myself, from way up in the thread, where i first mentioned nuclear weapons:
The discussion above about ramp up times to operational effectiveness in WW2 seems to miss one vital point: it doesn’t matter how big our military is if both our civilian and military leadership are too stupid to appreciate the military’s limitations
and it misses another: nuclear weapons and near total air superiority.
and i added that little bit of bold so at maybe clear up a little bit of the confusion that seems to have overtaken y’all.
m’k ?
When you put it that way, Xeynon, definitely the former. The United Kingdom will therefore step forward to resume our global hegemon role,
Right, because you guys did such a bang up job of it. It’s pretty generally agreed that many of the most serious problems that exist in places like Africa and the Middle East today are legacies of your colonial efforts and your misguided redrawing of national borders, which did things like lump Shi’ites, Sunnis, Turkmen, and Kurds together in a made-up place called Iraq. And your human rights record was even better. It was Britain to which Gandhi was referring when he quipped that he thought western civilization would be a good idea, if I recall. I know you western European left-wing intellectuals just love you your moral vanity, but there’s really zero evidence from history to support it.
while the US, a hyper-nationalistic, oppressive one party dictatorship, can bloody well step down.
I know you’re just being your normal button-pushing self here.. but seriously, as bad as the U.S. is at times (and I will be first to admit that we’re no angels), if you don’t think it’s better than China on the human rights front, nationalism, or militarism fronts, I humbly suggest you visit Tibet. Or the Uyghur homeland in Xinjiang. Or any number of Chinese jails in which political prisoners are routinely beaten and capital ‘T’ tortured. Or go to Beijing and try calling Hu Jintao a fascist pig on the streets and see how long it takes you to get arrested/deported. Or point out which region of the U.S. only remains so because its under military occupation. Etc., etc., etc.
More seriously, “policing the world” is what the UN is supposed to be for: the US is, at the moment, the key obstacle to this, as under no circumstances is the UN allowed to police the US or American allies.
This is just wishful thinking, for several reasons.
1.)since the interests of its member states diverge, the U.N. will rarely be able to even agree on when police action is necessary, much less summon the political will to bring it about or decide what form it should take (see Darfur, Kosovo, the Korean War, and too many other examples to enumerate).
2.)The U.N. has no power to enforce its decrees without military cooperation of its member states. When member states are not willing to provide troops, it can clear its throat and condemn things VERY FORCEFULLY, and do little else. See Rwanda, the early stages of the Balkan civil war, etc. When the U.N. police actions have been successful, it’s been entirely because the most powerful member state has acted to make it so.
3.)The hegemon (whoever it is) will always have the option of completely ignoring the U.N. or similar international bodies if it so desires. See, for example, Nazi Germany telling the League of Nations to buzz off. Or if you wanna go really old school, Athens ignoring the principles of the Delian League, because it could. Ultimately, international law is only as legitimate as the most powerful country considers it to be.
I’m not anti-U.N. – I think it’s a necessary organ for building cooperation on vital issues and can provide a useful sheen of legitimacy to police actions when they’re necessary. But to think that it’s capable of independently policing the globe is to fundamentally misunderstand its limitations.
All that said, if the UN had wanted to police the U.S. and its allies, France or Russia or somesuch could have put forth a resolution STRONGLY CONDEMNING the joint U.S./U.K. invasion of Iraq. Strangely, nobody did.
(and now i’m going to complain about web sites which rewrite your HTML in mysterious ways)
the indented and non-italic part of my last post was me. the italic part was Turbulence. there was supposed to be a line between those two bits.
and then the bottom should read:
and i added that little bit of bold so as to maybe clear up a little bit of the confusion that seems to have overtaken y’all.
don’t know why i have so much trouble with comments here. is it the tiny little comments box ?
Interesting. How do you know that this was not done? If the request was under the table, you’d never have seen it.
I don’t have any particular opinion one way or another as regards the way we made our wishes known to the then-government of Afghanistan, but I don’t see the Taliban as playing any role other than obstructionary.
Slarti: Interesting. How do you know that this was not done?
I don’t. It just seems more intelligent and potentially more effective than anything we’ve ever seen the Bush administration do.
And it presumes that the Bush administration wanted to arrest and try Osama bin Laden, when having him loose was a wonderful excuse to attack Iraq in 2002 or 2003.
Xeynon: Right, because you guys did such a bang up job of it.
Ooh, pot calls kettle black! It was a joke. I have no imperialist ambitions for my country.
if you really, really want to capture Osama bin Laden, the way to do it was to say quietly, under the table, to the Taliban: “Look, we want to help you rebuild your country, and we want to put this man on trial. Here’s our evidence for believing him to be the person ultimately responsible for a terrorist attack that killed thousands. We guarantee that once he’s in our hands we will hand him over to an appropriate neutral authority to be held in custody till he’s tried. Help us get him, and in return, what help do you want for reconstructing Afghanistan?”
Just a few questions you can perhaps answer.
1.)Why do you think the Taliban would have been persuaded to give up OBL by any evidence of his complicity in the 9/11 attacks, given that they’d long considered him a blood ally and not only refused to hand him over but provided him aid and succor even after he’d personally admitted responsibility for previous attacks against U.S. civilians (such as the 1998 embassy bombings), and that they had a brief but accomplished history of thumbing their nose at international opinion? You don’t seem to get that fundamentally, you can’t reason with people who aren’t rational, and the Taliban aren’t rational people.
2.)what makes you think the Taliban had any interest in rebuilding Afghanistan? Seems to me they were far more interested in keeping it mired in the Dark Ages than rebuilding it. These are people who think that girls shouldn’t go to school and women should be stoned if they refuse to wear a burqa. I highly doubt they’d have been enticed by infidel aid in rebuilding their country along modern lines.
If we’d done a better job with the occupation of Afghanistan and not gotten sidetracked by Iraq, we’d have done the Afghans an almost unmitigated favor by forcefully removing their government.
3.)If a foreign country provided shelter and direct assistance to a man who carried out an attack in London which killed thousands of your fellow Britons, would you think the British government was entitled to respond with force? If not, what would constitute sufficient grounds for military action in self-defense by your reasoning?
Ooh, pot calls kettle black! It was a joke. I have no imperialist ambitions for my country.
Yeah, I know. I don’t have any for mine, either. But like I said, if someone is gonna be the global hegemon (and somebody is, whether you like that reality or not), better us than, say, China.
But like I said, if someone is gonna be the global hegemon (and somebody is, whether you like that reality or not), better us than, say, China.
Better your hyper-nationalistic, oppressive one party dictatorship than theirs? Well, you would think that, but frankly, I’d rather neither one. The UN was intended to be the global police and peace organization: the US remains the primary stumbling block in the road of it not working, and would be the best means of ensuring that it did work.
Why do you think the Taliban would have been persuaded to give up OBL by any evidence of his complicity in the 9/11 attacks
Have you forgotten? The Taliban needed overseas help desperately, and knew it. And – though you probably have forgotten this – on 12th September 2001, there was a global upwelling of good feeling towards the US over the whole world. The Bush administration chose to kick it into the gutter and smash it to bits, but it existed. Yes, I do think that a skilled and direct diplomatic approach, genuinely intending to do right by Afghanistan, could have worked – if the US had been willing to try it rather than threaten force. The US made no legitimate attempt to extradite Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan.
what makes you think the Taliban had any interest in rebuilding Afghanistan?
Because (evidently, unlike you!) I was following Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban in the news from well before 2000 – probably from when I first read Full Tilt, which was sometime in the early 1990s. Yes, the Taliban were interested in rebuilding Afghanistan. They just couldn’t do it. Yes, they were a monstrous government: but the US has dealt with monstrous governments in the past, and has not denied aid to people living under monstrous governments.
If we’d done a better job with the occupation of Afghanistan and not gotten sidetracked by Iraq, we’d have done the Afghans an almost unmitigated favor by forcefully removing their government.
I almost agree with you, though the thousands of Afghans killed by the US attack on Afghanistan cry out against it. (Marc Herrold, using a method later adopted by the Iraqi Body Count project, estimated Afghan deaths at 3000+: from what we know of the IBC success at counting, that certainly means actual numbers were far higher.) War is seldom the best means of changing governments.
Nor is there any evidence that the US ever meant to do right by Afghanistan. The Iraq war had been planned since before Bush took power, remember? Documented at PNAC. September 11 was an excuse, not a reason.
