Semi-Daily Journal

It goes without saying that the awkward similarity with Israeli military tactics is extremely... what should I say... awkward in a region plaged by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of how the US and Israel are just-one-united-anti-Muslim-infidel-great-Satan. Surely, we don't want to bring water to the terrorists' mill, right?

P.S. Has anyone else been having this deja-read-in-the-Onion feeling about this week's foreign policy news?

Riverbend's posting for Tuesday November 18 at http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/ is worth reading on this.

This was to be expected from an administration that seems to have collective amnesia concerning the names Allen, NcNamara and Bundy. Expect Christmas bombings and some officer named Calley to make headlines.

Isn't one of the first principles of guerilla warfare to provoke your opponent into overreaction, preferrably an overreaction which will piss off the rest of the population?

Expect "We had to destroy Iraq in order to save it."

Fatalities

American soldiers 283
British soldiers 20
Coalition soldiers 25
---
328 Since May 2

American 422
British 53
Coalition 25
---
500 Since March 20

Wounded

American soldiers ~2376 Since March 20

Note: American forces have fallen to 130,000
British forces have risen to 12,000
Coalition forces have risen to 12,000

The similarity to Israeli tactics is disturbing ... it suggests that the conspiracy theory about the Likudnik influence being the reason this administration went to war may be true.

Speaking of the Onion, check out this week's story about the new Palestinian Minister of Rubble. Entertaining and at least as true as anything else in the news.

Major combat operations have ended - which implies that dropping "2,000-pound satellite-guided bombs" is not regarded as a major combat operation. Soon you will have some new nukes ready when it really is time for major ops (see end).

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The U.S. Air Force used some of the largest weapons in its inventory to attack targets in central Iraq in an escalating crackdown on suspected guerrilla strongholds, the military said Wednesday.

A pair of 2,000-pound satellite-guided bombs were dropped late Tuesday near Baqouba, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, on ``camps suspected to have been used for bomb-making,'' said Maj. Gordon Tate, a spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division

Near the northern city of Kirkuk, fighter-bombers dropped 1,000-pound bombs on ``terrorist targets,'' he said without elaborating
...
+
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html?hp
19 Nov 2003 00:55:26 GMT
U.S. House approves Bush nuclear weapons funds
...

Oh come on! Everything is fine, it's just the enemy's desperation.

This has always been the heart of the backbone administration problem on iraq.

The things that you do if you believe your task is to eliminate a guerilla insurrection are the precise opposites of the things that you do if you believe your task is to nation build.

You can't do them simultaneously.

The upsurge in casualties, and the decline in iraq adventure approval ratings, forced the administration's hand towards the former: a military response (whether it will be efficacious being rather another question), which surely won't help with the latter.

But since they're planning on cutting and running anyhow, i'm not sure how much it matters.

Although he's kept quiet since he made the comment, Jim Leach's "greatest security fiasco in ages" remark is exactly on the money.

I hope this isn't what came out of Cheney's request for new ideas.

Of course if we have limited intelligence concerning guerillas whatg must the targeting be like. One of the early strikes was an "empty" warehouse in Bahgdad where several explosions were heard as this offensive started. These were later labeled "secondary explosions." Essentially we have moved from liberation to pacification with no Iraqi government on the ground.

This is similer to all of those offensives by our forces during the Vietnam war. Move in forces, blow up some villes, meet scattered or little resistence, move out, declare it a success because of body counts.

You have to have a large strtegic vision in order to do this, which means that you have to develop an indiginous Iraqi state that is largely democratic. It has to be done now. We are not winning anythiongh with these tactics because we have no goal. Just nice little rhetorical flourishes about the worls being safer with Sadam gone. Please.

Howard -- how are repressing a rebellion/resistance and nationbuilding contradictory goals? I would say that they're not only not-contradictory, but absolutely necessary to each other. After all, if you have a rebellion, it's hard to have widely trusted public institutions, etc, etc, for a nation, and if you aren't moving a country toward nationhood, then people don't have a credible voice or expectation of having a voice in a peaceful forum, making rebellion more likely.

Or, at least, that's what I'd think. Am I missing something?

Julian, it's not that the goals are contradictory. It's that the tactics are contradictory.

Putting down an insurrection is likely to lead to things like dropping big bombs on individual houses, draconian identity and security checks, targeted assassinations, sweeps to make mass arrests, things along those lines. As the US military spokespeople are only too happy to tell us, basically you're showing how much power you have.

