Clinton to Progressives: Drop Dead!

The Clinton camp has dropped something of a bombshell:

One of the most important decisions that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton made about her bid for the presidency came late last year when she ended a debate in her camp over whether she should repudiate her 2002 vote authorizing military action in Iraq...

Yet antiwar anger has festered, and yesterday morning Mrs. Clinton rolled out a new response to those demanding contrition: She said she was willing to lose support from voters rather than make an apology she did not believe in.

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

The very next paragraph cuts right to the point:

Her decision not to apologize is regarded so seriously within her campaign that some advisers believe it will be remembered as a turning point in the race: either ultimately galvanizing voters against her (if she loses the nomination), or highlighting her resolve and her willingness to buck Democratic conventional wisdom (if she wins).

Gee, ya think?

I'm not going to mince words: Clinton's campaign just passed a point of no return which it will likely come to rue in the coming months.

The issue is only incidentally about apologizing for her decision to stand with the militarists in 2002. As Kos comments with eminent good sense: "I don't want her to apologize. I want her to say, 'I made a mistake.' Edwards did it. Just about every other Democrat who idiotically trusted this president and supported the war has done it. Had Hillary done this last year, the issue would be moot." It is far more crucially about her relationship with the Democratic party's grassroots -the activists on which any nomination campaign is vitally dependent for donations and especially volunteers. Clinton just told a great many of them, already unhappy with her obtuseness on this issue, to basically pound dirt.

And they will -right to Obama or Edwards (as she herself helpfully suggests), or possibly Richards.

The best part is how the Clinton campaign has tried to justify this move. One campaign aide quoted anonymously in the Times piece, who obviously lobbied for it, offers this rationale:

She is in a box now on her Iraq vote, but she doesn’t want to be in a different, even worse box — the vacillating, flip-flopping Democratic candidate that went to defeat in 2000 and ‘04,” said one adviser to Mrs. Clinton. “She wants to maintain a firmness, and I think a lot of people around her hope she maintains a firmness. That’s what people will want in 2008."

The incredible irony here is that Clinton is taking advice from the same people who led the Democrats over a cliff in 2000 and 2004 and, even better, who are now using their past failures to justify adopting the the same strategy in 2008.

The problem that Gore and Kerry had wasn't that they "flip flopped" on national security, but rather that they took their counsel from the so called "centrists" in the party establishment who held that "mainstream" America had an inherent conservative bias and that the Democrats had to finesse rather than accentuate policy differences with Republicans or risk political marginalization. In particular the centrists, led by the Democratic Leadership Council, argued that it would be political suicide for to listen to the party's progressive wing and offer an alternative to voters that differed sharply from Republican positions on tax policy, foreign affairs, health care, and so on. The result was that Gore chose as his running mate arch centrist Joe Lieberman -who (in case you haven't been keeping up with current events) is now an outcast from his own party- and Kerry ran a campaign that focused on his supposed national security bona fides to the virtual exclusion of everything else.

Both lost.

At least Gore learned from his mistakes and backed Howard Dean, the outside the beltway darling of the party's progressives, in 2004, over his own former running mate. Not that it prevented the DLC, aided and abetted by the mainstream media, from destroying Dean's candidacy so that the nomination could be secured for a safe, "electable" politician like Kerry.

By contrast in 2006, with the centrist hold on the party weakened by spectacular back to back failures, the Democrats wrested back control of Congress in no small part (centrist attempts to rain on their parade notwithstanding) by putting forward candidates who were unapologetic about the differences between a Democrat and a Republican.

Now Clinton appears to have fallen under the spell of the same quacks in whom Gore and Kerry placed their trust (not necessarily surprisingly, since her husband was closely identified with the centrist element of the party). This is the same timid, mealy mouthed "we can't afford to stray too far from the Republicans" talk we've heard in the previous campaigns. The difference is that whereas in 2000 playing hardball with the Republicans admittedly entailed a calculated element of risk, in 2007, with Bush's approval in free fall and his presidency visibly crumbling, disassociating yourself from this trainwreck would seem to be a no brainer. For the love of the Almighty, if this isn't the right time to proclaim yourself the anti-Bush when is?

And the ultimate irony? In the end Kerry's attempt to out-Republican the Republicans on national security didn't prevent Swift Boat Veterans for Truth from dragging his reputation through the mud. Newsflash Hillary: these people play for all the marbles, and they play to win. Sure you can innoculate yourself against the accusation of being a "flip flopper" -at the expense of alienating a large part of the party base- but you can't hide from the slime attacks that are coming as surely as night follows day.

They'll just find another angle to work. It's what they do.

The Unbearable Triteness of Being

So I found myself in scenic Grande Cache a couple of days ago and had the opportunity to peruse the local Asper newspaper offering, The Edmonton Journal, over breakfast.

