In recent weeks we’ve seen numerous supporters of the war point confidently to positive indicators and to benchmarks being met or neared. And we’ve also seen numerous critics of the war assert just as confidently that there’s been little if any progress. It all makes me think back to events long ago.

Late in the Vietnam War, I occasionally came into contact with a special forces captain. He stopped by to look at the militia units I worked with and we spoke often and in time informally. A former NCO, he had been in Southeast Asia intermittently for over nine years going back to the late fifties, mostly with S. Vietnamese (ARVN) units. I doubt anyone knew them better. Before he left for the states, after the usual farewell conversation I asked, “How long will this country last after the American troops leave?” The question was not if the ARVN would hold – any 19-year-old corporal could see they wouldn’t – but how long until the N. Vietnamese and Viet Cong inevitably overwhelmed them. It was a guileless if tactless question, and pondering it was unpleasant to someone who had worked with the ARVN so long and devotedly. He exhaled then began his reply.

I used to have fairly interesting dreams, the details of which I shall omit just now. Suffice it to say that advancing years and predilection with foreign policy have taken a toll. My reveries were usually graced with young women such as the one I chatted with Saturday in a bagel store on Rt 66. But last night I dreamed of a conversation with George Washington.

GW: Ever since my apotheosis I haven’t paid much attention to foreign affairs. I did for a while, right up to the Mexican War. I trust we learned from that.

Me: Hmmmmm. Where to begin. May I call you George?

GW: Certainly not. You act like that impertinent speculator Devon who dropped by unannounced to tell me of dubious land deals in Westmoreland County.

A stockbroker called me the other day with yet another pick. It was Devon, the same guy who told me a month ago that Bear Stearns was a screaming, slam-your-hands-on-the-table, back-the truck-up-and-load-up buy. I say short the market on occasional spikes that fortune sends our way, but I listened to him just the same.

Devon: Mr Downing? Hi, this is Devon from New American Century. I know you’re very busy and I won’t take much of your time. It’s just that . . . well, damn it, Mr Downing, this opportunity is so exciting I just had to let you know about it! May I call you Brian?

The Bush administration, General Petraeus, and Ambassador Crocker have all recently pointed to success in defeating al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). But just how important has AQI been in violence in Iraq, how successful have we been in expelling them, and at what cost has any success against them come?

The number of AQI personnel is difficult to assess, though most estimates, including that by the State Department’s intelligence section (INR – probably the most accurate part of our intelligence community in recent years), put AQI’s numbers as of last year at between one thousand and fifteen hundred. (By way of comparison, the Sunni insurgents were put at twenty times that.) How many of those numbers were actual combatants and how many simply helped infiltrate jihadists into the country or acted in other supportive roles is of course unclear. It is also unclear if AQI has been responsible for all the terrorist bombings that US officials assert, or if AQI is reflexively blamed for acts that cannot be affixed to any other group.

Last September, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker gave testimony before Congress on events in Iraq. Most critics of US policy in Congress came across as bloviators and dilettantes with little understanding of political and military matters. The result was the administration won the day and the war continued. When the general and ambassador reprise their performances this week, the questions might display better understanding of the region.

Analysts look for alternative explanations for events; politicians and politicized officials present pat explanations that suit their purposes. A fruitful line of questioning would probe explanations, other than the Surge program, for the decline in insurgent attacks. Former Sunni insurgents, who have been on the US payroll and fighting al Qaeda since well before the Surge began, have bargained with the US to protect them from Shi’a militias, which had been slaughtering them in large numbers. A related question is to what extent this shift came as a result of Saudi influence, which aimed at erecting a barrier to Shi’a-Iranian power. And this of course raises the issue of who turned whom and what pressures exist for us to stay in Iraq for an indeterminate period. These are not academic questions; they address the relevance of Petraeus’s Surge and ask if we are being dragged into the endless Sunni-Shi’a conflict.

The recent fighting in Baghdad, Basra, and elsewhere between Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Maliki government forces with American support have ably demonstrated that the relative tranquility has not been based solely or even mainly on General Petraeus’s surge program. The decline in violence has been based on many factors. The Sunni tribes of Anbar and Diyala have garnered US protection from Shi’a militias in exchange for their help in fighting al Qaeda. Shi’a groups have ceased fighting the US and each other, due to fears of a US-Sunni partnership and also due to Iranian pressure.

All observers are wondering if the recent violence will spread and undermine the administration’s Iraq policy. (Supporters dread it; opponents privately yearn for it.) Several forces will likely prevent a return to the violence of a year ago – at least for the time being.

