Since first discovering Vox Day's blog a couple of years ago, another blog I have come to read from time to time has been that of science fiction author Charles Stross. What I really enjoy about Stross' blog, though, is that one of my favorite authors, S.M. Stirling, occasionally engages in comments section discussions.
For those who are unfamiliar with him, S.M. Stirling is a science fiction author who rocketed to literary prominence during the late 1980s and early 1990s with a series of books centered on a fictional country called the Domination of the Draka. In Stirling's alternate historical universe, the Netherlands entered the American Revolutionary War on the side of the rebellious colonies, resulting in their Cape Colony (in what is now South Africa) being seized decades earlier than it was in our timeline and subsequently becoming a haven within the British Empire for Revolutionary War loyalists and other American and European outcasts. This new British colony, originally named the Crown Colony of Drakia (after Sir Francis Drake) develops into a ruthless, hierarchical, slave-holding empire called the Dominion of Drakia over the course of the 1800s, coming to dominate the entire African continent and - after World War I - much of western Asia. Once World War I is concluded, the Dominion formally declares full independence from Britain, renaming itself the Domination of the Draka. As envisioned by Stirling, the Domination of the Draka is an anti-America - a country built not on concepts of individual liberty and political equality, but on ideological pillars of social control and domination by the physically and mentally fittest.
Stirling's original Draka novels - Marching through Georgia, Under the Yoke, and The Stone Dogs - take place against the background of a global struggle that develops between the United States of America and the Domination of the Draka - from an uneasy alliance in World War II (called the Eurasian War in the novels) through a Cold War that lasts through the 1990s. I was mesmerized by Stirling's Draka novels when I first read them in the late 1990s and have since been a regular reader of his subsequent work.
Stirling's political views are not easily definable, but since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 he has been a supporter of our country's policies concerning the Global War on Terror and Iraq - which these days is enough to make someone a conservative or "neocon" in many social circles.
I bring this up because on Tuesday evening I was reading the comments to this entry by Charles Stross, wherein he wonders how the $523 billion spent on Iraq to date could otherwise have been used (Stross believing that our enterprise in Iraq has been a "boondoggle"). Looking at the comments, I came across this one by Stirling:
I follow the Iraq situation closely, and have many regular correspondents there (and in Afghanistan), including both officers and enlisted men. (My work's popular in the military.)
As for the state of the war, violent incidents are now at a 4-year low, after a modest spike in April due to the Basra and Sadr City operations; those were mostly Iraqi Army, with our air power, planning and special-ops backup, but with some US ground troop participation.
The Iraqis have done surprisingly well, with some of the shambolic Keystone Kops stuff you'd expect, but less than I anticipated.
The American forces are concentrating on getting Mosul and the surrounding area tied down.
The Iraqi government is taking over more of the routine security functions at an accelerating rate, and the theatre commanders anticipate a continued draw-down in the number of combat brigades. Some forces have already been shifted to Afghanistan.
Anbar Province has been handed over to the Iraqis and has remained relatively quiet, for instance, which frankly rather surprised me.
Tho' of course some American troops will remain in Iraq, along with advisory/training, special-ops, intelligence personnel, and so forth, on a long-term basis.
The current Pentagon plan is to increase the standing force by about 4 brigades or a little more. That indicates likely thinking as to the permanent garrisons needed there and in Afghanistan, while freeing our strategic reserve for other contingencies.
That's also the increase Obama and Clinton currently back; McCain wants to increase the total Army and Marine ground strength by another 150,000 troops on top of that, which indicates he's got rather more ambitious plans. 150,000 added to the current expansion plan would put the ground combat elements back to the 1992 level, and increase the available brigades by about 1/3.
(We haven't withdrawn from South Korea yet, either. Or from Germany or Japan, for that matter.)
The Sunni insurgency is pretty well over; most of the (surviving) former insurgents are now on our payroll. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been pushed back into a last redoubt around Mosul and is being hammered there; their current leader was killed last month, for example.
