If more members of Congress or the business and media elite had had children in uniform, the United States would probably not have gone to war in Iraq


Often quoted as part of the left wing class warfare argument, but has no basis in history. The Civil War, World War I and World War II had wide spread participation by Americas wealthiest families. Few were drafted, most joined to be officers because there was political and cultural pressure to serve the nation. Something that Fallows decried. Also there is no reason to believe we would be more cautious with a draft army. Look how progressives like LBJ through American lives away to make his anti communist bonna fides...Does anyone think Bill Clinton would not gladly send a thousand marines to their deaths if it helped him in the polls?

 

The Tragedy of James Fallows



  James Fallows has written an important article for The Atlantic, "The Tragedy of the American Military" , one whose hosannas are currently lighting up the web.  There is in this piece, much to like, and much to praise.  I utterly agree with Mr. Fallows about the degree to which the society and its military have become estranged, and the implications this distance has had on policy.  We have created a ducal military made up of other people's children, and we applaud it unquestioningly out of a sense of both appreciation and guilt.  Recent elections that brought more and more vets into the Congress have modestly addressed the lack of military experience in that branch, but it remains a body hamstrung by its own cowardly inability to directly question the military and assumptions made about it.

There is however, in Fallows' arguments the whiff--no, the stench--of irony and hypocrisy.  His arguments are not obviated, but he is an imperfect messenger for them.  Throughout this piece, we see a yearning from its author for days gone by, when the military looked more like the populace it served and when society's entertainments lampooned its military.  This gauzy time seems to have --for Fallows--prevented acquisition program nightmares and poor decisions to employ the military (both incorrect).  But to the extent that a closer relationship between the military and its parent society existed, Fallows completely misses the centrality that the draft played in supporting such a link.  I do not write today in favor of re-instituting the draft, only to raise the point that wistful yearnings for days long gone by need to analyze more closely the conditions that brought them about.  One cannot credibly assess this past time of civil/military relations without also acknowledging the draft's impact upon it.  Fallows does not do this, and it seems a giant error of omission.

But it is not an omission, it was an act of commission.  To have spoken of the impact, and to have ascribed importance--let alone centrality--to the draft in sustaining closer civil/military relations would repudiate the actions of the young James Fallows, who in 1969--with the aid and comfort of fellow students at Harvard-- including those studying to be doctors--willfully evaded the ongoing draft.  Fallows acknowledges the act in his Atlantic piece, which I applaud him for.   In fact, the link in the last sentence was provided by him in his Atlantic article. Fallows writes of the time:

"In the atmosphere of that time, each possible choice came equipped with barbs. To answer the call was unthinkable, not only because, in my heart, I was desperately afraid of being killed, but also because, among my friends, it was axiomatic that one should not be “complicit” in the immoral war effort. Draft resistance, the course chosen by a few noble heroes of the movement, meant going to prison or leaving the country. With much the same intensity with which I wanted to stay alive, I did not want those things either. What I wanted was to go to graduate school, to get married, and to enjoy those bright prospects I had been taught that life owed me."

And add the fact that war is ultimately a question of will. If the enemy keeps fighting longer than us, despite taking horrendous losses and defeats, they will win.

Which type of war costs more money?

Fast and brutal crushing of all who oppose us?

Or a long, drawn out, nation building effort?

It's all about the money, these kinds of war are a way for those in positions of power and influence to embezzle huge amounts of public money.

 Yup, and I'm getting the feeling that this was at least partially a deliberate result of the education and entertainment industries. We teach our children to be beta males and then fill their heads with Prozac, Girls and Danicng with the stars

 

Not any different with the military than with society in general.

 


















 

Much of the money wasted in IRQ and AFG was due to the folly of promoting development in unsecured areas.  Especially in IRQ, US Military commanders were charged with doing development work at the same time they were trying to hold their battle spaces.  Doesn't work.  The best way to utilize the military is to give them the latitude to secure the battle space so the build phase can proceed unhindered.  But that process might be ugly and the political leadership probably doesn't have the stomach for it, especially when video cameras are ubiquitous.