If a foreign country provided shelter and direct assistance to a man who carried out an attack in London which killed thousands of your fellow Britons, would you think the British government was entitled to respond with force?
No, I’m a pacifist. Do you think the British government was entitled to “respond with force” because Americans supported the IRA during the Troubles, then? Should we have bombed Chicago and Boston, key sources of fundraising for terrorism?
But like I said, if someone is gonna be the global hegemon (and somebody is, whether you like that reality or not)
This is a common argument, but I find that I’m not convinced.
Why is someone inevitably going to be the global hegemon? I think the normal state historically, by far, is that there is not one.
This is really ahistorical; one need only read one of the multiple excellent accounts of the War on Terror (broadly defined) to know that the Taliban deliberately gave refuge to OBL and Al Qaeda for years. They sacrificed their own regime rather than give them up for pete’s sake.
We’re segueing into cartoonish anti-american stuff here.
The invasion of Afghanistan was quite proper–any elected government that sits by while its citizens are slaughtered by the thousands will not remain elected for very long. The execution was clearly botched, since it seems like not putting a good number of American troops into Tora Bora was an epic blunder.
I also don’t believe the American government owes the Afghan people anything, cold-blooded though that may seem. Unlike Iraq, where they do have an immense responsibility, the invasion of Afghanistan was purely defensive. IMHO they would have been well within their rights to have left long ago, had the forces they went there to knock out truly been wiped out. If anything, they would be doing Afghanis a favour by leaving.
“Why is someone inevitably going to be the global hegemon? I think the normal state historically, by far, is that there is not one.”
To be fair, the norm is either that there is a large hegemon (Rome wasn’t ‘global’ but it was most of the world as could be travelled to by Romans, same with China) or there are massive and often generation spanning wars among smaller more evenly matched states. So there are non-hegemon options, though I’m unaware of any peaceful non-hegemon options.
“I also don’t believe the American government owes the Afghan people anything, cold-blooded though that may seem.”
It seems cold-blooded because it is cold-blooded. We used Afghanistan to bleed the Soviet Union. We and the Russians owe them quite a lot.
byrning: The invasion of Afghanistan was quite proper–any elected government that sits by while its citizens are slaughtered by the thousands will not remain elected for very long.
That would be a terrific argument, if Afghanistan had any connection to September 11. Which no one had been able to show it did.
Unlike Iraq, where they do have an immense responsibility, the invasion of Afghanistan was purely defensive.
That would be a terrific argument, if there was any evidence that the government of Afghanistan knew about the attack on the US in advance – and had the power to prevent it.
I also don’t believe the American government owes the Afghan people anything, cold-blooded though that may seem.
Yeah, because it’s not as if CIA support of the Taliban and other Islamic fanatics in 1978 because they were the only local group that coherently opposed the Saur coup* had anything to do with the Soviet invasion in 1979, nor that the US support of the mojaheddin against the Soviets had anything to do with the long war that destroyed Afghanistan’s infrastructure in the 1980s, nor that the previous Bush administration’s decision to abandon Afghanistan to rot had anything to do with the power vacuum and the well-armed and well-trained Islamists who became the Taliban government in 1995. No, the US doesn’t owe the Afghan people a thing, byr – how could anyone think such a thing? Sheesh.
*That is, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan coup – a local Communist party that, supported by the Afghan army, overthrew the regime of Mohammad Daoud Khan, who himself had taken control of the government in a 1973 coup…
So there are non-hegemon options, though I’m unaware of any peaceful non-hegemon options.
That’s a good observation. Although, I think the means by which would-be hegemons will compete may be different now, if only because a full-out military conflict would likely destroy much of the planet.
I’ll make a different point.
The argument that the US is the most benign available hegemon is often used to justify global projection of US military power.
I’m not sure our playing that role, especially by military means, is universally popular.
There are also a lot of countries — China, India, Iran, and others — who are, for historical and other reasons, natural regional hegemons. I don’t think there’s any realistic way for us to prevent them from emerging as economic, political, or even military rivals.
I’m also not at all sure that ‘last global hegemon standing’ is a role we can afford to play. Not without giving up lots of other things that we won’t really want to give up.
So I think we need to find another way to watch out for our interests around the world.
That would be a terrific argument, if there was any evidence that the government of Afghanistan knew about the attack on the US in advance – and had the power to prevent it.
By September 11, Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda had openly declared war on the US, had bombed US embassies in Dar Es Salaam and Nairobi, and had bombed the USS Cole.
During all of this time, Bin Laden received support and shelter from the Taliban in Afghanistan. A Taliban court found Bin Laden to be ‘without sin’ wrt the embassy bombings. They weren’t gonna give him up to us.
The US waited four weeks after the 9/11 attacks before attacking Afghanistan.
I don’t really think lots of folks were chomping at the bit, pre 9/11, to invade Afghanistan. Iran, yes. Iraq, yes. Afghanistan, my guess is no.
I’m not a fan, at all, of Bush or of his foreign policy, but my best guess is that if an alternative to invasion was available, we probably would have taken it.
It would be hard for me to think of a case in the last 60 years of US history when a military response would have been more clearly justified.
I don’t really think lots of folks were chomping at the bit, pre 9/11, to invade Afghanistan. Iran, yes. Iraq, yes. Afghanistan, my guess is no.
I doubt if most Americans had even given Afghanistan a thought.
But post 9/11, a lot of Americans wanted to see their government doing something – and invading another country and killing several thousand people seemed just right.
I’m not a fan, at all, of Bush or of his foreign policy, but my best guess is that if an alternative to invasion was available, we probably would have taken it.
Well, in the sense that the people of the US wanted to see some country suffer for what had happened to America, yes, I suspect that if 9/11 had happened on Gore’s watch, Gore would have ended up invading Afghanistan; while Bush and the Bush administration have special ties to Saudi Arabia and the bin Laden clan, probably no US government could have taken the risk of attacking Saudi Arabia. While tackling al-Qaeda using non-military means would undoubtedly have been more effective, it also couldn’t have produced showy results 4 weeks after September 11. Getting the Taliban to point out Osama bin Laden and let a US military team go in and take him away might have worked – but it would have required the US to make an expensive committment to Afghanistan, and left the Bush administration with no excuse to attack Iraq.
Attacking Afghanistan was popular with bloodthirsty Americans who wanted to see ragheads die, and liberal Americans could tell themselves they were doing the Afghans a favor.
All in all, yeah: it was probably inevitable. But talking it up as “defensive” is fantasy. The US has not become safer from al-Qaeda because Afghanistan is rotting in the hands of the warlords and the US has a gulag at Bagram Airbase.
@byrning
This is really ahistorical; one need only read one of the multiple excellent accounts of the War on Terror (broadly defined) to know that the Taliban deliberately gave refuge to OBL and Al Qaeda for years. They sacrificed their own regime rather than give them up for pete’s sake.
Right. Because if something was true at one point in the past, it will forever be true until the end of time. They sheltered him before, so their requests for evidence before talking extradition in the face of global condemnation and immanent invasion were dismissable out of hand.
The invasion of Afghanistan was quite proper–any elected government that sits by while its citizens are slaughtered by the thousands will not remain elected for very long.
Very, very debatable. Is military action the proper response to criminal action, even large-scale criminal action? Especially when the nation harboring a non-state actor is expressing willingness to negotiate extradition? Also, in re: your last line, something is not “proper” because it’s popular… and don’t even try to tell me that the US administration didn’t help shape said popularity, nor that they couldn’t have tried to shaped a different one.
I also don’t believe the American government owes the Afghan people anything, cold-blooded though that may seem. Unlike Iraq, where they do have an immense responsibility, the invasion of Afghanistan was purely defensive.
Purely. Purely. We have a nation expressing a desire to negotiate the extradition of the non-state actor we claimed (from evidence we’d show no one) to be responsible for a massive criminal act on our soil, and we baldly refuse to negotiate or even show them the evidence. A sovereign nation should hand over foreign nationals dwelling w/in its borders immediately and w/o question upon demand by third-party nations?
