— by Odysseus
As the cities of the Sunni triangle in Iraq, just north of Baghdad, fall to the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), some of the world’s people look on in horror, others look on with glee, and some watch with the resignation of the Greek Cassandra. We here at The Cassandra Times take no joy in noting that we told you so.
It has always been our stated belief that military force cannot be used to create a nation or society. Only the people who live there can do that. Attempting to make that the objective of military action is placing one’s win condition into the hands of others over whom one has no control. To achieve victory, a win condition must be something within one’s own power, not ceded to factors outside of one’s control. You cannot win if your stated goal is “a sunny day” or “a good crop”.
The left in the United States and the global anti-American movement will be quick to nod their heads in the pretense of deep knowledge. They will chatter that this outcome was inevitable and constitutes proof that American use of military force is never, never, never the answer and always ends in, at least, failure, but, more likely, makes any situation even worse. They will proclaim that they opposed the war in Iraq to begin with, and that this outcome proves them to have been correct.
The prevailing narrative will come from the sympathetic, left wing, global info-tainment industry which will recycle the slogans of the anti-Vietnam War movement of their youth, like chanting a favorite hymn. They will quote the same catch-phrases and mantras created for them by the Soviet agit-prop offices of the old KGB some 50 years ago in the same way that a decrepit church pianist plays the same tunes to accompany biblical scripture. The words will be have been memorized and accepted, confidently chanted for comfort, without question or reason.
Like all great lies, these purported lessons about the futility of using American military power do actually contain some small kernel of truth. Great lies will neither hold sway nor withstand scrutiny unless they have some truth within. The genius of the lie lies in twisting the direction of the truth to direct the gaze of the listener away from the true import and, instead. focus it on the liar’s desired outcome.
In this case, the truth is that military force is not always the way to achieve a goal. However, the purpose of the lie is to undermine and curtail the West’s desire or even ability to use military force anywhere in the world. Thus, the West is lured into a debilitating inaction, leaving the stage free and safe for any competitor to use its own military force, unimpeded by a Hamlet-like West.
One may recall that these selfsame naysayers who so sagely wrung their hands and decried use of military force in Iraq also opposed any military force in response to 9/11. They condemned the use of military force to free Kuwait from Saddam Houssein’s 1990 invasion by Iraq. They denigrated the use of American military force in Panama to oust Manuel Noriega and the use of American military forces to oust Cuban forces from Grenada. The usual suspects were nearly beside themselves with rage, when President Ronald Reagan ordered precision bombing on Muammar Quadafi in retaliation for Libya’s sponsorship of a terror wave.
One will note that the selfsame individuals and organizations who oppose American use of force also oppose NATO and Israeli military power. They also decried the use of British military force to oust the Argentinians from the Falkland islands, Israeli military force to stop the artillery barrages coming in from southern Lebanon, and the support of insurgents in Nicaragua or El Salvador who were sympathetic to the West.
Whatever the global issue for the past 40 years, you can find current Secretary of State John Kerry on whichever side is opposing America’s interests. The same is true for former Secretary of State and presidential contender Hillary Clinton and all her and Mr. Kerry’s fellow travelers except, perhaps, when overwhelming public opinion makes it politically dangerous to do so. The common theme, which can be discerned over the past four decades, is that they will say scarcely a word about the use of military force, insurgencies, or violence by any anti-western nation or movement despite horrifying acts of bone-chilling cruelty. They condemn only the West in the strongest language. Yet, for any other non-western country or group, an excuse or plea for “understanding” will always be found and argued.
Why is that?
Thinking minds can reasonably suspect that these self-proclaimed “liberals”, “progressives” or “left-wingers” do not have as much actual concern against war itself as they claim, but, rather, feign concern as an excuse to resist any pro-western military action. They are not so much “anti-war” as they are “anti-western”. We know that, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the KGB fostered many such movements around the world, teaching many of the leaders of the third world “independence”, “autonomy”, and revolutionary movements at Patrice Lumumba University outside of Moscow, but that is a subject for another time.
The burning issue of the day is that these aged and hoary spin doctors, both the leftovers from the bygone Vietnam era as well as their younger slack-witted and jug-eared acolytes will be very busy trying to trot out their ill-advised “lesson” that former President George W. Bush’s use of force in Iraq and Afghanistan has inevitably come to a bad end, as all western use of force always will. This is the great lie whose ultimate goal is not to draw the correct lesson from history or events, but, rather, to paralyze the West and to cause it to abandon use of military force anywhere in the world and for any reason.
Our purpose here at The Cassandra Times is to expose and to counter the coming propaganda wave and to show you, our loyal readers, the true lesson to be drawn from the coming disintegration of Iraq and soon after, Afghanistan.
The West successfully used military force to achieve its objectives in the Kuwait war of 1991, when Kuwait was restored as a sovereign nation. Likewise, military force was successful in the re-establishment of Panama as a pro-western and stable nation. Grenada was freed from Cuban influence and was restored to its former state of stability. Libya’s Muammar Qadaffi quieted down after his house was bombed and, eventually, surrendered his chemical weapons stockpile, rolled over on the global terror network, and exposed much of its finance and infrastructure to western intelligence after Saddam Houssein’s regime fell. The Falkland Islands remain a part of the United Kingdom, as its inhabitants desire, and the artillery fire from south Lebanon into Israel has largely stopped.
