Commander in Chief Commits Military Malpractice

Sometimes it seems you and the universe are dancing the tango. Some chucklehead in comments insisted that I wouldn’t be hatin’ on the "Commander and Chief" about Iraq if he were a Democrat, I would be out waiving the flag and callin’ folks wearing peace symbols ‘traitors’. I think to myself, "Damn I hate it when these idiots try to suppress my democratic dissent by calling the President the CinC, like I’m supposed to be some private in God’s own army. I oughta write a little something about this obnoxious practice…" And BANG, my wife mails me a link to an op-ed entitled "At Ease, Mr. President" by Garry Wills (no, not the odious George Wills…) on that very subject which is humiliatingly better than anything I might have written myself:

"WE hear constantly now about “our commander in chief.” The word has
become a synonym for “president.” It is said that we “elect a commander
in chief.” It is asked whether this or that candidate is “worthy to be
our commander in chief.”

But the president is not our commander in chief. He certainly is not mine. I am not in the Army."

Read More…

So, I decide not to flog a horse already perfectly butchered. (UPDATE: More on this from Glenn Greenwald) But the idea that I would support the same actions by a Democratic President that I condemn in Bush then rankles. I decide that I’ll write a few lines on that. But then on an unrelated Google search, a blog I’ve not read before pops up and I visit. The site happens not to be archived by entry, but by month, so I stumble across a post further down the page called "Long Political Memories Are Good Causes of Puking" which is not terribly auspicious, but turns out to be on that exact subject and very well researched and written to boot.

"The older I get, there is one type of politician I have a hard time
tolerating and that is the sort that changes a fundamental belief
simply because of a change in political fortune or opportunity.

Take the use of the filibuster in the US Senate. While the Democrats
were in the minority, the Republicans were against it. Now the
Republicans are in the minority, they love the filibuster.

Then
there is the House of Representatives. When the Democrats were in the
minority, they tried to push through legislation offering a sort of
political, "minority bill of rights." Of course, the Republicans were
against that until they lost the House.

During this same era,
Democrats were not allowed to tack on legislation while in the
minority, but now guess who is wanting to just that? Yep, the
Republicans in the minority."

Read More…

Well, so much for that idea. But still, would the Iraq war be better handled and successfully executed under a Democratic President? I have never maintained that, so far as I can recall. And I certainly don’t think that now. Ill conceived from the outset, I hope that a Democratic President would have been wiser and listened more seriously to the lessons of history, and not been determined to invade Iraq, even if he (or she) could.

I have often said that there is a way to win in Iraq, but we would not want to pay the cost it would exact from our national self-image and esteem: insurgencies can be be militarily defeated by the use of genocide and/or barbarous collective punishments to deny the support of the populace to the insurgents. Perhaps I should write about that?

Then I got the February edition of Harper’s Magazine. Edward Luttwak (one of my favorite scholars writing on military affairs) penned an article for the edition titled "Counterinsurgency Warfare as Military Malpractice" criticizing the newly promulgated draft of the new Army manual on counterinsurgency warfare by Generals James Mattis and David Petraeus (who is now in charge of Iraq – and incidentally, having read said manual with a view to criticizing it, I feel now that I have read said manual in vain. There goes another topic…).

Luttwak’s dissection of Mattis’ and Petraeus’ premises is devastating. Unfortunately the full text is not yet online, so I can’t share it with you. But I could write a summary.

Then I found an excellent summary of the article:

"In this February’s Harper’s, Edward N. Luttwak of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies heartily condemns the newly
published Counterinsurgency Manual. Luttwak doesn’t seem exactly to
disagree with the premise that more political/social approaches are
preferable to the current absence of political strategy, he just thinks
that 1) this is not an original idea and 2) it failed before (i.e.
Vietnam). In fact, there was a reason why the military abandoned
counterinsurgency training: they didn’t want to fight these kinds of
wars because Vietnam taught they were not winnable. Or, Luttwak points
out, only winnable with the application of collective punishment
against the entire population to prevent their support of insurgents."

Well, it is somewhat short, but that’s the purpose of summaries, n’est pas?

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, I don’t really have anything to write about at present.