Books reviews

I just finished reading/listening to the books above and they made an interesting trilogy.  Legacy of Ashes was a phenomenal book which traced the history of the CIA from its origins until 2007.  I found it particularly interesting how, from its very inception, the agency was characterized as one that saw any sort of control (from the President, congress, or the constitution) as interference.  The inability of the agency to voluntarily stay within the limits of its charter raises serious questions about the wisdom of having a secret agency whose central function requires deceit and subversion in an open democracy.

I have to admit, I’ve bought into the myth of the CIA as much as everyone else so it was a bit of a disappointment to hear the numerous instances where intelligence and analytical work was shoddy or took a back seat to political considerations or cowboys who decided they knew what was in the best interests of the U.S. and did their own thing.  It was that covert action, usually done with no consideration of possible consequences that has to make one wonder if we wouldn’t be better off without such an agency.

A good (semi) counter point would be Robert Baer’s See No Evil which is a brilliant description of the CIA from a covert operators point of view.  After reading his book you do kind of think that perhaps Baer (and those few like him) really does know what’s best for the country and should be allowed to just ‘get on with it’.  I’ll have to spend some time trying to reconcile those two accounts.  Both books do seem to agree, however, on the idea that the CIA is hobbled by a new wave of inexperienced analysts, agents as well as a glut of bureaucrats.

State of Denial doesn’t really tell you anything you don’t already know providing you haven’t been in a coma during the past five years.  Still, it just lets you know that the gross incompetence is a well documented fact and not just a strong suspicion.

Armed Madhouse is great because its one of those books that gives you an alternative narrative to what’s going on today in America’s political landscape.  I’m not entirely convinced that Palast is providing the best explaination for what’s been going on in America since 2001 (when a book tries to question so many closely held assumptions like this one does, it would be a big help to provide links to supporting evidence) but it does get you to think.  I found his defense of Hugo Chavez particularly interesting.

Welcome to the 51st state - Iraq edition

Remember way back at the beginning of the war in Iraq? People like Donald Rumsfeld were saying that the probability of the U.S. wanting permanent bases in Iraq were “so low that it does not surprise me that it’s never been discussed in my presence — to my knowledge.” (Heck of a qualifier there, Brownie)

There’s an interesting piece in Salon about the issue here which not only highlights other administration weenies (like the wonderfully incompetent Karen Hughes) stating their shock, SHOCK that anyone could even think we’d want permanent bases in Iraq. It also raises some interesting questions as to why the media (at least here in the U.S.) hardly bothered to raise the question at all in the first few years of the war. I’m not sure if that was a reflection of the shoddy journalism that greased the wheels to get us into Iraq (sorry Charlie) or just a realization that asking the administration about permanent bases would just be a waste of time since it would be unlikely that they’d actually tell the truth.

So, it should come as no surprise that there are now reports (well, one report) that the U.S. is seeking permanent bases in Iraq (up to 58!) as part of a status of forces agreement. According to CNN this morning, the pentagon is saying such an agreement might be finalized by next month. If such an agreement comes into being, that’ll be another nail in the argument for withdrawing from Iraq, regardless of who’s elected in November. “What? Withdraw? But we just got these nifty new bases. We just built a Pizza Hut! If we leave now, the terrorists win. Perhaps we can revisit the issue in 100 years or so.”

By the way, McCain’s argument makes no sense. He says he wants to stay in Iraq so long as Americans aren’t getting “injured, or harmed or wounded or killed” but the reason for being there is because it’s a volatile part of the world where Al-Qaeda is active. So, how exactly would we defeat this huge Al-Qaeda threat without getting any Americans harmed? An eternal pillow fight war?

Which leads to the beauty of the Republican argument about staying in Iraq. We can’t leave when there’s fighting going on because that would be ‘cutting and running’ and we can’t leave when there’s no fighting going on because it might break out any time. So, under what conditions exactly could U.S. troops be brought back?