American troops are walking through the streets of Ramadi and Fallujah handing out candies to the kiddies and chatting with shopkeepers, which is quite surprising to the guys who were there when they were the worst hellholes in Iraq.
When al Qaeda tries to infiltrate snipers or bombers, the locals grass them up or kill them themselves, having come to appreciate the merits of the quiet life, and not wanting to end up in refugee camps in Syria the way a lot of their relatives did.
Word got around how the Syrians treated their Sunni Arab brethren... 8-).
Both cities also now have large areas of open, empty parking-lot-like space, about 1/4 and 1/3 of the urban areas, respectively.
As one American commander remarked when asked about that, "we took the gloves off".
This got the locals' attention and convinced them we were serious and to be taken seriously; then more benign methods could be used, such as encouraging the "Anbar Awakening", which was generously lubricated with greenbacks and patronage.
"You can have five silver dollars or five lead bullets," as the old Mexican adage runs.
It helped the other side were such lunatics and made ordinary life unbearable, of course, and that the Sunni population realized that the alternative to peace was to be ethnically cleansed into Syria and Jordan, which actually happened on a fairly large scale.
But "respect" (in the Mafia sense of the term) was an essential precondition for getting people to turn against the bad guys.
The British in Basra tried to go straight to the nicey-nice part and it didn't work so well. It's a matter of cross-cultural communications, which are often difficult. Iraqis are not the Northern Irish, and require a different 'style'.
However, "bread or the club", to quote another adage of Porfirio Diaz, is evidently a universal concept easily understood nearly anywhere. Provided the club is big and used with vigor.
The Iraqi government's recent push against the dissident Shia militias has been more successful than expected, and more rapidly so; Basra has been pacified to a surprising degree, though it was in a deplorable state.
I thought it would take rather longer and be messier to get to the present degree of progress, but it turns out few actually liked nutcases killing people for playing music or forbidding air conditioning because it isn't mentioned in the Koran, not to mention the severed-genitals-in-the-mouth mass graves. There's nothing like a dose of Islamist control to make people repent of it.
The overall political situation is (by Iraqi/Middle Eastern standards) also encouraging, and the upcoming provincial elections will probably go off well. Fingers crossed -- unanticipated events always possible, particularly in that part of the world.
Since Iraq _is_ in the Middle East, and _is_ inhabited by Arabs and Kurds, it will remain corrupt and violent. But no more than is to be expected. Iraq is _not_ the Republic of Blondistan, a mythical country located between Sweden and Denmark, which a lot of the press uses as their basis of comparison. Life in Blondistan is very nice, but immigration control is strict.
Guerrilla wars are slow and they don't end with a surrender ceremony -- the whole point of the tactic is to avoid decisive battle and try to wait other side out, which is why it's rightly forbidden by the traditional laws of war.
A typical counterinsurgency war lasts at least 6 years and often 12 or more.
When you win a counterinsurgency campain, as is apparently happening in this case, things don't come to an end; they just sort of gradually dribble to a messy, irregular, ambiguous conclusion, with occasional minor relapses.
For example, the Malayan Emergency lasted (officially) from about 1948 to 1960, but there were occasional guerrilla attacks right through into the 1970's and the communists didn't actually formally sign a peace agreement until 1989, about 39 years after the beginning. The Philippine Insurrection started in 1898 and Samar remained troublesome into the 1920's -- or today, counting the current troubles with the Moros.
I expect there will be the odd bombing in Iraq into the 2040's, unless we've all been uploaded to the Matrix in the Singularity before then, or eaten by nanobots.
Given that Iraq has about 20% of the world's total oil reserves, in the long run adding it to our hegemony/empire/whatever will probably pay handsomely.
As a bonus, it's good for the Iraqis, too, which is usually the case -- compare and contrast North and South Korea, for example, or Vietnam and Thailand, or Cuba and Puerto Rico.
