Right on.

I hope we've got the guts to stick with it until the job is done.

This is a good analysis.

I think it is worth noting that if we were to lose the peace Iraq, this nasty kind of fighting is going to be the very kind of thing we will need to do eventually in the Muslim world.

It's strange that the "peace" movement advocates policies that would lead to the nuclear destruction of many Arab cities and the genocide of millions of Muslims.

There would be peace after such a thing, but would we be able to live with ourselves?

Stephen,

I agree with some of this but I think this ignores the flip side. There was an amazing amount of resentment, especially in Japan, that came from our tactics. Firebombing cities tends to motivate them to fight on, not demoralize them. Part of the rational behind "shock and awe" was that they would be amazed that we were able to decapitate the country and still leave most of the city standing. This is virtually magic and had to be mighty impressive.

I think what we're seeing in the guerilla movement is not so much the arrogance of people who don't think they are defeated but desperation on the part of the few who benefitted from Saddam's rule and who are scared of the reprisals that will follow once the former "outs" are in control of the government and the society.

Very good and apt analysis. The problem with the end of WWI was that as Germany had not suffered physically the way France had, severe reperations were imposed as as substitute.
Front line soldiers such as Hitler and Roehm argued that since they had not been defeated on the battlefield, they had been sold out. (shades of Raghad Hussein there).
Remember von Clausewitz, military victory must be political victory if it is to be effective.

The peace advocates see this as a win win situation, if they can get the US out of Iraq and chaos resumes, more terrorism occurs, then the US is bad because we abandon people, it was just for oil, look at the root causes, yada yada yada. If more terrorism occurs and we waste a whole bunch of ME, then we are even more evil. What makes me laugh is that if the Islamist Fascists actually win, the first people they would line up an shoot are the peace activists.

Stephen - Victor David Hanson said the same thing a while back, that we maybe don't kill enough people in our wars, a little more indiscriminate bloodshed would go along way. Someone also made the same pt about the Israelis, that a long time ago they should have over reacted to the PLO and that would have nipped the terror bombing in the bud. if you kill 13 Israelis at the cost of 500-1000 arabs living in palestine, well its not a good trade.

Bloodthirsty, yea, but beats the alternative of using nuclear weapons and starting over from scratch.

I don't think Stephen has really made the case that waging war the way we do now is "the right thing to do." If it makes winning wars harder, makes winning the peace harder, and makes it harder for the losing side to learn the lessons of war (thus increasing the liklihood that the war will have to be fought again), then I find it difficult to see how our modern way of doing things is more "moral" in any realistic sense of the word.

A stronger case can be made that it's profoundly immoral to wage war with anything less than the sort of overwhelming force necessary to insure that the war is brought to as quick an end as possible, and that it won't have to be fought again.

I think there is a big difference. The reports I am seeing is that the insurgents we face today, are jihadis from the outside, which are pissing off the Iraqis, and dead enders inside, who have already pissed off the Iraqis. Yes, there are a lot of Iraqis that are complaining, but there are even more who will tell you "When you are cured of cancer, you don't complain about a cold."

The bad guys we face I have doubts would have been convinced by anything less than total nuclear annilation. Which leaves the rest of the Iraqis that don't want them there, nor killing our servicemen. (But better jihadis in Iraq getting killed by our servicemen than over here killing us.)

This is a good analysis, one I agree with. As ex-military, with friends and relatives in Iraq, I receive much email from troops in country. What is reported versus the reality on the ground are quite different.

What is happening in Iraq is not classic guerilla warfare. The classic example of is of an insurgent force supported by the general population with sanctuary areas it can go to to rest and refit. Not so in Iraq. There is NO popular support for the fanatics doing the hit and run attacks, and there is certainly no sanctuary for them to hide in.

From all I hear, the general population wants us there and is helping us find and fix the idiots with weapons (many of whom are not Iraqis).

In addition, our military is keeping the pressure on big-time, with continued raids on suspect persons and places.

