War: Goals and Execution

Patrick Armstrong at Hurricane Radio has some remarkable insights about how this country should prepare before taking up arms against another, and what it should be prepared to do. I'll reproduce the first two on the list.

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1. Overwhelming Force/Powell Doctrine. If we're not willing to put enough troops on the ground to win the thing, at the onset of hostilities, we are not ready to go to war. We may go to war with the Army we have, but we usually go on the understanding that reinforcements will be along d'rectly, with more guns and better planes.

2. Total War. If the American public is not ready to watch us destroy enemy cities from the sky, shell enemy cities into rubble and burn an enemy nation's entire infrastructure to the ground, we may not be ready for war. Because that's war. That's what the enemy would do to us if we give them the chance. FDR was totally against carpet bombing enemy cities, right up until Japan attacked us and Germany declared war on us. Facing the two greatest military-industrial machines the world had yet seen, FDR then decided, screw 'it, bomb the @#$! out of 'em. That way, when we take over enemy nations with our overwhelming force, the population is cowed and defeated and they know they are beaten.
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The truth is, in the present war, we weren't ready to destroy enemy cities from the sky. At least I wasn't. I can remember standing in the law library at SMU and watching the execution of the shockingly callously named "shock and awe" strike and hating my country, or at least my president. And even that wasn't really the destruction of Baghdad. It was (supposed to be) a vast array of surgical strikes designed to cripple the Iraqi military in preparation for a (we hoped) quick land war to conquer the country, cut off it's head, and make it a better place.

We went to war, that day, not with Iraq, but with Saddam Hussein, and there is a huge difference. What we were in that for was not warfare, but assassination. It was elaborate and perhaps poorly conceived, but it was assassination nevertheless. Our goal was to get rid of Saddam Hussein and I think we all sort of thought that, after that, things would be better. Call that short-sighted, complain about the need for better planning, better intelligence, better diplomacy, more patience, whatever, but the truth is we expected the rest of the country to fall in line and so we didn't want to destroy it in the process of cutting the cancer out.

I think Patrick's right. I think that means we weren't ready for this war. Or it means that war isn't what we should have done. If assassination is what the country wanted, that's what it should have gotten. We should have sent someone in (thirty seals, or whatever it would have taken--I'm not a war guy) to kill the bastard and be done with it.

Then we could have sat back, scratched our chins and said, "Hm. That's odd. I thought they'd just write a constitution and start holding biennial elections. Who saw civil war coming?" without committing 140k American troops to the conflict. Then we would have had the chance to ask, as an American foreign policy question, "Are we willing to go in there and clean up that mess?" as we've gotten to ask about every other civil war we've intervened in or declined to intervene in.

Maybe you're thinking this is a bad plan because it puts us in the position of being able to ask whether or not we want to clean up a mess that we made, but the truth is, Iraq is not our mess. Even now it's not. Yeah, we helped make things worse there by removing the madman they'd allowed to cow them into submission, but things were pretty damn bad already and in the end a country's own population is responsible for its leaders. We proved that. The French have proved that. The Russians have proved it twice.

The Iraqis were responsible for getting rid of Saddam. When they didn't do it, we did it for them. Now they're responsible for getting themselves out of the mess they let him make. We should give them the chance. If, in five years, they've proved they don't have what it takes and they're still fighting, then we should think about going back and picking sides. Until then, our responsibility is to our troops and their families.