Friday, December 9, 2011

The Death of COIN, or the Death of Strategic ("C") Thought?

Recently Col. Gian Gentile USA (h/t to ZP) came out with yet another well-written short article on the dilemma facing the US military today. Which other US officer would one put in the same category as Gian Gentile? Good question . . .

In Coin is Dead: US Army Must Put Strategy Over Tactics, Gentile takes issue with the Counter-Insurgency (COIN) response to the Global War on Terror. He's done this in the past and I posted an analysis of a 2009 article he wrote. In that earlier post I dealt with Gentile's critique of COIN and expanded on that. In this one I rather leave COIN to Gentile but expand into the larger issues I see as at stake.

I organize this post the same way I did the earlier one, providing a list of Gentile's main points, but with fewer this time since this essay is much shorter. I then provide a following list of my own.

The first of Gentile's main points is that "tactical objectives have been used to define victory". This linked with the simple fact that both Afghanistan and Iraq have been "characterized by an all-emcompassing obsession with the methods and tactics of counterinsurgency".

Second, American strategic thought has lost the ability "to link cost-effective operational campaigns to core policy objectives, while taking into consideration American political and popular will".

Third, having learned nothing from the strategic defeats in both wars, "the American military has embraced the idea that better tactics can overcome serious shortcomings in strategy and policy".

The Fourth, following the third, is that the "US military is in dire need for a conversation on strategy, one that looks critically at the past 10 years of war and asks hard questions about the operational methods employed".

Fifth and finally, the future will not necessarily be like the past, unless the national political and military leaderships stumble into another incoherent war and the failure to even attempt to learn from the past will condemn "the US Army and Marines to strategic irrelevance in the years and decades to come".

Gentile is repeating an argument here he as made before, that concentrating on COIN while at the same time ignoring the political dimension in which war operates only condemns the US military to making the same mistakes they made in the past. It could be that the actual threats the country faces in the future are more of a conventional nature and thus requiring quite a different military than one well-versed in COIN, but at the same time having lost the knack for early 21st Century conventional warfare.

While I applaude Gentile's forthrightness in speaking out as a serving US Army field grade officer, I don't think he goes quite far enough in his critique. Mine is very much the opinion of a US civilian strategic theorist rather than a serving US military officer and should be taken as such. I agree with Col. Gentile's views as expressed in the article, but I make no assumption that he would in turn agree with what follows.

So from my own Clausewitzian perspective, let me add my own points which I hope will expand on and in some cases provide some possible political context to Gentile's points.

First, tactics has become the sole focus for the simple fact that the government has been loath to define what the actual political purposes/policy goals of the wars conducted were/are. This was particularly true for Iraq. The military was essentially given a list of propaganda themes (WMDs, overthrow a terrible dictator, inflict punishment for 9/11, ensure our security) and told that they were the political goals, when in reality the actual goals were the overthrow of the Iraqi government and the establishment of a US client state, bases for US force projection throughout the area, domination of Iraq's national resources and economy. That US economic interests/corporate players botched the last two goals should come as no surprise. They were too busy chasing the no-risk war $$$ . . .

So the disconnect between political purpose and military aim was intentional and reflected the rank dishonesty of the US government guided by our political/economic elite. Had the goals been more modest in nature, this might have not been a crippling problem, but given the radical nature of our policy goals (essentially the remaking of the Middle East and of various Muslim political identities) and the massive material and moral resources necessary, these military adventures were doomed to failure from the start. This was/is the fundamental reality of the situation: pre-ordained failure, if for no other reason then simply that these radical goals were not achievable through military means. Essentially instead of simply the confusion of COIN, for us the very concept of strategy (as in military means attaining a military aim to support a coherent political purpose) itself has been lost.

Second and very much related to this was/is the assumption by US policy makers that force and violence were/are the preferred means of attaining their strategic (political) goals, and with the level of force and violence the US was/is able to wield, there was/is no question of failure. I include the present tense here to indicate that this dubious assumption is still very strong in spite of the obvious reality to the contrary. It is in fact driving our current policy in regards to Iran. The assumption among a large swath of the US political elite is that violence is not only a means, but an end. Simply massive destruction is what war is about and when you have destroyed all the enemy target sets you have identified, victory follows. Warfare is simply deploying and manipulating, usually high tech and very expensive, weapons systems to maximum effect. There is no consciousness of war being a social interaction, where the enemy reacts, there is no understanding of a necessary connection between the military aim and the political purpose. "Strategy" is simply causing large explosions in the enemy's backyard while the "warriors" back home watch on TV and feel ever so proud and secure.

Back in 2003 the attitude was, hit the Iraqis hard enough, so the neocon thought went, and the US would be able to achieve anything, even the remaking of the Iraqi political identity. Would anyone argue today that that had any possibility at all of success? Yet we see essentially the same thing in regards to Iran.

There is a decidedly "Marxist" as in exclusively materialist view in all this. Political values stand for nothing in comparison to either unrestrained violence or potential economic prosperity. Make it worth their while, allow the magic of the market do its work, and the conquered peoples would become happy consumers in no time. What could possibly be their reason to resist the corporate bounty offered them? Violence as the unstoppable force, followed by simplistic notions of economics with both displacing politics.

Third, COIN provided an answer to two quite different problems. First, it was the basis of domestic propaganda/information operations whereby the war was repackaged as something quite different then it had been initially. General David Petreaus, "the father of COIN" became the "man with a plan", so the focus shifted from a lack of resources committed to "giving the plan a chance to succeed". Also the Iraqi "surge" provided the basis of the "we won" meme which has been more of less dominate among many Americans since 2007. I would argue that domestic information operations by the US military has become one of the legacies of these wars and will only become more important in the future since it in effect constitutes the military's only success story. This brings up another characteristic of the US as being "too big to fail" notion mentioned above. As long as the public supports the, that is any war, then that war continues, the US only having to worry about "us defeating ourselves as happened in Vietnam". The curious mix of a high level of material/financial resources versus a low level of moral and physical resources necessary to fight these wars particularly stands out; war as endless domestic financial shakedown.

COIN also provided for an unending operational commitment to both wars, since as long as the US was operating in the field, the reality of the strategic failures we had actually suffered could be ignored, actually discounted. COIN allowed for the "can" - and the political decision to withdraw from a couple of lost wars - "to be kicked down the road" indefinitely. In fact President Obama's decision to withdraw from Iraq leaves him open to being tarred with having "lost the war" since he ends military operations there and thus must now deal with the strategic reality (which has been there all along, as in Iran being the prime benefactor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq). This long ignored strategic reality also drives the current lurch to war with Iran, since a new war allows for another throw of the geo-strategic dice: Deep in the hole, is our political elite simply "throwing with their fingers crossed"?

