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:
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.
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