The Surge godfather speaks

Fred Kagan of Neocon Central, better known as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), is credited with being one of the main intellectual godfather's of McCain's Iraq escalation project, The Surge. He's just issued a new, lenghty manifesto about why the antiwar movement is evil and in league with Hell: Why Iraq Matters: Talking back to antiwar-party talking points National Review Online 04/07/08.

The greatest specialty of the neocons is their talent for invective. I don't call them "Trotskyists" as some of the Old Right isolationist types do. But 1930s Troskyism and the hair-splitting sectarian disputes that went with it is part of the bedrock intellectual foundation of neoconservatism. The more orthodox Marxists may have had a point even in the 1930s when it accused Troskyism of being reactionary ideology in Marxist disguise. But I won't go there in this post.

In Kagan's first three paragraphs, he set the stage with favorite Republican and neocon images of scorn and "truisms" of dubious historical foundation. Like: War opponents are "hyper-sophisticates" (unlike down-home good ole boys like Fred Kagan and William Kristol); the wicked left forced the US to "lose" the Vietnam War; these hyper-sophisticates have offered their devious arguments "during every major conflict" the US has had (meaning that some of us war critics possess a remarkable longetivity); the "American foreign-policy and intellectual establishment" opposes the Iraq War (standard posturing for rightwingers who like to imagine themselves as bold rebels against "political correctness" but not entirely wrong in this case as the Iraq Study Group report in 2006 showed); winning and losing are clear-cut alternatives in the Iraq War; if war critics aren't totally confident they can predict what the Middle East will look like 50 years from now we should just shut the hell up; the war critics are so devious and slippery that they change their criticisms when conditions change during the course of this particular Long War; war opponents are gleeful when the Bad People kill the Good People; and, of course, we war opponents are all trembling Neville Chamberlains who refuse the higher wisdom of Churchillian leaders like Fred Kagan.

If these sound like debating points, they are.

And that's a big problem with an awful lot of neocon writing on foreign policy. It's long on polemics, short on analysis - and often not very scrupulous about facts.

One thing I see in Freddie's debating points is that he's nervous about war opponents emphasizing the swelling cost of the neocon's merry little adventure in Mesopotamia. Military spending is a much lower percentage of the GDP and the federal budget than it once was, both of which I think are true though I would never assume Freddie's statistics in a polemic like this were reliable.

He makes a point that's remarkable for its ditsiness: The US presence in the Middle East doesn't cause oil supplies to go up. Because it's conflict and instability in the Middle East that cause oil prices to go up. Therefore our war in Iraq has nothing to do with it! I should be fair, though, and assume that Freddie has only been listening to people who say that the physical presence of human being with American passports in Iraq is what's causing oil prices to rise. It somehow may not have registered with him that war critics are usually referring to the war that the Cheney-Bush administration initiated in Iraq as what is affecting oil prices.

All that hippie stuff of worrying about what other things might be done with the money actually being spent on the war is incomprehensible to Freddie. If there weren't a war we would have to spend all that money on other military stuff. Why, he says, "the Air Force is just about at the bake-sell level [i.e., needing to hold bake sales to raise money] thanks to consistent underspending on defense since 1991". Wow! Who knew? We sure wouldn't want Al Qa'ida high-tech air force attacking us tomorrow, would we?

That brings us up to page 4 of 9, and suddently I feel a severe attack of narcolepsy coming on. Or maybe it's just mega-boredom. After that it descends into setting up straw-man talking points and knocking them brilliantly down.

You know, with all that has been said and written about the Iraq War, you would think that Freddie could have found some actual war opponents to quote on their points. But I only caught one passing reference to one of Barack Obama's criticisms in this nine-page diatribe. Gee, with 60% or so of the public saying they want to US out of Iraq, you would think he could have gotten a few actual arguments from actual war opponents. Shoot, he could have just picked people randomly on the street of any city and found some.

But it is a marvel to behold how neocons can instantly change the subject to the Second World War and make some goofy analogy to support their argument of the moment. It may not make jack for sense. But somehow it lets us imagine we're fighting the Good War, not a nasty, hopeless little colonial-type war in Iraq.