First, Sadr is unlikely to find allies in or outside of Iraq. He is not well respected among most Shi’a because he caters to urban masses and lacks the Islamic credentials that his father and Sadr’s rivals enjoy. Sunnis abhor him as the would-be avatar of their expulsion or extermination. And Iran, despite being supportive of him in some respects, views him as anti-Persian and an obstacle to its goal of a stable, Shi’a dominated Iraq.

Second, purely military considerations suggest that the violence will be contained. Sadr’s troops, though armed and trained by Iranian cadre, lack the discipline to deliver a decisive defeat to Maliki’s forces, who for their part have demonstrated no ability to do the same to Sadr’s. A return to a truce is more likely than an internecine war.

Third, the US is unlikely to press Maliki to fight on for an extended period or to launch once more its own incursions into Sadr’s strongholds. Much as the US would like to see Sadr’s command terminated (Wolfowitz is said to have authorized his killing years ago), protracted battles would call into question the surge’s success and make Petraeus’s upcoming visit to Washington far more than the triumphant publicity event it is hoped to be.

Fourth, Iran does not want its co-religionists, upon whom it places its hopes of a stable neighbor to its west, degenerate into intra-sectarian warfare. All this makes for a containment of the present fighting.

Now that US casualties in Iraq are down for the time being, the administration is hoping that meaningful political progress can take place, which will allow the US to greatly reduce its presence there someday. But the US presence will be sizable for at least the next few years and will itself present problems for political progress by sowing seeds of instability in Iraq and also in Saudi Arabia.

The US asserts that al Qaeda is on the run in Iraq, but the claim is difficult to accept. Since being driven from Afghanistan in 2001, al Qaeda has become a transnational assortment of cells, groups, and like-minded people, sharing common political goals and various degrees of willingness to effect violence, from abetting terrorist attacks to actually performing them. Its amorphousness makes it adaptive and difficult to defeat. It has lost sanctuaries in Anbar and Diyala where recruitment, training, communications, and operations were centered, yet in recent months it has launched devastating strikes in Shi’a urban areas and on tribal leaders cooperating with the US. Still operational in Iraq, al Qaeda can maintain enmity between Sunni and Shi’a and tie down US troops for the foreseeable future. A decade or more does not seem impossible.

It’s been clear for several years now that the neo-conservatives want to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and probably much of its military and infrastructure as well. The recent National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program several years ago seemed to have thwarted the plan. But when Admiral Fallon, who opposed such strikes, resigned last week as head of CENTCOM, speculation on such attacks naturally returned. Fallon’s ouster might simply be a bluff to keep Iran from causing more trouble and more US casualties in Iraq, which will continue the illusion that the relative calm there has been engineered by General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency program, and does not stem, even in part, from Iranian policy. However, the prospect of a series of airstrikes later this year is real.

Over the last sixty years, recessions, though entailing considerable hardship for many, have usually been short and shallow, at least compared to the Depression. This has been so, we are assured, because we have learned much about economic downturns and how to counter them through fiscal policy and monetary policy. Our knowledge of the economy has grown, but perhaps the complexities and causes of recessions have grown at least as much.

The recession we are now descending into is not simply another bust following years of boom. It is accompanied by, and in part caused by, deep problems in two bases of middle-class life: real estate and credit. Real estate values have dropped in most parts of the country – more sharply in some areas than others, but an ominous national trend. The consequences are not confined to the real estate world. Many homeowners have been refinancing their houses and withdrawing equity in order to pay the costs of a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Some do so simply to make ends meet. Many have been relying on the rising values of their houses as ersatz retirement plans that allow them to spend more of their incomes now. This is coming to an end.

Every now and then, we make a passing observation that bounces around our minds and leads us to ponder its significance. Not long ago, I was standing in line to board a plane. Finishing off a cup of coffee as my boarding pass was scanned, I asked if there was a wastebasket handy. The employee dutifully, though unnecessarily, held the wastebasket to just below her chin and smiled. As I dropped the cup in, she smiled more broadly and chimed, “Thank you!” A bit surprised and confused by this service, which went well beyond anything I expected – or wanted – I boarded the plane and walked back to my seat, in coach. “That poor woman,” I thought to myself.

Some sixty years after VE-Day, veterans of the 3rd Armored Division held a reunion, as they have every year since 1946. The guys who had spearheaded the Normandy Breakout and first crossed the Siegfried Line met in Northern Virginia, atop a hotel overlooking the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery. I attended with a neighbor who commanded a company of Shermans in the 3rd. We joked that I had been their drummer boy.