Have you noticed that reports on attacks on US military convoys, etc. seem to have subsided in the last few days? The series of raids at the end of last week have obviously had a deleterious effect on the bums.

This peace will be won, and Iraq will end up an ally - just as West Germany and Japan were after WWII. Just give it time.

I explored this line of thought in detail in March 2002, but I think it is a dead end. I am a retired Army artillery officer, and I must point out that Stephen's premises are simply flawed. This is not a good analysis of either the lessons of WW 2 or the situation on the ground in Iraq. Sorry.

See here.

I think we're never going to get anywhere with the Arab world until everybody acknowledges a few truths that most people aren't right now. i.e. 1.The Palestinians are way more motivated by tha idea of destroying Israel than by a Palestinian state. 2. The more radical Arab Islamists are still grinding a 900 year old axe. They want all of western Europe back under Islamic law. The Crusades were essentially a defensive war to put Arabs back where they came from. And 3. People like al Qaeda really do believe they can destroy America and are really motivated to do so and are really going to try hard to do so and until the western world adopts the right attitude they will have the wiggle room to act. We need to take the gloves off and eradicate these cockroaches where ever we find them. I don't look to the Democrats for much help here.

Aren't we holding our leaders and military to absurdly high standards here? The war started 4 months ago and we're supposed to have won the war, deposed and captured Saddam, rebuilt the economy, pacified and made cheerful the population, found the WMD, installed a new government, gotten the oil flowing, and withdrawn? In four months?????

Frankly, there's plenty of soul searching goin on in the Middle East, voluntary or not. Iran is damn close to revolution, and dissenters are doing their thing publicly. The Saudis have been exposed for the scumbags they are and are scrambling to make nice. Arafat has been suspiciously quiet and the Palestinian attacks have died down. Syria wisely shut the hell up after the outcome of the war was certain.

If you take a step back from the idiotic hour-to-hour blather of the media and look at the big picture in context, things are going amazingly well.

Yeah, flawed analogy. For one thing, painful civilian casualties would have angered the rest of the arab world much more than it is now, so that probably would have had the opposite effect.

More importantly I think, Japan and Germany were very nationalistic countries where the parties in power were very popular with the people. Japanese soldiers fought tooth and nail when it was clear they were going to lose a battle simply out of dedication to the emporer. Both Japanese and German soldiers were renowned for their cruelty to the countries they tried to conquer and troops they captured during aggressive, empire building wars. Being complacent in race extermination leaves a lot to feel guilty about.

Iraq had none of that. There is no soul searching because the regime in power was not popular. There was/is no large sense of Iraqi nationalism in any of the resistance.

Here is one dark counter-argument from the devils advocate departmet;

We used two nuclear devices in Japan. Today they were memorializng Hiroshima's loss in WW2, not for example, their own actions in Nanjing.

From that one may argue that it is not enough to deal serious blows to a hostile nation-at-whole... but for them to understand without question why people had to hit back and that peaceful countries don't necessarily start wars, but they shouldn't be criticized for finishing them.

It seems to me Seth has part of the right answer.

Iraq is not, for want of a better term, culturally cohesive the way Nazi Germany and militaristic Japan were. Iraqis have also been living in a cultural shithole with little rational input for at least a generation under Baathist power maggots. The intellectual climate is comprised of fatalism, politically incompetent strains of Islam, stale socialism, and primitive superstition.

The Iraqis need re-education. That means we need the intellectual courage to re-educate them. That means we need confidence in our ideals, and the courage to enforce a regime of individual rights, a free press, religious freedom, and free markets.

We have to have the courage and commitment to do something much harder than kill civilians - we have to impose the minimum civilized standards of reasonability. That means we have to have confidence not in our military capacities, but our ideals of civic life. Are there enough of us who have that confidence?

A final footnote: a guaranteed free press, and the real protection of intellectual debate in Iraq would be the fertilized ground for a new crop of Arab and Islamic intellectuals. Any individuals with such ambitions now live under crude dictatorships, they have no base of operation in the Islamic world. Those intellectuals have to remake political Islam, in the final analysis, not us.

