Blundering Into War

Wars usually begin because someone miscalculated the resolve of the other side.

Having successfully faced down England and France over the Sudetenland, Hitler thought that threats of war against Germany if he invaded Poland were simply bluffs. Hitler invaded and France and England declared war.

When Argentine dictator General Galtieri invaded the Falkland Islands he refused to believe that a pacifist Britain would insist on taking back control of its colony by force. He expected Margaret Thatcher to accept the Argentine occupation as a fait accompli. Instead, she sent the Royal Navy.

Saddam Hussein was one of the great “misestimators.” When the I5anian Revolution purged the officer corps of the army he expected to be able to seize a tidy parcel of Iranian coast for himself. What he got was a decade-long stalemated war that won him precisely nothing.

So Saddam followed up that blunder with a bigger one. Figuring the West was too effete, too decadent to resist, Saddam invaded Kuwait, a nation friendly to the United States and a key oil-producing country. This time even France joined the U.S.-led coalition of nations that, under the command of General Norman Schwartzkopf, destroyed the Iraqi military and tossed the invaders ignominiously out of Kuwait.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the potential of eclipsing the late great Saddam as the worst judge of another country’s intentions.

If he gets the Jerusalem Post he may have noticed an item this weekend headlined, “Israel slated to buy U.S. smart bombs.” The bombs in question are 1,000 GBU-39s, a GPS-guided munition that can penetrate 90 centimeters of steel-reinforced concrete to deliver a 22.7-kilogram package of high-yield explosives from a launch point 110 kilometers from the target.

This is not the weapon of choice to burrow into a target like the Natanz underground uranium enrichment facility in Iran. Israel has plenty of 900-kilo bunker-buster missiles for that particular job.

What the GBU-39 purchase demonstrates is that Israel is thinking ahead to the post-strike environment. Iran will surely unleash Hizbulla against Israel if Natanz is taken out. The GBU-39 will allow the Israeli air force to engage hardened enemy targets in Lebanon and Syria without having to overfly enemy-held territory. Ordering the bombs now is also a hedge against a possibly unsympathetic administration in Washington, should Barack Obama be elected.

The bottom line is that Israel is taking Ahmadinejad’s threats of extinction quite seriously. Even if Europe and the United States do nothing, Israel will not allow Iran to threaten its existence. Ahmadinejad needs to believe this.

Psst! Hey! We Won the War! Pass It On…

Iraq’s bloody Anbar Province is no longer an American battlefield.
Anbar, along with Baghdad, was the birthplace of the Iraqi Insurrection, which developed after we beat Iraq’s conventional forces in 2003 without any kind of cogent plan for military government afterward. Thank you Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush.
Beginning as the kind of lawless destruction and looting you typically get when no one is in charge of enforcing the law after a war, the Insurrection evolved into a loose coalition of tribes and Sunni veterans of Saddam Hussein’s army out to make the U.S. Occupation of Iraq as costly (and brief) as possible.
The world’s attention was finally caught by the insurrectionists when they ambushed a carfull of Blackwater civilian security personnel in Fallujah, lynched them and strung up their mutilated remains on a bridge.
Our response was slow in coming, but the city of Fallujah was to enter the annals of the U.S. Marines as one of its great battlefields. We fought in that city repeatedly, and in Ramadi, and along the highways of the province. We fought two enemies in Anbar, the Sunnis themselves and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which was made up mostly of foreign fighters.
We were on the defensive. We reacted to events. We won our battles, but typically went back to our snug bases after victory, leaving the battlefields, like Ramadi and Fallujah for the enemy to reclaim. We did not have the confidence of the civilian population, who said nothing when they knew when and where improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were being planted to mine the highways. Amputated limbs and grisly head wounds caused by the IEDs became symbolic of our war there.
In February 2007, General David Petraeus took command of coalition forces in Iraq. He authored The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century, which had become the Army’s counterinsurgency manual. Now he would apply it’s precepts practically.
Petraeus told Congress before shipping out that his plan called for decentralizing U.S. forces, especially in places like Baghdad. We would no longer concentrate in places like Camp Liberty, but go out to meet the enemy and stay on the battlefield after we’d won. It would require more troops to do this, which Bush and his new Defense Secretary provided –the famous Surge.
One thing that makes a commander great is that he is lucky. AQI made Petraeus lucky by acting like a combination occupying army, de facto government and Gestapo in Anbar Province. These Jordanians, Saudis and Syrians tried to run the Sunni province using terror and murder to enforce their fundamentalist Islamist rule over the native clans and their sheikhs. The Sunnis turned to the Americans for help just prior to Petraeus’ command.
Petraeus eagerly accepted the friendship of our erstwhile Sunni enemies and the two sides began to work in concert to crush AQI between them. With the people themselves on our side now, letting us know who were planting IEDs and where and where the enemy was basing their forces, American casualties began to taper off while AQI deaths and captures soared. Together, the Coalition armies, the Iraqi Army and the Sunnis drove AQI out of Anbar.
And now with AQI (for the moment) thoroughly beaten, with a competent Iraqi Army in existence, with the civilian government gaining more confidence and credibility every day ruling over a united Sunni-Shi’a Iraq, the most violent province of the war, Anbar, has been turned over to complete Iraqi control.
You might have missed the news, because the announcement came while Gustav threatened New Orleans, while Sarah Palin and her family was in the news and the Republican Convention was getting under way.
That’s how a modern war ends these days –slowly, gradually and unspectacularly. There is no surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri, just a statement to the press that, in effect, the war is over and we won.

