Memorial Day

The holiday we know today as Memorial Day started as a commemoration to Northern troops who were killed or died of disease during the War Between the States.  There were many to mourn.  The fatalities both North and South were massive, the largest ever experienced in relation to total population size by we Americans.

The awesome butcher's bill was the consequence not only of the size of the armies involved or the new technologies of killing developed and fielded during the war.  The greatest single cause of the body count, a body count so large as to permanently change the American way of warfighting arose from the nature of the war.  The American Civil War was a total war of national survival for each side.  The struggle was existential with a capital "E."

Since the guns fell silent over the battlefields of that war nearly one hundred fifty years ago, the US has engaged in only one war which might be described accurately as an existential affair, a total war of national survival.  That war was, of course, World War II.

Even if the Imperial Japanese government had not made entering the war easy as well as obligatory, there would have been no realistic way in which the US could have sat on its hands much longer.  It was apparent to many thoughtful people that desirable as the peace of isolation might seem, it was an impossible dream.  A world dominated by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan would have constituted a world entirely too hostile to both the defining core values of our country as well as its national interests to be long endured.

World War II may not have been as it has been termed "the good war" as no war can be said to be "good," but it was a most necessary war, a justifiable war, or, to be brutal, a least-worst option sort of war.  By the time the Japanese representatives signed the instrument of surrender in September 1945, the US had fought two existential conflicts, two wars of national survival in eighty years.

A lot of men were killed in each of these existential wars.  Only the fact that each war was existential and total provides justification for the great loss of life.  The lives of these men made and preserved the nation-state.  Without their violent deaths, the US would not have become and remained what it has been.   The modern United States, indeed, much of the modern world, has been erected on the corpses of these men.

(A point of personal privilege here.  The Geek cannot stomach terms such as "sacrifice" or "gave their lives" or "fallen," or any of the other commonly used terms in a vain attempt to cover up the brutal reality that these men were killed.  None sought out death.  Death, violent death, was inflicted upon them.  These men had done to them what they would have done to their enemy had the toss of fortune's coin only gone differently.  There ain't no way around it: War is a matter of killing or getting killed, of getting or getting got.  It cannot and should not be prettified.)

All  of the other wars we Americans have fought over the past century and a half, the Spanish-American War, World War I, the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, all the myriad of skirmishes, interventions, raids, humanitarian relief missions gone awry, were not matters of national existence nor even material national interest but rather national policy.  All were limited wars in support of policy.  Arguably, most were neither necessary nor justifiable in any realistic way.

Being wars men were killed in all.  A lot of men.  Even the lowest cost of these many nasty little policy exercises saw scores of American men killed.

After the Civil War, the American view of war and how to fight it became one not of avoiding war but rather of finding ways to both fight and win which resulted in the fewest number of Americans being killed.  More than any other state, the US sought and employed technologies of killing which were most effective at the lowest risk to American lives.  The hectatombs of the War Between the States taught Americans that there is nothing heroic in getting killed.  As General George S. Patton Jr. put it, "You do not win by dying for your country.  You win by making the other sonofabitch die for his."

Even though the US has been very successful at limiting friendly deaths, the reality remains that American troops are killed in the course of limited wars in support of policy.  More importantly, these men are killed without the ultimate justification that their deaths preserved the nation from existential obliteration.

It is for this basic reason that We the People question and finally turn against the continuation of limited wars in support of policy should such not be successfully completed at a low body count in short order.  Our repugnance for "small" wars being waged for obscure reasons of state has had several equally negative ramifications for the way in which the US approaches the difficult subjects of national security interest and coercive diplomacy.

One of these is the predilection of administrations (of both parties) to oversell the war or to overstate what is at stake in the conflict or to expand the mission so as to make it more politically acceptable.  The prototype for all three courses of action was President Woodrow Wilson's framing of our entrance into World War I.  But the Wilson approach was eagerly, if even unconsciously, followed by later administrations.

The War in Vietnam was oversold and overstated.  So too was the invasion of Iraq.  The operation in Afghanistan was reprogrammed from one of a purely punitive nature to the impossible goal of "nation-building" in order to put a proper gloss on the underlying reality.  Even the most easily justified war in support of policy, the Korean "police action," fell prey to mission-creep following the invasion of Inchon when the goal changed from restoring the status quo ante to that of eliminating North Korea as a functioning state.