The numbers had dwindled since the first reunion; the years had now taken more than the Wehrmacht had. Some knew others there, most did not. My neighbor could find none of his “boys.” Then there were the wives, children, and grandchildren, who lately had been showing more interest in the war and its meaning. There was even a Belgian man, born well after the war, whose village the 3rd had liberated in late ’44, just before the Bulge. A band played music from the era. Several couples got up and danced, and acquitted themselves well. There was no backslapping or tall tales. Those staples of army reunions, I was told, were common enough at the first dozen or so get-togethers, but had worn thin long ago. Since then, and especially lately, the affairs were simply assemblies of elderly gentlemen, short vacations with catered dinners. No boasting, little nostalgia; just a nice outing.

A review of Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. (New York: Doubleday, 2007).

“A vast field of illusion . . . we have no plan . . . wishful blindness . . . ham-handed operations . . . nobody knew what to do . . . we had also fooled ourselves . . . more courage than wisdom . . . we were just plain asleep . . . etc, etc.”
Quotes from CIA officials and the statesmen they served.

Tim Weiner, longtime national security reporter for The New York Times, has interviewed many CIA officials and pored over volumes of internal documents. His 700-page report is a stunning litany of incompetence and failure. Weiner finds that despite its cachet of stealth and efficacy, the agency is a deeply flawed bureaucracy that has never been able to perform its national security mission.

In the early years of the Cold War, the CIA trained thousands of indigenous personnel to start guerilla movements in the Ukraine, N. Korea, Albania, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, these covert operations had been penetrated by the other side early on and the would-be partisans were collected upon insertion. Most were killed immediately. Some became double agents, sending false information to the West, most of which the credulous agency accepted for years. A few were allowed to operate because the CIA funds coming in were being siphoned off and used to run communist intelligence organizations. Later, similar operations in Cuba, Laos, N. Vietnam, and Iraq fared little better.

Over the last few decades, the image of the veteran has undergone numerous pendulum-like changes. The changes reflect the public’s unfamiliarity with military service and war. Even when positive, the mythic images are more often than not harmful, to both the soldiers and the nation.

When young soldiers went off to Vietnam in the sixties, they were the benefactors of a highly romanticized image that had been bequeathed to them by veterans of World War Two, a war which in the public imagination had been fought by young Americans who had all been noble, virtuous, and ever victorious. The usually affable Bill Mauldin learned hard lessons in Italy and tried to convey some of them to the folks back home:

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals. . . .

Joseph Conrad, An Outpost of Progress

In 1984, after a few years of grad school, I interviewed for an analyst position with the CIA. On the appointed morning, I drove down the George Washington Parkway, took the turn-off leading to the Agency’s campus, and stopped at the checkpoint. The guard dutifully checked for my name on a roster and then directed me to the appropriate parking area.

It’s probably not the right time to institute military reforms. The prospect for pushing through ill-advised changes or opposing sound ones based on short-term passions is too great. But it is the right time to think about and debate them. One reform should aim at the military’s social composition. Our combat troops today are not made up of poor kids with no options – that’s just the rhetoric of lefties who know less about the military than the neo-conservatives do. It’s more accurate to say that soldiers come from the working- and lower-middle classes. Reforms should spread out military service into the middle classes and perhaps even above.

Every war draws upon myths of past conflicts. World War One drew upon the myths of the Civil War. Vietnam did the same with the myths of World War Two, at least until they lost their vitality. And during the present war in Iraq, our first war of any duration since the early seventies, both sides of the issue have conjured up various myths from the Vietnam War.

Supporters of the war are deeply committed to their position, in part due to the powerful myths that animate them. In the decade after the fall of Saigon, several myths about the war coalesced, especially in rural and small town America. As the pain of the war eased and wounded beliefs healed, the war underwent reinterpretation, from arrogant folly to honorable effort. Ronald Reagan called it a “noble cause” during the 1980 presidential campaign – a remark that appalled many but also played upon local sentiments that had lain silent since the war.

Several months ago, Ron Paul, the independent-minded congressman from Texas, raised eyebrows when on-line polls showed him the winner of a few televised debates. Yes, such polls are unscientific, and so they were ignored if not scoffed at. After all, he was only polling at one percent or less in the major national polls. Many commentators reasoned that the anomalous numbers were the result zealous campaign workers and ardent fans.

More recently, however, Paul has made news by drawing large amounts of campaign donations. Also, he took in a respectable ten percent in Iowa, eight in New Hampshire, and is moving up in major national polls. With a goodly supply of money and little popular enthusiasm for leading GOP candidates, he may be poised to make his presence and ideas more salient.