The Surge part 2

From the people over at the Defense and the National Interest blog (which I just added to the blogroll), here is a great interview put on Canadian TV (in early March, I believe).  Perhaps I like it because it validates my existing beliefs about the war in Iraq and the surge more specifically.  Unfortunately, I don’t know if there’s anything in the interview that can be put on a bumper sticker or in a 10 second soundbite.

All hail the surge!

While Rolling Stone may not be known for the most unbiased reporting around, but their article on the surge underscores some significant issues surrounding the surge that has become everyone’s darling lately. Proponents have been saying the reduction in violence over the past 8 months is a clear sign that we are now decisively winning the war in Iraq. Unfortunately, that’s based on a definition of victory that has been so watered down over the past four years, that there’s practically dancing in the streets over the fact that only one soldier is dying every day over there and political progress remains stagnate.

The other problem is that no one seems to try to figure out why there’s been a reduction of violence over the past 8 months. Could this have something to do with it?

“The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money,” says a young Army intelligence officer.

“We are essentially supporting a quasi-feudal devolution of authority to armed enclaves, which exist at the expense of central government authority,” says Chas Freeman, who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. “Those we are arming and training are arming and training themselves not to facilitate our objectives but to pursue their own objectives vis-a-vis other Iraqis. It means that the sectarian and ethnic conflicts that are now suppressed are likely to burst out with even greater ferocity in the future.”

It’s not easy to say (I’m generally an interventionist) but I’ve felt for awhile that Iraq is going to disintegrate into civil war and a lot of blood will be shed. Our options and ability to influence events are very limited. In my opinion, we can choose whether that civil will happen sooner or later. The longer we delay it (and provide the future combatants with money and weapons) the bigger the body county will be.

Why has violence gone down? Perhaps it’s because the insurgents think they’ve already won. They know that we won’t stay there forever. If the Americans want to hand out cash for ‘being good’ why not take it and prepare for the big fight that’s coming?

Osama himself makes no secret of his hatred for the Shiite government and its security forces. As we walk by a checkpoint manned by the Iraqi National Police, which is comprised almost entirely of Shiites, Osama looks at the uniformed officers in disgust. “I want to kill them,” he tells me, “but the Americans make us work together.”

If anyone was really serious about stabilizing Iraq, we’d see an attempt to give potential insurgents a stake in the existing system. Unemployment in Iraq is hovering around 60%. While handing out weapons and paying thousands of young, pissed off men to be militia men is quick it’s not the best idea for a jobs program. We’re just prepping guys for the next fight.

Instead, the money should go to a massive, civilian jobs program along the lines of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Have them build roads, parks, clear debris, etc. Quite honestly, it doesn’t matter if you have one group of guys stack rocks in one place and another group of guys to move the stack somewhere else. Get those guys working (ideally physically exhausting work) and paid by the central government (so that they’ll understand that if the government goes so do the checks). The key (and this is the tough part) is that the program needs to be so big that the corruption and cronyism that is everywhere in Iraq is just swamped. There needs to be so many jobs available that any eligible worker can get one without a bribe or having to be from the right tribe or sect.

Maj. Pat Garrett, who works with the 2-2 Stryker Cavalry Regiment, is already having trouble figuring out what to do with all the new militiamen in his district. There are too few openings in the Iraqi security forces to absorb them all, even if the Shiite-dominated government agreed to integrate them. Garrett is placing his hopes on vocational-training centers that offer instruction in auto repair, carpentry, blacksmithing and English. “At the end of the day, they want a legitimate living,”

So, why are we giving them guns?

Since the Americans often require that each mahala, or neighborhood, have two ISV bosses, Osama has given half of his 300 men to Abu Salih, a man with dark reddish skin, a sharp nose and small piercing eyes. “We know Abu Salih is former Al Qaeda of Iraq,” a U.S. Army officer from the area tells me. In fact, when I meet with him, Abu Salih freely admits that some of his men belonged to Al Qaeda. They joined the American-sponsored militias, he says, so they could have an identity card as protection should they get arrested.

Oh yeah, I just know this is going to turn out well.

