Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Richard Lugar would be an awesome choice for Defense Secretary.

You may have written that about Afghanistan in early 2004, but you certainly weren’t taking that line in late 2003, since you were writing:

As long as Bush holds the course in Iraq, he will get my vote.

It seems that you wanted the troops to stay in Iraq in 2003, and then, 4 months later, forgot your desire for Bush to keep those troops in Iraq.

Historical revisionism of one’s earlier positions on the war in Iraq have been rampant.  It seems to have inflicted you, as well. 

Of course, it allows you a better sleep at night after that process of grotesque self-deception.  But, it is heartening to see that some conservatives will eventually choose the right thing to do (after having chosen all the wrong things first).

(Apologies to Winston Churchill)

Sully: It’s true that in 2003, I supported staying the course in Iraq. Indeed, I still do.

In 2006, for example, I wrote in The Examiner that:

In foreign policy, Bush opted to treat terrorism as a war rather than a problem for police and intelligence agencies. This choice remains problematic. Even if he was right to do so, he has waged the war incompetently. Osama bin Laden remains at large to taunt America. Even if bin Laden is essentially powerless, he remains a potent symbol. And the Taliban threatens to make a comeback in Afghanistan, where we seemingly have far too few troops to maintain control.

As for Bush’s war of choice in Iraq, it is clear that the administration lacked a plan for succeeding with the occupation. We still don’t have a handle on the security problems in Iraq. Our feckless handling of the country looks likely to breed another generation of jihadists, and there is no sign that Bush has a viable exit plan. Worse yet, he created an American gulag: Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, secret renditions, the use of water-boarding and other coercive interrogation techniques that are little short of torture.

The decision to invade Iraq was, I believe, a mistake. The failure to pay due attention to Afghanistan was another mistake.

Having said that, however, cutting and running from Iraq would be a third mistake. In another Examiner column, I wrote:

As an Army brat growing up during the Vietnam War, I saw the damage our strategy of just declaring victory and going home did to Army morale and prestige, to the tone of our national politics and our nation’s standing in the world. Later, we cut and ran from Lebanon. More recently, we cut and ran from Somalia. I have no doubt that this pattern of cutting and running emboldened al-Qaida. We simply cannot afford to cut and run from Iraq, lest our foes be emboldened to new and even more devastating attacks. A global hegemon that keeps running away when the going gets tough will not command any respect.

In sum, even if attacking Iraq was imprudent, we have to stay the course. There could be nothing less prudent than cutting and running. Our permanent national interests now require that we win the peace.

There is no historical revisionism here. Instead, there is a consistent pattern of believing that you finish what you start. Bush was wrong to invade Iraq, but those who want to cut and run before the job is done are wrong too. Bush was right to take out the Taliban, but wrong not to finish the job. In 2003, on this issue, I preferred Bush to Kerry. I still think that was the right call. Kerry’s policies would have compounded Bush’s errors.

A couple of questions:

- is one to assume that the government will always wage war (and win the peace) competently? (regarding your first Examiner piece)

and, a much bigger question that I have yet to see answered properly:

- what does it mean to “finish the job”, to “win the war in Iraq”, to “stay the course”?  What would that Iraq look like to us?  To the Iraqis?  To the rest of the Middle East?  To the world?  (regarding your second Examiner piece)

I would hope that you see more nuance than “stay the course” v. “cutting and running”.  If we are to truly address the problem that Iraq (and Afghanistan) has become, we must set aside the simple phrases meant to “box in” our opponents.

I see that your view has changed over time (in regards to historical revisionism).  Yet, I can’t help but feel that - on some basic level - you are still defending your initial support for the war in Iraq.

You are correct, I think, that the Taliban needed to be taken out.  However, diverting the focus (and the troops) to Iraq was a blunder worthy of Custer.

Sully: Let me be clear. I hadn’t started blogging when Bush made the decision to invade Iraq. But almost since the day I started blogging, I expressed reservations about the decision to invade Iraq. So I don’t know where you keep coming up with the idea that I initially supported the war. Supporting winning a war once started is different than supporting starting it.

As for your questions: First, I assume government will be incompetent at just about anything. Second, an ideal end game would be a stable, peaceful, democratic, federal Iraqi state in which the rights of all three major groups are protected by the rule of law. Whether we can get there from here is debatable. But one thing seems certain; namely, setting a date certain for a withdrawal is not a solution. It simply tells the enemy how long they have to wait us out.

With regards to Obama looking to Hagel as a possible defense secretary...if you like McCain’s friends for high positions regards to foreign policy, then why not just elect McCain?