And forgetting the “purely” portion… how was it “defensive” at all? Retalitory, certainly. Pre-emptive, a strong case can be made. Defensive? Um, no. Afghanistan was not attacking the US. We have never claimed that the Afgan government did anything of the sort, and if we did we’d be hard pressed indeed to present evidence. If we lump resident foreign actors into the Afgan government, Al-Queda was not attacking the US. They had launched one attack that took years of planning to execute. There was no immanent danger of another. It’s very difficult to see how a war for regime change in a nation that was harboring a criminal, and refusing to extradite him w/o evidence, can be characterized as defensive. We did not like that government’s policies, and we told them to change said policies (which, mind, did not include “attack the US”) or we’d destroy them. Very defensive, indeed.
Well, actually, it’s not hard to see. I know exactly where you’re coming from claiming this. It’s just that I can’t rationally conclude this myself. I’d need to conflate Al-Queda and the Taliban, ignore our refusal to negotiate, throw rule of law out the window, and accept American exceptionalism. Alas, I’m disinclined to do any of these things, let alone all.
@russel
They weren’t gonna give him up to us.
We should have publicly called their bluff and presented our evidence. As it stands, we’ll never know if they’d of extradited him, only that they wouldn’t give him up to us when brashly demanded to w/o evidence. World opinion on 12/09/01 was not the same as world opinion on 10/09/01. Would it have made a difference? We can’t know now, because we didn’t bother to find out.
Granted.
I thought it wasn’t really all that great of an excuse, and so did a lot of other people. For the ++Nth time, I didn’t think that the administration had made a firm connection between bin Laden and Iraq; more that they’d made a GWOT connection. But that’s a digression; this is really an argument of opinion than anything else, at this level.
“Getting the Taliban to point out Osama bin Laden and let a US military team go in and take him away might have worked – but it would have required the US to make an expensive committment to Afghanistan”
What does this scenario have to do with reality? The Taliban wasn’t going to ‘point out Osama bin Laden’. They repeatedly made it clear, after 9/11, that he was a valued guest in their country.
I understand that it would be nice if the Taliban had been willing to say “he’s over there go get him”. But they weren’t. And so far as I’ve seen, no one has claimed that they were even secretly willing to give him up. So this looks like a science fiction fantasy about how Afghanistan, not anything much to do with the actual Afghanistan.
“Attacking Afghanistan was popular with bloodthirsty Americans who wanted to see ragheads die, and liberal Americans could tell themselves they were doing the Afghans a favor.”
At least you are clear about how you feel about the situation. You might have something approaching half a point if you were talking about Iraq. But the fact that you are applying it to Afghanistan pretty much just shows where you are coming from emotionally rather than analytically.
FWIW, I think the Taliban was ideologically in a bind. Under their system they couldn’t trust non-Muslim testimony so to be ideologically pure, they almost certainly could never give bin Laden up. Furthermore they had been schooled by bin Laden to believe that the US would never actually attack, so why would they give up their ideological commitment for nothing.
So given their wacky constraints, it was almost inevitable that they wouldn’t give him up. But that doesn’t change the fact that they wouldn’t give him up. It merely explains it.
Attacking Afghanistan was popular with bloodthirsty Americans who wanted to see ragheads die
Right after 9/11, my wife and I were talking to her folks. My father in law was a infantry soldier in the Phillipines during WWII, my mother in law spent that war building Corsair aircraft in Akron OH.
The first thing they said was, “We hope we don’t go to war over this”.
The desire for a military response was far from universal.
Would it have made a difference? We can’t know now, because we didn’t bother to find out.
After the embassy bombings in ’98, Bin Laden was indicted in US criminal court. The basis of the indictment included courtroom testimony from Al Qaeda members and satellite phone records linking the African AQ cells to Bin Laden directly.
The Taliban refused the request, claiming that the evidence was insufficient.
You’re right, we’ll never know what might have happened if we had made whatever intelligence we had linking Bin Laden to 9/11 public.
Based on their response to the embassy bombings, however, I feel pretty comfortable not giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Sorry, before “the Taliban refused the request” in my post above, please insert, “The US requested that Bin Laden be extradited”.
What does this scenario have to do with reality? The Taliban wasn’t going to ‘point out Osama bin Laden’. They repeatedly made it clear, after 9/11, that he was a valued guest in their country.
I don’t think we know a great deal about what they repeatedly made clear in private. Certainly, if they came to the conclusion that the US would not be satisfied with anything but war, making bold public statements about not giving in makes sense. Nevertheless, I do lean towards the notion that a competent administration could have gotten Bin Ladin without going to war.
I don’t find the Taliban’s behavior after the embassy bombings dispositive. 9/11 was a much bigger deal than the embassy bombings on the world stage and a rational government that concluded nothing would result from blowing off the US on the embassy bombing front could easily conclude that they could not do so after 9/11.
I also don’t put much faith in arguments that the Taliban were ideologically bound to Bin Ladin. Even the staunchest ideologues can achieve remarkable, um, flexibility when a sufficiently large sum of cash appears. Consider the behavior of the Saudi Royal Family, those paragons of Islamic virtue: they’ve become quite flexible. The Taliban had been getting tens of millions of dollars in cash from the US for years due to anti-opium efforts so it is not like they were fundamentally averse to taking American cash or dealing with the US government.
Moreover, the notion of being a war time preznit is at the core of Bush’s being. This is something that is vitally important to him; he can’t really do all the boring preznitting stuff well, but being a war leader, that’s what he lives for. And while the American public might have been satisfied with getting Osama sans war, doing so would have taken massive political finesse. In any event, there’s no question that in terms of electoral and political gain, going to war was the best option hands down. The public wanted something done, and saber rattling followed by deployments counts as eight kinds of something.
This administration has shown that it is competent in one and only one domain: the relentless striving for electoral and political gain. I think it is perfectly reasonable to assume that in a moment of crisis, that lone competency dominated their planning.
I do lean towards the notion that a competent administration could have gotten Bin Ladin without going to war.
Could be.
But, you know, just because Bush is a putz doesn’t mean the Talibs weren’t arrogant, apocalyptically violent, self-righteous, bloody minded thugs.
You can slice it any way you like, but the Taliban were not Bin Laden’s unwitting dupes, nor were they the helpless, innocent victims of raging US aggression.
But, you know, just because Bush is a putz doesn’t mean the Talibs weren’t arrogant, apocalyptically violent, self-righteous, bloody minded thugs.
Absolutely. In my experience though, arrogant, violent self-righteous thugs respond to incentives and can be dealt with, especially if they’re incredibly poor (both financially and militarily) and their negotiating partners are incredibly wealthy.
I could be mistaken here, but I sense (not in your comment russel) an undertone of “you can’t reason with those crazy Taliban lunatics!”; that seems awfully familiar: after all, we couldn’t reason with that crazy Saddam Hussein, and we certainly couldn’t reason with Iran. Those people are so irrational and ideologically blinkered that you can’t negotiate with them. Except that they were trying to negotiate and they were acting (mostly) rationally. In fact, the Iranian government even made overtures where they offered a whole lot — overtures that were rebuffed.
I’m not saying that there are no crazy irrational governments on Earth, but I do think that we seem to assume that everyone we don’t like is crazy and irrational and can’t be negotiated and furthermore, that we’ve often been wrong about that. Given our long unbroken record of abject failure, and our own government’s demonstrated irrationality, perhaps we can impose a ten year moratorium on this line of thinking? Maybe we could start by assuming that other governments are rational and are responding to incentives as they see them and then devote ourselves to negotiating in good faith to disprove that assumption? It sure would be nice to have a foreign policy that was not one giant exhibit demonstrating the Fundamental Attribution Error. Alternatively, we could ignore the mistakes of the past and carry on as we have been. I have a strange feeling though that the next country that pisses us off will be run by irrational madmen…
To be clear, this is what I would have done if I were running the country: I would have “encouraged” Saudi Arabia to ensure that high ranking Wahabbist clerics denounced the attacks as unislamic, hopefully giving some religious cover for the Taliban to work with us. I would have approached them directly and talked with some humility while stressing common bonds and talking about how times have changed.