Plus the Universal Inclusion/Virtue of Diversity/Moral Relativism worldview our culture has feasted itself upon over the past 50 years is completely contradictory to successful military campaigns.

Forth estate as fifth column.



 

That is the actual problem, since you are not willing to ID the problem that we need to defeat a culture and its world view because multiculturalism says all cultures are equal the western powers are doomed to failure.  Because the Islamist have no doubt in their belief their culture is superior

The enemy is :

1.  Patient

2.  More willing to die than we are.

Thus, they will win unless America has a change of heart and elects political leaders who advocate for victory.

Of course, as soon as we do, the dimocRats will use that decision to leverage their message and win back power like they did in Iraq.  

We're not likely to win this one, and if we do, it will only happen because some sort of catastrophic event galvanizes the nation at the cost of more wasted lives.

Good discussion bump.

I'm 99% sure Sun Tzu wrote that because leadership back then was prone to making the same fuckups that it is today.

Crush who? The good majority of Afghans weren't Taliban in 2001, they might be stuck living in Taliban controlled areas but most didn't affiliate with them. Should they be crushed? How about Northern Alliance, should they get crushed?

 






 

Keep the discussion going bump.

So COIN works if you are willing to have troops deployed indefinitely. What a victory. Those hearts and minds must have been gloriously won, for there to be such an effective change in direction so quickly right?

No all we did was intervene and delay the inevitable civil war that Iraq wants with the surge.

Why?

What project?

The Commander in Chief said the mission was to get WMD as part of some UN thingy.  There were no WMDs.  He said Iraq and Saddam had nothing to do with 911 so what is the 50 year project?

Some people are very confused about the reasons for invading Iraq.  They invented a reason connecting it to 911 when even the Commander in Chief that initiated the invasion denied that was the reason.

That is the poor leadership mentioned in the article.

We elect idiots to government and then we bitch about the consequences of idiotic government.

Speaking of inventing things...

It's amazing how some people re-write history.

COIN works if you have a long-term strategy and a willingness to execute it over the long haul. Iraq should have been one of two things--Either a "Go fuck shit up so badly that the locals cut the throat of the next family member that suggests attacking us", or a multi-generational program of stability and support like we did in Germany and Korea. I don't think that success is possible unless you pick one or the other strategy, and then stick with it.

When we went into Iraq in 2003, every single one of the senior leaders I worked with on a brigade staff was emphatically clear that we were starting a project akin to the post-WWII era in Germany. We knew it was going to take fifty years or more of stability operations supporting a democratic Iraqi government before we really changed anything in that country, and that given the surrounding morass of the Middle East, that this might well be the only way to effect change without killing a whole lot of people. Why the hell the politicians back in the states weren't laying that out, I'll never know. They should have been completely upfront with the public about things, but they weren't.

And, then we elected the current crop of dumbasses who pissed away every sacrifice made by our troops over the preceding half-decade, and made things exponentially worse. Iran had it's "Green Revolution", and instead of us supporting it and helping the students overthrow the government of the mullahs, our President and State Department chose to support the regime in speech and deed. The predicted "Arab Spring" that Bush had worked towards happened, and then was pissed away in a similar fashion, the President choosing to ally himself with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

The military did not fail in Iraq or Afghanistan. We did precisely as we were instructed to. The people who failed were the leadership class in this country, the ones who sniped at George Bush from the beginning, and who proceeded to destroy everything good that we managed to accomplish.

I'm not saying that Bush made the right choice, strategy-wise, but I do have to commend his humanity. He didn't want his name on the epitaphs for millions of third-world victims of an oil crisis beyond anything we can imagine. This is why he chose the long-term strategy of indirect action to influence Arab and Islamic culture. It's truly unfortunate that, once having committed us to that course of action, his successors chose not to continue down that path.