Building a stable country and a functioning democracy is likely to lead to restraints on military force, adherence to due process, social openness, things along those lines.

So the way you approach the one task is contradictory to the way you approach the other.

Which is essentially the point Tacitus makes in the first place (and we'll add that the question of whether the military tactics aren't just likely to lead to more resistance, as Tacitus notes, may call into question the efficacy of said tactics anyhow).

I am having very grim thoughts. Un-American thoughts - in the sense that I am doubting the possibility of a good outcome. The Tito/Saddam comparison is a bit worrying. Is there any sense in which very nasty ethnic divides within a state, kept repressed for a long time by a strongman, make civil society impossible for a period after the strongman is gone? I would think the scramble for advantage must be an overwhelming impulse in a situation like that. There is not only the appeal of gaining access to power, but the massive risk of a hostile ethnic group rising to power if one's own does not.

So the US and UK may be the "occupying powers" at one level of consideration, even "liberators" to some (many?), but at a more primative level, we are just part of the mix. We need to be tested and fought with until it is clear how the shares of power are going to work out.

Apologists for war as a path to democracy sounded absolutely convinced that the attractions of democracy would be overwhelming, with little thought to the potholes along the way. Individual Iraqis needn't be ill-suited for democracy in order for democracy to be a very distant possibility. This is a game in which the rules are dictated by past events, not by the choices of the players. History and all that. The rules of the game when ethnic distrust is kept under wraps by a regime that then disappears may not be conducive to peace and prosperity until power arrangements are worked out and become stable. That, I think, is one reason the entire region (ex-Israel) was opposed to invasion. Saudi Arabia does not want the solution to the puzzle to be that Iran wins hegemony or sovereignty over large parts of Iraq. Turkey doesn't want the solution to involve an independent Kurdish region, nor do Kurds want the solution to involve Turkish dominance of Northern Iraq. Ba'athists and Sunni in general (outside Iraq as well as inside) are uncomfortable with majority rule. Each of those outcomes may, however, represent the final, stable resting point for Iraq once the strongman is no longer there to enforce stability in some other form.

The problem is, it is hard to form US policy based on the strong possibility that we cannot pick an outcome that we like, and that we cannot know the outcome until the game plays out.

That's the worst thing about this, from a selfish, US-centric viewpoint: Bush has set things up so that our choices range from 'oh, sh*t!' to 'oh, sh*t!!' to 'oh, sh*t!!!!!'.

Then, after having eliminated any actual *good* choice, the pro-war faction demands that everybody else come up with a plan.

I largely share K Harris's assessment of thesituation.

It's difficult to justify incompetence instead of malice here, but I will note that the Union Army was known to do such things, about a century pre-Likud:

... Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, who commanded the garrison at Arlington House, appropriated the grounds June 15, 1864, for use as a military cemetery. His intention was to render the house uninhabitable should the Lee family ever attempt to return.

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.org/historical_information/arlington_house.html

Yep, Dave, the Union Army did such things. And the Southerners were quick to forgive, weren't they?

These bulldozing tactics are baffling, but were foreshadowed a couple months back when it was announced that such bulldozers were being transported to Iraq. The point: this isn't an isolated case, it is an explicit policy the occupying force has chosen.

Why choose such tactics? One must choose between several unappealing possible answers:

1) The idiots in charge actually think this will cut down on terrorism. Given that the entire American approach to this occupation has been exactly opposite the British approach, this may be most likely. The British learned through decades of hard lessons that the best way to gain the trust of the occupied is to build bridges, not walls. For example, in Basra the British were quick to get soldiers out of armored cars and onto the street, where they mixed with the locals. You don't often hear of these sort of incidents in the British-occupied Iraq, do you?

2) The idiots in charge know this will seed the flames of terrorism, but that's actually their goal. No idea why they would do this. I understand Likud doing this ... National Security is their lone campaign issue and so they have to encourage terrorism to stay in power. But the Iraqi terrorism isn't helping Bush in the polls.

"Apologists for war as a path to democracy sounded absolutely convinced that the attractions of democracy would be overwhelming, with little thought to the potholes along the way."

K Harris, I read a lot of work by people on both sides of the debate about how very hard it would be for us to acheive a democratic outcome.