It's been more than a decade now that George W. Bush's neocons initiated the regime-change "war of choice" in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein from power. One by-product is that there are now some books coming out that attempt a military history post-mortem, so that the commanders in the next conflict can avoid repeating any avoidable blunders. One that I would like to highlight here is: Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq," by then New York Times Pentagon correspondent Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor (Pantheon Books, New York; 2006). By itself, the book offers some useful insights into how things can go wrong in the course of combat, even with a power that is clearly outclassed in terms of military might. But this isn't a typical book review.
Follow the orange parachute cord to the 7 "snowflakes" below:
What struck me about the book were three things: 1) how colossally wrong the intel maps were about suspected Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) sites--the prime reason for a pre-emptive strike;
2) how completely the strategy in Iraq II reflected major strategic errors of past wars; and
3) how often this pattern has been repeated in past US dealing with tyrants.
The value in reading Cobra II, IMO, is not just reading it in isolation, but as part of a long line of dominoes--just with different dots--reflecting the establishment's penchant for supporting tyrants initially believed to be favorable to America's interests, then using the military as a hammer when the tyrants stray" off the reservation."
Which raises the very embarasing question: is the US military actually being used to support democracy, or not?
With the Republicans controlling Congress, and a Presidential election looming in 2016, and the right wing media beating the war drums against Iran, it's worth taking a few moments to pause and reflect on whether the country should go down the neocon road once again.
* Repeated mistakes of the Past. Author Niall Ferguson offers a useful "X-ray" of America's strategic approach to Empire. To wit:
1) Impressive initial military successes;
2) Flawed assessment of indigenous sentiment;
3) Strategy of limited wars and gradual escalation of forces;
4) Domestic disillusionment in the face of protracted and nasty conflict;
5) Premature Democratization;
6) Ascendancy of domestic economic considerations;
7) ultimate withdrawal. --From Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, by Niall Ferguson, Penguin Books, New York, 2005, p. 48.
This pattern is not just in Iraq, but derived from experience in creating 750 military installations around the world, over many years especially since WWII.
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Dictators and Tyrants. Dictatorship is a system that deliberately excludes the majority, says Uri Dan, citing Egypt's Nassar as an example (
The Secret War: The Spy Game in the Middle East, by Uri Dan and Y. Ben-Porat, Sabra Books, New York, 1970, p. 162). Nassar's policies were "mobilizing Egypt's meager resources for endless war against Israel, starving the masses of his people, and failing to fulfill his pledges of socialistic reconstruction, which would uplift the living standard, education, health and culture of the Egyptian nation." American foreign policy has ended up supporting a long string of dictators, including Stalin (
Stalin: History of a Dictator, by H. Montgomery Hyde), even though the Allies initially supported the very conservative White Army. Some snapshots of involvement with dictators is described in
Modern Dictators, by Barry Rubin, including the Shah of Iran, Hailie Salasie (Ethopia), Samoza (Nicaragua), Marcos (Phillipines), DuValier (Hati), Trujillo (Dominican Republic). From a strategic standpoint, a lot of the involvement stemmed from the need for oil, and transport routes such as the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal (making trade with Cuba now a recurring political issue).From a political standpoint, some of it stems from 1960 when 17 African states achieved some form of independence from colonial powers. Conservatives (read the Republican Party, Tories, etc) support ostensibly non-Communist dictators, hoping for a democratic change (
Argentina: Democracy on Trial, by David Poneman, Paragon House, 1987). Yet as dictators resort to repression and torture to remain in power, it becomes a political embarassment. In Argentina's case, the Sabato Commission documented torture so extreme it amounted to human experimentation (p.36). See also:
The Big White Lie: The CIA and the Crack Cocaine Epidemic, by Michael Levine,p. 58, on the dreaded Mechanic School of the Navy in Argentina (And economically, in 1985, inflation in Argentina was running about 1,000% per year. Poneman believes that "dictatorships are a result of the modernization process itself." And one of the historians of dictatorships, Raymond Bonner, goes as far as to theorize that dictatorship, as a form of government, is actually more widespread than democracy as we know it in the US. A scary thought not much examined in the Mainstream media.
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Economic Hit Man. Champions of the theory of '"Let the market decide," i.e. Republicans with kind of blind faith in Adam Smith's "invisible hand" would have you believe that an impersonal market will yield the best decisions for society. A more realistic explanation of how emerging nations make economic decisions comes from this book--
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins, Plenum, 2005). After the attacks of 9-11-2001, he published his description of the toxic subculture of high paid economic consultants who basically conduct "velvet glove" blackmail of emerging economies, offering the rulers bribes to borrow money from the World Bank, backed by threats of throwing them to contract assassins if they don't cooperate, which results in the poor country's taxpayers shoulder the burden of extending the American Empire, and enriching major corporations involved in international trade at the expense of the Third World.
The net result can be that the combination of international trade and debt can take more money out of the country than it brings in. (
Modern Dictators, by Barry Rubin). Not to mention creating institutionalized injustice. Some fear that the impending Trans-Pacific Partnership will give corporations the ability to undermine sovereign powers in matters of trade, which could create a new class of international conflicts between developed world and the Third World.