You know, something like “Omar, we know you’re not responsible for this, but if it had happened to you, you’d be pissed…we’ve worked together before, and that’s worked out pretty good for both us, eh? we’re both tight with King Faoud, so let’s see if we can’t work something out here…that embassy thing and the Cole, those were pinpricks, but this is a big fscking deal…I mean, for crying out loud, Le Monde is running a front page saying ‘We’re all Americans today’…this isn’t going away and right now we’re looking at support from around the world that makes the Gulf War look unilateral…even the Iranians, Syrians, and Libyans are falling over themselves to help out…and hey, look, we understand that you guys kind of got screwed with that whole Soviet invasion thing and we certainly played a role in that…we’re sorry, but we’d like to take this opportunity to right some of the mistakes we’ve made in the past…we’re thinking $20 billion cash every year for five or ten years to start with…we know that we’re asking a lot of you and its going to be hard for someone in your position to say yes, but I can promise you, the clerics in SA are about to ease the religious path for you and we really do want to partner with you to help develop Afghanistan…”
Now, I don’t think that sort humility is morally required here, but I do think it increases the odds that you can walk away with a deal. I think we would have been well within our rights to say “here’s a book with some evidence, now turn him over or else” but that wouldn’t have been very persuasive. This isn’t hard: going up to someone and demanding they do what you say or else inclines normal people to dig in their heels and reject you, no matter how correct you are. Smart negotiators need to defuse that sort of reaction, and this is exactly the kind of intelligence that I don’t think GW or Cheney or any of their staff possessed.
I have no idea if it would have worked, but I am pretty sure it had a better chance of working than what we did do. The point is that if you decide that your opponents respond to incentives and you move some of those incentives around, you can actually reach favorable settlements. Odds are, the Taliban had reasons for not doing what we told them and I think exploring those reasons could have been very fruitful if the administration hadn’t been hell bent on reaping the political and personal gains of being a war time President.
The Bush administration had no intention to get Bin Ladden. The Bin Laddens and Saudi Elite were up to their necks with support for Al-Queda. Afghanistan was the base (now the base seems to be Pakistan); however the money came from Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi Paradox
Summary: Saudi Arabia is in the throes of a crisis, but its elite is bitterly divided on how to escape it. Crown Prince Abdullah leads a camp of liberal reformers seeking rapprochement with the West, while Prince Nayef, the interior minister, sides with an anti-American Wahhabi religious establishment that has much in common with al Qaeda. Abdullah cuts a higher profile abroad — but at home Nayef casts a longer and darker shadow.
This article was written by Michael Scott Doran a star within Neocon circles, and it pretty much shows that Bin Laden is character within Saudi political wars. The Taliban were between a rock and a hard place, and it was easier for Bush to push a bunch a poor Afghani’s around than confront the Saudi political establishment. I mean, if the big bad US is not willing to deal with Bin Laden supporters in Saudi Arabia, what chance would the Taliban had? Support for Bin Ladden is stronger in Saudi Arabia (and apparently Pakistan) however, why would Bush and gang go after folks who would make him look like a bigger fool? Iraq and Afghanistan were low lying fruit, trying to get Bush to turn on his “friends” in Saudi Arabia would have taken a type of bravery he is just incapable of conjuring up. And its apparent, many Americans don’t have the bravery to call Bush on it.
Since you asked this…
Gary: Are you saying that if the the 51st Fighter Wing, and Osan air base, as well as the DMZ, Seoul, and much of the ROK army, get overrun, that the U.S. won’t respond identically as it would if we had 2nd Division sitting there as well?
No.
When we discuss the Taliban and how unreasonable they are, we should always keep this image in mind.
Attacking Afghanistan was popular with bloodthirsty Americans who wanted to see ragheads die, and liberal Americans could tell themselves they were doing the Afghans a favor.
All in all, yeah: it was probably inevitable. But talking it up as “defensive” is fantasy. The US has not become safer from al-Qaeda because Afghanistan is rotting in the hands of the warlords and the US has a gulag at Bagram Airbase.
None of this stuff has anything to do with reality. I know it would be nice to think that, because GW Bush has made of hash of most things, everything his administration has ever done is terrible and bad and evil and pony-shooting, but in reality things are a little more mixed.
Saying the “US has not become safer” is liking asking me to prove that there is no God. We have every reason to think that Al Qaeda as it existed before the invasion of Afghanistan has taken a bad beating, I can’t think of a direct attack they’ve carried out on US interests or personnel since, although I might be missing something at the end of a long day.
Either way, I know everything America does is evil and horrible, and its government has the moral equivalency of the Taliban and Stalin for you, but back in the real world, the Taliban had no interest in giving up OBL; his organisation was clearly intent on continuing its attacks on the USA if allowed to do so; and the invasion was thus a defensive operation which, while clearly not achieving all its goals, does at least seem to have rained on their operational capability parade.
Oh horrors! Dubya and the USA did at least one thing that might not have been purely evil and purely incompetent!
And as for the bloodthirsty americans who wanted to see ragheads die etc… how is this not just cartoonish anti-americanism? i’d love to see a convincing explanation as to how this sentiment actually played a role in policy-making after 9/11.
A few other people have been talking about negotiating something with the Taliban; this really was not a viable option. Had been tried and rebuffed several times over the course of years.
Saying the “US has not become safer” is liking asking me to prove that there is no God. We have every reason to think that Al Qaeda as it existed before the invasion of Afghanistan has taken a bad beating, I can’t think of a direct attack they’ve carried out on US interests or personnel since, although I might be missing something at the end of a long day.
I’m still waiting for that anthrax guy to be captured. Also, in Ron Suskind’s book “The One Percent Doctrine”, he describes how AQ came up with a plan to deploy cyanide producing devices in subways and large office buildings in NYC (and I think other cities as well). The plan was quite sophisticated: they had cased the buildings and assembled maps and had designed and built a very clever device that scared the crap out of the CIA. Yet AQ seems to have called off the plan because it would have looked too small compared to 9/11, not because the US government had foiled them.
Either way, I know everything America does is evil and horrible, and its government has the moral equivalency of the Taliban and Stalin for you, but back in the real world, the Taliban had no interest in giving up OBL;
You know that for a fact? I have no interest in paying taxes, and yet I do it anyway. Apparently, people can be compelled to do things they have no interest in by manipulating incentives. Shocking! I suppose that might not have worked with the Taliban if you assume that they are special not-rational humans who don’t respond to incentives at all or if you assume that the particular incentives they do respond to were not subject to our control. I’d like to see you make one of those cases though, because I’m not willing to accept those assumptions absent some evidence.
his organisation was clearly intent on continuing its attacks on the USA if allowed to do so; and the invasion was thus a defensive operation which, while clearly not achieving all its goals, does at least seem to have rained on their operational capability parade.
I suspect that the war in Afghanistan may have been less valuable than the financial interdiction work done by the CIA and FBI. This was a massive program to trace AQ’s financial network both backwards to the sources of cash and forwards to operatives using that cash for operations. This work was done largely in the shadows and didn’t get nearly as much press as the war in which our heroic soldiers fought against evil, so most people assume it wasn’t important, but it actually was. If you deliberately exclude all other anti-AQ efforts the US engaged in besides the war, then yes, the war was central to injuring AQ, but that’s a somewhat deceptive argument, no?
Also, to some extent, AQ destroyed itself on 9/11, expending its best human resources. The notion that AQ is infinitely flexible and powerful and would have continued with lots more 9/11s after 9/11 absent a ground invasion of Afghanistan needs to evidence I think.
The question isn’t “did invading limit AQ’s operational effectiveness”; after all, if that’s the only criteria, then we could have just used most of our nuclear arsenal against Afghanistan. The real question is “was invading a cost effective way to limit AQ effectiveness compared to the other options”; given how much we’ve inflamed support for AQ with our invasions, I think you have a high bar to clear here.
Oh horrors! Dubya and the USA did at least one thing that might not have been purely evil and purely incompetent!
I know Jes is an easy target, but is this comment directed at me as well? Because I am an American and I think the US government has done lots of things right. I even thing the Bush administration has done some things right. Given that Jes and I have espoused similar views in this thread, I don’t think one can reasonably say that those views are solely the result of burning anti-Americanism.
And as for the bloodthirsty americans who wanted to see ragheads die etc… how is this not just cartoonish anti-americanism? i’d love to see a convincing explanation as to how this sentiment actually played a role in policy-making after 9/11.
One of the most persistent critiques of the Bush administration is that they don’t do policymaking. Their primary focus is on electoral politics, and in the (rather liberal) areas where I lived, in the months after 9/11, lots of people I talked to wanted blood, and they weren’t overly concerned whose blood was spilled. They wanted action, preferably involving the military that strike back. The Bush administration understood those desires and rushed to satisfy them in order to increase their political power. You may wish to watch the documentary “Why we fight” for some particularly cogent examples of ordinary people demanding blood and pledging their support to Bush when he gave it to them.
