Trump Trainwreck - Ongoing diary of betrayal and evil

[Warren Dew]

(12-11-2016, 02:41 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(12-10-2016, 11:54 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(12-10-2016, 07:51 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(12-09-2016, 02:21 PM)Cynic Hero Wrote: Playwrite: Most Xers and Millies opposed the Iraq war (and Afghanistan after Bin Laden was killed) because boomers refused to allow the troops to fight with the gloves OFF.

I can't speak for all Boomers, just for this one, but when Bush 43's "surge" occurred as the 2008 election cycle was gearing up, there was a shift in tactics that came with it.  The early battle against the insurgency focused on killing bad guys.  As in Vietnam, the Army kept score with a body count.  It was presumed that if we killed more people than we lost, we must be winning.

With the surge, came a shift in tactics from killing Iraqis to protecting Iraqis.  They built a lot of walls and tried to protect the people within the walls.  There was no small amount of racial cleansing.  If the different tribal and religious factions lived in separate neighborhoods separated by walls with various forces covering the perimeter, the civilian deaths at least became less.  The phrase 'hearts and minds' was thrown around.  The new thought was that if you killed people, they'd get mad and try to kill you back.  If you protected people, they might start treating you as a friend.  This approach was called counterinsurgency.  It didn't pacify Iraq, but it did significantly better than the initial 'increase the bodycount' approach.

Protecting people, trying to end the fighting, might be less gratifying to the young boots on the ground than killing people.  It might be more fun, if a hostile sniper starts shooting at US troops from a village, to call in an air strike on the village.  Entertaining the troops isn't the general's job, though.  If you want to entertain the troops, you call in the USO.  If you want to end an insurgency, you use counterinsurgency tactics.

But even with the new tactics, if you are fighting an insurgency, you really want a certain ratio of occupying troops to boots on the ground.  LBJ was told that the troop level he was intending to use in Vietnam would not be sufficient if the opposition went to insurgent warfare.  LBJ went in anyway, the enemy went insurgent, and the US didn't have the will to escalate.  The exact same thing happened in Iraq.  If you don't have the will and the funds for a lot of boots on the ground, the tactics don't matter a lot, you are going to get a quagmire.  After years of trying to make it work with inadequate force, and knowing full well that they were fielding an inadequate force, even Bush 43 recognized that it was time to start bringing the troops home.

Anyway, this Boomer at least favors counterinsurgency tactics when fighting insurgencies because expending ammunition with the goal of maximizing the bodycount just helps the insurgents recruit.

I was going to post most of the same thing - all except that protecting ordinary Iraqis was actually a goal from the beginning; it was just that the surge was needed to have enough troops to do it.  Iraq would ultimately have been a success had the US followed through on ensuring democratic traditions were established, rather than corrupted.

However, I disagree that "will" would have been sufficient to do the same in Vietnam.  Human nature is such that it's difficult to make people enthusiastic about fighting and sacrificing for the benefit of people who are on the other side of the world.  It's far easier to make them enthusiastic about fighting and sacrificing to fight against the evil of people on the other side of the world.  In that respect, Cynic Hero's view is much closer to what most people could feel emotionally, even if logically it's a mistake.

There was a significant change of tactics that came with the surge.  Whether the numbers was more important or the tactics seems to be tied in with values.  Conservatives seem to think it was a matter of will and brute force. 

Speak for yourself, please.  As an actual conservative, it looks from my side like it's the progressives who think it's a matter of will and brute force, and indeed, you're the one who wants to talk in those terms.  Conservatives understand a lot more of the nuances of different missions, the force levels needed to achieve them, and how they fit together into a geopolitical strategy.  Policing and pacification for the benefit of the locals is a very different mission from simply invading to remove an evil dictator and then leaving the locals to fend for themselves.

Quote:Progressives tend to think how one interacts with the people whose front yards are being turned into battlegrounds is important.  I wouldn't neglect either factor.  I doubt there will be agreement on such.

But we weren't going to do well in either Vietnam or Iraq with just numbers.  Whether it is money or political capitol, we just weren't willing or able to put enough boots on the ground to get critical mass given the local population levels.  From day one, the Democrats were telling the Bush 43 administration that they weren't putting in enough troops.  The Democrats were listening to the Pentagon's briefings.  Thus, the Democrats correctly predicted quagmire.  It took Bush 43 far too many years and lives before he finally accepted that fighting insurgency isn't easy and started pulling out, pulling the rug out of McCain's "stay the course" presidential run.  

