More from Angelo Codvilla

Angelo Codvilla’s summary of the Iraq war, pg 190 in his book Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft:

In fact our statesmen never decided among themselves what part of the terrorist problem Iraq posed, hence how invading Iraq would solve it, hence who our enemy was, and therefore what victory would mean.  Much less did they decide why they were occupying the country.  They did not choose among competing analyses of the problem, and then settle on a coherent plan for victory against concrete enemies. They compromised with one another, adjusted their definition of enemies and of victory to fit what they happened to be doing at any given time, and claimed that it was all so complex.

But victory in our time is as self-evident as ever.  If you can’t celebrate it in peace and safety, with flag flying, bands blaring, and enemies dead or cringing, chances are it’s not the real thing. Among other things, victory means being unencumbered to deal with tomorrow’s problems. Remember that the natural objective of any fight is to win, to get it over with – not to pass the troubles on to your grandchildren……

Now think about our current adventure against the Islamic State.

1. Do we know who the enemy is? Not really, certainly not once they melt back into populated centers, and especially since many of them are members of the indigenous population.

2. Do we have a plan to completely defeat them? Not really, since we don’t even really know how to identify them, let alone how to kill them without killing the civilians around them, thereby recruiting even more of the population to their cause.

3. Is that plan achievable realistically? Since we don’t have a plan, by definition it is not achievable

Statecraft and the Islamic State

Hard-headed, clear, unambiguous language from Angelo Codevilla’s book “Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft", pg 96:

…statecrafts primoidal questions: What exactly are we after? What does it take to persuade whom of what? What means are sufficient to what ends?

So think about the Syria/Iraq conflict, and America’s current responses to it, in the context of those simple, clear questions:

With the Islamic State what, exactly, is our objective?

To exterminate them entirely? What realistically would it take to do that, considering how little success we had suppressing insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan after a decade of trying? Once they melt back into the populations in the cities, how do we identify them to kill them?

To “degrade” them to the point where they no longer threaten Iraq? What, realistically, would it take to do that, considering the number of disenchanted Sunni tribes in Iraq who have joined the Islamic State?

To strengthen local forces enough that they can defeat the Islamic State? We spent a decade and who knows how many millions of dollars building up and training the Iraqi army, and they fled in panic when faced with the Islamic State fighters. The Kurds, with our support, may fight well enough to preserve their own territory, but they are in no position to move out and reconquer the rest of Iraq. What other local forces are there that haven’t already joined the Islamic State?

What would it take to persuade whom of what?

What, realistically, would it take to persuade all these Islamic State fighters to stop fighting, and to persuade potential new recruits to not join? Considering that opposing us and recapturing territory is a religious imperative for them, what possible incentive or threat could we offer that would deter them? Do we have any means at all at our disposal to deter them?

What means are sufficient to what ends?

It seems to me perfectly clear what it would take realistically – a massive US ground force (because no one else in the Middle East or the European Union is either willing to do it, or militarily capable of doing it), sweeping through and conquering the whole territory, and then remaining and administering it as brutally as Saddam Hussain did when he ruled. Are we willing to do that?  Of course not.  Our troops would refuse to be as brutal as it would take to suppress ISIS and keep them suppressed, and the American public would refuse to let them be so brutal. Beyond that, there is no pressing American interest that would justify the cost on dollars, equipment and lives to conquer and administer a far-away piece of desert.

So in fact we are unwilling to do what it would take to achieve the ends we want.  So then why are we there at all, wasting American money on a lost cause?

Recommended: Advice To War Presidents

Having recently discovered Angelo Codevilla’s books, I have been reading my way through a number of them, including two recommended in recent posts.  Today I am recommending his book Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft (2009). The title might sound a bit condescending if we didn’t currently have a president who looks like he badly needs a remedial course in statecraft.

Codevilla presents a detailed and pointed criticism of American statecraft all across the spectrum, from the Liberal Internationalism launched by Woodrow Wilson, through Realists to Neoconservatives.  Each of these academic dogmas has its peculiar beliefs and agendas, but Codeville argues that at root they all share the same naïve and fundamental flaw – they all assume that other nations and peoples think more or less like we do, aspire to more or less the same things as we do, value more or less the same things we do, and therefore would respond to threats and incentives more or less as we would. Clearly that is not the case, and he details American foreign policy failures from Woodrow Wilson to the present day, across both political parties, to make his case.

This is not as easy a book to read as the previous two.  It takes some work to really understand the complexities, but it is worth the effort.  I don’t agree with everything he writes, but I think on balance his arguments are persuasive. He certainly won’t ever be the darling of the ruling elite in this country, because he thinks most of them are naïve about the wider world, and their dearest policies completely unrealistic. But then, I am coming to believe that too.

