How To Decide: Covenant Or Contract

A Covenant With Death or A Contract With Defeat, Pt. 3

Why are wars fought? Really that’s a no-brainer. Wars are fought to achieve a better form of peace.

The next question isn’t any harder. A better state of peace, from which combatant’s perspective? There is only one historically accurate answer. It depends on who wins the war.

This dynamic is equally true whether the war is a conventional interstate war or an insurgency. The contestants don’t agree, don’t come close to agreeing on what constitutes a better state of peace.

From the perspective of the United States a better state of peace would exist when the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the Baathist regime of Saddam in Iraq were ended. Of course, Sheik Omar and Saddam Hussein didn’t agree, even though there were some Afghanis and Iraqis who no doubt believed that the US had the right attitude.

Regime change is properly the concern of those under the domination of the government who object to the status quo and want to effect a change. When the change is prompted by an outside power, the correct term is either "aggression" or "invasion" regardless of whatever fig leaf of crypto-legality such as "preemptive self-defense," or a UN Resolution might be delicately held over the genitalia of policy.

The United States (or any other outside power for that matter) would have been within historical precedent, if not legality, had it sought to foster or facilitate an offensive insurgency. An offensive insurgency, you ask? That’s the polite term for revolution, an internal war where the overthrow of the existing political, social and economic order is sought. The classic examples are the French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions.

It’s not that we didn’t try, at least in Iraq. The problem came when the US government failed to get a grip on one easily ignored but absolutely critical fact. The best an outsider can hope to do is effect the course of an insurgency on the margins, to advance it slightly, to retard it a bit, to turn its course ever so slightly. There was a second central fact USG didn’t grasp either. The insurgent you support must show a genuine capacity to win even without your help.

Was that a skeptical snort I heard?

Consider our War of Independence. True that war was a defensive insurgency, where the goal was simply to establish a no-go zone for a remote government without any goal of tossing the current regime out, but the principles are identical to those applying to the offensive variety.

Despite excellent diplomatic representation in Paris by the overwhelmingly popular and influential Ben Franklin, the French held off until the Continental Army had defeated the British at Saratoga, an act that proved the Americans might win without assistance. This took much of the risk out of aiding the insurgents.

Risk to the French was further reduced by inventing the concept of "plausible deniability" nearly two centuries before the Eisenhower Administration coined the term. This was done by furnishing material aid through a dummy private company. (For those of you who play Trivial Pursuit, if it still exists, the name of the front corporation was Hortelez and Company.) In addition, French Army officers were encouraged to take leave and visit the scenic American colonies.

Regarding both Afghanistan and Iraq, the US did not wait to see if a domestic insurgent group with a genuine capacity to win against the two regimes existed. In Afghanistan the probability of a successful insurgency was set back considerably when Osama bin Laden performed a service for the Taliban chief, Sheik Omar, by arranging the hit on the only credible, militarily effective opposition leader. The situation in Iraq was different.

In Iraq there was no internal figure capable of mounting a successful insurgency. There were no giants, only dwarfs. The current administration seized upon one of the dwarfs, perhaps the smallest of the lot and decided he would be our man in Iraq. Our man, Chalibi, hadn’t lived in Iraq since Jimmy Carter resided in the White House, but he looked good in a suit and had a fine line of patter which was believable to those who knew nothing about Iraq and Iraqis.

Leaving poor personnel decisions to the side, the reality was stark. The best opportunity the US had enjoyed for fostering and aiding an offensive insurgency came and went in the first few weeks after the first war in 1991. For reasons that will give mounds of dissertation materials for future generations of history PhDs, the H.W. Bush Administration declined to take the chance.
A decade or so later that left only one apparent choice: invasion.

The goal of the invasion was, above all else, removing Saddam Hussein and his regime. The definition of victory which follows from the goal must have been the capture or death of Saddam and his senior lieutenants. The theory of victory was derived from the military mottos quoted earlier: Shoot, move, communicate in order to Find! Fix! Destroy!

With Saddam and his henchmen safely under the ground or behind bars, presumably the Iraqis, good democrats one and all, imbued with the spirit of pluralism and free enterprise, would rise up gratefully and create a new government acceptable to the US. Dream on, Mr Vice President. Only in your wildest hopes, SecDef Rumsfield. Keep on hallucinating, Mr Wolfewitz, Mr Feith. Maybe in your favorite video games, Mr President. Trouble is, this is the real world.

Afghanistan without the presence of a dynamic, charismatic figure of proven military and inter-tribal diplomatic skills presented an almost identical problem. Defeating the Taliban forces in the field was difficult enough. (A fair argument that the US and its allies didn’t defeat the Taliban can be made, but not here, not now.)

Time to get a grip on the realities of the human terrain. Only then can an assessment be made regarding whether we should sign a covenant with death or bite on the contract with defeat.