Personally, if it had been me, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan would likely both still be smoking craters. I'd have identified the perpetrators of 9/11, called in the ambassadors from those two countries, laid out a set of ultimatums and reparations demands, and then I'd have asked Congress for a declaration of war against both of them. Collateral damage would have been in the millions for deaths, but the point would have been made that making war by proxy through non-state third-party actors would be dealt with as though your country made the attack itself. Hell, the resulting dislocation might well have killed billions, in the long run--Once the agricultural market descended into chaos in the absence of cheap Saudi oil feedstock for fertilizers and fuel, it might have taken decades to come back.

I am not a "decent human being", however. You attack me, and I will feel no qualms about doing whatever it takes to make sure you won't ever even consider that as a course of action. George Bush is an exemplary man of decency, and likely did not want to have his name associated with the possible death toll such a course of action would have made almost inevitable.

You realize that you're part of the reason we have idiots in government?

Let's say that Bush had been up front about what he was doing, and why: What would your response have been? How would that have been framed by the media? I kind of blame Bush for not making his plans clear, but when I think about it, now? I don't think he'd have been able to even begin to do that, with the forces he was working against.

After watching the BS thrown up by the left's mouthpieces in the media, and how credulous the average citizen was when that crap was put out, I completely understand why Bush didn't even bother to engage through the media. It was a futile, lost cause from the start--And, people like you are the reason.

Did you actually ever look at the cease-fire documents and sanctions that the UN applied, which clearly defined what constituted a WMD, and what Saddam was supposed to do? Point the first--The definition of WMD included delivery systems like the missiles the Iraqis launched at the opening of the war, and with which they hit targets in Kuwait. Right there, you had prima facie evidence that the "lies" you refer to weren't lies, at all--And, let's not even get into the literal thousands of other things Saddam didn't comply with. He never allowed inspections in hundreds of locations, actively engaged in a program to prevent the UN inspectors from getting into locations he was required to open for inspection, and generally blew off the requirements he'd agreed to in the cease-fire documents. How about the thousands of Kuwati detainees that were never accounted for, until we found the warehouse filled with their bodies--Men, women, and children?

You weren't lied to, you cretin--You just didn't pay attention to the reality of things, and allowed the media to hoodwink your stupid ass. All this crap was reported, right alongside the bullshit stories about how "No WMD were found..". All you had to do was actually read beyond the opening paragraphs, and compare the information in the body of the text with the bullshit in the headlines, and you'd have known you were being lied to--But, by the media. You didn't bother to do that, though, did you? So, now you whine like a child, saying that the nasty man promised you an ice-cream cone, while forgetting that little caveat of "...if you behave..." which was attached. All you remember is "Ice cream".

Iraq was invaded to establish a base from which to destabilize the region, in a good way. And, until the cretinous American media and electorate chose to throw that away by electing the current set of left-wing scumbags, we were on our way to doing that.

As is, we're probably going to be faced with a situation where the only way to deal with the coming Islamic Caliphate is through use of WMD, and the death of millions. Right now, the Saudis are building a Maginot Line across their Northern border, because the men running ISIS are going to do what their ilk do--Go for where the money is. When that happens, and Saudi Arabia is a part of the Caliphate? Look forward to interesting times.

And, do remember that Bush tried doing this the easy, humane way. Just like he tried heading off the mortgage crisis, and was ignored by all and sundry, back around 2002. Remember that, when the butcher's bill comes due, sometime in the next generation. I won't even predict what it's going to look like, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be a lot uglier than it ever needed to be, had we kept on the course laid out by the Bush administration. Without the idiots we put in office in 2008, Iran might be something other than a soon-to-be nuclear Islamic state, ISIS wouldn't exist, and we'd still have enough troops on the ground to stabilize Iraq while they got their shit together. Not to mention, hundreds of thousands of people would likely not be dead in a futile war in Syria, and all those decent people like the Yazidis wouldn't have their women in slave markets across the coming Caliphate, either.