Another effect of addressing the American distaste for wars in support of policy is that of prevarication.  While the "Jive at Five" press briefings of the Vietnam period stand as the towering monument to this particular attempt to stave off the effects of public disenchantment, the same dynamic has been at work in every American war following World War II.  Successes have been magnified.  Difficulties have been downplayed.  Mood music intended to sooth the potentially savage beast of political disaffection has been played often and loudly.

Worst of all, the various administrations have seen it necessary to build coalitions in order to give the appearance that the US was not fighting a limited war in support of American policy and national interests but rather was acting in concert with other states in a common, preferably universally supported, cause.  By avoiding the public appearance of fighting a war by and for ourselves, the administrations have undercut the clarity of purpose, certainty of goals, and unity of effort necessary to bring the war to a quick and successful conclusion.

By yoking ourselves to coalitions which may be far more an artifact of diplomacy than an organic expression of coinciding national interests, the US both complicates the problem of pursuing critical national interests and renders the achievement of these interests less rather than more likely.  The chimera of multilateral action is sought in order to lower the political risks to an administration which seeks to wage a limited war in support of a policy which it perceives as critical to national or strategic interests of the US.

The history of limited war shows that such wars are the least likely to be successful.  That is, they are the least likely to lead to a better state of peace at the end of fighting.  In the past, these wars have been quite unlikely to provide a firm base for permanent peace in the contested area.  In largest measure this has been the consequence of failing to understand properly the linkage between diplomacy of the negotiation sort and diplomacy of the fighting variety.

More than a contest between organized bodies of armed men, a war is a contest of political wills.  Each party to a war is wagering that it has the greater political will.  Each party is putting the lives of its men at risk as a demonstration of its determination to win.  Battles are a way of upping the ante, corpses are chips pushed to the center of the table.

One of our limited wars in support of policy--the one in Korea--put this linkage in stark relief.  The most bitter as well as most pointless combats were waged over obscure terrain features of no intrinsic value while the armistice talks were in progress.  It took the Americans a while to tumble to the fact that these battles, exemplified by the one at Pork Chop Hill, were being used by the Chinese as a demonstration of their political will--and a test of ours.  The side which was willing and able to quite literally "waste" the greater number of lives was the side possessing the greater political will.

This key lesson taught by the killing of Americans on bleak hillsides in Korea during 1952 and 53 had been forgotten fifteen years later as the North Vietnamese used the same process during the Paris Peace Talks.  Nor has the US remembered these lessons today when they would be applicable to combining talking and killing in the context of Afghanistan.

To put the matter simply and in no way oversimplified, the only way in which the limited war in support of policy can achieve a better state of peace and thus begin to justify the leaving of American bones to (metaphorically) bleach in some far away place with an unpronounceable name is the proper combination of the diplomacy of talking and that of killing.  Simply declaring victory and heading home or (as in Vietnam) establishing a "date certain" and then cutting off all funding for the war neither redeems failure nor makes right the killing of American personnel.

In the total war, the existential struggle between peers, there is no substitute for victory as General MacArthur properly noted.  However, the reality in the limited war in support of policy is different.  In this kind of war, the "small" war of limited lethality, limited means, limited scope, and limited goals, there is a substitute for victory.  The substitute is the achievement of a better state of peace by demonstrating superior political will.  The means of doing this is the proper linkage between the killing kind of diplomacy and the palaver variety.

Talking does not mean--nor should it--that the shooting must stop.  Nor does the continuation of the shooting render talking either impossible or unproductive.  Now and in the future when wars will continue to be of the limited policy directed sort, the realization of the crucial nature of political will is needed along with a commitment to the capacity to talk and shoot at the same time.

Sure, it is a multitasking approach, but we Americans invented the concept so we ought to be good at it.  Why not give it a try in Afghanistan?  If we can  pull it off there we will be in very good shape for the many small wars yet to come.

Bad Analogies Equal Bad Results

There are a lot of people--including senior decision makers, even heads of state--who think by association.  You know it, the this-reminds-me-of-that approach to assessments and deciding.  It is this mental characteristic which results in the often used and frequently quite misleading reasoning by analogy.

