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Posts Tagged ‘war’
March 5th, 2015 at 4:58 pm
Congress Would Rather Write Letters than Pass Laws

Reuters is reporting that Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and a bipartisan group of House members sent a letter to President Barack Obama this week urging him to send weapons to the Ukrainian government in order to send a message to Russia.

“In the face of Russian aggression, the lack of clarity on our overall strategy thus far has done little to reassure our friends and allies in the region who, understandably, feel vulnerable. This needs to change,” wrote the lawmakers.

But here’s the irony. According to Reuters, “The House and U.S. Senate voted unanimously late last year for a bill authorizing Obama to provide weapons to Kiev but he has yet to decide whether to send any.”

That is, Congress voted to give Obama the discretion whether or not to send weapons to Ukraine. Now, some members are upset that he won’t enact their preferred strategy.

Just like immigration policy, Congress has the ability to limit the president’s options by passing laws that spell out exactly what he can and cannot do. Unlike immigration – where Obama’s amnesty programs are deliberately in conflict with federal law – in the case of Ukraine the president appears to be clearly within his power not to act.

It’s a sad commentary when leading members of Congress are reduced to relying on third-party lawsuits and strongly-worded letters instead of their inherent, constitutional power to create the laws of the land.

No wonder this president ignores them.

December 5th, 2014 at 6:19 am
Podcast: Putting a Face to War
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In an interview with CFIF, Wayne Kopping, Director, Editor and respected Filmmaker, discusses the new feature-length documentary film “Beneath the Helmet: From High School to the Home Front,” which highlights five young Israeli high school graduates who are drafted into the army to defend their country, and why it was important to create a documentary that brings to the screen the faces of the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Listen to the interview here.

September 9th, 2013 at 6:35 pm
Obama’s Syria ‘Message’ a Bay of Pigs Redux?

How bad has President Barack Obama mishandled his possible Syria bombing campaign?

“…President Obama finds himself in the biggest and ugliest public mess of his career, with a total policy meltdown playing out on the front pages and cable TV studios of the world,” writes Walter Russell Mead.

“It is like a slow motion Bay of Pigs, unrolling at an agonizing, prestige wrecking pace from day to day and week to week. It is almost impossible to defend whatever policy he actually has in mind at this point, yet the consequences of a congressional vote that opposes him are grave.”

Mead’s allusion to JFK’s Bay of Pigs fiasco is instructive. In 1961, the Kennedy administration armed and sent 1,400 Cuban exiles to topple Fidel Castro. However, they didn’t have air support or reinforcements from the U.S. military, and were quickly defeated.

Like Obama, Kennedy wanted to ‘send a message’ on the cheap, and got what he paid for.

The consequences to America were nearly disastrous. Not only did Castro and his Soviet Union patrons humiliate the United States in front of the world, they interpreted the defeat – and the resulting timidity – as a free pass to put ICBMs 90 miles from Florida. Without the Bay of Pigs fiasco as a precursor, it is almost impossible to imagine the following year’s Cuban Missile Crisis.

With this in mind, Members of Congress should be extremely skeptical about the Obama administration’s claim that those we attack won’t be “arrogant and foolish enough to retaliate.”

History indicates otherwise, and in ways we can’t easily predict.

September 6th, 2013 at 6:58 pm
Let’s Cool it with the “Chicken Hawk” Nonsense
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I sometimes find the best way to settle your views on an issue is not to read the opinion of those you admire, but rather those whom you despise. Even my favorite thinkers go astray sometimes. The hacks are slightly more consistent.

One of the kings of errancy is the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, who spends today’s column trying to act as a moral backstop for President Obama in regard to Syria. It’s a throwaway remark early in the piece, however, that gets my hackles up:

At Wednesday’s hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I thought for a moment that [Secretary of State John] Kerry was going to blow. Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., launched into a self-righteous soliloquy about Benghazi, the IRS, the National Security Agency and what he portrayed as Kerry’s longtime aversion to using military force.

Kerry, you may recall, is a highly decorated Vietnam combat veteran. Duncan is an armchair warrior.