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Republican Strategy: By now it's a familiar platform:Tax cuts for the rich, cut services for the poor. You won't find Fox News pointing out how similar the strategy is to the one used by Egypt's Nassar (above) or in El Salvador (
Weakness and Deceit: US Policy in El Salvador, by Raymond Bonner, Crown, 1984, p. 38) Nor will you find them remembering what even key economists have said about the effects of Republican policy. Such as when Paul Volcker charged in 1982 that Reagan's tax cuts ran US deficits up above $100 billion, and that was keeping interest rates high (The Power Game, by Hedrick Smith, Ballantine Books, 1996, p. 51). Republicans boast of budget cutting, but it's worth remembering how they act in power, as when Air Force cost expert Ernest Fitzgerald embarassed the administration with testimony before Congress about cost overruns, and the president declared Presidential immunity
Richard Nixon v A Ernest Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 731. Add to that how corporations act on their own, such as when big banks pressured Congress to reward Enron (now defunct) shareholders $8 billion (
Pigs at the Trough, by Ariana Huffington, Crown Publishers, 2003, p. 81. Meanwhile, a survey as far back as 1988 showed that 77 percent of the American public supported legislation that would make the wealthy and corporations "pay their fair share of taxes" (
Who Will Tell the People?, by William Grieder, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992,p. 22) .With the decision of
Citizens United, corporations now have greater power than ever to try to rig the legislative process towards inequality. Students of history are reminded of the warning from Gibbon when the 12 Tables of Rome were overwhelmed by new laws which "became a grievance more intolerable than the vices of the city." (
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon, Phoenix, p 421).
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Where this leads. The policies carried out by the
IMF and the World Bank "lead to both corrupt governments and to undermining landowners, says David C. Kurten (When Corporations Rule the World, Kumarian Press, West Hartford, CT, 1995). On a larger scale, the economic struggle reflects the increasing tensions that arise, culturally, as more people move from an agricultural economy to an urban economy, described more fully in The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spangler (Alfred A. Knopf; New York; 1926). Pure civilization, he said, involves the "progressive taking down of forms that are dead." Thus the evolving struggles of the future are more likely to reflect increasing pitting of urban values (materialistic cult of science, utility and prosperity) which increases the contrast between the rich and the poor, as opposed to agricultural values (tradition). That conflict in history is more fully developed in The Politics of History, by Howard Zinn. The newer element now, is that climate change is shifting the agricultural landscape (drought in California, for example), which will possibly change the location of newer urban centers. The tension can lead to "Rogue states hostile to the US because our global reach frustrates their regional ambitions," (
The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, by Philip Bobbitt, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002, p. 15).
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Capitalism out-of-balance . One of the by-products of modern large-scale war can be a major change in the distribution of wealth. World War I sprung from continued competition for colonial assets. After WWI, half of the wealth of the US was in the hands of the top 200 US Corporations (
The Conduct of War: 1789-1961, by Maj. Gen. J.F.C. Fuller, p. 312) .Then there was the Great Depression, where approximately 25% of the US workforce was out of work, but then the shocks of World War II actually resulted in a decrease in income inequality, according to Thomas Piketty
(Capital in the 21st Century, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Harvard Press, 2014, p. 14). Leading to a conclusion that "there is no fundamental reason why we should believe that growth is automatically balanced (p.16), and so "Distribution of wealth is political, not reducible to purely economic mechanisms (ibid, p. 20)." Piketty argues that the way to growth for a country is to have policies that encourage saving, yet, even so, the current concentration of wealth is explained by the importance of inherited wealth (p. 246) and that the lower class, the bottom 50% of labor, owns next to nothing. And stagnant growth increases the importance of inherited wealth (p. 83),widening the gap. One conclusion: "By 2030, the US will approach a level of inequality as great or greater than the French Revolution.(p. 274)
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Conclusion:The saber-rattlers in Congress would like the public to believe that the armed forces are filled with warriors the likes of Cris Kyle in
American Sniper. The reality is more complex. Some estimates show that obesity is such a problem that as much as half of the US population of draft age would be physically unfit for service. Since 1973, the percentage of the population going into the "all-volunteer" services is on the order of 1/2 of 1 percent. For a fuller picture of the situation, see
Legions Stretched Thin: The US Army's Manpower Crisis, by Jeremy Barnicle and Leif W. House, in a study done for the Century Foundation, 2004. They found that the actual number of active duty personnel was at a relatively low point, and that the large mobilizations for conflict depended on a large reliance on the Guard and Reserve units, "stop-loss" meaning keeping people in uniform who really intended to get out (up to 40% at times) , and a reliance on contractors. In Gulf War I, the ratio was one contractor for every 63 in uniform; In Gulf War II it was 1 contractor for every 10 in uniform (Think Blackwater). On average, a snapshot of the services would show that the services contained more married, more females, and fewer whites, and for all but a few most it was a short-term career "choice," the average leaving before 10 years of service (
American Military Population, by David R. Segal et al,
Population Bulletin, Dec. 2004, vol. 59, #4). This is important because that is the group that should be the next generation of leaders, with both knowledge and experience--think sergeants and majors. With increasing mechanization and faster computer speeds, the troops need to have equipment in shape to respond to quicker reaction times--for instance the flight time for one US missle is 12 minutes, so the pace of fire and maneuver can be very quick--and thus there is increased chance of "friendly fire" (Blue-on-blue) incidents.
Finally, one of the big morale problems is that the ranks can see that the military results are "neutralized by political decisions." George H.W. Bush's decision to halt the first Gulf War I drive to topple Saddam Hussein is just one example of that. The rules of engagement are another. On a larger scale, the seemingly endless string of choices that can lead to "Blowback" is another--as in arming Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan only to see an attack on the World Trade Center. Some of the hard won lessons in the Vietnam War--such as the necessity of a defined goal and a clear exit strategy--were deliberately ignored in Gulf War II, as described in
Cobra II, and the book is quite likely to lead to embarasing questions for Jeb Bush and the neocons in general.In the inevitable discussion of issues in the upcoming 2016 Presidential election, it's a fair question to put to candidates: Where do you stand on the Powell Doctrine? And what will you do to make sure that other parts of the government don't undermine any military success?