| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
10 Jul 2005 05:27:32 AM |
| Object: |
OT: A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War |
A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/08/AR2005070802303_pf.html
By Eliot A. Cohen
Post
Sunday, July 10, 2005; B01
War forces us, or should force us, to ask hard questions of ourselves.
As a military historian, a commentator on current events and the father
of a young Army officer, these are mine.
You supported the Iraq war when it was launched in 2003. If you had
known then what you know now, would you still have been in favor of it?
As I watched President Bush give his speech at Fort Bragg to rally
support for the war the other week, I contemplated this question from a
different vantage than my usual professorial perch. Our oldest son now
dresses like the impassive soldiers who served as stage props for that
event; he too wears crossed rifles, jump wings and a Ranger tab. Before
long he will fight in the war that I advocated, and that the president
was defending.
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: OT: A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War |
15 Jul 2005 05:30:07 PM |
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On 10 Jul 2005 03:27:32 -0700, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote:
A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/08/AR2005070802303_pf.html
By Eliot A. Cohen
Post
Sunday, July 10, 2005; B01
War forces us, or should force us, to ask hard questions of ourselves.
As a military historian, a commentator on current events and the father
of a young Army officer, these are mine.
You supported the Iraq war when it was launched in 2003. If you had
known then what you know now, would you still have been in favor of it?
As I watched President Bush give his speech at Fort Bragg to rally
support for the war the other week, I contemplated this question from a
different vantage than my usual professorial perch. Our oldest son now
dresses like the impassive soldiers who served as stage props for that
event; he too wears crossed rifles, jump wings and a Ranger tab. Before
long he will fight in the war that I advocated, and that the president
was defending.
So it is not an academic matter when I say that what I took to be the
basic rationale for the war still strikes me as sound. Iraq was a
policy problem that we could evade in words but not escape in reality.
But what I did not know then that I do know now is just how
incompetent we would be at carrying out that task. And that's what
prevents me from answering this question with an unhesitating yes.
The Bush administration did itself a disservice by resting much of its
case for war on Iraq's actual possession of weapons of mass
destruction. The true arguments for war reached deeper than that. Long
before 2003, weapons inspections in Iraq had broken down, and
sanctions, thanks to countries like Russia, China and France, were
failing. The regime's character and ambitions, including its desire to
resume suspended weapons programs, had not changed. In the meanwhile,
the policy of isolation had brought suffering to the Iraqi people and
had not stabilized the Gulf. Read Osama bin Laden's fatwas in the late
1990s and see how the massive American presence in Saudi Arabia -- a
presence born of the need to keep Saddam Hussein in his cage -- fed
the outrage of the jihadis with whom we are in a war that will last a
generation or more.
More than this: Decades of American policy had hoped to achieve
stability in the Middle East by relying on accommodating thugs and
kleptocrats to maintain order. That policy, too, had failed; it was
the well-educated children of our client regimes who leveled the Twin
Towers, after all.
The administration was and is right in thinking that the overthrow of
Saddam's regime could change the pattern of Middle Eastern politics in
ways that, by favoring the cause of decent government and basic
freedoms, would favor our interests as well. Iraq will not become
Switzerland, a progressive and prosperous social democracy, for
generations, if ever. But it can become a state that makes room for
the various confessions and communities that constitute it, that has
reasonably open and free politics, and that chooses a path to a future
that could inspire other changes in the Arab Middle East. I still
think something like that will happen. The administration believed
that the invasion of Iraq would jolt and transform a region bewitched
by the malignant dreams that my colleague Fouad Ajami has described so
well -- the dark fantasies of Baathists, ultra-nationalists and
religious fanatics. And indeed, in the aftermath of the Iraq war the
cracks have begun to show -- in Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, and even in
Syria and Saudi Arabia.
