First World War propaganda and the stab-in-the-back legend (1 of 2)

In this post, I'm looking at the argument Klaus-Jürgen Bremm makes in Propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg (2013) essentially defending the infamous stab-in-the-back myth that says Germany's glorious generals won the war on the battlefield only to have it undermined by the unworthy civilians and democrats and traitors back home in the wimpy civilian world. (See Part 1 here.)

Rightwing propaganda representation of the "stab-in-the-back"

Bremm describes the theory this way:

In der langen Geschichte der Schlachten und Feldzüge war es ein nahezu beispielloser Vorgang. Eine Nation, die für ihre militärischen Qualitäten bis dahin weltweit respektiert oder gefürchtet war und deren Armeen sich im Oktober 1918 noch an allen Fronten tief im Feindesland behauptet hatten, warf im November 1918 unvermittelt und entnervt die Waffen fort. Die erst drei Tage alte Republik ließ ihre unglückseligen Vertreter hastig karthagische Waffenstillstandsbedingungen unterzeichnen, die den fluchtartigen Rückzug der scheinbar noch unbesiegten Divisionen des Heeres hinter den Rhein diktierten.

Trotz der allgemeinen Erleichterung über das so unvermittelt eingetretene Ende des deutschen Widerstandes rieben sich die alliierten Führer verwundert die Augen. ...

Plötzlich waren die Enttäuschung und vor allem die Scham über die vorzeitige Kapitulation grenzenlos. Dazu traf die Besiegten der internationale Spott: „Bevor sie am eigenen Leib das Leiden und die Zerstörungen des Krieges erdulden mussten, hätten sich die Deutschen vorteilhaft aus der blutigen Affäre gezogen, in die doch sie allein die Welt gestoßen hatten", höhnte der französische Schriftsteller Henry Lichtenberger und der britische Journalist George Young bemerkte einigermaßen verständnislos: Es wäre besser für die Deutschen gewesen, wenn sie mehr Mut bewiesen und weniger schnell aufgegeben hatten.

[In the long history of battles and military campaigns, it was a nearly unprecedented instance. A nation that until then was respected or feared worldwide for its military qualities and which in October 1918 had still maintained its armies deep in enemy territory, in November 1918 directly and unnerved threw their weapons away. The only three days old Republic had its unlucky representatives hastily sign a Carthaginian ceasefire that dictated the hasty withdrawal of the apparently still undefeated divisions of the army behind the Rhine.

Despite the general relief over such an immediately arriving end of the the German resistance, the Allied leaders rubbed their eyes in wonder. ...

Suddenly the disappointment and above all the shame over the premature capitulation were boundless. International mockery about that was directed at the defeated {Germans}: "Before they had to tolerate the sorrows and destructions of the war in their own body, the German advantageously pulled them out of the bloody affairs, into which they alone had thrust the world." {my translation from the German}, taunted the French writer Henry Lichtenberger. And the British journalist George Young remarked fairly unsympathetically: It would have been better for the Germans if they had shown more guts and not given up so quickly.] [my emphasis]

This is a ridiculous conclusion, at least formulated in the way Bremm does.

As Lothar Machtan, biographer of the Kaiser's last Chancellor Max von Baden, puts it in "Autobiografie als geschichtspolitische Waffe" Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 4/2013, by October 1918 Imperial Germany had become "ein politisches System und einen Herrscherstand retten ... die nur durch eine veritable Neuerfindung hätten überleben können" ("a political system and a governing elite ... that could have survived only through a veritable reinvention [of itself']").

"Your Homeland Fatherland is in Danger": German first World War recruiting poster

The Kaiser and his generals had failed across the board. They launched a war of aggression under the false pretense of a defensive war. They denied concealed the consistently expansionist goals to which they held until military failure eventually forced them to recognize their impossibility of achievement, as Fritz Fischer famously documented in detail in Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961).

Gerd Krumeich in his article on the Dolchstoßlegende in the Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg (Gerhard Hirschfeld et al, Hrsg; 2009) notes:

[Gen. Wilhelm] Groener, [Gen. Hermann von] Kuhl und sogar [Gen. Paul von] Hindenburg hatten betont, daß das deutsche Heer im Spätherbst 1918 keineswegs mehr an »allen Fronten siegte« und daß es sich seit den militärischen Katastrophen des Juli/Aug. 1918 nur noch darum habe handeln konnen, einen »anständigen Frieden« zu erreichen - was indessen durch die revolutionäre Entwicklung unmoglich geworden sei.

[{Gen. Wilhelm} Groener, {Gen. Hermann von} Kuhl and even {Gen. Paul von} Hindenburg had emphasized that the German army in late autumn 1918 had certainly not "won on all fronts" and that since the military catastrophe of July/August 1918 the only option was to work to achieve an "respectable peace" - which, however the revolutionary development made impossible.]

In other words, well over a year before the end of the war the Kaiser's glorious generals were whining that the civilians on the home front had failed to be worthy of their glorious generalship, the generalship that had grossly overestimate their own capabilities and failed repeatedly to deliver the results they promised to the nation. The leadership that had expected what became the nearly 4 1/2 year carnage of the First World War to be a short war of a few weeks ending in German victory with vastly expanded territory and even more vastly expanded effective control over neighboring nations and new colonies.

An in October 1918, they knew they were beaten. And Gen. Erich Ludendorff, who had functioned in effect as a military dictator since mid-1917, was happy to turn over his disastrous loss to the Social Democrats to let them take the heat for the defeat and what turned out to be a humiliating peace. They didn't even try to "reinvent" the Imperial Government. It was finished.

There is a lot to criticize about the politics of the Social Democratic Party and its leaders Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann during their first few months in office.

But their initial agreement to a ceasefire that represented a non-annexationist peace and recognized the cold reality of the failure of the Kaiser and his generals in their war, was the only sensible option open to the new government. In fact, if the leaders of the Entente Powers had shown more judgment and restraint in the peace negotiations than greed and the general spirit of banditry that they did - leading the ineffectual Woodrow Wilson by the nose along with them - they would have imposed far fewer punitive conditions than they did on Germany.

But the bullheadedness and stupidity of David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau and the fecklessness of Wilson at the Paris Conference that produced the travesty known as the Treaty of Versailles is not in itself an indictment of new German government to accept the ceasefire terms. (A "Carthaginian" ceasefire? Please.)

For all the faults of the political policies of the Majority SPD of Ebert and Scheidemann during the war, they were consistent in demanding a non-annexationist peace. Keeping a defeated army in the field fighting even longer would have resulted in far more deaths and destruction to the German Army. War is war, so it's no surprised that there were jingoistic-minded Brits and Frenchmen like those Bremm cites would would have preferred to see the German Army further chopped up on the field, even if that meant many more of their own fellow Brits and French killed. War makes people do and say stupid things.

But for Bremm to take those as some kind of meaningful indictment of the new German government's policy on the ceasefire is just plain silly.

It's worth noting, too, that the previous year the Kerenski government in Russia that took power in the February 1917 revolution also made the fateful decision to continue their war against Germany. It didn't work out well for them. Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann weren't fools enough to ignore that experience, either!

As Machtan writes:

Von Anfang an blies ihnen überdies ein eisiger Wind aggressiver Ablehnung durch diejenigen Kreise entgegen, die die deutsche Kapitulation und die deutsche Revolution für ein Versagen der Verantwortlichen, ja für ein Verbrechen hielten und nicht müde wurden, die vermeintlich Schuldigen schonungslos an den Pranger zu stellen. Das provozierte jenen fatalen ideologischen Bürgerkrieg, der wesentlich zur Zerstörung der Weimarer Republik beitrug.

[From the beginning on, an icy wind of aggressive rejection blew against them from those circles who held the German capitulation and the German revolution to be a failure of the responsible official, and even a crime, and who never tired of ruthlessly pillorying the alleged guilty ones. Which provoked that fatal ideological civil war that contributed in an essential way to the destruction of the Weimar Republic.]

This was a circular process. The Kaiser and his generals failed in their plan to snatch territory, colonies and power from their neighbors on the basis of which they launched the war in 1914. As Bremm himself describes at some length, the German generals had constantly declared victories, hidden their failures and systematically presented a sanitized version of the reality of the war to the home front. When they could no longer hide their ultimate failure, they turned the collapsing mess over to the Social Democrats so they cold take the blame for the failure. Then they and their allies in the nationalist movement proceeded to loudly blame the Social Democrats (and the Bolsheviks and the Jews) for their own failures.

