Sunday, May 21, 2006
The Anatomy of Terror 2: A New Kind of War
HISTORY
It's hard to believe, but President George W. Bush's war on terror has lasted longer than either World War II or the Civil War. No wonder this country is losing interest in pursuing it to a final outcome.
The twin campaigns we are now conducting in Afghanistan and Iraq have deep roots. They actually began more than a quarter century ago as an outgrowth of the Cold War. Ironically, Al-Quaida owes its existence to an improbable foster parent: Jimmy Carter, a Baptist Sunday school teacher and the nation's first born-again Christian president.
On July 3, 1979, President Carter signed the first secret directive authorizing covert assistance to the opponents of the pro-Soviet Afghan regime in Kabul. The underlying idea was to draw the Russians into a trap in Afghanistan. The Soviets took the bait and invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. The day they officially crossed the Afghan border, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's security adviser, crowed to Carter, "We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War." How do we know this? The circumstances leading up to al-Quaida's birth were detailed in a largely overlooked 1998 interview with Brzezinski printed in Le Nouvel Observateur, a French weekly.
The CIA supplied money and arms generously, and facilitated the infiltration of foreign Mujahedeen fighters into Afghanistan. A Saudi from a wealthy family, Osama bin Laden--he was then "our" Osama bin Laden--played a major role in this operation. It would truly be supreme irony if the weapons supplied by the CIA a quarter-century earlier were bringing down our helicopters in Afghanistan today. "For almost ten years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government," Brzezinski stressed, "a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire."
We sowed the wind in Afghanistan and inevitably reaped the whirlwind. Some experts believe that Osama bin Laden's ultimate aim is to cause the U.S. to implode as the Soviet Union did. One reason for the length of this latest conflict may be the lack of a clearly identified enemy and a plainly stated objective. How will we know when we have won?
Our Growing Tendency to Intervene
Recent American history is marked by repeated incidents of impromptu military intervention abroad. In 1999, a blue-ribbon U.S. panel appointed to formulate future security policy, found that since the end of the Cold War ten years earlier, "the United States has embarked upon nearly four dozen military interventions . . . as opposed to only 16 during the entire period of the Cold War." The Cold War started in 1947 and ended more than four decades later in 1989 with the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Bill Clinton became the first post-Cold War president and his administration was marked by a succession of military interventions, many of them for peacekeeping. Our attitude since the collapse of the Soviet Union is embodied in Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's famous question to Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It embodies the mood of the moment during the crises of Bosnia and Kosovo: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about," she asked, "if we can't use it."
George W. Bush exhibited that same attitude when he attacked Iraq on March 20, 2003, to remove Saddam Hussein and destroy his supposed weapons of mass destruction. It was to have been a quick, surgical, preemptive strike. We were assured the only significant postwar problem would be how to dispose of the mountains of flowers with which our conquering troops would be pelted. We were promised no expensive Woodrow Wilsonian nation-building would be undertaken.
Some 130,000 American troops are still slogging it out in Iraq more than three years later, trying valiantly to bring order out of chaos, with no end in sight. A smaller force is fighting in Afghanistan, the graveyard of invaders over the centuries, to keep a puppet government from being overthrown by marauding warlords. Unfortunately, as in Vietnam, in Iraq we repeated the most flagrant error a nation can commit: We underestimated the enemy's strength, determination and capacity to prevail, and overestimated our own. If there is one immutable law that has operated during our long, bitter and costly campaign in Iraq, it is Murphy's Law. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, largely because of our failure to have learned from history.
What Went Wrong?
The military campaign in Iraq was brilliantly planned and executed, although American forces moved north so quickly supply lines became stretched thin. Then, to put it bluntly, we made an unforgivable mess of the postwar occupation of the country. Iraqi resistance is now a full-blown insurgency. Here's what we did wrong:
* We failed to declare war in traditional fashion. Doing so would have enabled us to negotiate a formal surrender of Iraqi troop units. Instead we allowed tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers to melt into the countryside with their weapons and their skills.
* We failed to anticipate the postwar insurgency by sending in an attack force large enough to saturate the country and impose order in the postwar period, thus discouraging resistance and reducing the number of casualties. By trimming their occupation forces, the British made the same mistake in the early 1920s, with the same result.
* Incredibly, we failed to guard the dozens of by-passed ammunition dumps from which today's terrorists stole their seemingly limitless stocks of weapons, ammunition and explosives.
* We failed to recognize the importance of infrastructure and the need to safeguard oil pipe lines and the electrical grid from sabotage and looting.
* We failed to protect government offices, police stations and hospitals from being looted. As a result of our indifference, everything from furniture and files to pencil sharpeners were stolen, making it impossible for Iraqis to provide basic administrative, police and health services.
* We failed to act to prevent terrorist safe havens from developing in urban centers like Sunni Fallujah and Shiite Najaf, complicating the inevitable job of rooting them out.
* We failed to prevent the infiltration of foreign fighters through Iraq's porous borders with Syria, Jordan and Iran. As a result, Iraq has become a hands-on training camp and laboratory for terrorists.
* When the time came to rebuild, instead of choosing local contractors who would have given work to Iraqi youths and unemployed now easily recruited into terrorist ranks, we contracted with giant firms like Halliburton.
For years to come, military staffs will study the lessons of the Iraq war and occupation. Our lack of postwar planning will surely be cited as a classic military faux pas. In this amateur military historian's view, not only did planners fail to anticipate the postwar insurgency, causing troops to sustain unnecessary casualties, the Pentagon damaged the military and weakened morale by committing these errors:
* First and foremost, the Pentagon failed to supply adequate body armor and to armor all vehicles to protect the troops. No one was held responsible for this serious oversight.
* The Pentagon failed to establish equivalent rotation plans for the Army and Marines.
* Soldiers rotating home from Iraq were required to return to duty there much too quickly.
* Many Army units in Iraq were required to extend tours of duty beyond the promised one year abroad.
* The Pentagon placed too much reliance on undertrained and poorly equipped Army National Guard and Reserve components.
* The Pentagon's dependence on such units, which made up about half the original force in Iraq, put severe strains on their home communities.
Who's to Blame?
President Harry S. Truman had a small plaque on his desk in the oval office that read, "The buck stops here"--and he meant it. Not so in the Pentagon, where the most accomplished buck-passers are at the top. Chief among them is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Consider what he said at a gripe session with the troops at Camp Buehring in Kuwait Dec. 8, 2004. Specialist Thomas Wilson of the Tennessee Army National Guard complained to the Secretary of Defense about the lack of armored vehicles and the necessity of digging through military scrap heaps for pieces of rusted metal to armor them and pieces of bulletproof glass for windshields.
The answer he received was classic Rumsfeld: "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." A peculiar remark, considering that the Army we went to war with was the Army designed by Donald Rumsfeld over the objections of his Army Chief of Staff.
The Defense Secretary added that the Army was pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that could be accomplished at the moment. "General Schoomaker [Army Chief of Staff] and the leadership of the Army and certainly General Whitcomb [Coalition Forces commander in Kuwait] are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle has the degree of armor that would be desirable for it to have, but they're working on it at a good clip." In Rumsfeld's view, the Army was responsible. And Rumsfeld? He's just a guy who happens to hang out in the same building they work in.
A week earlier, when asked about troop levels for the occupation, his evasive answer to reporters demonstrated the usual Rumsfeld fast footwork and buck-passing, "The big debate about the number of troops is one of those things that's really out of my control," he said. "The number of troops we had for the invasion was the number of troops that General Franks and General Abizaid wanted." The record shows that Franks had estimated that 250,000 troops would be needed. He was assured that any shortfall would be made up by international troops--troops that never materialized.
When challenged recently, the Secretary of Defense even tried to deny the concept of responsibility, grudgingly saying, "Everyone likes to assign responsibility to the top person, and I guess that's fine." It's better than fine; it's where the buck should stop in every organization. According to conservative columnist William S. Lind, "Rumsfeld treats people like crap. Working for him is like working for Leona Helmsley, except that Leona is less self-centered. Unless you are one of his sycophants, equipped with a good set of knee pads and plenty of lip balm, you can expect to be booted down the stairs."
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki discovered what happens to an officer who disagrees with the Secretary of Defense. Appointed by Bill Clinton in 1999, he did not see eye to eye with the Defense Secretary on plans for transforming the Army or new high-tech weapons systems. Rumsfeld reacted vindictively toward Gen. Shinseki by leaking to the Washington Post the name of his successor, Gen. John M. Keane, 14 months before Shinseki's term was up. Usually such announcements are made at the last minute; Rumsfeld's action turned Gen. Shinseki into a lame duck. Shinseki stayed until the end of his term.
Defying protocol and tradition, Rumsfeld ungraciously failed to attend Gen. Shinseki's departure ceremony. Claiming health reasons, his replacement, Gen. Keane also put in for retirement. Rumsfeld had to cajole a friend, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, to come out of retirement to take the post of Chief of Staff of the Army.
In planning for the Iraq War, based on his experience in the Balkans and the Army's doctrine, Gen. Shinseki knew that there was a critical period right after a regime fell when the potential for disorder was great. He advocated going into Iraq with a force much larger than what was needed to conquer Iraq's army and make our military's presence intimidating. This made good sense. A RAND Corporation study of previous occupations in Germany, Northern Ireland and the Balkans had recommended a ratio of 20 soldiers per 1,000 civilians. With a population of 25 million, such a force for the occupation of Iraq could be as high as 500,000. Gen. Shinseki lost that bureaucratic battle, but events proved him to be right on the money.
