Liberal and Loving It

Only 90 days? - way to go

With everyone else coming down on the new Iraqi government for taking 90 days to propose a new government, I figured I'd put in my $0.02 worth.

I think this is a tremendous accomplishment. With no tradition of political horse trading... With numerous groups that not only distrust each other, but in cases hate each other... With more interest groups and ambitious politicians than positions... They did it!

They came up with a list of cabinet members that received overwhelming approval. And they did it in just 3 months. In the U.S. we've been debating Social Security for over 3 months and there still isn't even a specific proposal, much less a vote or resolution. And here we basically have a single party government.

So to the Iraqi politicians I say - "way to go." This is a great accomplishment in any amount of time and 3 months is fast for what you accomplished.

Iraq is not Vietnam

There has been a lot of people saying that Iraq is another Vietnam. But it strikes me that there is a giant difference between the two.

North Vietnam had the backing of two other superpowers, Russia and China. And they had their own country to base from.

The insurgents in Iraq get surreptitious funding from individuals and some small governments (like Iran). And they get some hidden help again from small countries.

But they have no superpower on their side. They don't even have a single country that is openly backing them. They are on their own. And I cannot think of a single instance where insurgents battling a superpower were able to win without the backing of a competing superpower.

I went back 200 years and even then the U.S. won the Revolutionary War because France openly supported us. So maybe there is a case where a truly local insurgency has beat a superpower - but I don't think so.

And that makes Iraq very different from Vietnam.

Trackbacks: Thunder Run

Some Questions for Charles Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer gave the keynote address at the CWA. In it he made his case for the neo-con approach to world affairs. First off, I would like to say thank you to him and to all of the others that have come to the CWA to talk. I really appreciate their doing so - the conference has been amazing.

And I found that he made a number of good points, some that I agreed with and some that I could see the logic behind although I didn't fully agree with his conclusions.

But with that said, I also have some questions for him on his points.

First, to your point that the only solution to solving problems with other countries is at the point of a gun. Exactly how does you propose to do that with North Korea. Yes diplomacy has failed so far. But a war with North Korea would be devastating to South Korea (Seoul is maybe 40 miles from the border) and horrible for China. And in the course of the war we could end up with an atomic bomb detonated in an American city.

Second, do you claim that the neo-con approach is the only approach for any country? Do we invade France every time the get pissy (which is basically always)? What is wrong with the liberal approach of treaties with countries that do abide by the rule of law? This is not just the first world but also many third world countries.

Third, when you say that the liberal internationalism and realism won't work - isn't that the combination we used in the cases of Taiwan and South Korea that turned them from dictatorships into democracies? And an even better example is China where they are going down the same road Taiwan and South Korea already travelled.

Fourth you talk about Bush having the right approach with his decision to invade Iraq. Ok, let's postulate that he does and give him an A for approach. What do we given him for implamentation? (I'd say an F-.)

While the U.S. does not need the approval of the U.N. to act (we did not have it when Clinton took us in to Yugoslavia), there is a lot to be gained by having allies. Don't you think that Clinton or Reagan would have had the French merely annoyed and the Germans and Russians quietly accepting if they had been President taking us to war in Iraq. Instead the Bush team seemed almost to purposely piss everyone off. They violated Churchill's maxim that the only thing worse than having allies is not having allies.

And how they handled the peace in Iraq is just short of criminal. And it's not like there were not only tons of studies discussing how to win the peace, but there were tons of recent examples from Panama to Bosnia. And yet they appeared blind to all of this.

So how would you score their implementation?

And finally, I ask you more as a psychiatrist than as a political columnist, what do you make of the Bush administrations almost pathalogical unwillingness to learn from others or to learn from their own mistakes? Their unwillingness to look outside their own preconceptions just boggles the mind.

thank you.

CMOH for smarts as well as bravery

This is not my idea - it was stated very eloquently by Ahmad Ghoreishi at the CWA today.

I remember seeing this on CNN when it happened and just being amazed at it. An infantry company had headed in to the town that was the most religious Shite site and contained the Mosque where Al-Sistini lives. It would have been horrible for the U.S. and a democratic Iraq if the soldiers had fought there.

