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Subject: Lay Waste to Iraq and Call it Peace?
Waltzing Matilda    5/5/2007 12:20:16 AM
COIN is all the rage and fashionable indeed...but Edward N. Luttwak of "Give War a Chance" fame has a few time tested and Roman approved pointers for the US military. Chief among them are: -Government needs no popular support as long as it can secure obedience -Clerics hold sway; the idea that the US is unselfishly expending blood and treasure in order to help Iraqis does not -Insurgents don't engage in direct combat. As a result, better operational methods and tactics aren't going to be of much help -Occupiers can be successful without need of any specialized counterinsurgency methods or tactics if they are willing to out-terrorize the insurgents, so that the fear of reprisals outweighs the desire to help the insurgents or their threats The blood thirsty and professional minded alike, can find Luttwak's critique of FM 3-24 in the February 2007 issue of Harper's..."http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081384" Waltzing
 
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swhitebull    Luttwak on Why the Middle East Doesnt matter   5/5/2007 8:24:03 AM
Luttwak is a brilliant, if oft-times erratic writer. His excellent treatise on The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire is a classic, and suitably dog-earred and spine-cracked from overusage on my shelves, not very far from my boardgame table for ancient history games (great Battles of History and Imperium Romanum figure highly!).
 
Here, though, is another take on Luttwak, from national review:
 
 

Luttwak's Cakewalk - by David Frum

Edward Luttwak is a very genuinely interesting writer. His book on the grand strateg of the Roman Empire was terrific, and his Coup D'Etat is that astounding thing: a great work of political science that is also a hilarious satire. Part of the secret of his success is his tone of total confidence. He makes startling claims in a tone that says, "If only you knew my super-secret sources ..."

His article in the current issue of Prospect fulfills the rule of Luttwak's interestingness. It's called, "Why the Middle East Doesn't Matter," and it magisterially and sardonically attacks a whole series of intellectual errors that allegedly dominate expert opinion on the Middle East. For instance:

The second repeated mistake is the Mussolini syndrome. Contemporary documents prove beyond any doubt what is now hard to credit: serious people, including British and French military chiefs, accepted Mussolini's claims to great power status because they believed that he had serious armed forces at his command. His army divisions, battleships and air squadrons were dutifully counted to assess Italian military power, making some allowance for their lack of the most modern weapons but not for their more fundamental refusal to fight in earnest. Having conceded Ethiopia to win over Mussolini, only to lose him to Hitler as soon as the fighting started, the British discovered that the Italian forces quickly crumbled in combat. It could not be otherwise, because most Italian soldiers were unwilling conscripts from the one-mule peasantry of the south or the almost equally miserable sharecropping villages of the north.

Exactly the same mistake keeps being made by the fraternity of middle east experts. They persistently attribute real military strength to backward societies whose populations can sustain excellent insurgencies but not modern military forces.

In the 1960s, it was Nasser's Egypt that was mistaken for a real military power just because it had received many aircraft, tanks and guns from the Soviet Union, and had many army divisions and air squadrons. In May 1967, on the eve of war, many agreed with the prediction of Field Marshal Montgomery, then revisiting the El Alamein battlefield, that the Egyptians would defeat the Israelis forthwith; even the more cautious never anticipated that the former would be utterly defeated by the latter in just a few days. In 1973, with much more drama, it still took only three weeks to reach the same outcome.

In 1990 it was the turn of Iraq to be hugely overestimated as a military power. Saddam Hussein had more equipment than Nasser ever accumulated, and could boast of having defeated much more populous Iran after eight years of war. In the months before the Gulf war, there was much anxious speculation about the size of the Iraqi army—again, the divisions and regiments were dutifully counted as if they were German divisions on the eve of D-day, with a separate count of the "elite" Republican Guards, not to mention the "super-elite" Special Republican Guards—and it was feared that Iraq's bombproof aircraft shelters and deep bunkers would survive any air attack.

