The War on Juan that Mr. Badger rather listlessly wages is an interesting matter in its own right, and this minor skirmish could have scored a few real points, for a change, against the Sage of Ann Arbour, who really did not properly indicate what sort of document it was that he helped disseminate.
| Professor Colin Kahl of the Political Science Department at the University of Minnesota shared the thoughts below . . . . |
Naturally one would take it that Prof. Dr. Kahl was seated at his computer trying to get his own Soc. Sci. thoughts about invasion and occupation policy straight and then, once they had turned into an e-text, he decided they were so precious that various colleauges ought to be permitted to share in them.
In fact, however,
| This e-mail concerns U.S. counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in Iraq and a briefing presented by Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments titled The “New” Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Baghdad Surge: Formula for Success? |
Mister K, that evil mastermind in the shadows, is thus not Prof. Dr. Kahl at all, but rather Neocomrade Dr. A. Krepinevich, who describes himself for potential customers of his tank-thinking as follows:
| r. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. is President of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Dr. Krepinevich gained extensive strategic planning experience in national security and technology policy through his work in the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment, and by serving on the personal staff of three secretaries of defense. During this period, Dr. Krepinevich wrote the Defense Department's seminal assessment of the emerging revolution in military affairs. Dr. Krepinevich also served as a member of the Department of Defense’s National Defense Panel. In 1993, following an Army career that spanned twenty-one years, Dr. Krepinevich retired from military service to assume the directorship of what is now CSBA. An accomplished author and lecturer, Dr. Krepinevich has written extensively on a variety of security related issues, to include articles published in The National Interest, Issues in Science and Technology, Armed Forces Journal, Joint Forces Quarterly and Strategic Review, among others. He is also the author of a number of monographs, including The Air Force of 2016, A New Navy for a New Era, Missed Opportunities: An Assessment of the Roles and Missions Commission Report, and The Bottom-Up Review: An Assessment. In 1987 he received a Furniss Award for his book The Army and Vietnam, a critical assessment of the service’s performance during the war. Dr. Krepinevich has testified on numerous occasions before the Senate Budget Committee, the House National Security Committee, and the Senate Armed Services Committee. He frequently contributes to both national and local print and broadcast media, including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and U.S. News & World Report, and has appeared on each of the major networks and National Public Radio. Dr. Krepinevich has lectured before a wide range of professional and academic audiences, including those at Harvard University, Princeton University, Stanford University, the U.S. Military Academy, the Naval War College, the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University, Europe’s Marshall Center, and the Defense Department’s "Summer Study," among many others. He has taught a wide variety of national security and defense policymaking courses while on the faculties of West Point and George Mason University, and currently lectures at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and Georgetown University. A graduate of West Point, Dr. Krepinevich holds MPA and PhD degrees from Harvard University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. |
There must be hundreds of other Big Management Party hangers-on with similar credentials. Naturally that does not prove that this particular neocomrade is not the evil mastermind lurking in the shadows. These are very lurkable shadows, after all. Nevertheless, on the same page as Dr. K.'s autobiography are the names of his subordinate tank thinkers, not one whom has ever come to our attention before this morning. None of them seem to know anything in particular about the Middle East, and perhaps one shouldn't expect them to, when the tank as a whole floats the word "budget" aloft on its pennant. Invasion and occupation policy, "COIN," is probably not their main beat at all. The names of the Dr. Col.'s books suggest to me that he is probably mainly interested in getting big-ticket items into the Pentagon budget for the enrichment of his corporate customers. He might easily have found the late Rumsfeld a congenial spirit, considering Rummy's characteristic vixion of a brave new military with lots and lots of extremely expensive whizbangs and not a whole lot of Joe Rifleman. On the other hand, perhaps his tank thinkers can come up with ways to make the GOP GWOT pay well too?
