New at Reason

Tim Cavanaugh | September 16, 2004

Michael Young sees a light at the end of the Vietnam/Iraq-comparison tunnel.

Comments

|9.16.04 @ 2:55PM|#

Doug Bandow easily sinks Michael Young's argument.
And, if you still need more good points, see Patrick Buchanan's latest in AntiWar.com.

Justin Raimondo|9.16.04 @ 3:00PM|#

What argument? Young doesn't bother making one. He simply reiterates the neocon line that the "real" debate is between the "gradualists" and the "confrontationalists," and then proceeds from there.

Shannon Love|9.16.04 @ 3:17PM|#

"The third question, whether the war in Iraq can be won, is only now beginning to be asked."

It would be helpful if (1) anybody had any idea what "winning" means in this context or (2) if a binary state of win/lose applies at all. This isn't a sporting even or even an old style battle or war between integral groups that cleanly end when one or another of the coherent groups quits.

There's never going to be a Victory in Iraq day like V-E or V-J day in WWII just like there never was a Victory in the Cold War day. In the Cold War people just looked around one day and noticed that it was over. The entire process took well over 5 years and during the process itself nobody was at all sure what was really going on.

Iraq is not ritualized warfare, rather, it is a process of organic transformation with violence being one of the tools. Even in the best case scenario we will never "win" in Iraq. We will just suddenly notice one day that it's been a long time since we saw it on the news. Then it will be over.

At least, as much as anything every is.

|9.16.04 @ 3:33PM|#

Justin -- You've got to put a leash on that knee, it's jerking far too predictably. The argument is pretty simple if you read beyond beyond paragraph 7, and it has nothing to do with advancing the neocon line: it's that, thanks to the paradigm of Vietnam, and the concomitant tendency to judge the Iraq war entirely on how it affects America, the administration has given up on what it claimed it wanted to do in Iraq. If anything, I'm criticizing Bush on this and saying that any solution in Iraq must come from a better understanding of the dynamics there. I think democracy, a pluralistic constitution and more long-term reconstruction was precisely what Iraqis would have welcomed. Alas, those aims may now have been abandoned.

|9.16.04 @ 3:54PM|#

Michael Young,

Amid the comparisons, spurious or otherwise, between the reality of Iraq and Vietnam...

You mean instead of the attempt to compare it to WWII? I have a far better comparison than either of these; try the US intervention in the Phillipines.

In that context, people are more likely to brush off tomes by David Halberstam, Bernard Fall and Neil Sheehan to understand what must be done, than by those who actually understand Iraq.

And they "understand" Iraq how? The pro-war crowd has yet to actually demonstrate that they understand Iraq (neither has the anti-war crowd either).

It was about the United States.

How could it not be? Its hard to imagine a state undertaking a war which isn't about that state. I mean, duh!

Conway was echoing an old military rant pervading discussion of Vietnam: that wars are lost through excessive civilian interference in military affairs.

This sort of thinking goes back at least to Sun Tzu, and in the American experience, at least to the Revolutionary War; in other words, it is not unique to the Viet Nam discussion, or to the Iraq discussion.

Either way, one can hear the resonance of Vietnam in that implicit exchange.

What you're hearing is the themes expressed in most wars.

"The lesson of Vietnam is that you can't win these wars via military means. You have to build a political structure that organizes public support and mix it with military might."

Sure you can "win" these wars via military might; but the question is, do you want to? Do you want to repeat the French experience in Algeria during the 19th century? Or the American experience in the Phillipines?

Apparently gone because of this is any notion of Iraq becoming a democratic centerpiece in the Middle East...

That was pure infantile fantasy from the start; it reminds me of the "civilizing" or "christianizing" dreams of some 19th century Europeans.

Gone, too, it seems, is the careful consideration American officials once gave to a new Iraqi polity...

What the hell? Ahmed Chalabi was about as "careful" as they ever came to that issue.

It preferred to defer to Ayatollah Ali Sistani...

Of course it did; that is part of a long tradition in US foreign policy - under Democrats and Republican administrations - of perferring to deal with one point man in another country that I've observed over many years. Of course, that's often because the US has little choice in the matter.

Gone too are the sensible long-term priorities the Bush administration had set for Iraq.

Well, the obvious reason why is because they can't get the short term priorities met - namely meeting the country's security needs.