It seems pointless for us to inflict more destruction on a country that has been the victim of Hussein for 30 years. The reason we pummeled Germany and Japan was to destroy their ability and will to make war. The reason Sherman's march throught Georgia made sense was that it destroyed the illusion among Southerners that the war was a grand and noble thing, and along with that illusion it destroyed a lot of their ability to support the war.

In the present case, the support of Iraq's population was not a factor in Saddam's aggressions. They were his first victims. He has already destroyed Iraq in ways we would never consider, and I think it would send the wrong signal were we to inflict more damage.

This is the time to bind up the wounds and prove to the Iraqis that we don't mean them harm. After all, if we can accomplish that, they can find the WMD a lot faster than we can, as well as provide information on who the war criminals are. I just hope that the majority here at home can understand that and support staying there until the job is done.

Nobody should think this war is over, either. Afghanistan and Iraq were only the first campaigns. We've still got to deal with Syria, Iran, North Korea, and the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan, Indonesia, Phillipines, and Africa. It must be made a political imperative that the global war on terror is as necessary as the Cold War was, and that we cannot afford to go back to the 80s and 90s and ease the pressure on Al Qaeda or its allies.

One more thing, re: no debate in the Arab world.

I think that we need to do a lot more confronting, especially with our "allies" in the Arab world. We need to identify Muslim thinkers and clerics who understand the need for separation of church and state and make it clear to them that it is the price for admittance into the modern world.

The Muslim world has been unable to solve Bernard Lewis' question, "What went wrong?" and so has settled into learned helplessness, indiffferent to its failures, because the only thing it hears from its religious leaders is the assurance that God is on their side and no others. Since this world stinks for them, and the world to come is fabulous, the only hope left for them is jihad and martyrdom.

They need a new prophet.

A major difference is that in Germany at least, we get the sense that German citizens were, if you believe Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, much more enthusiastically supportive of their dictator than the Iraqis were of theirs.

Thus in Germany, it was necessary that we defeat the Germany people as well. The Bush admin argued that once Saddam Hussein fell, Iraqis would be dancing and cheering in the street. If that is your belief, then why the need to smash the Iraqi people? If the Iraqi people were primed for celebration, then overkill destruction (besides looking bad in the public eye) would have certainly turned even more Iraqis against us.

Russ
Editor - Legal Memo-Random

Spoons writes,

A stronger case can be made that it's profoundly immoral to wage war with anything less than the sort of overwhelming force necessary to insure that the war is brought to as quick an end as possible, and that it won't have to be fought again.

I must disagree. I think that you may be confusing what is "right" with what is "good." This is a fine distinction, but one that is not merely semantic: we're talking moral vs. immoral, here, and it makes sense to parse ideas most finely.

That is: the right thing to do in a situation may not be the good thing to do, because "the good" exists as an approachable ideal, and not a practical reality. The basic idea here is that it is never "a good" to kill another human being, inasmuch as we would, ideally, like to value the continuance of all individual human lives.

However, killing may be the right thing to do (e.g. executing unrepentant murderers, defending yourself against a lethal attacker, etc.).

The United States military is demonstrating an unprecedented shift from the practical rightness of overwhelming force to the ideal goodness of valuing human life on a mass scale—even the lives of our ostensible enemies. As a nation we have committed many hundreds of billions of dollars towards the development of weapons of unsurpassed accuracy. It would be far cheaper to raze a city with dumb iron bombs; military victory would be assured...perhaps even more assured. That's a practical reality.

What America has done is to replace a utilitarian ethic of warfare with a highly visible and undeniable commitment towards minimizing the loss of any lives. Is that a risky strategy? Certainly—it may very well prove to be a mistake, for the reasons cited by Stephen and others.

But consider the depth and breadth of that change: our material and technological prosperity has made possible a level of mercy, and a recognition of the value of human life, that is so unprecedented in history that there are many who simply cannot see it or refuse to believe it. Is this change entirely the result of some high-minded moral conviction? Of course not.