The top of the front page referred readers to opinion pieces by resident scribes Paula Simons (“Time for a Smarter Climate Change Debate”) and Gary Lamphier (“Kyoto Accord is a Dead Duck”). Now I admit I have a prejudice against most newspaper columnists, in that I consider them poorly informed idiots peddling the most trite conventional nostrums, often with the kind of slipshod, self serving reasoning that would embarrass a first year liberal arts student. And I particularly believe that there is one ring in hell reserved for alumni of the CanWest media empire, who are not merely run of the mill hacks but hacks who have sold their souls to the Dark Prince Leonard Asper, who demands above all from his employees not talent, and certainly not professional integrity, but rather loyalty to the principle that the CanWest empire exists first and foremost to promote the Aspers’ own political agenda. Toe the line and you will be liberally rewarded, but show the slightest inclination to your own opinion and you will be turffed out on your ungrateful ass and replaced with more compliant journalistic drones who understand what side their bread is buttered on, as more than a few people who harbored quaint notions of editorial independence have found out during the consolidation of the empire.

Having said all that I’m always hopeful for signs that CanWest can be redeemed, so I dutifully gave Simons and Lamphier the benefit of the doubt. It almost goes without saying that this tale ends in bitter disappointment, eased only slightly by the realization that I’ve been down this road more than a few times before. Call it the triumph of hope over experience.

Now that I’ve had a few days to mull it over, I’ve decided that the Simons and Lamphier pieces are best understood as the rhetorical equivalent of a fighting retreat. As we all know on February 3, five days before the pieces appeared, the UN issued an alarming report on global warming that characterized the evidence as “unequivocal”. The scientific consensus about climate change has solidified to the point that a continuation of the strategy heretofore favored by the antediluvian deniers of global warming, namely that the evidence is ambiguous and there is no consensus, simply makes them look ridiculous. Since CanWest was at the forefront of opposing emissions controls, especially in oil rich Alberta, a new approach was required.

One of the indispensable skills of an able propagandist is of course the ability to change tack on a dime and argue the reverse of the position they previously held, when it serves the needs of their paymaster to do so. Simons and Lamphier don’t quite go that far, but they use remarkably similar rhetorical strategies to try to make the best of a bad hand. First, they try to cover up their past misdeeds by seizing the offensive and insisting that they are “serious” about addressing the problem while by implication their opponents –who it turns out where right all along- are “unserious”. Then, realizing that denying the science of climate change is now a non starter, they try to shape the coming debate by defining its parameters, and specifically by insisting that certain measures be declared off limits right from the start and taken off the table. The objective of preventing public policy from dealing seriously with the threat posed by climate change is the same, only the tactics have changed.

I’m going to dissect Simons’ piece here, since it was the first one I read. Suffice it to say that Lamphier’s is very much cast from the same mould.

Simons position can be summarized in a single sentence: “Nothing we’re doing to reduce our carbon dioxide output will make much difference”.

To whit:

If you want to install energy efficient windows, drive a hybrid, fill up with ethanol gasoline, put up LED Christmas lights, buy your produce at the famers market or live in the city core instead of the suburbs, be my guest, if it makes you feel better. I do half of those things myself.

But if we think buying local asparagus or buying a downtown loft will save the polar bears, we’re dreaming. Much of the green lifestyle posturing we’re seeing around us is just that – a trendy fashion choice, an upper middle class indulgence.

See Simons is serious about climate change, and what she characterizes as the “green zealots” are not. In fact Simons, like other serious people, realizes that climate change cannot in fact be stopped, so why bother even trying?

I will not bother with the obvious fact that Simons offers no actual evidence for her position. One of the joys of being a newspaper columnist is that since you are merely expressing an opinion –and usually a very ill informed and trite one- you cannot be held to the same evidentiary standard as, say, the local high school debating team. Anyway it is self evident your opinion is worthwhile, it is after all being published in the paper and the Aspers are maintaining you in the same upper middle class lifestyle as the peers you affect to despise for expressing it. In our society, in which your worth as a human being is essentially determined by the size of your paycheck, that point is unanswerable.

In any case we have now come full rhetorical circle: once the climate change deniers said climate change wasn’t real so we didn’t have to do anything about it. Now they say it is real but it doesn’t matter, since we can’t do anything about it.

But here’s the real kicker, in which Simons inadvertently gives the whole game away: “The citizens of the industrialized world would never willingly accept the radical lifestyle sacrifices that would slow climate change”. One might well wonder what qualifies Simons to speak for “the citizens of the industrialized world”, until one realizes that she is exercising the well established newspaper columnist’s prerogative of transcribing her own personal preferences onto the rest of the world: it will be a cold, cold day in hell when Paula Simons trades in her gas guzzling SUV for a SmartCar, and she just knows all her fellow pampered and privileged members of the upper middle class are with her! (Granted even this group represents only a relatively small segment of society as a whole, but in the minds of people like Simons it’s the only segment that really matters).