Fighting Identity

I just finished reading an article by Michael Vlahos in the current issue of Military Review for the third time. It’s a great piece of work, do yourself a favor and read it.  I began highlighting passages so that I could include them in this post but there he says so many things so well you’re better off just reading the article.

He has two main themes that I find particularly interesting:

1)  We see war as “rituals of American religious nationalism”.  As a result, challenges to our national identity can lead to only one response, a “spiritual need to prove [our] battle-worthiness and warrior ethos”.  Such a response precludes nuanced responses and drives us to “seek affirmation that we have what it takes to win.  Hence, battle serves the same deep needs as any church liturgy.”

Further, the way we understand war manifests itself in what Vlahos calls ‘rule-sets’ which define how we conduct war and define success.  One reason we’ve been so successful in war generally is that most of our enemies were what he calls ‘kin-enemies’, those who share essentially the same rule sets about conduct and evaluation of conflict.  Therefore, according to Vlahos, “with Confederates and Germans and Japanese and Russians, victory was also very much their gift to us.”

2)  We’re undergoing a time of significant change in which non-state actors are able to affect huge changes upon the existing world system.   He identifies two other times in history which, he says, are similar:  the collapse of antiquity (from the 5th to the 7th centuries) and the end of the Middle Ages during the 13th and 14th centuries. One of the ramifications of being on one of these fault lines of epochs is that we will find it increasingly difficult to maintain the old order and, in fact, the very way we see the world contributes to our difficulties and defeats.

I’m a bit hesitant about proclamations that we’re living in a radically new age and on the precipice of major changes that will fill the history books for centuries but he does make an interesting case.

By combining those two themes Vlahos writes that our enemies (and potential future enemies) will have no intention of fighting according to our rule sets and instead will use our inability to deviate from our established rule sets to further their cause.

We’ll take the good war…

I saw this article yesterday and let out a big “WTF?!”

The Marine Corps is pressing to remove its forces from Iraq and to send marines instead to Afghanistan, to take over the leading role in combat there, according to senior military and Pentagon officials.The idea by the Marine Corps commandant would effectively leave the Iraq war in the hands of the Army while giving the Marines a prominent new role in Afghanistan, under overall NATO command.

Supposedly, there are all sorts of logistical reasons why this might be a good idea but I’m a little suspicious.  I can’t help feeling the Marines might be thinking “This Iraq thing sucks…let’s go to the good war and leave the Army holding the bag for this Iraq mess.”

…its supporters, including some in the Army, argue that a realignment could allow the Army and Marines each to operate more efficiently in sustaining troop levels for two wars that have put a strain on their forces.

If we’re stretched that thin then we’ve got even bigger problems (which I think we do) and need to consider even bolder options (withdrawal, draft…we’re already lowering standards).

Gates is saying it’s all preliminary talk and hopefully squashed it before it snowballs.

Those Marines are pretty crafty…better keep an eye on them.

You want the bad news or the bad news?

I had the opportunity to see Michael Scheuer speak last week and he was quite interesting. His talk focused on the Islamist threat as well as the difficulties our intelligence community (IC) has in getting it’s collective act together and cooperating. Regarding the latter, he said that any list of IC shortfalls would have to include the following (none of these are direct quotes but they’re pretty close. My extrapolation will be in italics):

1. Pride of bureaucratic place and prerogatives. Turf battles.
2. Resistance to changing tactics and procedures (we still like to operate like our enemy is a Soviet like state). In fact, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center continued to teach Soviet tactics and doctrine to new intelligence analysts years after the USSR collapsed and ceased to be a significant threat to NATO. I think this was essentially because it was easier to keep training about a threat that no longer existed than do the heavy lifting of identifying new threats, understanding them and developing a new doctrine to deal with them.
3. Agencies have different aims, charters and goals, many of which are not compatible. The FBI is all about criminal prosecutions and the CIA is about intelligence gathering. Those things don’t mix too well.
4. Complex procedures for classifying and declassifying information. Everyone classifies way too much stuff, doesn’t unclassify it, and refuses to share it. Even more frustrating is that (until relatively recently at least) security clearances weren’t always transferable. For example, the Department of Homeland Security might not recognize a clearance granted by the military. I don’t know why this is/was but I’ve heard some horror stories. I suspect this might have more to do with issues surround #1 above than actual department policy.
   