Fourth and finally, while I agree with Gentile in his view of COIN, the actual strategic discussion we should be having involves not how the military should be structured, but rather how the political dysfunctions of our political system should be addressed and radically dealt with. The focus on what's wrong with the military is a symptom of a much larger and serious problem. I fear that all the discussion in regards to COIN or no COIN is a distraction from what we should be dealing with, especially regarding the 2012 election . . .

How to conclude?

Allow me to make three comments:

First, this whole time that we live in could be seen as simply the latest link in a long line of social history, that of attaining "human self-awareness" which I would define as the ability to govern and regulate ourselves without any type of ideology. Long ago our species came to the conclusion that the only way to unite large numbers of people was through a "Weltanschauung" or spiritual worldview, something that made sense of the whole in terms of existence. We've in the West essentially burned through religion, and politics and are now at economic system, which is the threadbare rag that we attempt to hide naked self interest. Consider that we do possess the capacity to negotiate, administer and salvage this planet to the adequate betterment of all. Whether we will or not is another question.

Second, be clear that this is basically a despicable betrayal. This is NOT what was sold to the citizenry as OUR country. The usurpers attempt to blind us with our own values, but they themselves are at heart hopelessly corrupt. Ad hoc structured cynical opportunism built on flimsy stands, essentially broken shards of glass pieced together collapsing before your eyes. Besides fear of not believing, what's left? 2008 came and went with no change. Still the old elite continue, but they are not anything near capable of pulling off what they are now attempting . . .

Finally, language itself has escaped us. We no longer enjoy the rather common place ability of describing our own political relations and conditions. Intricate concepts involving complex social systems/relations are reduced to one simple cause, usually dealt with by means of violence. That this stupid and self-defeating approach to strategy - or even basic existence - that this has led to consistent institutional failure does not matter in the least. Instead, we use language drained of all useful meaning. Clear communication is basic to survival of a group which makes me wonder if what we see today is predominately dead language used by essentially a dying political community blubbering its last shrieking gasps . . . Sad.

More than sad, tragic. Tragedy is something our grandparents would have understood.

On the most personal level, I, my generation and myself, imo, stand disgraced before our grandparents. They are the ones that I, for one, actually answer to, in this very specific case, since they did more to define my values than my parents did, however hard my parents may have tried.

We've lost it big time as a political collectivity somewhere along the line. "C" stands for communal. That's the very simple message of this post. If I were still a Christian, I would tell you all to pray, but since I am now an agnostic, I simply would recommend to hang on tight and hope for the best. That, and perhaps consider immigration.

39 comments:

  1. seydlitz-

    As far as the "strategic objectives" for Iraq, it is doubtful that Rummy ever had one. It was just an opportunity for him to prove the power of "Rumsfeld Light" up to the defeat of the opposing armed force, and no further. His goal was to reduce the cost of the personnel side of the DOD, and Iraq was a chance for him to prove that we had hundreds of thousands of extraneous people in uniform.

    Similarly, I am willing to bet that the other major players at the top had dissimilar and non-strategic objectives. Just turns out they were all served by staging the invasion.

    So why are were surprised that COIN has almost become an objective? Americans tend to be process rather than outcome oriented. As I become more curmudgeony, I have come to the conclusion that Americans really believe in and want snake oils, miracle cures and silver bullets. The knind of strategic thought you enjoy, seydlitz, is far to much effort for the bulk of the population, to include many in "responsible" positions.

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  2. Al-

    Thanks for your comment.

    Wasn't Rummy's light approach all about being able to go into the next war quickly? Iraq was supposed to be only the beginning of the neocon plan in 2003 . . .

    Please define what exactly me mean by "non-strategic objectives".

    As to your snake oil comment I think "fear of not believing" covers the same thing.

    Disagree as to many in "responsible" positions not seeing it. For instance, Thomas Donnelly has a good handle on strategic theory as evidenced by this article, but would you agree at all with his conclusions . . . ?

    http://www.aei.org/article/foreign-and-defense-policy/regional/middle-east-and-north-africa/war-with-iran

    He's just one. I could provide a whole list of links from competent strategic theorists who have supported policies (for example Iraq) which both of us would see as self-defeating and absurd. The problem is not so much the total lack of strategic thought, but rather that extreme political assumptions and views have blinded these people to the fallacy of their own positions. Strategic theorists are not immune from the virus of national hubris.

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  3. seydlitz-

    By "non-strategic", I mean no real reasonably stable, geo-political end state. Access to oil is not a geo-political end state. It may be a result of a given end state, but in no way an end state in itself. Same as basing rights.

    Let's look at Rummy. He had real difficulties with the cost of the personnel side of the military. It was a constant theme with him - too many people in uniform, too many benefits. All that money wasted on uniformed personnel that could be spent on sexy hardware. Iraq was the perfect chance to prove his point. Win the battle with half the "doctrinal number" of bodies than what the generals and their FMs said were needed. So, when the Iraqi military, and the government fell, that was it. Time to go home. There are numerous accounts of Rummy threatening to fire anyone who mentioned "Phase IV" (I personally think "Occupation" sounds more honest) operations during the planning stages. After all, as Shinseki pointed out, that would take a few hundred thousand troops. Far beyond Rummy's magical 250,000 max uniformed personnel in theater, which was probably based on wacky notion of doing "the whole job of Desert Storm" with half the people. End result, political and social vacuum as Rummy does the Bruce Willis "Last Boy Scout" line - "Kill a lot of people, then smoke some cigarettes".

    Ah, Desert Storm, the "Unfinished War". Was it? I was with the 3rd Army Theater Avn Bde HQ for that. Lots of moaning and groaning amongst the tactical minded that we didn't "march on to Baghdad and finish the job." One of my favorite drinking buddies from CentCom, a Naval Aviator ("hey, I'm just a fighter pilot, but.....") answered it succinctly. "The strategic political objective was the Liberation of Kuwait. Liberate from outside occupation and restore the rightful (by Kuwaiti terms) government. Concurrent, was stability in the region. No governments to build, no defeated countries to occupy. Near unanimity in the Arab world in support of this. Liberation and Restoration - CHECK. Stability - CHECK. First perfect score in a long time, and we didn't have to conquer anyone."