But when it became possible to wage a necessary war without killing millions, or even tens of thousands...that's what we did. I'm proud of that; I'll be even more proud if it proves to be effective as well as moral.

[I wrote a bit more about what is good vs. what is right (and Nick Kristof's and Grenville Byford's confusion of same) here

First, the Tribune published a piece the other day, which I mentioned at the Command Post, that painted a slightly different picture of Iraq... a much more positive one. So check it out.

Second, while your thesis is fascinating Stephen, I am not sure that I can discount the cultural make up of Iraq as a key factor.

Germany was a secularist culture, al beit a nationalist one. The "nation" could exist under various forms of rule, so that the implementation of a new western government did not pose an existential threat to the vast majority of the Germans.

In Japan, if I recall this propoperly, didn't they enlist the support of the Emperor, who was God-like to the Japanese, in the new regime...thus helping to pacify the people.

In Iraq we have a heterogenous culture with an instable mix of secularism. And to many of those non-secularist, their faith doesn't make the rather western distinction of church and state. So to them a western or secular government carries an spiritual and existential threat.

This is why I think Radical Islam is far different from any thing we ever faced so. Thus, while analogies are valuable as always, we musn't expect the same strategies to work on one population just because they did on another.

Ahh yes-WWII- Men were men, woman were riviting or barefoot, boys wanted to grow up and fight, girls wanted to marry boys who fought and the media had only 1.5 ways to communicate. War was ugly,War was bloody,War had purpose,Everyone knew what the purpose was and accepted the fact that WAR IS UGLY!
Today, Men are only men if they are in touch with their fem. side, Women have put their shoes on and are running for president, boys want to play basketball, girls want to go to college and the media runs the world, ugly isn't an option unless it sells-oh my Jessica Lynch was kidnapped doing what she signed up for. Until America can seperate ugly and PC we have no business waging war. I agree with why we are doing what we are doing but If we are going to war then we need to accept the uglyness of it.

As far as soul-searching is concerned. Again I think that there are substantial differences between failry homogenous secular cultures in germany and japan...and the heterogenous non-secular nature of teh middle east. Soul search is not something that is really encouraged there.

Contrast the philosophy of Iraq's heritage with that of Germanies and Japan's...I would expect there are clear and important differences.

I think this highlights the fact that, while our treatment of Germany and Japan ensures that they'll never again be a troublesome enemy, it also makes them unlikely ever to be a very useful ally. As you say, "Want to know why Japan prefers to settle problems diplomatically? Look no further than the twin Ground Zeros at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How come they no longer deify their emperor? Because we damn near killed his ass when we firebombed Tokyo." By the same token, you might ask why Germany was so unwilling to take a strong line against Iraq, and answer that it's because the last time they tried to use war as an instrument of y got their cities levelled the last time they tried to use war as an instrument of national policy. (Or as Mark Twain said, if a cat jumps on a hot stove, it will never jump on another hot stove again, but it will never jump on a cold one either.)

Ian, I fundamentally disagree with you. If what we're doing in the name of "good" turns out to have predicably bad results, then it was not only not "right", but was never "good" to begin with.

Now, in many cases, I believe that avoiding unnecessary civilian destruction is both right and good -- but that's not always the case.

John Rogers comments, "This is a good analysis."

I couldn't disagree more. This is an an absolutely horrible analysis; its "lessons learned" are completely wrong.

Stephen Green asks, concerning the Japanese, ""How come they no longer deify their emperor? Because we damn near killed his ass when we firebombed Tokyo."

That's not the reason at all. We damn near killed Mullah Omar's ass too. But we didn't. More importantly, we didn't even capture him, as we did Hirohito. The Japanese no longer deify their emperor, because they could see a photograph of him next to General MacArthur...and MacArthur looked like the more powerful one:

http://fourthmarinesband.com/mcarthur_hirohito.jpg

In other words, it was necessary to show the Japanese people, through that photograph, that their Emperor was no longer in charge...or even leading a "brave resistance." That photograph demonstrated that ***MacArthur*** was in charge (i.e., he wasn't bowing to Hirohito) and that Hirohito was just another man.