Secretary Rumsfeld is big on reform, but his idea of reform is just to add more high-tech weapons. The more a system costs, the more complex it is, the better he likes it. An example is the so-called the Future Combat System, a combination of electronically controlled robots, tanks and drones. That this Buck Rogers system is totally unsuited for urban guerrilla warfare, has been overlooked. In the meantime, truly needed reforms to meet future threats are dismissed out of hand.
In his love affair with technology, Rumsfeld seems to have forgotten that 19 terrorist s armed with nothing more than box cutters destroyed the World Trade Center or that two terrorists with a bomb in an inflatable rubber boat crippled the destroyer Cole, capable of intercepting sophisticated missiles. The paradox is that the Defense Secretary puts the Army at the very end of the line for money and weapons, yet the administration insists on getting the country into wars that only the Army can fight. In situations like the occupation of Iraq, the Navy is irrelevant and the Air Force almost so. Marine Corps doctrine is based on getting in and getting out quickly, not patrolling an occupied country.
No master prognosticator, before the invasion of Iraq the Secretary of Defense told troops, "It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." In June of 2005, he noted, "Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, ten, twelve years." Despite the administration's rosily optimistic statements, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld later admitted that security in Iraq is no better today than the day Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled. When challenged by Sen. Ted Kennedy [D-Mass.] about his dismal record, the Defense Secretary's only defense was that he had twice offered his resignation to the President.
Another candidate for blame is former academic Paul Wolfowitz. As Deputy Secretary of Defense, this ardent neoconservative was the principal architect of our Iraq policy. Shortly before the 2003 attack on Iraq that was to have been welcomed with waving American flags and garlands of flowers, he appeared before a House subcommittee. Mr. Wolfowitz pointed out that containment of Saddam Hussein in the twelve years since the earlier Gulf War that evicted Iraqi troops from Kuwait had cost "slightly over $30 billion." He added, "I can't imagine anyone wanting to spend another $30 billion to be there for another twelve years." By April of 2006, Congress had approved more than $300 billion for combat and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, with more on the way and no end in sight. How many bridges, schools or hospitals would that sum have bought here at home?
Before the attack on Iraq, responding to a question from Sen. Carl Levin [D-Mich.] of the House Armed Services Committee, Gen. Shinseki estimated that "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers is probably the figure that would be required" to provide security in postwar Iraq. "Way too high," was what Paul Wolfowitz later called this number in an unusual public rebuke of a serving general by a political appointee. He also insisted that resistance would be low because "Iraq's ethnic groups do not have the same history of conflict as places like the Balkans." For being so wrong about every aspect of the Iraq campaign, he was rewarded with the presidency of the World Bank.
Fighting the Wrong War
It has been said that the United States always prepares for the last war instead of the next war. In Iraq, we made the same mistake. We are now fighting what military think tanks call a fourth generation war with an army intended to fight a third generation war, yet one that is using tactics intended for a second generation war.
Four generations of war? You may protest that you haven't heard anything about this from TV pundits. And the print media do not seem aware of the new thinking in military doctrine. Not to worry; neither does the administration or the Pentagon evince much interest.
The concept of fourth generation warfare was first enunciated by a mixed group of officers from the Army and Marines, including former Marine and conservative columnist William S. Lind. Their innovative article appeared in the October 1989 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette with the title, "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation." Revised and updated in an article in the same publication five years later, their a revolutionary theory traces "generational" changes in warfare through the centuries. The concept was fleshed out for the general public in a 2004 book, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century, by Marine Col. Thomas X. Hammes, a senior fellow at the National Defense University.
First generation warfare began in 1648 at the Treaty of Westphalia that closed the Thirty Years' War and continued until the American Civil War. Prior wars had been fought by families, tribes, cultures, religions, cities, even business enterprises. The Grimaldi family, which has ruled Monaco since 1297, began by renting out war galleys. A monopoly of the nation-state, first generation warfare was waged by troops in lines and columns--until highly accurate rifled shoulder weapons and the machine gun made its tempting targets of massed lines and columns of soldiers obsolete.
Second generation warfare was developed by the French Army during World War I and emphasized massed firepower, mostly artillery. Its goal was attrition through carefully synchronized artillery barrages. Infantry, "the queen of battles," spearheaded by tanks, would then occupy the territorial objective. Warfare became a veritable "shoving contest" in which opposing forces attempt to hold or advance a battle line. Second generation warfare remained America's way of warfare, as we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq, with planes and guided missiles replacing artillery as the source of firepower.
Third generation warfare also had its origins before the First World War in Germany's Schlieffen Plan, which called for attacking France by invading Belgium and the Netherlands in a giant sickle-like movement. German forces would descend to the west of Paris, encircling and capturing the French Army. Before he died in 1913, von Schlieffen was asked what Germany should do if the plan failed. His practical answer was, "Sue for peace." The Schlieffen Plan, modified by von Moltke, was a giant gamble that almost succeeded, but it took four years for a beaten and exhausted Germany to finally surrender.
Count von Schlieffen's tactic was refined in World War II as Germany's "Blitzkrieg"-- "maneuver warfare," in military parlance. Not based on firepower or attrition of troops, it depended on speed, surprise and disorientation of the enemy. Gen. Heinz Guderian, who created Germany's first panzer division in the 1930s, often reminded his troops that their mission was speed: "We are not a killing machine." Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, a second generation engagement, failed. It allowed al-Quaida to get away because we were unable to fight battles of encirclement characteristic of third generation warfare.
Fourth generation warfare, also called "asymmetric warfare" by military thinkers, marks the end of the nation/state's monopoly on war and a return to conflict between cultures or religions. Basically, it involves fighting a different war than the opponent envisions. Afghanistan and Iraq have become fourth generation wars whose ultimate objective is to convince the enemy--and particularly the enemy's civilian population at home--that continuing the war will be too costly. An example of this strategy was the Tet offensive during the Vietnam War. Although it was actually a disaster for North Vietnam, unsettling TV images of black-garbed Viet Cong infiltrators inside the walls of the American Embassy compound convinced the home front that continuation of the war was useless.
Another strategy central to fourth generation warfare is to emphasize the power of weakness. Palestinans employed this to their advantage in the first intifada by portraying themselves as the victims of the vastly more powerful Israeli military. Instead of using modern weaponry, the Palestinians resorted to throwing stones, even using primitive slings to launch them. Taking advantage of the ever-present TV cameras, they transformed Israel from a brave little nation hemmed in by hostile Arab neighbors into a cruel and oppressive state that sanctioned the killing of children. The unbalanced situation was summed up in an Israeli joke of that period. Question: Why does Israel need its own spy satellites? Answer: So it can see a 12-year-old Palestinian boy picking up a stone.
In the second intifada, however, the Palestinians mistakenly abandoned their hard-won image of weakness and switched to violence. The horrors wrought by radical elements in the Palestinian resistance changed the roles of each side. The Palestinians' suicide-bombing campaign removed all restraints and gave Israel complete freedom of action.
It may be a bitter pill to swallow, but one reason our problems in Iraq continue to worsen is that we foolishly demolished the apparatus of the nation/state, creating an opportunity for fourth generation forces to flourish. Once a state has been destroyed, it is not easy to recreate it--as we are painfully discovering.
Fourth generation wars are never short wars. Mao Zedong's Chinese Communists fought for 28 years; Ho Chi Minh's Vietnamese Communists for 30 years; the Sandinistas for 18 years. Palestinians have been resisting Israeli occupation for 39 years, but some Arabs insist the fight has actually been waged since 1948. Off and on, the Chechens have fought the Russians since the 19th century--most recently for the past dozen bloody years. Al-Quaida has been trying to impose its fundamentalist vision on the Islamic and Western worlds since the early 1980s.
Modern insurgencies are the only type of battles that have defeated the United States--witness Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. To win fourth generation wars, in addition to identifying the enemy and fielding properly trained forces, a nation must have the will to persist to victory, however long it takes.
It's hard to believe, but President George W. Bush's war on terror has lasted longer than either World War II or the Civil War. No wonder this country is losing interest in pursuing it to a final outcome.
The twin campaigns we are now conducting in Afghanistan and Iraq have deep roots. They actually began more than a quarter century ago as an outgrowth of the Cold War. Ironically, Al-Quaida owes its existence to an improbable foster parent: Jimmy Carter, a Baptist Sunday school teacher and the nation's first born-again Christian president.
On July 3, 1979, President Carter signed the first secret directive authorizing covert assistance to the opponents of the pro-Soviet Afghan regime in Kabul. The underlying idea was to draw the Russians into a trap in Afghanistan. The Soviets took the bait and invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. The day they officially crossed the Afghan border, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's security adviser, crowed to Carter, "We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War." How do we know this? The circumstances leading up to al-Quaida's birth were detailed in a largely overlooked 1998 interview with Brzezinski printed in Le Nouvel Observateur, a French weekly.
