Surge Politics, Analogies, and bin Laden

Positions on the Surge

Democratic Factions

1. Mainstream Congressional leaders: While the surge may have temporary success, it cannot equate to strategic stability. The Iraqis have failed to create political reform sufficient to result in a viable reform government: slowly get out now.

2. Liberal Congressional leaders: Even if the surge works, and even if stability follows, 3700 lives and $600 billion weren’t worth it. Support the troops, but not a single Marine was worth all of Iraq: get out now!

3. A few mavericks: Finally, the administration, wallowing in repeated error, listened to our cries in the wilderness. Thus after taking our recommendations to remove Sec. Rumsfeld, change the generals in Iraq and Centcom, and send in more troops, they have seen the light. The last four years were squandered, but thanks to us, Iraq is not yet lost: stabilize the country, and only then withdraw.

4. The Hard Left: This was always a cooked-up war for oil, Halliburton, a savage military, and the Neocons. An American defeat serves as a timely lesson for our hubris. Get out now!

Republican factions

1. Mainstream Republicans: despite all the errors, unfortunately not rare in war, Iraq is on the path to becoming a viable state that will not translate its natural wealth into wars against its neighbors, and now fights rather than subsidizes terrorists. The war can be won and will be, and in retrospect with far more positive than negative consequences: keep the amount of troops in Iraq that the military feels is necessary to allow the government there to quell violence and perform its duties—the only safe way to disengage.

2. Hard Neocon: taking out Saddam went smoothly. Letting the State Department in on the occupation was a terrible mistake, as was letting Syria and Iran off the hook. We won’t have peace until Iraq’s neighbors are tamed. Iran must be addressed: stay on and hit terrorist enclaves along the borders, with all options open.

3. Realist: None of these countries are reliable. We should accept their authoritarianism as innate, and their governments as they are—and thus make sure no single one becomes more powerful than any other. We can always use stand-off bombing in a purely punishing manner should they send terrorists after our interests, but under no circumstances fight on the ground inside a Muslim country: Get out now, at best under UN auspices or with regional partners’ peacekeeping forces—or by trisecting the country into friends and enemies.

4 Paleo-con/Libertarian: : This was always a cooked-up war for oil, big government, Israel, and its apologist Neocons. An American defeat serves as a timely lesson for the evils of foreign involvement, the garrison state, and big government: Get out now!

All these positions of course shift and overlap, and their adherents (with the exception of the hard left and right) often show no consistency, but rather adapt views to the 24-hour news cycle emanating out of Iraq. Which position prevails upon the public, depends on the next 60 days and the news from Iraq. Should Iraq blow up, and get worse, opponents will gravitate to the Hard Left and Paleo-con/Libertarian view; should it show signs of improvement, moderate and mainstream Democrats will gravitate to mainstream Republican; should it suddenly become absolutely quiet and no longer a war, the hard neo-con position will want to expand on the victory.

My own position? About the same as always: mainstream Republican, a Jacksonian one of support for the war that is ongoing, confidence that it addresses the root cause of the events that we saw six years ago.

Sicily

One of the favorite analogies of Iraq is the evocation of the Athenian invasion of Sicily (415-13 B.C.) and the democracy’s defeat there by democratic Syracuse (40,000 Athenians and their allies lost). It was certainly a catastrophic mistake to attack Sicily at a time of an uneasy respite with Sparta.

But for some strange reason, the historian Thucydides, after chronicling the lapses, still believed the Athenians might have won (and indeed they almost did), had they not been torn apart by bickering at home—usually thought to be a reference to the recall of Alcibiades. It is difficult to know exactly how Thucydides thought the operation might have worked—a different commander than Nicias?; had Lamachus not perished?; had the armada brought more horses?; etc.).

But an analogy to Iraq makes no sense. Sicily was, by some accounts, the largest city-state in the Greek-speaking world. And it was democratic as well—at a time that Athens was trying to wage a war of ideology that pitted democratic allies and subject states against Sparta’s oligarchy and its sympathetic partners and friends. A better modern parallel might have been made had the United States attacked larger, democratic India right in the middle of the Afghan war. Apparently, because democratic Athens lost the Peloponnesian war, and did not ever fully recover from Sicily, so too it is simply claimed that the United States has lost in Iraq, a precursor of general American decline.

Ron Paul’s complaint

I watched Ron Paul last night make the argument that something the United States had done—like deploy troops in the Gulf—had earned the jihadists’ attacks. True, bin Laden at one time listed three casus belli: U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the UN boycott of Iraq, and support for Israel.

Two points: first, yes, U.S. troops were in Saudi–on the invitation of the terrified Saudi government to stop Saddam Hussein from swallowing it as he did Kuwait, and were sequestered far out in the desert, distant from shrines, mosques—and most Saudis. Careful reading will show all that infuriated bin Laden primarily because he had begged the House of Saud in 1990 to let his jihadists fight Saddam in some sort of terrorist campaign. That request was turned down since there were 500,000 Iraqis, with sophisticated arms, ready to pounce, but it created a level of outrage in bin Laden at the infidel who instead won the day.

Second, the UN boycott orchestrated by Bill Clinton was designed to preclude war, and to ensure that Saddam did not purchase with oil money more sophisticated weapons to attack his Muslim neighbors and kill more of his own Muslims.

Third, as far as Israel goes, since the Camp David accords, the U.S. has tried to match Israeli aid with generous monies given Egypt (over $50 billion by now, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority.) And often friends supposedly asked bin Laden why after 1988, he did not locate to the West Bank or Gaza to wage his war against the hated Israelis, whom he had identified as the real enemies. The unspoken answer, of course, is that he thought it safer to attack the U.S. in the 1990s than to strike head-on Israel from next-door, something perceived tantamount to a death sentence.

Moreover, two of these writs are no longer valid, and yet the jihadists continue manufacturing new ones, since their anger is existential and their grievances bogus.

But more importantly, even a brief scan of Peter Bergen’s The Osama bin Laden I Know will reveal dozens of various reasons why al Qaeda (in bin Laden’s own words) chose to attack—Jewish women walking around in Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, a general Western decadence, supposed massacres of Muslims in Burma, Kashmir, Somalia, and the Philippines; the arrests and detentions of Muslim “scholars;” attacks on Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan; theft of petroleum; support for the Saudi and Egyptian governments. In Raymond Ibrahim’s recent The al Qaeda Reader we even learn of furor over our financing of elections, and failure to sign Kyoto.

Finally, the discussion omits the US salvation of Muslim Kuwait, the effort to feed Muslims in Somalia, our criticism leveled against Russia for Chechnya, the bombing of Milosevic to save Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia; and billions given to a number of Arab countries, as well as generous immigration policies that have allowed many millions to emigrate to Europe and the United States to practice their religion freely and express themselves openly in a fashion unimaginable for Westerners in most of their own countries of origin.

As far as what tipped the scale and made these talking points translate into action in the 1990s, I think there were two reasons. The “Afghan Arabs” were able to exaggerate their own role in the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan, and play down both the efforts of Massoud and the Northern Alliance, and the critical use by the warlords of American missiles and weaponry. To bin Laden, the biggest slur was that the resistance had benefited from US aid.

That sense of triumphalism was matched by a policy of not retaliating against terrorists, to any significant degree, for most of the 1990s. The World Trade Center, slain individuals abroad, barracks, embassies, and war-ships were all targets. Rightly or wrongly, especially after Mogadishu, bin Laden decided that he was unstoppable after Afghanistan and had little to fear from the United States. Once he “broke up” the United States, the same level of honor and status would accrue to him that he was claiming after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.