I really fear we lost our last best chance to get through this coming fire when we chose to elect the idiots we put into office in 2008. They've screwed up everything they put their hands on, and the people who tore down George Bush in the media, and helped elect these clowns are the ones who are responsible. Although, I have to put equal responsibility on the credulous cretins that fell for the bullshit they were spinning. Anyone who paid more than casual attention to the news reports should have been able to look at the contradictions in them, and figured out that there was something seriously wrong with the majority of the interpretations that the media put on everything, but nobody bothers to do more than read maybe the headlines and perhaps the lead paragraphs. Or, worse yet, they don't read the news at all. So, reap as ye have sewn, my friends. Your children certainly will.

Tie a warriors hands, and you turn them into a defender, not a conqueror.

I think we have to be realistic about the nature of the Body Politic. Democratic governments don't seem to handle protracted conflict very well; we can lament this all we wish, but it is what it is and we're going to have to make allowances for it in the future if we hope to avoid similar outcomes.

The most ironic part of it to me, is the fact that invading Iraq for humanitarian reasons was initially a left wing idea, first advanced in 1989 by Kanan Makiya in Republic of Fear. It also became something of a fashionable opinion in the European left for a chunk of the 90's.

Many people are calling for a reconnection of war arms with the people as mass - a way to force the electorate to associate with the policies they're allegedly responsible for. The occasional leftist will even call for a draft - emptiness to permit moral posturing they'd never volunteer for, but the obverse is telling.

You don't execute policies by forcing the people in; you execute policies by locking out multi-faction objections. It's the essence of the democratic virus. That's why drones work - they have their native benefits, but the special sauce is limiting electorate exposure to policy, in execution, and in cost.

The endgame is extending the binary government of hired-on, dedicated technicians versus vote-seekers as far as possible. Doing that demands destruction of attribution.

The paleocons will swallow that about as willingly as a dick, but it's inevitable, and it's not just a political movement, it's multidisciplinary. Neoliberalism needs public laws and registries, for good results but its drives are also incompatible with public responsibility.

Germany, Italy, and Japan had organized, uniformed enemies.

If you can go over to Afghanistan and point out who is Taliban and who isn't, be my guest.

Occupation doesn't need to last forever, just long enough to stabilize things. In 2009, they had mostly stopped killing each other, SIGACTs were down across Iraq, AQI and ISIS were on the ropes (before SOFA kicked in and we emptied Camp Bucca). Shia were playing nice, Mahdi army wasn't really active.Baghdad wasn't being bombed often. At that point the military has set the conditions for success. All we had to do would have been pressure Maliki to abide by the 2010 Elections and allow some Sunnis to have some political power and it would have probably worked out well.

 








 

Read up on COIN. It definitely needs more than 4-5 years to succeed, which is what we effectively gave it in Iraq.   The Iraq COIN campaign was actually very successful for the time we gave it.

Cited not sighted.

Could you show me the uniform of a resident of Hiroshima or Nagasaki please.

War is supposed to be so horrible that a population would do what it takes to ensure that it never is visited with it.

Those allowing evil acts to be carried out from within their borders and in the name of their bullshit religion are just as responsible as those perpetrating the acts as without the reluctance, apathy, or indeed, the support of those perpetrating the acts, those doing them would cease to have a safe place to hide, train, recruit etc...

Read up on it...LOL.

I've read quite a bit. Enough to know that if there are any other options, choose the other one.

I'm not criticizing what we did. I just disagree that it was working, or that another 5-10 years of commitment would have changed anything. 50-60 years probably would work. There are good reasons for not wanting to do that. As we've seen, there are good reasons we should have. Quite the conundrum.

Not every German was a member of the NSDAP, but they had the shit bombed out of them, too.  Not every Italian was a fascist, etc.  You can't just land in country, start handing out granola bars and think everyone is now your friend and you've won.

You don't go to war if you don't have the politcal will to identify the enemy, including those giving the enemy material, moral and other support, and deal with them swiftly and decisively.  We lack the political will to say there are a lot of people that support the Taliban (or your favorite terrorist organization) in both spirit and materially.  You need to have the will to say we will destroy you if we think you support the enemy.  Talking to them and trying to convince them they are wrong is not fruitful.  It prolongs the fight and endangers friendly forces due to the exposure of a prolonged mission.  The "war on terror" leaves a lot of objectives hanging.  This is the result of craptastic political leadership.