The current obsession with Vietnam is hardly valueless, but it is stifling.

That I can agree with; but I think that the current obsession of some hawks with WWII is also stifling.

When thinking about Vietnam, we tend to look at 1968 and beyond, when the Johnson and Nixon administrations sought to exit from the war (even though it would continue for several bloody years). They were effectively operating in a framework of defeat foreseen.

That's a rather revisionist spin. If you actually look at both administration's programs they weren't defeatist; they expected long-term involvement of US forces, etc., to continue, but not US ground forces. Indeed, it was a "gradualist" approach. South Viet Nam and the Lon Nol government were to continue the ground war, whilst the US would continue the air war and the gravy train. Now, maybe in hindsight this appears to be defeatist and they may have been deluding themselves, but their plan was not defeatist in their eyes.

Young, if you seriously think that the Bush administration is going to risk anymore than they have on Iraq, I think you're just fooling yourself. :)

|9.16.04 @ 4:00PM|#

Shannon Love,

Even in the best case scenario we will never "win" in Iraq. We will just suddenly notice one day that it's been a long time since we saw it on the news. Then it will be over.

Which doesn't mean that anything along the lines of Young's fantasies will have been accommplished. Haiti disappeared from the news, but its still a nasty place to live.

Shannon Love|9.16.04 @ 5:17PM|#

Gary Gunnels,

I meant that trying to apply the concept of win/lose to Iraq is very dangerous and massively counterproductive just like it was in Vietnam.

Win/Lose only applies to ritualized events like sports and some wars. Once one side no longer plays by the rules, Win/Lose no longer applies. If there is no consciences of when the game ends, it never does and nobody ever wins or loses.

It's as in business. Despite the titles of many business books, nobody wins or loses in business because the game of business never ends, it just evolves.

The problem with the idea of Win/Lose as applied to events like Vietnam or Iraq is that it gets people to thinking about some definitive event at some definitive time must occur for a win or loss to be declared.

No such event will ever occur in Iraq just like it never occurred in the Cold War. The country will, over a period of years, grow slowly more peaceful and prosperous until we no longer really think about it. There will never be a definitive event were people will say, "there now we've won."

The political problems comes because if people don't see the "win" event they conclude that we must have "lost." Culturally, Americans are especially prone to this type of thinking.

|9.16.04 @ 6:39PM|#

Shannon: I see your point, but every action must have some kind of success/failure judgement or else the action is meaningless. Logically, success or failure must be evaluated in light of the original goals. One of the "rules" that underlies strategic and tactical thinking is that of the "maintainance of the objective." That is, one's methods might change, but a force should stick to its goal and not get distracted by secondary objectives, no matter how tempting. This holds true in political/military Grand Strategy as much as it does on a discrete battlefield. If things are deteriorating, then you have to assume we're "losing," even if we do not know where the finish line actually lies.

It's true that the boundaries between military and civilian authority are a source of contention in every conflict, in every nation. Arguments over strategy and tactics leave a bad taste in the mouth, especially when the war goes badly. The "stab in the back" slur does not originate with Vietnam; the fact that the returning Marine general went out of his way to disown responsibility for what happened in Fallujah is certainly an indicator that a) the war is going badly, regardless of the posts of the desperadoes who think it's all in the media's head, and b) the generals are starting to get their stories straight.

fyodor|9.16.04 @ 6:56PM|#

Regarding civilian "interference" in war, I think it should be looked at in terms of quality rather than quantity, with the operative metaphor being the role of a good boss, where the civilian leadership is the boss and the military is the underling. A good boss, IMO, sets clear goals with input from the underling, and then leaves it to the underling to decide how to carry out those goals, so long as the underling demonstrates competency in doing so, getting involved only when facilitation is called for.

In the case of Falluja, if the administration didn't want a sea of civilian deaths, they apparently shouldn't have ordered the assault in the first place. Omniscience aside, they should have at least checked with the folks on the ground first, in which case, if Conway is to be believed, they would have learned that a smooth and painless victory was unlikely and that attack was not the only means to the desired end. That said, once the administration grasped its mistake, it only made sense to pull back if it perceived that the problems associated with a bloodbath outweighed the immediate military goals within Falluja.

|9.16.04 @ 7:30PM|#

Shannon Love,

Congratulations on starting your own Blog!

|9.16.04 @ 7:32PM|#

Shannon Love,

I meant that trying to apply the concept of win/lose to Iraq is very dangerous and massively counterproductive just like it was in Vietnam.

