A war the West cannot win

[Karmadillo]

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/11/14/paris-attacks-andrew-bacevich-war-west-cannot-win/UVlV0AsL8ddnE8L5gJaTXO/story.html

OPINION | ANDREW J. BACEVICH
A war the West cannot win
NOVEMBER 14, 2015

French President Francois Hollande’s response to Friday’s vicious terrorist attacks, now attributed to ISIS, was immediate and uncompromising. “We are going to lead a war which will be pitiless,” he vowed.

Whether France itself possesses the will or the capacity to undertake such a war is another matter. So too is the question of whether further war can provide a remedy to the problem at hand: widespread disorder roiling much of the Greater Middle East and periodically spilling into the outside world.

It’s not as if the outside world hasn’t already given pitiless war a try. The Soviet Union spent all of the 1980s attempting to pacify Afghanistan and succeeded only in killing a million or so Afghans while creating an incubator for Islamic radicalism. Beginning in 2003, the United States attempted something similar in Iraq and ended up producing similarly destabilizing results. By the time US troops withdrew in 2011, something like 200,000 Iraqis had died, most of the them civilians. Today Iraq teeters on the brink of disintegration.

Perhaps if the Russians had tried harder or the Americans had stayed longer they might have achieved a more favorable outcome. Yet that qualifies as a theoretical possibility at best. Years of fighting in Afghanistan exhausted the Soviet Union and contributed directly to its subsequent collapse. Years of fighting in Iraq used up whatever “Let’s roll!” combativeness Americans may have entertained in the wake of 9/11.

Today, notwithstanding the Obama administration’s continuing appetite for military piddling — air strikes, commando raids, and advisory missions — few Americans retain any appetite for undertaking further large-scale hostilities in the Islamic world. Fewer still will sign up to follow President Hollande in undertaking any new crusade. Their reluctance to do so is understandable and appropriate.

more...

[The2ndWheel]

1. The parable of the tribes

http://www.context.org/iclib/ic07/schmoklr/

The new human freedom made striving for expansion and power possible. Such freedom, when multiplied, creates anarchy. The anarchy among civilized societies meant that the play of power in the system was uncontrollable. In an anarchic situation like that, no one can choose that the struggle for power shall cease. But there is one more element in the picture: no one is free to choose peace, but anyone can impose upon all the necessity for power. This is the lesson of the parable of the tribes.

Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another. If all choose the way of peace, then all may live in peace. But what if all but one choose peace, and that one is ambitious for expansion and conquest? What can happen to the others when confronted by an ambitious and potent neighbor? Perhaps one tribe is attacked and defeated, its people destroyed and its lands seized for the use of the victors. Another is defeated, but this one is not exterminated; rather, it is subjugated and transformed to serve the conqueror. A third seeking to avoid such disaster flees from the area into some inaccessible (and undesirable) place, and its former homeland becomes part of the growing empire of the power-seeking tribe. Let us suppose that others observing these developments decide to defend themselves in order to preserve themselves and their autonomy. But the irony is that successful defense against a power-maximizing aggressor requires a society to become more like the society that threatens it. Power can be stopped only by power, and if the threatening society has discovered ways to magnify its power through innovations in organization or technology (or whatever), the defensive society will have to transform itself into something more like its foe in order to resist the external force.

I have just outlined four possible outcomes for the threatened tribes: destruction, absorption and transformation, withdrawal, and imitation. In every one of these outcomes the ways of power are spread throughout the system. This is the parable of the tribes.

[snagglepuss]

3. bkmd to read later

[Jarqui]

2. Historically, guerrilla warfare / terrorism

has been really tough to beat. Some of the options to beat it are not available to the US (ie occupy and eventually, they'll like you).

Poor war criminal, Dick Cheney thought "I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."

"Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I've talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with them, various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. And like Kanan Makiya who's a professor at Brandeis, but an Iraqi, he's written great books about the subject, knows the country intimately, and is a part of the democratic opposition and resistance. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that. "

Spring 2005

MEQ: On April 9, 2003, you watched the fall of Baghdad on television with President George W. Bush in the Oval Office. Can you describe your feeling?

Makiya: It was a wonderful moment. I think that the liberation of Iraq is a great historic achievement of the United States, and I think that it will go down in history as such. I am very proud to have been in that room on that day.

Boston Globe, March 2013 10 years later
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/03/16/kanan-makiya-regret-about-pressing-war-iraq/k6ZsBxp4sXptfXrcRAocdO/story.html

IN FACT, Makiya rarely, if ever, publicly said the war would be detrimental to the United States. When he told Bush and Cheney that Iraqis would greet Americans with “sweets and flowers,” he was suggesting the cost of the war would be slight and the benefits tremendous. Makiya’s stubbornness—he told The New York Times in 2007 that “people shouldn’t feel the need to apologize”—enrages his detractors. They describe Makiya variously as a tool of the Bush administration and uncaring about the suffering the Iraq war has caused. “The point is he doesn’t want to admit he’s wrong because he doesn’t want to live in a world in which he wasn’t right,” Samantha Power, until recently a senior White House staffer, told a reporter at The American Prospect in 2007. Virtually everything written and said about Kanan Makiya since the Iraqi insurgency emerged has been about just how Makiya could have gotten it so wrong.