The sheer sense of entitlement reflected in this statement is simply breathtaking. Could it possibly be true that Simons leads such a sheltered existence that she simply does not comprehend that if the climate change science is right –and even she now half heartedly acknowledges that it is- we are all in for radical lifestyle changes, whether we like it or not? Just how puerile does one have to be to believe that you can tell Mother Nature, a la Marie Antoinette, to go “eat cake”?

But Simons saves the worst for last. Having already argued the futility of trying to fight climate change she abruptly changes course and asserts “We can’t throw up our hands in defeat” (perish the thought), thus showing that she doesn’t even have the courage of her convictions. Having already dismissed lifestyle changes as one possible part of the solution, what does Simons have to offer instead?

Technological solutions –carbon sequestration, new fuels, new cars- offer more hope. But they won’t happen without public policy and economic incentives that drive market innovation. Make it too expensive and inconvenient for carbon-emitting industries to do business as usual, and change will inevitably happen.

Now Simons is actually starting to talk some sense, though it is far too little and too late to redeem the atrocities she has already committed against science, reason and common sense. It is obvious at this point that in her mind what separates viable (read: technology based) strategies for controlling global warming from non viable (read: lifestyle based) ones isn’t any hard facts –facts are after all an unjustified encumbrance on the newspaper columnist’s sovereign right to proffer any opinion, no matter how outrageous- but that the latter will presumably entail certain sacrifices Simons would rather not make, while the former hold out the prospect of a sacrifice free solution to global warming.

Actually, now that I think about it, Simons position here is almost identical to that of Peak Oil optimists whose blind faith in “technology” assures them that even if the earth is running out of petroleum we will find sufficient substitutes quickly enough to avoid any really inconvenient dislocation in the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed.

In both cases of course this kind of thinking betrays a certain lack of familiarity with obdurate reality , the kind that might arise for example if one earned (and I use that term loosely) one’s daily bread by writing insipid opinion pieces for the Aspers. The important thing is that in spite of her call for “real action” and “a smarter climate change debate” Simons devotes less than 50 words (quoted above) of an 800 word piece on possible solutions. Most of the rest of the piece is about what Simons doesn’t want to see happen, which is to say any approach that would impinge on her comfortable lifestyle.

People who are thinking seriously about the implications of climate change have accepted the science and moved on to the difficult question of what we are going to do about it. People like Simons are still fighting the last war all over again: even as they claim to (finally) accept the validity of the science, they still hold fast to the core principle which has always animated their opposition -that any changes to their lifestyle or standard of living is a priori non negotiable.

The irony of course is that in adopting a no compromises position now they are probably only ensuring we will all pay a much heavier price than would otherwise have been necessary later.

The Romans had a saying relevant to this topic: Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. It literally means "you can drive nature out with a pitchfork but she always comes back". A more succinct rendition however would be (with apologies to Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park) "Don't fuck with Mother Nature".

Paula Simons of the world take heed.

Why America is Losing in Iraq

Mao Zedong once famously likened a guerilla to a fish in the sea - the guerilla evades detection by blending seemlessly with his environment, waiting to strike until he judges the corallation of forces momentarily favorable, then fades back into the environment before his opponents can fully marshall their forces against him. In this way a small, ill equipped irregular force and hold its own against a much larger and better armed conventional one, until the conventional force grows weary of the cat and mouse game and throws in the towel. In a nutshell this is what is happening in Iraq now.

Defeating an insurgency means taking the sea away from the fish, by winning the "hearts and minds" of the people of Iraq over to your side and in so doing depriving the insurgents of the recruits, protection, intelligence and other resources that are indispensible to their effectiveness. It is this essential mission that the US military has utterly failed in Iraq, for the following reasons:


1. Insufficient Manpower / Technological Fetishism

There is a struggle going on for the heart and soul of the American military: on one side are the proponents of the so called "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA), which is now virtually orthodoxy both within the Pentagon and neocon circles, while on the other is a band of iconoloclastic insurgents who argue that Fourth Generation Warfare has rendered many of the RMA school's assumptions about future conflict obsolete. Specifically, while the RMA school envisions military ascendency through technological domination, proponents of Fourth Generation Warfare argue that future opponents of the United States will not repeat Saddam's mistake of trying to outfight the US in a conventional struggle in which the US holds all the high cards but will instead resort to unconventional tactics and strategy aimed at mitigating the US' conventional advantage. To the extent that the critics are right the rebalancing that has occured since 1989, in which military manpower has been reduced by 33% on the assumption that technological superiority will compensate for smaller forces, has actually hurt American military readiness. Even current American counterinsurgency doctrine estimates that one soldier or police officer is required for every 50 population, which based on Iraq's population of about 26 million would imply a force of over half a million (or about 250 000 if only the Sunni Triangle is counted). The US is currently struggling to maintain a paltry 130 000 troops in Iraq, with the much vaunted "surge" contributing a further 20 000 for a few weeks.