That much of this was believed at some level we know from the magnitude of the coalition armies that were laboriously assembled, including 575,000 US troops, 43,000 British, 14,663 French and 4,500 Canadian, and which incidentally constituted the sacrilegious infidel presence on Arabian soil that set off Osama bin Laden on his quest for revenge. In the event, two weeks of precision bombing were enough to paralyse Saddam's entire war machine, which scarcely tried to resist the ponderous ground offensive when it came. At no point did the Iraqi air force try to fight, and all those tanks that were painstakingly counted served mostly for target practice. A real army would have continued to resist for weeks or months in the dug-in positions in Kuwait, even without air cover, but Saddam's army was the usual middle eastern façade without fighting substance.

Ha ha! Good stuff! What idiots those Middle Eastern experts must have been to fall for that Mussolini error about feeble old Saddam. Especially this one:

All those precision weapons and gadgets and gizmos and stealth fighters . . . are not going to make it possible to re-conq

 
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AFA2007       5/5/2007 1:31:49 PM
Cut to the chase - if any comparison to Roman strategy of occupation can be applied to the U.S. occupation in Iraq let's start with the fact that Rome was utterly ruthless in conquested lands - and slaughter whole villages if even a hint of rebellion.

For this to happen in Iraq here is a good scenario:

Empty out GITMO.  Line the roads leading to Baghdad with crucifixions (as in Spartacus) of insurgents.

Are we up to that?

We certainly aren't winning the hearts and minds with tender loving care and money.

Fighting cockroaches with advanced technology can be debated as ever being successful.  Fighting ruthless cockroaches with civility is a lost cause.

If we were to fight like Rome there would never have been an insurgency.  Iraq would have already been made desolate and the earth salted, a modern day Carthage.




 
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Waltzing Matilda       5/6/2007 3:36:50 AM
swhitebull/AFA2007

Much of Luttwak's writing is in fact "sardonic." Obviously, he’s not in favor of washing the streets of Baghdad three times daily with Iraqi blood. To the contrary, he specifically points out that while good ‘ol fashion barbarism “might” be effective, it’s not particularly becoming of a democracy. Instead, and as the title alludes, he’s arguing that the United States has hit a military and strategic “Dead End.” We’re unwilling to crush the opposition and incapable of attaining decisive political results via COIN.
 
 
Waltzing
 
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Waltzing Matilda       5/6/2007 3:45:26 AM

To Help Iraq, Let It Fend for Itself

Published: February 6, 2007

THE sooner President Bush can get his extra troops for a ''surge'' in Iraq, the sooner he will be able to announce that all American troops are coming home because of the inevitable failure of the Iraqi government to ''live up to its side of the bargain.'' In fact, in the run-up to the surge proposal, it is unlikely that there was any real two-sided bargaining before Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was induced to issue promises -- particularly in terms of government troops taking on Shiite militias -- that he cannot possibly fulfill. Mr. Maliki, it seems, simply agreed to whatever was asked of him, to humor the White House and retain American support for a little while longer.

For the Iraqi Army and police to disarm the Shiite militias, the prime minister would have to be a veritable Stalin or at least a Saddam Hussein, able to terrorize Iraqi soldiers and policemen into obedience. Mr. Maliki, of course, has no such authority over Iraqi soldiers or police officers; indeed he has little authority over his own 39-person cabinet, whose members mostly represent sectarian parties with militias of their own.

Actually the situation is even worse than that, because only the Kurdish militias unfailingly obey their political leaders -- one is the president of Iraq no less, Jalal Talabani -- while for the rest, it may be more true to say that Iraqi militias have political leaders to represent their wishes. The largest and most murderous of the Shiite militias, the Mahdi Army, which is invariably described as belonging to the truculent cleric Moktada al-Sadr, is actually divided under a bevy of local commanders, some of whom obey Mr. Sadr some of the time.

In sum, the most that Prime Minister Maliki can do is not to interfere when American troops arrest suspects and fight militias, as he has done in the past.

