American wars since World War II

We have been watching the PBS special “The Sixties”, and tonight we watched the episode about the Vietnam War.  It made me think about all the American Wars since World War II.

The Korean War was at least a draw, in that when the fighting stopped the North Koreans and their Chinese allies had at least been pushed back more or less to the original dividing line.

Vietnam was a disaster. We essentially never found a workable strategy for winning, we lost 58,300 American lives with another 153,300 wounded, killed over a million civilians, spent about $173 billion (about $800 billion is 2014 dollars), and eventually withdrew and let the North Vietnamese take the whole county. Oh, and records now show our government lied to us repeatedly about the war, starting with the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident.

The first Gulf war a disaster. We spent about $30 billion of American taxpayer money (other nations contributed the rest) and beat Saddam’s forces in Kuwait in 100 hours, and then stopped without finishing the job, and then allowed Saddam to kill tens of thousands of his own people who thought we were going to help them.

Afghanistan was and still is a disaster. After 13 years of inconclusive fighting, the loss of 2200 American lives thus far with another 20,000 wounded, and perhaps around 20,000 civilians killed, and about $750 billion in America taxpayer money spent, the Taliban are reclaiming territory as fast as we withdraw from it. Once again, we never found a workable strategy for winning, and a student of history might have known from the beginning (or at least from the Soviet’s recent example) that it was an impossible war to win.

Iraq was and still is a disaster. After 11 years of inconclusive fighting, the loss more than 4500 Americans killed and something over 32,000 wounded, and between 130,000 and 150,000 more civilians killed and another $1.7 trillion in American Taxpayer money thus far (not counting another $500 billion in veterans’ benefits), the newly-trained Iraqi army fled in terror from the ISIS fanatics, leaving much of their expensive American-supplied weapons behind, and now the northern part of the country is in the hands of the most brutal thugs imaginable. Once again, our ruling elites never figured out a workable strategy to win – or even decided what would constitute winning. Oh, and once again our government gave us misinformation about the war - the infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction that were never found.,

Is there a disturbing pattern here? Our military are doing their job superbly, often under impossible conditions.  Our politicians, on the other hand, have fumbled repeatedly.

Encryption and the feds

I see that the federal law enforcement agencies are quite perturbed about the new default encryption appearing in Apple's new iPhones and Google's Android phones, which will make it much harder, perhaps even impossible, to listen in on everyone's phone calls and e-mails. It will, they say, seriously impede the tracking of drug dealers, pedophiles, terrorists and other criminals. And no doubt they are right. Such measures have already been shown to be very effective in other systems - we call those systems "police states" - like Russia and North Korea.

Most of us already appear many times a day on surveillance cameras in big stores and on street corners in many towns. Our auto license plates are read and tracked automatically in many jurisdictions. The NSA already sweeps up all our phone calls, and perhaps most of our web visits and emails as well. Our credit card transactions can be tracked, as well as our air travel. No doubt a police-linked surveillance camera in every bedroom would further help the police deal with rapes and domestic violence, but do we really want to go that far?

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies always want more, and more intrusive, powers - of course it makes their job easier. It also makes abuses of power easier, and the history of federal agency abuses, from the Nixon years to the Obama administration's IRS scandal, ought to alert us to the dangers to our freedom and privacy that this constant federal overreach offers.

The feds are annoyed about the encryption. My response is "tough - get used to it". This is supposed to be the land of the free - if the feds can listen in to every telephone call I make and and every email I send, we are hardly free.

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?