A few quick thoughts:

    — I’ll grant you that Duncan comes off as a blowhard in his questioning of Kerry. Hearings on the possibility of war are about as serious a task as a member of Congress faces and his insistence on turning it into a glorified campaign ad are both misplaced and unimpressive. He comes off like a guy trying to sell you insurance at a funeral. That being said, non sequitur droning constitutes about 90 percent of all congressional questioning. You know who used to be the king of that? John Kerry. So forgive me if I can’t muster sympathy when he’s on the receiving end of the same kind of firehose-intensity stream of inanity he spent over two and a half decades dispensing.

    — I’ve never understood why, in a nation that from its inception has insisted upon civilian control over the military, we try to settle policy arguments by determining who’s the closest approximation of Leonidas. You know who else was an “armchair warrior”? Franklin Roosevelt, who prosecuted World War II and never served in the military. Abraham Lincoln spent three months in the Illinois State Militia.

    And Mr. Robinson should be careful about tying credibility on foreign affairs to time in uniform. Barack Obama didn’t serve. Neither did Joe Biden. And neither did Eugene Robinson, who spends the rest of this column telling us how we should think about Syria.

    Liberals spent the last decade mocking conservative “chicken hawks” who had never served in the military but advocated for American intervention overseas. It was a bogus argument then and it’d be bogus (if not satisfying) to turn it back on them now. If we’re going to debate ideas, let’s do it on the merits, not according to the resumés of the people advancing them.

    September 6th, 2013 at 2:31 am
    Syrian Resolution Looks Doomed to Failure
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    Earlier today, Rick Klein, Political Director for ABC News, tweeted out that 217 members of the House of Representatives have gone on record “as likely to oppose authorizing military force against Syria,” giving those opposed to the resolution a majority in the lower chamber (if we have any pedants in the audience shouting about the fact that it takes 218 to reach a majority, note that Alabama and Massachusetts both currently have one vacant seat).

    Now, “likely to oppose” isn’t the same thing as definitely voting no, but anyone who’s staking out territory this early in the process is disproportionately likely to to stick to his guns. And it’s clear that the momentum on this is all going in one direction — and it’s not the president’s.

    That’s remarkable, but not particularly surprising. Sometimes you can get a member to vote against his political interest for the sake of ideology. Sometimes you can get him to vote against his ideology for the sake of his political interest. But when both are imperiled simultaneously, the whipping gets much harder. That’s precisely the case with a potential military offensive that polls terribly and hits intellectual pressure points for liberals and conservatives alike.

    One dispiriting aspect of this debate is the chorus of conservative voices such as Jennifer Rubin, Hugh Hewitt, and Bret Stephens who’ve conflated opposition to feckless, limited airstrikes in Syria with “isolationism.” It may be fair to say that nearly all isolationists are opposed to taking action in Syria. It does not follow, however, that all who are opposed to taking action in Syria are isolationists. The scope of opposition is far too large to be constituted entirely (or even primarily) of those opposed to American action overseas in all but the most limited circumstances.

    I suspect that there are a fair number of conservatives like me — as far removed from the reflexive international reticence of Rand Paul as we are from John McCain’s “anytime, anywhere, for any reason” school of intervention — who just don’t see the strategic payoff here, especially given the manner in which the Obama Administration would be likely to conduct the fight.

    America has played too fast and loose with defining our national security interests in recent years. Doing so again — especially when it’s clear that the Obama Administration has no plan that will actually result in a change of circumstances on the ground in Syria — is an exercise in futility. The measure deserves defeat.

    September 4th, 2013 at 6:16 pm
    Senate Lying to Self with ‘Tailored’ Syria Resolution

    A highly regarded separation of powers expert says the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s oddly worded resolution to authorize military force in Syria might be more expansive than its drafters intend, according to the Washington Times.

    At issue is the resolution’s use of the words “limited and tailored” in the phrase giving President Barack Obama power “to use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in a limited and tailored manner against legitimate military targets in Syria…”

    Louis Fisher, a former long-time expert at the Congressional Research Service and author of a leading treatise on presidential war powers, says the word choice is unprecedented and could be so vague that it creates space for an escalation.

    “What could possibly be the meaning of ‘limited and tailored’? I doubt if I’ve ever seen the word ‘tailored’ in a bill,” Fisher told the paper. “Even if the ‘intent’ of Congress is a limited war, war has its own momentum.”