But what happened when the infantry met a very large and angry crowd was simply amazing. There were numerous Iraqis working on calming down the Iraqi crowd. And the Colonel in charge of the troops ordered his troops to kneel and point their rifles at the ground.

And it defused the issue. Not only did the soldiers show that they were not going to attack anyone, but their kneeling was taken as a sign of respect to the religious location and Immans residing there.

Al-Sistini clearly is the one irreplaceable individual if Iraq is to be a success. And he clearly understands how to win the peace better than anyone else involved. And all that could have so easily been lost if the Colonel of that company had not handled the situation as he did.

The Congressional Medal of Honor has historically been for extraordinary acts of bravery, such as for the one just awarded. But these new kinds of wars are many times going to require brains even more than brawn. And while kneeling with your rifle pointed at the dirt in front of an angry crowd is unquestionably a very brave thing to do, even more than that it was a brilliant thing to do.

Awarding the CMOH for extraordinary brilliant actions in cases like this sends a very clear message to all of the troops that the expectation is that they need to figure out the smart thing to do. And it rewards someone who showed amazing thought in an incredibly stressful situation.

Learning how to win the next war

The U.S. has historically started each war losing the early battles. From New York in the revolutionary war to Bull Run and most of the first two years in the Civil War to the Philippines and Kasserine Pass in WWII.

And then in Vietnam we never learned. This was our first battle against an insurgent enemy and in this case the army stuck to fighting the last war and failed.

In Iraq we do seem to be learning. (And in fairness to the uniformed forces, the big mistakes seem to rest mostly with the civilian leaders in then pentagon, not with the troops on the ground.) It may be taking us a couple of years to do so - but the U.S. is handling Iraq much better now than two years ago.

And it is due to a very different approach. The paternalistic idea of slowly guiding Iraq to democracy under an American pro-consul is gone. Instead we are turning things over to the Iraqis as fast as possible so it is their fight and they have to step up to create their new society.

I think the U.S. can win this if it continues to learn and adapt. And sticks with it to the end. And equally important, hopefully these lessons will be retained for the next insurgent war as that is what we are probably going to be fighting for the forseeable future.

postscript - I asked one retired general why is it that the U.S. starts out losing. His reply made a lot of sense to me - because we are not a militaristic people.

The real reason for invading Iraq

It was clear even before the invasion that the real reason many of the neo-cons wanted to invade Iraq was to bring in democracy at the point of a gun. Many people find the excuses used to cover this real reason abhorrent. (And while most of these are people who opposed the war - some are those who supported the war but still find making an excuse wrong.)

Without getting in to the moral arguments for this, I would like to bring up one observation. Roosevelt made a much bigger stretch before Pearl Harbor in bringing the U.S. in to war against Germany/Japan. And he did this when there was a clear majority against fighting in WWII.

First off, the U.S. Navy was already in a shooting war in the North Atlantic with the Germans having attacked several U.S. destroyers and having sunk one. And the U.S. Navy had depth bombed several U-boats.

In the pacific Roosevelt ordered the USS Lanikai to steam to Malaysia (from the Philippines) so that if the Japanese attacked the British, they would be forced to sink the Lanikai pulling the U.S. into the pacific war.

In hindsight, it was a totally necessary thing for the U.S. to actively fight in WWII and not just supply arms the the British and Russians. It will probably be at least 20 years before we know if Bush's decision was also a very good thing.

But using other excuses for attacking Iraq is not without precedent. And in the case of Roosevelt, it was a necessary step the world needed.

One Big Assist for Lebanon

There is a lot of discussion about the impact of the Iraqi elections on the recent events in Lebanon. The elections definitely had some effect, and it probably differed person by person among the demonstrators.

But there is another giant effect the U.S. had that doesn't seem to be mentioned. And that is the fact that if Syria had put down the demonstrations, they very well could have had the U.S. Army in Damascus the next day.

The fact that the U.S. had invaded Iraq, clearly had considered invading Syria, and had several divisions next door, made it clear to the Lebanese and the Syrians that a violent reaction to the Cedar Revolution would very likely mean an invasion of Syria.

This meant the Lebanese felt it was safe to demonstrate against Syria. And it meant Syria felt they had very limited options in there responses. So the U.S. in Iraq had a very significant impact on Lebanon.