The CIA supplied money and arms generously, and facilitated the infiltration of foreign Mujahedeen fighters into Afghanistan. A Saudi from a wealthy family, Osama bin Laden--he was then "our" Osama bin Laden--played a major role in this operation. It would truly be supreme irony if the weapons supplied by the CIA a quarter-century earlier were bringing down our helicopters in Afghanistan today. "For almost ten years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government," Brzezinski stressed, "a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire."
We sowed the wind in Afghanistan and inevitably reaped the whirlwind. Some experts believe that Osama bin Laden's ultimate aim is to cause the U.S. to implode as the Soviet Union did. One reason for the length of this latest conflict may be the lack of a clearly identified enemy and a plainly stated objective. How will we know when we have won?
Our Growing Tendency to Intervene
Recent American history is marked by repeated incidents of impromptu military intervention abroad. In 1999, a blue-ribbon U.S. panel appointed to formulate future security policy, found that since the end of the Cold War ten years earlier, "the United States has embarked upon nearly four dozen military interventions . . . as opposed to only 16 during the entire period of the Cold War." The Cold War started in 1947 and ended more than four decades later in 1989 with the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Bill Clinton became the first post-Cold War president and his administration was marked by a succession of military interventions, many of them for peacekeeping. Our attitude since the collapse of the Soviet Union is embodied in Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's famous question to Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It embodies the mood of the moment during the crises of Bosnia and Kosovo: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about," she asked, "if we can't use it."
George W. Bush exhibited that same attitude when he attacked Iraq on March 20, 2003, to remove Saddam Hussein and destroy his supposed weapons of mass destruction. It was to have been a quick, surgical, preemptive strike. We were assured the only significant postwar problem would be how to dispose of the mountains of flowers with which our conquering troops would be pelted. We were promised no expensive Woodrow Wilsonian nation-building would be undertaken.
Some 130,000 American troops are still slogging it out in Iraq more than three years later, trying valiantly to bring order out of chaos, with no end in sight. A smaller force is fighting in Afghanistan, the graveyard of invaders over the centuries, to keep a puppet government from being overthrown by marauding warlords. Unfortunately, as in Vietnam, in Iraq we repeated the most flagrant error a nation can commit: We underestimated the enemy's strength, determination and capacity to prevail, and overestimated our own. If there is one immutable law that has operated during our long, bitter and costly campaign in Iraq, it is Murphy's Law. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, largely because of our failure to have learned from history.
What Went Wrong?
The military campaign in Iraq was brilliantly planned and executed, although American forces moved north so quickly supply lines became stretched thin. Then, to put it bluntly, we made an unforgivable mess of the postwar occupation of the country. Iraqi resistance is now a full-blown insurgency. Here's what we did wrong:
* We failed to declare war in traditional fashion. Doing so would have enabled us to negotiate a formal surrender of Iraqi troop units. Instead we allowed tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers to melt into the countryside with their weapons and their skills.
* We failed to anticipate the postwar insurgency by sending in an attack force large enough to saturate the country and impose order in the postwar period, thus discouraging resistance and reducing the number of casualties. By trimming their occupation forces, the British made the same mistake in the early 1920s, with the same result.
* Incredibly, we failed to guard the dozens of by-passed ammunition dumps from which today's terrorists stole their seemingly limitless stocks of weapons, ammunition and explosives.
* We failed to recognize the importance of infrastructure and the need to safeguard oil pipe lines and the electrical grid from sabotage and looting.
* We failed to protect government offices, police stations and hospitals from being looted. As a result of our indifference, everything from furniture and files to pencil sharpeners were stolen, making it impossible for Iraqis to provide basic administrative, police and health services.
* We failed to act to prevent terrorist safe havens from developing in urban centers like Sunni Fallujah and Shiite Najaf, complicating the inevitable job of rooting them out.
* We failed to prevent the infiltration of foreign fighters through Iraq's porous borders with Syria, Jordan and Iran. As a result, Iraq has become a hands-on training camp and laboratory for terrorists.
* When the time came to rebuild, instead of choosing local contractors who would have given work to Iraqi youths and unemployed now easily recruited into terrorist ranks, we contracted with giant firms like Halliburton.
For years to come, military staffs will study the lessons of the Iraq war and occupation. Our lack of postwar planning will surely be cited as a classic military faux pas. In this amateur military historian's view, not only did planners fail to anticipate the postwar insurgency, causing troops to sustain unnecessary casualties, the Pentagon damaged the military and weakened morale by committing these errors:
* First and foremost, the Pentagon failed to supply adequate body armor and to armor all vehicles to protect the troops. No one was held responsible for this serious oversight.
* The Pentagon failed to establish equivalent rotation plans for the Army and Marines.
* Soldiers rotating home from Iraq were required to return to duty there much too quickly.
* Many Army units in Iraq were required to extend tours of duty beyond the promised one year abroad.
* The Pentagon placed too much reliance on undertrained and poorly equipped Army National Guard and Reserve components.
* The Pentagon's dependence on such units, which made up about half the original force in Iraq, put severe strains on their home communities.
Who's to Blame?
President Harry S. Truman had a small plaque on his desk in the oval office that read, "The buck stops here"--and he meant it. Not so in the Pentagon, where the most accomplished buck-passers are at the top. Chief among them is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Consider what he said at a gripe session with the troops at Camp Buehring in Kuwait Dec. 8, 2004. Specialist Thomas Wilson of the Tennessee Army National Guard complained to the Secretary of Defense about the lack of armored vehicles and the necessity of digging through military scrap heaps for pieces of rusted metal to armor them and pieces of bulletproof glass for windshields.
The answer he received was classic Rumsfeld: "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." A peculiar remark, considering that the Army we went to war with was the Army designed by Donald Rumsfeld over the objections of his Army Chief of Staff.
The Defense Secretary added that the Army was pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that could be accomplished at the moment. "General Schoomaker [Army Chief of Staff] and the leadership of the Army and certainly General Whitcomb [Coalition Forces commander in Kuwait] are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle has the degree of armor that would be desirable for it to have, but they're working on it at a good clip." In Rumsfeld's view, the Army was responsible. And Rumsfeld? He's just a guy who happens to hang out in the same building they work in.
A week earlier, when asked about troop levels for the occupation, his evasive answer to reporters demonstrated the usual Rumsfeld fast footwork and buck-passing, "The big debate about the number of troops is one of those things that's really out of my control," he said. "The number of troops we had for the invasion was the number of troops that General Franks and General Abizaid wanted." The record shows that Franks had estimated that 250,000 troops would be needed. He was assured that any shortfall would be made up by international troops--troops that never materialized.
When challenged recently, the Secretary of Defense even tried to deny the concept of responsibility, grudgingly saying, "Everyone likes to assign responsibility to the top person, and I guess that's fine." It's better than fine; it's where the buck should stop in every organization. According to conservative columnist William S. Lind, "Rumsfeld treats people like crap. Working for him is like working for Leona Helmsley, except that Leona is less self-centered. Unless you are one of his sycophants, equipped with a good set of knee pads and plenty of lip balm, you can expect to be booted down the stairs."
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki discovered what happens to an officer who disagrees with the Secretary of Defense. Appointed by Bill Clinton in 1999, he did not see eye to eye with the Defense Secretary on plans for transforming the Army or new high-tech weapons systems. Rumsfeld reacted vindictively toward Gen. Shinseki by leaking to the Washington Post the name of his successor, Gen. John M. Keane, 14 months before Shinseki's term was up. Usually such announcements are made at the last minute; Rumsfeld's action turned Gen. Shinseki into a lame duck. Shinseki stayed until the end of his term.
Defying protocol and tradition, Rumsfeld ungraciously failed to attend Gen. Shinseki's departure ceremony. Claiming health reasons, his replacement, Gen. Keane also put in for retirement. Rumsfeld had to cajole a friend, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, to come out of retirement to take the post of Chief of Staff of the Army.
In planning for the Iraq War, based on his experience in the Balkans and the Army's doctrine, Gen. Shinseki knew that there was a critical period right after a regime fell when the potential for disorder was great. He advocated going into Iraq with a force much larger than what was needed to conquer Iraq's army and make our military's presence intimidating. This made good sense. A RAND Corporation study of previous occupations in Germany, Northern Ireland and the Balkans had recommended a ratio of 20 soldiers per 1,000 civilians. With a population of 25 million, such a force for the occupation of Iraq could be as high as 500,000. Gen. Shinseki lost that bureaucratic battle, but events proved him to be right on the money.
Secretary Rumsfeld is big on reform, but his idea of reform is just to add more high-tech weapons. The more a system costs, the more complex it is, the better he likes it. An example is the so-called the Future Combat System, a combination of electronically controlled robots, tanks and drones. That this Buck Rogers system is totally unsuited for urban guerrilla warfare, has been overlooked. In the meantime, truly needed reforms to meet future threats are dismissed out of hand.
In his love affair with technology, Rumsfeld seems to have forgotten that 19 terrorist s armed with nothing more than box cutters destroyed the World Trade Center or that two terrorists with a bomb in an inflatable rubber boat crippled the destroyer Cole, capable of intercepting sophisticated missiles. The paradox is that the Defense Secretary puts the Army at the very end of the line for money and weapons, yet the administration insists on getting the country into wars that only the Army can fight. In situations like the occupation of Iraq, the Navy is irrelevant and the Air Force almost so. Marine Corps doctrine is based on getting in and getting out quickly, not patrolling an occupied country.