Our presence in Iraq is far different from what it was a year ago. There was no decisive battle, no act of Congress, no shift in public opinion. Though largely unremarked upon, the US has stumbled into a long-term presence in Iraq. Administration officials and like-minded media figures foreshadowed this change early in the year by likening Iraq to Germany and South Korea, where we have stationed troops for over a half century. But events, not rhetoric, have interacted with one another to plant us more firmly than ever in Iraq.

©Brian M. Downing

In recent months, US casualties and Iraqi deaths have dropped markedly. Americans and Iraqis welcome the news but are perplexed by it as well. This is especially so in the US Congress, where confusion and indecision have deepened, and opposition to the war is even more tepid and incoherent than a year ago. The administration and the military have cautiously claimed progress; sympathetic figures in Congress and the media have incautiously trumpeted it. They advance a readily understood explanation with an intuitive plausibility that a war-weary public is willing to accept. But momentous shifts rarely have simple causes.

After Vietnam, the American military was scorned, the prospect of another war seemed impossible. Yet since then, the military has become lionized and has fought two wars and numerous smaller actions. Andrew Bacevich – West Pointer, Vietnam veteran, and professor of international studies – attributes this change to the creation of two powerful myths: our military is omnipotent, capable of almost any feat, anyplace; the US has a mission, a sacred one in many quarters, to confront evil and spread our way of life. These myths, he argues, constitutes a new militarism, which he looks upon with considerable dismay, if not consternation.

The bulk of this timely book describes six forces that created these myths. Three are readily recognizable: “opportunistic politicians” who lavished money and praise on the military before sending it into small wars around the world; “purveyors of popular culture” who deluded the public with images of quick, clean, and uncomplicated wars; and civilian strategists who wished to restore military power to better play the great game they claim expertise in.

Bacevich praises military leaders, the fourth creator, for rebuilding the armed forces after Vietnam, but faults them for not opposing peace-keeping and nation-building missions they judged unwise. He notes their dilemma: become instruments of dubious internationalist policies, or resist them and risk diminished relevance – and resources. Too many generals chose the former, many too eagerly. Though rarely successful, these missions built faith in military omnipotence and the American mission.

Downing Is A Regular Agonist Contributor on defense issues--all rights reserved to the author. More after the jump.

"I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize."

Siegfried L. Sassoon. July 1917

As the war in Iraq drags on and a favorable outcome seems unlikely, Americans will ask how we got into this land war in Asia. Fingers are already pointed to the neo-conservatives, oil executives, and naive strategists, most of whom have broad ideology and narrow interests, but narrower historical knowledge and no military experience. Yet clearly our generals, who began their careers amid another insurgency, also supported the present war, or at least acquiesced to it, and so are unlikely to emerge blameless. How did our military, which after Vietnam regarded politicians with suspicion and another guerrilla war with dismay, find itself waist-deep in Mesopotamia?

Downing Is A Regular Agonist Contributor on defense issues--all rights reserved to the author. More after the jump.

The United States' war in Iraq, as is more apparent with each passing year, is going badly. The administration of President George W Bush has recently admitted as much and announced a new strategy - or at least a new word. "Counterinsurgency" glitters in studies of guerrilla war, darkles in news reports, but is not generally understood. Accordingly, the term either enjoys a talismanic quality, offering hope of reversing failing fortunes, or it is dismissed as a new buzzword, replacing others that have lost luster and utility.

Downing Is A Regular Agonist Contributor on defense issues--all rights reserved to the author. More after the jump.

Divisions between red and blue America and between rich and poor are well known. But another one, related but not quite identical, exists as well. There is a deep divide between those who honorably live the traditions surrounding war and those who dishonorably capitalize on them, between those who fight wars and those who plan them. This divide, troubling if not infuriating to most veterans, is perhaps even more dangerous than the others.

Downing Is A Regular Agonist Contributor on defense issues--all rights reserved to the author. More after the jump.

Ever since the November elections and the Iraq Study Group report, both widely seen as rebukes of the present war policy, there has been expectation of a new course in Iraq. A new policy, part of which has been dubbed a “surge,” is expected in January. Changes are thought to include expanding the overall size of the army and marines, raising troop levels in Iraq, increasing troop levels in Baghdad to reduce sectarian killing, and placing greater emphasis on training Iraqi forces. Change tacitly admits problems with the old policy, and that is at least somewhat promising. Nonetheless, serious problems in the proposed changes suggest themselves – sending in more US troops not the least of them.

More after the jump