The Scotland vote

The people of Scotland vote on Thursday on whether or not to split from the United Kingdom and become an independent country. It doesn't take rocket science to see that splitting from England would be a very dumb move, leaving Scotland as a very small, insignificant nation, almost entirely depended on the dwindling North Sea oil reserves to keep fiscally solvent.

But in fact the polls show the race too close to call at the moment, so nationalism and emotion may well trump reason in this case. Well, people make their bed so they get to lie in it. If the Scots vote to leave the UK, they will have generations to regret their decision.

The President’s speech last night

I read the text of the speech to the nation that President Obama gave last night.  I couldn’t bring myself to listen to it live, because I am tired of his rhetoric (but to be fair, by this point in the Bush presidency I couldn’t stand to listen to Bush any more either).  If I were to paraphrase the speech, it would run like this:

Introduction:

Hey, I know I have been getting a lot of flak lately for being a do-nothing, indecisive, lead-from-behind, golf-playing president in foreign policy, but we have managed to do a few minor things, like find Bin Laden and waste him.  Give me a little credit here.

Central Point:

We still have no idea what to do about Syria, Iraq, or the Islamic State, so we are going to continue to do the only thing we can think of, which is to drop a few bombs on them any time we can find a worthwhile target, and maybe pass out a few MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat) to a few of the Syrian rebels. We certainly don’t intend to do anything really effective, like putting American troops on the ground. By some hard arm-twisting over the past few days we have managed to assemble a coalition of nations who are willing to at least give lip service to the idea of helping us (though of course they see that we don’t intend to invest much in the effort, so they won’t either). This effort will be a long one (meaning that I intend to dump this whole problem off on my successor just as soon as I can).

Conclusion:

Lots of meaningless platitudes about how great we are.

Is this really the best the administration can do?

Realism in foreign policy

Everybody has their own diagnosis for why American foreign policy seems to be failing: here is mine – we need a lot less utopian idealism and a lot more hard-headed realism!

Here are my top 5 principles that it seems to me our ruling class have lost sight of:

1. American-style democratic government is not exportable. It requires a particular set of cultural and institutional and historical underpinnings which simply don’t exist in many of the nations and cultures we keep trying to “nation-build” into replicas of America.  Realistically it just doesn’t work, and by now we have had enough failed attempts that one would think even the densest ideologues would be beginning to get the message. We need to drop this persistent dream of turning the whole world into a democratic utopia – it just isn’t going to happen. Countries that choose themselves to move toward democracy will do it in their own way, in their own time, and will probably develop a form of democracy of their own, reflecting the peculiarities of their own culture and history – and it probably won’t look like American democracy.

2. We can’t right all the wrongs in the world, and we shouldn’t try to. Lots of very nasty things go on around the world all the time – massive poverty, brutal dictatorships, plagues, famines, wars, genocides, etc, etc.  They always have and they always will. There is no way America can “fix” all of them. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what we can to improve the world in the long term, but this business of picking the odd injustice here and there (based largely on the whims of what the news media happens to choose to report in the nightly news) and basing our foreign policy on it is ineffective, counterproductive, and frankly just plain stupid.

3. Any government’s first duty is to keep its own people safe and prosperous.  As I have written before, “it’s the economy, stupid”.  American power – hard and soft – flows entirely from its economic strength.  Not from its moral posturing or religious base, not from its supposed ”exceptionalism”, certainly not from the brilliance of its statesmen and politicians, not even from its fortunate geographic position – but only from its massive economic strength, which means we can afford a powerful well-trained and well-equipped military, a good  national infrastructure, good public health services, good public education, with enough money left over to buy goodwill from our allies. If our economy went south, our influence in the world would follow it right down the drain. A wise government would, as a matter of foreign policy and national security,  look first and foremost toward keeping our own economy as vibrant and powerful as possible.

4. A rational foreign policy for a superpower like America would seek first and foremost to try to keep any other hostile nation, or coalition of hostile nations, from becoming powerful enough to become an existential threat to America. We did that successfully through the post-war Soviet era. It ought to remain the central guiding principle of our foreign policy. This requires (a) that we keep ourselves strong economically and militarily, and (b) that we build and maintain an effective coalition of nations who see it in their own clear self-interest to support us.

5. Current public sentiment is not a reliable guide to effective foreign policy. It is an effective leader’s job to lead his/her people where they need to go, not to just follow the polls and try to tell them what they want to hear (and will get her/him re-elected). An effective foreign policy in a democracy requires that the government educate and lead the people toward rational policies, rather than just reacting to the passing whims of the public (or, more likely, the news media that shapes the public whims).

I wonder if the Nobel Prize committee....

The Nobel Prize committee awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama, apparently on the basis of his soaring rhetoric about ending wars, since he hadn't actually done anything yet at that point. I wonder how they feel about their choice this morning?