What's even more impressive, in a shake-your-head-in-amazement kind of way, is how Freddie views everything that happens in Iraq as a victory for Our Side. It's all good for Freddie.

frederick kagan, iraq war

Not blaming the military

The Miller Center at the University of Virginia has the audio of a conference on the Iraq War available online, Is Keeping Troops in Iraq in America's Best Interests? 09/18/07. At this writing you have to click on, "Click here to watch video of Jessica T. Mathews' remarks" to get the video. Another link promises the full video, but I can't find it at the link. The "Mathews' remarks" link has a substantial portion of it. The participants are Jessica Tuchman Mathews and Chas Freeman for withdrawal, and neoconservatives Frederick Kagan and Reuel Marc Gerecht for indefinite commitment of US troops.

According to the Event transcript, it appears that only Margaret Warner's introduction and Fred Kagan's brief pitch for staying forever are missing from the video link above.

Mathews and Freeman have a lot of interesting things to say. But one of Freeman's comments jumped out at me as an example of a very bad habit that war critics need to get over now. It occurs at around 39:15 on the video, p. 29 of the transcript:

[The] Iraq [War] now stands as a monument to the discipline and the professionalism of our military and the utter ineptitude of our civilian leadership.

Yes, it's become standard for everyone when speaking publicly about the war to praise the brave, professional, heroic soldiers with various additional superlatives. And that's fine as long as people remember that those are real human beings we're sending off to war, and not some abstractions we call Noble Heroes.

But we should not let our glorious generals hide their own mistakes behind abstract praise of "our military" or The Troops.

Tags: chas freeman, frederick kagan, iraq war, jessica mathews, reuel marc gerecht

The "patrol base" attack

The suicide-bomb attack this week that killed nine American soldiers in Iraq has understandably received a lot of attention in the news:Al-Qa'ida group behind US deaths in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn Independent 04/25/07. What hasn't been clear in a lot of the reporting is that they were struck in a "patrol base" which is an essential part of the Petraeus strategy for the McCain escalation currently under way. As a point of historical reference, at the height of American fighting in Vietnam, American KIAs (killed in actions) were running at about 10 per day. Cockburn reports:

The US military said that only one truck had exploded yesterday at a patrol base of the 82nd Airborne Division in the much-fought over province of Diyala, north-east of Baghdad. The death of the paratroopers brings to 85 the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq so far this month. This is higher than the total in each of the previous three months.

Residents in the Ameen area south of the provincial capital, Baquba, said the base attacked was in an old primary school called Sheikh Abdul Qadir al-Qailani. In a sophisticated attack, gunmen opened fire on US snipers on the roof of the school. Then one suicide truck bomb blasted a gap in the concrete wall protecting the base through which a second truck was able to pass before blowing up and causing the school building to collapse. (my emphasis)

The current strategy calls for establishing these small "patrol bases" staffed by American troops in neighborhoods throughout Baghdad and other target areas; the one sucessfully attack this week was in Diyala province, as Cockburn reports. Previously, American troops had been concentrated in larger and heavily-defended bases, emerging for individual patrols and then returning to base. The "patrol bases" are supposed to let the Americans get more familiar with the neighborhoods and developed better intelligence on insurgent operations.

In counterinsurgency theory, this getting closer to the people is a necessary step, though it will be likely to produce higher US casualties, including KIAs, in the short run. Cockburn writes:

But the US strategy since the start of the "surge" in Baghdad on 14 February has been to make greater use of US troops and give less priority to training Iraqi forces. This is likely to lead to an increase in US casualties that are often a function of the number of patrols being made. ...

The most effective method of attack against US and British forces has been the roadside bomb, to which neither has found an effective answer. No less than 1,310 US military fatalities have been caused by bombs in or beside roads. While the suicide bombers have hitherto not concentrated on US forces, possibly because they are too well defended, the more aggressive use of US forces is likely to make them more of a target.

But there are a couple of problems with this. At least a couple. One is that most American troops don't speak Arabic. And they are foreigners in Iraq. The Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are too unreliable for the Americans to trust them enough to make the joint counterinsurgency operations effective. Plus, there aren't nearly enough of them, and the ones that are there are more loyal to sectarian militias than to the Iraqi government. And the military is apparently giving up for the time being on hoping for American training of the ISF providing any immediate relief.

