Iraq in the Context of American Military History

Victor Davis Hanson chronicles our past military blunders and determines that most of the wars the U.S has been involved in since our nation's inception started under dubious circumstances, involved bad intelligence and were fought by ill-equipped troops in the beginning.

...what is missing from the national debate over the "worst" (Iraq) war in our history is any appreciation of past American military errors—political, strategic, technological, intelligence, tactical—that nearly cost us victory in far more important conflicts. Nor do we accept the savage irony of war that only through errors, tragic though they may be, do successful armies adjust in time to discover winning strategies, tactics, and generals.

Read the whole article. There's much to digest.

The Study of War

War has been apart of humanity since man first delineated an "us" which in turn created a "them." Despite the yearnings of pacifists and those that feel we should by now be able to transcend war and all live together on a higher plane of harmonious consciousness, war remains as real as its ever been. Unfortunately, most people's understanding is limited to images on CNN or sensationalized stories read in the newspaper. In other words, it doesn't go very deep. It's not a pleasant subject, so one can be forgiven for not wanting to think too much about it. Because ours is an all-volunteer military, it is not even necessary for the average citizen to acknowledge a change in their lifestyle or make any sort of day to day sacrifice when war rears its ugly head.

Victor Davis Hanson has an outstanding piece in the City Journal this month titled, "Why Study War?"

It’s no surprise that civilian Americans tend to lack a basic understanding of military matters. Even when I was a graduate student, 30-some years ago, military history—understood broadly as the investigation of why one side wins and another loses a war, and encompassing reflections on magisterial or foolish generalship, technological stagnation or breakthrough, and the roles of discipline, bravery, national will, and culture in determining a conflict’s outcome and its consequences—had already become unfashionable on campus. Today, universities are even less receptive to the subject.

This state of affairs is profoundly troubling, for democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war—and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.

It's a shame that more people do not take an interest in military history. It goes a long way towards explaining the present. Recently it occurred to me that the leftist group think that paralyzes many fine academic institutions takes great pride in its general ignorance of all things military. Of course, that does not stop the hard left from vociferously speaking out as though they were experts.

VDH seems to agree:

The academic neglect of war is even more acute today. Military history as a discipline has atrophied, with very few professorships, journal articles, or degree programs. In 2004, Edward Coffman, a retired military history professor who taught at the University of Wisconsin, reviewed the faculties of the top 25 history departments, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report. He found that of over 1,000 professors, only 21 identified war as a specialty. When war does show up on university syllabi, it’s often about the race, class, and gender of combatants and wartime civilians. So a class on the Civil War will focus on the Underground Railroad and Reconstruction, not on Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. One on World War II might emphasize Japanese internment, Rosie the Riveter, and the horror of Hiroshima, not Guadalcanal and Midway. A survey of the Vietnam War will devote lots of time to the inequities of the draft, media coverage, and the antiwar movement at home, and scant the air and artillery barrages at Khe Sanh.

Winston Churchill said, "If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future".

Unfortunately, this is what I feel happens every time I hear Iraq compared to Vietnam by people who frame all of history as though it started in the 1960's.

Thankless Pacifists

This morning I woke to the following headline: U.S., British Troops Rescue Iraq Hostages

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. and British troops Thursday freed three Christian peace activists in a rural area of Iraq without firing a shot, ending a four-month hostage drama in which an American among the group was shot to death and dumped on a Baghdad street.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. military spokesman, said the hostages were being held by a "kidnapping cell" in a house, and the operation to free the captives was based on information from a man captured by U.S. forces only three hours earlier.
(Proof that when we torture poor sheep farmers with underpants and barking dogs they can yield useful information.)

As the article states, these were the comrades of the recently murdered American Tom Fox, all members of the Christian Peacemakers Team based in Chicago. From the heading on their website, "What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?" I gather that they are pacifists in practice and at heart.
Doug Pritchard, the group's co-director speaking from Toronto, had this to say about the rescue operation:

"They knew that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers," Pritchard said.

He also called for coalition forces to leave the country.

"We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq," Pritchard said.

Commentary

Pacifism is a fine strategy when the stakes are low. It's easy to make enlightened claims about the virtues of non-violence when the wolves are not knocking at the door. Probably the most famous pacifist of the 20th century was Mahatma Gandhi. He and his followers famously stood down the mighty British Empire, paving the way for an independent India. I can't help but wonder how India would have fared using such a strategy against Chairman Mao, Stalin, or Hitler rather than the largely benevolent British?
Gandhi had this to say regarding the Jews and the Holocaust: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs." He believed that the Jews should commit mass suicide in order to make the Third Reich introspectively realize that maybe the Aryan race was not really the master race afterall, and should instead live peacefully with their neighbors as equals. Regardless of whether or not you believe in reincarnation as Gandhi did, recommending mass suicide hardly seems like the recipe for living peacefully on this earth in this moment.