    In other words, use of the word ‘tailored’ in the resolution can mean anything to the clever lawyers who will twist it however they please, so in reality that word, and any limiting effect it is designed to have, is meaningless.

    It is impossible for me to imagine that the people drafting this resolution don’t know this. Therefore, it seems almost certain that the underlying intent here is to sound like they are limiting the President’s options while in fact not doing so at all.

    If we’re going to bomb Syria then we are going to war with Syria. If that’s in America’s national security interest, Congress should declare it in unambiguous language.

    To my mind it’s better to do nothing than to say something that means nothing.

    Otherwise, Congress is just lying to itself so that it can act outraged when the President uses the resolution to wage a war the Senate and House impliedly authorized.

    September 4th, 2013 at 1:09 pm
    Obama’s Syria Policy Incoherent at Home and Abroad

    McClatchy news ran a piece yesterday describing how President Barack Obama’s seeming indecision on striking Syria is being interpreted by Middle Easterners.

    “Obama’s abrupt decision on Saturday to delay the strikes that seemed just hours away is being seen in the region as the latest confirmation of an incoherent U.S. approach of mixed messages and unfulfilled threats that have driven America’s standing to a new low,” the paper said, citing numerous interviews with Syrian rebels and others.

    The confusion wasn’t helped during Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There, the Vietnam veteran and anti-war hero did an about-face. Without a hint of irony he argued that in asking for congressional approval to fire missiles at Syria “President Obama is not asking America to go to war.”

    Instead, the President was “asking only for the power to make clear, to make certain, that the United States means what we say,” when the Commander-in-Chief threatens military force.

    But the fact remains that firing missiles into another country is an act of war, a fact that didn’t escape Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) before heading into the hearing.

    “This is the most serious policy decision any senator will make,” reports the Daily Caller. “Authorizing the use of military force is, let’s face it, is a declaration of war against another country, no matter how limited it is, that’s what it is.”

    Kudos to Senator Corker for saying the truth out loud. He understands the real world consequences of this decision, as do the Syrian rebels, Syrian President Bashar Assad and every other sentient being paying attention.

    So far, the Obama administration is doing itself no favors by pushing forward an ad hoc, incoherent rationale for bombing a government whose actions – while immoral and deplorable – don’t necessarily threaten America’s national security interests.

    February 23rd, 2012 at 2:06 pm
    How Many Times Does Iran Have to Tell Us They’re Serious?
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    Over at the Daily Caller, Jamie Weinstein has a piece today regarding the grave seriousness with which the Iranian regime approaches the prospect of wiping Israel off the face of the planet. The column opens by citing the widow of one of the recently-assassinated nuclear scientists working on the Iranian bomb, who says that her husband’s “ultimate goal was the annihilation of Israel.”

    The intellectual balm of choice for foreign policy sophisticates has been to tell themselves that this sort of language out of Tehran is purely for domestic consumption, empty rhetoric aimed at consolidating support for the regime. At last night’s Republican debate in Arizona, Newt Gingrich rejected that line of thought, saying “I’m inclined to believe dictators. It’s dangerous not to.” (lest that quote sound a bit strange, it should be noted that Gingrich was saying it’s important to take threats from dictatorial regimes at face value).

    Weinstein riffs on that theme at length and does a fine job of fleshing out Gingrich’s point:

    They’re just posturing or joking or have been misinterpreted, we’re told. Israel and the West can live with a nuclear Iran, foreign policy intellectuals in New York, London and Berlin proclaim.

    But if you’re the tiny, embattled State of Israel, it is hard to see how you can afford to take the chance that the Iranian leadership is merely joshing with their eliminationist rhetoric. Even if the odds are only 5 percent that the Iranian regime is apocalyptic and would act to bring back the hidden Imam through a nuclear holocaust, a five percent chance of a second holocaust is five percent too much for Israel to tolerate. (And let’s forget entirely for a moment the dire strategic problems of dealing with a nuclear-armed Iran even if the Islamic Republic doesn’t immediately use the bomb once it obtains the capability to strike. Try handling Hezbollah when they have a nuclear shield.)