No master prognosticator, before the invasion of Iraq the Secretary of Defense told troops, "It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." In June of 2005, he noted, "Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, ten, twelve years." Despite the administration's rosily optimistic statements, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld later admitted that security in Iraq is no better today than the day Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled. When challenged by Sen. Ted Kennedy [D-Mass.] about his dismal record, the Defense Secretary's only defense was that he had twice offered his resignation to the President.
Another candidate for blame is former academic Paul Wolfowitz. As Deputy Secretary of Defense, this ardent neoconservative was the principal architect of our Iraq policy. Shortly before the 2003 attack on Iraq that was to have been welcomed with waving American flags and garlands of flowers, he appeared before a House subcommittee. Mr. Wolfowitz pointed out that containment of Saddam Hussein in the twelve years since the earlier Gulf War that evicted Iraqi troops from Kuwait had cost "slightly over $30 billion." He added, "I can't imagine anyone wanting to spend another $30 billion to be there for another twelve years." By April of 2006, Congress had approved more than $300 billion for combat and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, with more on the way and no end in sight. How many bridges, schools or hospitals would that sum have bought here at home?
Before the attack on Iraq, responding to a question from Sen. Carl Levin [D-Mich.] of the House Armed Services Committee, Gen. Shinseki estimated that "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers is probably the figure that would be required" to provide security in postwar Iraq. "Way too high," was what Paul Wolfowitz later called this number in an unusual public rebuke of a serving general by a political appointee. He also insisted that resistance would be low because "Iraq's ethnic groups do not have the same history of conflict as places like the Balkans." For being so wrong about every aspect of the Iraq campaign, he was rewarded with the presidency of the World Bank.
Fighting the Wrong War
It has been said that the United States always prepares for the last war instead of the next war. In Iraq, we made the same mistake. We are now fighting what military think tanks call a fourth generation war with an army intended to fight a third generation war, yet one that is using tactics intended for a second generation war.
Four generations of war? You may protest that you haven't heard anything about this from TV pundits. And the print media do not seem aware of the new thinking in military doctrine. Not to worry; neither does the administration or the Pentagon evince much interest.
The concept of fourth generation warfare was first enunciated by a mixed group of officers from the Army and Marines, including former Marine and conservative columnist William S. Lind. Their innovative article appeared in the October 1989 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette with the title, "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation." Revised and updated in an article in the same publication five years later, their a revolutionary theory traces "generational" changes in warfare through the centuries. The concept was fleshed out for the general public in a 2004 book, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century, by Marine Col. Thomas X. Hammes, a senior fellow at the National Defense University.
First generation warfare began in 1648 at the Treaty of Westphalia that closed the Thirty Years' War and continued until the American Civil War. Prior wars had been fought by families, tribes, cultures, religions, cities, even business enterprises. The Grimaldi family, which has ruled Monaco since 1297, began by renting out war galleys. A monopoly of the nation-state, first generation warfare was waged by troops in lines and columns--until highly accurate rifled shoulder weapons and the machine gun made its tempting targets of massed lines and columns of soldiers obsolete.
Second generation warfare was developed by the French Army during World War I and emphasized massed firepower, mostly artillery. Its goal was attrition through carefully synchronized artillery barrages. Infantry, "the queen of battles," spearheaded by tanks, would then occupy the territorial objective. Warfare became a veritable "shoving contest" in which opposing forces attempt to hold or advance a battle line. Second generation warfare remained America's way of warfare, as we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq, with planes and guided missiles replacing artillery as the source of firepower.
Third generation warfare also had its origins before the First World War in Germany's Schlieffen Plan, which called for attacking France by invading Belgium and the Netherlands in a giant sickle-like movement. German forces would descend to the west of Paris, encircling and capturing the French Army. Before he died in 1913, von Schlieffen was asked what Germany should do if the plan failed. His practical answer was, "Sue for peace." The Schlieffen Plan, modified by von Moltke, was a giant gamble that almost succeeded, but it took four years for a beaten and exhausted Germany to finally surrender.
Count von Schlieffen's tactic was refined in World War II as Germany's "Blitzkrieg"-- "maneuver warfare," in military parlance. Not based on firepower or attrition of troops, it depended on speed, surprise and disorientation of the enemy. Gen. Heinz Guderian, who created Germany's first panzer division in the 1930s, often reminded his troops that their mission was speed: "We are not a killing machine." Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, a second generation engagement, failed. It allowed al-Quaida to get away because we were unable to fight battles of encirclement characteristic of third generation warfare.
Fourth generation warfare, also called "asymmetric warfare" by military thinkers, marks the end of the nation/state's monopoly on war and a return to conflict between cultures or religions. Basically, it involves fighting a different war than the opponent envisions. Afghanistan and Iraq have become fourth generation wars whose ultimate objective is to convince the enemy--and particularly the enemy's civilian population at home--that continuing the war will be too costly. An example of this strategy was the Tet offensive during the Vietnam War. Although it was actually a disaster for North Vietnam, unsettling TV images of black-garbed Viet Cong infiltrators inside the walls of the American Embassy compound convinced the home front that continuation of the war was useless.
Another strategy central to fourth generation warfare is to emphasize the power of weakness. Palestinans employed this to their advantage in the first intifada by portraying themselves as the victims of the vastly more powerful Israeli military. Instead of using modern weaponry, the Palestinians resorted to throwing stones, even using primitive slings to launch them. Taking advantage of the ever-present TV cameras, they transformed Israel from a brave little nation hemmed in by hostile Arab neighbors into a cruel and oppressive state that sanctioned the killing of children. The unbalanced situation was summed up in an Israeli joke of that period. Question: Why does Israel need its own spy satellites? Answer: So it can see a 12-year-old Palestinian boy picking up a stone.
In the second intifada, however, the Palestinians mistakenly abandoned their hard-won image of weakness and switched to violence. The horrors wrought by radical elements in the Palestinian resistance changed the roles of each side. The Palestinians' suicide-bombing campaign removed all restraints and gave Israel complete freedom of action.
It may be a bitter pill to swallow, but one reason our problems in Iraq continue to worsen is that we foolishly demolished the apparatus of the nation/state, creating an opportunity for fourth generation forces to flourish. Once a state has been destroyed, it is not easy to recreate it--as we are painfully discovering.
Fourth generation wars are never short wars. Mao Zedong's Chinese Communists fought for 28 years; Ho Chi Minh's Vietnamese Communists for 30 years; the Sandinistas for 18 years. Palestinians have been resisting Israeli occupation for 39 years, but some Arabs insist the fight has actually been waged since 1948. Off and on, the Chechens have fought the Russians since the 19th century--most recently for the past dozen bloody years. Al-Quaida has been trying to impose its fundamentalist vision on the Islamic and Western worlds since the early 1980s.
Modern insurgencies are the only type of battles that have defeated the United States--witness Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. To win fourth generation wars, in addition to identifying the enemy and fielding properly trained forces, a nation must have the will to persist to victory, however long it takes.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
The Anatomy of Terror 1: A Bloody Past
HISTORY
"It's déja vu all over again."
This delightful expression from baseball player and inadvertent homespun philosopher Yogi Berra aptly sums up America's national habit of locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen. Another bad habit is our tendency to concentrate on the messenger and overlook the message. These habits characterize our reaction to terrorism.
In March of 2004, ten bombs concealed in innocent-looking parcels and backpacks exploded on commuter trains arriving at Madrid's railway station, leaving 191 dead and 1,800 injured. The perpetrators were quickly identified and brought to justice. Sixteen months later, the day after London was named host to the 2012 Olympic Games, four bombs exploded in central London, bringing that city's transportation system to a standstill. Fifty-two were killed and 700 injured. Although homemade, the three bombs that struck London's Underground showed a remarkable level of coordination, exploding within seconds of each other. A fourth bomb exploded belatedly on the upper level of a double-decker bus, perhaps accidentally by a rattled bomber.
Having experienced Hitler's firebombing and rocket blitz during World War II and 30 years of intermittent bombing by the Irish Republican Army, Londoners stoically took this latest onslaught in stride. Taking a cue from our reference to the 2001 attacks as 9/11, the London incidents became 7/7. We now know that the London attacks had nothing to do with the Olympic Games and were made by locally home-grown al-Quaida wannabees. Significantly, they occurred on the opening day of the G8 Summit in Scotland. London was targeted for the same reason Spain was hit: because of its participation in the coalition--Britain contributed the second largest contingent to the invasion and occupation of Iraq--and to discourage continued participation in the coalition.
Here in the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security raised the threat level for the mass transit sector of the transportation system from code yellow (elevated) to orange (high). Patrols and surveillance were increased on all forms of transportation. While our attention was diverted to trains and buses, independent experts warned that terrorist plotters could strike some unexpected new target--for example, a lightly protected chemical plant near an urban area.
We should never forget that the basic purpose of these acts of terrorism is to disrupt the way we lead our lives, to turn our open society into a closed, intimidated society and to turn one group against another. But isn't it time for us to pay attention to the message fanatical terrorists are trying to deliver? To do this, we must see ourselves as the rest of the world sees us, particularly the Third World.