The PBS Newshour on Tuesday featured Judy Woodruff interviewing Phil Carter, who has served in Iraq as an Army captain and writes on intelligence issues, and neocon ideologue Frederick Kagan, who is considered one of the intellectual godfathers of the McCain escalation, aka, The Surge: Iraq's Diyala Province One of Deadliest for Troops 04/24/07. Carter explained how the current strategy is affecting Diyala province, where he has served:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Captain [Carter], yesterday's suicide attack on the 82nd Airborne, it was a third brigade. We know nine paratroopers killed, 20 injured. Since November, we're told 56 U.S. service members have been killed in Diyala. Why do we see the violence spiking there?

PHILLIP CARTER: Well, it looks like this is the unintended consequence of the surge. That is, you squeeze the bad guys out of Baghdad, and they pop like a water balloon up into the Diyala province, which borders Baghdad.

There's also a sense that we drew down, as Professor Kagan says, too many of our forces in this province. And so as we were squeezing in Baghdad, we were squeezing the insurgents and the militias into an area where there was not a sufficient U.S. presence.

And the third problem in Diyala is that the provincial government and the security forces are both ineffective and corrupt, and they are far more beholden to their own agendas than to any mission or security in the province.

Kagan, being the ideologue that he is, kept trying to stress the al-Qaida role in Diyala:

FREDERICK KAGAN: Well, they're going to a variety of difference places. And they've been moving around. And we've been following, as al-Qaida has been trying to establish new bases. They've been trying to do this in Salahadeen, as well.

But Diyala offers a prospect for them, because it is a mixed area, and al-Qaida's methodology in Diyala has been to attack the Shia, drive them away, and then attack the Sunni to terrorize them. That's been sort of their trademark out there, and they've been hoping that that would work for them. Diyala is a province that offers that prospect.

Carter smoothly called Kagan on it, and also talked more about how the current approach is likely to mean higher US KIA counts:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Captain Carter, again, the worst attack on the 82nd Airborne, they were saying today, in almost 40 years. Is there something that makes them particularly vulnerable in this location?

PHILLIP CARTER: There is, but first it's important to note a couple of things. First is that Diyala has long been home to Baath party elements and others. It was a favorite sort of retreat area for Iraqis in Saddam Hussein's government. So there's a fertile area for Sunni insurgents to go up there.

The second is that Colonel Sutherland's brigade has really adopted a muscular approach to counterinsurgency up there. And since when we left, it appears that they have almost resumed major combat operations. It's possible that there is a spiral effect between the way that the U.S. is acting and the way that the insurgents are acting, in the absence of reconstruction effort.

On your question, yes, this is a deadly attack. And it's because of the new way that the U.S. is postured. No longer is the U.S. simply occupying these massive super bases outside the city, but they're now pushing out into smaller outposts throughout the cities, the kind of things that might resemble a community policing substation in a housing area. We're talking small bases, with small-sized units, and they're much more vulnerable than the large bases outside of town. (my emphasis)

Kagan agreed about the higher risk of casualties involved:

So it is sort of Counterinsurgency 101, as Captain Carter described, that you really do have to get out among the population in order to make any of this work. You accept a certain degree of greater risk, especially initially, by doing that. But over the long term, the hope is that the risk goes down because you get a lot more intelligence from the people when you're doing more than just sort of driving through neighborhoods, where nobody knows you and doesn't expect you to stay there.

The Pentagon will be tempted to pull back from this "patrol base" arrangement to emphasize "force protection", i.e., minimizing American casualties. Which is likely to interfere with whatever good the current counterinsurgency approach might produce. But given the incredible difficulties in their way, that's probably just as well. Why lose people in a counterinsurgency approach that is hopeless for other reasons anyway?

Of course, the obvious follow-on question is, why lose people in a counterinsurgency war that cannot be won by Americans at any remotely acceptable cost, if at all?

Tags: frederick kagan, iraq, iraq war, patrick cockburn, phil carter