    Quite so. The higher the stakes, the lower our tolerance of ambiguity should be. It’s becoming increasingly clear that — regardless of how Iran uses a bomb — the cost will be prohibitively high for the U.S. and our allies. We still have a limited window in which we can set back and ultimately undo the threat with means short of war. Should we fail, the remaining options will be as unpalatable as they are necessary.

    June 20th, 2011 at 11:45 pm
    NPR Host: Taliban Isn’t a Threat to the U.S.
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    Reasonable people disagree on the way forward in Afghanistan. Reasonable people, however, don’t tend to work at NPR.

    That’s the conclusion we can take from remarks made by John Hockenberry, host of NPR’s “The Takeaway” (full disclosure: I’ve appeared on Hockenberry’s show before — not that it’s earning him any lenience). As the Daily Caller reports:

    In an interview with Christine Fair, assistant professor at the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Hockenberry challenged the notion of the Taliban being an enemy of the United States and declared that the idea it could again make Afghanistan a haven for terrorists “an absurdity.”

    “I guess, Christine Fair, I’m wondering why this is even a debate,” Hockenberry said. “The Taliban has never been an enemy of the United States. They don’t love us in Afghanistan, but they’re not sending planes over to New York or to the Pentagon and it seems to me much more broadly that the debate needs to happen is what is the sort of multi-state strategy for dealing with rogue nations of all kinds. Yemen is about to fall apart. You’ve got Somalia problems. The idea that terrorists just go to Afghanistan and launch weapons at the United States it seems in 2011 is an absurdity.” 

    I’m sure the monotone sophisticates of NPR don’t need any math lessons from out here on the right wing. But, Mr. Hockenberry, a quick review of the transitive property: The Taliban harbored Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. (by sending planes over to New York and to the Pentagon, as I recall). Thus the Taliban is a demonstrated enemy of the U.S.

    You can keep the tote bag.

    June 3rd, 2011 at 3:53 pm
    House Drops the Hammer on Obama for Libyan War
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    As I wrote earlier this week, a bipartisan coalition in Congress is growing tired of President Obama’s refusal to involve the legislative branch in the policy-setting for the conflict in Libya. Today that irritation grew to a head on the floor of the House of Representatives. The Washington Times reports:

    Crossing party lines to deliver a stunning rebuke to the commander in chief, the vast majority of the House voted Friday for resolutions telling President Obama he has broken the constitutional chain of authority by committing U.S. troops to the international military mission in Libya.

    In two votes — on competing resolutions that amounted to legislative lectures of Mr. Obama — Congress escalated the brewing constitutional clash over whether he ignored the founding document’s grant of war powers by sending U.S. troops to aid in enforcing a no-fly zone and naval blockade of Libya.

    The resolutions were non-binding, and only one of them passed, but taken together, roughly three-quarters of the House voted to put Mr. Obama on notice that he must give explain himself [sic] or else face future consequences, possibly including having funds for the war cut off.

    The word “including” in the last sentence is a bit of an overstatement. Since the courts will almost certainly refuse to intervene in this matter under the political question doctrine, cutting off funds is virtually the only way for Congress to impose real consequences (it’s also something of a proxy for a vote on policy, given that many White Houses argue that approving funds is the same as approving a war).

    It’s not clear that this would be a wise move, however. Regardless of the initial rationale for the Libyan expedition (which was not compelling in terms of American national security interests), the reality is that the strategic landscape has shifted since the West has intervened. Leaving now in a rush has the potential to be more destablizing than not intervening in the first place. It would be better instead to set a few hard and fast objectives (killing Gaddafi, securing rebel control of certain parts of the country, etc.), achieve them, and go home, hopefully leaving that nation no worse than we found it.

    That prescription may be less dramatic than the Congress wants. But that’s what they get for not speaking up sooner.

    March 25th, 2011 at 11:24 am
    Eugene Robinson Asks Obama: “What the Hell Are We Doing” in Libya?

    From Charles Krauthammer on the Right to Peggy Noonan in the middle, denunciation of President Barack Obama’s handling of the war in Libya is expected.  But tough talk from a reliable liberal like Eugene Robinson?  Now, that’s progressive.