How did the social scientizer come across Dr. Col. Krepinevich? Fortunately we have his own account, responding to Mr. Badger's first apoplexy attack:
| Colin Kahl said... I read your commentary on my recent email on the evolution of U.S. counterinsurgency in Iraq, re-posted on Juan Cole's website. The "academic" tone should not lead you to believe that I, personally, think about the horrible ongoing human tragedy in Iraq in purely calculating terms. Rather, the original email was in the context of commenting on the analysis in a widely circulated briefing by Andrew Krepenevich, a well-known scholar of counterinsurgency, on the thinking leading up to the recent U.S. "surge" (the briefing and the full context of my email can be found [here]. I think it is fair to take the military and administration to task on the torture issue. However, despite the widely publicized abuse of detainees and the failure of the U.S. to live up to its international legal obligatons as occupying powers to provide for basic security in Iraq, the U.S. military has not thrown out the Geneva Conventions altogether. As my Foreign Affairs piece makes clear, the U.S. military has taken more steps than is commonly recognized to protect Iraqi civilians. That is a good thing, both morally and strategically. We know what contemporary wars look like when powerful militaries combat insurgents without any regard for the population. In Chechnya, for example, between 50,000 and 250,000 Chechen civilians have been killed by the Russian military in indiscriminate attacks since 1994 (out of a total population of 1 million). All that said, in my Foreign Affairs article, I note the many instances in which American troops have engaged in misconduct or conducted operations in ways that put Iraqi civilians at signficant risk of death and injury. And I clearly note in the conclusion of the article that the U.S. should take additional steps to protect the Iraqi civilian population and improve its record of investigating alleged atrocities. Lastly, I share your concern about what might occur "after the surge." Indeed, I have an essay on precisely that topic in the new Foreign Policy (online). |
Prof. Dr. Kahl was not personally present at Dr. Col. Krepinevich's dog-and-pony show for "senior congressional staff." Who it was that summarized the words that all those pretty PowerPoints illustrated remains unknown, as does whether it was only Boy-'n'-Party staffers that were invited to the show. Provisionally we may attribute the summary to the doctor colonel himself, I suppose. It has been distributed widely enough that if he feels it misrepresents his tank thought, probably he'll take the trouble to set the record straight.
Kahl is rather more alarming than Krepinevich, wouldn't you say, Mr. Bones? If Mr. Badger's saeva indignatio had started with that response rather than with the slide show as summarized, the situation would make more sense. Still, he can't have condescended to read very much aggression-friendly matterial in English if he finds Dr. Kahl outstandingly godawful These gentry all "share our concerns," do they not, at their CFRs and their ISGs and so on? In dealing with that crew, one needs to cultivate a sort of double vision, attending not just to their remarks about the actual state of the Kiddie Krusade, but to what they would be saying, had it all worked out more happily for Boy and Party. Mr. Badger seems to concede them one of their most dubious polemical ploys, that we are not to look back at the mistakes actually made, but think of what to do next from the bushogenic quagmire as we find it. "To live each day as if it were our first." Dr. Kahl perhaps passed the summary of the dog-and-pony show on to Prof. Dr. Cole because of the retrospective or "denial" part of it, however, and not because of the words of wisdom for future invasions and occupations.
Mr. Badger not only knows exactly why Don Juan published it, he even told us his knowledge at the end of Fit the First:
| Kahl's little essay is something he sent to other experts who participate in a listserve, and he gave Juan Cole permission to publish it. Cole's own point in publishing it is no doubt that Iraq is on the brink, and this is no time to be thinking of toppling the SCIRI-led administration. But I think this tells us more than that. |
It looks like the namesake of meles meles is living up to his chosen creature's reputation in so-called unnatural history. Having once gotten it into his head that poor JC is a shill for SCIRI --- on what original basis who can guess? -- Mr. Badger is never going to let go of that notion. This misunderstanding is especially funny for Mr. Bones and me, considering that we more or less actually believe the vile heresies that he wildly attributes to Prof. Cole. Unfortunately the JCIA merely reprints the summary without venturing any informed commentary about what is especially striking or important in it. There's nothing closer to "on the brink" than "that leaves the 'clear, hold, and build' option. However, as the briefing makes clear, this strategic shift may simply be too little, too late," which does not seem all that close to me, and certainly inspires no especial concern in my breast for the domination of SCIRI.