Bush also had the "Read my lips, no new taxes" problem.  He wanted to fight wars but not pay for them.  This limited numbers available and will continue to limit numbers as long as Reagan unravelling era economics continues to dominate Congress.

At the same time, the surge did change the situation.  Before the surge, the "stay the course" vs "cut and run" debate was divisive and values locked, both sides convinced and not listening.  The surge started to work.  I went from a full 'quagmire' position -- saying that you can't get there from here -- to saying you can do nation building at gunpoint, but it is very expensive in gold, iron and blood.  It just isn't worth it.

I agree that it wasn't just numbers:  Johnson's approach, predicated as it was on racist assumptions about the pointlessness of helping "gooks" govern themselves, could never have worked.

However, your narrative about force levels doesn't match up with the numbers.  During the initial invasion, the desired invasion troop levels by the military - presumably the levels you characterize as what the Democrats wanted - were around 300,000.  This was just for the invasion and toppling of Saddam Hussein.  Rumsfeld eventually got the military to cut this back to 140,000 by embracing modern military techniques and weapons, rather than sticking to the WWII style operations and tactics used in Powell's 1991 invasion.

Then after the Bush administration realized that a western democracy wasn't going to magically grow from the ashes of war and there would have to be some nation building involved, the "surge" happened, and as you yourself pointed out, started to work.  However, the "surge" involved only a modest increase in force levels, an increases of 20,000 from 140,000 to 160,000, still barely more than half of what the old guard though would be required just for the initial invasion.  I you looked at the graph of US force levels without knowing that the "surge" had happened, you might not even be able to identify it:



(from the English language Wikipedia - don't ask me why they label the graph in German)

From a budgetary standpoint, this was virtually invisible; the same $200 billion a year that the invasion had cost was enough to sustain the surge.  The reason it wasn't "worth it" was not that it was any more expensive than the invasion; it was that, as I said, the public was much more enthusiastic about spending the money to topple an evil dictator than about continuing to spend the money to help the people the evil dictator has left behind, and they made that clear with their rejection of McCain and his "stay the course" strategy in 2008.

Then of course Obama also kept spending the money, moving the resources to Afghanistan and who knows where, but that's another story.

Quote:I do believe the Iraq war changed US values at a national scale.  The "stay the course" v. "cut and run" debate was to a great degree a reprise of the Vietnam War debates.  I see this debate as essentially settled.  It is now understood that fighting insurgency is a tough tough thing, that occupying territory requires lots of effort and lives, that it should be avoided if one doesn't have a clear path to victory and an exit strategy.

I'm concerned that Trump might not get it.  I worry that his call for more aggressive use of force wasn't just another of his empty campaign promises, that he will try to sell a 'short victorious war' that will be anything but.

Trump generally prefers no intervention at all.  If you're talking about his promises regarding the Islamic State, I'm hoping they're just hot air.  However, if there's anything he doesn't understand, it's not the point you are saying, but rather that exiting after victory is likely to result in losing any gains from the victory.  And that's a lesson that hasn't sunk in with the public at all.  They may think the Iraq War was a bad idea in retrospect, but faced with the same situation as we had in 2001, the AUMF would still be passed with barely a dissenting vote, and faced with the same situation as we had in 2003, tomorrow's equivalent of the Iraq invasion would likely be just as popular.  Military intervention plans always look better before they are executed.

Quote:I don't get the feeling that "Cynic Hero's view is much closer to what most people could feel emotionally, even if logically it's a mistake."  Then again, I live in a predominantly blue region.  It's a values thing.  (Yes, I know you are from Massachusetts as well.)  Most people I talk to would fight a war to win rather than to gratify emotions, and if they aren't fighting to win they would rather not fight at all.  While there is much to be prideful regarding Scotts-Irish heritage and values, their tendency to embrace violence isn't shared in the Whig Yankee tradition.  The country is very much split.

It's definitely not a blue/red thing.  The thing is, fighting "a war to win" is exactly gratifying emotions.  Logical reasons for fighting a war would be things like increasing US or world security, and those objectives are likely to require indefinite participation, rather than withdrawal after the war is "won" militarily.