What about Iraqi security forces you ask? I'll deal with that question below.

In a sense what is occuring in Iraq now is a test case of these competing contentions, and as things stand right now the RMA school is wipping a lot of egg from its face. For all its technological sophistication the US military has not been able to contain (much less defeat) the insurgency, in part because it doesn't have nearly enough troops to mount an effective counter insurgency campaign.

Not that much is likely to change in the near future. The military's obsession with fantastically complex and expensive weapons' systems is reinforced by an iron triangle of interests that virtually guarantees it will remain ill adapted the to the challenges of the 21st century. It works like this: senior brass at the Pentagon convince Congress to lavish hundred of billions of dollars on weapons, and in exchange the defence contractors channel part of the windfall profits into campaign contributions to politicians and cushy "consulting" jobs for retiring senior officers. You can see how directing money at more boots on the ground instead of weapons serves the interests of none of the principals. The inviobility of this iron triangle is a key reason why former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was such a vociferous advocate of "lean" fighting forces that would prevail over more numerous opponents through technological superiority, and probably also why the Bush administration was so unwilling to contemplate the possibility of a serious insurgency in the first place. Such an insurgency would -and has- challenged many of the core assumptions that has guided Bush administration defence policy since its inception.


2. Stranger in a Strange Land I - Military Culture

Part of the implicit bargain America has made with its professional warriors is that no expense will be spared in shielding service people from the unpleasant fact that they are actually in a foreign country populated by foreigners. Hence American forces barricade themselves inside fortresses where they can enjoy as many familiar amenities from home as possible -American food, consumer goods, entertainment, even dependable electricity, water and air conditioning. They make only occassional sallies ("patrols") into the strange, threatening OtherWorld beyond the base perimeter, usually for no more than few hours at a time. In short, the physical distance between those inside and outside the wire might only be a couple of hundred meters, but the psychological, emotional and material distance is incalculable -and those on the outside know it.

This distance creates an insurmountable barrier to fostering the shared interests and mutual respect and trust that is essential to win the Iraqi people -or at least a significant segment of them- over to America's side in the conflict. Even those Iraqis who are not fond of the insurgents have no use for the Americans, as evidenced by public opinion polls that show an overwhelming majority want the US to leave, come what may.

3. Stranger in a Strange Land II - Linguistic and Cultural Illiteracy

Turns out Muslim Arabs aren't all that keen to live under military occupation by an army of English speaking Christian Americans. Who knew?

On top of the military culture issues there are national culture ones. There are hardly any Arabic speakers in the whole US government -never mind the military (which coincidentally speaks volumes about the status of the Arab world in Washington's priorities). Most Americans, including much of the country's senior leadership, is so ignorant of the Arab world they aren't even aware of the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite -a difference which is kind of hugely important.

The upshoot is that insurgent networks are almost impervious to American penetration. The Iraqi street, where the insurgency will ultimately succeed or fail, remains for the vast majority of Americans a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Note also that, just as the prophets of Fourth Generation Warfare predicted, America's enormous investment in spy satellites, Predator drones, cryptographic supercomputers, signals intelligence and the rest is mostly ineffective against this type of opponent.

4. Obsession with Force Protection

Another implicit bargain between Uncle Sam and the troops is that the US will never place the life of a non American on the same level as the that of an American serviceperson (or contractor). What this means in practice is that the US military would rather kill 100 innocent Iraqis than risk the death of one American soldier, and the rules of engagement and American tactics reflect this. This means, first of all, that American forces have already killed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis in order to invade and occupy their country, although Americans collectively remain in deep denial about this. It means, second, that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iraqis blame American for the loss of loved ones, in many cases fairly, in some not, but as a practical matter this is a distinction without a difference. Those Iraqis will never be reconciled to the American presence, never mind actually supporting it. In fact, many of them will make common cause with America's enemies not out of ideological sympathy but on the principle of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".

5. Unreliable Allies

If Americans were better imperialists they would, like Fox Muelder, have already adopted "Trust no one" as their motto. Instead, senior American officials continue to talk as if the "Iraqi government" and the "Iraqi army" are legitimate national institutions -and worse, they act as if they believe it. This accords with American interests, which are served by a secular, nationalist Iraq.

The problem is that Iraq isn't really a nation or, perhaps more accurately, it is a highly circumscribed one. Iraq's deeply fractured society means most people have multiple loyalties -confessional, ethnic, tribal, nationalist- that sometimes are in conflict. This is obvious in the composition of the Iraqi parliament, where parties are readily identified by sectarian affiliation. Similarly, it is naive to believe that when someone puts on an Iraqi army uniform they abandon their identity as a Sunni, Shiite, Kurd or Turkman. The upshoot is that these key national institutions mirror rather than transcend the divisions that exist in Iraqi society at large. Americans want desperately to believe that sometime in the near future these institutions will be able to shoulder the primary burden for holding the country together, thus redeeming their own botched efforts at empire building and creating conditions for a face saving withdrawal of American combat troops. The last thing the US wants is an Iraqi pullout that looks anything like this. In reality however when put to the test these institutions will almost certainly prove far too fragile and weak to play the part for which they have been cast in America's script ("Victory in Iraq 2008", Cinderella version) -the most likely outcome once the stabilizing influence (such as it is) of American forces is withdrawn is an intensification of the civil war and the marginalization or collapse of the political process and national army, much as occured in Lebanon after the outbreak of the civil war in 1975.