I notice, by the way, that there is a little bit of two-hundred proof Kahl present, in the sentences after the one just cited. Let's have enough of a chunk of it to get some handle on the context:
... There are other successful approaches to COIN, including what the briefing calls 'the Roman Strategy' ('make a desert and call it peace'), which was basically the approach Saddam used to prevent sustained insurgency in Iraq. But, as the briefing properly notes, adopting this approach (or even somewhat softer, but still highly coercive COIN practices, such as those used by the Americans effectively in the Philippines between 1899-1902), is incompatible with norms against targeting civilians embraced by the U.S. military and political leadership. So, with the Roman strategy off the table, that leaves the 'clear, hold, and build' option. However, as the briefing makes clear, this strategic shift may simply be too little, too late. What the briefing doesn't say is that it is also unclear whether employing COIN best practices will work in the context of not only a raging insurgency (in Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala), but also a sectarian civil war (in Baghdad, Diyala, and increasingly Kirkuk), diffuse criminal anarchy and militia rivalry (in the South), and endemic separatist tendencies (in Kurdistan) . . . |
Prof. Dr. Kahl thinks that the whole neo-Iraqi racket is falling apart, it looks like, and even more interestingly, he does not care for any of the indigs much, except perhaps the rootless cosmopolitan community, which he does not mention. That view might expect to find favor at Ann Arbour as well as the preceding bit about "denial," if our own general theory of the JCIA is correct, and denouncing whatever the militant GOP happens to be up to at the moment is the real key to all Colean mythologies.
Mr. Badger is determined to think otherwise, though. He wants there to exist a coven or cabal of "experts" (his shudder quotes) that Cole and Kahl and Krepinevich are all dedicated and conscious participants in. The really existing CFR has produced quite a number of crazies who think rather similar dark thoughts about it, except that they do not often possess anything like Mr. Badgetr's detailed grasp of the Levant, or of any other hapless region that the "Conspiracy on Foreign Relations" might decide to victimize hereafter. He is further disposed to think that his preferred scenario's black hats don't have any serious objections to "Roman" solutions for their various problems with restless natives. Their boilerplate disclaimers of the "I appreciate your concerns" type are indeed rather annoying, and in the remoter background it would not be wise to forget about Hiroshima and Nagasaki altogether. Nevertheless, one can -- and some do -- go paranoid in that direction easily enough.
We ourselves are antecedently disposed to reject badgerism about the USA, because it falls under a broader rubric that we made up our minds about years ago. To think such thoughts requires that there be a "power elite" hiding at some undisclosed location and reducing our public theory about how America works to a nonsense. However the public theory is at least 95% accurate, and political power remains where the 1787 Constitution (as subsequently amended) assigned it originally, with a few hundred elected persons at Washington City and Rancho Crawford, not in the hands of corporate boards, or CFR's and ISG's, or even of partisan para-academic think tanks. If such folks want to rule, they still have to talk Representatives and Senators and Administrations into agreeing with their views. They cannot simply tell the latter waht to think and do, nor blackmail them into doing it either. I.e., they cannot really "rule" at all, not the way a Weekly Standardizer craves to rule.
This reflection is encouraging in general, but there is a certain dark lining about it as regards the Middle East in particular, where the bad news iincludes the distressing fact that our Uncle Sam aggressed against the former Iraq because he wanted to. The motives of those who think they are doing la Démocratie en Amérique a favor by dissociating it from such follies and unpleasantnesses are perhaps admirable, but since one requires to think unclearly in order to enlist under their banner, we shall not be signing up. I see that we quoted M. Pascal's maxim Travaillons donc à bien penser : voilà le principe de la morale against Mr. Badger less than a week ago, but the rule is so important that repetition seems excusable. The only defense of democracy that will look good in the long run is one that admits all the warrantable charges against our stuff and then is still for it even when described by the most hostile antidemocrat who does not positively misrepresent. The "Gulf of Defense," so to call it, is profoundly unsatisfactory. We were not, in fact, deceived by anybody as regards either Indochina or "Iraq," and even if we had been, the blame for it would be at least 50% our own for being so gullible. That portion would also be more important than the other 50%, since it is the half we could actually do something about ourselves. Attributing our own mistakes .to a Power Elite or to the craftiness of hidden persuaders and "experts" is no better ethically than it is factually.