A few other people have been talking about negotiating something with the Taliban; this really was not a viable option. Had been tried and rebuffed several times over the course of years.
Indeed, I’m sure it had. Except, we did a pretty good job negotiating that whole cash for opium control deal. And, I think you’ll agree that the 9/11 drastically raised the stakes higher than previous attacks. Just because they were not willing to cut a deal with low stakes doesn’t allow us to assume that they would be unwilling to cut a deal when the stakes went up dramatically.
More to the point, if you’re going to claim that something was not a viable option, it would help if you provided some evidence. Using the logic above, one might say that the government could not possibly have responded better to Katrina because Bush tried and that proves that we could never exceed his performance.
And as for the bloodthirsty americans who wanted to see ragheads die etc… how is this not just cartoonish anti-americanism?
Because it’s what actual Americans were actually saying online right after 9/11. On craigslist, on a bunch of bulletin boards I was reading then, on several mailing lists I was on.
I recognize that this is not typical behavior. Many of the Americans on mailing lists were people I had known online for years and who I’d had no idea had any hate like that in them – and who certainly don’t talk that way now. The fulminating online Mark Stromans and Frank Silva Roques may be unusual. But they existed then, post-9/11, in numbers that spoke of a public groundswell of opinion that wanted the US government to attack something, to kill people, to “hit back”.
“9-11 changed everything” was the national mantra while we were being lied into war.
This place was like a lynch mob being led by the Klan, after 9-11.
“And as for the bloodthirsty americans who wanted to see ragheads die etc… how is this not just cartoonish anti-americanism? ”
I knew some cartoonish Americans, apparently. Genocidal “kill them all, nuke them till they glow” type Americans back in the fall of 2001. I thought they were real people, but I suppose either they were cartoon figures or reality is “anti-American”. I despise that phrase “anti-American”, btw. It is possible to be overly critical of US foreign policy, but I think you really have to work hard at it to be more critical than is warranted, and generally speaking, Americans start complaining about “anti-Americanism” long before that point is actually reached.
One could defend the invasion of Afghanistan and also recognize that there was a desire for vengeance in this country right after 9/11. That was clear to me. It wasn’t universal, but it was pretty common.
Negotiate with the Taliban to turn over Bin Laden, but leave them in power in Afghanistan? So they could destroy more Buddhist statutes and other fifteen hundred year old archaeological artifacts? And continue to forcefully circumcise young girls? And publicly execute woman in soccer stadiums for adultery? And chop off hands, arms, legs and ears for minor offenses? And shoot children for laughing during religious services?
I bet you’re one of those guys who think Odysseus should have negotiated with the suitors who invaded his home, and Robin Hood should have made nice-nice with the Sheriff’s men, and instead of putting bullets in their heads Michael Corleone should have had a tete-a-tete while sipping espressos with Sollozzo and Sergeant McCluskey at the restaurant. Why, I bet you even think Shane should have lit up a stogie with the gunfighter and cattle baron and pow-wowed the afternoon away instead of quick-drawing and bulletizing them into villain guy hell. There’s good in everybody, right? So lets give radical-Islamic-murderers a chance — to continue their good works —
And by the way, the Taliban (a scummy religious sect if ever there was one) refused to negotiate with numerous Western nations who wanted to prevent the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas. Even after they were offered money, and economic assistance, and were implored by UNESCO not to destroy the statues, they proceeded to cut off the heads and the feet of the Buddhas, then fired rockets at them, finally toppling the defaced torsos over the ledge they were on to the ground below, and once there, attacked them with sledge hammers.
This, of course, is what Bush should have done to the Taliban, and to their Al Queda buddies, figuratively and literally, instead of invading Iraq.
Better your hyper-nationalistic, oppressive one party dictatorship than theirs? Well, you would think that, but frankly, I’d rather neither one. The UN was intended to be the global police and peace organization: the US remains the primary stumbling block in the road of it not working, and would be the best means of ensuring that it did work.
Because (evidently, unlike you!) I was following Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban in the news from well before 2000 – probably from when I first read Full Tilt, which was sometime in the early 1990s. Yes, the Taliban were interested in rebuilding Afghanistan. They just couldn’t do it.
I’ve already explained why the UN can’t possibly function as you think it can. Now, I’d suggest you get yourself a dictionary and look up the words “hypernationalistic”, “oppressive”, “one party”, and “dictatorship”, because it’s increasingly clear that you have no idea what they mean.
The Taliban needed overseas help desperately, and knew it.
That’s funny, because they sure weren’t asking for it.
Still waiting for you to provide evidence of this.
I almost agree with you, though the thousands of Afghans killed by the US attack on Afghanistan cry out against it. (Marc Herrold, using a method later adopted by the Iraqi Body Count project, estimated Afghan deaths at 3000+: from what we know of the IBC success at counting, that certainly means actual numbers were far higher.) War is seldom the best means of changing governments.
I agree, broadly, on your last point. But in this case, there was no alternative. And I see no reason to believe that 3,000 dead Afghans (or whatever) is not a body count the Taliban regime could have matched with their continued oppression and aggression toward Northern Alliance enclaves.
Nor is there any evidence that the US ever meant to do right by Afghanistan. The Iraq war had been planned since before Bush took power, remember? Documented at PNAC. September 11 was an excuse, not a reason.
Fine. But what does Iraq have to do with anything?
No, I’m a pacifist.
Pacifism is wonderful. If only there was any record of it ever actually, you know, working in the real world. It’s a violent world. If you can’t accept this, you’re living in a fantasy land. I’m sure Hitler would have been grateful had you been in charge during WWII – conquering England would have been a piece of cake.
Do you think the British government was entitled to “respond with force” because Americans supported the IRA during the Troubles, then? Should we have bombed Chicago and Boston, key sources of fundraising for terrorism?
You’re missing a very important distinction, which is that there’s a big difference between active support from the government of a nation and a bunch of guys passing around a collection jar in an Irish pub. Since broadstroke generalizations, simplistic conflations, and illogic are hallmarks of your arguments, though, I can’t say I’m surprised.
Why is someone inevitably going to be the global hegemon? I think the normal state historically, by far, is that there is not one.
As Sebastian noted, history suggests that either there is one, or there is ongoing war among rivals aiming to become one. The former alternative is, if not perfect, preferrable to the latter.
We’re segueing into cartoonish anti-american stuff here.
From my observation, that’s jesurgislac’s specialty.
Attacking Afghanistan was popular with bloodthirsty Americans who wanted to see ragheads die, and liberal Americans could tell themselves they were doing the Afghans a favor.
Tell me, was it also popular with the bloodthirsty Britons, French, Germans, Poles, Spaniards, etc. who for the first time in NATO history unanimously invoked the mutual defense clause of the NATO charter? Was it popular with the bloodthirsty Uzbeks, Turks, and other middle eastern peoples who willingly aided our invasion? Was it popular with the bloodthirsty Afghans who readily cooperated in the overthrow of the Taliban?
Sebastian’s nicer than I am. This assertion is not just emotionally charged/analytically challenged, it’s also offensive and jaw-droppingly stupid.
One could defend the invasion of Afghanistan and also recognize that there was a desire for vengeance in this country right after 9/11. That was clear to me. It wasn’t universal, but it was pretty common.
And perfectly understandable. I think it’s only human nature.
I don’t think, though, that this desire for vengeance led us to strike out blindly in retaliation, though. Far from it.
So they could destroy more Buddhist statutes and other fifteen hundred year old archaeological artifacts? And continue to forcefully circumcise young girls? And publicly execute woman in soccer stadiums for adultery? And chop off hands, arms, legs and ears for minor offenses? And shoot children for laughing during religious services?
You’re right. I don’t think blowing up statues is a good reason to risk the lives of American soldiers. I admit it. I don’t think we should sacrifice the life of a single US soldier to save a fracking statue.
You obviously suffer from no such qualms however. So let me ask you: if the Taliban weren’t involved with AQ at all, how many American soldiers would you be willing to sacrifice to terminate their regime? 100? 1000? And, just out of curiosity, do you think we should invade all countries that do things we hate? Should I pencil in Saudi Arabia and China on my calender for future invasions? I really am curious to hear your theory as to what grounds justify or necessitate a US invasion.
JFTR, the Taliban sucks and destroying the statues sucked and FGM sucks and executions for minor offenses suck. But sucking isn’t sufficient justification for unilateral invasion, and I’m pretty sure that despite the massive sucktitude involved, the UNSC would not have been willing to sanction an invasion to save some statues.