But a pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for
the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I
could not imagine, for example, that the civilian and military high
command would treat "Phase IV" -- the post-combat period that has
killed far more Americans than the "real" war -- as of secondary
importance to the planning of Gen. Tommy Franks's blitzkrieg. I never
dreamed that Ambassador Paul Bremer and Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the two
top civilian and military leaders early in the occupation of Iraq --
brave, honorable and committed though they were -- would be so
unsuited for their tasks, and that they would serve their full length
of duty nonetheless. I did not expect that we would begin the
occupation with cockamamie schemes of creating an immobile Iraqi army
to defend the country's borders rather than maintain internal order,
or that the under-planned, under-prepared and in some respects
mis-manned Coalition Provisional Authority would seek to rebuild Iraq
with big construction contracts awarded under federal acquisition
regulations, rather than with small grants aimed at getting angry,
bewildered young Iraqi men off the streets and into jobs.
I did not know, but I might have guessed.
You are a military historian; what does
the history of war have to tell us about the future of Iraq?
History provides perspective and context, not lessons. The failures
and squandered opportunities of that first year in Iraq do not look
that different from some of the institutional stupidities we saw in
Vietnam. What is different here is how quickly -- relatively speaking
-- the United States changed its course. It took five years before we
became serious about training our Vietnamese allies to take our place.
It has taken about a year to get serious about training Iraqis.
The political side of insurgency, which is the side that counts most,
never really came to the fore in Vietnam, but it has in Iraq. For the
presidents who got us into Vietnam, and for that matter out of it, the
war was a distraction from other, more important priorities. For this
president, the war is the defining decision of his tenure, and he
knows it. Whatever his faults may be, a lack of determination is not
one of them. And in war, character -- and above all persistence --
counts for a very great deal.
That's particularly true here because counterinsurgency is inherently
a long, long business. Conceivably, the Iraqi insurgency could
collapse in a year or so, but that would be highly unusual. More
likely Iraq will suffer from chronic violence, which need not prevent
the country as a whole from progressing. If the insurgencies in
Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka and Kashmir continue,
what reason do we have to expect this one to end so soon? Most
insurgencies do, however, fail. Moreover, most insurgencies consist of
a collection of guerrilla microclimates in which local conditions --
charismatic leaders (or their absence), ethnographic peculiarities,
concrete grievances -- determine how much violence will occur and with
what effect.
This is an unusually invertebrate insurgency, without a central
organization or ideology, a coherent set of objectives or a common
positive purpose. The FLN in 5lgeria or the Viet Cong were far more
cohesive and directed. The decentralized ad hoc nature of the
insurgency makes it harder to figure out, but also less likely to
succeed; there is a reason why it is well-organized and disciplined
guerrillas who eventually occupy presidential palaces. And with all of
its errors and follies, the United States remains an extraordinarily
wealthy and formidable foe. By any historical standard, our resources
are immense, our technology fabulous, the quality of our people on the
ground superb. We have far more power than the Britain of the 19th
century or the America of the 1960s. That fact may invite hubris, but
it also provides solace.
None of this predetermines the outcome, of course, or foretells the
consequences of a muddled success or a blurred failure in Iraq.
Historians have the comfort of knowing how past wars played out. But
short of clairvoyance, no one can forecast the outcome and the second-
or third-order effects of events as they unfold. Five or even 10 years
from now, we still may not be able to judge our Iraq venture in a
definitive way. Unfortunately, that philosophical detachment is cold
consolation in the here and now, as young men and women go off to war.
Your son is an infantry officer, shipping
out soon for Iraq. How do you feel about that?
Pride, of course -- great pride. And fear. And an occasional burning
in the gut, a flare of anger at empty pieties and lame excuses, at
flip answers and a lack of urgency, at a failure to hold those at the
top to the standards of accountability that the military system
rightly imposes on subalterns.
It is a flicker of rage that two years into an insurgency, we still
expose our troops in Humvees to the blasts of roadside bombs --
knowing that even the armored version of that humble successor to the
Jeep is simply not designed for warfare along guerrilla-infested
highways, while, at the same time, knowing that plenty of countries
manufacture armored cars that are. It is disbelief at a manpower
system that, following its prewar routines, ships soldiers off to war
for a year or 15 months, giving them two weeks of leave at the end,
when our British comrades, more experienced in these matters and wiser
in pacing themselves, ship troops out for half that time, and give
them an extra month on top of their regular leave after an operational
deployment.