As you can see I'm not sanguine about Iraq's future, nor do I have patience for the many war propagandists who, confronted with the enormity of their miscalculations, have no better retort than "well what's your plan for getting us out of this mess?" My plan was elegantly simple -don't invade Iraq in the first place. There was never a compelling case made that such an invasion served a bonified national interest. It is worth remembering that not that long ago anyone who dared speak such heresy was shouted down as a naive advocate of appeasement at best (the historical illiterati, not leastly the President himself, digging deep in their profoundly shallow grasp of 20th century history for such insipid analogies), and quite possibly a traitor.

Even at that, it seems in retrospect that at every turn where the Bush administration faced a choice, it chose wrong. Rather than emulate the example of his father and build a broad coalition to overthrow Saddam for example Bush 43, deep in the thrall of his neocon braintrust, modelled its relations with former allies on that of the Soviet Union's dealings with the nations of Eastern Europe, profoundly alienating potential supporters. The Bushites clearly intended to rule Iraq through an American proconsul for at least several years, using Iraqi quislings (first Ahmed Chalabi and then, when they realized he had virtually no constituency in the country, the laughably misnamed Iraqi Governing Council) as window dressing. They only became converts to the virtues of democracy when the extent to which they had underestimated Iraqi resistance became apparent and popular elections seemed an expedient means to undercut support for the insurgents or, failing that, at least give the Americans some local saps to share the blame when the whole project finally went under. I have already mentioned some of the more egregious errors made in the administration of occupied Iraq in a previous post -disbanding the Iraqi army, staffing the occupation authority with unqualified ideological fellow travellers, using tens of billions of dollars obstensibly for badly needed reconstruction as a slush fund to reward American companies that were political allies of the administration.

It's true that even if the Bush administration had done everything right in Iraq we might still have come to the same point we are at today. This is a reminder that war is always the most capricious of enterprises -a point forgotten not only by the Bushites but a long list of other leaders throughout history who led their peoples to catastrophe after being seduced by the apparent simplicity of using force to solve complex problems. The very fact that war is such a blunt and unpredictable instrument of policy is exactly why it should only be resorted to in the most dire circumstances, with the most deliberate forethought, and only after every other possible recourse has been exhausted. Obviously Iraq never came close to meeting any of these criteria.

At the end of the day policymakers and other human beings sometimes face circumstances in which all of their options are bad, and this is the situation the US now confronts in Iraq. Some people -the architects of this fiasco primary among them- are still looking for the silver lining, hoping against hope that just one more empty gesture, like sending another 20 000 troops to Iraq, will save them from the consequences of their decisions (coincidentally, in the military this is a cardinal sin called "reinforcing failure"). What they are still unwilling to accept is that they are no longer the masters of their own fate, the time when a few more right decisions might have tipped the scales in their favor is long past.

They, like everyone else, are now just awaiting the inevitable.

The Road to Baghdad

Helena Cobban quotes Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post on the similarities between Vietnam and Iraq:

For a gray-haired journalist whose career included 18 months covering the Vietnam War for The Washington Post, it is a source of amazement to realize that my country has done this again. We twice took a huge risk in the hope that we could predict and dominate events in a nation whose history we did not know, whose language few of us spoke, whose rivalries we didn't understand, whose expectations for life, politics and economics were all foreign to many Americans...

In Vietnam as in Iraq, U.S. military power alone proved unable to achieve the desired political objectives.

How did this happen again? After all, we're Americans -- practical, common-sense people who know how to get things done. Or so we'd like to think. In truth, we are ethnocentric to a fault, certain of our own superiority, convinced that others see us as we do, blithely indifferent to cultural, religious, political and historical realities far different from our own. These failings -- more than any tactical or strategic errors -- help explain the U.S. catastrophes in Vietnam and Iraq.

As Helena goes on to explain at some length this is something of a of a mea culpa for Kaiser, who was one of the many, many journalists in the mainstream media who drank the Bush administration's Kool Aid on Iraq and has only come to see the error of his ways as Iraq, not to say America's broader, hubristic ambition of "remaking" the Middle East, slowly disintergrated before his eyes.

