Ever since the assassination of Bin Laden I have been pondering the war on terror. Some would say I was late to the game.  I was glad to see Bin Laden killed, but I stilled questioned the method. We invaded a sovereign nation without their permission and assassinated a target.  I am always troubled by the argument that the ends justify the means because once those means become institutionalized in precedent we can count on future objectives that we would be less sanguine about approving so readily without question.

The war on terror presented us with a dilemma. We had to fight an organized enemy without a nation status. Al Qaeda occupied numerous countries and used many methods that took advantages of safeguards we depend on.  We questioned whether the Geneva accords applied to them since they were not combatants in uniform, and we questioned whether our laws applied to them because they were not US citizens.  While the Patriot Acts justly raised concerns over our rights I have seen much more concern about it than any actual abuse.

Rumsfeld and Bush actually spent considerable effort using a number of legal heavies trying to define the problem and get guidance on how to proceed. But ultimately we must create a third class of adversaries.  Citizens and combatants are not sufficient.  You can imagine how difficult this debate will be.

The use of military in Libya is disturbing. The targeting of a citizen is disturbing, but may be justifiable if he is a real threat that avoids or refuses other ‘legal’ means .

While we have avoided assassination as a national policy it may be preferable to outright warfare where far more innocents are killed.  Our military has actively assassinated over 1800 Al Qaeda operatives.  The problem and irony with  our targeted killing approach is that wars never end. Traditional combat ended when one side was exhausted. That no longer happens.

As to Ron Paul,  while he may be technically correct on the constitutionality of the recent hits and the current state of combat, the constitution is not a suicide pact.  We are faced with a foe that requires solutions that must be addressed.  While I think that our solutions are subject to abuse  we would be worse off to pretend that the threat is not real and that our approach cannot be different than the efforts that lead us here.

I agree with W that we cannot wait  until the mushroom  cloud appears.  I commend Israel for taking out the reactor in Iraq in 1980, and the reactor under construction in Syria in 2007.  For Israel is was an existential threat. Ron Paul wants to pretend that such threats do not exist because our constitution does not acknowledge them.

We need new laws and policies defined for non state combatants, but until we do we need to do our best to eliminate threats even though we will make mistakes along the way.  It has been our diligence in continuously assassinating AQ leaders and constantly disrupting their networks that has kept further attacks at bay.  Our military successes may have  actually avoided further potential erosion of our protections .

Our policies will evolve and there will be abuses and imperfections as there will always be in foreign affairs. We should address them properly but we cannot afford to wait till we perfect those polices before we address current threats.

I just finished reading Dance of the Furies- Europe and the Outbreak of World War I by Michael Neiberg.  It is an excellent companion to another book he wrote about WWI:  Fighting the Great War.  Michael is a history professor with a focus on World War I,  and my nephew. His other books about World War I include The Second Battle of the Marne, Warfare and Society in Europe, The Eastern Front and The World War I Reader.

Fighting the Great War was a broad view of the military campaigns.  The carnage of WWI was a confluence of history and technology.  Picture the Civil War with machine guns, high power artillery, tanks, airplanes and poison gas.  Yet medical care had little improved.  The carnage was incredible and the war ended from an exhaustion of resources and people.  For many European nations WWI was more significant and devastating than WWII. Britain and France lost twice as many soldiers in WWI than WWII.

Dance of the Furies focuses on Europe outside the military campaign.  Neiberg researched volumes of civilian correspondence and finds a Europe that did not want nor expect this war.  The conventional academic wisdom is that WWI was an inevitable outbreak of nationalistic and jingoistic developments.  Neiberg argues that while these attitudes existed it did not explain the outbreak of the war.  Few people felt these attitudes justified war.

There had been violent acts and smaller conflicts that had been mediated without leading to war.  The success in preventing war by mediation for decades gave a sense of comfort that war was a very avoidable outcome.  The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian national seemed a relatively minor incident in the scope of the European concerns and few expected it to lead to WWI.

But efforts to mediate the harsh terms the Austro-Hungarians placed on Serbia after the assassination failed and war ensured. Few people, however, believed it would last very long. Shop keepers hung signs on their stores that they would soon return.

The book notes the impact on the civilians: inflation, unemployment, critical shortages of foods and commodities. 800,000 people fled Paris. “3,000,000  in France and Belgium were homeless by the end of the year (1914)”.

Few soldiers from any army understood why they were fighting. The news from the German, British and French papers was controlled and bereft of any current information on the state of the conflict.  The American papers were sought even though they were weeks old because it had more information on the war than their local papers allowed.

Few civilians understood what was happening until the casualties started, and they were significant.  At the Battle of the Marne, not far from Paris, “200,000 wounded men from the battle came into a stunned and unprepared city…. more men had been wounded in this one battle than had been present at either Gettysburg or Waterloo.”

Tales of atrocities, some verified and some rumored, dissolved any reluctance the fighters may have harbored at the onset of the conflicts.  Neiberg suggests that the nationalistic sentiment many suggest caused the war was more the result of the conflict.  Every country thought they were fighting a defensive war, as difficult as that rationalization is to understand today.