    Back to Iraq II. Again, we defeated someone, but did not conquer them. Nor did we restore a government. We created a vacuum in which a civil war or insurgency blossomed. Unlike Viet Nam, for example, the "insurgents" did not exist until we created (and maintained) the conditions that feed an insurgency. What were those conditions? The absolute lack of a plan for and definition of a relatively stable, realistically attainable geo-political end state.

    In WWII "Total and Unconditional Surrender" was an end state of sorts. Germany and Japan became vassal states of the Allies. However, it was clear that this was to be a transitory situation from the start. Even the most punitive objective, Morganthau's "permanent agrarian state", foresaw a long term geo-political objective, and initial occupation policy, sadly, was guided by that. The point is that there was a geo-political objective, and occupation forces were provided to continue the process to the desired end state, a return to full functioning sovereignty - which came in 1952 for Japan, and 1955 for Germany. And those objectives, obtained in the 1950's were identified prior to the defeat of either nation.

    I would also note that WWII was not initiated by the victorious belligerents. Yet, while prosecuting the war, the Allies were able to identify a desired post war end state. We invaded Iraq without a plan or objective other than toppling Saddam.

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  4. I think it's pretty clear there was not strategic agreement inside the Bush administration. On one hand you had true believers like Wolfowitz who actually thought "creating democracy" in Iraq would transform the Middle East. At the other end of the spectrum was Rummy who wanted to settle the standoff with Iraq and Saddam once and for all. The only thing everyone agreed on was that Iraq needed to be invaded and so that's where the "strategy" began and ended. The incoherence following the invasion reflects the internal divisions in the administration where there wasn't agreement on what to do next. So the decisions were essentially tactical - things like the decision to disband the Baath Party and Republican Guard.

    I actually supported a lot of Rummy's reform initiatives in the beginning. The services needed reform and they still do. Bernard Finel talks about that some here.

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  5. Seydlitz, while - as you know - I fully agree with your assessment of the complete and utter failure to define specific political goals, I still think there is a justification for COIN in there. But of course it is tactics, and thus on a completely different level. Suppose there had been a clear goal as to how to proceed in Iraq once Saddam was out, then some of the basic tenents of COIN in my eyes would have been highly effective in guiding that process. More, I think there would have been a place for such a thing as preemptive COIN, i.e. conducting the war effort in such a way as to avoid causing resentment among the locals as much as you can. I believe what Kilcullen calls "conflict ethnography" would have to play a major part in any such operation. In fact, I think the failure to engage in it is at the heart of having such silly ideas about reforming the Middle-East/Islamic world in a similar fashion as Germany or Japan.

    COIN is a tool and depending what one's goals are -and especially for goals that are both realistic and morally defensible- they can be pretty good tools - if used at the right time and in the right place. The problem in the major recent conflicts was not just a "too little" but also a "too late", but that was caused not the least due to the shoddy definition of goals at the get-go. Once someone guided a stampede through your home, assurances of him really being a nice guy and wanting to be your friend are pretty much a wasted effort. Plus when you STILL have no political goal and all expect of COIN to do is curing symptoms, it's no surprising if you don't get anywhere.

    This is like discussing the utility of a hammer when you have no idea whatsoever as to what you want to do at all - tear down a house, build a house, do both, or just build a wardrobe. Of course, some might trigger a discussion on the great general utility of a hammer to distract from the fact that the task they want to use it for isn't quite clear. But the problem is with the latter and not having a plan doesn't change anything about the general parameters of utility of a hammer.

    In a way, I pity Petraeus, because he had many good ideas but only got to implement them when the situation had already been royally screwed up.

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  6. Clausewitz: But the problem with the COIN paradigm is that you have to have some straw for your bricks.

    Pretty much everyone who looked at Iraq pre-'03 saw that

    1. Saddam was Saddam because Iraq was Iraq, not the other way around, and

    2. He had pretty well managed to behead every other realistic replacement except

    3. The Shia power bases linked to Iran.

    So any war that defenestrated Saddam would inevitably place the Shia clients of Iran, even at the time the most powerful force in the Persion Gulf region aligned against the U.S., in a position to be the most probable successor to the Ba'ath.

    No amount of COIN would have changed that, and none did. Which merely points up the single most immense weakness of the entire Kilcullen/Petraeus school of COIN - that it depends on a U.S./Western-philic local government.

    But in general the sorts of factions in non-European and non-North American nations are usually the least liked and least trusted by the bulk of the local popualtion. They are the most Westernized and thus most-likely-to-spawn-local-resentments-that-create-accidental-guerrillas rather than solve those local problems and "avoid causing resentment among the locals".

    The average Rafiq and Maryam Lunchpail don't like our Israel policies. They don't like our long-term support for corrupt local dictators and elites (including, in many cases, theor own). They often like "America" in the sense that they like the things we have and many aspects of our society...but those don't usually show up at their doorstep. What shows up is an American-made weapon in the hands of a local thug/policeman or soldier or, worse, a GI himself announcing that he's gonna be their friend and, oh, yeah, if they want to play a part in their "new" nation they need to get with the Western program.

    Yeah, THAT's gonna work.

    So the problem is that most of the allies we have that have functional governments don't need our COIN...and if they need our COIN they're often too fucked up to develop a functional government, regardless of how hard we pack the mud into the mold.

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  7. I tend to agree with Andy that had young Mr. Bush and his gray eminence managed to con us into the Moss-o-potamia that Rummy might well be remembered as one of the better SecDefs. He really did have some intelligent ideas about reforming procurement and was willing to, among other things, take on the Guard Bureau over the massive porkbarrel project that is the ARNG.

    But he DID end up having a manage a war and proved to be a supremely incompetent war-manager being, like so many of the other Bushies convinced that he made his own reality rather than having to deal with the facts he was faced with.

    I will disagree that he "wanted to settle the standoff" with Saddam. I think he wanted to concentrate on his ideas for transformation within the DoD. Iraq was a nuisance for him other than as a way of demonstrating the "more rubble/less trouble" school of foreign policy. I think he would have been fine maintaining the no-fly zoes etc. if Dubya and Dick hadn't forced his hand...