"The Kaiser has abdicated!" SPD special edition cover

Gerd Krumeich also writes of the roots of the stab-in-the-back myth:

So ist beispielsweise bereits der mangelnde Nachschub in den Kämpfen um Verdun im Jahre 1916 in der soldatischen Literatur als »Dolchstoß« bezeichnet worden. Bereits im Juli 1917 formulierte General von Seeckt den archetypischen Vorwurf: »Wozu fechten wir noch? Die Heimat ist uns in den Rücken gefallen, und damit ist der Sieg verloren«. Durch Streikaktivitäten und Anti-Kriegsagitation, z. B. des Spartakusbundes im Frühjahr 1918, wurde dieser Vorwurf zunehmend nachdrücklicher. Auch die Tatsache, daß den heimkehrenden Soldaten ab Nov. 1918 immer wieder in öffentlicher Rede bestatigt wurde, sie seien »im Felde unbesiegt« geblieben, festigte vielfach die Uberzeugung, daß die Niederlage nicht militärische Gründe gehabt hatte, sondern von »den Zivilisten«, »den Arbeitern«, »den Juden« usw. zu verantworten sei.

[So, for example, the shortage of reinforcements in the battles around Verdun in the year 1916 already had been labeled in the soldiers' literature as a "stab-in-the-back." Already in July 1917 General von Seeckt formulatede the archetypical accusation: "What are we still fighting for? The homeland has attacked us from behind and therefore the victory is lost." By strike activities and antiwar agitation, for example that of the Spartacus League early in the year 1918, this accusation became more and more insistent. Also the fact that the returning soldiers starting November 1918 continually claimed in public speeches that they remained "undefeated in the field," reinforced many time over the conviction that the defeat didn't have military grounds, but rather than "the civilians," "the workers," "the Jews," and so forth were responsible.]

In other words, this idea was constructed by the military as a fallback alibi long before the end. We've seen this in other situations, as well. The US military promoted a very similar claim about the Vietnam War.

Bremm even cites Von Seeckt's 1917 whining, but cites it as though it were a statement of the obvious rather than an ideological and political construction.

And, as as the undated article Die "Dolchstoßlegende" from the SPD Ortsverein Feldmoching-Hasselbergl puts it, "Hindenburg und Ludendorff hatten nach der gescheiterten Sommeroffensive von 1918 die Reichsregierung am 29. September 1918 ultimativ aufgefordert, Waffenstillstandsverhandlungen aufzunehmen." ("Hindenburg and Ludendorff after the failed summer offensive of 1918 demanded in an ultimative way that the Imperial government start ceasefire negotiations.") Kaiser Bill (Wilhelm II) abdicated on November 9. The same day, the Kaiser's last Chancellor Max von Baden turned over the government to Friedrich Ebert and his Social Democrats.

Cover of a book on the Dolchstoß Trial

Both Bremm and Krumeich refer to the Munich Dolchstoß Trial of October-November 1925, in which an editor was sued for by the head of a conservative publication over the latter's accusing the Social Democrats of having performed a stab-in-the-back in the First World War. (This sides are a bit confusing: Martin Gruber of the Münchener Post had accused Paul Nikolaus Cossmann of the conservative of spreading poisonous propaganda by promoting the stab-in-the-back myth, and Cossman sued Gruber over the criticism; it was the conservative side that initiated the suit.) The court found narrowly that the SPD could not be accurately accused of such a thing, but nevertheless reinforced the idea that the stab-in-the-back had taken place. Krumeich:

Das Ergebnis des Prozesses war, daß die Mehrheitssozialdemokratie der Kriegszeit vom Vorwurf entlastet wurde, sich am »Dolchstoß« beteiligt zu haben. Es bestand aber für das Gericht kein Zweifel daran, daß erhebliche Versuche unternommen worden waren, die Front zu destabilisieren.

[The result of the trial was that the Majority Social Democracy of the time of the war was acquitted of the accusation that they had taken part in the stab-in-the-back. But there remained for the court no doubt that significant attempts had been undertake to destabilize the front.] [my emphasis]

Bremm's description of the Dolchstoß Trial runs like this:

Im Münchener „Dolchstoß-Prozess", den der Publizist und zum Katholizismus konvertierte Jude Paul Nikolaus Cossmann im Oktober 1915 unter großer offentlicher Aufmerksamkeit gegen den leitenden Redakteur der Münchener Post wegen Verleumdung angestrengt hatte, bestand selbst fur das Gericht bei aller Abwagung der bekannten Fakten kein Zweifel, dass im zurückliegenden Krieg erhebliche Anstrengungen in der Heimat unternommen worden waren, die deutsche Front zu destabilisieren. Wenn auch die hauptsachlich attackierte Sozialdemokratie vom Vorwurf, dem Heer in den Rücken gefallen zu sein, durch das Verfahren insgesamt entlastet wurde, war damit doch der Dolchstoß-Topos nun auch gerichtsnotorisch.

[In the Munich "Dolchstoß Trial" which Paul Nikolaus Cossmann, a publicist and a Jew who had converted to Catholicism brought in October 1915 under great public attention against the chief editor of the Münchener Post on the grounds of defamation, there remained for the court after all consideration of the known facts no doubt that in the previous war substantive efforts had been undertaken on the homefront to destabilize the German front. Even though the Social Democrats, who were the main ones accused {in the case of the stab-in-the-back}, were acquitted on the whole of the accusation of having attacked the Army from behind, the stab-in-the-back theme was thereby also given judicial notoreity.] [my emphasis]

Bremm cites a separate 2002 article by Gerd Krumeich at the end of that paragraph. But Krumeich's description in the 2009 article cited above not only frames it notably differently, he explicitly describes the partisan nature and repercussions of the court's decision endorsing the idea of the stab-in-the-back myth: the decision "schuf insgesamt eine eindeutig parteipolitische Ausrichtung der Frage nach den Gründen des deutschen Zusammenbruchs von 1918" ("altogether created a clear party-political bias to the question of the reasons for the German collapse of 1918.")

"The trial," as the SPD Ortsverein Feldmoching-Hasselbergl article puts it, "was a pure conservative propaganda maneuver" ("Der Prozeß war eine reines konservatives Propagandamanöver").

Bremm presents it rather as producing a judicial verification of the stab-in-the-back claims.

To say it again, this is a ridiculous conclusion on Bremm's part.

Tags: dolchstoßlegende, first world war, erster weltkrieg, stab-in-the-back, world war i

Stab-in-the-back keeps on stabbing

Mark Moyar elaborates a version of the stab-in-the-back history of the Vietnam War in Disastrous Lessons Foreign Policy Online 10/19/09. That would be the version in which our brilliant generals brilliantly won the Vietnam War but were undercut by the gutless wimpy politicians and cowardly civilians back home.

This should be read in conjunction with this article from Rick Perlstein from a couple of years ago, which Digby recently highlighted: The Best Wars of Their Lives The Nation 09/27/09 (10/15/09 edition). Rick analyzes a couple of examples of books elaborating a stab-in-the-back viewpoint, one of them by Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (2006), which he describes as follows:

Here is right-wing Vietnam revisionism at its most respectable.

Moyar's method is simple: Take what the "orthodoxy" says and revise it 180 degrees hard to starboard. For instance, in 1954 the insurgent Communist forces of Ho Chi Minh beat French colonial forces (whom the United States backed) at the French garrison of Dien Bien Phu. Most have discerned in France's humiliating defeat a classic example of a hubristic colonial power foolishly underestimating a nonwhite enemy. Not Moyar. He cites Communist sources--more on this move later--to argue that France barely lost.

He walks through Moyar's fantasy version of the Vietnam War in more detail, noting that there are distinct and incompatible versions of the stab-in-the-back myth. In Moyar's version, it was William Westmoreland who had brilliantly won the war as chief commander in Vietnam.

In another version, represented in Rick's essay by Lewis Sorley, it was Westmoreland's successor, Gen. Creighton Abrams, who instituted a brilliantly brilliant counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy that recognized the need to secure the population and etc., etc. We've heard quite a bit of this version lately from advocates of endless war in Afghanistan and Iraq as alleged historical evidence for the magic virtues of COIN thinking. Which for the US military in practice has been a less-preferred method of justifying heavy use of bombing and artillery on largely civilian targets.

I don't want to dismiss the value of COIN thinking. I've quoted before Steven Metz' Rethinking Insurgency (June 2007), which makes a realistic argument for recognizing different types of COIN situations and adopting approaches appropriate to the practical possibilities presented by each one. But as we saw in some the footage from Frontline's recent program on the "AfPak" conflict, Obama's War, in a war now into its ninth year with no end in sight, American COIN approaches to winning the confidence of the population involves heavily armed American soldiers going out to talk to Afghan peasants in English, relying on an interpreter may not be able to communicate that well with the soldier in English to communicate the soldier's message to the Afghans. In other words, the current McCrystal COIN strategy is to a large extent a marketing ploy for the American public and Congress, not a dramatic change from the strategy of the previous eight years.

This 10/22/09 interview with Tom Hayden at Antiwar.com also goes into the reality of COIN as it is being implemented in our current wars.

Here's a real-time news report: U.S. forces kill four Afghans in car: police by Ismael Sameem and Golnar Motevalli, Reuters 10/24/09.