Other than that he repeated themes that he wrote about in his most recent book. The Islamists don’t hate us because we let women drive to the mall, have Howard Stern on the radio or vote for our local dog catcher. Rather it’s because of our policies, particularly in the middle east (support of Israel and ‘apostate’ Muslim regimes, military presence in the holy land, support for other nations’ battles with Muslims, etc.)

I got to ask him a couple of questions. The first was in response to a statement he made that he thought that Al-Qaeda was just as powerful today as it was on September 11. I asked if that was the case, why hadn’t we seen a significant attack from them since 2001. He replied that he felt there were two reasons:

1. It’s difficult to surpass the attack of 9/11 and anything less will be seen as a weakness
2. There’s no need since things are going so well with Al-Qaeda now. Their enemy (us) are losing two wars, spending gobs of money at home and abroad to counter Al-Qaeda, descending into political factionalism and strife, and eroding civil liberties. A massive attack now would only risk reuniting the American population.

Then at one point in his presentation he said that Al-Qaeda would view a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq as a victory similar to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.  He also said that Al-Qaeda views continued involvement by the U.S. in Iraq as a victory since it proves their claim that the U.S. is intent on invading and occupying Muslim countries in order to take their oil and establish secular states.  I asked him that if, in fact, we are ‘damned if we do and damned if we don’t’ that how to we achieve any sort of non-disastrous resolution to Iraq.  He first recommended that we try to change the definition of ‘victory’ with the dictionary people but then, in a more serious note, said that the best move would be to withdrawal immediately.

Scheuer thinks that when challenged we should quickly and massively respond without too much concern for causing civilian casualties.  I have to admit, I can’t agree with him here but I can see the logic behind the argument.  Since he didn’t see us as willing to commit to that level of violence in Iraq he argued that we just cut our losses and let the inevitable civil war take place now.  While I don’t think he explicitly stated it, I think the hope may be that the battle between Sunnis and Shia over the corpse of Iraq might prove a magnet for all the jihadists for some time, allowing the U.S. to figure out how to best retake the initiative.

He was great speaker and offered a lot of views not easily pigeonholed.

Stories from Sweden…Baghdad edition

I’ve been back from Sweden for a little over a month now and realized that I hadn’t yet written about some of the more noteworthy events I witnessed while I was there. So…here’s the first in a (hopefully) multi-part series about those events that I’ll be writing over the next couple of days.

Ready? Let’s go!

I was walking through Stockholm with my wife, brother in law and his wife (I don’t know if I can officially call her my sister in law but I’m not sure what term I could use to describe her. It’s a bit cumbersome to always have to say ‘My brother in law’s wife’ but ’sister in law’ might mislead people into thinking I have a sibling.) for a day of sightseeing when we hear car horns blaring and shouting down the road. I turn to look and see a bunch of cars driving towards me, men hanging out of the windows, yelling and screaming and holding up Iraqi flags…

My first impression?

OH CRAP!

What happened? Did something (or someone) get bombed? Did someone die? I felt the old PTSD kicking in and was missing my M-16.

We decided to take advantage of a nearby Irish bar and figure out what was going on over a beer. Fortunately, the Irish bar had some TVs on and it quickly became clear what was going on. Iraq had beat Saudi Arabia in the Asia Cup. Now, I’ve never even heard of the Asia Cup but that doesn’t mean too much. I’m a bit of a sports dolt. I don’t even know if it’s baseball or football season (I usually figure it out when I hear people talking about Superbowl parties).

Because Sweden has such a huge Iraqi population the event became big news and Iraqis congregated in the thousands in Stockholm.