Clearly, military force in the post World War II world does, indeed, work in many instances. So, the lesson is not what the leftist info-tainment industry will have people believe, but the conclusion to be drawn is that military force works when used properly.
In his book “On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War”, Col. Harry Summers attempted to draw a proper lesson from Vietnam. His analysis informed former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell and the latter’s creation of “the Powell Doctrine”. Both Col.Summers and General Powell believed that Vietnam was a political defeat, not a military defeat. The cause of the defeat lay in a failure to clearly identify and define, at the outset of the conflict, a set objective for the military action, and, even more importantly, to make that objective actually achievable by military force. An army is designed to kill people and break things. There are other components in any army that are designed to support the efforts to kill people and break things, such as engineering, medical, and communication, but their function is to facilitate and support the soldiers who kill people and break things.
Col. Summers noted that any potential use of force should be preceded by naming a mission objective which is appropriate for military action. The overall mission objective should be to kill/capture certain people and/or break certain things, be they buildings, missile pads, runways or facilities. Any other objective should be the mission for a different organization and, if that other mission were the desired outcome, then another means or method and not military force should be sought to achieve that other outcome. Gen. Powell added the caveat that, if America commits itself to military action, it should be a full commitment done with overwhelming force and not started without a clear exit strategy.
All of the successful western military actions outlined above met Col. Summers and Gen. Powell’s criteria for the correct use of military power. In contrast, all of the failures, namely, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel’s long-term occupation of South Lebanon, did not heed their criteria.
A more pointed description would say that America should not use military force to accomplish “nation building”. “Nation building” is complete folly, a siren song mistakenly based upon the unrepresentative examples of post-World War II Europe and Japan. In those two instances, America did not engage in “nation building”, but in “nation re-building”. The Marshall Plan and MacArthur’s reconstruction of Japan were merely the reconstruction of cohesive, mono-culture societies that pre-existed the advent of the war.
In contrast, the building of a nation or a cohesive society from internal chaos is not possible by an outside power regardless of the degree of military might that can be brought to bear. A people must create its own society or nation. Even though the process may be bloody, it cannot be done for them. An armed force from outside the society can only hope to contain the seething cauldron of internal chaos only so long as the outside force remains present. As soon as the outside force departs, the locals will return to their former chaotic patterns and will find in their own way a balance of their own making. While welcome at first, the outside forces will, over time, come to be resented as intruders in the same way that even a welcome guest will eventually outstay that welcome.
The lesson of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is not that American military force is never a useful tool of foreign policy. It is merely that military force is not always the appropriate tool. The objective of such force must be achievable through force, and, therefore, it must be within the scope of what military force is good for, which is killing people and breaking things.
Certainly, the events of 9/11 called for the United States to use its military, and there were credible reasons to use military force in both Iraq and Afghanistan. An appropriate objective for use of force should have been defined. In Afghanistan, we could identify that the Taliban regime had allied itself with the terrorist organization Al Qaeda and allowed use of its territory to launch the 9/11 attacks, as well as the embassy bombings in Africa. Therefore, the objective should have been to kill Osama Bin Laden, kill or capture the leaders of the Taliban government, and to destroy any heavy-weapons in the hands of the Taliban. The limited objective of toppling the Taliban regime could have been and was achieved rather quickly. The secondary objective, the killing or capture of Bin Laden and the leaders of the Taliban government, would not have created conditions where the focus of the overall mission would not have strayed into such un-win-able pursuits as stabilization or “nation building”.
In Iraq, a similar set of objectives should have been in place. America’s publicly stated objective should have been the overthrow of the regime and the death or capture of Saddam Hussein and his inner circle. Should these objectives been made explicitly, America could have avoided its lengthy occupation to oversee the de-Baathification process and much of the dismantlement of the old Iraqi infrastructure. In order to end the United States’ presence in Iraq, even Saddam Houssein supporters in the Baath party likely would have eventually simply turned in Saddam Houssein, his sons Uday and Qusay, and his innermost circle over to American forces. Had this been done, the same lesson that state sponsors of terror will not be tolerated would have been learned and American forces would have left Iraq sooner and more intact.
While it may appeal to America’s kinder nature to seek to rebuild the war-torn societies it had just overrun, to a great extent, this defeats one of the purposes of war. War is terrible and it should be terrible. Its horror is a deterrent to those who would take actions that make war likely. A flattened Iraq, horrified at the destructive power of the United States, would not again tolerate a leader whose actions threatened to bring the United States war machine back to their doorstep. While America does not have to intentionally inflict terror on the population like the Roman practice of “decimation”, it is not immoral for it to ruthlessly pursue its legitimate military objectives and to allow the population to see what their leaders have brought down upon them.
As it is, there will now be bloody civil wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. They will culminate in regimes that will be extraordinarily hostile to the United States and, even worse, contemptuous of its capacity to inflict further military losses upon them. Failure to establish a clear policy for use of force and the subsequent “mission creep” has dealt America a catastrophic strategic defeat. It is highly likely that this strategic defeat will again require America to use its military forces again in the region, whether it wishes to do so or not.
Next time, when America uses its military forces, it should wisely follow the lessons of Vietnam as laid out by Col. Summers and Gen. Powell, as they are the same lessons that had to be re-learned in Afghanistan and Iraq.