Nor can the Iraqi leader fulfill his other major promise: leading a new effort to reconcile the warring sects of Iraq. He is not another Gandhi, but a leader of the fiercely sectarian Dawa Party. It is very much as a militant Shiite that he speaks out; lately he has been threatening Sunni members of Parliament and accusing them of grave crimes. (It was not a coincidence that Saddam Hussein was tried, convicted and executed not for his greatest crimes, but for his 1982 reprisal killings for a failed attempt by Dawa members to assassinate him.) It would be remarkable if Mr. Maliki could even reconcile with his Shiite rivals, let alone the Sunni insurgents.

Fortunately, there is a promising, long-term policy ready and waiting for President Bush whenever he decides to call off the good old college try of his surge: disengagement. By this, I don't mean a phased withdrawal, let alone the leap in the dark of total abandonment. Rather, it would start with a tactical change: American soldiers would no longer patrol towns and villages, conduct cordon-and-search operations, or man outposts and checkpoints. An end to these tasks would allow the greatest part of the troops in Iraq to head home, starting with overburdened reservists and National Guard units.

The remaining American forces, including ground units, would hole up within safe and mostly remote bases in Iraq -- to support the elected government, deter foreign invasion, dissuade visible foreign intrusions, and strike at any large concentration of jihadis should it emerge. This would mean, contrary to most plans being considered now, that United States military personnel could not remain embedded in large numbers within the Iraqi Army and police forces. At most, the Americans would operate training programs within safe bases.

What would be the result of disengagement along these lines? First, it would not be likely to increase the violence afflicting Iraqi civilians. The total number of American troops in Iraq -- even including any surge -- is so small, and their linguistic skills so limited, that they have little effect on day-to-day security. Nor have they really protected Iraqis from one another. At most, the presence of American soldiers in any one place merely diverts attacks elsewhere (unless they themselves are attacked, which is a sad way indeed of reducing Iraqi casualties).

Intelligence is to counterinsurgency what firepower is to conventional warfare, and we just do not have it or the capacity to gather information on our own. Thus the sacrifices of our troops on the ground are mostly futile.

Politically, on the other hand, disengagement should ac

 
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AFA2007       5/6/2007 3:45:40 PM
And keep our own body bags from stacking up higher and higher.

 
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PlatypusMaximus       5/7/2007 8:11:51 AM
You throw in Steal The Oil with that plan and I could get onboard. ROE: Engage any movement within 1 Kilometer. Roads we need will be 2K wide, fenced off and closed to all traffic....
 
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shek       5/7/2007 1:26:09 PM
Luttwak's analysis beats down a bunch of strawmen and has some historical inaccuracies to boot.  Here's David Kilcullen's response.
 
 
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theBird       5/8/2007 5:23:46 PM
Slaying large numbers of the population would make the name "Operation Iraqi Freedom" a bit ironic though.  If we can get Iraqis to do it for us though, it might go over a bit better.
 
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Waltzing Matilda       5/9/2007 10:53:23 PM

Luttwak's analysis beats down a bunch of strawmen and has some historical inaccuracies to boot.  Here's David Kilcullen's response.

 

shek,

Luttwak is by no means beyond reproach, but Kilcullen sidesteps his main argument, which centers on our inability to shape Iraq’s domestic, political landscape. The problem is that the political effects of enhanced security can logically cut both ways. On the one hand, US protection could conceivably make the Iraqi populace more amendable to political compromise; on the other hand, if the various sectarian groups come to rely on the US for protection, they might actually harden their political positions. Consequently, “securing the population” is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the attainment of our current objectives.

Thus far, the surge and all things counterinsurgent appear to be largely tactical in nature, while our political aims and overall strategy remain much the same. So, round and round we go…the GOI is incapable of controlling the violence on its own, which means we have to increase our support; paradoxically, the more support we provide, the weaker the incentive for the GOI to stand up.

Waltzing
 
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shek       5/10/2007 1:02:11 PM
Waltzing,
 
I disagree with your fundamental premise - security is a necessary condition (although I absolutely agree that it isn't a sufficient condition).  Without security, there cannot be governance.  That is the basic social contract between the government and governed.  Thus, the effects of the US presence are strategic in nature - they just cannot be decisive on their own.

Shek
 
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