It is the sick feeling that churned inside me at least 18 months ago,
when a glib and upbeat Pentagon bureaucrat assured me that the
opposition in Iraq consisted of "5,000 bitter-enders and criminals,"
even after we had killed at least that many. It flames up when hearing
about the veteran who in theory has a year between Iraq rotations, but
in fact, because he transferred between units after returning from one
tour, will go back to Iraq half a year later, and who, because of
"stop-loss orders" involuntarily extending active duty tours, will
find himself in combat nine months after his enlistment runs out. And
all this because after 9/11, when so many Americans asked for nothing
but an opportunity to serve, we did not expand our Army and Marine
Corps when we could, even though we knew we would need more troops.
A variety of emotions wash over me as I reflect on our Iraq war:
Disbelief at the length of time it took to call an insurgency by its
name. Alarm at our continuing failure to promote at wartime speed the
colonels and generals who have a talent for fighting it, while also
failing to sweep aside those who do not. Incredulity at seeing
decorations pinned on the chests and promotions on the shoulders of
senior leaders -- both civilians and military -- who had the helm when
things went badly wrong. Disdain for the general who thinks Job One is
simply whacking the bad guys and who, ever conscious of public
relations, cannot admit that American soldiers have tortured prisoners
or, in panic, killed innocent civilians. Contempt for the ghoulish
glee of some who think they were right in opposing the war, and for
the blithe disregard of the bungles by some who think they were right
in favoring it. A desire -- barely controlled -- to slap the highly
educated fool who, having no soldier friends or family, once explained
to me that mistakes happen in all wars, and that the casualties are
not really all that high and that I really shouldn't get exercised
about them.
There is a lot of talk these days about shaky public support for the
war. That is not really the issue. Nor should cheerleading, as opposed
to truth-telling, be our leaders' chief concern. If we fail in Iraq --
and I don't think we will -- it won't be because the American people
lack heart, but because leaders and institutions have failed. Rather
than fretting about support at home, let them show themselves
dedicated to waging and winning a strange kind of war and describing
it as it is, candidly and in detail. Then the American people will
give them all the support they need. The scholar in me is not
surprised when our leaders blunder, although the pundit in me is
dismayed when they do. What the father in me expects from our leaders
is, simply, the truth -- an end to happy talk and denials of error,
and a seriousness equal to that of the men and women our country sends
into the fight.
Eliot Cohen is Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at the
Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins
University.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned
by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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| User: "Ian Braidwood" |
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| Title: Re: OT: A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War |
10 Jul 2005 06:49:36 AM |
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Thanks again for this, Maff.
I feel for this man, but wonder what else he expected than the
unrealistic approach taken by the American people and their leaders.
After all, they spend too much time wrapped up in power fantasies to
appreciate their limitations and they are too parochial to take
interest in what life is like for others.
Look at Hollywood, at films like Stealth, and Fantastic Four; both
power fantasies in which the baddie is vanquished after 90 minutes -
and decisively so. But the world isn't made of computer sprites and not
even your closest allies see the US as a wise, caring overlord.
It is more like living next to a strong, but emotionally unstable
simpleton, who though capable of kindness, can fly into uncontrolled
rages.
This war was inevitable, because war is part of laissez-faire
capitalism and the US needed to srike out at _somebody_ because the
grief and shock of 9/11 isn't part of power fantasies that can't equip
them emotionally for real life. Oh, Hollywood has blown up office
blocks, but always at night, so there was no danger of dealing with
human cost.
Even when people in films are killed, they're either in uniform and so
not displaying individuality, of a recognisable 'other' stereotype, or
like you and sacrificed to provide justification for acts which would
otherwise count as barbarism. That is how barbarians think: always
looking for an excuse.
To those relatives of American allies killed, either in uniform or
attacks like those on Thursday, that is why your loved ones died:
because someone has to stay close to the mad kid next door - to stop
him from doing too much damage to himself and others.
I'm sorry if that's cold comfort.
(-: Ian :-)
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