In the end, everything returned to normal the next day. I have to admit that even after finding out what all the hub-bub was about I was a bit nervous. It’s become traditional in parts of Arabic society after all to pull out the AK-47s and shoot off a couple of rounds when there’s good news at hand.

It was such a joyous occasion in Baghdad that day that stray rounds killed four and wounded 17! Can’t people just give each other a ‘high five‘ (although these people take the practice a bit too far)?

No…the NEXT 4-6 months will decide it…

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno is the latest in a long string of knuckleheads to buy into the use of Friedman units to tell us that the ‘next 4 months are critical’. Purists will note that a Friedman unit is, technically, six months but I think Odierno is well aware of how that unit of measure hasn’t panned out and doesn’t want his comments at the end of a long string of predictions all saying ‘the next 6 months’ showing up on the Daily Show or YouTube.

So, why drag out the fiasco that is the Iraq war?

1. We can (well, at least until April when we won’t be able to sustain the ’surge’ without extending tours yet again).
2. There’s progress! (Well, not really. See below)

All that nonsense you hear about ‘grassroots change in Al Anbar is a lie. Local Sunnis have started to partner with us not because they’ve suddenly seen the virtue of liberal democracy and can’t wait to “let freedom reign!”. Rather, it’s the old arab axiom “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. The Sunnis in Al Anbar have (at least) three enemies:

1. The Shia who want to take revenge for the Saddam years, don’t want to share oil revenue and will exclude the Sunni from any real political power.
2. Al qaeda who made the fundamental error of any insurgent group - ‘Don’t piss off your sympathizers.’ Mao was right:

“Many people think it impossible for guerrillas to exist for long in the enemy’s rear. Such a belief reveals lack of comprehension of the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water the latter to the fish who inhabit it. How may it be said that these two cannot exist together? It is only undisciplined troops who make the people their enemies and who, like the fish out of its native element cannot live.”

3.  The U.S. - Let’s face it, we’re the least of the Sunnis enemies now.  We aren’t going to be there forever, we’ve got our hands so full that if someone is even mildly cooperative we’ll throw all sorts of money, weapons and training their way

The Sunnis aren’t working to support the central government.  They’ve got their eyes on a prize further out on the horizon.  The U.S. will eventually leave Iraq and the Sunnis are trying to position themselves best for when that day comes.  If working with the Americans and killing a few foreign fighters now translates into a steady flow of money, weapons, training, etc. to better prepare them for the next battle so be it.

All we’re doing in Iraq now is postponing the inevitable bloodbath and ensuring that it will be even more violent and destructive.

“Heck of a job, Bushie!”

Why the troops hate America and don’t support the troops…

I’ve always wondered why so many in the army supported the war in Iraq (and, more generally, the Republican party) since the invasion in 2003.  From the start it seemed to be a huge waste of our military capability and a distraction from our real threats.

But, finally, the tide seems to be turning.  Check out this op-ed piece from the NY Times.  A number of soldiers finishing up their deployment state the numerous ways that our Iraq strategy is failing at the ‘boots on the ground’ view.

And this article by General Batiste describes the failure from a higher vantage point.

I thought it was particularly interesting that Batiste’s article was rejected by the WSJ and Washington Times.  Unfortunately, that tends to be the Republican response to criticism coming from ’sacred cow’ sources (after all, what Republican politician wants to get up in front of cameras and call members of the 82nd Airborne a bunch of ‘cut and runners’ or accuse a general of being a terrorist sympathizer).  If you ignore them, hopefully they’ll go away and not be included in the narrative about this war.

I feel like WWII comparisons are over done but I keep getting reminded of Hitler’s last days in his bunker when he was reported to have looked at his situation map and moved little flags around depicting divisions and corps, planning his massive counter attack.  Never mind those units were reduced to tiny fractions of their normal size, no one would dare tell the Fuhrer that.  I wonder if the war supporters are holed up in their own ‘mental bunker’ convinced that their ‘vengeance weapons‘ are just around the corner and will suddenly make everything ok.

(thanks to Armchair Generalist for the Batiste link!)