Its massively counter-productive because your're a hawk, and Iraq is now FUBAR. To be frank, if Iraq were the paradise that some hawks appear to have predicted it would be, you would have no problem declaring victory; now that its FUBAR, you are desperately trying to muddy the waters of analysis by shifting the goal posts, etc.
It's as in business. Despite the titles of many business books, nobody wins or loses in business because the game of business never ends, it just evolves.

A business that goes out of business clearly loses; and a business that succeeds wildly clearly wins.

The country will, over a period of years, grow slowly more peaceful and prosperous until we no longer really think about it.

You - as usual - got the cart before the horse there. Indeed, the country could turn more wartorn and disasterous and we could still ignore it.

BTW, its pretty easy to tell when the Cold War ended; it ended when the USSR ceased to exist; your revisionism denies such a clear demarcation, but it clearly did happen, no matter how much you want to hide your eyes to the events.

|9.16.04 @ 7:37PM|#

Shannon Love,

BTW, I find your comments strange in light of the fact that not too long ago you boasted with some certitude that things which lie within human awareness can be measured objectively and their nature determined with some measure of certainty. You seem to be going back on your earlier statements.

Shannon Love|9.17.04 @ 1:46AM|#

Gary Gunnels,

"A business that goes out of business clearly loses; and a business that succeeds wildly clearly wins."

Your assertion reminds me of the humorous saying, "He who dies with the most toys wins!" The humor comes from the absurdity that existence itself can be won or lost. Businesses are abstractions. They are clusters of humans working toward a common goal and nothing else. The evolve greatly over their existence. Like a human's lifetime, they neither win nor lose. Just like a human, all businesses will eventually "die" in some fashion. Does that mean that all businesses are destined to lose?

The concept of winning and losing only applies to ritualized forms of competition wherein all sides abide by pre-agreed on rules. Without the pre-defined ritual winning and losing cannot be determined. The situation will simply evolve to another state. If the state is better, we may look back upon it and say, "we won" but we are really just making an analogy between a ritual contest and unstructured one.

The problem with Win/Lose as apply to non-ritualized warfare is one of psychology and it's effect on moral and the course of the war. In Vietnam, people kept asking "When are we going to win" or "How are we going to Win" when the conflict would never have any discrete event that we would constitute victory or defeat. Look at the Korean war. We neither won nor lost. In fact, legally it still continues to this day. Not even the end of the Cold War brought the conflict to an end.

In Vietnam people grew disheartened when nobody could provide them with the discrete event and because they were psychologically trapped in the Win/Lose dichotomy, they concluded since there was non "winning" event that we must be losing and doomed to always be so. It would be disastrous to apply the same ideas to Iraq.

"BTW, its pretty easy to tell when the Cold War ended."

So you can provide a definitive widely recognized date for the end of the Cold War? More importantly, can you provide a date whereon the people at the time recognized that it represented the end of the Cold War. I don't think you can because there is considerable academic debate about just when it ended.

"you boasted with some certitude that things which lie within human awareness can be measured objectively

I did not. I said that some subset of things can be objectively measured. I am painfully aware that that subset is only a very small piece of reality. But the things that can be measured should be measured and those measurements used to make decisions.

Shannon Love|9.17.04 @ 1:53AM|#

zorel,

"Congratulations on starting your own Blog"

Thanks, I have also been invited to join the Chicago Boys group blog which is pretty spiffy.

|9.17.04 @ 3:04AM|#

Shannon Love,

BTW, I really find your willingness to turn a blind eye to reality and give into wishful fantasies about the future to be quite disturbing.

|9.17.04 @ 3:11AM|#

Shannon Love,

I have noticed that you do have one continuous red thread throughout your comments: that ignorance is bliss. We can see that in your comments on what should be reported about terrorist attacks, and we can see that here in your thread about the "evolution" of human beings, etc. Things will just evolve; no need to worry about the details; no need to sweat the day to day reality; etc.

