On the death of a soldier

I would like to extend my condolences to Professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston university on the death of his son Andrew junior. Lt Bacevich was killed in action in Iraq on May 13th. Words cannot express the respect I feel for both of them and the sorrow I feel for professor Bacevich's loss.

It is nauseating to think that none of the men who promoted this illegal, immoral and murderous war, or any of their children would dream of fighting in it. And it is unbearably sad to think that precisely one of the most articulate, reasoned and firm opponents of the war should lose a son there; killed while following their family's tradition of bearing arms in the country's service.

The death of Lt. Bacevich and the grief of his warrior-historian father has notes of ancient Rome, Greek tragedy or of the heroes of the Mahabharata. Peace to both of them and to those who love them. Amen. DS

Bacevich's questions for candidates

David Seaton's News Links
Professor Andrew Bacevich is one of the clearest thinking political analysts working in the United States. As a graduate of West Point he knows that strategic thinking begins with asking the right questions.

Answers to those questions themselves may change with the circumstances, but woe to the strategist that asks the wrong questions.

Obviously to ask the right questions you have to have a realistic idea of who you are, where you are and what you hope to achieve. For example, if you are in Paris and ask a passerby directions to "Times Square", you will probably find that unproductive.

As Professor Bacevich points out, all serious discussion of Iraq and post-Iraq revolves around recognizing that the United States has failed in Iraq. All presidential candidates should then ask themselves, "who we are, where we are and what we hope achieve". If they don't have plausible answers to those questions they have no business asking Americans for their votes. DS

Bacevich: 'Your Iraq plan?' is a pointless question - Los Angeles Times

Abstract: For today's presidential candidates, the question is unavoidable: What is your plan for Iraq?(...) However sincere, such questions are also pointless. To pose them is to invite dissembling. The truth is that next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq. It no longer lies within the capacity of the United States to determine the outcome of events there. Iraqis will decide their own fate. We are spectators, witnesses, bystanders caught in a conflagration that we ourselves, in an act of monumental folly, touched off. The questions that ought to be asked now — but so far have not been — are of a different order.(...) Recall that Bush saw Baghdad not as the final destination of his global war on terror but as a point of departure. He imagined that liberating Iraq might trigger a flowering of Arab democracy.(...) None of that has come to pass. Baghdad has become a cul-de-sac. Having plunged into a war he cannot win, Bush will not relent. Iraq consumes his presidency because the president wills that it should. He has become Captain Ahab: His identification with his war is absolute. As a consequence, the "global" effort aimed at eliminating Islamic terror, launched back in September 2001, has narrowed in scope. Today the global war is global in name only. In reality, it has become a war for Mesopotamia.(...) Ritualistic allusions to freedom as the antidote to terrorism still occasionally crop up in presidential speeches, but rhetoric no longer translates into action. An administration that once touted its expansive and principled approach to preventing another 9/11 has abandoned principle. Now there is only Iraq and the effort to ensure that today's news out of Baghdad isn't any worse than yesterday's. Our political attention, then, needs to turn to whether the president's would-be successors can do what Bush cannot: acknowledge our failure in Iraq and look beyond it. Candidates who still find merit in an open-ended global war on terror should explain how we prevail in such an enterprise. Given the lessons of Iraq, what exactly does it mean to wage such a global war? Where can we expect to fight next, and against whom? What will victory look like? Candidates who, in light of Iraq, have become skeptical of open-ended global war as a response to violent Islamic radicalism should be pressed to describe their alternative. How do they define the threat? How do they propose to deal with it? Will they isolate it? Contain it? Subvert it? Relying on what means and at what costs? "What's your plan for Iraq?" was the right question back in 2002 and 2003 — although it went largely unasked and almost completely unanswered then. But as we approach the 2008 presidential election, though the tragedy of Iraq continues to unfold, that question is moot. The one that matters is this: As President Bush departs and leaves the United States bereft of a coherent strategy, what should fill that void? READ IT ALL

Bacevich cuts to the bone

David Seaton's News Links

Professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, formerly Colonel Andrew Bacevich, US Army, is one of the most incisive political thinkers in America's intellectual panorama. The world of American think tanks has turned US geopolitical discourse into a massive, over-funded, Swiftian Academy of Lagado, where sunbeams are extracted from cucumbers and a quick journey to the heart of any matter would put a lot of scholars out of work. Bacevich, however, cuts to the bone. His book, "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War," is an absolute 'must read': an invaluable starting point for any serious discussion about the terrible situation that the US has created for itself. Obviously, without a keystone or linchpin, without finding the axis around which the problem revolves, we will never find our way out of the labyrinth. This article from The International Herald Tribune, which is quoted below, will give you some idea of Professor Bacevich's unerring instinct for constantly locating the center of gravity of these questions. DS
Bush's illusions - International Herald Tribune
Abstract: The world's only superpower no longer acts; instead, it reacts, usually to whatever happens to be the latest bad news out of Baghdad. As events in Iraq slip out of his control, President George W. Bush's strategy for waging his "global war on terror" lies in ruins. He is navigating without a compass. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Recall that for the architects of Operation Iraqi Freedom, taking down Saddam Hussein never qualified as more than a preliminary objective. Baghdad was not Berlin. It was Normandy, the jumping-off point for a much larger enterprise.(...) Skeptics saw the Freedom Agenda as little more than eyewash. The real object of the exercise, they insisted, was to assert U.S. control over the oil-rich Gulf. The aim of the global war on terror was not to share the blessings of liberty but to expand the perimeter of the American empire. Whether the name of the game was liberation or dominion, Iraq was a crucial test case. Iraq's transformation into the first Arab democracy — or (depending on your point of view) its conversion into a compliant protectorate — promised to validate the Bush administration's concept of global war. Victory in Iraq would also affirm key assumptions underlying that concept: that U.S. forces are invincible and unstoppable; that preventive war works; that the concerns of other major powers or the absence of a UN Security Council mandate need not constrain American freedom of action. In short, Iraq constituted step one. Success there would pave the way for the Bush administration to proceed along similar lines to steps two, three and four. The disappointments and frustrations resulting from that first step now leave the entire project in a shambles. If the United States cannot democratize Iraq, then to imagine that democracy will emerge from the barrel of an American gun in Iran, Syria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia is simply fanciful. If U.S. troops cannot pacify Iraq, then only the truly deluded would court a further military showdown that could oblige American forces to pacify Iraq's neighbors as well. The United States already has too much war for too few soldiers.(...) As if tacitly acknowledging that they have spent all their ammunition strategically, Bush and his lieutenants now preoccupy themselves with operational matters that ought to fall within the purview of field commanders.(...) Fighting the Battle of Baghdad does not qualify as presidential business. Devising an effective response to the threat posed by Islamic radicalism does. On that score, however, the most pressing question is this: Does open-ended global war provide the proper framework for formulating that response? Or has global war, based on various illusions about American competence and American power, led to a dead end? READ IT ALL