    Robinson has done his best to keep up with Obama’s ever-shifting views on military involvement in Libya.  No more.  Today, Robinson apparently can’t interpret the blizzard of mealy-mouthed talking points flying out the White House press office.  So, he’s asking for a little clarity:

    So what the hell are we doing? I realize that President Obama and his advisers have answered this question many times, but I feel it’s necessary to keep asking until the answers begin to make sense.

    What’s that you say, Mr. Robinson?  Obama isn’t making sense?  Welcome to the club.

    March 24th, 2011 at 6:56 pm
    Senate Liberals at Loggerheads Over Libya

    It’s nice to see liberal members of the Obama regime getting in a dust-up over whether the president’s Libya bombing is legal.

    Today’s combatants are Senator John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the chamber’s Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Dick Lugar (R-IN) whose thinking on foreign affairs is usually in lock-step with Kerry’s.

    Until, that is, President Obama forgot to ask Lugar’s permission before going to war.  As one of then-Senator Obama’s earliest Republican admirers, Lugar takes pride in his status as elder adviser to a young president.  Trouble is, Obama no longer needs Lugar for anything.

    And as Lugar is finding out, that includes setting aside procedural niceties like declaring war or getting congressional authorization for military action. (Far better to go the Lugar-approved route of U.N. permission slips.)

    Thanks, Senator.  He couldn’t have done it without you.

    February 18th, 2011 at 7:27 pm
    Iran Tells Israel Not to Worry, Warships Sailing Past to Train in Syria

    Who says Iran’s leaders don’t know how to lighten the mood?  With tensions in the Middle East boiling over – and Iran rumored to be behind many of the region’s revolutionary protests – the Islamic Republic is trying to downplay the threat of its decision to send two warships through Egypt’s Suez Canal and emerge off the coast of Israel.

    Hard to blame Israeli officials in Tel Aviv for fearing the truth of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinijad’s repeated promises to destroy the Jewish state after getting the news about his navy’s surprise trip.  But as proof of Iran’s peaceful intentions the government offered two assurances.  First, the ships won’t carry any weapons or nuclear or chemical material.  Second, the duo is headed to Syria for training.

    Unfortunately for Iran, its dishonest record of nuclear enrichment and ties to terrorist organizations in Syria and elsewhere aren’t fooling anyone – except the weakened Egyptian government looking to avoid a confrontation.

    It’s worth noting that an Iranian warship going through the Suez Canal under the Mubarak reign is unthinkable.  Now, Israeli officials must consider more unthinkable scenarios with its sworn enemy soon sailing within sight of the Jewish homeland.

    August 16th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
    The Unstoppable Bomb
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    I’ve been writing in this space for months now that Western policymakers who believe Iran can be contained or deterred by conventional methods once it goes nuclear are deluding themselves. As I wrote in a commentary nearly a year ago:

    In the 1930s, Winston Churchill – virtually alone – called for swift action to remove Hitler before he could wreak havoc.  What was the source of his clarity? Churchill simply understood that Hitler meant what he said in “Mein Kampf” and was developing the capacity to act on it. Meanwhile, the rest of Europe’s political sophisticates believed that Hitler’s rhetoric was purely for domestic consumption – a tool used to exploit the grievances of the demoralized Weimar Republic.
     
    Today, a similar debate rages over Ahmadinejad and the mullahs whose regime he leads.  But the sincerity of their beliefs should be in doubt to no one.  The Iranian President is a man who, during his tenure as the mayor of Tehran, ordered the city’s streets widened in anticipation of the return of the Twelfth Imam, a figure who accompanies the apocalypse in Shiite Islamic theology. The American left would call for the head of any mayor in the United States who wanted to widen Main Street to prepare for the return of the Christ. Yet they apparently think a similar figure in the world’s biggest hotbed of religious fundamentalism can be expected to be a benign wielder of nuclear launch codes.

    In the new issue of Commentary, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, in a piece entitled “Iran Cannot be Contained”, comes to the same conclusion from a different angle, rebutting those who think that because containment worked on the Soviet Union it can work on the Iranian regime:

    … The most important difference between the Soviet Union and Iran may be ideological. A credible case can be made that Communism is no less a faith than Islam and that Iran’s current leadership, like Soviet leaders of yore, knows how to temper true belief with pragmatic considerations. But Communism was also a materialist and (by its own lights) rationalist creed, with a belief in the inevitability of history but not in the afterlife. Marxist-Leninist regimes may be unmatched in their record of murderousness, but they were never great believers in the virtues of martyrdom.