|9.17.04 @ 3:26AM|#

Shannon Love,

In sum, winning and losing do not require, discrete, ritualized events to occur; winning and losing can entail entirely self-imposed goals which an opponent can resist, but does not have to define or even know about. Your under-inclusive definition is thus neccessarily, and I think limited because you would rather ignore the present reality for some dreamy future. I think that my statement is demonstrated by your earlier assumptions that Iraq's future is guaranteed to be bright. The Bush administration is not meeting the goals it set out to accomplish; it is therefore losing at this time.

|9.17.04 @ 6:33AM|#

Gary,

You're so right about the ending of the Cold War. I don't think Shannon was into politics at the time, because every person I knew that paid attention, breathlessly watched the coup play out on CNN, and when it was over and the USSR was defunct, we all knew that the Cold War was over. There was much rejoicing!

By the way, nobody as of yet knows how Iraq will play out. I'm way tired of the arguments. In about 20 years, we'll know if the hawks or the doves were right.

|9.17.04 @ 8:03AM|#

Fyodor: hence the military's frequent discomfort with presidents that have little or no military experience. They often are ignorant of what their orders will actually mean, are shocked when the results are in, and blame the military for not warning them beforehand, even though the military thought it was making itself perfectly clear in its arcane professional language.

This is an interesting subject that is often overlooked: the relationship between the men (who are often amateurs or at least political generalists) who make foreign policy and the men (soldiers especially, but also diplomats) who actually carry it out. While the civilians are often pilloried for their meddling, it can be fairly said that Abraham Lincoln, for one, was a better strategist than most of his generals and that generals who seize control of the government usually aren't much more successful than the civilians they replace.

The usual problem with the civilians at the top of the food chain is that they view foreign policy only in terms of its impact on domestic opinion. This explains the short-term thinking, the obsession with image and "messages" sent or received from the enemy. In American politics, it's always better to look "tough" rather than "smart." Giving Fallujah time to settle down before smoking out the bad guys would have been the smart move. Rolling in to tear the place apart right now was the tough policy. I doubt they really gave it much thought at all. They knew what the voters wanted to see on the evening news and issued orders accordingly.

In fairness, I side with the generals because I despise the Administration. But historians who study foreign policy in general often conclude that in all nations it tends to be irrational from the point of view of its intended goals. More often, foreign policy statements and maneuvers are directed at domestic opinion, which is poorly informed about the issues and unable to form a firsthand opinion of its efficacy. They rely on the government to tell them whether or not the government's foreign policy was successful or not, whereas the failures of domestic policy are more evident.

|9.17.04 @ 8:35AM|#

I doubt many of the Neocons really believe that Arab Democracy is possible, so just what is their objective? I think civil war is success to these people.

Wirkman Virkkala|9.17.04 @ 3:34PM|#

I doubt if much good come from the Iraq war, no matter what the American military does now. Because of fool neo-con/neo-imp politicians, it went into the war with lies, and with the very opposite of a rhetorical strategy that could yield good effects on Islamic soil. Now, it's all just blood and hate, and will likely remain such.

I agree with Young that the Vietnam analogy misleads us. But it probably misleads us to be more optimistic than we should be.

Wirkman Virkkala|9.17.04 @ 4:06PM|#

Error in previous post; should read "I doubt if much good can come ..." Missed the word "can"; sorry.

|9.17.04 @ 8:28PM|#

Michael --

Re these two sentences --

1) "I'm criticizing Bush on this and saying that any solution in Iraq must come from a better understanding of the dynamics there. "

This is undoubtedly true and was a good reason not to have gone in or at least to do so with full understanding of the limited result.


2) "I think democracy, a pluralistic constitution and more long-term reconstruction was precisely what Iraqis would have welcomed. Alas, those aims may now have been abandoned."

It is true that many would want that and many more woudl have welcomed it, but many would not. The region isn't primarily the liberals of the Daily Star. Most fellahin prefer clan, tribe, and sect, and most citizens are apathetic about public contribution, a habit made more resilient by past repression of public activity. Even the key word "welcomed" is revealing; it is not the job of Iraqis to welcome but to create and nurture such things. They show no great inclination to do so.

The US ought not be the death ray of democracy but its beacon. The messiah of political liberation for Arabs will come from Arabs. There will be no foreign deliverance. Not even of Lebanon from the shackles of Assad. And if that does happen, it is still an issue when the people will liberate themselves.