Grand strategies or delusions of grandeur

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There is an interesting article in today's Washington Post by Professor Daniel W. Drezner of Tufts University where he outlines a series of "grand strategies" proposed by foreign policy analysts who he postulates as possible successors to George F. Kennan, the State Department analyst whose oft misinterpreted, but seminal article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, was the foundational document of the US policy of "containment." On reading the article Drezner will take you on a quick tour of a series of well argued ideas for how the US should conduct itself in foreign affairs. Drezner's "original sin" is having the hubris to compare today's America with the America of the late 40s and early 50s when America's cold war strategies were formed and to believe that America, instead of being driven by events, in fact continues to have the power to actually decide what path it will finally take. George Will quoting author Bill Bryson in the November 26th Washington Post, describes the America of the 50s:

"In 1951, when the average American ate 50 percent more than the average European, Americans(...) controlled two-thirds of the world's productive capacity, owned 80 percent of the world's electrical goods, and produced more than 40 percent of its electricity, 60 percent of its oil and 66 percent of its steel. America's 5 percent of the world's population had more wealth than the other 95 percent, and Americans made almost all of what they consumed: 99.93 percent of new cars sold in this country in 1954 were U.S. brands. By the end of the '50s, GM was a bigger economic entity than Belgium, and Los Angeles had more cars than did Asia."

Obviously anyone who still sees American power in these terms, or the role of America that flowed from that power in these terms today is delusional. You only need to compare the Marshall Plan with the pitiful effort in Afghanistan to get an idea of the slide. The world has changed a lot since the 50s or even the 70s as Christian Reiermann wrote in Der Speigel apropos the falling value of the dollar,

"The perils of a currency crash are not nearly as great as they were in the days of the dollar's absolute dominance 30 or 40 years ago. Globalization has led to the development of a number of growth centers in the world economy which share the burden of turbulence. Gone are the days when an American finance minister could boast: "The dollar is our currency, but it's your problem."

This quote, as well as any, describes the general situation. What about military power? Isn't the US the unchallenged hegemon? Certainly nobody is crazy enough to think of invading the USA, the question for everybody else is rather if the United State is going to invade them. French demographer Emmanuel Todd describes recent US power projection in Grenada, Panama and Kosovo as "theatrical micromilitarism", a strategy that neocon Michael Ladeen describes as, "Every now and then America needs to pick up some shitty little country and throw it against the wall just to show that it can". Obviously Iraq has proved that the all volunteer Army simply doesn't have the numbers to occupy and control a large, hostile country after it has been "thrown against the wall." To change that would mean a return to the draft would be necessary, with US draftees and "draftettes" playing the role of Israeli soldiers on the West Bank all over the Middle East and beyond... For a "generation. Never say never, but a return to the draft doesn't really look very likely. That leaves air power. America is unchallenged in the air, right? Again the problem America's possible adversaries face is not having to invade US air space, but to prevent the USA from invading theirs. In the case of Iran, one of the most significant, but little discussed, developments has been Russia's delivery of the Tor antiaircraft system, to quote the Israeli DEBKAfile,

"a weapon widely regarded as the most advanced of its kind in the world. Some Iranian and Russian air defense experts say its full deployment at Iran’s nuclear installations will make them virtually invulnerable to American or Israeli attack in the foreseeable future."

Also little noticed, if Google searches are any yardstick, is the Russian development of the Triumf anti-aircraft system, said to be the most advanced in the world. The Federation of American Scientist, FAS describes Trumf as,

"intended to detect and destroy airborne targets at a distance of up to 400 km (2- 2.5 times greater than the previous S-300PMU system). The Triumf system includes radars capable of detecting low-signature targets. And the anti-missile capability of the system has been increased to the limits established by the ABM Treaty demarcation agreements -- it can intercept targets with velocities of up to 4.8 km/sec, corresponding to a ballistic missile range of 3,500 km."

Then, of course there are China's advances in "passive radar" research and then even the invisible "stealth" technology that allows the USAF to bomb invulnerably around the world would be neutralized. "Theatrical micromilitarism" as a strategy of dominance would be finished. The United States would be as invulnerable to military attack by land sea or air as it always has, but would no longer be invulnerable or nearly invulnerable when attacking. At this point the American people might ask themselves, as many are doing already, the reason for spending so much of the US budget on "Full Spectrum Dominance" when some 40million of its citizens are without health insurance and the old-age pension system is said to be in danger of bankruptcy. DS