Matt Yglesias

Ricks’ The Gamble Leaves Out Iraqis

When any book comes to be as highly praised as Thomas Ricks’ The Gamble, my natural instinct is to start looking for the flaws the praisers are leaving out. And Spencer Ackerman, while not denying the book’s virtues, delivers the goods in his review for The National:

We do not learn from The Gamble what the Iraqis – or any Iraqi factions – think of the surge. At the beginning of the book, Ricks prints an account of how an Iraqi witness to the 2005 Marine massacre in Haditha viewed the horror. An analogous Iraqi viewpoint might have complemented his description of an initiative known as “gated communities”, in which Petraeus’s subordinates built huge blast walls to separate Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad from Shiite ones. Petraeus meant the barriers to reduce sectarian violence, but Sunni residents of the Adhimiya neighbourhood protested loudly that the US was ghettoising Baghdad. Al Maliki publicly sided with the protesters, but the walls kept going up. Similarly, Odierno recognised that fighting in the “belts” around Baghdad was key to reducing violence inside the city (slyly, Ricks compares him to Saddam Hussein, who adopted a similar strategy). This peri-urban fighting was fierce and sustained, even if it helped protect the population from the insurgency. How did the Iraqis view this predicament? [...]

It’s possible that Ricks’s blindness to the SOFA reflects that of his sources. During the month when the SOFA was signed, Odierno tells him, “I would like to see a… force probably around 30,000 or so, 35,000” in 2014 or 2015 – years after the SOFA mandates the US must leave. A discomfort with the prospect of US forces leaving Iraq permeates the quotes from Odierno’s deputies. “The American military is trying to persuade the American people that this is going to take a long time,” Odierno aide Maj James Powell says. Emma Sky, a British liberal who improbably serves as Odierno’s political adviser – and who took the job, she says, to see if the US could “exit with some dignity” – tells Ricks: “We have to buy time in the US to complete the mission.” There is no recognition evident in their quotes that it is the Iraqis, not the Americans, who ultimately decide when the mission is completed.

To lean a bit speculatively, but not too much I would say, I think we can conclude that the limits of Ricks’ perspective reflect the limited perspective of his sources—sources within the U.S. military. And that this, in turn, reflects the fairly inherent limits of an imperial enterprise. The American military forces charged with administering Iraq report to politicians in Washington, DC who report to voters and interest-groups scattered throughout the country. Whether or not one acknowledges Iraqi opinion to be, in some sense, the “center of gravity” of one’s counterinsurgency campaign the fact of the matter remains that one’s key bases of support are all back home. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid pose a much more credible threat to cut off your supply lines than does the insurgency. Naturally, then, the focus remains to a large extent on sentiment back home.

Meanwhile, for Iraq to be run decently, it’s really necessary that Iraq be run by people who are accountable to Iraqis. Which means that Iraq needs to not be run by foreigners. Which is precisely why Iraqis from across the spectrum were able to unite around the principle that the Americans have to go. And it appears that the new Obama administration recognizes that reality and is planning to leave. And thanks to the security gains associated with the surge, we’ll get to do so with our heads held much higher than they would have been had we started leaving in 2006. But the strategic, human, and material costs of dragging things out have been high and all the successes of the surge period didn’t change the fact that in the end we need to go.

The Gaza Tunnels

Will Saletan writes on “How to Close the Gaza Tunnels”. But as Blake Hounshell explains, “It’s really terrible advice — almost a parody of the worst sort of technocentric thinking that military reformers like H.R. McMaster have been fighting against for decades.” Blake recommends this piece from Michael Slackman on the Gaza smuggling issue.

Common sense works here, too. It’s just clearly not the case that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is primarily a technical problem related to the difficulty of preventing smuggling. Implementation of a political solution would entail technical aspects, but the idea that a political solution needs to wait for a complete and total resolution of all the technical aspects of Israel’s security problems just ensures that neither the politicsl nor the security issues will ever be addressed.