Russia's Power Politics, 1914-Style

There is no reason on God’s green earth why Russia and the United States should ever come to blows.

On the other hand, in 1914 there was no reason why Russia, France and England should have to have gone to war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. No reason except the insanity of power politics as practiced before the Great War. It was the sheer purposelessness of the struggle, the insanity of it all, that was the most demoralizing aspect of the Great War.

After two world wars and the Cold War, our European cousins are very keen on "soft power;" getting things done by diplomacy, persuasion and moral force. It worked for a while and then reality set in, first in the former Yugoslavia and now in Georgia. Now power politics, 1914-style, is back in vogue. Here's why:

Russia has grievances against us that won’t go away. In the 1980's we blocked the Soviet expansion into Afghanistan by arming the Mujahideen. Once they learned how to shoot down Hind helicopters with Sparrow air-to-air missiles it was only a matter of time. We also lured the Soviets into an arms race they didn’t need --or could afford-- to pursue in the 1980’s. When we tossed in the Star Wars chip, they had a breakdown of national will because they utterly believed we could build a system that would negate their intercontinental rocket forces.

Fooled ya! We’re still trying to make the damn thing work 20 years later. It was Ronald Reagan’s coup de grace to the back of the head of communism.

Instead of propping up the USSR in gratitude for being liberated 60 years earlier, the ungrateful eastern European satellite nations gleefully quit the Warsaw Pact. Now they are mostly members of NATO and the European Union and out of Moscow’s grasp. The fact that the presidents of Poland and the Balkan nations dared travel to Tiblisi in the middle of the war, to proclaim solidarity in public with Georgia indicates enormous moral courage –and the knowledge that their security is America’s direct concern.

Except for recently, with the fighting in Georgia, the Russian public regards the United States the Number One Enemy. Russians, from the man in the street to the ex-KGB operative who manipulates the president of Russia like a marionette—they all long for the days when a threat from Russia made the United States and the West tremble.

They long for the days when, in what they call the “near abroad,” the leaders of nations on the Soviet periphery phoned Moscow to check in before making a rest room visit. They don’t just miss the respect the mighty Soviet Union generated; they miss the fear the USSR inspired. Bullying is a part of Russian life, families, neighborhoods, schools, even the armed forces, are riddled with bullies.

Vladimir Putin is an old-time KGB bully.

Putin believes in the power of the bully. Disgusted after the Chechin terrorist attack on a grade school and subsequent massacre, Putin noted darkly that in this world, “The weak are to be beaten.”

Georgia was made an example of because it was weak. Weakness inspires contempt in Russia. More than the so-called provocations in South Ossetia (really stirred up by the Russians themselves), more than siding with the United States, Georgia’s major crime was to be weak. The Russian instinct, when presented with the face of a homeless, helpless, weeping civilian, is to smash that contemptible face in with the heel of a jackboot, as Orwell said, forever and ever.

Having beaten Georgia on the battlefield, Russia now wishes to humiliate her. Again and again. In the past week the Kremlin announced, “Georgian territorial integrity is a dead issue.” Russian soldiers are acting in accord with that statement, robbing everything of value they can get their hands on and digging in on Georgian national territory, despite the promise from Moscow that they were leaving.

We are flying in humanitarian supplies and, I hope, weapons to rearm Georgian soldiers and militia. We are going to have to stand beside our friends when their noses are bloodied because they are our friends, and especially because they are weak. In this world, Americans believe, the strong help the weak, whatever the risk.

Russia is richer than ever in its history thanks to energy revenues. It has all the land it can use and all the raw materials. They simply aspire to smash a few faces from time to time as their God-given right and to scare the rest of the world.

Which leads me to a question. Of the two, who is best suited to deal with Fascist Russia? Barack Obama, or John McClain? This is turning out to be much more important a presidential election than we had dreamed just 14 days ago.