We act as guarantors against their neighbors, thus freeing them from the necessity of maintaing large conventional armies, and our presence keeps the more Grand Guginol tendencies of their internal politics under control.
Some people seem to find the prospect of an American success in Iraq unpleasant -- despite the lurid Darfuresque horrors which would undoubtedly result from our failure. It's a bizzare attitude.
S.M.@222: Some people seem to find the prospect of an American success in Iraq unpleasant -- despite the lurid Darfuresque horrors which would undoubtedly result from our failure. It's a bizzare attitude.
You know what's bizzare? Back in the Reagan administration, NASA bureaucrats kept pushing the launch window for the shuttle for PR purposes, launching when the engineers kept saying "No launch". You know what happened? The bureaucrats launched a bunch of times, they got a successful launch, and they convinced themselves that they had empiracally proven that the launch envelope was wider than the engineers thought it was.
The people who made the decision to launch, against the advice of the people who understood the system, congratulated themselves on their wise leadership and convinced themselves they had more insight into how the system worked than the designers did.
Until the Challenger launch, that is. Some asshole pushed for a launch when all the engineers were saying "no". And that asshole pushed for launch because the president was going to make a great patriotic speech that day about teachers in space, and that asshole didn't want to disappoint his fearless leader.
Too bad it wasn't the asshole who paid the price.
This is just to point out that every thing you said in #222 is complete garbage as far as actually understanding what the design parameters of the system. If, and that's still a big if, IF we actually manage to get out of Iraq without it splitting into three countries and a full out civil war (fuller than the current civil war that is), then we did so by luck. Three trillion dollars of money, a lot of American troops killed, and a shit load of luck.
Why luck?
Because everyone who knew anything about what it would take to invade and occupy Iraq before the invasion was saying it would take years and cost thousands of lives and would still have a huge chance of failure.
I don't wish for our troops in Iraq to fail, you asshole, I don't find the prospect of an American victory to be unpleasant, you prick, what I find offensive is that you imply I wish for American defeat in the same breath you congratulate yourself on your foresight and wisdom in pulling off a successful launch, as if it were part of the original design, as if the launch were over, had succeeded, and we were safely in orbit.
If we win, if we achieve a stable Iraq and can withdraw without massive additional bloodshed, and I hope to hell we do, then we will only do that because some idiot lied us into a war that no sane man would have taken on, lied to us that the cost would be six weeks, lied to us that Iraq had WMD's, lied to us by insinuating over and over again connections between Iraq and 9/11, the experts were predicting up to 15 years of occupation, and we just got absolutely fucking lucky. And you sit there with complete blinders on and give a myopic report:
Launch may succeed. Doubters may find it unpleasant.
Kiss my ass, you arrogant cuss. I don't want Americans to die. I don't wish Americans be defeated. But I sure as fuck ain't gonna let you list off a bunch of short-sighted statistics about the possibility of success as if that was part of the design.
This wasn't the war the administration lied us into. This wasn't the enemy the administration propagandized us against. And this sure as hell isn't a simple accounting of whetehr or not we can achieve a stable Iraq, but whether the cost, the real cost inherent in the system of war, invasion, and occupation was worth it.
We've been in Iraq longer than we fought the Germans in WW2 and we still haven't gotten a victory. The hawks told us over and over again that we'd be in and out in six weeks, six months tops.
Whether we achive victory or not, the launch to war was made by some bureaucratic assholes who ignored the system experts and launched against every sane person's advice. We could very easily have lost this in the first year due to circumstances beyond our control. Just like the Challenger blew up because the weather just happened to be cold enough that morning to fuck the o-rings. That wasn't something the bureaucrat knew about. He just pulled the trigger and crossed his fingers, having convinced himself that the previous launches somehow had enlarged the envelop beyond what the experts were telling him.