Innovation in Counterinsurgency

Via Spencer Ackerman, this is definitely clever:

For some U.S. operatives in Afghanistan, Western drugs such as Viagra were just part of a long list of enticements available for use in special cases. Two veteran officers familiar with such practices said Viagra was offered rarely, and only to older tribal officials for whom the drug would hold special appeal. While such sexual performance drugs are generally unavailable in the remote areas where the agency’s teams operated, they have been sold in some Kabul street markets since at least 2003 and were known by reputation elsewhere.

“You didn’t hand it out to younger guys, but it could be a silver bullet to make connections to the older ones,” said one retired operative familiar with the drug’s use in Afghanistan. Afghan tribal leaders often had four wives — the maximum number allowed by the Koran — and aging village patriarchs were easily sold on the utility of a pill that could “put them back in an authoritative position,” the official said.

One especially neat thing about this is that unlike guns or money, our Taliban rivals have essentially no prospect of producing large quantities of advanced pharmaceuticals. So if Afghan elders decide they like their ED meds, they’ll really have no choice but to try to stay on our good sides. And conversely, if things don’t work out so well there’s much less potential for a “blowback” problem when you’ve been handing out viagra than when you’ve been handing out rocket launchers.

An Empire of Sentimentality

I think this kind of sentiment from Dave Dilegge at the COIN hotspot Small Wars Journal reflects some dangerous trends in American culture:

Ain’t this just dandy and a pisser to boot – those who have strived – and died – to ensure Iraq’s freedom and future place as a responsible partner on the world scene are brushed aside for the latest bash Bush melodrama and a ‘real hero’ is on the scene – Iraqi who threw shoes at George Bush hailed as hero via The Times. Plenty on this elsewhere, on the dailies and wires – most likely more tomorrow – meanwhile back in the real word… People care, they die or suffer serious wounds, and their contributions are tossed aside for this. A damn shame it is, indeed.

Americans love and respect the men and women who volunteer for military service under our flag. And those of us who’ve had friends serve in Iraq, and especially those who’ve personally served in Iraq and watched friends be killed or maimed, think only the best of the people who’ve been doing dangerous jobs in difficult circumstances. But I think it’s crucially important not to allow these positive sentiments about soldiers and marines to deteriorate into sentimentality about the mission they were undertaking in Iraq. The Iraqi people didn’t ask to be liberarted conquered and occupied by a foreign power that destroyed their country and then immediately set about meddling in Iraqi politics and until just a month or so ago was struggling mightily for the right to permanently station military forces on Iraqi soil contrary to the will of the Iraqi public. Not only did Iraqis not ask for such services, but nobody anywhere has ever asked for them.

The harsh reality is that this was not a noble undertaking done for good reasons. It was a criminal enterprise launched by madmen cheered on by a chorus of fools and cowards. And it’s seen as such by virtually everyone all around the world — including but by no means limited to the Arab world. But it’s impolitic to point this out in the United States, and it’s clear that even a president-elect who had the wisdom not to be suckered in by the War Fever of 2002 has no intention of really acting to marginalize the bad actors. Which, I think, makes sense for his political objectives. But if Americans want to play a constructive role in world affairs, it’s vitally important for us to get in touch with the reality of what the past eight years of US foreign policy have been and how they’re seen and understood by people who aren’t stirred by the shibboleths of American patriotism.

“Winning” The War

I share Kevin Drum’s concern that good news out of Iraq is going to lead people to become over-optimistic about the prospects for counterinsurgency in general:

It’s still the case that in the entire history of the world since WWII, big power counterinsurgency has virtually no success stories. Malaysia is the famous exception, but the circumstances there were unusual, it took a very long time anyway, and it’s almost certainly not repeatable. Likewise, although Petraeus’s success in Iraq is unquestionably due partly to his adoption of superior tactics during the surge, that was only one of the Five S’s that allowed his counterinsurgency doctrine to work. Without taking anything away from him, this just isn’t an indication that COIN is any easier to pull off than it ever has been.