The President has declared war on terror, but have we ever formulated clear-cut objectives for this war? Foolish taunts like "Bring 'em on" don't help. And the attacks in London underscore how empty is the President's statement, "We're taking the fight to the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home." Simply stated, there are no front lines in this war, not in Iraq nor elsewhere; the front line is everywhere. From Bali to Casablanca, from Buenos Aires to Istanbul, all of which have been terrorist targets, we're all in it together, by golly--and we have been since long before 9/11.
Terror's Long History
The evil of terrorism has been abroad in the world for centuries, and in the service of many causes. To help put terrorism in proper perspective, it may be useful to examine it through a historian's eyes.
In 1776, the British meted out harsh punishment to "terrorist" American colonists who fought frontier-style and took potshots at Redcoats from behind stone walls and trees. Two centuries later, the South African government labeled Nelson Mandela a terrorist for opposing apartheid and imprisoned him for 30 years.
Terrorism has long been the weapon of choice in the Middle East, where it has not been limited to Muslims. For example, on July 22, 1946, working to set up an independent state, members of the Jewish underground military organization Irgun Zvai Leumi exploded a bomb in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The hotel was then the headquarters of the secretariat administering the British mandated territory of Palestine and of the British Army.
The death toll was 91, mostly civilians, including 17 Jews; 45 persons were injured. The bombing was condemned as "cowardly" in the British Houses of Parliament, but the British did not retaliate. The perpetrators, David Ben Gurion, who had ordered the bombing but later rescinded his order, and Menachem Begin, who carried it out anyway, were never brought to justice. In fact, both later became prime ministers of Israel. If anything, the bombing hastened the British decision to give up the mandate.
America and Terrorism
For many years, America has been a toothless tiger, peculiarly tolerant of terrorist attacks on its citizens and regarding them almost as annoyances. Repeated hijackings of American commercial aircraft in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in few changes in routines or baggage examination. There has been more than enough blame to go around among a succession of presidencies for their responses to terrorist attacks. Consider this sampling of incidents:
Khartoum, Sudan, March 1, 1973. Eight Palestinian gunmen take five hostages at a party at the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. Two are Americans, ambassador Cleo Noel and George Curtis Moore, chargé d'affaires. The Black September faction claims responsibility for the kidnapping and demands the release of Palestinians jailed everywhere, including Sirhan Bisrah Sirhan, who had assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles in 1968.
The customary practice of the State Department then was to negotiate the release of Americans being held by terrorists. When a reporter asks President Nixon to comment on the demand for the release of Kennedy's assassin, he explodes, "We will do everything to get them released--but we will not pay blackmail!" President Nixon's "no concessions" policy continues to this day.
The Nixon statement seals the fate of Noel and Moore. Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization sends a message to the terrorists in the embassy containing the code words Nahr al-Bard ("Cold River") ordering the death of the Western hostages. Nahr al-Bard was a terrorist training facility in Lebanon that had been attacked by Israeli troops 11 days earlier. With a third diplomat, Guy Eid, chargé d'affaires of the Belgian embassy, they are hustled to the Saudi embassy basement and machine-gunned. The perpetrators are detained briefly, but are never punished for the crime.
Before the kidnapping, an American listening post on Cyprus had intercepted a message indicating that terrorist action of some sort was about to happen in Khartoum and notified the State Department in Washington. Instead of immediately radioing a warning to the American embassy in Khartoum, the message was handled routinely by a State Department functionary. After the diplomats are killed, Nixon, up to his elbows in the uproar over the Watergate break-in, orders copies of all messages about the incident to be destroyed.
Beirut, Lebanon, Oct. 23, 1983. A suicide bomber drives a truckload of dynamite into the barracks of U.S. Marines established at the Beirut Airport, killing 241. The troops were sent by Ronald Reagan to stabilize the country. Retaliation against Syria with Tomahawk cruise missiles is considered. Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's secretary of defense, vetoes the idea out of fear that a misfired missile might be retrieved by Syria and passed to the Soviet Union, where the secret of its new technology could be revealed by reverse-engineering. President Reagan's response is to withdraw our troops.
Beirut, Lebanon, June 14, 1985. Two Hezbollah hijackers seize TWA Flight 847 between Athens and Rome. Demanding the release of 766 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, they divert the plane to Beirut. [TWA is then the major American overseas carrier; this is the fourth TWA flight hijacked by terrorists in 16 years. Previous TWA hijackings have taken place in 1969, 1970 and 1976.] The terrorists hope to find many Israelis on board. There are none, so they turn their attention to Americans with what they believe are "Jewish-sounding" names or with military ID. After murdering a U.S. young sailor named Robert Stethem, they dump his body from the plane onto the tarmac. Seventeen women and two children are released. The pilot is forced to fly to Algiers, where additional women and children are released. The plane again returns to Beirut. Here, after additional negotiations involving Syria and Iran, the remaining passengers are set free. The Syrian and Lebanese governments arrest and later release the hijackers. Although an American serviceman had been murdered, President Reagan does little more than impose sanctions on Lebanese air carriers to show his displeasure.
Mogadishu, Somalia, Dec. 8, 1992. Near the end of his term as President, George H.W.Bush sends U.S. troops into Somalia in support of U.N. humanitarian activities, promising to withdraw them by inauguration day, January 20th. Bill Clinton is sworn in and discovers that 25,000 U.S. troops are still in Somalia. The misadventure ends with the Mogadishu disaster on October 3, 1993, in which 18 American soldiers are killed and mutilated, and 84 are wounded. President Clinton's response is to withdraw our troops, and the last soldiers leave Somalia in March of 1994. The perpetrators are never caught or prosecuted.
New York, Feb. 26, 1993. A rented van containing 1,300 pounds of homemade explosives was driven into the underground garage of the World Trade Center. The intention was to cause one of the city's two tallest towers to topple into its adjoining twin. Although it did considerable damage underground, the targeted tower did not topple into the other. The perpetrators were brought to justice--but no attention was paid to their message. Ramzi Yousef, the bomb's mastermind was captured later in Pakistan and returned to the United States. He and two accomplices were convicted and sentenced to life without parole.
Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Aug. 7, 1998. The Clinton administration's ineffectual response to al-Quaida's almost simultaneous bomb attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania is to launch 79 cruise missiles at targets in Sudan and Afghanistan in the hope of killing bin Laden. Each missile costs about a million dollars.
Aden, Yemen, Oct. 12, 2000. As the American destroyer USS Cole is refueling in the inner harbor, two men in an inflatable Zodiac boat loaded with C-4 explosives pull alongside. The explosion that follows blows a huge hole in the side of the ship and kills 17 sailors in the main and auxiliary engine rooms and the crew's mess.
By the time it is established that bin Laden was behind this attack, hopes are running high for an agreement between new Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat. President Clinton is reluctant to launch more attacks on another Islamic country and does nothing.
New York and Washington, September 11, 2001. Four commercial airliners are hijacked in flight and steered toward emblematic buildings: the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the seat of financial power, and the Pentagon in Washington, seat of military power. On the fourth plane, intended to strike either the U.S. Capitol or the White House, seats of government power, passengers heroically battle the hijackers. The plane crashes in Pennsylvania, far short of its intended target.
A wave of revulsion sweeps the country, which clamors for the capture and punishment of the perpetrators. Screening techniques that should always have been in place are instituted at airports to guarantee that this method of massive destruction would never again be attempted. President Bush declares that the country is now engaged in a "war on terror."
Shortly after the attacks of 9/11, Daniel Pipes, a conservative commentator on the Middle East and usually a supporter of the President, points out in the Jerusalem Post that terror is a tactic, not an enemy. Pipes points out that by insisting its quarrel is with terror and not with radical Islam, the U.S. is obscuring the political roots of the confrontation.
Our primary adversary should always have been Osama bin Laden. Yet he was allowed to escape from our clutches, and now seems to thrive and issue pronouncements via taped messages from the safety of the tribal area of northwest Pakistan.
Ironically, bin Laden is a creation of the United States, although the U.S. government, probably out of embarrassment, has been singularly quiet about its participation in the recruitment and arming of fighters who forced the Russians in 1989 to abandon their occupation of Afghanistan. After Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the CIA, operating at arm's length, organized an Afghan jihad, or holy war, against the godless Russians, with the cooperation of the Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan. The CIA provided weapons and recruited candidates from various Muslim countries and facilitated their travel to Pakistan for training.
Arab countries were the main source of fighters, who were jocularly called "Afghan Arabs." Non-Afghan recruits came from Algeria, Indonesia, Kosovo, Chechnya and Sudan. The Pakistani embassy in Algiers issued 2,800 visas to Algerian volunteers in the 1980s. Fighters from all countries trained at Peshawar in Pakistan and received the comparatively high salary of $1,500 a month.
The CIA had hoped to turn up a Saudi prince to lead this jihad but could not find one. It settled for Osama bin Laden, recruited in 1980--with CIA approval--by the head of Saudi intelligence. Osama bin Laden shuttled frequently between Saudi Arabia and Peshawar in Pakistan with Saudi donations for the jihad. By 1986, bin Laden, whose family had made millions in construction, was the major contractor on a large CIA-funded project, the Khost tunnel complex deep in the mountains near the border with Pakistan.
Not many years later, with the Russians gone, bin Laden turned on his erstwhile American employers. In Operation Anaconda, U.S. planes would bomb this same tunnel complex. Although ample Special Forces were available, with peculiar timidity and to spare American casualties U.S., commanders choose to use Northern Alliance fighters of doubtful allegiance to root out Taliban die-hards in 2002.
