A bridge too far? (Was our Iraq mission a failure - One Opinion)

The Washington Times ^

[MplsSteve]

DISCLAIMER: This is not necessarily my opinion but I am putting it out for discussion.

This article appeared in the Washington Times two days ago. It's written Arnaud de Borchgrave, a long-time member of the Times.

His belief is that Iraq was and continues to be a mistake for the US.

My take? de Borchgrave has written articles like this over the last few years so he is consistent in his beliefs. He is a knowledgable, worldly guy so his opinions aren't easily arrived at.

Opinions on this article anyone?

[hershey]

We started down this rocky road soon after 9/11, knowing it was dangerous, there'd be bad times, etc.. But we had and have a noble purpose, one de Borchgrave mentions, that of lifting Arabs out of poverty and despair. He probably would prefer we work with Europe on this endeavour, but Europe has been doing its level best to stab us in the back on many levels since 9/12. Like it or not, the US is the only nation equipped and able to do the heavy lifting. However, if Kerry wins, we'll see what he plans to do, with Europe's permission of course.

[jonrick46]

When the trees have a blight that grows bad fruit, we first try to treat the blight with chemical remedies. When the remedies don't work, we chop down and burn the affected trees. When that don't work, we take out all of the trees.

The Muslim people had better get on board to fix the blight because more drastic remedies may mean taking out all of the trees.

[Mister Baredog]

Horrible reasoning Baredog

I guess we'll just have to agree to dissagree.

Iraq was the ONLY country on earth after 9/11 where our military was taking hostile fire almost daily, I guess that doesn't matter.

After the sanctions were gone Saddam could have become a bigger problem than N Korea and Iran, but I'm sure you don't agree with that so ok.

Was 9/11 just an incident or should we be fighting offensively?

War is an ugly business, we can agree on that.

[sinkspur]

are in suspended animation here on FR. Bush must win, so any criticism of the long term ramifications of this war in Iraq must not be mentioned.

What's the point of talking about it? We're there, and we have to win it.

That's all there is to it. This second-guessing is for Libertarians and losers.

[sinkspur]

Buck up, bub. Read #21.

Realize what's at stake here and prepare for the long haul.

[Nick Danger]

Is a democracy in Iraq doable?

For our own sanity, we must try. If it turns out not to be doable, and we end up turning to what one Freeper called an "engineering solution," we will know that we at least tried to avoid it. Our consciences would not permit us to do otherwise.

There is an old Star Trek TNG episode in which the Enterprise encounters an omnipotent being who had created a little paradise for himself and his human wife on some planet. Some 'bad guys' came and attacked the planet with death rays. The omnipotent being was unaffected, but they killed his human wife. He is relating this story to Captain Picard, and he is explaining that he killed the aliens in retaliation. Picard assures him that was justifiable, and the omnipotent being says, "You don't understand. When I say I killed them, I mean I killed them all. Everywhere."

We are in a very similar position vis a vis the 8th-century culture that is sending out these suicide killers. We can indeed kill them all — everywhere. But like the omnipotent being in Star Trek, we know that it is wrong. In fact it is horrifying. We must try everything we can to avoid it.

[Publius6961]

Was Our Iraq Mission a Failure?

Isn't this a presumptuous and premature question? It is not "over yet".
What mental midget decided that he was entitled to determine how much time was "enough"?

[Publius6961]

Won't work. For one the Islamofascists would leave their kids in the city. No military commander would advocate this even if it were possible.

This is a real war, it's not a movie

What planet or alternate universe did you just arrive from?
Even the defective Geneva Conventions make it clear that when this happens, the ones decidng where the children remain are the war criminals. Get real.

This not a movie, and in a real world, women, children, the helpless and even fuzzy bunnies die: London, Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, Nanking, Hiroshima... How old are you anyway?
You are not allowed to make up universal rules of war until you have attained at least an IQ of 75!

[Rockingham]

De Borchgrave is a man of experience and good judgment, so his views deserve a hearing. But I am not in agreement with him here.

• "The neocon objectives for restructuring Iraq into a functioning model democracy were a bridge too far. They were never realistic."

This is too cutely phrased. Would a less than model but functional, pro-American democracy be a failure? By de Borchgrave's formula here, that would be marked a "neocon" failure. Such a democracy is already in existence in the Kurdish region, and could probably be set up in a few years in the Shia areas in the south of Iraq. The Sunni areas are the problem and it is too early even there to declare failure.


• "The plan to train Iraqi military and security forces in time to cope with a budding insurgency before it spun out of control was stillborn."

True. Iraqis had little enthusiasm for joining up until Saddam and the Bathist regime were displaced. But new Iraqi police and security forces are being trained and many are already in the field.