To go stronger here, it’s worth observing that absolutely integral to starting to achieve success in Iraq was the rolling strategic decision to abandon our main war aims. In particular, we’re now neither trying to create a strong Iraqi state, nor trying to create an Iraqi state that isn’t dominated by pro-Iranian forces, nor trying to create an Iraqi state that’s a base for American military power, nor especially trying to create a stable Iraqi democracy. I think all of those decisions were the right decisions, based in smart pragmatic thinking about Iraqi realities and American interests. But if we didn’t want to do that stuff, that we could have just not invaded in the first place. Which is exactly what we should have done!

But this is an important point. It seems that Bill Kristol is running around saying “we won the war” in Iraq. In the real world, back in 2004 when liberals were proposing that the United States radically curtail its objectives in Iraq and agree to a firm date for leaving, conservatives called that proposal “losing.” I’m glad they’re now willing to lower their horizons and accept less. But the implausible partisan spin doesn’t change the fact that the war’s been a strategic disaster. Nor does it change the fact that Iraq looks to me more like a lesson in the limits of counterinsurgency than its promise. But it doesn’t seem to me that it’s being read that way. America is a country of optimists and a country that loves the uniformed military and the idea of success, so I think folks are going to look at the very equivocal “success” of 2007-2008 in Iraq and possibly reach some very unsound conclusions about the prospects for succeeding at other ventures.

The War’s End

SOFA and security pact pass Iraqi parliament — US forces will leave by 2011 and the only sense in which it isn’t a fixed timetable is that they might leave sooner. Days ago I read something relevant that I strongly disagreed with on the Abu Muqawama counterinsurgency blog:

Regardless, at no point were either Sen. McCain or Sen. Obama key players in future U.S. policy in Iraq. In fact, either of them was going to inherit a course — negotiated by the Iraqis and U.S. policy-makers in Baghdad — that might or might not have looked anything like what they wanted to do. It was Sen. Obama’s good luck that his vision of a future U.S. presence in Iraq looked a lot like the vision of the Iraqis.

It’s not luck that liberals’ vision of a future U.S. presence in Iraq was closer to Iraqis’ vision than was the vision of America’s neo-imperalist camp. Rather, liberals’ take on the matter has always been informed by both awareness of actual Iraqi public opinion (which has been hostile to the American presence since at least 2004) and to the folly of empire more broadly. It’s not a coincidence that when you look at the annals of counterinsurgency “success” stories — Kenya, Malaya, etc. — the success looks pretty equivocal and the occupying power winds up leaving in the end.

Had out policy not been dominated by foolish dreams of a US-dominated Iraq, we could have extricated ourselves with honor and dignity over the course of 2005 — declaring victory at the formation of the post-Saddam Iraqi government. Instead, we pursued a bloody and costly alternative course for years before, eventually, even the war’s keenest proponents came to recognize the realities of of the situation.

The Petraeus Solution

A few weeks back, Glenn Beck suggested that we should put General David Petraeus in charge of oversight for the $700 billion TARP program:

Spencer Ackerman has some related thoughts about counterinsurgency and fiscal stimulus:

Clearly, we’re not facing an insurgent threat in the U.S. that requires COIN tools for remediation and so what I’m saying here is pretty silly and astrategic. But it’s always been weird to hear military officers moot suggestions for dealing with “root causes” of insurgencies by massive government jobs programs, increasing the capacity of the state and so forth, since if you ever suggested in the U.S. that people should deal with crime by, say, getting the goverment to give poor people jobs you’d be considered some sort of squish.

I don’t think it’s all that silly. Both a counterinsurgency and a systemic bank crisis are situation in which standard monetary policy interventions aren’t going to be sufficient to generate job growth. I’m sure Petraeus would have been happy to just have the Iraqi central bank cut interest rates and forget all about the jobs program if there were any chance of that actually working. But it wouldn’t work so we got a big jobs program. And of course there is some precedent — like with the Marshall Plan — of progressive leaders using popular military men to help build support for controversial-but-necessary emergency spending endeavors.