Michael Scheuer, author of two books on Osama bin Laden under the pen name "Anonymous," spent many of his years of service as a CIA analyst studying bin Laden. Scheuer's advice in his 2004 book Imperial Hubris was not to see bin Laden as a criminal terrorist or as a lunatic, but rather as a talented, clever and brilliant military and political genius, with the attributes of a successful CEO. Scheuer warned that bin Laden has been precise in telling us the reasons he is waging war on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, as George W. Bush insists. They have everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world. Scheuer confidently predicted another massive bin Laden attack on the United States. In bin Laden's words, "just as you lay waste to our nation, so shall we lay waste to yours."
Osama bin Laden's long-term strategy is one developed by Mahatma Gandhi and refined by radical Chicago labor and civil rights organizer Saul Alinsky. It is embodied in the phrase, "The action is the reaction." In his 1971 book Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote, "The real action is in the enemy's reaction. The enemy, properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength. Tactics, like life, require that you move with the action."
The bin Laden action was the bombing of American symbols: the twin WTC towers (Wall Street/wealth), the Pentagon (the military), and (probably) the White House or the Capitol Building (the government). The American reaction exceeded his wildest dreams. We attacked bin Laden's enemy, the hated secularist Saddam, and laid waste to Iraq. Now we are engaged in rebuilding it. In bin Laden's words, "The policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy various corporations--whether in the field of arms or reconstruction--has helped us to achieve our results." What is remarkable about bin Laden as an adversary is that he has clearly spelled out his intentions and objectives in his many taped messages to the West.
For an investment of about a half million dollars, bin Laden succeeded in goading us into attacking a Muslim country and committing us to spending billions of dollars. He has acknowledged that his policy is to bleed America to the point of bankruptcy--and we are foolishly cooperating with him in this. He knows that the soft underbelly of the West is oil, and oil will never get cheaper. Yet we continue to do nothing about reducing our dependence on hydrocarbon fuels.
Despite a record-shattering reward of $50 million offered for his capture, Osama bin Laden still remains at large, a potent threat to the United States and the West. Are most intelligence professionals worried about the possibility of another major incident masterminded by this formidable adversary? Yes, they are very worried--and you should be too.
The Second Iraq War
Ignoring the findings of U.N.inspectors and wanting to believe that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, in 2003 the Bush administration attacks Iraq. Unlike the Gulf War of ten years before, other than Britain few countries send sizable contingents to participate.
Opponents of the war point out that if the undeclared war on Iraq was intended to be payback for participation in the 9/11 attacks, we were attacking the wrong enemy. A more logical opponent would have been Saudi Arabia, 15 of whose citizens made up the majority of the 19 plane hijackers. Although a huge reward is posted for the capture of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, this extremely tall and conspicuous Arab who travels with dialysis equipment disappears from our radar.
On the eve of the 1994 Republican convention in New York, George W. Bush, answering a question from Matt Lauer on NBC's Today show, admits that the war on terror cannot be won. Realizing that such a remark smacks of defeatism, an administration spokesman quickly explains that the President was merely pointing out the unconventional nature of the conflict. George W. Bush hastily backpedals at the American Legion convention in Nashville a day later. Nevertheless, the toothpaste is out of the tube and cannot be put back.
Today, a tidal wave of uneasiness is sweeping the country fed by revelations that the Iraq war was launched without a postwar plan and concerns over the lamentable lack of a timetable for withdrawal of our forces from that unhappy country.
The administration is now living in fear that the public will attach the word "quagmire" to the word Iraq and completely abandon support for the ongoing war, just as they once appended it to the word Vietnam with disastrous political and military consequences.
Although there are obvious differences between the struggles (jungle vs. desert) and political considerations and military technology have changed significantly, there are many uncomfortable parallels in the two wars.
Vietnam vs. Iraq
Four decades ago, the Kennedy administration saw Vietnam as an avenue of Chinese expansionism, although it was actually an obstacle to it. They closed their eyes to what any historian specializing in the Far East could have told them. Namely, that the Vietnamese have always feared and distrusted their giant neighbor to the north, convictions born of a thousand years of hated Chinese occupation.
Secular Iraq, debilitated by ten years of sanctions and daily reconnaissance flights, posed no real threat to America's security. Nevertheless, using flimsy evidence we convinced ourselves of the presence of weapons of mass destruction and launched a "pre-emptive" attack.
Lyndon Johnson surrounded himself with "the best and the brightest": Robert McNamara, inherited from assassinated John F. Kennedy as Secretary of Defense, with his number-crunching "whiz kids," and McGeorge Bundy, first in his class at Yale, as National Security Advisor. Preferring the advice of these civilian experts, Johnson ignored counsel from his Joint Chiefs of Staff even going so far as to exclude them from his Tuesday luncheon strategy meetings with advisors.
Similarly, George W. Bush has given Donald Rumsfeld, a former congressman wise in the ways of Washington and industry executive, a free hand in the redesign of the military. Although the Middle East loomed as the prime problem, the inexperienced president chose as his National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, an academic expert on Russia with no knowledge of the Middle East.
Vietnam was a costly undeclared war with hazy objectives, blessed by a compliant Congress, and characterized by the glaring disparity between the troops' bloody sacrifices and indifference of the home front. The Iraq war now resembles that earlier war, with a similar disconnect between battlefield and home front. American unit commanders in Iraq now report insurgents' "body counts," which were often falsified in Vietnam to give politicians at home the impression of progress.
One reason for the present administration's growing problem in keeping the public's attention focused on the war on terror is its unwillingness to level with the public and admit mistakes, a flawed stance matched by Presidents Johnson and Nixon in the earlier war. Consider what Lyndon Johnson told Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy in a taped phone conversation on Feb. 1, 1966. Although he publicly defended the war, Johnson frankly admitted to the Minnesota senator that going into Vietnam was a mistake. The following is a transcript of that conversation:
"Well, I know we oughtn't to be there, but I can't get out. I just can't be the architect of surrender. (pause) I'm willing to do damn near everything. If I told you what I was willing to do, I wouldn't have any program. Dirksen [Senate majority leader Everett Dirksen, Republican from Illinois] wouldn't give me a dollar to operate the war. I just can't operate in a glass bowl with all these things. But I'm willing to do nearly anything a human can do, if I can do it with any honor at all."
[Readers interested in hearing or reading transcripts of this and other presidential tapes are referred to http://www.whitehousetapes.org/]
Up until the day of that conversation, only a comparatively small number of battle deaths had occurred in Vietnam--3,078 to be exact. With the stroke of a presidential pen, Johnson could have kept our losses at that low figure. But because he lacked political courage and feared being charged with being soft on Communism if he withdrew, Johnson continued to ship American troops into the meat grinder that was Vietnam.
By the time the last troops were withdrawn in 1973 in accordance with the Paris peace agreements, a staggering 44,291 battle deaths were added, 28,975 of them on Johnson's watch and 15,316 on Nixon's. The total battle deaths in Vietnam eventually reached 47,369. [These numbers are taken from the OASD's "Southeast Asia Statistical Summary" and do not include losses due to disease, accident, heart attack, criminal activity, barroom brawls or suicide.]
The Vietnam War is popularly perceived as a stinging defeat for the United States military at the hands of the North Vietnamese Army. In reality, it was more like a self-inflicted wound. The last American troops departed in 1973. In retrospect, the U.S. Army actually gave a good account of itself and won every battle it engaged in, even though it was severely hampered by restrictive policies instituted by Defense Secretary McNamara and President Johnson. These two, with no military experience, prevented American troops from pursuing North Vietnamese units into North Vietnam. The majority of Americans killed in action died in South Vietnam's four northern provinces.
Nevertheless, the massive American casualties in Vietnam were the result of both the Johnson and Nixon administrations' foolish persistence in error. An apt quotation from The March of Folly, by Pulitzer prize-winning historian Barbara W. Tuchman, says: "Politicians and political appointees continued down the wrong road, as if in thrall to some magic power which directs their steps. To recognize error, to cut losses, to alter course is the most repugnant option in government."
The lingering question remains: "Have we not made the same mistake in Iraq?"
"It's déja vu all over again."
This delightful expression from baseball player and inadvertent homespun philosopher Yogi Berra aptly sums up America's national habit of locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen. Another bad habit is our tendency to concentrate on the messenger and overlook the message. These habits characterize our reaction to terrorism.
In March of 2004, ten bombs concealed in innocent-looking parcels and backpacks exploded on commuter trains arriving at Madrid's railway station, leaving 191 dead and 1,800 injured. The perpetrators were quickly identified and brought to justice. Sixteen months later, the day after London was named host to the 2012 Olympic Games, four bombs exploded in central London, bringing that city's transportation system to a standstill. Fifty-two were killed and 700 injured. Although homemade, the three bombs that struck London's Underground showed a remarkable level of coordination, exploding within seconds of each other. A fourth bomb exploded belatedly on the upper level of a double-decker bus, perhaps accidentally by a rattled bomber.