    But as to the point of your post, seydlitz...I'd argue that short of the Cold War the U.S. has never had much of a "strategic vision" and before 1945 it didn't really matter. But it does now, and the problem is that at the time we most need some sort of general consensus of what the U.S.' geopolitical interests are our political system is reverting to the sort of contentious mess we had in the first half of the 19th Century - without some sort of "Manifest Destiny" ideal to influence our foreign policy. If anything, what we seem to have is a sort of national paranoia and fear for some sort of nebulous "enemy" and an unwillingness to look hard at the mismatch between the sort of immense outlays that sort of fear requires and the resources actually available to us - the sort of thing that Andy often characterizes as the "unsustainability" of our current political and economic practice.

    It's gonna be ugly.

    So...emigration...but to where? Show me the industrialized nation that doesn't share many of the U.S. problems other than a vastly overblown military? We better hope for the Galt Engine, and soon...

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  8. ..."young Mr. Bush and his gray eminence NOT managed to con us into the Moss-o-potamia..."

    Note correction

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  9. Let's look at the historical record:

    1781-about 1880: The U.S. doesn't really HAVE a geopolitical "strategy" other than "Kill the redskins and keep an eye on the Brits" and given our relative weakness outside the North American continent it doesn't really matter. I'd throw up "Manifest Destiny" as the only possible basis for geopolitical strategy except it really doesn't do much other than form a justification for all the land-grabbing.

    1880-1914: Imperialism. We want to play the colonial game, and do.

    1918-1941: Isolationism. We don't want to play ANYONE's game, and don't.

    1945-1991: Cold War. There's a strategy there, but it's so broad as to be pretty useless as a guide for everyday political practice. It does lead to us getting involved in several civil wars or rebellions because one side or the other are percieved as commies.

    1991-2001: The Decade of Inertia. No more Cold War, but nobody wants to think much about What Comes Next so we don't and just keep acting like the Soviets are still lurking around Out There.

    2001-2011: The Decade of Terror. We're scared spitless that the Islamic Navy will launch their carrier aircraft to strike Norfolk, and end up spending tax dollars accordingly.

    So not to be snarky, but...given that record to date, who would ever suspect that the U.S. COULD begin thinking "strategically" at this point?

    So far if this country has even tried to think past tactics it seems to generally have been to justify some form of land-grab from someone weaker and smaller than ourselves.

    Not trying to say that the present all-in goofiness doesn't present us with a historic opportunity for fiscal and political disaster, but...in all honesty, can you think of a precedent for a more thought-out geopolitical framework (outside "containment", and look at the stuff THAT brought us - Mossadegh, Lebanon '58, Vietnam, Iran-Contra...

    I'd love to see my country plan its policy better...but I would be surprised to actually SEE it...

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  10. Chief-

    It is interesting that in the years you don't cover above (1941-1945), the need to think strategically was thrust upon us and we did a pretty good job of it. The resulting position of "world leader, world power" was the result of some pretty talented minds knowing the limits of and harnessing our national capability, not just that capability alone, and sadly, minds of that quality just don't seem to get to the helm any more.

    Andy-

    Yes, Rumsfeld's "Reforms" looked intriguing, but after all is said and done, I am willing to bet that he will be found to have been just another "Empty Suit". While he was pontificating on his idea of a "transformed military", totally in isolation from any strategic policy of his country, he was mismanaging, underestimating and not understanding, no less losing, the two wars he had been at the helm for. In short, George C. Marshall had Lt Cols working for him that had a better grasp of waging war in the strategic sense. His infamous response to a Soldier's question as to why they still did not have suitable armor, "You have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want", is a classic look at how totally out of touch he was. We had gone to war in Iraq a full 17 months prior, yet Rummy was still not addressing this glaring and easily addressed shortfall, while spending tens of millions for never served meals from contractors, because that was "a better way to do business". I'm not sure if he even know what was "The Army we needed" for the wars he was in charge of, if he even wish to have that Army in the first place.

    As is the case with modern day "Empty Suits", he was so involved with an abstract and questionably accurate "Big Picture" that the "Little Picture" he was too haughty to attend to was slowly destroying, or at least crippling his organization. And when he made his numerous micro-managing forays into the "Little Picture", it was often with disastrous results. just look at his TPFDL diddlings with the force structure for Iraq.

    Now, having said the above, I'm going to dig back into George C Marshall's famous "90 Division Army" decision. One of our History profs at CGSC had studied that in depth, and went on and on about it with us, because it was such a significant issue that was driven by factors light years beyond what any C of S had ever to consider before, and after. And that "ranking" remains without change since 1984 when I was at Leavenworth. So, be prepared for a new thread on WWII and some "real" strategic thinking.

    As a final thought, Rummy was clear in that he wanted to "change the way the military does business." Sounds great, and all of us have witnessed less than stellar practices. However, the military isn't about "doing business", is not a "business" and cannot have the mentality of a contemporary American "business". For starters, Chap 11 is not an available management option.

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  11. FDChief: "No amount of COIN would have changed that, and none did. Which merely points up the single most immense weakness of the entire Kilcullen/Petraeus school of COIN - that it depends on a U.S./Western-philic local government."

    In my eyes, it's precisely the point of conflict ethnography to understand the points you list. Someone understanding the culture of the area for example would have understood that Saddam not being clear about whether he had some WMDs left over was a deliberate feint towards his neighbours, specifically Iran, to discourage "rash" decisions. If they had been certain that he had no WMDs, the risk/benefit analysis on an invasion would have been quite a different one. As for the Shia, some of the most important Shia holy sites are actually in Iraq itself - who says that they have to defer to Iran? Just because there are more people there? I don't think that scholars would see that as relevent criteria. So a tactic here could have been to push a wedge between the Iraqi Shia and Iranian leadership. In fact, if such a move had been successful, it would have been a major blow to Iranian ability to project power, since it would have allowed Shiite groups elsewhere to look for guidance towards Iraq instead of Iran. I'm not sure if such a move could have been successful, but not only wasn't it even attempted as far as we know, the Shiites were driven straight into the arms of Iran. It would, of course, have meant wrapping one's head around "Islam" not being the enemy but a possible ally.

    Take Afghanistan. I've seen reports of the US bombing warlords because a rival warlord told US leadership his enemy would be collaborating with the Taliban. Conflict ethnography would have told you the two are at odds and thus you would have taken such accusations with a grain of salt. Instead, we've had several "bomb first, ask questions later" incidents which lead to the US being perceived as just another bunch of foreigners who want to rule the country.