Yes, that was my point. Also, I find it unfortunate that no matter how much wise men may write down the lessons are never absorbed.



 

You're trying to compare nation state actors like Nazi Germany to non-state decentralized insurgent networks like All Qaeda. Aplles and fucking baseballs. I know you think going all Curtis Lemay would be awesome but where are the bombs landing?

 
















 

Well then this war was doomed to fail before it began. A minimum of a 5 decade commitment was definitely not how it was sold to the public. And most would have never supported military action with that as a condition. Those professional soldiers should have been sounding the alarm loud and clear that victory would be unobtainable without such a long term commitment when the use of military action was being promoted under the false representation that the action would be quick and decisive.

How, pray tell, was the commitment in Germany or Japan "sold to the public"?

You make war, you have to understand the implications. We weren't going to be fighting in Iraq for fifty years, but we were going to have troops there for a long time--If we wanted our sacrifices to actually mean anything. Instead, it's pretty damn likely that your kids are going to be faced with the option of either acquiescing to Islamic domination, or killing off a whole lot of people.

Anybody who thought that what we were doing in Iraq was going to be a quick "in-and-out" deal was delusional. That it was unspoken, and not clearly laid out? I blame the Bush administration for it, along with the media. But, on the Bush side, it's not like he could exactly spell out the intentions he had, and still make it work. You try to reform a culture like the dysfunctional Arab/Islamic one from the outside, you can't exactly go advertising what you're doing, because that will stop it from happening. Look what did happen, though--The whole Arab Spring thing was an almost direct result of the things we did in Iraq, and had we had the right people running things, we might have been able to use the opportunity that those events represented into something positive. The almost-Green Revolution in Iran? What happened in North Africa? That might have had a positive outcome. Hell, if we'd had someone smart in the State Department, they'd have realized that allowing the arsenals of Libya to be looted was a horrible idea. Troops on the ground would have stopped that.

What we've got, to show for all this? Pretty much the worst-case scenario. Wait and see what happens in Saudi Arabia. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the people running ISIS don't make a grab for at least the Holy Cities, and if they manage to take them? Yeah... The story of the 21st Century isn't going to be about anything other than cleaning up that mess. There was never a good set of options, with any of this--But, what we've done since 2008 pissed away everything we gained, and set up what's pretty much the worst case scenario for the next fifty years. By the time this is all over, occupying Iraq for fifty years is going to look like a forgotten dream--Even if we'd spent those fifty years like we did 2004-05.

Yep. Revisionist history. Very few people thought it would be a long war, and it wasn't advertised as such.

The phrase "greeted as liberators" comes to mind.

Anyone that goes in thinking any military action will be "quick and decisive" is a fool.

'Hearts and minds' was a strategy for the Cold War and the proxy conflicts waged in SE Asia, Africa, Central America ,etc. between the West and East.


















 

Awwww... Did the politician lie to you? Where did he touch you? Show me on this doll... Was it a bad touch?

Look--Regardless of how the idiot politicians and the media sold this shit to the public, the job had to be done, and it was the least bad course of action. All this whining about "being lied to..." is so much bullshit. Professional soldiers knew damn good and well what the mission was, and how we really had no good options. If we let Saddam stay in power and fester, Iraq was going to turn into a strategic black hole as soon as the assholes in the UN and the Euros got enough of the Oil for Food money in their pockets to make them unable to resist loosening the sanctions regime. And, then what?

Right now, the Islamic world is in the process of self-destruction. What comes out of it is going to depend a great deal on what happens in the next 10 years. We pissed away our best chance to influence things in 2008, and abandoned a course of action that was starting to show results. No matter what, the whole region was going to require our involvement, if only to stabilize the world energy markets--Which, in the final analysis is the least expensive of the options we were and are faced with.