I, for one, am comforted that McCain is not hinting at Obama-friendly Dems for domestic policy positions.

As it is late, I may be a bit too terse. As for Lugar and Hagel:  good ideas but not terribly new.  FDR had Stimson during WW2. Lugar and Obama have sponsored some legislation together.  Not sure that Lugar would go into a Democrat’s cabinet - pretty sure he will not run again, but he is too good a party man to cut down the Republican votes in the Senate.  No guarantee that Indiana will not go for Obama this Fall. 

I am in the same position as the Professor.  I thought invading Iraq foolish.  Focusing on Iraq as the centerpiece of the “War on Terror” to determent of Afghanistan was folly.  Problem is we are in Iraq and have to figure a way out.  Might help finding the exit if we could figure what we were doing in Iraq and therefore define “victory”.  If victory as we might want to think of it even might exist - do we bring The USS Missouri into the Persian Gulf for a treaty signing and if so a signing by whom?  AS silly as that sounds, what other image of victory comes to mind when Bush utters the word victory?  We never talked about victory when we pushed our way into the banana republics or our other displays of gunboat diplomacy.

Oh, yeah, Lugar would make a great Secretary of State for McCain, too.  Some of us in Indiana wish he had made more noise about Bush’s lack of planning for post-invasion Iraq. Bad thing is his age.

Professor Bainbridge:

“The decision to invade Iraq was, I believe, a mistake.”

Ummm, well, HOW was it a mistake? You damn well know that Saddam was buying off everybody to the point in 2002 that the sanctions regime was crumbling like two week old bleu cheese. On top of that, Saddam was getting a piece of the action from every Oil-for-Food transaction.  Dare I think, Professor Bainbridge, that you’re okay with murderous kleptocracies?

We also now know that Saddam had every intention of restarting his WMD programs once the coast was clear.  The reason we know is because Saddam said so himself before his neck got stretched, which is yet another benefit of our invasion. By the way, name me one other Arab despot who has been brought to justice before a jury of his peers and called to account for his crimes.  O.N.E. You can’t, can you?  I hardly call that a “mistake.”

Do you really think Saddam would have let a de facto independent Kurdistan exist once he was out from under the sanctions? Well? Do you?  Short answer: no.  How about the Marsh Arabs? I guess, in your mind, they were expendable too.

I don’t call multiple elections and establishment of imperfect, but improving democracies a “mistake” either.  Do you? 

What IS your comfort level with tyranny anyway?

Here’s my short take:

“Daddy, why did we invade Iraq in 2003?”
“Well son, so we wouldn’t have had to nuke it in 2005.”

The problem in VietNam was the contradiction between an elitist South VN government and our need to have a government have democratic support to battle the communists. We, including South VN, could have muddled through if we had kept some 65,000 troops there and B-52 support as we had when the communists tried to blitzkrieg from North VN in the early seventies. We face a contradiction in our battle in Afghanistan more important than our troop numbers.  Opium = livelihood for the Afghanis; again we are fighting a war against freedom to some extent.  More troops = more love (not).  Fortunately this does not seem to be a war we are fighting in Iraq.

I don’t Obama has thought things through on Afghanistan vs. Iraq.  Afghanistan, like Iraq, has two or more neighbors who are trying to stir up violence inside.  Unlike Iraq, it is a landlocked, mountainous country where critical supply lines run through one of the neighbors who is trying to stir up the violence. Yet somehow it is General Obama’s idea of a good place to fight.  Yeesh.

Many of the criticisms of the effort to put democracy in Iraq, the backwardness of the people, their tendency toward authoritarianism and sexual, racial, ethnic and religious bigotry are more true of Afghanistan than Iraq.  But we can win there, if we persevere and train a local army, just like Iraq.  I just think we need to keep a smaller footprint there because events in Pakistan could leave a large force stranded and impossible to supply.

I find all of this from Obama quite confusing.

I mean, Hagel and Lugar both supported the Iraq war.  They voted for it.  That’s apparently disqualifying when it comes to Senator Clinton, but not when it comes to a future Secretary of Defense. 

We know that some of our European allies opposed the war in Iraq.  Not all of them, of course.  But are any of them on record as opposing the UN-endorsed efforts we’re undertaking now?  I think the answer is no, so why would Obama think that our surrender in Iraq would make these nations provide more assistance in Afghanistan?