That having been said, there is more than a little wisdom to Kaiser's musings. There are of course a multitude of reasons why the US is now facing imminent defeat in Iraq, from failing to deploy enough troops (not that enough were available, but that's another story) to stacking the occupation authority with neocon spearcarriers whose only qualification was passing an ideological purity test, to summarily disbanding the Iraqi army, to believing that the invasion and occupation would be self financing through Iraqi oil exports (current cost to American taxpayers: $400 billion $660 billion, adjusted for inflation, and rising, according to Juan Cole's blog). Out of all these reasons two stand out however as being particularly calamitous to American ambitions in Iraq: first, the US military doesn't know how to fight a counterinsurgency war (see under "lessons not learned from Nam"); and second, the entire project was completely compromised from the start by the quaint belief, so characteristically American, that the interests of the people of Iraq -or at least those of them who weren't Islamofacists or Saddam lovers- was identical to the interests of the United States.

The post Vietnam American military is a fighting force explicitly optimized to win conventional wars. One of the key lessons American military leaders took from the deeply traumatic experience of Vietnam was "one of the first rules of war is: don't fight insurgencies". Indeed, the much vaunted Powell Doctrine is really this dictum packaged in a more intellectually rigorous wrapper. It is deeply ironic, and will remain forever a stain on Powell's reputation, that as secretary of state he abandoned his own professed beliefs in order to cheerlead for the Big Iraq Adventure.

After Vietnam the only big war the army was interested in fighting was in Germany, where 90 Warsaw Pact divisions faced 45 NATO ones across the Iron Curtain and the possibility that the Soviet Union would try to end the stalemate of the Cold War by making a dash for the Rhine was the Pentagon's central strategic preoccupation. To this end the American military adopted a number of important changes, including abandoning conscription in favor of an all volunteer force, adopting the Airland Battle Doctrine, and placing a renewed emphasis on technological superiority to counter numerical inferiority. One thing the military did not change however, and which arguably played a major role in its failure in Vietnam, was the belief born out of American experience in both World Wars and Korea that the massive application of firepower was the key to victory.

In one sense the reforms undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s worked too well: although the Soviet blitzkrieg in Central Europe never came, the Pentagon had the opportunity to showcase what it could do with a highly trained, all professional military armed with the very best weapons money can buy in Gulf War I in 1991, and it was a showstopper. Iraq was completely defeated in a six week campaign of arial bombardment followed by a 72 hour land war -which was really nothing more than a mopping up operation- completed with absolutely minimal casualties, an outcome no one not certifiably insane would have predicted with any confidence before the shooting started.

Turns out Gulf War I had a downside however, and not just for the Iraqis. Suddenly American neocons, dazzled by the vision of techno war offered up on the nightly news, and by the apparently cheap and decisive road to victory it offered, were converted to the cause of militarism. During the Cold War neocons had been strong advocates of taking a hard line with Moscow and were willing to stomach many unpleasant means to that end (such as cozying up to brutal right wing dictatorships) but even they weren't advocating settling the issue through a test of arms. In any case the collapse of the Soviet Union just a few months after the conclusion of Gulf War I made the issue moot and, with the loss of its principal nemesis, set the movement adrift for some time. Eventually however the neocons regrouped around a new and even more ambitious agenda -basically that the United States, as the world's sole remaining superpower, had the means, the right, and indeed the moral obligation to recast the world in its own image. It is difficult to overstate the radicalism of what the neocons were proposing (even if the mainstream media and the political establishment decided that discretion demanded that they remain willfully blind to it): it amounted to a plan for global American hegemony backed by the coercive power of the American military, whose invincibility in the face of any conceivable opponent or coalition of opponents was now virtually an article of faith among the brethren. This agenda was formalized and become official US policy with the publication of the National Security Strategy of United States in 2002 or, as it more concisely known, the Bush Doctrine.

Gulf War II was intended, among other things, to legitimize the Bush Doctrine by asserting the pernicious principle of "military pre-emption" (a euphemism for wars of aggression, including the invasion of Iraq) and by cowing would be challengers through the graphic demonstration of the consequences of defying America's will. In the first blush of victory after the American military's defeat of the Iraqi army the neocons indulged in an orgy of self congratulation, not to mention patronizing taunting of their ideological opponents, which coincidentally is why I feel little sympathy for them now that the shoe is on the other foot. Profoundly impressed by the ability of the world's only superpower to crush a fourth rate opponent like a bug the historical illiterati fell over themselves to christen America's glorious legions "the greatest fighting force in the history of the world". As neocon charter member Max Boot enthused in Foreign Affairs shortly after the invasion, the ease of American victory made "fabled generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison."

And then of course it all started coming apart.

George W. Bush: The Psychology of Escalation

Now that we have the preliminaries out of the way it's time to get down to brass tacks: the slow motion implosion of the American imperial adventure in Iraq.