I bet you’re one of those guys who think Odysseus should have…Robin Hood should have…Michael Corleone should have…Shane should have…There’s good in everybody, right? So lets give radical-Islamic-murderers a chance — to continue their good works —
To be honest, I haven’t given a lot of thought to what all these fictional characters “should have” done. Mostly because that seems like the most pointless wankery imaginable. I don’t know why you’re so obsessed with hypothetical scenarios involving fictional characters or my thoughts regarding them.
I don’t think the Taliban are good. They are very very bad. But so what? We cut deals with very very bad people all the time; that’s life. And my point is that even very very bad people are still subject to incentives and can often be profitably negotiated with. If commerce and diplomacy only worked in cases where everyone was good, our world wouldn’t exist. These tools work even when everyone involved is a rotten SOB.
You seem to have this idea that the US should be deploying its military around the world to eliminate all sorts of regimes we don’t like with no legal basis. I don’t accept that.
And by the way, the Taliban (a scummy religious sect if ever there was one) refused to negotiate with numerous Western nations who wanted to prevent the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas. Even after they were offered money, and economic assistance, and were implored by UNESCO…
Refusing to negotiate one particular issue once in the past does not imply that one will refuse to negotiate any other issue at any time in the future. Refusing deal 1 which involves $X does not imply refusal of deal 2 for a whole lot more than $X along with the threat of war.
This, of course, is what Bush should have done to the Taliban, and to their Al Queda buddies, figuratively and literally, instead of invading Iraq.
And he should have done that after the statues were destroyed in March 2001, right? I’m pretty sure that Bush didn’t think the general sucktitude of the Taliban, including their statue demolition, justified anything like a war in the spring of 2001. You know, if I discovered a case where Bush was much less eager for war than I was, I would seriously reevaluate my values. Just sayin’.
And my point is that even very very bad people are still subject to incentives and can often be profitably negotiated with. If commerce and diplomacy only worked in cases where everyone was good, our world wouldn’t exist. These tools work even when everyone involved is a rotten SOB.
Like with Mugabe, and Kim Jung Il? Hamas? Iran? Plus, there are other very bad people that are terrorists, etc that are not state sponsored , that are not influenced by commerce and diplomacy.
You’re missing a very important distinction, which is that there’s a big difference between active support from the government of a nation and a bunch of guys passing around a collection jar in an Irish pub. Since broadstroke generalizations, simplistic conflations, and illogic are hallmarks of your arguments, though, I can’t say I’m surprised.
First off, I don’t think that minimizing the American contribution to IRA violence is helpful. We’re talking substantial sums of cash, a large chunk of the weaponry used, and a handy relocation program for terrorists. Moreover, it is simply not the case that the IRA’s US-based support was so small that the US government was powerless to do anything. In the 1980s, after the British government had successfully convinced the US to help shut down IRA support, things changed quickly: arms and money were interdicted and extradition laws were changed so that IRA terrorists in the US were now subject to legal jeopardy.
Secondly, I don’t think this active/passive distinction you’re trying to draw would be appreciated by the Bush administration if, say, Syria tried to use it. As I recall, the relevant criteria was “You’re either with us or against us” and not “You’re either passively supporting terrorists or you’re actively supporting terrorists”.
Like with Mugabe, and Kim Jung Il? Hamas? Iran?
I’d like to hear your plan for resolving the crisis in Zimbabwe DaveC.
From NK’s perspective, the US walked out on a deal. In any event, the Bush administration has cut a new deal with NK and SK has cut many deals with NK in recent years. Now, if you think that both Bush and the SK government are stupid for cutting deals with NK, please state that explicitly and explain what alternative policy you would implement.
As for Hamas, I don’t see a problem. We’ve consistently refused to negotiate with them. As a result, they’ve stubbornly refused to die. Perhaps if we continue pretending they don’t exist and pretending that they didn’t win a fair election, they’ll disappear. I believe Hamas had at one point adopted a unilateral ceasefire which they honored until Israel launched air strikes against them. If you have some sort of point to make about Hamas, please do so.
As for Iran, they’ve attempted to open up negotiations with the US only to be rebuffed. If you think this affair tells us something about irrational state actors, then I’d agree, but I think it tells us a lot more about the US than Iran. I also think that Iran’s government’s behavior has been quite rational.
Again, I don’t claim that every single bad actor on Earth will respond rationally to incentives or can be profitable negotiated with. I only claim that we have been consistently wrong in arguing against this hypothesis for governments we dislike and that we should be wary of our long history of wrongness when making future assessments.
Plus, there are other very bad people that are terrorists, etc that are not state sponsored , that are not influenced by commerce and diplomacy.
None of these very bad people are the nation we call Afghanistan, so they’re not terribly relevant when discussing the invasion of Afghanistan. Moreover, I think the IRA is one example of a non-state terrorist group that had no official state sponsors and yet still responded to diplomacy and negotiation. I’d say the fact that they’ve now been integrated into the government of Northern Ireland suggests that diplomacy can be enormously powerful, even when dealing with such disconnected groups.
turbulence: “And he should have done that after the statues were destroyed in March 2001, right?”
It would have been better to attack them ‘before’ they destroyed the statutes: that way, they like wouldn’t ya know have been destroyed–
One small step for the collective cultural history of Buddhism; one giant step for mankind; a lot of steps backward for one repressive religious sect the world would be better off without…
But, hey, maybe I’m just being ‘bitter’ and not seeing it from your higher plane of moral reference.
Here’s the reality on the topic of negotiating with the Taliban for Bin Laden’s release.
The Taliban had refused requests to extradite Bin Laden in ’98. The basis of the request was pretty solid. Perhaps the embassy bombings were small potatoes, perhaps they were not. In any case, they told the US to pound sand.
After 9/11, facing an immanent invasion by the US, opinions within the Taliban were divided on what to do with Bin Laden. Some of the Talibs wanted to try to negotiate some kind of deal, as long as it met the requirements of Islamic jurisprudence.
There was some talk of extraditing Bin Laden to Pakistan, to be tried under Islamic law. Musharraf nixed that.
Others of the Talibs, notably Mullah Omar, were basically of the opinion that we could go screw ourselves.
Bring it on, said Omar, and we’ll see you in hell.
Mullah Omar’s camp won the day.
Remember also that the issue from our point of view was not just the surrender of Bin Laden personally. Al Qaeda had an extensive presence in Afghanistan above and beyond Bin Laden, including extensive operational leadership and a robust training program.
Bush took a hard line. His posture was surrender Bin Laden and close the camps, no ifs and or buts, or you have a war on your hands.
He could have taken a different approach, but he didn’t. The approach he did take, while not his only option, was certainly not inappropriate to the situation.
Remember that the target of flight 93 was the US Congress. When we characterize Bin Laden as a ‘criminal’, it’s only because he doesn’t happen to represent a state. In any other context, the events of 9/11 would unquestionably have been an act of war.
The Taliban were jerking us around.
It’s possible that we could have finessed the situation and ended up with Bin Laden and company in our custody without a military action.
IMO it’s far more likely that the diplomatic approach would have met a dead end. Based on their behavior in every other case of diplomatic negotiation that I’m aware of, I believe they would have horsed us around for while and then told us to go screw.
We’ll never know, it’s true. But that cuts both ways.
russell,
Thanks for your comments. I agree that we’ll never know for sure. I would suggest though, that if we tried and it didn’t work, we could always fall back to the invasion option. In fact, I think keeping the possibility of invasion open would have been necessary for negotiations to work anyway.
In any event, if the goal was to get Bin Ladin, the war has been a complete and utter failure. We’ve spent a tremendous amount of money and…we don’t have Bin Ladin. I really don’t see the downside of trying to negotiate seriously. In the worst case, we would have ended up exactly where we are now: losing a war in Afghanistan with Bin Ladin on the loose. In the best case, we would have captured or killed Bin Ladin without getting mired in a land war in Asia. And all it would have cost us would have been some pretty words around a conference table.
Mullah Omar’s camp won the day.
Which camp wins is a function of what kind of deal we offer. If we offered them a different deal, we cannot just assume that their decision would have turned out exactly the same. Maybe it would have, but maybe not.
Remember also that the issue from our point of view was not just the surrender of Bin Laden personally. Al Qaeda had an extensive presence in Afghanistan above and beyond Bin Laden, including extensive operational leadership and a robust training program.