The Biden piece is also strange.  This talk of “the border” is an equivocation intended to mislead.  Troops in Afghanistan aren’t in Pakistan; the folks we’re looking for are in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.  And one line ("When President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan concluded that we were not serious about finishing the job in Afghanistan, he began to cut deals with extremists in his own country.") made me laugh out loud for its lack of connection to reality.  Sadly, this is the what counts as serious on the Democrat side.

I’m not sure that it is possible to win in Afghanistan no matter how many troops we put in there.
We can’t be beat. But that’s not the same as winning.
First of all. Captains study tactics, Generals study logistics.
Afghanistan is a landlocked country. There are no seaports. Access by sea has to come through Pakistan or Iran. I think we can safely scratch Iran. I don’t see them allowing us to ship military equipment and ammunition through their ports.
That leaves Pakistan. This is OK for now. But that leaves us with a single supply route through territory that, while it is secure now, can quickly change if things change in that country. And given the problems that we have had with Musharraf and the problems he has had with the Islamists, they could change in a hurry.
We can airlift a lot. But some things cannot be transported by air.
There is also the huge amount of other supplies that are needed and expected by the Soldiers and Marines. They expect to be fed. They expect to have water, a lot of water. The American military has a huge supply tail to feed them. It would be the Berlin Airlift minus Rhein Main. We would have to expand Baghram AB to O’Hare size and build another one outside the country to stage from. (Or fly out of Rhein Main)
If we do send all our available military to Afghanistan, and manage to supply them, what are we going to do with them? Are we going back to the Iraq strategy where we hole up in firebases and come out only to drive around and get blown up by VIEDs? Unlikely.
As in Iraq it is the people that are the key. But one vital condition is missing. The Iraqis are upset because al Qaeda was killing their people and forcing an extreme version of Islam on them. They didn’t like that. So they “awakened” But Afghanistan the people in the countryside are not worried about this. They accept it. It is the kind of Islam that they have been practicing. There is not going to be an “awakening” in the countryside in Afghanistan no matter how much aid you pour in there.
The Russian’s had 300,000 troops in Afghanistan and were defeated. They controlled the cities, just as we control the cities. But that doesn’t matter for the majority of the country. Afghans are not a bunch of modern day liberals who made some bad clothing choices. Think Borat with AK47s. They will take our “development” sell what they can and plant poppies in the rest.
The area is tailor made for an insurgency and they have a sanctuary across the border in Pakistan. The Pakistani government does not control those areas but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to agree to a bunch of foreigners barging in there.
They’re probably OK with an occasional missile strike but anything more than that is going to rouse some of the population to go help the Taliban defend their homeland in the face of an invasion.
We didn’t go to Afghanistan to free the people from the Taliban. We went there to deny a sanctuary to al Qaeda. The Taliban refused to give them up. If they had, we would have said “Thank You” and let them get back to blowing up Buddhas and having the executions before the soccer games.

"I assume government will be incompetent at just about anything.”

The ones you vote for certainly will be.

Those darned liberal Democrats somehow managed to win WWII in under 4 years - a war fought against real enemies, with massive casualties and consequences.  Your chosen government can’t manage to do anything well in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Is it really a coincidence that the “government is evil” crew can’t get anything done apart from enriching their cronies?  I suggest it isn’t.

Your censorship of the comments section really sucks the life out of it.  I guess you can’t handle opposition well, Prof. Kingsfield.

Last year, almost 150 civilians were killed by suicide bombers in Afghanistan.  Over 4000 were killed in Iraq.  Those suicide bombers in Iraq, by the way, are composed of over 90% non-Iraqis.  Whom do you suppose is recruiting, training, equipping and transporting them?

Just thought I’d inject a couple of facts into the opinionfest.

McNamara was a walking talking disaster as SoD. Hagel would be worse. These are NOT positive points for a President Obama!

The war on terror is not simply about AQ and Afgansitan. Here is the “triangle” again:

1) terrorist cells, suicide attacks, jihad

2) NBC proliferation [nuclear, biological, chemical weapons]

3) State sponsors of terror orgs [Iraq, Iran/Syria, North Korea]

We invaded Afganistan after 9-11 not only to get Al Queda, but to destroy the Taliban leadership who gave them aid and sanctuary. Terrorists are much more lethal when supported by rogue nation states.

There are two reasons why our enemies haven’t launched unconventional [NBC] suicide attacks against us: they either don’t have the NBC material [terrorist cells] or they don’t want to risk retaliation [rogue nation states].