The lack of gratitude that Doug Pritchard and CPT have shown for the brave troops that rescued the hostages is inexcusable. Instead of for a moment setting aside his dogmatic belief "... that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers" and thanking the actual people that rescued his helpless pacifists, he instead took the opportunity to call for the coalition forces to leave the country. Surely he would argue that they would have never been harmed had we never invaded Iraq etc... A chicken or the egg argument if there ever was one. It seems the power and the love of God was a little slow to the rescue. Fortunately for the CPT, our brave Armed Forces were up to the thankless task.
Pacifism is not only immoral, it's suicidal.

UPDATE:
In my recent post, "Weapons of Mass Destruction Revisited" I mentioned the boxes of documents and hours of audio tapes that we've found in Iraq leftover from Saddam's reign. Some enterprising members of Pajamas Media have taken to translating some of the documents themselves and then cross-checking the translations for accuracy. The following link provides evidence that members of Saddam's regime were in contact with Osama Bin Laden via Sudan as early as 1995.
Also, Mark Steyn has written an excellent article that explores the costs of maintaining the U.N. mandated sanctions against Iraq had we continued with the status quo.

Bad News for People Who Like Bad News

Shocking, I know, but there actually IS good news from Iraq from time to time.

It's easy to be a pessimist. All that is required of you is to give up.

Weapons of Mass Destruction Revisited

One of the problems with the 24/7 news cycle we are all subjected to is that it rarely allows for a story to develop before the pundits start giving us their analysis in real-time. The result is that we are often forced to reach premature conclusions. The fact that we've been conditioned to think in 30 second sound bytes and seek instant gratification (if we don't insist on having things "yesterday") makes it difficult to recognize this cycle.
It has been almost three years since we invaded Iraq and rid the world of Saddam Hussein. Although there were many other legitimate reasons for our actions, ostensibly the easiest one to sell to the public was that Saddam had WMD's, had used them in the past and as a result he needed to be removed from power before he acted again. When we failed to find any WMD's, the left took the opportunity to use this as evidence that President Bush lied to us in order to further his neoconservative agenda. (I'd wager that the majority of those who use this argument have never taken the time to actually learn what the definition of a "neocon" is, but I digress).

On March 12, The New York Times published the first of two articles on "Saddam's Secret Strategy." The Times reported that "the Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them [in December of 2002] three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense."
This information was provided to a CIA task force called the Iraq Survey Group by Tariq Aziz, who had been deputy prime minister of Iraq. The survey group was established "by the CIA after the second gulf War ended to investigate what happened to Iraq's weapon's programs." The Times article continues, "to ensure that Iraq would pass scrutiny by United Nations arms inspectors, Mr. Hussein ordered that they be given the access that they wanted. And he ordered a crash effort to scrub the country so the inspectors would not discover any vestiges of old unconventional weapons, no small concern in a nation that had once amassed an arsenal of chemical weapons, biological agents and Scud missiles, the Iraq Survey Group said." (link)

His own generals did not know that they had no WMD's, yet it was Bush who lied. But wait, maybe Saddam did, in fact, have WMD's; or at the very least, the capability to resurrect the program once he got France and Russia to persuade the U.N. to lift the sanctions and call off the weapons inspectors.
We are now in the process of interpreting 3,000 hours of audio tape and 48,000 boxes of records which document his military activities; records we surely would never have seen had we not invaded.

In one 1992 tape, Saddam discusses the diversion of electric power from a massive plant in Basra for a uranium-enrichment process like one the U.S. used to create the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In another tape, a top Iraqi scientist explains to Saddam how uranium is being enriched through the advanced process of plasma separation.
The tapes support the account of Mahdi Obeidi, who'd been in charge of the centrifuge program, that parts and blueprints were hidden from U.N. inspectors but not destroyed. Components of a gas centrifuge used to enrich weapons-grade uranium and documents relating to WMD were discovered in a barrel buried in Obeidi's backyard in a rose garden.

Too many people have too much of their credibility invested in the meme "Bush Lied, People Died" and in discrediting "Bush's War on Terror" to ever take an honest look at the entire issue. Anything that does not support this meme must be discredited at all costs. They will continue to pass as gospel reports by Western reporters safely in the Green Zone--who purchase gloomy stories from their Iraqi counterparts because they know that's what sells--as long as it supports the meme. Never for a moment will they consider that things may not be as bad as they seem.
Iraq continues to be story unfolding despite a 24/7 newscycle that forces us to react to every twist and turn of the drama. Stay tuned, and try not to lose your focus after 30 seconds.

DoublePlusUnGood

"We were not strong enough to drive out a half-million American troops, but that wasn't our aim. Our intention was to break the will of the American government to continue the war."
--North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, in a 1990 interview with historian Stanley Karnow

Although that quote is 15 years old, change the tense from past to present and it could have been said by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi , the man claiming responsibility for the majority of bloodshed in Iraq today. As happend following the Tet Offensive in 1968, our nation's Senators seem to be losing their stomach for the task at hand in Iraq. It is one thing to have not supported the war from the onset--everybody is entitled to their opinion. It is quite another thing to change your story at this point in the game as many formerly pro-war Senators from both sides of the asile are doing; even if it is the politically expedient thing to do. It is quite another thing altogether to do as former President Clinton did when he told a group of students recently at the American University in Dubai that the Bush Administration had committed a "big mistake" by liberating Iraq. "Saddam is gone. It's a good thing, but I don't agree with what was done," said the former President.