The photos of Uday and Qusay Hussein achieved--or will achieve--a similar effect. They are no to be feared, or admired as brave leaders of "the resistance." They are just dead bodies, buried in Tikrit. Any photo of Saddam Hussein in prison stripes or in a morgue will also have the same effect.

"The problem we have in Iraq is, we smashed their army, but not the country."

This is nonsense.

First off, we do NOT have a significant "problem" in Iraq. The post-war efforts are actually going VERY well.

It's quite possible that the U.S. will leave Iraq somewhere near the first anniversary of Iraq. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan lasted far, far longer. And it's likely that we will leave behind a country with a constitution, and with a democratically elected government. (Whether that constitution and democratically elected government will "stick" is another matter.) Further, neither Iraq, nor any of it's neighbors (except Israel) has any tradition of democracy; the Germans at least had the Weimar Republic. So even if a constitutional democracy DOES fail in Iraq, the main problem will likely be a simple lack of any experience, in the whole region, with anything but dictatorship.

It is neither necessary, nor even desirable, to "smash a country." What IS necessary is to smash the GOVERNMENT that we went to war with.

We must capture or verifiably kill virtually every single person in that deck of 55 playing cards...most especially Saddam Hussein. Then we must absolutely guarantee that no upper level Baathist has any position even close to power in the new government. Most especially in the military. THAT'S what war is about: smashing governments, not "countries."

Summary:

1) Things are NOT going badly in Iraq. In fact, compared to virtually any war the U.S. has ever engaged in (including WWII), both the war and the peace are going stunningly well. For example, we lost 50,000 good men in Vietnam, we didn't even win. In other words, ***IF*** we lost one military person per day in Iraq for the next year (I think it will be less than that) we will have lost less than 1% of the men we lost in Vietnam.

2) The most important remaining task is to completely capture or kill all the remaining upper levels of the Baathist government, especially Saddam Hussein.

3) I didn't mention this, but we HAVE caused significant re-thinking in Iraq and the Arab world. Arab nationalism is reeling. ALL of the governments in the Arab world have seen how poorly armies perform, when the government is not supported by The People. And all of the undemocratic governments in the Arab world will be hugely challenged, if a liberal democratic government can be set up in Iraq.

4) War is about smashing governments... and militaries, IF those militaries support the government. It's not about killing innocent people.

5) I also haven't mentioned this, but once we pull our troops out of Iraq, we will no longer have any need for placing troops in Saudi Arabia. Hopefully, we will also remove our troops from Kuwait and Qatar, too. Then we will have no troops left in Muslim lands in the Middle East. A significant talking point of Osama bin Laden will have been completely eliminated. The infidel won't be in the Middle East, so he'll have no one to complain about but the Muslim leaders of the Middle East.

An oft-forgotten fact very relevant to this discussion is the German guerilla resistance that continued until 1947. It didn't get much play in the news, for fairly obvious reasons.

If the Germans, who were pretty much crushed, could fight on (in a limited fashion) for two years, why are we not expecting the B'aath Party types to fight on for a while?

Spoons,

I understand your objection. But none of this will be acceptable if you do not first accept that there is such a thing as "goodness" which has meaning beyond the simple dictionary definition of the word. If you don't, then the distinction I have suggested between what is good and what is right will be meaningless to you.

This is why I started from

The basic idea here is that it is never "a good" to kill another human being, inasmuch as we would, ideally, like to value the continuance of all individual human lives.

and worked from there.

The "bad result" is the killing, and--if you want to continue to use the future height of a pile of Iraqi corpses as a moral barometer--I doubt that we will eventually have to go in and raze Baghdad because of our current restraint.

As I said, our current strategy represents a fundamental shift away from the utilitarian, results-based ethic which you describe.