• "The insurgency has mushroomed from 5,000 in the months following collapse of Saddam's regime to an estimated 20,000 today and still growing. Insurgents are targeting green Iraqi units and volunteers for training, and some have already defected to the rebels."

Accurate, but that does not mean that our efforts are failing or are bound to fail. We have the capacity to make it work if we stick it out.

• "Iraqi soldiers trained by the U.S. are complaining the equipment ordered by the U.S. from Ukraine being assigned to them gives them 'second-class status.'"

There is little justification to this complaint. If the Iraqis are to be equipped with the AK-47 and the related Soviet era weapons that they are familiar with, they are not going to be drawing on US Army stocks are they? I have no doubt that if the Iraqis want to ignore the hundreds of thousands of tons of weapons left over from the Saddam era in favor of new US weapons, our arms industry will be pleased to sell them all they want.


• "To cope with the insurgency, the U.S. requires tenfold the rebel strength — or some 200,000 as a bare minimum. Short of that, the insurgency will continue gaining momentum. The multiple is based on the British experience in Northern Ireland for a quarter-century as well as France's civil war in Algeria (1954-62), when nationalist guerrillas were defeated militarily, but won the war diplomatically. France deployed half a million men to defeat the fellaghas in Algeria."

Correct, but de Borchgrave's calculations do not include the developing Iraqi military and security forces, which amount to well over a hundred thousand with more being trained. Their numbers, quality, and experience will improve over time and should make for the necessary ratio of forces against the insurgents without additional US troops.


• "The U.S. occupation has lost control of large swathes of Iraq where the insurgency operates with virtual impunity."

True, but that is not as consequential as it sounds in a country with large patches of vacant desert. The center of gravity in a guerrilla war is not territory but the enemy forces and the support of the local population.

Moreover, one highly effective counterinsurgency tactic is to let the opposition develop a false sense of security and pour into apparent sanctuaries, but to them concentrate and destroy them. The Algerians used this method to help crush the Islamic insurgency that they recently confronted.


• "Iraq was a diversion from the war on a global movement that was never anchored in Baghdad."

Ludicrous. Every day, American troops in Iraq are killing terrorists, with many of them being drawn there from all around the Muslim world. Eventually, one side or the other will exhaust itself or lose patience and give up. Just where does de Borchgrave suggest our troops should instead go to kill terrorists? Or does he propose that we wait for them to again attack our cities? Distraction -- Iraq is integral to the terror war.


• "Iraq does not facilitate a solution to the Mideast crisis. And without such a solution, the global terrorist movement will continue spreading."

This is a variation on the argument made by the check waving sheik in New York a few days after 9/11: accommodate to Muslim demands in the Mideast if you want peace and safety. No thanks: my preferred return message to the Muslims would be that there can be no Mideast peace until the Palestinians renounce terrorism in word and deed and they and the states surrounding Israel accept its existence and open good faith peace negotiations.


• "Iraq has become a magnet for would-be Muslim jihadis the world over; it has greatly facilitated transnational terrorism."

Actually, the terrorists are more like termites drawn to an attractant that is laced with a poison: they are going to Iraq to be killed by US troops. How is this a bad thing?


• "Charting a course out of the present chaos requires an open-ended commitment to maintain U.S. forces at the present level and higher through 2010 or longer."

We are there to stay in Iraq, but are unlikely to be engaged in combat that long and not in the present numbers.


• "The once magnificent obsession about building a model Arab democracy in Iraq now has the potential of a Vietnam-type quagmire."

This purple prose misses some elementary points: the Kurds already have a thriving democracy and are not Arabs; the Shias' version of Islam is generally seen as congenial to democracy; and, learning from our mistakes and not under the constraints of the Cold War, the Bush administration is not going to let Iraq strategy and policy stagnate as they did in the Viet Nam war under Lyndon Johnson.

Nor was Viet Nam really a "quagmire" in the sense offered by de Borchgrave. Once a faltering commander (Westmoreland) and a bad strategy were replaced, Gen. Creighton Abrams' classic "seize and hold" strategy and a program of "Vietnamization" proved effective in defeating the Viet Cong insurgency in several years.

When the South Viet Namese government fell, it was to an invasion from the North after American troops withdrew and a liberal Democratic Congress blocked further assistance. We won the guerrilla war, but then let our ally fall victim to a conventional military attack.


• "Everything now undertaken in Iraq is palliative to tide the administration over the elections."

Overstated. There is a natural strategic pause because the fate of the Bush administration is yet unknown. Why concede anything to Bush and the US now when Kerry would be more accommodating later?

Bush's reelection though will clarify the choices because countries will close deals that are now held open pending the election. A second term Bush administration will pick up those gains and apply the screws where necessary.


