Lieutenant General Raymond T. Ordierno, who took over as operational commander in Iraq last month, says that even with additional American troops deployed to Iraq it may take “two or three years” for U.S. and Iraqi forces to turn the tide in that country.
John F. Burns of the New York Times reports that “In his first lengthy meeting with reporters, General Odierno, 52, struck a cautious note about American prospects, saying much will depend on whether commanders can show enough progress to stem eroding support in the United States for the war.”
I’m of two minds about Odierno’s comment.
On one hand, I’m encouraged to see that Odierno understands that support of the American electorate is necessary to persist in a war that seems to have little hope of achieving an end state that U.S. political leaders have consistently been unable to describe in a coherent manner. On the other hand, I’m concerned that Odierno is falling into the standard disclaimer mode of blaming lack of public support for the failures of the military and its commanders to achieve our foreign policy objectives.
Since the fall of Saigon, military pundits in and out of uniform have tried to lay blame for America’s defeat in Vietnam on hippies, the “liberal” press and a limp wrested Democratically controlled Congress. The truth is that we lost Vietnam in Vietnam, thanks to bad generals and politicians who started a bad war for bad reasons and ran it badly for over a decade. Similarly, we’re not presently losing our so-called “war” on terror on the home front. We’re losing it in two third world sinkholes called Iraq and Afghanistan.
Wisdom of Ages
The ancient Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu said “Every battle is won before it is ever fought.”
Sun Tzu also said “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”
And: “When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men’s weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.”
And: “If the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.”
And: “Contributing to maintain an army at a distance causes the people to be impoverished.”
And: “In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.”
And: “It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.”
And: “In war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.”
I reckon you get the idea.
We lost this “war” before we started it. The neoconservative cabal headed by Bill Kristol that goaded us into it had no experience of war, didn’t know how to conduct one, shattered and destroyed and turned loose the Iraqi Army without considering the consequences of doing so, and underestimated the cost of war. Their misadventure has dulled our weapons, and we’re still pursuing an indefinable “victory” after the fact of having fought first and not achieved it.
Kristol and his neo-conspirators seduced us into a distant war that is straining the resources of the state, and yet they seem to have convinced young Mr. Bush into taking steps to prolong it even further.
Our ship of state is bow down in a sand dune. It’s time for us to relieve the conning officers who continue to order “full speed ahead.”
And it’s way past time for us to stop letting them blame us for their failures.
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at Pen and Sword.
and Iraq wasn’t either.
There was a great diary over at Big Orange back in 2005 called “The Yankees Are Losing And It’s Your Fault.” Basically, Zackpunk stated that the reason the Yankees were doing so badly was because the fans weren’t cheering loud enough, not because management put together a team that couldn’t do the job. The parallels are pretty obvious.
and just about as perfect as an anology gets.
Unfortunately, when the Yankees suck, it’s just a bunch of overpaid crybabys complaining.
Nobody dies.
I think it was Heinz von Foerster who said: He who only knows how to use a hammer, sees nothing but nails.
The neocons seem to think that the only power in the world is military power. Therefore, to them, the US should win any war just by showing up. The only reason the US would lose is because of internal opposition to wage wars.
The US is indeed the world’s first military power, but there are more powers in the world than the military. There are spiritual powers, moral powers, diplomatic powers. The US is loosing (check, has already lost) a war in the mideast because it lacked those other powers, not because of the hippies.
Have you perchance ever read The General by C.S. Forester?
No… can you tell me why you recommend him? Wikipedia says he writes military novels…
I’d check out a copy from the library.
Forester makes the analogy that the Brits who ran WWI were like primitives trying to pull a screw out of the floor with a claw hammer, and who could never grasp the concept of screws and screwdrivers.
Even if we’re just talking about military power, there are different kinds of military power. If you want another analogy (I love them), consider Bill Cosby’s routine about the referee doing the coin toss at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. “All right, colonists win the toss, colonists get to hide behind trees and rocks and wear anything they want, British have to wear red coats and march in straight lines.” (I forget exactly how it goes, but you get the idea.) Except that this time the Iraqis won the toss.
Bush either forgets, doesn’t realize, or doesn’t care that we are an occupying power fighting an indigenous insurgency. He and his followers chant “We have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” like this was some kind of World War I trench warfare where you can dig in and hold the line. They don’t realize that the enemy is all around them and can be literally anywhere.
Back to the hammer and nail analogy: Neocons are fighting terrorism as if it were a sovereign state, using conventional warfare. Police work is the way to prevent terrorists acts.
Now, if you want to end terrorism…I have a few ideas on how to fight terrorism. Tanks and missiles are not involved:
If people still want to bomb you after that then the world makes no sense… live by the sword, die by the sword…
There are certainly others. I can think of a few, but they all boil down to: Stop pretending like we own the world.