Tags: afghanistan war, afpak war, stab-in-the-back, vietnam war

The stab-in-the-back accusation, Afghanistan War version

The Democratic Party as a group is not yet ready to challenge the Cold War/Long War framing of American foreign policy. And the Republicans have no interest in doing so. There is a small dissenting faction of Old Right isolationists in the Republican Party. But they mainly function to reinforce the belligerent nationalism of the Cheneyists and the neocons. At least within the Democratic Party there is a visible antiwar faction with considerable influence.

After the two world wars, it's a sad state of affairs that both political parties aren't solidly antiwar in their general orientation. Instead, we have one Party with a substantial antiwar faction toward which the Party leadership is highly distrustful.

As a consequence, advocates of a chronically hawkish view based in a stab-in-the-back version of the "lessons of Vietnam" and a deep distrust toward civilian government are actually taken seriously. Far more seriously than a they would be in a healthy democracy. Here is a current example, from Gen. Mark Kimmitt (ret.) writing at Foreign Policy's AfPak blog, Losing the War of Exhaustion 09/21/09:

Over time, the U.S. military has evolved in its conviction that the center of gravity in counterinsurgency operations is protecting the local population rather than defeating the enemy forces. However, while protection of the Afghan people is necessary, it's not sufficient, for the true center of gravity for the Afghanistan enterprise is not in Kabul or Kandahar - it's the support of the domestic U.S. population that matters most. And, the Taliban intends to fight a war of exhaustion to defeat that support.

This is a reminder that foreign policy is way too important to be left to generals. Or to elected officials with their hands out to defense-industry lobbyists for campaign contributions and future lobbying jobs.

Mark Kimmitt served in Iraq with the US Army and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and as Assistant Secretary for Political-Military Affairs for the last few months (Aug 2008-Jan 2009) of the Bush administration.

The notion that the military "center of gravity" in a war is the Will of the civilian population back home, and the civilian wusses in Congress, is a corruption the theory of war elaborated by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). Actually, calling it a "corruption" of Clausewitz' ideas is probably generous. Prostituting it would be a more apt description. Because the idea as Kimmitt elaborates it here is a cheap propaganda usage of a theory that Clausewitz used in describing battlefield strategy put in service of an open-ended excuse for military failure.

Generals don't have to overpromise. But it seems to be a chronic affliction for American generals. Sure, agree in the winter us a few more thousand troops and by summer we'll be implementing our whiz-bang new counterinsurgency theory and we'll be on the road to Glorious Victory in Afghanistan. Pakistan, too. Come summer and we've won victory after victory, mowing down terrorists and Al Qaidists and Talibaners by the dozens - with the occasional slaughter of noncombatants and gosh we're sorry about that - but, hey, we need more troops! Maybe hundreds of thousands of more troops. But we'll use them to implement our whiz-bang new counterinsurgency theory and we'll be on the road to Glorious Victory in Afghanistan. Reset. Repeat.

But, golly, our generals get their feelings hurt if anyone questions their competence, honesty or sanity in these things. So they have an all-purpose excuse. The American military is invincible and our generals certainly are. So if we're not winning a war - even though we're winning every battle for eight years straight! - it's not because our military or our fine generals have failed. Oh no, it's because the gutless public just isn't worthy of such a superb invincible military with such outstanding leadership.

That's really what defenders of military failure are saying when they trot out the all-purpose stab-in-the-back whine that Gen. Kemmitt uses in that post. And yes, it deserves to be both seriously refuted and ridiculed until our military culture develops a healthier respect for civilian authority and basic principles of Constitutional democracy. And maybe even gets to the point that it doesn't produce such whiners.

But the set-up for a stab-in-the-back version of the Afghanistan War is clear in Kimmitt's remarks:

If this war is to be won, it will certainly require more capability: more troops, more civilians, more funding, and a coherent strategy. For that, we can depend on the Department of Defense to find the troops, on the Department of State and other cabinet agencies to find the civilians, and on Congress to find the money.

But capability is insufficient. Achieving success in Afghanistan will also require domestic will, popular support, and strategic patience. These are the most important weapons in a war of exhaustion. Congress, DOD, and State can help out, but only the president can achieve a popular mandate for Afghanistan. Only the president can ask Americans to endure years of sacrifice. Only the president can build support for a protracted struggle that, in his words, is a "war of necessity." And, only the president can harness domestic will, popular support, and strategic patience -- the indispensible [sic] elements for success -- without which our efforts in Afghanistan cannot succeed.

Obama made a mistake in escalating the Afghanistan War as much as he already has. In doing so, he made it "his war" in a political sense.

And Obama's responsibility is real. But his real responsibility is very different than Kimmill's pitch to commit any amount of resources necessary to achieve some mythical total victory in Afghanistan.

There's a fundamental assumption in the open-ended stab-in-the-back excuse that it's illegitimate for the American public to take into account the costs and benefits to be expected from military action. Kimmitt's argument assumes that it's the public's duty to cheer for whatever the military is doing and wants to do. In the real world - and in the scheme of Constitutional democracy - it's the public's job to make sure that our government, including our invincible military and glorious generals, are acting responsibility and in the best interest of the American public and our national security. Sometimes that may mean fighting a war. Sometimes that may mean choosing not to fight a war. And it always means taking into account what's likely to be gained versus what is being lost and likely to be lost in the context of the unpredictable vagaries that come with all wars.

Kimmitt seems to be a true believer in the neocon view of The Terrorists as an existential threat to the US comparable to the nuclear-armed Soviet Union during the Cold War. See Terror War Strategy Goes Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan By Donna Miles, American Forces Press Service, DefenseLink.mil 11/29/05.

Tags: afghanistan war, mark kimmitt, stab-in-the-back

Iraq War: Back on the front page

At least it was on Sunday's Washington Post, right there on A-1: Self-Sufficiency Still Eludes Domestic Security Forces by Mary Beth Sheridan and Ernesto Londoño 11/09/08.

The White House was successful in getting the war off the front page on most days. The Surge definitely accomplished that. But now that the election is over and it's soon to be President Obama's problem, I expect to see a lot more page 1 stories. Military officers who want to impede the withdrawal in some way, outgoing Bush officials and others can now be expected to leak their concerns about how badly things are going.

The stab in the back: First World War, German edition

And the Republicans will be doing everything they can to hang the failure of their merry Mesopotamian adventure on Obama and the Democrats. So they now have an incentive to highlight the bad news that they've been calling war critics unpatriotic for years now for having been paying attention to all along. I guess if your definition of "patriotism" is "supports the Republican Party", that's perfectly consistent.

On the other side, Democratic officials may feel some need to stress that proverbial good news as a way to reassure the public in the face of Republican criticism that they aren't being reckless and irresponsible in the withdrawal.

It's a temptation I hope they can resist for the most part. The war has been going for what will be six years in March. And as the Post article points out, the goals for training enough Iraqi police keeps receding into the distance like a desert mirage. (Although they don't quite put it that way.)

It's clear now that there's little reason to be concerned about an "Al Qa'ida" (Salafi extremist) takeover in Iraq. There is virtually no constituency for it. And the Sunnis have shown they will eliminate those who try. That's one of the keys to the alleged success of The Surge.

But there is a strong likelihood of the resumption of civil war after we leave, or even while we're withdrawing. So happy talk from the new administration about how good conditions have become in Iraq would wind up being counter-productive. And those like Juan Cole who actually know something about Iraq seem to think a blowup over the oil supplies of Kirkuk is virtually inevitable, and probably sooner rather than later.

None of that changes what the US needs to do: get US troops out on a rapid schedule - I would prefer one year rather than the 16 months Obama has talked about - and organize a diplomatic offensive like the one the "Hamilton-Baker" Iraq Study Group called for to prevent an all-out regional war from breaking out as the US withdraws.

The Democrats and war critics generally also need to pay close attention to how the stab-in-the-back narrative unfolds as we withdraw from Iraq. At this point, we can see how the narrative runs up until now. Things were going badly from 2003-6, though the Republicans attacked anyone who was saying that at the time in the nastiest ways, insisting that we were piling up victory after victory and soon the capital-v Victory would come. Then the legendary General Petraeus came in and did The Surge and everything was really, really wonderful this time.

And we know the end of the narrative: the war was almost won - why, Sarah Palin said so herself! - and then the Democrats came in and surrender to the Enemy. What we don't know yet are the details of the intermediate steps in the narrative.

The prevalence of the stab-in-the-back narrative among the officer corps and in Republican mythology about the Vietnam War has done a great deal of harm. It affected military assumptions in ways that contributed to the fiascoes in Iraq and also Afghanistan. And it had seriously poisonous political effects.

War critics need to do what we can to deconstruct the new stab-in-the-back narrative as it's in the process of being created. That process has been well underway since early 2005 already. The legend of The Surge has become a major part of it now.

