My objection was primarily to the perception issue. You will recall that I posted in favor of your “boa constrictor” tactic and objected only to the notion that running the beretted Bathist General in at the last minute was part of the original plan:
However, you will no doubt be surprised that I agree and always agreed with
What I do not accept is that this bug out and hand off to the Baathist Establishment is a clever denouement to your plan. It simply does not fit
The gravamen of my complaint was stated thus:
We started a battle for perception, upped the ante with bluster, and then at the final thrust, blinked.
This is true even if this last minute hand off to our beretted Baathist general friend was part of the original plan which I do not for a moment believe and neither does most of the rest of the world. The burden is on the administration to sell that spin and so far they haven't even tried. But even if true, the battle is lost because the world sees it lost. The world sees it my way, not yours and I take no joy in that observation.
The rest of the world now believes that the America of the Bug out from Beirut and from Mogadishu, is still the America of George Bush.
I do not mean to introduce a red herring here, I do not think the matter turns on whether the plan originally called for an Iraqi general to gallop in to our rescue, that would hardly be fair or productive. My objection remains one of PERCEPTION of the whole battle. Did and does the world regard the operation around Fallujah as a defeat or as a victory for America? Additonally, I had posted that the promise of apprehending the murderers of our four civilian citizens so stridently made by the administration and its General was cynically betrayed by this turn over to the Baathist General. But first, the matter of perception.
Why should perception matter? After all isn’t reality on the ground why wars are fought? The reply, in a phrase: The Tet offensive. No one my age can forget the television image of Walter Cronkeit stepping through the rubble and declaring the battle lost. The air went out of the baloon at home and the war was lost, no matter that Cronkeit had it wrong, America had defeated the Viet Cong on the ground, but the world thought otherwise and so, in the end, Walter Cronkeit was not wrong – but ironically he was right because he had made his own reality and put it our living rooms and we believed it. Since that moment, every President who wages war, especially, a preemptive war, must do so while negotiating the following obstacles: 1) He must win decisively within a few weeks and preferably within days. 2) He must do so virtually without casualties. 3) He may inflict only limited collateral casualties 4) He may not damage any sacred sites 4) He must go to war only with UN approval. 5) He must not sustain any surprises. 6) His troops may not commit any atrocities or even imagined atrocities. 7) He must accomplish all this on live television. These are obstacles presented by television and the 24 hour news cycle. Cronkeit had to wait years to spring his trap but he was operating without satellites. Since the first Gulf War the list could be expanded to require the President to avoid all asymmetrical terror attacks on the troops, which I conclude means that we may no longer occupy a liberated land absent a causus belli involving a direct strike on our homeland from the occupied country or the discovery of WMDs.
So what has all this got to do with Fallujah? Well, at minimum, given the above list, it means that the Bush administration must at all costs avoid the appearance of indecisiveness or muddle. No one can deny that the administration looks absolutely confused at Fallujah. If nothing else in the modern age of televised warfare, the President must not fail to meet expectations which he himself and his generals have created i.e. he must capture or kill the bad guys who murdered our civilians in Fallujah. The administration has failed these tests. I note that the article alleges the capture of 27 of 28 insurgent leaders but I assume them not to be the actual murderers.
You can complain that these tests are unreasonable and impossible and you will gain my sympathetic understanding. The President may ignore these strictures and rely on the inertia of patriotism and his popularity to carry him. But eventually the friction of the left wing media will prevail and his capacity to wage war will be weakened. Bush has crossed this threshold and Fallujah (or should I say the perception of Fallujah) is part of the reason.
The President simply cannot lose the war of perceptions and remain a war President.
Of course other factors like Najef and especially the prison scandal have contributed. But there can be no doubt that Bush has lost the perception battle over the battle of Fallujah. The question is, has he also lost the war? The first sentence of your article from the WSJ Opinion page says it all, meaning the media is simply not reporting the administration’s successes in Fallujah. These three have been used by the media to disillusion the American public and make them war weary. Consider the cost to Bush in the last 30 days to his approval ratings, the confidence in the conduct of the war, and his standing in the polls. More than half the nation now disapproves of his handling of Iraq and the line was crossed since we handed off at Fallujah.
We react to Fallujah because we are emotionally involved because of the atrocities committed there but we should also care about Fallujah because it is part of the war in Iraq and thus part of the World War against terrorism. To the degree that Bush loses ground in the election, America loses ground in this greater war and that imperils us at home.
I believe that Fallujah is also important ( and now I have the chance to finally find something positive to say,) because it represents a sea change in our policy in Iraq and one which I might add thankfully goes a long way to solving the 7+ perception problems listed above which confront a war President. In essence, Fallujah represents the inflection point in which the administration abandoned its Wilsonian goal of granting Iraq a Jeffersonian democracy through and extended occupation with attendant unavoidable casualties in favor of a more Machiavellian reality which deals with the Mullahs and local strongmen in a way reminiscent of the British occupation of India. I have previously posted along these lines many times.
It seems to me there are two models of waging war on the ground against terrorists. The first is Afghanistan and the second is Iraq. In Afghanistan, America demonstrated the capacity and the will to take out a government which had supported terrorists but undertook relatively little in building a shining new western democracy. Our cost in blood and treasure has been minimal. The second model, Iraq, saw the attempt to build a democratic paradigm at much greater cost.
Rather than being applauded for our selfless trouble, the distorted Arab mind sees our efforts and losses to be indicia of defeat in a quagmire. Indeed, much of the world, including western Europe and the domestic Democrat party see the efforts as, at best, misguided. These efforts in these two countries should not be judged sui generis but in the context of the world war against Muslim fanaticism and terror. I believe that Assad while Machiavellian is not foolish and has considered and rejected the possibility that he could end up in solitary confinement like Saddam if he flirts too closely with the terrorists. He probably fears his own fundamentalists more than the possibility that America will take him out. This is not the fear of Uncle Sam that we want to be animating the actions of these Arab dictators.
I listened intently to Charles Krauthammer s acceptance speech at his award from the Heritage Foundation in which he argued cogently that the Iraq model of building a democracy was not a bridge too far. I hope feverently that he is correct but I suspect that some dictators like Assad are betting that he is not. Assad has, in effect, concluded that George Bush has shot his bolt and cannot possibly start another war. He sees a fifty fifty chance that Bush will lose this election and Kerry will revert to the feckless appeasement of the Clinton administration.
I think it is time we reconsidered whether we can virtually alone take on the task of nation building throughout the Arab world and in Iran with the inevitable attendant guerrilla conflicts following a relatively cheap and easy regime change. Bush should modify his doctrine to confine it to regime change without the moral obligation to pay and bleed and die for a new democratic nation. If in the aftermath of regime change and new odious dictator assumes power, so be it, unless he supports terror in which case he will know that he will go the way of his predecessor.
I pray that the successes which this article cites are real and enduring. I pray equally that they are seen to be such. I earnestly hope that the turn in Fallujah on the ground and as a figure of the administration's change of policy has not come too late.
However, as the commander on the ground decided, as noted in the article, that would have caused too much destruction. The cost/benefit analysis is his call.
In regards to perception, we now, unlike 59 years ago, unfortunately have an enemy that will ensure that we always lose that battle:
Post 15 of FR Thread "Death Toll: U.S. Iraq Casualties Setting Records (gag alert)"