In particular, we need to be a lot more sensitive about cultural imperialism. You know, the idea that the American way of life is the only way of life worth living, and the English language is the only language worth speaking. And we need to quit making movies and TV shows that carry the message that any Arab not named Danny Thomas, Jamie Farr or Omar Sharif is an evil bad guy.
For starters.
not just “stop pretending like we own the world”… I think the only way the United States will retain superpower status in the next century is if it follows the Spiderman Principle: with great power comes great responsibility.
Not only must the US not act like a spoiled child, it must act like a responsible adult. There are dangers to the world where US leadership is needed: aids, global warming, world poverty, hate wars.
Right, but we can’t pretend that our solutions are the only solutions. When we go into an area, we have to be sensitive to the local culture and history, not pretending the locals were just less fortunate proto-Americans. If you’ve ever read The Ugly American, you know what kinds of solutions I mean. Instead of selling off the mineral rights of a country to enrich a few multinational corporations and the power elite of the country, for instance, we should be doing things like designing bicycle-powered computers or teaching them how to increase the yield on their farms with crop rotation.
Evil means lead to evil ends: helping dictators is not helping, creating a “good business envirnment” is not helping. On the other hand, doing things like, you know, aiding the sick and hungry, sharing knowledge, those things are helping.
The US needs and enormous dose of honesty and forthrightness, especially with itself, in order to move on.
Well, they ignored Sun Tzu going in too… I still remember Gen Wallace (think I am recalling that rightly) who was quoted from around Kut, “This isn’t the enemy we war gamed against”.
Lost… as we invaded.
Yes, I think it was William Wallace.
And I’ll tell you what, the war games we play are totally useless, except as a tool to “prove” that everybody’s favored system/doctrine works.
Until, of course, the next war proves that the war game was rigged.
War games are fun and interesting. I used to work for a company that made games. Most of our line was roleplaying games, but we had a couple of wargames, including a Battle of the Bulge simulation and a game that simulated what would have happened had we been able to complete the raid on the US embassy in Teheran in 1979.
The first thing you learn about gaming is that if you don’t expressly prohibit an action in the rules, someone will give that action a try to see what happens. (Our war cry when my friends and I tested such things was “It doesn’t say you can’t!”) In fact I seem to remember an actual military wargame preparing for the invasion of Iraq where the side simulating the Iraqis completely routed the United States by trying something the organizers of the simulation hadn’t thought of. The solution to that was apparently not to come up with a counterplan to the Iraqis’ strategem, but to prohibit the Iraqis’ plan and run the game again.
That’s the sort of thinking that lands you in military trouble. Your opponent doesn’t care if you outlaw a particular tactic. If they think it’ll defeat you they’ll try it anyway.
i remember that
retired marine lt general Paul K VanRiper,, learned his chops in vietnam…
they couldn’t have gotten it more wrong if they’d tried.
if they have their way and go after iran for real…
ITMFA
Now that you bring that up I remember thinking something like, “If I was the Iranians I would probably do something very much like that.”
I just hope we can stop them before they decide to try it for real.
Yes. MCO2.
I wish I had the book with me. His theory of war explains the US failure perfectly. He says there are three levels to war, from top to bottom: Political, Strategic and Tactical.
Now, for any well thought out action, one must have a clear goal. In the case of war, the goals of the bottom levels were dictated by the goals from the top levels. That is, tactical goals are decided by strategic goals, and strategic goals by political goals.
After the US military toppled Saddam, it seemed to expect that democracy would flourish magically. It had no clear vision of what it wanted to achieve politically other than ” a free Iraq”, as vague a goal as you could make one.
The lack of a clear political goal meant no clear strategy and, at the tactical level, frustrated and scared soldiers just driving around, not knowing what they are supposed to do.
Right wingers seem to think that you only need two things to win a war: 1) firepower and 2) internal political will to continue fighting. To them, wars are about huge guns and shutting up the hippies. They didn’t thin, for example, that creating a free Iraq would mean creating an autonomous Iraq. How do you order someone to be autonomous?
Clausewitz famously said that war is politics continued by other means. To the neocons, it seems that politics is war temporarily waged through other means.
Clausewitz famously said that war is politics continued by other means
Somehow they hear this as: Why talk when you can fight?
But I don’t think that is what he meant.
The series of Sun Tzu quotes followed by the one-paragraph summary of mistakes is elegant and forceful. Please consider making this the center of a brief essay that isn’t tied to current events. I can imagine it having traction in circles that are more positive toward war, with Sun Tzu as the hook.
The ancient Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu said “Every battle is won before it is ever fought.”
Far be it from me to attempt to improve upon Sun Tzu, but in rereading the ancient wisdom it seems that this statement would have been more accurately phrased as every battle is decided before it is ever fought. There are always at least two opposing sides, one of which will be deemed the winner. The other will not.
But, of course, in waging war, we are all losers.