Meanwhile, Mr. Badger's account of what the hidden persuaders are supposedly doing at the moment is positively Baroque. It appears that The Cabal wants to have an esoteric debate and an exoteric debate conducted simultaneously. In Fit the Third we read
| So the problem being proposed for urgent public discussion in the vibrant American democracy is a completely different problem from that being discussed in private by the policy elite. The policy elite is discussing what to do if America can't quell the resistance to its occupation using 'best practices', and the options are to withdraw, or kick back and try the last-resort 'Roman option', perhaps with the help of some 'hired guns'. The vibrant democracy is discussing what do do if the civil war continues, and the options are to withdraw, or stay and take sides. And curiously enough, what happens is that staying and taking sides (fighting Sunnis, in other words) is presented as something that is more in keeping with America's 'moral obligations in Iraq', because having American soldiers along side Shiite forces 'might be the only way to minimize atrocities'. So when you boil it down, the policy-elite is discussing non-withdrawal in the interest of a last-resort scorched-earth policy by America, but at the same time presenting this as non-withdrawal in the interest of fulfilling America's moral obligation to help minimize atrocities. |
Even if we believed in this double-barreled fantasy, it would not be easy to make out exactly what the alleged perps stand to gain from their ingenuity. Does The Cabal propose to be in fact at Roman or Halliburtonian war against all our neo-Iraqi subjects, yet pretend to Televisionland and the electorate that they are supporting the Shí‘a against the Sunnis? What sense would that make? Televisionland does not especially cherish the Twelvers of "Iraq" and dislike the colony's Arab Sunnis, it does not give a hoot about either group, except perhaps to be very tired of hearing so much about them all the time. And considered as Mil. Sci. rather than as agitprop, what's the West Point point of this "last-resort scorched-earth policy by America" supposed to be? Mr. Badger makes it sound like mere petulence, smashing the chair to pieces that one stubbed one's toe against in the dark. That line is so infantile that surely it ought to be the exoteric aspect rather than the esoteric one. Televisionland might find that plan a bit too childish even for them, but I can scarcely imagine any exalted violence professional wasting five seconds on such stuff.
Mr. Badger is probably right to expect that "nonwithdrawal" is what the CFR/ISG gentry will plump for after the Republican Party extremists' Surge of '07 fades from notoriety, but at least the gentry have grown-up ideas about their real interests in neo-Iraq, which of course center around "stability" for the Gulf of Petroleum and for the Tel Aviv statelet. Neither The Cabal's economic nor their ideological interest would be forwarded by gratuitous earth-scorching. It would not make gasoline cheaper, and equally, it would not make the Levant any safer for Hyperzionists to dwell in. It would, in brief, be stark raving madness. A policy analysis based on the assumption that they are all clinically nuts as well as politically wingnuts might conceivably be fun to make up, but beyond that I can perceive no merit in it.
However amidst the general dottiness, one faint glimmer of sense may be detected. When Surge turns to crunch, many CFR gentry are likely enough to appeal to "America's moral obligation to help minimize atrocities," as Mr. Badger phrases it. Why not? Doubtless they sincerely believe in that "military humanism" that lead them to muck about with Serbia and Kosova back when they had more influence with the Executive Branch than they do at present. What devout Boy-'n'-Party fans will make of it, though, ought to be entertaing to watch: however nice it may be for them to find Republican invasionism supported from that rather uinexpected quarter, and the face of the Big Management Party thus to some extent saved, they can scarcely be happy with the idea that Boy and Party have managed to make their neo-Iraq a humanitarian disaster comparable to M. Milosevic's Kosovo! At that point, I daresay both militant GOP nonwithdrawers and "nonpartisan" CFR nonwithdrawers will have to agree very strictly never to talk about how they got to where they find themselves. The whole fragile alliance could fall to pieces if that sort of discussion were indiscriminately permitted. And fragile their alliance is bound to be, because it is by no mean a sure thing that Congress and the electorate will agree with them that nonwithdrawal is the only proper course, the only conceivable course, even.
Mais nous verrons.
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