    That is not the case with Shiism, which has been decisively shaped by a cult of suffering and martyrdom dating to the murder of Imam Husayn—the Sayyed al-Shuhada, or Prince of Martyrs—in Karbala in the seventh century. The emphasis on martyrdom became all the more pronounced in Iran during its war with Iraq, when Tehran sent waves of child soldiers, some as young as 10, to clear out Iraqi minefields. As Hooman Majd writes in his book The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, the boys were often led by a soldier mounted on a white horse in imitation of Husayn: “the hero who would lead them into their fateful battle before they met their God.” Tens of thousands of children died this way.

    The martyrdom mentality factors into Iran’s nuclear calculus as well. In December 2001, former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—a man often described as a moderate and a pragmatist in the Western press—noted in his Qods (Jerusalem) Day speech that “if one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”

    We are, quite simply, running out of time.  We can try to ignore reality, but reality won’t return the favor.

    April 1st, 2010 at 10:49 pm
    David Petraeus: Profile in Greatness
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    Here’s a little secret about those of us who tend to the Freedom Line garden (though it applies equally to all our brethren in the conservative blogosphere): we’re hopeless nerds. Our reader’s digests of political and policy developments come from hours of reading, writing, and thinking about the great issues of the day. Government is for us what fantasy football is to a much broader swath of America.

    When you spend that much time consuming news, however, the callouses develop quickly. It’s hard to be impressed. To break through to the sense of genuine wonder that brought us into this field usually requires either singularly great writing or a singularly great man.

    I mention all this to give a full-throated endorsement to Mark Bowden’s article “The Professor of War,” a profile of General David Petraeus in the May issue of Vanity Fair (a publication whose political coverage — with some exceptions for Christopher Hitchens — is usually uneven at best). This is a piece so exceptional — and an individual so compelling — that one can only hope Bowden someday gets drafted to be Petraeus’s official biographer.

    This piece is far too rich to justify through excerpt, so here’s one brief paragraph that ably represents the writing in microcosm:

    Congress underestimated David Petraeus. He is a man of such distinction that in the army legends have formed about his rise. Beyond his four-star rank, he possesses a stature so matchless it deserves its own adjective—call it “Petraean,” perhaps. It is an adjective that would be mostly complimentary, but not entirely so—there can be a hard edge to the man, a certain lack of empathy, and there is something vaguely unseemly in his obvious ambition. But when Petraeus tests himself, he usually wins. When he assumed command in Iraq, he had accepted a challenge few thought even he could meet, turning around the longest and most mismanaged war in American history. But Iraq is only part of the story. Through his writing and teaching, Petraeus was at the same time redefining how the nation will fight in the 21st century. And he was doing something more difficult still: leading a cultural and doctrinal revolution inside one of the most hidebound institutions in the world, the United States Army. Whatever the fate of Iraq and Afghanistan, this transformation is a Petraean legacy that will be felt for years to come.

    My favorite piece of journalism so far in 2010. Read the whole thing here.

    January 15th, 2010 at 3:27 pm
    America’s Drift Towards Perpetual War?

    In The American Conservative, Andrew Bacevich writes a thought-provoking meditation on American military outcomes since World War II.  Contra William Kristol and the neo-cons, Bacevich argues that “kinetic” (i.e. violent) power is actually much less effective than its supporters in the punditry suggest.  If anything, the career soldiers cutting their teeth in Afghanistan and Iraq on their way up the chain-of-command are likely to incorporate the limits of using force into their future strategic thinking.

    Extending this thread a bit, support for Bacevich’s point may be found in this week’s disaster in Haiti.  Though the earthquake is devastating, the conditions that pre- and post-date it (lack of infrastructure and political leadership) are contributing mightily to the scale of its toll.  Like the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the earthquake brought the state and its citizens to their knees.  At some point, the pieces will be picked up, but the recent past doesn’t predict a better future for countries that produce strongmen and weak societies.