    FDChief:"The average Rafiq and Maryam Lunchpail don't like our Israel policies. They don't like our long-term support for corrupt local dictators and elites (including, in many cases, theor own). They often like "America" in the sense that they like the things we have and many aspects of our society...but those don't usually show up at their doorstep. What shows up is an American-made weapon in the hands of a local thug/policeman or soldier or, worse, a GI himself announcing that he's gonna be their friend and, oh, yeah, if they want to play a part in their "new" nation they need to get with the Western program."

    They don't like US policies vs. Israel, true, but like everyone, they have a priority list of concerns, and for Shia and Kurs alike, Saddam was much higher on the list of problems than the plight of their Palestinian brothers and sisters. Acting the right way and with sensitivity for the people there might have helped to make some major headway. Instead, for quite some time, one acted like an elephant in a China store - not the least because one failed to see any relevance in actually understanding the land and the people.

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  12. Al: Good point, and I'd enjoy reading your thoughts. I've just posted a link to an article in the USNI proceedings that points out just how difficult that sort of strategic thinking is, in this case the development of Japanese carrier airpower in 1941; a development SO radical that it appears to have taken even the Japanese Navy by surprise.

    I have to agree with you that the U.S. did a very good job of managing the strategic direction of the war, although you've pointed out here elsewhere that the original post-war plans for Germany were unrealistic to the extreme. Yet even there the Allies adapted and drove on.

    Clausewitz; So much there that it's hard to know where to start.

    1. WMDs were a macguffin and always were. We DID know that Saddam had nothing of any military value. The dark genius of the Bushies was to manage to turn the entire issue into a "some people claim" "controversy" long enough to get the CPA into palaces in Baghdad. Too late, then.

    2. The Iraqi Shia-Iran connection was of long standing and based on common interests and goals. What did we have to offer them to "drive a wedge" between the two factions? Power in Iraq for the Shia? Ummm...they were gonna get that, anyway. We never had any intention of "leaving" - since the real point wasn't WMDs but power-projection and the PNAC, and thus our forces were going to collide with the Iraq-for-Iraqi-Shia in the Sadr movement if nowhere else. Dreaming of co-opting the Iraqis was a dream that died when we fell for Chalabi's spiel. Or, more significantly, when we handed over our foreign policy to people like Wolfie, who believed that the strength of their iron will could overcome centuries of Ottoman misgovernment, ethnic division, and economic and political desutude.

    So "if such a move had been successful, it would" not only "have been a major blow to Iranian ability to project power" it would have been a friggin impossibility on the order of turning straw into gold.

    The only way to have "won" this Game of Iraqi Thrones was not to play. The Department of State knew that. The DoD, unfortunately, believed its own press release.

    And my concern is that if we don't look deeply at the fundamental flaws in the Culture of COIN - those flaws I pointed out - that we're going to walk away from this fucking train wreck with the conviction that it wasn't the fundamental impossibility of realizing a neocolonial fantasy about civilizing them with a Krag that foiled our ingenious plan but a "failure of execution". And we're going to try this damn nonsense again...and again.

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  13. The particular point of disagreement seems to be that Bush & Co didn't really have a strategic goal going into Iraq.

    What aggressor has ever initiated a war for the overthrow of an enemy state and then suddenly and quite surprisingly found themselves in control of said territory? It simply doesn't follow. They did have a plan - hand it over to Chalabi - if nothing else, and as Al has effectively argued in the past a bad strategy is not the same as no strategy. Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Wurmser, etc were all Rumsfeld's men with various positions within DoD. This argument seemingly assumes Rumsfeld to be acting as some sort of free agent within the Bush administration, when the reality was that there was little light between him and Cheney, that is they acted very much as a team.

    The problem was in the very radical nature of the political goals along with the extensive resources achieving them would have required, not that they had no strategic goals at all.

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  14. Claus-

    I dealt with the COIN issue on the earlier thread . . . specifically my first point. What is going on in Afghanistan and earlier in Iraq is unrecognizable from a traditional (David Galula) perspective. You may find it interesting . . .

    http://milpubblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/gian-gentiles-strategy-of-tactics-and.html

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  15. FDCHief-

    "So not to be snarky, but...given that record to date, who would ever suspect that the U.S. COULD begin thinking "strategically" at this point?"

    I don't think you're snarky, but I do think your reading of US history misses the point.

    Al's mentioned WWII and Gulf War I which don't support your view.

    Now consider WWI, which you pass over without any comment. Why is that? We gained a good bit from that conflict at relatively little cost. I don't think the actual reason for the US declaring war on Germany had that much to do with the submarine threat or the Zimmermann telegram, but that the Allies were looking weak in April 1917 and the possibility of France and Britain loosing the war and defaulting on all those war loans scarred the financial sector. Not to mention the seizure of German chemical and industrial patents by the US ushered in the birth of the US chemical industry (Du Pont especially) as a major player. In all during 1917-18, the US waged "economic warfare" very effectively. Coming in as an "Associated power" allowed Wilson a place at the peace conference, but he could act independently at the same time. The US also gained much at the expense of not only Germany, but the Allies as well in Latin America, with US interests displacing the Europeans. So a basically sound strategy at little relative cost and great economic gains - which were imo the dominate US reasons for going into the war in the first place . . .

    I would also add that the outcome of the Cold War was probably the most successful example of a basically coherent/long-term strategy in US history . . .

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  16. @Chief

    "2. The Iraqi Shia-Iran connection was of long standing and based on common interests and goals. What did we have to offer them to "drive a wedge" between the two factions? Power in Iraq for the Shia? Ummm...they were gonna get that, anyway."

    Nope. Not with Saddam in power. Which is why I say the failures you point out are failures of adressing COIN tenets too late, not failures of COIN itself.

    @seydlitz
    "I would also add that the outcome of the Cold War was probably the most successful example of a basically coherent/long-term strategy in US history . . . "

    Well, there are also scholar who believe it had little to do with US strategy and more with the fact that the Soviet system was unsustainable in the long run anyway. Though that leaves to US strategy still some of the more precise details.

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  17. Claus-

    One could also argue that Containment took that fundamental instability into account. At the same time, no system lasts forever . . .

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  18. seydlitz: The problem was in the very radical nature of the political goals

    I would offer that Rummy had no political or "strategic" goal. He simply found a "laboratory" in which to prove those inflexible generals and their doctrine wrong. I honestly think he was waging war for the sake of waging war - to prove his point. Wolfie, Feith, GWB and Cheney may have had some objectives, but Rummy was just plain arrogant and had to prove he was right.

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  19. Seydlitz,

    The problem was in the very radical nature of the political goals along with the extensive resources achieving them would have required, not that they had no strategic goals at all.