Basic fucking problem here is that most Americans are too God-damned insular and self-involved, will not read a newspaper or book on the issues facing us, and are completely oblivious to the world around them. This last forty years has been a perfect example--The Islamists declared war on us in 1979, literally. We ignored that fact for twenty-plus years, and wound up with 9/11 to show for it. We really can't afford to throw up our hands and say "Not our problem..." because the problem is going to follow us home here to the US, no matter what. Things are only going to get worse as the technology of WMD becomes more and more available to the common person. Care to imagine what a world full of high-school genetic engineering labs is going to look like, when it's also shared with a bunch of unreformed, unredeemable religious fanatics that want to kill everyone who isn't a member of their primitive faith? The world is getting smaller every day, in terms of how much damage some dipshit can do with cookbook technology. In our lifetimes, some random idiot is going to be able to download computer virus-building kits and do immense damage to imbedded systems, which we're going to be dependent on. Genetic engineering is likely to become a routine, simple task necessary for doing all sorts of things from agriculture to food  production, and we're not going to be able to do jack squat about the ugly little fact that all that stuff is going to be inherently dual-use. The only way to keep the whole world from turning into a massive tomb is going to be heading the fanatics off at the pass and forcing them to reform their primitive societies, or we're going to have to kill them in order to be safe from their infantile little fanaticisms. The effort in Iraq? I don't grudge the years I left over there, or the friends I lost, if only because it was in service of the idea that we might not leave a world behind where our kids have to commit what amounts to a genocide in order to live safely.

Right now, whether or not we want to recognize the fact, we're in a major war. Not one of our making, but one we're going to have to acknowledge and fight, eventually. What Bush did may not have been the most elegant solution to the problem, but at least it was a start, and one that was probably the most humane and noble one possible at that time. I curse the idiots that put the current administration into power at this moment, because their child-like idiocy is making it almost inevitable that there will be a truly horrible future in store for a lot of us--One that was not necessary. And, if I could have prevented it from happening by spending the next twenty years of my life somewhere in Iraq on guard, I'd have gladly done it.

The blood will come, one way or another. If ISIS could do to your home what they did to the Yazidi, they would. And, never forget--Most of the leadership there was in our custody, until the feckless children we elected to make decisions for us decided to let the Iraqis release them from Camp Bucca. Better we should have just killed them when we went to capture them--The amount of human misery those decisions to be humane will cost us in the future is both untold, and unknowable.

 

This.  The problem is that the politicians don't want to declare "Total War", like we had in WWII.  

This country should never, and mean fucking NEVER send young men to get killed if it is not willing to do whatever is necessary to both win the conflict and convince the enemy that more fighting will just get more of them killed.  Why the American people put up with politicians who send our troops into battle without committing to absolute victory is beyond me.  These stupid ROE's that are imposed upon the troops by politicians should never be tolerated by the Pentagon.  It used to be that our military leaders had balls and spoke with one voice.  It certainly isn't that way any more.

LC

And those that know it won't be, and go anyway are bigger fools.

This.

The fighting had stopped.  The war was won. With the unfolding mess in Syria, and the meddling of Iran, there was plenty of justification to maintain a presence. And, if we had, this whole ISIL thing could not have happened.  ISIL did not rise up internally, it came from outside of the Iraqi border, from areas where we hadn't done anything, through areas we could and should have been stationed. (The parallels to 1975 are not lost on me. It was not the VC that brought down Saigon.  Heck, at least Baghdad still stands, even though their whole government seems to have become a proxy for Iran now.)

Obama had decided, politically, to pull us out.  The SOFA negotiations became half-hearted jokes, with the incoming administration already making its intent clear.

Did the Bush admin fuck up, too?  Yes, and I still think we were wrong not to have formally declared an occupation and managed the transition.  You can't do "regime change" with a foreign army in a country and not formally occupy it - especially not if you disband the country's own Army (and by what authority, if no occupation "provisional?").

That doublespeak cost us, and allowed the continued *our hands are tied, we're here at the behest of a sovereign government" line (which, we had been) to become the exit strategy for the next administration.

Part of me thinks that maybe this is best for the region - GD loved to show the Peters' map quite often in 2007, 2008.  The sticky question Peters' never addressed was Baghdad.  But, there's nothing like war to help solidify workable borders - that's how Europe evolved.