Sure, but that could have been part of what we were trying to negotiate. What we really wanted from them was a free hand to operate inside the country and whatever information they could give us.
IMO it’s far more likely that the diplomatic approach would have met a dead end.
When the decision at hand is whether to engage in warfare, I personally lean towards caution. I think war should be a last resort, which means that we should at least try to negotiate seriously (and no, giving ultimatums is not serious negotiation). Even though we were probably entitled to say “do what we say or else”, war is sufficiently horrible that I think the burden was on us to negotiate with some humility if that would have prevented a war.
Xeynon, I’m deliberately ignoring the rest of your comment, but the questions you raise here are worth answering: Tell me, was it also popular with the bloodthirsty Britons, French, Germans, Poles, Spaniards, etc. who for the first time in NATO history unanimously invoked the mutual defense clause of the NATO charter?
No one liked the Taliban, and Afghanistan was in a mess, and for several weeks after 9/11 there was genuine international goodwill towards the US that the Bush administration could use to get things done.
Invading Afghanistan had a superficial logic to it. The Taliban would be got rid of! Human rights would be restored! (No one then knew that among the fruits of the Afghan invasion would be the Shebargan massacre, the torture rooms of Bagram Airbase, and the Guantanamo Bay oubliette.) Billions of international aid would be forthcoming – even though it hadn’t been forthcoming any time between 1988 and 1995.
The particularly bloodthirsty response was, I think, a peculiarly American thing – though that may have been a function of the Internet being generally dominated by Americans. Still, while I heard plenty of arguments that invading Afghanistan was logical and rational – a little evil to bring a great good – I heard the “kill ragheads!” argument only from people identified as Americans.
Professor Marc W. Herold‘s work in documenting the civilian casualities of the US invasion of Afghanistan got brief media light when he announced that the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan had at least equalled the number killed in the WTC. He used the same method as Iraqi Body Count adopted: we can therefore be sure that his estimate of “3000-3400” was a low figure. I recall a good many people who shrugged it off as certainly inaccurate: I recall a few who simply said that if it was right, the Afghans deserved it, and the US should kill two Afghans for every American who died on September 11. These things were said. It is not “cartoonish anti-Americanism” to remember and report them.
I didn’t support the war on Afghanistan: but I didn’t suppose it would come to as much nothing as it did. Even after nearly a year of witnessing the Bush administration, I did think they would support reconstruction in Afghanistan, having said they would, and I didn’t imagine anything like Guantanamo Bay.
Was it popular with the bloodthirsty Uzbeks, Turks, and other middle eastern peoples who willingly aided our invasion?
Again: for every other country in the region, Afghanistan was one big problem. It had been lawless for years; no one liked the Taliban (no one ever did, not 30 years ago or now): Iran had to cope with an enormous refugee problem: everyone (as far as I can see) thought that when the US planned to invade, this would hopefully fix the problem at American expense. Rebuilding Afghanistan was always going to be a costly problem, because of the geography of the country. In a sense, I think, the US invasion was perceived as a trigger action – a means of getting the rest of the world interested in Afghanistan, the problems of which were only affecting its neighbors.
Was it popular with the bloodthirsty Afghans who readily cooperated in the overthrow of the Taliban?
Yes. The Northern Alliance mujaheddin were bloodthirsty foes of the Taliban – that’s why they were never in the Taliban, in shorthand – and yes; allies who proposed to beat the Taliban for them would be very popular. With the former warlords, who hoped to be able to take up power again (and did, of course) the overthrow of the Taliban would have been popular.
And the city populations, which had been Communist strongholds before the country fell into ruin, and retained art and leisure and education up until the Taliban took over, the presence of the US was assumed to bring change.
To quote one of RAWA’s leaders interviewed in October 2005:
(Worth reading the whole interview, by the way.)
To pour (literally) some extra oil into the fire google: ‘either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs’.
The US was quite willing to negotiate with the despicable regime that was the Taliban*, if it was just about oil and money. If the above quote is actually genuine, that could have had an influence on the “negotiation climate” after 9/11. There are people more rational than the Taliban that would refuse to deal with someone that only offers “be bribed or die”.
*although it is news to me that they were in the female genital mutilation camp; that is to my knowledge an African thing and only overlapping with Islam there (i.e. done by non-Muslims too and clearly not by all Muslims)
Hartmut: although it is news to me that they were in the female genital mutilation camp
They weren’t. Female genital mutilation has never been practiced in Afghanistan. (Well, I can’t say never, obviously – but it has never been part of the Islamic cultural tradition in Afghanistan.)
Other horrible ugly things have been done to girls and to women in Afghanistan, but FGM wasn’t part of their culture traditionally, and as far as I know, isn’t now.
Turb: …we’re thinking $20 billion cash every year for five or ten years to start with…
I’m trying to picture the reaction of the country in the fall of 2001 had it come out that our government was offering $100-$200 billion to the Taliban. I don’t think there is actually a word that would describe it as “outrage” could hardly do it justice.
The bloodlust was real. I’m not proud of it but I certainly felt it. Someone had to pay. At least with the Taliban there was some justification for it. Now in reality SA was more directly responsible than the Taliban. Should we have bombed SA? At the time I would have said hell yeah. Rebuild Afghanistan? I wanted the place nuked at the time. No, that hellhole wasn’t worth the life of one American soldier. It was well worth one LGM-118A Peacekeeper missile though. Would I regret it later? Yes, of course I would. But at that particular time my only regret would have been if cloud cover prevented us from getting good imagery of the detonations.
Again I’m not proud of the fact. But in all honesty it is how I felt at the time.
Now in terms of negotiating with them, in terms of unilateral action, in terms of the UN – UNSC Resolution 1267 dates from 1999. The UN did its usual bang-up job at handling the situation.
Has anyone pointed out that, for all the histrionics and ad homs and counterfactuals and whatnot being bandied about here over the last several days that, had we NOT invaded Afghanistan, we would at best be no worse off today than we currently are in re the status of Osama bin Laden?
No? OK then.
I’ll take that on, Phil. Bin Laden the human is obviously alive, but his freedom of operation as the leader of a group is severely restricted. I think if you compare his situation today to his situation in the summer of 2001, you wouldn’t call it either better or the same. The status quo is nowhere near good enough, and I can’t believe the pass that the President’s supporters give him on this, but really, it’s just denial to say that nothing at all was accomplished against BL and AQ in late ’01 and ’02.
After this lying to get us into Iraq and years of despicably immoral actions by the Bush Admi., I now believe we should have taken non-military action with Afghanistan. I used to think military action was rational; it now appears to have made things worse. Which proves many pacifists point, most wars are unnecessary. The Bush Admin has made me a bigger anti-war type than I was before 9-11.
9-11 did not change everything, it showed how typical many Americans are: total cowards in the face of evil.
We had a chance at dignity, and we embraced mob rule. When I saw that crowd burning and mutilating American mercenaries in Falluja, I saw our faces.
“More to the point, if you’re going to claim that something was not a viable option, it would help if you provided some evidence.”
In the embassy bombing case we had rock solid evidence and went through all the proper diplomatic hoops.
The reason it was rejected was because the evidence did not meet the Taliban’s idea of Islamic jurisprudence–it took the word and investigation of non-Muslims over what Muslims like bin Laden said.
When 9/11 came around they said that they wouldn’t give up bin Laden unless the evidence against him met their previously established rules of evidence. That was a no, with a hell no wrapped around it. The fact that you choose to interpret the second no as a possible yes, when really it as strong a no as the first, is frustrating the conversation.
If you have evidence (and I will accept it from non-Muslims) that the Taliban really wanted to negotiate, please offer it.
Currently you’ve offered essentially: they must have because only a crazy person wouldn’t have.
As I said above, I’m convinced that they believed we wouldn’t attack and further that if we did attack that they might win. So their f-you position doesn’t look so crazy from that perspective. Stupid perhaps, but not crazy.
In any event, if the goal was to get Bin Ladin, the war has been a complete and utter failure.
Can’t argue with that.
Which camp wins is a function of what kind of deal we offer.
The deal we offer is certainly part of the equation, but it’s not the only input.
Look, I’m not a fan of George Bush, but it’s crazy to talk about all of this without acknowledging that the Taliban also own tremendous responsibility for the fact that the events of 9/11 led to a war with Afghanistan.