Having experienced Hitler's firebombing and rocket blitz during World War II and 30 years of intermittent bombing by the Irish Republican Army, Londoners stoically took this latest onslaught in stride. Taking a cue from our reference to the 2001 attacks as 9/11, the London incidents became 7/7. We now know that the London attacks had nothing to do with the Olympic Games and were made by locally home-grown al-Quaida wannabees. Significantly, they occurred on the opening day of the G8 Summit in Scotland. London was targeted for the same reason Spain was hit: because of its participation in the coalition--Britain contributed the second largest contingent to the invasion and occupation of Iraq--and to discourage continued participation in the coalition.
Here in the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security raised the threat level for the mass transit sector of the transportation system from code yellow (elevated) to orange (high). Patrols and surveillance were increased on all forms of transportation. While our attention was diverted to trains and buses, independent experts warned that terrorist plotters could strike some unexpected new target--for example, a lightly protected chemical plant near an urban area.
We should never forget that the basic purpose of these acts of terrorism is to disrupt the way we lead our lives, to turn our open society into a closed, intimidated society and to turn one group against another. But isn't it time for us to pay attention to the message fanatical terrorists are trying to deliver? To do this, we must see ourselves as the rest of the world sees us, particularly the Third World.
The President has declared war on terror, but have we ever formulated clear-cut objectives for this war? Foolish taunts like "Bring 'em on" don't help. And the attacks in London underscore how empty is the President's statement, "We're taking the fight to the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home." Simply stated, there are no front lines in this war, not in Iraq nor elsewhere; the front line is everywhere. From Bali to Casablanca, from Buenos Aires to Istanbul, all of which have been terrorist targets, we're all in it together, by golly--and we have been since long before 9/11.
Terror's Long History
The evil of terrorism has been abroad in the world for centuries, and in the service of many causes. To help put terrorism in proper perspective, it may be useful to examine it through a historian's eyes.
In 1776, the British meted out harsh punishment to "terrorist" American colonists who fought frontier-style and took potshots at Redcoats from behind stone walls and trees. Two centuries later, the South African government labeled Nelson Mandela a terrorist for opposing apartheid and imprisoned him for 30 years.
Terrorism has long been the weapon of choice in the Middle East, where it has not been limited to Muslims. For example, on July 22, 1946, working to set up an independent state, members of the Jewish underground military organization Irgun Zvai Leumi exploded a bomb in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The hotel was then the headquarters of the secretariat administering the British mandated territory of Palestine and of the British Army.
The death toll was 91, mostly civilians, including 17 Jews; 45 persons were injured. The bombing was condemned as "cowardly" in the British Houses of Parliament, but the British did not retaliate. The perpetrators, David Ben Gurion, who had ordered the bombing but later rescinded his order, and Menachem Begin, who carried it out anyway, were never brought to justice. In fact, both later became prime ministers of Israel. If anything, the bombing hastened the British decision to give up the mandate.
America and Terrorism
For many years, America has been a toothless tiger, peculiarly tolerant of terrorist attacks on its citizens and regarding them almost as annoyances. Repeated hijackings of American commercial aircraft in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in few changes in routines or baggage examination. There has been more than enough blame to go around among a succession of presidencies for their responses to terrorist attacks. Consider this sampling of incidents:
Khartoum, Sudan, March 1, 1973. Eight Palestinian gunmen take five hostages at a party at the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. Two are Americans, ambassador Cleo Noel and George Curtis Moore, chargé d'affaires. The Black September faction claims responsibility for the kidnapping and demands the release of Palestinians jailed everywhere, including Sirhan Bisrah Sirhan, who had assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles in 1968.
The customary practice of the State Department then was to negotiate the release of Americans being held by terrorists. When a reporter asks President Nixon to comment on the demand for the release of Kennedy's assassin, he explodes, "We will do everything to get them released--but we will not pay blackmail!" President Nixon's "no concessions" policy continues to this day.
The Nixon statement seals the fate of Noel and Moore. Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization sends a message to the terrorists in the embassy containing the code words Nahr al-Bard ("Cold River") ordering the death of the Western hostages. Nahr al-Bard was a terrorist training facility in Lebanon that had been attacked by Israeli troops 11 days earlier. With a third diplomat, Guy Eid, chargé d'affaires of the Belgian embassy, they are hustled to the Saudi embassy basement and machine-gunned. The perpetrators are detained briefly, but are never punished for the crime.
Before the kidnapping, an American listening post on Cyprus had intercepted a message indicating that terrorist action of some sort was about to happen in Khartoum and notified the State Department in Washington. Instead of immediately radioing a warning to the American embassy in Khartoum, the message was handled routinely by a State Department functionary. After the diplomats are killed, Nixon, up to his elbows in the uproar over the Watergate break-in, orders copies of all messages about the incident to be destroyed.
Beirut, Lebanon, Oct. 23, 1983. A suicide bomber drives a truckload of dynamite into the barracks of U.S. Marines established at the Beirut Airport, killing 241. The troops were sent by Ronald Reagan to stabilize the country. Retaliation against Syria with Tomahawk cruise missiles is considered. Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's secretary of defense, vetoes the idea out of fear that a misfired missile might be retrieved by Syria and passed to the Soviet Union, where the secret of its new technology could be revealed by reverse-engineering. President Reagan's response is to withdraw our troops.
Beirut, Lebanon, June 14, 1985. Two Hezbollah hijackers seize TWA Flight 847 between Athens and Rome. Demanding the release of 766 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, they divert the plane to Beirut. [TWA is then the major American overseas carrier; this is the fourth TWA flight hijacked by terrorists in 16 years. Previous TWA hijackings have taken place in 1969, 1970 and 1976.] The terrorists hope to find many Israelis on board. There are none, so they turn their attention to Americans with what they believe are "Jewish-sounding" names or with military ID. After murdering a U.S. young sailor named Robert Stethem, they dump his body from the plane onto the tarmac. Seventeen women and two children are released. The pilot is forced to fly to Algiers, where additional women and children are released. The plane again returns to Beirut. Here, after additional negotiations involving Syria and Iran, the remaining passengers are set free. The Syrian and Lebanese governments arrest and later release the hijackers. Although an American serviceman had been murdered, President Reagan does little more than impose sanctions on Lebanese air carriers to show his displeasure.
Mogadishu, Somalia, Dec. 8, 1992. Near the end of his term as President, George H.W.Bush sends U.S. troops into Somalia in support of U.N. humanitarian activities, promising to withdraw them by inauguration day, January 20th. Bill Clinton is sworn in and discovers that 25,000 U.S. troops are still in Somalia. The misadventure ends with the Mogadishu disaster on October 3, 1993, in which 18 American soldiers are killed and mutilated, and 84 are wounded. President Clinton's response is to withdraw our troops, and the last soldiers leave Somalia in March of 1994. The perpetrators are never caught or prosecuted.
New York, Feb. 26, 1993. A rented van containing 1,300 pounds of homemade explosives was driven into the underground garage of the World Trade Center. The intention was to cause one of the city's two tallest towers to topple into its adjoining twin. Although it did considerable damage underground, the targeted tower did not topple into the other. The perpetrators were brought to justice--but no attention was paid to their message. Ramzi Yousef, the bomb's mastermind was captured later in Pakistan and returned to the United States. He and two accomplices were convicted and sentenced to life without parole.
Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Aug. 7, 1998. The Clinton administration's ineffectual response to al-Quaida's almost simultaneous bomb attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania is to launch 79 cruise missiles at targets in Sudan and Afghanistan in the hope of killing bin Laden. Each missile costs about a million dollars.
Aden, Yemen, Oct. 12, 2000. As the American destroyer USS Cole is refueling in the inner harbor, two men in an inflatable Zodiac boat loaded with C-4 explosives pull alongside. The explosion that follows blows a huge hole in the side of the ship and kills 17 sailors in the main and auxiliary engine rooms and the crew's mess.
By the time it is established that bin Laden was behind this attack, hopes are running high for an agreement between new Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat. President Clinton is reluctant to launch more attacks on another Islamic country and does nothing.
New York and Washington, September 11, 2001. Four commercial airliners are hijacked in flight and steered toward emblematic buildings: the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the seat of financial power, and the Pentagon in Washington, seat of military power. On the fourth plane, intended to strike either the U.S. Capitol or the White House, seats of government power, passengers heroically battle the hijackers. The plane crashes in Pennsylvania, far short of its intended target.
A wave of revulsion sweeps the country, which clamors for the capture and punishment of the perpetrators. Screening techniques that should always have been in place are instituted at airports to guarantee that this method of massive destruction would never again be attempted. President Bush declares that the country is now engaged in a "war on terror."
Shortly after the attacks of 9/11, Daniel Pipes, a conservative commentator on the Middle East and usually a supporter of the President, points out in the Jerusalem Post that terror is a tactic, not an enemy. Pipes points out that by insisting its quarrel is with terror and not with radical Islam, the U.S. is obscuring the political roots of the confrontation.
Our primary adversary should always have been Osama bin Laden. Yet he was allowed to escape from our clutches, and now seems to thrive and issue pronouncements via taped messages from the safety of the tribal area of northwest Pakistan.
Ironically, bin Laden is a creation of the United States, although the U.S. government, probably out of embarrassment, has been singularly quiet about its participation in the recruitment and arming of fighters who forced the Russians in 1989 to abandon their occupation of Afghanistan. After Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the CIA, operating at arm's length, organized an Afghan jihad, or holy war, against the godless Russians, with the cooperation of the Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan. The CIA provided weapons and recruited candidates from various Muslim countries and facilitated their travel to Pakistan for training.