Though few expected or wanted this war, once it started it took on a life of its own.  Attitudes hardened and were sustained long after the war ended.  The war was a decision of a dozen leaders.  Michael referred to it as a Cabinet War.

Thus the war developed from a political structure where the leaders were distant from their constituencies and where a free press was the first casualty.  There was little civilian support for the war from either side and few made plans for either the duration or depth of the losses.

WWI may have been an avoidable war but the outcome just laid the basis for WWII.  The nationalist hostilities may have been a result of the first world war but it led to the second. Yet the utter exhaustion and devastation from WWI led to appeasements that ultimately made WWII far more costly than it would have been. From one perspective WWII seems like a continuation of WWI.

Though the intelligence failures surrounding Iraq are now well known, recent history is abundant with examples of flawed intelligence that have affected key national security decisions and contingency planning.  They include, for example: the poor quality of the intelligence gathered on the ground in Viet Nam; the underestimates of the scale of the Soviet Union’s military efforts during the Cold War; a lack of awareness about the brewing Iranian revolution that forced the Shah, an American ally, to flee the country; the failure to detect the preparations for India’s nuclear test; and consistently underestimating the number of missiles that China had deployed along the Taiwan Straits.  For Iraq, there was a similar pattern of intelligence estimates that had dangerously miscalculated Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capability.  After the Gulf War, UN inspectors were surprised ti discover that Iraq had been no more than a year or two away from having enough fissile material top produce a nuclear bomb.

David Kay, the chief UN weapons inspector in 1991, believed it would have been only twelve to eighteen months until the regime reached “regular industrial-scale production of fissile material, ” or enriched uranium, that could be used in an atomic bomb.

From Known and Unknown by Donald Rumsfeld

Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs, has written a book focusing on the conclusion and post military developments of America’s wars  from WWI though the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.  If How Wars End has a common theme is the need to carefully consider the consequences and costs of victory as a part of the planning of the overall campaign.

Few lenses provide the clarity of hindsight.  The failure of peace after the military victory of WWI was recognized and not repeated after WWII. But new mistakes cause the victories of WWII to degenerate into the Cold War.

The lessons of total victory did not apply to the limited actions, defined by our limited commitment, such as Korea and Vietnam.  But George H. Bush and his military advisors were strongly motivated not to repeat the many mistakes of Viet Nam.  Desert Storm was strong, decisive, devoid of political tampering and most of all, limited.  But it left a tyrant in power and did not protect us from a 9/11 from the region.

The emotions and fear of 9/11 dominated a largely unchecked effort  to eradicate all terrorist threats, whether directly responsible for 9/11 or not. But the strategic failure to plan or to competently execute a plan after Saddam’s fall left us with new lessons.

But other lessons are not in the book.  Americans are an impatient people. In war a deadline can be a disadvantage. We like our wars fast and cheap. A committed enemy can readily lose the war and win by making the peace or aftermath intolerable.  Once the troops come home we turn our television station to another channel and tend to neglect the aftermath of our actions.

Peace must take into account changing political dynamics.  Both Wilson’s and Nixon’s plans at the bargaining table were frustrated by changing political control at home.  A successful peace can require a consensus that was worn thin by the war.

When we cure one disease, we succeed in living longer and thus are able to contact another disease.  We do learn the lessons from our previous conflicts, both successes and failure. But this just creates the opportunities to confront new problems.

We have not inflicted total defeat and surrender since WWII. We now face an enemy that considers survival a victory.  We fight enemies unaligned with a nation state, and must adapt to armies without borders.

The lesson from our past conflicts was that victory was only the first step.  Now we have to find a whole new definition for what victory really is.

The Syrian dictatorship possessed in the extreme two qualities particularly dangerous in a military adversary- ruthlessness and patience.  Like all dictatorships, the regime had the advantage of not needing to cater to its domestic opinion.  It could do whatever it deemed expedient to achieve its goals.  The Syrians had been playing a diplomatic card game with us for decades: doing just enough to look accommodating or coming up just shy of being too provocative. They played the international media like skilled poker players-offering public words of support for peace efforts so as to be seen as not unreasonable.  The Syrians would float friendly diplomatic overtures to give the regime  deniability when negotiations went off-track, as they had intended all along.  This left them free to pursue their hostile interests behind the scenes: destabilizing the Lebanese government and supporting armed militias and terrorist groups.

From Known and Unknown by Donald Rumsfeld

HKO comments:

This was written in reference to troubles in Lebanon in 1983 with Rumsfeld serving as a special envoy under Reagan.  When the U.S. decided to pull out after the devastating loss of 241 marines in the barracks bombing, Rumsfeld had to deliver the news to President Gemayel. Both men knew how devastating the U.S. exit would be to Lebanon’s future.  We later learned this was one of several actions of perceived weakness on our part that emboldened Bin Ladin.  Rumsfeld learned that perceived weakness in the face of a ruthless enemy does not lead to peace.

After taking the House in 2006, Pelosi reached out to Assad in Lebanon in a visit strongly discouraged by the State department and Bush who was still president.  If Assad was a “skilled poker player” Pelosi proved to be a naïve rank amateur.  In September 2007 the Israelis destroyed a nuclear reactor in Syria.