• "What is urgently needed, whether a Bush II administration or a Kerry White House is for the world's great democracies to meet at the summit to map a common strategy to confront a global challenge. The war on terrorism — on the terrorists who have hijacked Islam — is only one part of a common approach for (1) the defense of Western democracies and (2) the gradual transformation of an Arab world that must be assisted out of poverty, despair and defeat."

This is unlikely to be productive and would be harmful because of the divisions between Western countries and the almost certain reaction of many Muslims in seeing such a summit as planning a war on their societies and faith. Why give Chirac and other cretins an opportunity to preen and pillory us? We are better served by conventional diplomatic means instead of high profile summitry.


• "A war on terrorism without a global strategy, which must include funding major educational reforms in poor countries like Pakistan, where wannabe jihadis are still being churned out by the hundreds of thousands, could only lead to the gradual erosion of Western democratic structures."

De Borchgrave has a point, but the central problem is that the madrassas training the jihadis are funded by wealthy Muslims, especially the Saudis, and the madrassas themselves reflect the pathologies of the muslim world. Even a massive, US funded educational effort in the muslim world will fail unless the madrassas and jihadist teaching is suppressed. That will be a difficult sales job and it will taken a generation or more for a reformed educational system to bear fruit.

In the meantime, what does de Borchgrave suggest that we should do? And what about the educated elite that controls and leads the Muslim jihadists? Unless we are careful and strict about funding education in the Muslim world, we may well find that we are simply turning out better educated terrorists with a more lethal mix of skills and an ability to move easily in western circles.


• "The 'war on terror' is a misnomer tantamount to rhetorical disinformation. One can no more fight terrorism than one could declare war on Adolf Hitler's Panzers in World War II or Dreadnoughts in World War I. Terrorism is a weapons system that has been used time and again for the last 5,000 years. The root causes are the problem, not the weapon."

True. But the obfuscation is necessary to obscure a more provocative truth: we are at war with radical Islam, trying to defeat it by limited measures without engaging the Muslim world as an adversary, and hoping to spur reforms in Muslim societies. We are making progress, but, as the Beslan atrocity suggests, we do not have the upper hand.


• "Ignoring the causes guarantees escalation — to weapons of mass destruction."

This cliched "root causes" observation offers no insight and suggests a lack of understanding in that the terrorists will use WMDs if they can get them, not because we have failed to understand the "root causes" of terrorism. A better approach would be making clear to Muslim governments that facilitate terrorism that the use of a WMD against the US or our allies will bring extreme consequences for those governments.

[Woodworker]

Arnaud de Borchgrave has the right idea in his column, attack the root causes. And the root causes are the instructions in the Koran with regard to treatment of the other People of the Book and the infidels. But Bush can’t come out and say such a thing publicly.

Arnaud de Borchgrave isn’t stupid, and he may have a true insight into the situation. However, the Muslim world has definitely stirred from a long sleep. Likely the old remedies will no longer work. The move into Iraq was an attempt to shock the Muslim world, or least that what the Pentagon analyst, Thomas PM Barnett ( http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com ), believes. Islam has, over the centuries, had Satan’s own good luck in avoiding defeat and crushing its enemies. Perhaps the USA will be luckier than the past opponents of Islam.

[Mike Darancette]

It has always been my opinion that victory was too swift. Instead of breaking more things and killing more people what we did was perform a coup d'etat. We walked into Baghdad and just took over causing the enemy to dissolve.

There was a plan to encircle Baghdad and slug it out maybe even fighting in urban Baghdad. Given that scenario I would Imagine that the military had planned for 2,000 to 3,000 deaths even before Baghdad was pacified.

The commanders on the ground saw an opportunely and Franks allowed the "Hail Mary" dash into Baghdad and by May 1, we had Baghdad with only 138 dead.

Had things gone by the plan I believe that we would have had 2-3 times the numbers of death that we have today.

[familyop]

"How about: The neo-cons should go back to NY, Tel Aviv, or wherever they come from?

Of course not. Mind your racist tone."

That statement of victimology and hypocrisy for the various races of radical Islamists and the tiny groups that comprise their same. old allies gets my deepest sympathy (irony, sarcasm). "Neo-cons" is neo-Nazi propaganda phrase to describe true conservatives as opposed to them, the national socialists ("paleo-cons" who pretend to be conservatives in their recruiting efforts, as did their predecessors and as do their affiliates). Mind your false accusation. Small sub-groups of all kinds of races are involved in neo-Nazi efforts.

The USA is allied with Israel and leaders in other countries who can get along with that. And that's the way it will continue to be.

Iran and its shady friends will continue to be the main focus until their situation is resolved.