About the last thing we need is yet another administration who thinks they know more about war than what history has shown us, what the experts have predicted. Or some asshole who thinks victory in Iraq changes the parameters for another launch.
By focusing solely on the immediate direction the Iraq war is heading towards victory, you've managed to not only focus only on the potential benefit of teh war (possible victory), not only ignore the possibility for losing the war, not only ignore the question of cost regarding the war (3T$, thousands of dead Americans, tens of thousands permanently wounded americans, and about a hundred thousand dead iraqi civilians), not only ignore the fact that this war was sold to us by a bunch of morons who lied to us at every step about the cost, about the threat, but most importantly, act as if victory after six years was the original bill of goods, and by default reinforce the notion of that bureacrat who thinks a successful launch against all odds actually proves it was a good decision, proves it was good leadership.
Good leaders don't close their eyes, ignore reality, ignore the facts, and play dice with other people's lives based on wishful thinking and their own propaganda.
This is the current realistic cost: 3T$, thousands dead, tens of thousands wounded, six year quagmire.
The potential cost could still be another 6 to 12 years before we get full stabilization, another 3 trillion dollars, several thousand more dead americans, another hundred thousnad dead Iraqi civilians.
You don't know.
You present the possibility of a victory within the next six months as if it were part of the original design, as if it were part of the original timeline, as if everything were going according to schedule from the beginning.
it isn't.
And then you sum up with this complete and utter bullshit that "some" (conveniently unnamed) might find the prospect of American victory to be unpleasant.
As if this discussion was saying "Hey, who wants victory? Who wants us to get our asses kicked? Raise your hands."
Bullshit.
The question is was the cost worth it. The sort of question the voting public should ask themselves before sending troops into the meatgrinder.
The question is what sort of war were we promised by our government, and what sort of war did they deliver? The question is does launching a war against the advice of experts mean you've changed the parameters of war? Or did an idiot from Texas send us into an insane war, and by blood, sweat, tears, and a lot of luck, we just might beat the odds and get victory.
If we get victory in anotehr six months, then we got lucky. Bush senior didn't invade Iraq the first time around becaue his experts predicted an occupation that might last a decade or more. And all you can do is put the blinders on and report the most short-sighted piece of information you can come up with: Victory might be possible in six months, and present it as if that were the original plan all along.
As if questioning the possibility of victory in six months is to wish for American defeat, rather than to understand that the system has its own launch parameters and wishing for a successful launch isn't the only requirement for success.
I've had it with you six-months-and-we'll-turn-this-around yahoos who act as if six months is by design. It isn't. The design is a decade or two of occupation. If we get out in six years, we just got lucky. There was ice on the shuttle, but for some reason the o rings held that day.
So, now the shuttle is in mid takeoff, and there are icicles hanging off the tank, and it could very well blow up, and all you can do is tell me the positives and tell me that my questions mean I find the possibility of success "unpleasant"? You're telling me we haven't blown up yet, and we're getting close to orbit, so we should focus on the positives or something?
This thing could still very well blow up. I don't need your Mary Poppins status report to tell me the best possible outcome. I need to know if the cost is worth it right now, if we should abort the mission right now, because if the reality is a hundred years of occupation, I'm not sure Americans should be dying over there for this. If the reality is a decade or more of occupation like we've had so far, then I need to know that, not have some yes-man tell me everything's looking good, sir. Bush and his yes-men are exactly why we're in this boondoggle in the first place.
And any asshole who takes a thread that discusses the true cost of the war and reframes it into some bullshit about "finding success unpleasant", implying that to ask hard questions is to wish for American defeat, that sort of asshole isn't the sort of person I can trust to answer hard questions. Mary Poppins will want to sugar coat everything and challenge the loyalty of anyone who asks questions. No thanks.
If I'm going to look at the cost and benefit of some gamble and someone only wants to tell me the benefit and tell me that looking at the cost is wishing for defeat, that sort of moron isn't the sort of person I would trust to give me honest answers.