The Post article gives some glimpses of how flawed the Legend of The Surge really is. For instance:

The blast walls around Kadhem's station stand as symbols of continuing U.S. efforts to strengthen the Iraqi security forces so they can keep order by themselves. The U.S. government has spent more than $20 billion on building a new Iraqi military and police force, and both sides report considerable progress. But the Iraqi units still depend heavily on Americans for training, logistics and other assistance. [my emphasis]

For all the talk of Petraeus' innovative counterinsurgency brilliance, in fact the Iraqi security forces are still largely sectarian militias with uniforms. The American training of the Iraqi forces, to the extent that it's taught them how to be more than sectarian death squads, has left them so that they are still dependent on US forces for logistics, continued training, transport and weaponry.

Here's another hint:

But the national police, with about 42,000 officers, are still well short of the projected goal of about 100,000 and cannot yet cover the country. They do not operate in the autonomous Kurdish region in the north and have failed to reach an agreement to absorb the Kurdish police force, U.S. and Iraqi officials say. Iraq also has tens of thousands of local police officers.

"We don't have air cover to help us to implement our missions. We need more transportation. We need arms. All these things right now are covered by the coalition forces," the chief of the national police, Lt. Gen. Hussein al-Awadi, said in an interview.

The Iraqi security forces training sounds an awful lot like the training of the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN). They are trained to rely heavily on American air power. And they don't have their own air power.

In fact, the country has virtually no air force. How does a country surrounded by potential foes defend its borders with no air force? That was part of the open secret all along. Cheney and Bush expected US forces to stay indefinitely. McCain was ready to leave them there for 10,000 years, as he once said. They basically expected that the US would handle any actual external defence needed.

Read realistically, the Post article illustrates once again what a complete disaster Cheney and Bush created with this totally unnecessary war in Iraq.

But politically, the Republicans now have an incentive to spin reports like this as reasons why leaving in 16 months would be a terrible idea. And that will eventually become part of their new stab-in-the-back narrative.

Tags: iraq war, stab-in-the-back, surge

What is victory in war?

Did it ever occur to you that the US military doesn't now what victory is? I'm not sure how else we can read this:

The security profession needs a basic theoretical construct within which to think about winning wars. Gallons of ink have been expended over the centuries on how to win wars, but that effort has largely been uninformed by even a rudimentary theory of victory. Many existing theories pay little attention to what victory is and why one wins, going instead to the more difficult issue of how one wins. When theorists do address winning, it is usually in passing, as an assumption, or as an excursion from their primary topic. Clausewitz is an exception to this assertion, but his musings on winning are scattered and incomplete. There is a school of thought that claims theory is not necessary for competent performance. While that might explain how mankind has gone without a theory of victory for so long, it does not negate the utility of theory. Existing theories of war are not necessarily wrong; they simply might benefit from some supplemental thought specifically devoted to victory. Fortunately, the extant theoretical literature contains enough material to begin constructing a theory of victory.

That's from another article in the Summer 2008 Parameters, Theory of Victory by J. Boone Bartholomees.

Bartholomees makes some important points in the first part of his article by discussing how victory and defeat, the scale of decisiveness in the results of the war, and the level of achievement all have to be understood as continuums. And he makes the important distinction between tactical success, operational success, and strategic success. Strategic success has to do with the political goals of the war, both in conventional warfare and in counterinsurgency (COIN):

If war is a political act, victory at the highest levels is correspondingly defined in political terms. The implication is that tactical or operational victory without favorable political outcomes is sterile, and by any reasonable assessment that is true.

He describes how success and defeat can be understood differently by opposing sides. In the Israel-Egypt war of 1973, both Israel and Egypt were able to claim victory from their different viewpoints. Even in the Gulf War of 1991, the coalition headed by the US could claim victory because Iraq was pushed out of Kuwait, the maximum goal of the war from the coalition's perspective. But Saddam could also claim victory because he remained in power after the war, which was his key political goal.

But as he goes into an analysis of how "victory is heavily dependent on perspective", the discussion starts to go so far into abstractions that we're up in the clouds. He argues for instance, that since the public is one of the major judges of victory: "As a result, at the strategic level victory and defeat can be as much issues of public perception and even partisan politics as they are of battlefield achievement or diplomatic negotiations."

That sounds a bit too New Agey for me: "victory" is what we think it is; with the right thoughts, we create our own victory.

Because it's one thing to say that the majority of the public in a country make a political judgment about whether "victory" has been achieved and that their opinion will have an effect on policymakers. It's another to say, in effect, that whatever the public decides is "victory" really is. Particularly when he's supposedly trying to define what "victory" is in some objective way.

As his explanation continues, it begins to sound increasingly like he's saying that there really is no objective measure for victory in the so-called "war on terrorism". Or, rather, that there is no objective measure for strategic (political) victory. However, he writes, "At the tactical and in most cases the operational level winning is a military condition, and the assessment rests on reasonably well-understood military criteria."

This sounds an awful lot like the outlines of the stab-in-the-back excuse: the military "won" on their part of the fight (tactical and operational) but the politicians failed on their part (strategic). And my suspicions increase when I read things like this, in a discussion about how the Will of the enemy public is a critical factor in war:

The only method currently available to directly attack will is information operations; all other options attack indirectly through some other aspect presumed to influence will. Information operations, however, are very blunt instruments whose impact is difficult to predict or target. Conversely, if victory is an assessment, information operations are strategically critical in deciding the winner. America'’s inability to come to grips intellectually, physically, or psychologically with this aspect of war in an age where control of information is impossible is a huge part of our current perceived inability to achieve positive strategic results in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bartholomees is not making a stab-in-the-back argument about the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War or the "war on terrorism".

But there is a large body of argument growing out of the stab-in-the-back theory of the outcome of the Vietnam War, a theory widely popular among the officer corps and political conservatives, that emphasizes the central role of American public opinion in counterinsurgency wars. Although Bartholomees doesn't use the phrase in this article, that view of these types of wars typically holds that the US military cannot be defeated in their part of the fight. So therefore the "center of gravity" in such a war is American public opinion, which must be persuaded to support the war.

Not only is the notion highly questionable as a theory of war. But defining American public opinion as the central focus in winning a war also leads to directing those "information operations" (i.e., propaganda) at the American public. And the Pentagon has given in to that temptation in a big way with the Iraq War. (See Pentagon’s Pundits: A Look at the Defense Department's Propaganda Program Democracy Now! 04/22/08.) Despite federal laws against the government conducting propaganda operations aimed at the American public.

Bartholomees' analysis is certainly open to being read as validating that line of thinking.

Tags: j boone bartholomees, stab-in-the-back

The "blame game" over the Iraq War

It still amazes me sometimes that military journals will discuss some major issues relating to the military and to our current wars with a clarity and frankness rarely seen in the Establishment press. And by "clarity and frankness", I mean discussions that don't always put the Republican administration and the current military leadership in the most flattering light.

This article in the July-Aug Military Review reminded me of that again, After Iraq: The Politics of Blame and Civilian-Military Relations by George Mastroianni and Wilbur Scott. They write that the discussion over the next several months is likely to intensify over the topic of who is to blame for the disaster known as the Iraq War:

At issue will be who to blame for what has gone wrong up to that point, and who to blame if things go wrong in the future. The question, "Who gets the blame for mistakes made in prosecuting the war in Iraq?" has shifted focus since the surge. The 2007 increase in the number of boots on the ground and the new counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Iraq mark an important transition in public perceptions of the war. The administration’s decision to surge additional troops to Iraq despite congressional and public opposition provoked an acrimonious debate that foreshadows the next phase of the blame game. Congress debated the inclusion of timelines for withdrawal from in legislation and the administration's plan to surge additional troops to Iraq. The administration and its supporters attacked those who advocated timelines for troop withdrawals or reductions (mainly congressional Democrats) by portraying them as opponents of our troops in the field, determined to cut off funding for Soldiers in harm’s way, to "cut and run," and to offer our enemies easy victory by setting a "surrender date," thus throwing away our chances for "victory."

The administration also worked hard to identify the surge as the preferred strategy of respected, competent military authorities, not politicians. They frequently invoked the views of commanders on the ground to justify the policy and praised General David Petraeus’ COIN expertise, academic credentials, and earlier successes in Iraq. As a result, the public’s perception of the military (particularly its leaders) is now linked to the success or failure of the surge (and the war). The post-surge blame game will implicate senior military leaders far more directly than they have been thus far. (my emphasis)

When our Savior-General David Petraeus (peace be upon him) loses his current infallibility, he is likely to be dumped on heavily by military analysts and retired officers for allowing the Cheney-Bush administration to make him for all intents and purposes the chief political spokesperson for the Iraq War policy these last two years.

This Republican habit of trying to dress up everything they do as simply going along with our infallible generals is dangerous in all kinds of ways.

Mastroianni and Scott are pointing here to something that pretty obvious to those paying attention, which evidently does not include most of our Big Pundits: the Iraq War is an obvious disaster, and everybody involved is scrambling to pin the responsibility on someone besides themselves. As Jack Kennedy commented after the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, success has many parents but failure is an orphan. (Actually he said many fathers, but I thought I would update it.)