After 9/11, we woke up to the realization that the combination of 1, 2 and 3 meant that our enemies would eventually acquire the capability to attack US soil with NBC, using terror orgs as proxies to remain anonymous. This outflanks the deterrence of MAD that protected us during the Cold War. So, we’re in a race to disrupt that triangle before we suffer a nuclear/bio/chem 9/11. To do so, we must attack all three legs of the triad:

1) discredit the jihad, marginalize the radical extremists.

2) pressure the international community to prevent NBC weapon proliferation

3) overthrow the governments of rogue nation states that support terrorist orgs.

1 and 2 will take some time. 3 requires a multifaceted approach, depending on the country. With N Korea, we are establishing a multilateral diplomatic engagement with nations in the Pacific Rim to rein in Korea. With Iran, we are supporting the rebels and hoping [naively, I think] for an internal revolution. Iraq was the only rogue state that could be overthrown with force, so we liberated it. We stayed to rebuild it because a free and democratic Iraq, by example, will also help us marginalize the radical extremists [so liberating Iraq is a two-fer, it helps achieve our 1st and 3rd goals].

Obama simply does not see the big picture. The primary goal for now should not be to avenge 9/11 by capturing/killing a figurehead. The primary goal should be destroying the triangle of 1) rogue nation states who 2) seek WMDs and 3) sponsor terrorist organizations.

Those darned liberal Democrats somehow managed to win WWII in under 4 years - a war fought against real enemies, with massive casualties and consequences

Yes, its amazing what this country can do when liberal Democrats aren’t trying to sabatoge the war effort at every turn…

Powerline did a piece critical (naturally) of Obama’s foreign policy views and potential advisors.  Let’s see a throwdown!  Again!

If Obama is so bent on getting the Euros involved in Afghanistan, then when is he going to call his committee into session to deal with the subject.  After all he is the Committee chair of the Senate Committee that deals with Europe and he has not called that committee into session yet.  His reason?  He is too busy campaigning to meet with this committee.  Why is he then even a senator if he doesn’t fulfill his function there.  Essentially the people of the state of Illinois are missing one senator who took on the job of representing them and he has been missing since he took office.

I’m still trying to understand why Obama will sit down for unconditional negotiations with leaders like Ahmadinejad, but not Osama bin Laden. Whats the difference?

I understand that you have expressed reservations about invading Iraq (in the post you linked to).  However, that post begins:

Saddam has been captured, which is an unqualified good thing.

This reads as an “ends justifies the means” form of unqualified support - not prudential support.

Arguments can certainly be made that the world is better off without Saddam.  Yet, the world would also be better off without Musharraf (or Kim Jong Il, Saudi royals, Khaddafi, et al).  Hegemonic interests follow the same line of reasoning.

Additionally, you hedge your reservations about the war with:

My concerns and reservations with respect to President Bush’s Iraq policy - and my hesitation to endorse it - thus were based not on blanket opposition to war or even pre-emptive war, but rather on whether it was prudent.

You say you were hesitant to endorse it, not hesitant to oppose it.  Is the war-glass half-full or half-empty?

I think it shows that you were supportive, but hesitant to endorse, rather than unsupportive but hesitant to oppose.

This, combined with the “unqualified good thing” remark, I think, shows that you initially supported the war (and continue to do so, using the “we broke it - we bought it” methodology).

Also, prudence is a subjective issue.  Certainly, it is a worthwhile virtue; yet it is not an empirical virtue.  As such, it is prone to the abuses of human nature.  I believe that the neo-con arguments in favor of the war initially relied on it being “prudent” to take out Saddam before he created WMDs and gave them to terrorists.  This is a hollow argument, since there are many other states of which the same argument could be made.

The other side of “setting a date certain for a withdrawal” is “a large number US troops permanently in Iraq” - which is also not a solution (it would be an equivalent “third mistake").  These are both extreme statements, and not very illuminating or helpful.

Thank you for your short answer on:

what does it mean to “finish the job”, to “win the war in Iraq”, to “stay the course”?

It still does not answer the question properly, in my opinion, since it does not explain how we could achieve a functioning democracy and a peaceful state in a region with a very long history of chaos.

I had hoped for more nuance and less rhetoric in your replies (e.g. “cutting and running").  Perhaps you do have more nuance in your thinking, but you use rhetorical devices in your words that eliminate any middle ground or opportunity for discussion.  In my opinion, the solution lies in the middle ground.

If the purpose is only to demonize those with differing ideas and opinions (via the use of rhetorical phraseology), then it is pointless to discuss this further.  I will not bother you any further, but please feel free to respond if you desire.

Also, please feel free to delete my bile-filled, cowardly-anonymous comments.

Sincerely,

Mark Twain
(aka Sully Fick)