Nice!
Posted on 11/05/2003 9:53:25 AM PST by FlameThrower
KIBITZING RUMSFELD
Donald Rumsfeld’s famous leaked memo solicited out-of-the-box ideas from a small number of his closest advisors. He did not ask me, but I happen to have a lot of out-of-the-box ideas -- on many subjects. The following are five such ideas about the Iraq War and the War on Terrorism. Since he did not solicit me for them, I post them here where he will probably never see them.
TWO IRAQS
Watching the young toughs dancing on the burned out Humvee makes it clear that there are two Iraqs: Free Iraq (North and South) and Occupied Iraq (the Sunni Triangle). It may be time to formalize the distinction lest the latter undermine the former.
Designate areas of high indigenous support for Baathist resurgents or al Qaeda insurgents as Occupied Iraq. Establish martial law. Impose travel restrictions and curfews. Isolate these territories with checkpoints and barriers. Require registration and new identification papers. Police them using military formations – Coalition and Iraqi. Require internal passports to travel outside the occupied zone to protect Free Iraq. Interdict travel within the occupied zone to capture fugitive Baathists and terrorists trying to move around.
Designate relatively supportive areas as Free Iraq and accelerate transfer of local administration to the Iraqis. Police primarily using local police forces. Keep Coalition forces in the background as much as possible.
As occupied areas become pacified, move them into Free Iraq. Eventually, the contrast between the freedom, progress and affluence of Free Iraq will undermine support for the Baathists in Occupied Iraq. It is important, however, to provide as much security, freedom and opportunity zone as possible under the circumstances to potentially friendly Iraqis within the occupied.
There will be hardcore "dead-enders", those radicalized rather than converted. These will at least be isolated. And they will become more identifiable. In the end, they must be eliminated before they turn the Sunni Triangle into a Palestinian-style ghetto.
BOTTOM UP, NOT TOP DOWN
Press reports cause me to worry that Iraq reconstruction will become a centralized, command economy effort, sort of a Tennessee Valley Authority for Iraq. The first problem is that this model does not work. At best it is wasteful and inefficient. The other problem is that it is difficult to make the transition to free market capitalism.
Iraq has three of the four elements required for an entrepreneurial renaissance. There are millions of unemployed. There is a widespread lack of goods and services. There is an intelligent, literate and educated populace. What is missing is capital. Capital not denominated in billions but in thousands and hundreds.
We ought to establish small loan companies to lend small amounts of start-up capital at very liberal terms, to Iraqi entrepreneurs. We ought to incorporate larger utilities, appoint boards of directors and lend them working capital. We would hold the stock as trustees for the Iraqi public. Eventually, the stock would be sold on a national stock exchange to raise additional capital for the businesses.
Loan repayments would be lent out again. These companies would eventually become publicly traded finance companies or banks.
CIVIL POLICE FORCE
The American military was designed to defeat the Russians in Europe. It did a magnificent job bringing down Saddam’s regime. Postwar turbulence in Iraq, however, pins it down when it ought to be regrouping to confront other threats. It is also less than ideally configured for garrison duty and policing. We need another DOD service -- a land version of the Coast Guard, an extraterritorial civil police force
LEGIONS FOR EMPIRE
America has been forced, against its nature and instincts, into a neo-imperial role, imposing order in a dangerous world. There is absolutely no reason why the manpower for such internationalist efforts must come entirely from citizens or residents of this country.
We need a separate force to take care of the dirty jobs between conventional military deployment and extraterritorial policing. Recruiting foreigners in this role would insulate us somewhat from the Mogadishu effect.
An American Foreign Legion may be the answer. It would probably resemble the Marines in training and equipment but would recruit primarily from foreign countries. Honorable retirees would be entitled to apply for US citizenship. At first, most officers and many non-commissioned officers would be Americans on loan or retired from the US military.
FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE
Terrorism is the injection of lawless violence typical of inter-national conflict into the national life of a society to undermine it or influence its actions. Neo-imperialism is the imposition of order (of the sort generally found in nation-states) onto the international scene, but without the political underpinnings. America’s response to terrorism after 9-11 has been neo-imperialist.
We use conventional power to attack terrorist formations and hosts countries, to impose order in areas of chaos and interdict the flow of WMD. This is all well and good – as far as it goes. We need, however, to fight terrorism with extra-legal violence. In short, we need to hunt down and kill terrorists wherever they are without cumbersome legal and diplomatic formalities.
The power to license private persons to conduct such activities is given to Congress under the US Constitution. To some degree we have, under the Hague Convention, renounced the use of such letters of marque against sovereign nations. Non-state terrorist organizations should receive no shelter from this however. Congress may, I believe, license and equip non-government entities and deploy them against specific targets outside the United States.
Nice!
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