They also correctly identify the most important immediate model for the emerging stab-in-the-back theory:

The Vietnam War was a social and cultural watershed for America. Many Vietnam veterans felt betrayed when they returned home amid controversy over the war. Today some feel the U.S. accorded them little of the respect and gratitude now so generously given to veterans of current operations. Some Americans and many veterans believe "stab-in-the-back" antiwar protests at home led to restrictions on the use of military power that tied the hands of the military and caused South Vietnam to fall to the Communists. Others point to misguided policies that top civilian and military leaders pursued at the time. In the coming months, variations of these two failure narratives about Iraq will likely surface.

But I don't really like their formulation here. For one thing, these debates are already furiously under way. By saying they will "surface" in the coming months, they momentarily descend to the level of Big Pundits.

The High Broderism recedes in the next paragraph, though it doesn't vanish entirely:

When the inevitable drawdown begins in Iraq, the battle to interpret the war will begin anew. Thus far, respect for the troops in the field has somewhat muted partisan conflicts over the war. However, divisive, destructive instances of social conflict have occurred. Some compare those who question current administration policy in Iraq with participants in the Vietnam antiwar movement and counterculture. Others on the political right seek to lay exclusive claim to the loyalty of military members by asserting that the media, "liberal elites," and others who oppose administration policy have anti-military, antiwar, and anti-American tendencies. Similarly echoing policy disagreements in the Vietnam era, many on the left summarily dismiss the administration's vision of an achievable and sustainable political-military solution in Iraq. (my emphasis)

At least they leave the (correct) impression that the rightwing criticism is far dingier than that coming from most war critics. Still, there's a bit of the "this side says, the other side says" treatment here. That last sentence doesn't make much sense. After over five years of this war, it's scarcely summary judgment on anyone's part to see how difficult the situation remains. Or that "the administration's vision" has no solid basis in reality. Nor does McCain's magical mystery plan for Victory.

In the following, they are carrying water for the advocates of the stab-in-the-back view. Their article seriously downplays, though it doesn't quite ignore, the available indications that Iraq War veterans are at least as opposed to the war and in favor of rapid withdrawal as the general public. The first paragraph calls attention to the perils of too great a separtion between civilians and the military, which the all-volunteer military has encouraged. But these paragraphs are almost purely ideological:

Because service members are volunteers, and civilians do not share the hardships service members accept, many in the military are not especially receptive to civilian opinions. Some are tempted to ask the illogical but emotionally charged question, "If I’m in Iraq, and you’re at the mall, which of our views has more moral authority?" There is also a strong sense among military members that average Americans simply do not know what is going on in Iraq because they are too far removed from the military experience or because the media distort news reports from Iraq, focusing only on sensational, negative events while ignoring good news.

In spite of the substantial skepticism about the war’s costs within the military, service members also view the Iraq war as a success in a way that civilians do not or cannot. The repeated, lengthy deployments, the hardships of service members and their families, and of course, the casualties, motivate many service members to see the sacrifices they and their families have made in an unerringly positive light. American Soldiers are willing to sacrifice, but for a noble purpose - no one wants to waste their lives and livelihoods on a moral mistake. In this case, while critics repeatedly suggest, "the war has been lost," the only acceptable narrative for sacrifice is the administration’s rhetoric about noble victory. Even though these critics do not blame the military for this predicament - the administration is at fault - service members find it nearly psychologically impossible to agree with them. Civilians have less of a personal stake in seeing things the administration’s way. (my emphasis)

The bolded statements are so egregious that they call into question the credibility of the authors. To suggest that virtually all service members basically agree with the Cheney-Bush administration's line is just not consistent with what we do know about soldiers' opinions.

And the notion that soldiers can only deal with their sacrifices or the loss of close comrades in war by cheering for the war and the administration's political positions on it is just plain counter-factual. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist with extensive familiarity with "survivors" or wars and other extreme situations, including the experiences of soldiers in the Korean and Vietnam was, has written about "survivors' missions" which are an important element of the grieving process. Cheering for the cause is one form of a "survivor mission"; opposing it can be another. (See, for instance, A War Over Meaning By Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell The Nation 09/12/05)

But the authors' analysis in their conclusion strikes me as very plausible:

To be sure, there are different perspectives and competing interests represented: those of the military services, senior and junior officers, and officers with different views on the right way to do counterinsurgency, but none of the narratives focus on the role of civil society. In the future, the political right may find it expedient to deflect blame for what has happened or what might happen away from the Bush administration and onto the next administration, the media, or the majority of Americans skeptical of the war. They may try to do this by articulating a new "stab-in-the-back" theory that focuses on the news media, liberal elites, and a permissive and decadent civilian society as the source of the rot. ...

Tensions between the public and the military may grow after the war. The new administration may be Republican, and if so, a “stay-the-course” strategy will conflict with the weight of public opinion and the realities of an increasingly strained defense establishment. The ensuing disputes over Iraq policy will rekindle the debates that erupted over the surge. If the new administration is Democratic, right-wingers will probably attack its new policies as evidence of a lack of concern, support, and respect for military members and their sacrifices. Members of the military may be politically disposed to respond to such representations by adopting attitudes consistent with the seductive "stab-in-the-back" way of thinking. Such a development would be both divisive and destructive of the great progress in civil-military relations that has taken place since the Vietnam War.

As the end game unfolds, there is every reason to think that the blame game will intensify. Once the war is over, the stakes will be the historical and cultural interpretation of what happened, an interpretation that has the potential to shape American political fortunes for years to come. On the surface, civil-military relations have never been better, but the underlying structural asymmetries between military and civil society could be crucial under certain conditions. Let us hope that our politicians and generals will resist the temptation to make good relations between our citizens and our Soldiers the last casualty of the Iraq war. (my emphasis)

I hope so, too. But I'm sure from what they are saying already that the Republicans will continue to work hard to make sure that such a "last casualty" occurs. In fact, the way things are going, it may be far from the last casualty in that war.

Tags: iraq war, stab-in-the-back, vietnam war

Rummy's propaganda and the stab-in-the-back legend

Stab-in-the-back illustrated on a 1924 rightwing German nationalist election poster (this stab-in-the-back legend was related to the First World War and is called the Dolchstosslegende in German)

This important article from this weekend, Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand by David Barstow New York Times 04/20/08, has received justifiable attention in the liberal blogosphere, though the poobahs of the Sunday morning talks shows didn't see anything in it worth mentioning. Barstow's article describes what was in fact (and probably in law as well) a propaganda operation aimed specifically at the American public, run by the Pentagon, using retired generals, many of whom were defense industry lobbyists, and relying on at least a tacit quid-pro-quo arrangement in which the lobbyists would spout the Rummy line of the day in exchange for "access" to Pentagon officials with decision-making power over contracts.

This story gives a grimly dramatic picture of how deeply corrupt the American news media have become, particularly TV news. As Barstow rights, the cases he discusses describe "a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated".

Historian Gareth Porter (The Pentagon's Corrupt Sock Puppet "Military Analysts" Exposed Huffington Post 04/20/08) and The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel (NYT Investigation Exposes Pentagon Pimps & Propaganda Operation 04/20/08) have both made impassioned calls for public follow-up on the problems described in Barstow's article.

Others have put this story into some historical perspective of the massive dysfunction of our national political press, including Bob Somerby in his Daily Howler post 04/21/08 and Glenn Greenwald in Major revelation: U.S. media deceitfully disseminates government propagandaSalon 04/20/08).

One of the things that particularly caught my attention is how the stab-in-the-back theory of the loss of the Vietnam War played a significant role in this operation. Barstow writes:

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. "This was a coherent, active policy," he said. ...

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

"Oh, you have no idea," Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. "You're back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV." It was, he said, "psyops on steroids" — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. "It’s not like it's, 'We'll pay you $500 to get our story out,' " he said. "It's more subtle."

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon. (my emphasis)

It's important to understand what "psyops" means in this connection, in which Allard's application of the term seems to be unfortunately correct.

Psyops, also known as "information operations", is propaganda aimed at the enemy, pursued as part of a military effort. Leaflets dropped from planes or balloons are a familiar, if fairly primitive and probably low-impact form of psyops.

But in this case, the psyops were directed by the Pentagon and were aimed at Congress and American public opinion. It's not clear if this operation technically violates US laws against propagandizing the US public, although if such operations like this one aren't illegal, they should be.

Because "the enemy" at which this secret psyops operation was aimed was Congress and the American public. How much more explicit does it get than this?

[On Aug. 4, 2005] James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines' [14] deaths [the previous day] further erode support for the war.

"The strategic target remains our population," General Conway said. "We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen." (my emphasis)

And the stab-in-the-back notion is a key part of the mindset that regards the democratic public of the country as the enemy of the Pentagon and its wars:

Many [of the analysts in question] also shared with Mr. Bush's national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation's will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from "enemy" propaganda during Vietnam.