    My point is not that they didn't have goals, my point is that they had several and those goals were at cross purposes. On the one hand you had the desire to promote the "Freedom Agenda" which played a large public role in President Bush's speeches prior to the war, while on the other hand you had Rummy telling the military not to plan for an occupation because we going to hand-off Iraqi governance to the coterie of Iraqi exiles and the State Department. Those two goals simply aren't compatible.

    I'm also not sure bases or oil was a big part of that picture even though they were probably one the wish lists of some in the administration. Based on declassified planning documents there was no plan for a long-term troop presence in Iraq, so if permanent bases were part of the plan then the DoD never got the memo.

    For oil, I'm not aware of anything that would suggest the Bush Administration actually tried to get exclusive access to Iraq's oil for the US. We didn't even get money from oil sales to "pay for" the war and that was one thing the administration publicly said it would do. As I recall the majority of the long-term contracts ended up going to French and Chinese companies. Again, it doesn't appear to me that the desire by some in the administration to get Iraq's oil ever made it past the wish-list stage in whatever passed for strategic planning inside the administration.

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  20. (cont)...

    In short the nexus for all these goals was that Saddam had to go but there wasn't any coherent political goal for what should happen once that was done. In other words, the reasons for wanting Saddam gone varied widely. Various people in the administration had a laundry list of reasons - WMD, democracy, oil, bases, a reliable ally, etc. The roads for all those goals met at one crossroads called "depose Saddam" before going their separate ways. It doesn't appear to me that these goals were prioritized (except for WMD) and put into a coherent framework that the entire government could plan around in order to achieve some political goal beyond Saddam. Instead different parts of government had completely different expectations for what would happen after Saddam was gone - the biggest and most obvious disconnect was between DoD and DoS. I'm not sure how else one can explain how Defense and State were on such completely different sheets of music following the invasion. To me it says there wasn't a coherent strategy (radical or otherwise) other than "depose Saddam" and the result was that the various instruments of US power were unprepared for the aftermath of the invasion.

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  21. Andy: My point is not that they didn't have goals, my point is that they had several and those goals were at cross purposes......The roads for all those goals met at one crossroads called "depose Saddam" before going their separate ways.

    Spot on. No one was at THE helm of the Ship of State. Rather, several thought they had their own helm. As anyone with any nautical experience can explain, there is a reason that THE helm is singular and described with a definite article.

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  22. Clausewitz: Not sure if you're being willfully obtuse on this or what. Saddam stays, there is no COIN. Saddam goes, the Shia take over. No COIN, brilliantly executed or otherwise, prevents that.

    The current meme seems to be that we could have "succeeded" in Iraq if we'd just have "done it right". That's a fallacy and a pernicious one. Once we knocked the Saddam cork off the Iraqi bottle the Shiite genie was loose. Short of a full-on colonial occupation - which we did try initially and got nothing but trouble for our pains - would have made the Bush faction's Chalabi/exile-ruler plans work.

    Seydlitz: I think our WW1 "strategy" wasn't really thought out. We entered on the Entente side largely because of well-executed Entente planning, and then frittered most of our "gains" away due to Wilson's diplomatic arrogance and incompetence.

    And the Second Gulf War? Well, start with that the entire farrago largely resulted from our incompetent meddling in the First (Iran-Iraq) Gulf War culminating in April Glaspie's carelessness in seeming to greenlight Saddam's invasion of Kuwait the resulting operation was competently run. But I wouldn't consider it any particular example of strategic genius, and the incompetent handling of the Shia uprising (whether you consider the incompetence the encouragement of it or the refusal to target the Iraqi helos after it began) is a pretty black mark on the "planning" aspect of it.

    And while the Cold War had a "strategy" - containment - that strategy doesn't seem to have been particularly rigorous or to have prevented the U.S. from mistaking local resistance movements from global Communist conspiracies. I'll credit the overall strategy, but, again, it had it's limits.

    So I'm not saying that the U.S. "can't" do strategic planning. I'm saying that we haven't done as much of this as a nation as powerful as we have been since 1945 might have done, so the fact that we're not doing this now is irking but not shocking. And that much of the "planning" has been ad hoc and somewhat less than thorough.

    So - I agree with you that we SHOULD be doing more. But I also agree with you that it is unlikely that we will...and that has a fair bit to do with our national lack of systematic strategic planning experience.

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  23. @Chief
    "Clausewitz: Not sure if you're being willfully obtuse on this or what. Saddam stays, there is no COIN. Saddam goes, the Shia take over. No COIN, brilliantly executed or otherwise, prevents that."

    The problem in your assessment is that you see COIN as starting when the feet are on the ground and the shots are fired. But if you actually HAVE a political goal you want to realize, you start the planning and the actions much earlier than that. Which can include talking to the Shia religious leaders, making deals, agreements, promises.

    If I follow what I take as your line of argumentation, the Libya operation would have been perfect because one avoids all the trouble by not setting a foot on the ground. But that doesn't change the fact that the place can turn into a mess and then what? We've already seen arsenals being plundered. You will probably say that no, your line is that there shouldn't be an action to begin with in such areas, but that's really independent of COIN or no COIN. At that level, Libya is pretty no-COIN.

    "The current meme seems to be that we could have "succeeded" in Iraq if we'd just have "done it right". That's a fallacy and a pernicious one. Once we knocked the Saddam cork off the Iraqi bottle the Shiite genie was loose."

    That's what happens when you have no cork to replace it with and no means of control. I am no friend whatsoever of the invasion and the removal, but especially not because I had my doubts from the get-go that this was a particularly well thought-out operation. And even if there's been a plan, the question would have been if the US armed forces have the tools to implement it... I seem to be pretty much in line with Andy here - if you have no plan what to actually do and consequently no tool to actually do anything, the likelihood of the thing blowing up in your face is pretty high.

    When you play around with guns in the vicinity of flammables, you better have a plan as to how to contain and combat a fire, if it happens, and bring a fire extinguisher with you. If you don't, it's not that firefighting is useless, it's that by the time anyone is actually undertaking serious efforts, the fire is already so big there's no hope to contain it anymore.

    I have Iraqi Kurdish friends - when the invasion started, they said "Finally, something is happening". I said "The kurdish area was relatively safe and stable for a while now, I wouldn't take for granted that the situation improves now"

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  24. Andy-

    Thank you very much for commenting.

    I don't think we're in disagreement.

    You commented:

    "My point is not that they didn't have goals, my point is that they had several and those goals were at cross purposes."