Recommended: Informing Statecraft

The previous post recommended Angelo Codevilla’s book War: Ends and Means, in my opinion as good a book, and as important a book for students of history and foreign affairs as such classics as von Clausewitz’s On War and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.  This post recommends another of his books, the 1992 book Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century.

The US intelligence system is massive and exorbitantly expensive, employing well over 100,000 people, plus tens of thousands more as contractors. Of course much of the annual cost is invisible, hidden in “black” budgets, but informed estimates put it at more than $50 billion per year.

Yet despite all that money and all those people and all the expensive equipment, US intelligence has failed to anticipate almost every significant world event since the end of World War II, starting with the Soviet Union’s postwar plans in Eastern Europe, including the Korean invasion, both major Arab-Israeli wars, the Eastern European “color revolutions”, the fall of the Communist party in Russia, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and most recently the so-called “Arab Spring”, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the rise of the Islamic State.  US intelligence efforts have, for the most part, been a failure.  There have no doubt been successes (which understandably are seldom publicized), but on the major events, there have been a lot of failures.

There are many reasons for the ineffectiveness of America intelligence services. There are too many competing services, and because of bureaucratic turf battles and jalousies they don’t share information easily. They are too big, so that communication paths are too long and too tortuous. They have become too bureaucratic, with more of a focus on budget politics and career preservation than on their primary tasks. They have a fascination with technical tools and have neglected to develop enough human sources in other nations. They are too insular in outlook; too wedded to American concepts to think out of the box. They are short not only linguists who can read or translate the intelligence they collect, but more critically they are short of experts who truly understand the cultures they are trying to collect information on.

And of course, the politicians who get the intelligence products they produce are mostly too poorly educated in history, comparative cultures, and statecraft, and often too blinded by their own preconceptions, ideologies and biases to make effective use of what they do get.

Codeville tallks at length about how to do intelligence work correctly, with many real-world examples from both American experiences and other nation’s intelligence services experiences of what worked and what didn’t work, and why. He has a background in intelligence work, so he knows what he is talking about.  This is a very good book.

Recommended: War: Ends and Means

I have written before that the well-educated, comfortable middle class political, academic and business elites who run this country apparently have a far less realistic view of the world than the poor who live in tough neighborhoods dominated by gangs. The poor understand first hand that force and the threat of force matters, and that some people can’t just be reasoned out of conflicts.

And recent events have shown, once again, that liberal American Utopian views of a peaceful, orderly world are not shared by the brutal Islamic State, nor Hamas in Gaza, nor any of the many, many other armed militias, jihadist groups, pseudo-communist insurgents, or pirates in Africa or the Middle East or even in parts of Latin America. And now we can see that they aren’t shared by Russia and President Putin either.  In fact, the world produces a steady, reliable stream of brutal dictators and ambitious leaders in the mold of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Saddam Hussain, Napoleon, Bashar Assad, Vladimir Putin, and their ilk, who are only contained or defeated by force.

Paul Seabury (Prof of Political Science , Berkeley) and Angelo Codevilla (Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institute, Stanford) wrote War: Ends and Means (1989) as an attempt to educate a new American generation, who did not live through World War I or World War II, about the importance of understanding wars – why they are sometimes necessary (because bad as they are , the alternative is sometimes worse), how they start, how they are prosecuted, and how they end - instead of just naively pretending it will never happen again.

This excerpt from the introduction makes their point:

This book is not written for strategic theorists, military professionals, or historians who devote themselves to the nature of organized violence and its relation to politics. It is written for a generation of Americans whom the absence of the military draft has trained to live as if military matters were a spectator sport, whose popular culture gives the impression that violence belongs exclusively to the past or to lower forms of life, and whose university curriculum make it well-night impossible to put one’s self in the shoes of history’s protagonists – or of those caught in the middle. This book would not be understood in the Communist world or in much of the Third World, where violence is endemic and discourse on this subject is deformed or nonexistent.  It would be superfluous in, say, Switzerland or Israel, where personal involvement in military matters  goes hand-in-hand with sober discourse, as it would have been superfluous in America  prior to the 1950s.  But in the magic kingdom of modern upper-middle-class American life, it is as necessary as it was two thousand years ago for the slave who sat behind the conquering hero in Rome’s triumphal processions and whispered in his ear: “All glory is fleeting”.  Hubris and ignorance are equally narcotic.  We write to break the spell of ignorance about war and to bring some of the least palatable aspects of reality into contemporary American minds though the gentle medium of the printed page lest someday these aspects intrude of their own accord.

In a time when the world is aflame in violence, from the Middle East to the Ukraine, and our government appears unable to settle on a coherent strategy to manage our responses, if any, to these crises, this book seems to me particularly relevant and important.

PS - Get the 1990 paperback reprint, if possible.  It includes a new forward analyzing the first Gulf war in the context of this discussion - and the analysis is very revealing indeed!

PPS - Better yet, get the second edition (2006), which adds a new extensive discussion of the American "war on terror".