"We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped," he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach "MindWar" — using network TV and radio to "strengthen our national will to victory."

This lazy excuse is unfortunately very popular in the officer corps and is practically a religious dogma for Republican conservatives.

But the notion is false. And its widespread popularity, particularly among the officer corps, is a very serious democratic deficit in the US. As we see in Barstow's story, it also has a toxic interaction with what is probably the most serious democratic deficit of all, the "train wreck" state of our Establishment political news media.

As long as military leaders and civilian officials define the manipulation of American public opinion as a military goal for which the Pentagon can and should be responsible, this kind of thing will happen. The military's emphasis is on achieving results and on protecting operational security. Given a choice, most military officers will play it safe and opt for more manipulation of information and less transparency to Congress and the public.

The separation between "political" and "military" functions may be somewhat fluid in a political theory sense. But in the practice of a Constitutional democracy, those boundaries have to be defined and respected. You could argue that Rummy's bullying, arrogant management style represented a strengthening of civilian control over the military. But, as we see here, Rummy's goal was actually to erase boundaries between what were properly military roles and civilian roles.

We've got the military running an elaborate psyops operation against the American public, mixed with the banana-republic style crony capitalism that is one of the defining characteristics of the Cheney era. And we have Bush publicly hiding behind the skirts of Savior-General Petraeus, pretending that he's just doing what the military tells him to, while Petraeus cooperates with the charade. We have a serious breakdown in the proper distinctions between military and civilian spheres. And it's the job of Congress first of all to recognize and correct the problem. It's also - don't laugh - the job of the mainstream media to expose and criticize this, though it's hard to see how that can happen on the necessary scale without new legislation restricting corporate control of the news media.

But military theorists themselves also have a responsibility to distinguish between democratic and undemocratic ideas in this regard. The notion that the military can or should regard the American public as the enemy in a foreign war is fundamentally incompatible with democratic governance.

They also embrace the stab-in-the-back lie

Military theorists and historians both military and civilian can also address this with honest work on the Vietnam War, as many have, and specific debunking aimed at the dishonest and phony notion that the military won the Vietnam War but the gutless civilians in Congress and the public which was unworthy of its glorious victories generals threw it all away. It's a deeply false version of history. And the ideological conclusions being drawn from it are deeply destructive to democracy. As well as being a lazy excuse for the officer corps to avoid dealing with the very real failings of their own processes and assumptions.

As one of many sound historical treatments of the war that do not indulge this false, ideologically-generated pseudohistory, I would mention here George Herring's America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (1986 edition) and Jeffrey Record's The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam (1998).

It's also up to all of us to do what we can to ensure that the already-emerging stab-in-the-back version of the Iraq War doesn't gain the kind of traction that the Vietnam War stab-in-the-back lie has achieved.

That false claim doesn't have only anti-democratic implications at home. It's also at the foundation of the great Maverick McCain's strategy of opened-ended war in Iraq.

Tags: authoritarianism, stab-in-the-back, propaganda, vietnam war

More Maverick militarism

I've seen a couple of very worthwhile pieces this week on the bold Maverick's foreign policy ideas: McCain's Vietnam Obsession by Mark Benjamin Salon 04/01/08 and McCain's War Thing by Steve Clemons, Washington Note blog 03/31/08.

Clemons has recently confessed to being disappointed not to find more of that discriminating, maverick-type thinking he once perceived in the legendary Straight Talker. But I like the distinction he makes that he says runs across both conservative foreign policy types and liberal/progressive one, "that there are those like McCain who are committed to the militant export of American-style democracy and those who are motivated by other objectives that depend less on the Pentagon".

Now, like any brief summary of a tangled complex of issues, we could nit-pick that endlessly. But we shouldn't forget that there are "liberal hawks" like Obama's (former?) adviser Samantha Power who are anxious to have the US and others enforce a humanitarin vision by military power in various trouble spots in the world. We need to have, and I mean really, really need to have an "Iraq Syndrome" in the US that will hopefully remind most people for a long time to come that war is very risky and unpredictable. Good intentions alone aren't going to in themselves teach anyone Arabic or Urdu, or impart knowledge about the convolutions of ethnic hatreds in the Balkans or the Sudan, or grant magical insight into tribal fueds in Somalia or Pakistan.

Despite Clemons' wish to see a more hopeful side of McCain, there's not much mistaking the harshness of this judgment:

If McCain actually believes what he is saying, it is mind-blowingly frustrating to imagine a president who would commit to a further collapse of the American military machine by adding more security obligations in the next term and not take stock and then mend and repair the miserable condition of America's national security portfolio.

I remember when I wrote articles for my college newspaper, one of the few things that I had edited out was a reference to "the American war machine". Okay, Clemons said "military machine" but still, I'm going to take it as a sign that "acceptable" language about such things is loosening up.

Benjamin's article explains how the supposed dovish tendencies that the Maverick showed in opposing St. Reagan's commitment of US troops to Lebanon, and in demanding that Bill Clinton cut-and-run as quickly as possible after the "Black Hawk Down" incident in Somalia, are actually part of a rigidly hawkish view of foreign and military policy. (The distinction between foreign and military policy in the Maverick's worldview isn't really clear to me, but I'll return to that another time.)

It has to do with the Weinberger/Powell Doctrine. This was the theory to which conservatives and much of the officer corps adhered during the 1980s and 1990s, which Benjamin summarizes well.

What his article doesn't make clear is that the Weinberger/Powell Doctrine assumed that all wars after Vietnam would be conventional wars. It was a way to justify staying out of counterinsurgency (COIN) situations. It also relied heavily on the stab-in-the-back view of the US defeat in the Vietnam War. And Lord knows that's a healthy instinct in itself!

But it also in practice incorporated a heavy, even extreme, reliance of air power. And the Maverick himself seems to be as true a believer in the magic war-winning capabilities of air power as Rummy was, if not more so. Benjamin recalls the Maverick's prescription for the upcoming Gulf War when he said in October, 1990, "I believe that a scenario of 10,000 or so is not unreasonable or unbelievable, but I'll tell you this: We'd better not fight a tank-war battle on the ground. We'd better use what we've got the most of and the best of and that's our air power."

That gives us a strong hint of part of how McCain will try to fight his 100 Years War in Iraq, by increasing tonnages of bombs dropping on "terrorist hideouts" in crowded urban areas.

Benjamin also quotes the Maverick's campaign's "director of foreign policy", Randy Scheunemann, saying, "The right way to think about Vietnam is, think very carefully about getting in before you get in, about the goals and how do you plan to achieve those goals. If you get involved, prosecute it to victory."

The real stinker in that formulation is the v-word. Unfortunately, our Maverick like many an Republican war fan seems to be able to conceive Victory only in terms of the unconditional surrender of the enemy in any given conflict. But wars in which that is a realistic or desirable goals are almost as scarce as WMDs in Iraq were in 2003. The Maverick in his post-POW studies seemed to have concluded that seeking unconditional surrender would have been a desirable goal to seek in the Vietnam War.

At any rate, something like unconditional surrender - whatever that might look like in Iraq - seems to be the idea behind this formulation, "Speaking on behalf of the McCain campaign, Scheunemann said the Arizona senator has a very clear exit strategy for Iraq: 'victory with honor.' "

Tags: mccain, stab-in-the-back, vietnam war

Stab-in-the-back: a militarist view of warfare

The Mar-Apr edition of the Army's Military Review has a good example of someone using a stab-in-the-back view of the Vietnam War to advocate viewing domestic public opinion as a military target, Hybrid Wars by Jack McCuen:

We in the West are facing a seemingly new form of war—hybrid war Although conventional in form, the decisive battles in today's hybrid wars are fought not on conventional battlegrounds, but on asymmetric battlegrounds within the conflict zone population, the home front population, and the international community population. Irregular, asymmetric battles fought within these populations ultimately determine success or failure. Hybrid war appears new in that it requires simultaneous rather than sequential success in these diverse but related "population battlegrounds." Learning from the past, today's enemies exploit these new battlegrounds because the West has not yet learned to fight effectively on them. We still do not fully appreciate the impact and complexity of the nuanced human terrain.

One need only read our daily newspaper headlines or listen to TV and radio news about the insurgencies being fought within the populations of Afghanistan and Iraq to understand the validity of the above observations. Insurgencies rage within these conflicts' penetrated and often alienated populations in spite of our having first defeated the enemy's conventional forces. Our population at home usually wearies of the protracted struggles, waged, until recently, with little apparent progress. We are in danger of losing if we fail to fully understand the human terrain m these conflicts, as well as, perhaps, the even more decisive battlegrounds of public opinion at home and abroad. (my emphasis)

Public opinion is a part of the politics of war. And in a democratic society in wartime, public opinion should be shaped by free public debate, and as little as possible by military propaganda directed at the "home front".

It's a very different thing to define domestic public opinion as a military factor, as McCuen does here.