In fact, it’s crazy to talk about all of this without acknowledging the responsibility that the Taliban owns for the events of 9/11 in the first place.
Do you really want to argue to the contrary?
Just because George Bush is an idiot doesn’t make them good guys, or innocent victims.
I’m trying to picture the reaction of the country in the fall of 2001 had it come out that our government was offering $100-$200 billion to the Taliban. I don’t think there is actually a word that would describe it as “outrage” could hardly do it justice.
I hear that.
had we NOT invaded Afghanistan, we would at best be no worse off today than we currently are in re the status of Osama bin Laden?
Well, no. To add just one point to Charlie’s comments, the training program is gone.
That’s a good thing. Full stop.
Look, defending decisions to go to war, especially when made by George Bush, is not a hat I enjoy wearing. But the facts are what they are.
IMO, the Taliban were in no way inclined to surrender Bin Laden to us, or any reasonable proxy for us. Perhaps, with the perfect combination of carrots and sticks, we could have persuaded them to do so. Maybe not. We’ll never know.
If we had, lots of wonderful people who are now dead would still be walking the earth today. There would have been no Baghram and likely no Gitmo. It might even have been harder to justify invading Iraq. You’ll never hear me say those would not have been better outcomes.
But you’ll also never hear me say that we had no cause to go to war with the Taliban, because IMO sufficient cause was there, in full measure.
They were, and are, violent, self-righteous bullies, who sponsored and gave shelter to an organization that openly called for acts of violence against Americans, and that was responsible for, at least, four major acts of political violence against Americans, resulting in well over 3,000 deaths. They did nothing to stop that, and in fact did quite a bit to abet it.
You can’t brush that aside.
I’ve made my points, and I’m done.
Sebastian: I’m convinced that they believed we wouldn’t attack and further that if we did attack that they might win. So their f-you position doesn’t look so crazy from that perspective. Stupid perhaps, but not crazy.
Not stupid, either. The Soviets were in Afghanistan for just over 10 years – initially a concerted effort that involved a lot of development and aid work as well as fighting the US-funded Islamic terrorists who resented (a) the foreign occupation (b) Soviet/Communist education of women and women’s liberation (c) any attempt to dispossess major landowners in favor of the local peasants – but eventually had to withdraw. The US and Allies have been in Afghanistan for 7 years: the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan already, and, after their previous experience, I doubt if any of the former mojaheddin yet regard the war as lost.
I doubt if any of the former mojaheddin yet regard the war as lost.
I agree with this. And to the extent that they are fighting over who will be “Mayor of Kabul” or which warlords will hold sway in which provinces, it’s hard to disagree with them. The war to create a caliphate, though, is lost, if it ever even existed. As hard as we’ve tried to bring it back to life with our invasion of Iraq.
Speaking of Iraq, my catch-phrase of the day is as follows: if Iran is such a problem in Iraq, why don’t we ask our friend al-Maliki to go to Tehran and work it out; he and Mr. Talibani have, by all accounts, excellent relations with their former hosts.
The reason it was rejected was because the evidence did not meet the Taliban’s idea of Islamic jurisprudence–it took the word and investigation of non-Muslims over what Muslims like bin Laden said.
In general, when governments say they refuse to do X because of Y, I don’t assume they’re always telling the truth. I’m kind of surprised that you do in this case. If I offer to buy your car for $500 and you say no, it does not mean that you will refuse and offer to buy your house for $500,000 several years later. If you refuse the car offer claiming that $500 is too little, it does not mean that you actually think your car is worth more than $500: people, and especially organizations, lie quite often. I’m surprised that I need to explain this to a conservative.
When 9/11 came around they said that they wouldn’t give up bin Laden unless the evidence against him met their previously established rules of evidence.
Indeed they did. No, can you tell me what they would have said if we approached them with a serious negotiating position? You may want to read the fundamental attribution error link I provided earlier in this thread because you seem to be demonstrating it perfectly. Apparently, you seem to think that the Taliban’s responses are dictated by absolute conviction to the principle of Islamic law and that the Taliban’s behavior does not respond to situational factors that we can control. I don’t think that’s completely true. Especially if we could procure a proper religious ruling from SA.
That was a no, with a hell no wrapped around it. The fact that you choose to interpret the second no as a possible yes, when really it as strong a no as the first, is frustrating the conversation.
I accept that they said “no”. Their no answer was unambiguous. What I don’t accept is whether they would have said no if we had approached them differently. I am honestly uncertain there: it is possible that would have refused no matter what. But it is also possible that if we approached them seriously, they might have acceded.
If you have evidence (and I will accept it from non-Muslims) that the Taliban really wanted to negotiate, please offer it.
I cannot prove a hypothetical just as you cannot prove an alternative hypothetical. I do think that alternative approaches would have raised the probability of a peaceful settlement.
You talk about what the Taliban “wanted” to do and that seems very strange to me. Of course the Taliban didn’t want to negotiate: they wanted the whole issue to just go away. But it wasn’t going to go away and in the real world, organizations often do things they don’t “want” to do because the alternatives are worse.
Currently you’ve offered essentially: they must have because only a crazy person wouldn’t have.
This is simply not true. What I’ve argued is that almost all people are subject to incentives and that we did not make a serious effort to rejigger incentives when “negotiating” with the Taliban. Our negotiations were less serious than any merger deal made in the Fortune 1000. It bothers me that this country will go to war with less attention devoted to negotiation than is given when Proctor and Gamble buys a cereal company.
As I said above, I’m convinced that they believed we wouldn’t attack and further that if we did attack that they might win. So their f-you position doesn’t look so crazy from that perspective. Stupid perhaps, but not crazy.
As russell pointed out, there were different camps within the Taliban: some of them were convinced and some were not. We could have done things to alter the balance, but we didn’t even try.
OCSteve: I’m trying to picture the reaction of the country in the fall of 2001 had it come out that our government was offering $100-$200 billion to the Taliban…The bloodlust was real. I’m not proud of it but I certainly felt it. Someone had to pay.
Yes, I agree completely and it was one reason why there was no real attempt at negotiation (another was that Bush didn’t have the skills). I was arguing that point with byrningman.
russell: But you’ll also never hear me say that we had no cause to go to war with the Taliban, because IMO sufficient cause was there, in full measure.
They were, and are, violent, self-righteous bullies, who sponsored and gave shelter to an organization that openly called for acts of violence against Americans, and that was responsible for, at least, four major acts of political violence against Americans, resulting in well over 3,000 deaths. They did nothing to stop that, and in fact did quite a bit to abet it.
Sure. The Taliban are evil mofos who deserved all manner of punishment and destruction. I totally agree with you there. I just don’t think that we’re very effective at punishing bad guys (hint: the Taliban seem to be doing OK right now).
I think our positions are actually very close: we seem to only disagree on the question of how likely serious negotiation would have been to avoid the war. If you think the chances of that are zero, then going straight to war makes sense but if you think there is a chance, even a small one, then I think we have an obligation to pursue it and if it doesn’t work, we can always start the war that has worked out so very well for us.
I think our positions are actually very close: we seem to only disagree on the question of how likely serious negotiation would have been to avoid the war.
I don’t think we’ll ever know if the soft pedal would have worked, simply because this crew would have never tried it. Bush didn’t want bin laden, he just wanted war.
I don’t necessarily blame him for it, the vanity of being The War Leader would really appeal to him. But he wanted the Taliban to tell him to piss off, and they obligingly did.
And the Saudi’s told him to piss off, and that sure didn’t motivate him to get tough with them. He knew who had to suffer and it would not be Bin Ladden.
I’m quite certain that Bin Laden wanted war, and that no faction within the Taliban was capable of standing up to him. The negotiation route here is a diversion.
the Taliban seem to be doing OK right now
Compared to what? Death or total defeat? Sure. Running any province, a city of any size, having consistent control over any significant swath of territory? Nowhere near “doing OK.” They have the ability to strike most places. This is not nothing, but it’s way way different from having the ability to control most places, and actually exercising that control.
Ralph Nader didn’t win the 2000 election, but he’s doing OK.
I do agree with people that think that Afghanistan has been neglected, that the US has decided to a certain extent just to kick the can a little further down the road, and not do so much nation-building there. It’s a legitimate criticism of the focus on Iraq. But there is more international support – thanks, Canada, and France! – which makes it tempting to keep a low profile nowadays.