By now everyone knows that George Bush has fastened on the idea of redeeming his fast sinking Iraq project by temporarily increasing the American military presence in Iraq by about 20 000 troops. For reasons that deserve their own post this will not avert the near certainty of a humiliating American defeat in Iraq or it's impact on Bush's historical legacy and reputation. For me however the most interesting aspect of the "surge" strategy is the insight it gives us into Bush's psychology and particular habits of mind that have contributed so much to his disasterous tenure as president.

In a couple of decades when historians look back at the Iraq trainwreck and ask themselves "how could this disaster have ever been allowed to happen?" a lot of ink will be spilled on the topic of Bush's psychological suitability for the job. With the benefit of hindsight it will be clear that Bush was remarkably underqualified to hold what is arguably the most powerful political office on the planet, partly because he plainly isn't all that bright, but perhaps more importantly because he lacks a certain emotional maturity that has saddled him with remarkably poor judgement, of which the surge strategy is only the latest manifestation.

Doubts about Bush's suitability for the job arose among many who studied his career prior to becoming governor of Texas in 1995. As is so often the case however the evidence can be read two ways, often depending largely on the ideological predisposition of the person doing the evaluation. Bush's apologists, and back in the day their numbers were legion, looked at Bush's resume and convinced themselves he had solid credentials. In particular, they pointed out that:

• He held two degrees from elite Ivy League schools (a BA in history (no that's not a typo) from Yale and an MBA from Harvard)
• He was a fighter pilot in the Air National Guard
• He had business experience running oil companies in Texas

A sceptic however could look at exactly the same evidence and reach a very different conclusion. The difference isn't so much a disagreement about what Bush did or didn't do in the years prior to holding public office, but rather what this formative period tells us about the man's character and values. Hence to the sceptic:

Bush got into Yale as a legacy preference. His 1970 application to enter the University of Texas law school was rejected. In 1973, which is father serving as chairman of the Republican National Committee (having previously built his profile within the party as a two term Representative and American ambassador to the UN), he is admitted to Harvard. Bush stumbles through university on the strength of a succession of "gentleman's C" grades. Yoshi Tsurumi, who taught Bush during his first year at Harvard, recalls that he was not (ahem!) an outstanding student, and in fact was already exhibiting many of the character flaws traits that would taint his presidency.

All of which goes to show that in America everything has a price, including intellectual respectability.

Bush joined the Texas Air National Guard (flying obsolescent F-102 Delta Dart interceptors) in order to avoid service in Vietnam. He was posted to the 147th Fighter Wing, a "champagne unit" that included sons of other prominent Texans, like those of Senators Lloyd Bentsen and John Tower and Texas governor (later Nixon Treasury secretary) John Connally. There has of course been a great deal of controversy about Bush's National Guard service, but that needn't distract us here. The point is that at the height of the Vietnam War the American draft system was deliberately engineered to ensure that the sons of the elite were not press ganged into active military service. Those from this charmed cohort that did serve, like John Kerry and Al Gore, actually volunteered.

Bush's business dealings are, if anything, even more opaque and controversial than his National Guard service. He dabbled in a series of small cap energy companies, initially financed largely by friends of the family. None of these were financially successful but, at the same time, none of them failed outright on his watch, largely because of a series of remarkably fortuitous interventions by outside investors. Each time one of his ventures was close to collapse -Arbuso / Bush Exploration in 1982 and 1984, Spectrum 7 in 1986- it was rescued by a white knight. The fingerprints on the first bailout are not hard to identify: it came in the form of a cash infusion from New York financier Philip Uzielli, a close friend of James Baker III (then President Reagan's chief of staff, later Bush 41's secretary of state) which Bush used to take the company public (though in the end this raised only a bit over $1 million, instead of the $6 million originally hoped for). The second and third (Spectrum 7's merger with Bush Exploration in 1984, with Bush becoming CEO of the merged entity, and then Harken Energy's buyout of Spectrum 7 two years later, with Bush becoming a director at Harken) involved mergers in which the acquiring firm got a company that was essentially worthless, headed by a man with an unbroken record of failure. Bush did have one very marketable asset however: he was the son of the vice president. As he himself was once fond of quipping, "I'm all name and no money".

Ironically Bush finally made his fortune not in the oil business, but as a result of a sweetheart deal to purchase the Texas Rangers baseball club in 1989, shortly after his father was elected president. The owners' consortium that bought the team, which included several prominent backers of his father, cut Bush in on the action even though he had virtually no money of his own to invest. He eventually contributed $600 000, 80% of which was borrowed from a bank where he was a director, representing about 1.8% of the purchase price. In spite of that his business partners gave him a 12% ownership stake in the team. The new owners successfully persuaded / blackmailed the city of Arlington into building a new stadium for the team, funded by sales tax increase. They then sold the team for three times the purchase price - Bush realized a profit of almost $14.5 million on his initial $600 000 investment. (It was Bush's efforts to pay back the bank loan by selling shares in Harken that led to allegations of insider trading).