    Yes, agree, and those conflicting goals required the "total victory" as I have set it out. You can waste time refuting each individual argument, blind to the whole, or you can see the whole, the Gestalt of what I'm attempting to describe. Its the best model I've come up with.

    Strategy, as more than what WE have thought of or considered up to now. Strategy also in terms of "attitude", how we individually deal with authority?
    Including lots of "chips on the shoulder" which given the technological platforms of our times can create real social problems. Essentially the individual capable of creating strategic effect? Scary?

    Yea, but not limited to that, including one's Weltanschauung as well. Value assumptions about the world . . .

    At precisely this point in time, why are we so divided? Why are we so blind?

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  25. Al-

    "I would offer that Rummy had no political or "strategic" goal. He simply found a "laboratory" in which to prove those inflexible generals and their doctrine wrong. I honestly think he was waging war for the sake of waging war - to prove his point. Wolfie, Feith, GWB and Cheney may have had some objectives, but Rummy was just plain arrogant and had to prove he was right."

    Nicely put, but are you arguing that Rummy was running essentially his own little fiefdom? While managing two wars? Disagree. Why did Bush hold on to him for so long? Because he was sooooo independent or because he was such a "tool"?

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  26. seydlitz-

    Rummy was retained because he was willing to run the wars Bush wished to prosecute.

    One can be a "tool" for one's own motives. As long as Rummy's own agenda was seemingly similar to Bush's (Andy's very accurate quote, "The roads for all those goals met at one crossroads called "depose Saddam" before going their separate ways."), why would GWB care. Appearances were deceiving. Just because two or more individuals are fulling engaged in the same endeavor does not mean they are pursuing the same personal objective for the same personal reasons. In a very simplistic example, a plant manager schedules 4 hours overtime production to produce 100 more widgets to meet a special order. The workers putting in paid overtime are rarely doing it for the same reasons as the plant manager that scheduled the overtime. The salaried employees supervising those making time and a half will most likely have different motives and objectives as well. Yet there they all are staying late while 100 more widgets are produced, but not necessarily because they all primarily want more widgets produced. However, the plant manager had an objective, it was a clear objective, the activities of the employees were directed towards that objective and whatever their motives for working the extra 4 hours were, they supported the real objective.

    On numerous occasions, Rummy was an embarrassment. His "The Army you have" is not a lone example. He worked for an intellectual lightweight (GWB) who saw Rummy's behavior solely as supporting GWB's war. Rummy was not the kind who admitted to making an error (You simply whipped up "Unknown Unknowns to preclude that). GWB basked in the halo effect of that bogus infallibility. Just because Rummy would accept no alternate opinions from his subordinates does not mean he was not serving as a "tool" for GWB. Just two huge egos working in mutually supportive alternate realities.

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  27. Andy commented:

    " Instead different parts of government had completely different expectations for what would happen after Saddam was gone - the biggest and most obvious disconnect was between DoD and DoS. I'm not sure how else one can explain how Defense and State were on such completely different sheets of music following the invasion. To me it says there wasn't a coherent strategy (radical or otherwise) other than "depose Saddam" and the result was that the various instruments of US power were unprepared for the aftermath of the invasion."

    As I commented above, I see this view as essentially the same as my own. Consider this from my post:

    "There is a decidedly "Marxist" as in exclusively materialist view in all this. Political values stand for nothing in comparison to either unrestrained violence or potential economic prosperity. Make it worth their while, allow the magic of the market do its work, and the conquered peoples would become happy consumers in no time. What could possibly be their reason to resist the corporate bounty offered them? Violence as the unstoppable force, followed by simplistic notions of economics with both displacing politics."

    This IS the dominate view among US elites today. The government is not the solution, it is the "problem". One sees this even with big "O" and his economic policy. To have expected the Bush administration to have coordinated various plans within the government and then implemented them is counter to their very approach to government. That would have been the Clinton/policy wonk response which Bush and his followers were loath to imitate.

    American exceptionalism ("too big to fail"), the unrestrained use of force/violence, and the "magic of the market" were the main characteristics of Bush's world view, just as they are for Obama . . . These assumptions drive US policy today just as they did in 2003.

    Dominating the Middle East is a strategic goal. How one achieves that is strategy and as I have pointed out the current US approach is not strategy at all but violence based on a set of highly questionable assumptions. It is looking at the strategic goal in terms of strategic theory which leads me (and Andy as well as shown above) to label this approach "incoherent".

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  28. It is interesting that GWB, and the GOP ever since, have referred to the president as "Commander in Chief", yet in fighting the war Iraq, there was effectively no such person. Just uncoordinated actions by various entities.

    Similarly, they want little or no government, yet still want the nation "commanded".

    As to "dominating the Middle East" being a strategic goal, one would need far more detail to make it a goal upon which the US could act, if indeed it is attainable at all. What kind of dominance, for example. Can we establish economic dominance? Political dominance? Military dominance.

    Incoherence has become the national pastime.

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  29. Now that we've mostly got the history out of the way WRT the GWB administration, was he an aberration or just an extreme example of the status quo? Or, to put it another way, was the strategic incoherence a product of his particular administration or was (and is) it a problem with US strategy in general? I tend to think the latter simply because so many of these issues are driven by domestic political considerations and whatever is "priority du jour" inside the beltway. At least that's my perception.

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  30. Al-

    Interesting comparison between GWB and Wilhelm II . . . in that both were very much interested in the trappings of military pomp and dress, but not so interested in actually making strategy/decisions. Ludendorff for Wilhelm and Petraeus for GWB?

    As to "dominating the Middle East", how did Britain do it from 1918 to circa 1950? Was it not a combination of different sources of power applied in different ways to different situations over time, that is a strategy?

    I would add that while domination can be a strategic goal, it is dependent on the wider political situation/relations. What Britain was able to achieve after WWI was based on the conditions present in the ME at the time.

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  31. I'll chime in here: Andy gets the brass ring - the U.S. (outside the brief periods when an actual war concentrates our political mind) has NEVER been much for deep geopolitical thought. Generally we've been pushed or pulled by our own domestic concerns on the short-term election cycle timeframe.

    Seydlitz, you seem to come at this with a sort of shock; "WTF are you people DOING?" while I think the way to look at this is the way Andy suggests - that most of the time most of our political organs (including DoS and DoD) are focussed on the short-term, small-ball aspects of foreign policy.