Arab countries were the main source of fighters, who were jocularly called "Afghan Arabs." Non-Afghan recruits came from Algeria, Indonesia, Kosovo, Chechnya and Sudan. The Pakistani embassy in Algiers issued 2,800 visas to Algerian volunteers in the 1980s. Fighters from all countries trained at Peshawar in Pakistan and received the comparatively high salary of $1,500 a month.
The CIA had hoped to turn up a Saudi prince to lead this jihad but could not find one. It settled for Osama bin Laden, recruited in 1980--with CIA approval--by the head of Saudi intelligence. Osama bin Laden shuttled frequently between Saudi Arabia and Peshawar in Pakistan with Saudi donations for the jihad. By 1986, bin Laden, whose family had made millions in construction, was the major contractor on a large CIA-funded project, the Khost tunnel complex deep in the mountains near the border with Pakistan.
Not many years later, with the Russians gone, bin Laden turned on his erstwhile American employers. In Operation Anaconda, U.S. planes would bomb this same tunnel complex. Although ample Special Forces were available, with peculiar timidity and to spare American casualties U.S., commanders choose to use Northern Alliance fighters of doubtful allegiance to root out Taliban die-hards in 2002.
Michael Scheuer, author of two books on Osama bin Laden under the pen name "Anonymous," spent many of his years of service as a CIA analyst studying bin Laden. Scheuer's advice in his 2004 book Imperial Hubris was not to see bin Laden as a criminal terrorist or as a lunatic, but rather as a talented, clever and brilliant military and political genius, with the attributes of a successful CEO. Scheuer warned that bin Laden has been precise in telling us the reasons he is waging war on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, as George W. Bush insists. They have everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world. Scheuer confidently predicted another massive bin Laden attack on the United States. In bin Laden's words, "just as you lay waste to our nation, so shall we lay waste to yours."
Osama bin Laden's long-term strategy is one developed by Mahatma Gandhi and refined by radical Chicago labor and civil rights organizer Saul Alinsky. It is embodied in the phrase, "The action is the reaction." In his 1971 book Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote, "The real action is in the enemy's reaction. The enemy, properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength. Tactics, like life, require that you move with the action."
The bin Laden action was the bombing of American symbols: the twin WTC towers (Wall Street/wealth), the Pentagon (the military), and (probably) the White House or the Capitol Building (the government). The American reaction exceeded his wildest dreams. We attacked bin Laden's enemy, the hated secularist Saddam, and laid waste to Iraq. Now we are engaged in rebuilding it. In bin Laden's words, "The policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy various corporations--whether in the field of arms or reconstruction--has helped us to achieve our results." What is remarkable about bin Laden as an adversary is that he has clearly spelled out his intentions and objectives in his many taped messages to the West.
For an investment of about a half million dollars, bin Laden succeeded in goading us into attacking a Muslim country and committing us to spending billions of dollars. He has acknowledged that his policy is to bleed America to the point of bankruptcy--and we are foolishly cooperating with him in this. He knows that the soft underbelly of the West is oil, and oil will never get cheaper. Yet we continue to do nothing about reducing our dependence on hydrocarbon fuels.
Despite a record-shattering reward of $50 million offered for his capture, Osama bin Laden still remains at large, a potent threat to the United States and the West. Are most intelligence professionals worried about the possibility of another major incident masterminded by this formidable adversary? Yes, they are very worried--and you should be too.
The Second Iraq War
Ignoring the findings of U.N.inspectors and wanting to believe that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, in 2003 the Bush administration attacks Iraq. Unlike the Gulf War of ten years before, other than Britain few countries send sizable contingents to participate.
Opponents of the war point out that if the undeclared war on Iraq was intended to be payback for participation in the 9/11 attacks, we were attacking the wrong enemy. A more logical opponent would have been Saudi Arabia, 15 of whose citizens made up the majority of the 19 plane hijackers. Although a huge reward is posted for the capture of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, this extremely tall and conspicuous Arab who travels with dialysis equipment disappears from our radar.
On the eve of the 1994 Republican convention in New York, George W. Bush, answering a question from Matt Lauer on NBC's Today show, admits that the war on terror cannot be won. Realizing that such a remark smacks of defeatism, an administration spokesman quickly explains that the President was merely pointing out the unconventional nature of the conflict. George W. Bush hastily backpedals at the American Legion convention in Nashville a day later. Nevertheless, the toothpaste is out of the tube and cannot be put back.
Today, a tidal wave of uneasiness is sweeping the country fed by revelations that the Iraq war was launched without a postwar plan and concerns over the lamentable lack of a timetable for withdrawal of our forces from that unhappy country.
The administration is now living in fear that the public will attach the word "quagmire" to the word Iraq and completely abandon support for the ongoing war, just as they once appended it to the word Vietnam with disastrous political and military consequences.
Although there are obvious differences between the struggles (jungle vs. desert) and political considerations and military technology have changed significantly, there are many uncomfortable parallels in the two wars.
Vietnam vs. Iraq
Four decades ago, the Kennedy administration saw Vietnam as an avenue of Chinese expansionism, although it was actually an obstacle to it. They closed their eyes to what any historian specializing in the Far East could have told them. Namely, that the Vietnamese have always feared and distrusted their giant neighbor to the north, convictions born of a thousand years of hated Chinese occupation.
Secular Iraq, debilitated by ten years of sanctions and daily reconnaissance flights, posed no real threat to America's security. Nevertheless, using flimsy evidence we convinced ourselves of the presence of weapons of mass destruction and launched a "pre-emptive" attack.
Lyndon Johnson surrounded himself with "the best and the brightest": Robert McNamara, inherited from assassinated John F. Kennedy as Secretary of Defense, with his number-crunching "whiz kids," and McGeorge Bundy, first in his class at Yale, as National Security Advisor. Preferring the advice of these civilian experts, Johnson ignored counsel from his Joint Chiefs of Staff even going so far as to exclude them from his Tuesday luncheon strategy meetings with advisors.
Similarly, George W. Bush has given Donald Rumsfeld, a former congressman wise in the ways of Washington and industry executive, a free hand in the redesign of the military. Although the Middle East loomed as the prime problem, the inexperienced president chose as his National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, an academic expert on Russia with no knowledge of the Middle East.
Vietnam was a costly undeclared war with hazy objectives, blessed by a compliant Congress, and characterized by the glaring disparity between the troops' bloody sacrifices and indifference of the home front. The Iraq war now resembles that earlier war, with a similar disconnect between battlefield and home front. American unit commanders in Iraq now report insurgents' "body counts," which were often falsified in Vietnam to give politicians at home the impression of progress.
One reason for the present administration's growing problem in keeping the public's attention focused on the war on terror is its unwillingness to level with the public and admit mistakes, a flawed stance matched by Presidents Johnson and Nixon in the earlier war. Consider what Lyndon Johnson told Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy in a taped phone conversation on Feb. 1, 1966. Although he publicly defended the war, Johnson frankly admitted to the Minnesota senator that going into Vietnam was a mistake. The following is a transcript of that conversation:
"Well, I know we oughtn't to be there, but I can't get out. I just can't be the architect of surrender. (pause) I'm willing to do damn near everything. If I told you what I was willing to do, I wouldn't have any program. Dirksen [Senate majority leader Everett Dirksen, Republican from Illinois] wouldn't give me a dollar to operate the war. I just can't operate in a glass bowl with all these things. But I'm willing to do nearly anything a human can do, if I can do it with any honor at all."
[Readers interested in hearing or reading transcripts of this and other presidential tapes are referred to http://www.whitehousetapes.org/]
Up until the day of that conversation, only a comparatively small number of battle deaths had occurred in Vietnam--3,078 to be exact. With the stroke of a presidential pen, Johnson could have kept our losses at that low figure. But because he lacked political courage and feared being charged with being soft on Communism if he withdrew, Johnson continued to ship American troops into the meat grinder that was Vietnam.
By the time the last troops were withdrawn in 1973 in accordance with the Paris peace agreements, a staggering 44,291 battle deaths were added, 28,975 of them on Johnson's watch and 15,316 on Nixon's. The total battle deaths in Vietnam eventually reached 47,369. [These numbers are taken from the OASD's "Southeast Asia Statistical Summary" and do not include losses due to disease, accident, heart attack, criminal activity, barroom brawls or suicide.]
The Vietnam War is popularly perceived as a stinging defeat for the United States military at the hands of the North Vietnamese Army. In reality, it was more like a self-inflicted wound. The last American troops departed in 1973. In retrospect, the U.S. Army actually gave a good account of itself and won every battle it engaged in, even though it was severely hampered by restrictive policies instituted by Defense Secretary McNamara and President Johnson. These two, with no military experience, prevented American troops from pursuing North Vietnamese units into North Vietnam. The majority of Americans killed in action died in South Vietnam's four northern provinces.
Nevertheless, the massive American casualties in Vietnam were the result of both the Johnson and Nixon administrations' foolish persistence in error. An apt quotation from The March of Folly, by Pulitzer prize-winning historian Barbara W. Tuchman, says: "Politicians and political appointees continued down the wrong road, as if in thrall to some magic power which directs their steps. To recognize error, to cut losses, to alter course is the most repugnant option in government."
The lingering question remains: "Have we not made the same mistake in Iraq?"