The goodness of the act itself is not dependent upon the future, any more than the goodness of saving a man from drowning who, ten years from now, will murder his wife (or even you).

It is the rightness (or, if you prefer, the "correctness") of the act which is grounded in your practical terms, not the goodness, and it is in the more ideal realm of goodness that we find qualities such as mercy and compassion.

I find those qualities admirable in a powerful nation such as ours; the fact that the demonstration of these qualities may not be practical is beside the moral point I am attempting to make.

I am willing to support our nation in taking the admittedly riskier idealistic path for the chance to become a more beneficent actor in the world. Moral decisions are never easy, and are often impractical.

In my opinion, the risk is worth it, even against the possibility of failure.

Mark:
I also haven't mentioned this, but once we pull our troops out of Iraq, we will no longer have any need for placing troops in Saudi Arabia. Hopefully, we will also remove our troops from Kuwait and Qatar, too.

Sorry, but we are not pulling out of Iraq any time soon. Most likely, we are going to build at least one base there, and establish a long-term presence. Iraq is but a stepping stone, hopefully next into Saudi. Maybe to return the Hashemite king to his rightful place...?

Syria, Iran, then Saudi

All diplomatically.

"Sorry, but we are not pulling out of Iraq any time soon. Most likely, we are going to build at least one base there, and establish a long-term presence. Iraq is but a stepping stone, hopefully next into Saudi. Maybe to return the Hashemite king to his rightful place...?"

Are you kidding? If so, you probably ought to put a ;-) next to your punch line.

I hope to G@d we're not going to "Maybe return the Hashemite king to his rightful place..." I thought we knew way back in 1776 that the only legitimate government is one that operates with the consent of the governed...

On US remaining troops in the country: the most revealing bit I've heard so far was from Bremer during his CNBC interview about 10 days ago when he said that the CPA would probably pack and leave once elections were held, but that he fully expected the new Iraqi government to invite the US troops to stay on indefinitely. He explained that onlookers should not confuse the political handover with the security situation in the country and in the region, for that matter.

To me, Eichra's point about resistance to Allied occupation in Germany up to 1947 gets to the point about why Friedman's echoing of the diplomat's "concern" is a bunch of nonsense. If we're talking about direct effects of the coalition victory over Saddam, there simply hasn't been enough time for the "soul-searching" to tangibly manifest itself. Besides, I'm not sure how Friedman or the Arab diplomat are gauging the level of soul-searching at this early stage. I've recently returned from the region, and I can assure all of you, the US's proactive presence in the region is making everyone think.

The orignal post is:

a) a good argument against going to war in the first place
b) factually ignorant

The argument against the invasion of Iraq goes like this:

Unlike Japan and Germany, Iraq hasn't been so horrible to the rest of world that every other country wants to see them suffer greatly. Any 'lesson teaching' by the US would look more like Axis aggression than like the Allied response. Since we can't teach a lesson without looking like we are the ones who need to be taught a lesson, best to just be patient and wait for Saddam to die. Otherwise, we will have a half-assed and probably unsuccesful attempt at lesson teaching...which is exactly what is now developing.

As for factual incorrectness: to say that the bombing in 1991 (much heavier than in 2003) and TWELVE YEARS OF ECONOMIC SANCTIONS did not "smash the country" of Iraq is, at best, a relative statement. No, we did not do to Iraq what we did to Germany and Japan. We did, however, destroy the country to a greater extent than anything since Vietnam, and the proof is in l,.how little conventional military resistance there was to the invasion.

The reason Iraqis are not (all of them) accepting that they are defeated has nothing to do with the fact that they haven't suffered. (You try having been an Iraqi in the last decade.) It has everything to do with the fact that the US has failed to justify its invasion to them and to the world, politically, logically, morally.

BTW, Eichra, what were US casualty figures due to German resistance, 1945-1947?

So, why don´t you just go out of Iraq. UN and Europe will do it better. After all, we
know how to deal in a civilized way with
people. You are like rats looking around for
something to rob.