The picture that emerges of Bush in these formative years before he won political office is of a man whose priviledged upbringing opened doors for him that would otherwise have remained closed, spared him some of the difficult choices faced by his peers, and, at several critical junctures, shielded him from failure. I can't help but feel he missed out on some important life lessons along the way, like how to accept responsibility for his actions, admit he was wrong, and deal with failure. I also think some of Bush's less desireable personality traits stem from this, such as his inability to empathize with people who lack the advantages which he takes for granted.

Which brings us to the 21 000 troop solution. After many, many months of insisting that things in Iraq were a lot better than his critics or independent observers claimed, Bush has finally come around to acknowledging, at least tacitly, that they were right all along. Unfortunately, his instinctive response to the crisis is to escalate it because he is psychologically unable to contemplate the alternative -admitting he was wrong and accepting the consequences of that error. After all, throughout his life friends of his father, or people who wanted to become friends of his father, have looked out for him and cleaned up after him. Why should this time be any different? (Indeed the Iraq Survey Group was very much in this tradition, even if Bush was characteristically too dumb to realize that the Group's whole mission was to save him from himself and from the cabal of neocon idealogues with which he has surrounded himself).

The net result is that more people are going to die, both American and (especially) Iraqi. The much vaunted "surge" will petter out after a few weeks, because the US has no strategic reserves to send to Iraq and is instead further straining an already exhausted force structure that is perilously close to collapse. The situation in Iraq post surge will look remarkly like the situation pre surge, with the US still facing imminent defeat.

The only thing that might be different is that the surge will buy the occupation a few months, ideally allowing the US presence to hang on past November 2008. Because at that point cleaning up the Iraq mess will be someone else's responsibility.

Which is after all, according to the internal logic of Bush's own particular understanding of how the world wags, exactly as things should be.

So It's Come to This

Well, here we are.

Welcome to The Last Outpost, my own little corner of the blogosphere devoted to incoherent rants about Canadian and international politics, public policy, strategic studies, and how the world is going to hell in a handbasket generally.

Just as every author of an academic treatise seems to feel compelled to justify why they wrote yet another book on the fascinating subject of the etiology of the jury system in the courts of assize established by Henry II, I feel a few words about why I started this blog are in order.

I’m an avid reader and occasional commenter on other peoples’ blogs, but until now I’ve resisted the idea of starting my own, for several reasons: first, I was reluctant to make the time commitment involved; it’s so much easier hanging out on other peoples’ blogs and dropping a comment when the mood strikes me. No pressure. Second, the blogosphere is a pond dominated by a few huge man eating fish and innumerable tiny insignificant minnows, and I’m obviously a minnow. It seems like a lot of work writing stuff no one is going to read (did I mention I’m lazy?) Third, I’ve always kind of suspected that there is a touch of egomania motivating many bloggers –why would anyone care what I think about anything anyway?, and I flatter myself that I’m not an egomaniac.

Having said all that, what finally forced me to reconsider is that Billmon abruptly threw in the towel at The Whiskey Bar on December 28. Some of you have no idea who Billmon is, which is a tragedy, kind of like spending two years living in a apartment in the same building as Ernest Hemingway on rue Cardinal Lemoine in Paris and not realizing it until after he’s moved out. Suffice it to say that IMO Billmon was hands down the best blogger on the Internet, and that’s saying something (those of you who are really interested can read his entry in Wikipedia and, although he pulled the plug on his website (www.billmon.org), the posts, except for the last six months, are archived here. They will reward close reading with a wealth of insight into geopolitics and economics).

The day after Billmon called it quits Swopa over at progressive power blog Firedog Lake made the following comment:

Some people, though, might think it's unfair of Billmon to leave — that as (by acclamation) the most purely talented writer on any blog, we need his gifts more now than ever as we battle to end the war in Iraq and retake the White House in 2008. Although Billmon might consider this comparison to be sacrilegious, I'm reminded of a perhaps-apocryphal story (I can't find any reference to it via Google) I read once about John Lennon. During Lennon's five-year retirement from music in the late 1970s, a top rock critic wrote a melodramatic plea for him to return, claiming that only the brilliant John Lennon could make sense of the times and show his fans the way forward.

Lennon supposedly passed on a riposte via a mutual acquaintance: "Tell him I did my part. It's his turn now." If Billmon has indeed shuttered the Whiskey Bar for good, that's the lesson for us — it's our turn now.

It is in the spirit of continuing the very high quality of analysis that Billmon routinely provided, and the contribution it made to public discourse, that I decided to start The Last Outpost. Of course no one blog, and certainly not this one, can hope to fill the void left by Billmon’s retirement from blogging. However, as someone who shares many of his intellectual interests and concerns I decided that it's time to stop making excuses and accept responsibility for doing my small part to fill that void. When the age of heroes has past nothing remains for us mortals but to set before us their example and aspire to do it justice, even knowing that we can never hope to attain the same lofty peaks!

So once again, welcome.