This is the same man who in 1998 made regime change in Iraq official U.S. policy when he signed the Iraq Liberation Act.

Why would so many politicians go to such lengths to change their story? Victor Davis Hanson thinks he knows why:

...what then is really at the heart of the current strange congressional hysteria?
Simple — the tragic loss of nearly 2,100 Americans in Iraq.
The "my perfect war, your messy postbellum reconstruction" crowd is now huge and unapologetic. It encompasses not just leftists who once jumped on the war bandwagon in fears that Democrats would be tarred as weak on national security (a legitimate worry), but also many saber-rattling conservatives and Republicans — including those (the most shameful of all) who had in earlier times both sent letters to President Clinton and Bush demanding the removal of Saddam and now damn their commander-in-chief for taking them at their own word.
In the triumphalism after seeing Milosevic go down without a single American death, the Taliban implode at very little cost, and Saddam removed from power with little more than 100 fatalities, there was the assumption that the United States could simply nod and dictators would quail and democracy would follow. Had we lost 100 in birthing democracy and not 2,000, or seen purple fingers only and not IEDs on Dan Rather's nightly broadcasts, today's critics would be arguing over who first thought up the idea of removing Saddam and implementing democratic changes.
So without our 2,100 losses, nearly all the present critics would be either silent or grandstanding their support — in the manner that three quarters of the American population who polled that they were in favor of the war once they saw the statue of Saddam fall.
In short, there is no issue of WMD other than finding out why our intelligence people who had once missed it in the First Gulf War, then hyped it in the next — or what actually happened to all the unaccounted for vials and stockpiles that the U.N. inspectors swore were once inside Iraq.
So the real crux is a real legitimate debate over whether our ongoing costs-billions spent, thousands wounded, nearly 2,100 American soldiers lost-will be worth the results achieved. Post facto, no death seems "worth it". The premature end of life is tangible and horrendous in a way that the object of such soldiers' sacrifices — a reformed Middle East, a safer world, enhanced American safety, and freedom for 26 million — seems remote and abstract.

The reason of this post is to point out the revision of history that is taking place before our eyes in the Senate. You, the reader, would do well to recall or read George Orwell's 1984. In it he describes the Records Department where the protagonist Winston works revising old news stories to reinforce Big Brother's version of history. Inconvenient facts as well as any stray piece of anything were tossed into the Memory Hole, never to be referenced again. Judging from the Senate's behavior of late, I'd say it must have been on their Summer reading list.

Side Note: Military deaths are as tragic at the individual level as any death. In an attempt to keep perspective on things I came up with what I think is a good demographic comparison to our Armed Forces: motorcycle riders. They're mostly young and mostly male just like a soldier afterall.
Single vehicle motorcycle crashes account for about 45 percent of all motorcyclist fatalities. More than 38,000 motorcyclists have died in single vehicle motorcycle crashes between 1975 and 1999. (Source)
If you do the math that works out to a little over 2,000 deaths per year. I realize this is not an exact comparison as the number of U.S. soldiers that have been killed in Iraq spans almost three years, and surely there's more motorcycle riders than soldiers in Iraq so the sample size is different. However, if you look at it strictly in deaths per year, riding a motorcycle is more dangerous than soldiering in Iraq.

Iraq Unfiltered

Most people realize intuitively if not overtly that "if it bleeds it leads" is the mantra of the mainstream media (MSM). Being a reporter in a war zone is a hazardous affair, and I can understand one's desire to hole up in a hotel room in the Green Zone and pass off rumors and the like as bona fide news stories in order to meet deadlines; and I believe the majority of the population will swallow these stories without too much thought or question. If one listens to only the MSM day in and day out, one may be left with an impression that does not necessarily square with the reality of the situation on the ground. This may or may not be the intent of the reporter, but that's the subject of another blog entry. Fortunately there exists a cadre of independent journalists in Iraq that truly risk their lives each day in order to give the world an alternative and unedited version of what is really going on. Michael Yon is one if them. His blog is the best I've found yet on the subject. I strongly encourage you to check it out and support him if you are able.

Democrats Forked Tongues

I lifted these from Craigs List today.

"As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am keenly aware that the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is an issue of grave importance to all nations. Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process." -- Nancy Pelosi, December 16, 1998

"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is a serious danger, that he is a tyrant, and that his pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated. He must be disarmed." -- Ted Kennedy, Sept 27, 2002


"[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs." -- From a letter signed by Joe Lieberman, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara A. Milulski, Tom Daschle, & John Kerry among others on October 9, 1998


"Iraq made commitments after the Gulf War to completely dismantle all weapons of mass destruction, and unfortunately, Iraq has not lived up to its agreement." -- Barbara Boxer, November 8, 2002

"The community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists. If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow." -- Bill Clinton in 1998

"Iraq is not the only nation in the world to possess weapons of mass destruction, but it is the only nation with a leader who has used them against his own people." -- Tom Daschle in 1998

"Iraq does pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf and we should organize an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power." -- Al Gore, 2002

****compare these fools with their 2005 rhetoric

Off to Lollapalooza in Chicago...booUP! booUP!