It takes him only until the second page to use the Vietnam War to argue that point:

In Vietnam, after a flawed beginning, we learned from our mistakes and successfully won the battle within the South Vietnamese population - although we ultimately lost the war when massive U.S. home front political pressure forced us to withdraw" (my emphasis)

That notion is one of the most poisonous legacies left to us by the administration of Jerry Ford the National Healer, whose chiefs of the White House staff were, successively, Rummy and Dick Cheney.

McCuen is an old-time counterinsurgency theorist. He argues, accurately, that the US military radically de-emphasized counterinsurgency after the Vietnam War. And the following argument is true so far as it goes, in situations where there is effectively...

... no host government, indigenous military, or police forces at the outset [of a conflict]; much of the political, economic, and social infrastructure will also likely have been destroyed or seriously damaged. These conditions will radically change how our military conducts counterinsurgency. As they have in Afghanistan and Iraq, our military forces will initially have to be responsible for conducting political and economic operations within the population. Until sufficient security and stability have been established to allow other government agencies to first participate and later assume responsibility, military forces will have these burdens while concurrently conducting military operations.

Although he talks about public opinion in the country where the war is actually going on and also international opinion, those appear to be largely window-dressing. His main argument focuses on how the military should attempt to control public opinion among the public at home. As in this passage:

Our current enemies have targeted the populations as their battleground of choice. They fully recognize that they do not have the military strength to defeat us in a conventional or nuclear war. However, past experience demonstrates to them that they can win wars within the population that we have not learned to fight. know they can protract such wars until home front and international community discouragement over casualties and cost force us to throw in the towel and withdraw. Our enemies’ strategic and tactical objectives are thus not to destroy our conventional military forces and seize critical terrain, but to seize, control, and defend critical human terrain until we give up the fight. The decisive battles of the hybrid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are being fought within the population battlegrounds - the populace in conflict, the home front populations of the intervening nations, and the international community. (my emphasis)

By blurring these concepts together, it softpedals - for those who aren't paying attention - the radical differences between the military conflict abroad, public opinion in the country undergoing civil conflict, and "home front' public opinion, in our case public opinion in the US.

Some such thinking as this lies behind Maverick McCain's policy of the 100 Years War for Iraq. The possibility that conditions in the country at war could defeat the US, or at least deny the US any clear-cut "victory" is absent. As is any recognition that that in a democracy it is the business ultimately of the voters to decide about war and peace, not the military brass. Or any notion that the intervening power may reach a point where it is rational to think that the costs of the war are exceeding any gains likely to come from continuing it. Here, public opinion at home is treated as a military front in the war.

It's hard to see how, in this perspective, any opposition to any war could be seen as anything other than unpatriotic. And as not just giving aid and comfort to the enemy - the Constitutional definition of treason - but of actual being part of the enemy.

Just how this approach is consistent with legitimate democratic practice is unclear to me.

This is another standard element in the stab-in-the-back pseudohistory of the Vietnam War, how Gen. Creighton Abrams won the war:

It was our faulty attrition strategy - our failure to orient operations on the population - that deprived the United States of success early in the Vietnam War. Fortunately, General Creighton Abrams assumed command of operations in Vietnam in 1968, and he recognized that the population was the key to success. Abrams radically changed the strategy to embrace a "one-war battlefield" where "clearing, holding, and rebuilding" the population was the critical objective of all military and civilian forces in South Vietnam; in other words, Abrams fought a hybrid war. (my emphasis)

Also, "in other words", McCuen's "hybrid war" notion is basically stab-in-the-back pseudohistory transmuted into counterinsurgency theory.

And, then, there's the final key element of the stab-in-the-back story, the gutless civilians at home caving after our glorious military had essentially secured Victory by 1972. "However," he writes, "even though the counterinsurgency war within its population had been virtually won, South Vietnam was far from able to defend itself in a conventional war against North Vietnam’s 20 battle-hardened, regular divisions without U.S. support." That would be in 1972, 11 years after the Kennedy administration committed large numbers of military "advisers" to South Vietnam, seven years after the Johnson administration "Americanized" the war by taking on the lead role in the counterinsurgency. And then:

By then, Congress had prohibited this support by law. Also, Washington had never allowed its forces in Vietnam to block the avenues of potential attack within/from Cambodia and Laos. The prohibition against U.S. support and our failure to seal off South Vietnam against future North Vietnamese conventional attacks assured the South’s ultimate downfall in the spring of 1975.

This interpretation of matters was encouraged by the Ford administration. And did I mention that at that time Rummy was Ford's White House chief of staff and Dick Cheney the deputy chief?

And here's another standard element of the stab-in-the-back dogma, Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831):

The current military term "strategic center of gravity" is the appropriate vehicle for thinking about the elements of success in hybrid wars. Clausewitz defined "center of gravity" as the "hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends ... the point at which all our energies should be directed." What all this means for us is that to succeed in a hybrid war, we must first identify proper strategic goals (in military parlance, "strategic end states"), and then go about achieving them by directing all our energies toward accomplishing certain strategic objectives. In hybrid war, we will attain our desired end states only by—

• Conducting conventional operations that carefully take into account how destroying or neutralizing the enemy nation’s governmental, political, security, and military structures will play out in the longer term.

• Clearing, controlling, and counter-organizing the indigenous population through a values-oriented approach that fosters legitimacy.

• Winning and maintaining support for the war on the home front(s) and in the international community. Doing so means maintaining legitimacy and avoiding losses through incompetence.

He elaborates that all these fronts, including democratic public opinion at home, must be considered as parts of a "holistic attitude toward war", a "one-way" strategy as he calls it in which public opinion at home is as much a military target as enemy fighters:

Not surprisingly, the battle to achieve the third objective of gaining and maintaining public support requires different strategies, tactics, doctrine, and weapons than those used to control the physical and human terrain in combat zones. Competent strategic communications and the perception of moral legitimacy become the determining factors. Our current asymmetric enemies have, with a few exceptions, been much more successful than we have in influencing public perceptions. However, we can reverse this trend and control the moral terrain by judiciously executing our one-war "clear, control, and counter-organize" strategy.

That, of course, does not mean that success among the indigenous population is not decisive—success there is vital to establishing legitimacy and thereby maintaining home and international support. Knowing this, the enemy will often mount combat operations in the field hoping to give the impression that the intervening forces are losing, or at least not winning, and so influence both their enemy’s home front and international public opinion. They expect a country to cut its losses and retreat strategically when public opinion sours. Evidence from Vietnam and Somalia has led them to such a conclusion. (my emphasis)

The underlying assumption of this seems to be that a war should never be ended until some goal has been achieved, a goal that sounds implicitly like unconditional surrender of the other side. Otherwise, how could he treat cost-benefit calculations on the part of a democratic public as just as much a target in the war as the enemy soldiers? Because whatever the enemies in a particular situation may think or hope, anyone in their right mind would keep in mind what the costs of a war versus likely gains would be. And that calculation may look different in, say, the sixth year of a war than it did in the days of its shock-and-awe beginnings.

McCuen argues that the military's task in such wars is:

... simultaneous achievement of the three strategic aims described above - target lethal force carefully; clear, control, and counter-organize the people; work the information operations - will lead decisively to achievement of strategic objectives and post-bellum success.

Note again that "the people" blurs the distinction between the population of the country where the conflict is occurring and the "home front". But it's hard to read this any other way than as assuming that counter-organizing and "information operations" (propaganda) would be directly at least as much toward the "home front" as at the population in the country where the conflict is happening.

If McCuen is aware that for the military - or the civilian government, for that matter - to directly propagandize the voting public is illegal under American law. It can scarcely be said that the law is strictly enforced in that matter. But the law is there in recognition of basic principles of democracy and of the demarcations between military and civilian functions that the US has observed in the past, even in wartime, however imperfect the observance may have been in some cases.

The vision Jack McCuen articulates in this article is straight-up militarism. In the viewpoint he outlines, public opinion at home is as much a military target as enemy troops on the battlefield. Once a war is initiated, the generals should decide how it will be fought and the job of civilians (citizens and politicians alike) is to cheer for the war and give the generals whatever they say they need to prosecute it. And waging "information operations" against the democratic public at home is not only legitimate, but absolutely necessary.

Whatever else it may be, this is not an approach that is compatible with democratic government.

