It lacks the sex appeal of the Mark Foley scandal, but the most important political news of October is probably the U.S. Army's decision to finally try and implement a proper counterinsurgency doctrine in its training and planning. The move is, in a sense, long overdue. The American military's ingrained preference for equipment-heavy conventional war fighting has long been a problem, and since 9/11 it's become positively crippling. On the other hand, the way the issue is being framed -- as a response to the lessons of Iraq -- makes me worry.
The idea that we should look at the fiasco over there, roll up our sleeves, and write up some new manuals about how to avoid these mistakes in the future is part-and-parcel of the "can do" American spirit that, in many ways, makes our country an appealing place. At the same time, that very spirit has very much been part of our problem in Iraq. Indeed, as Jeffrey Record points out in his survey of America's long-troubled relationship with the concept of counterinsurgency, one of this country's longstanding difficulties has been precisely a love for "an engineering approach to war." In particular, as Colin Gray concluded in an essay published by the Army War College's Institute for Strategic Studies:
Holding to an optimistic public culture characterized by the belief that problems can always be solved, the American way in war is not easily discouraged or deflected once it is exercised with serious intent to succeed . . . the problem-solving faith, the penchant for the engineering fix, has the inevitable consequence of leading U.S. policy, including its use of armed force, to attempt the impossible. After all, American history is decorated triumphantly with 'impossible' achievements, typically against physical geopgraphy. Conditions are often misread as problems. Conditions have to be endured, perhaps ameliorated, and generally tolerated, whereas problems, by definition, can be solved.Cultural, political, sociological, and psychological barriers to success, however, are not like geographical ones -- issues that can simply be resolved with sufficient application of money, materiel, know-how, and determination. The failure to recognize this dimension of our troubles in Iraq was well-represented by an editorial last week in The Washington Post, as ever the voice of America's elite consensus. Surveying the three and a half years of war, the authors noted that "it may be that much of the trouble the United States now faces in Iraq was the inevitable result of the decision to crack open a complex society that had been repressed and brutalized for three decades by Saddam Hussein."
Nevertheless, after one paragraph they pass lightly over the point to offer up a familiar rendition of the Bush administration's incompetence in Iraq. The possibility that the thing simply could not be done, in other words, is acknowledged, but not genuinely confronted, let alone accepted. The point, however, is a crucial one -- once Rumsfeld is out of office and our new counterinsurgency manuals are all written up, do we try the invade/conquer/democratize routine again? What's more, the Post's recounting of the factors that might have made failure inevitable ("the fierce unwillingness of many Sunnis to accept minority status; the uncompromising drive of Shiites and Kurds for power so long denied them; the relative absence of competent or inspiring leaders") focuses relentlessly on the specifics of the situation in Iraq and avoids any consideration of the general advisability of doing this sort of thing anywhere.
A point Americans would do well to consider (well-illustrated, incidentally, by the current storyline on Battlestar: Galactica) is the simple difficulty of conjuring legitimacy and trust. To reconstruct Iraqi politics and society along democratic lines, the United States had to try and set itself up as the supreme coercive authority in Iraq. We expected most Iraqis to accept this -- it was, after all, for their own good, and only serious malefactors would object.
This assumption proved badly mistaken. Poll after poll has shown the American military presence to be deeply unpopular, information the American political establishment has managed to keep from penetrating our collective consciousness. Similarly, recent polls indicating that overwhelming majorities of Iraqis want us to leave have been simply ignored by almost everyone except Nicholas Kristof.
The trouble is that Iraqis simply don't have faith in the good intentions of American soldiers and policymakers. And, really, why should they? Nothing in pre-war American history had ever indicated that sincere concern for the well-being of Arabs was a major consideration in U.S. policymaking. And letting a culturally alien force you don't especially trust gain absolute control over your country is a huge risk -- one lots of people aren't going to want to take. Very bad tactical decisions wound up greatly exacerbating the situation, but better tactics would probably only have caused us to fail more slowly or somewhat less dramatically. Mistakes of one kind or another are essentially inevitable in such a complicated undertaking and what doomed us in Iraq was less that mistakes were made than that we were put in a situation where there was no chance to recover from errors. Every occurrence was interpreted by Iraqis in the most-threatening possible way; things went from bad to worse.
The missing ingredient was something no Army manual can provide: legitimacy -- widespread belief among the relevant people that American power is being used in their interests rather than in pernicious ways. This is not, fundamentally, the Army's problem to solve. It requires politicians and policymakers to take opinion abroad seriously and recognize that the American military is not a magical toolkit that can solve thorny issues merely in virtue of its considerable merits as a fighting force.
Fundamentally, what America needs is better grand strategy, a better approach to the world as a whole. Better tactics would be nice, too. But if we convince ourselves that the only lesson Iraq has to teach is about the need for better training manuals and handbooks, then we haven't really learned anything at all.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to The American Prospect here.
Support independent media with a tax-deductible donation here.