    So if you want the U.S. government to genuinely look big-picture/long term you'd first have to get some sort of agreement on "What are U.S. global interests" and then "What are U.S. interests in the Middle East/Central Asia"...and I suspect that you'd find it difficult to nearly impossible to get the Washington factions to agree on anything more sophisticated than "U.S. mighty! U.S. strong!"

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  32. Andy-

    As much as I hate to admit it, I think GWB was an adequate representative of our political elite. Agree too that domestic politics drives policy (or what goes under that label) which today consists mostly of scams for the majority and pay offs for the well-connected. The questions we as Americans should be asking are basically and fundamentally political, imo.

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  33. FDChief-

    It's not shock, I just don't agree with your view as to historical US strategic incompetence. I think if you look at the historical record it shows that we as a country dealt with strategy pretty effectively prior to 1992 (Defense Planning Guidance). "Effective" defined as a relationship to what other political communities achieved.

    Andy's only commented on Gulf War II up to now, and I think his comments compatible with my argument. He has yet to give any comment in regards to earlier wars and any "beltway" influence creating strategic incoherence . . .

    In my view the current strategic incoherence is a direct result of relatively recent changes within our political community and is not the result of some historical American flaw . . .

    It's the same old disagreement Chief . . .

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  34. FDChief

    Andy gets the brass ring - the U.S. (outside the brief periods when an actual war concentrates our political mind) has NEVER been much for deep geopolitical thought

    I second the brass ring. Looking at what was going on in DC during WWII is much more intellectually stimulating than anything on the battlefield. The battlefield would have been a shambles if FDR and Company had not done the job they did in terms of full national mobilization, and all the balls they had in the air to juggle in that regard. As to the "strategic outcome", that did take a little wickering, but they were able to prosecute a war on a scale never before seen, deal with allies and come up with a pretty good geo-political end game.

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  35. "In my view the current strategic incoherence is a direct result of relatively recent changes within our political community and is not the result of some historical American flaw"

    If you believe that I direct your attention to the U.S. political scene circa 1840-1850.

    Look at the Mexican War; no "strategic coherence" there. Massive division and dissention between free and slave states, between imperialists and nativists, between Polk and the fairly large number of Americans who just flat-out hated Polk.

    Or, hell, damn near any other period in U.S. history. Look at the lack of unity regarding the Louisiana Purchase...or "Seward's Folly"...or the imperial wars of the Gilded Age...or Versailles and the League of Nations...

    And again, I want to emphasize that "competence" isn't really the issue. I'd argue that MOST polities don't have some sort of brilliant long-range geopolitical plan but tend to wander from one crisis to another based on local, transient, immediate greeds, lusts, hatreds, affections, and confusion - the usual human condition.

    Now what HAS happened to the U.S. recently is that we emerged from an unusually, ahistorically moderate political climate. Between 1945 and 1965 - that is, the time most of us grew up in - we enjoyed none of the sorts of sectional, economic, factional, Federalist-vs-antiFederalist, Jeffersonian-vs-Jacksonian, slave-vs-feee, labor-vs-capital cagefighting that characterize most of the rest of U.S. history. And before that, between about 1935 and 1945 the GOP and the plutocrat Right was far in the wilderness they'd driven themselves into after 1929.

    But that doesn't change the fact that regardless of political climate, most of the time the U.S. hasn't really "planned" its foreign policy from any sort of coherent, over-arching geopolitical strategy. We have domestic politics that often drives our foreign policies and the fact that the Bushies drove it off a cliff says more about the individual incompetence of the Bushies than it does any sort of structural change in U.S. policymaking.

    In fact...can you pinpoint an actual change in how the Bushies made policy - structural change, a "how" rather than a "what" - that would suggest that their fuckups represent anything than that, rather than some sort of ahistorical lack of competence in geopolitics?

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  36. FDChief-

    I've already given you the example of WWI which you pretty much rejected without even considering my argument. We've been over this ground soooo many times . . .

    You commented:

    "But that doesn't change the fact that regardless of political climate, most of the time the U.S. hasn't really "planned" its foreign policy from any sort of coherent, over-arching geopolitical strategy."

    If we consider US foreign policy since 1898, since prior to that there really wasn't much of a foreign policy at all, then US policy has been consistently pro-US business interests with the idea that what was good for American business was good for America. That is US policy was to provide a stable environment for US commerce. This strategy reflected that basic belief and it worked well enough through the 1920s. The Great Depression of course focused the country on other things and gunboat diplomacy in support of US commercial interests was seen as counter to what the government should have been doing at home, although there were instances of it even during the Depression.

    World War II seems to have been a success story in terms of strategic planning, I think everyone agrees on that . . . but why stop there? What of the establishment of the Bretton Woods system of commercial and financial relations, or the IMF, or World Bank . . . have these not been the result "an over-arching geo-political strategy"? Have they not supported US interests?

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  37. Simply consider this . . . we, as in the US have currently the successor of Mao wearing a Western business suit and talking our economics . . . with a trade surplus, not to mention all that US paper . . .

    And we were all along such f***ups? instead weaknesses over the long term . . .

    1992.

    Rather didn't we lose the thread, in fact do it to ourselves in this particular sense . . . ?

    Strategic effect . . . lost?

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  38. Clauswitz: "In my eyes, it's precisely the point of conflict ethnography to understand the points you list. Someone understanding the culture of the area for example would have understood that Saddam not being clear about whether he had some WMDs left over was a deliberate feint towards his neighbours, specifically Iran, to discourage "rash" decisions. "

    Google Hans Blix. Saddam was open to inspection, and not playing coy. In the end, anybody paying attention knew that he had sh*t. And I'm willing to bet that that was the final green light for the invasion.

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  39. seydlitz89 said...

    "For instance, Thomas Donnelly has a good handle on strategic theory as evidenced by this article, but would you agree at all with his conclusions . . . ?

    http://www.aei.org/article/foreign-and-defense-policy/regional/middle-east-and-north-africa/war-with-iran"

    It's garbage, which I could have told from the AEI connection - that group of criminals lied us into the mess that we're in.



    " He's just one. I could provide a whole list of links from competent strategic theorists who have supported policies (for example Iraq) which both of us would see as self-defeating and absurd. The problem is not so much the total lack of strategic thought, but rather that extreme political assumptions and views have blinded these people to the fallacy of their own positions. Strategic theorists are not immune from the virus of national hubris."
    [bolding mine]

    This suggests that they aren't competent; the first thing I'd want from a competent guy is decent levels of immunity from that virus.

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