Tags: jack mccuen, stab-in-the-back, vietnam war

A sign of the times

Now this is an eye-catching title for an article, Can the United States Iraq-ify the problem: Consider the Soviet Lessons in Afghanistan by Maj. Daniel Morgan Small Wars Journal 02/07/08. Maj. Morgan writes:

After six years of conflict with religious-inspired resistance, Soviet public support for Afghanistan waned, military leaders grew weary and cynical, and Afghan resistance increased in strength and willpower. Currently, public pressures for an Iraqi withdrawal are rising and if not carefully managed could result in a similar outcome like the Soviet efforts to "afghan-ize" the Afghan conflict. As US politics push to "Iraq-ify" the problem, leadership should note past withdrawals from counterinsurgencies to ensure a US withdrawal does not set preconditions for an Iraqi collapse and US failure. This paper analyzes Soviet-Afghan withdrawal negotiations and recommends that the US implement an internationally-monitored, regional “compromise and enforcement” negotiations strategy because any publicly announced timetable without provisos to modify or reverse the withdrawal will only accelerate the withdrawal itself and likely lead to civil war in Iraq and result in long term repercussions for US foreign policy. (my emphasis)

We always have to be on the lookout for stab-in-the-back arguments that blame the American public and Congressional war critics for losing the Iraq War. But when he writes that withdrawal "if not carefully managed" could lead to bad outcomes, he's got a point. I used to open all my posts on the Iraq War with a quotation from George McGovern and Jim McGovern, "Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." (Withdraw from Iraq Boston Globe 06/06/05).

What the two McGoverns wrote in 2005 still holds:

One thing, however, is clear: Washington cannot determine Iraq's destiny. It doesn't matter how many times Condoleezza Rice or Donald Rumsfeld visit. It doesn't matter how many soldiers we deploy. The myriad factions in Iraq themselves must display the political will to demand a system of government that respects the diversity that exists in their country.

There are no easy answers in Iraq. But we are convinced that the United States should now set a dramatically different course - one that anticipates US military withdrawal sooner rather than later. We should begin the discussions now as to how we can bring our troops home.

And despite the fact that war supporters like to claim that war opponents ignore the potentially bad aftermath of US withdrawal, the also wrote:

There are no guarantees that militarily withdrawing from Iraq would contribute to stability or would not result in chaos. On the other hand, we do know that under our occupation the violence will continue.We also know that our occupation is one of the chief reasons for hatred of the United States, not only in the Arab world but elsewhere.

Any hope of withdrawing with some reasonably good outcome - if there ever was such a hope - vanished long ago. We have only bad options in Iraq. But some, the Maverick McCain's 100 Years War plan comes to mind, are much worse than others.

Although I'm very much in favor of setting a near-term deadline for US withdrawal, Morgan does have some important observations about what we can learn from the Soviet disaster in Afghanistan that may have relevance to our Cheney-Bush-McCain disaster in Iraq. For instance:

Three years after the Soviet intervention in 1979, the Soviets demonstrated the foresight to commence with diplomatic negotiations for an exit strategy in the Afghan crisis. In 1982, with United Nations mediation, the primary actors – Pakistan, Afghanistan, Soviet Union, and US - settled on four points. First, the resolution demanded a politically independent and non-aligned Afghanistan. Second, the Soviets would withdraw all foreign combat troops. Third, Afghanistan would govern with the right of self determination and no outside interference. Lastly, the actors would set conditions for the return of over five million refugees, "in safety and honor." The Soviets and US saw these points as vital for conflict resolution and the regional balance of power. Unfortunately, the debate over a Soviet withdrawal timetable turned negotiations away from political solutions towards military ones that resulted in intensified violence throughout Afghanistan and ultimately a Soviet defeat. (my emphasis)

Unfortunately, much of Morgan's article is a polemic against setting a timetable for withdrawal. In his argument, Gorbachev's decision to set a deadline and get out underlined international negotiations on an orderly exit. Or, as he puts it with double emphasis, "the pronouncement of a timetable ultimately undermined the international legitimacy of the negotiations."

But he frames the story narrowly. Sure, if the Soviets had been willing and able to negotiate an exit in 1982, they probably could have come out of it with less damage to themselves and doing less harm to Afghan society. But, for whatever reason, Gorbachev in assessing the situation six years later in 1988 was dealing with a very different situation. They had clearly failed to suppress the rebellion, the US and Pakistan had no intention of ending supplies and other aid to the rebels, the Sunni recruitment network for foreign jihadis set up by the Saudis was still providing recruits for the holy war against the godless Communists, and he decided to cut his losses and get out.

The Soviet intervention went on for nine years, give or take. On March 19, McCain's war in Iraq enters year six. With no end in sight.

The Soviets never believed that the might Red Army that had turned back Hitler's Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow and eventually turned back the German invasion, still the largest military invasion in human history, could be defeated in Afghanistan by a bunch of scroungy Muslim terrorists brave mujahideen freedom fighters. By the time the Soviets accepted reality and began their witdrawal, they were in no position to prevent a situation in which:

... a newly empowered Mujahideen seized key terrain for positional advantage and leverage upon the Soviet withdrawal which began to unravel the balance of power, worsened the refugee crisis and internally displaced persons crisis, and set conditions for civil war. ...

Consequently, the Soviet military found itself planning, organizing, and executing an accelerated withdrawal without flexibility and unable to meet key termination criteria developed in the negotiations.

But Morgan clearly buys into the stab-in-the-back notion of how dangerous and awful it would be for elected officials in the US to respond to the large majority opinion against the Iraq War:

... when Gorbachev announced in 1988 that the Soviet withdrawal would be complete within nine months and not be linked to stability of the Afghan government, he was attempting to mollify unfavorable Soviet public opinion toward the government because of an unpopular war. ...

Minimize US domestic politics during time of war and within the negotiations of any withdrawal strategy. Soviet politics affected the leadership decisions and the enemy exploited this opportunity. Currently, US frustration and upcoming elections are repeating Soviet-Afghanistan history in Iraq.

This is where the stab-in-the-back model can lead someone. Think about what the major is saying there. We're talking about the Soviet Union. You know, the godless Communist dictatorship, enemy of all civilization and business profits, the Evil Empire, and yadda, yadda.

He's stressing how important and effective public opinion was in the Soviet Union in pressuring their government to pull out of a disastrous war whose costs had long since come to exceed any possible benefits for the USSR. More effective than majority opinion has so far been in the United States, the City On The Hill, the Light Of Democracy To The World, in getting the US out of the Iraq War. Amazing.

Even more, he recommends emphatically, in the context of the whole article I would say it is his most emphatic point, that US leaders be more resistant to public opinion on the Iraq War than the leaders of the Soviet Union were in 1988 over their Afghanistan War. Wow. And, wow.

And that's only part of what he has to say on the subject:

US Congress continues to push for a public withdrawal timetable from Iraq, despite senior US military advice that it would empower the enemy and lead to civil war. Despite an admirable Soviet media plan, the Mujahideen exploited the publicly announced nine month timetable by gaining positional advantage against the Kabul government. Today, US Joint Chiefs of Staff estimates believe a precipitous withdrawal would be "under combat conditions." As the US heads into election debates and likely withdrawal negotiations, US leaders must remain cognizant of Soviet lessons from their withdrawal announcement. Below are some ideas for consideration:

1. Initiate another strong media embed program during the withdrawal phase to influence enemy forces and signatories to adhere to any "compromise and enforcement" agreements. The Soviets initially attempted this course, but their precipitous withdrawal undermined the negotiations and curtailed any media coverage of the withdrawal.

2. Develop a worldwide public relations campaign for the Iraqi government similar to the rebuilding of Kuwait following Desert Storm. The US should consider hiring public relations companies like Fleischmann-Hillard and others to build regional and international confidence in Iraq’s government and institutions. Of course, this plan requires a decision point where the Iraq Government is more effective in its governance and violence at a much lesser degree. (my emphasis)

Since Morgan's point is that American public opinion is the key perception problem for the 100 Years War plan his negotiations proposal, it's safe to assume that the "worldwide public relations campaign" would be primarily directed at American public opinion. I know this will sound as "quaint" as the notion of the Geneva Conventions does to Dick Cheney, but it is illegal for the US government to overtly propagandize the American public. Congress, the press and the general public need to be more aware of how much that law is evaded and probably much violated in practice.

In his conclusion, Morgan writes, "The current 'surge' strategy is the right path to victory. However, the enemy is time as well. History suggests that political capital will diminish and a withdrawal to some level is inevitable."

Yes, time is also the enemy. But to Morgan, it appears that time is only the enemy because it undermines support for the war among the US public. And that public opposition could eventually force Congress and the President to be as responsive to public opinion as the Soviet leaders were to their public in the Afghanistan War. Good grief! Do people who write stuff like this ever stop to think about how it sounds to an ordinary reader?

Behind that focus on US public opinion is an assumption of American invincibility. Whether the US stays or goes in Iraq, that view assumes it's entirely a matter of American domestic politics. But time is also an enemy because a protracted conflict itself in a war like this can be damaging to the US in a number of ways. And while a local population may be tolerant or friendly to a hostile occupying power under certain circumstances, in most cases the longer the occupier stays, the more hated they become. The longer we stay, the more narrow our options become. And that would be true even if a majority of the public thought McCain's 100 Years War strategy was just dandy.

By the way, although Morgan doesn't mention it, we and our NATO allies have our very own Afghanistan War going on. It's currently in year 6. Also with no end in sight.

Tags: daniel morgan, iraq war, stab-in-the-back