Foreign policy, even matters of war and peace, are quite susceptible to reasoning by analogy.  A complex current situation is understood and explained by use of an overly simplified, normally highly inapposite analogy.

So it was during the Vietnam War when criticism of the war was typically rebuffed by use of the Munich analogy.  "Anything less than total commitment to stopping Ho Chi Minh is appeasement."  During the run up to the Gulf War twenty years ago, President George H.W. Bush constantly used Hitler as an analogy for Saddam Hussein--a comparison which was unfair to both men.

During the weeks preceding the more recent invasion of Iraq, the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and many others assured each other and the American public that the invading troops would be greeted by cheering multitudes, bouquets of flowers, and general rejoicing in a manner identical with the reception given the American, British, and Canadian forces during the days following the landings in Normandy.  It was a heartwarming picture, easily reinforced by ancient black and white footage of joyously delirious French crowds waving American and other flags.  The idea like the grainy images were so appealing, so easy to believe, so seductive, so---

Wrong.  Utterly, absolutely, totally wrong.  The analogy used with such abandon by the planners and decision makers right up to the Decider Guy in the Oval equating the warmth purportedly extended to the Allied "liberators" in France with what would be expected in Iraq was tragically, disastrously wrong.  The tragedy and disaster alike came from the fact that planning for the day after was based upon an analogy which was not only indescribably wrong for the Iraqi context but was without basis in the reality of the days following 6 June 1944.

Wait one, Geek!  The old newsreels did show crowds of French and Belgian citizens kissing the GIs, the Tommies, tossing flowers, waving bottles of wine and champaign.  That was the truth.  All contemporary films, news reports, letters, even private diaries attest to that.

You bettcha, bucko.  The crowds, the cheers, the kisses were all genuine.  But, none came from the actual combat zone.  All happened after the breakout from the beachhead and the drive across France was in full sway with the Germans beating feet in all out retreat.

In the combat zones, in the areas surrounding the landing zones, the picture was completely different.  Different and not so encouraging.  Where the fighting occurred, there were no cheers, no kisses, no flowers, no joy.  The diaries, the letters, the censored and therefore never published dispatches, the intelligence reports all agree.  At best, the local folk, the French who cowered in fear as the bombs fell and the shells exploded, as their cities, towns, and villages were ground to dust by the white hot plow of war, were at best sullen, withdrawn, and anything but kindly predisposed to their "liberators."

The only reasons that armed resistance did not break out from the wells of local hostility were the lack of effective organization and, more importantly, the very high density of Allied personnel on the ground--some two million just before the breakout nearly two months after D-day.  Still, the anti-Allied sentiments were clear in attitudes and behavior alike across the ruins of Normandy.  The intelligence and civil affairs documents of the day make that obvious.

The joy of liberation sprang forth only in those areas of France and Belgium where there was no, or, at worst, minimal combat operations and concomitant damage and death.  Good feelings were directly proportionate to the lack of dead bodies and broken buildings.

Whether from pure ignorance or volitional misinterpretation, the Bush-Cheney neocon crew used a false analogy so neither the administration nor the military nor the American and world public were prepared for the instant outbreak of violence in the wake of the invasion.  There were no cheers.  No flowers tossed at the onrushing tanks.  No plethora of kissing.  There was a lot of looting.  A lot of shooting.  A lot of resistance both silently sullen and noisily hyperactive.

There was also a lot of local settling of old scores.  This aspect of the invasion and its aftermath could and should have been predicted on the basis of the World War II in France analogy.  The settling of assorted political scores, debts, vendettas poured swaths of blood the length and breadth of France.  This sanguinary effusion was well known at the time as it is by later generations of historians.  Only the Bush/Cheney crew seemed unaware of it with the result there were insufficient men and resources to deal quickly with the problems of "liberation."  The results of that are well known by all of us.

Bad analogy brought bad results.

But all the use of bad analogy does not exist on the American side of the hill.  It resides as well, for example, in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Iranian president Ahmadinejad commented during his recent Great American Tour that the US had never been involved in a "real war."  He opined that not even World War II, generally considered to be an excellent example of the breed, constituted a "real war."  The Ahmadinejad view of history and war has been echoed repeatedly by senior Iranian governmental and military officials over the past several years.  The constant refrain of Iranian military supremacy and an equivalent lack of American competence in the field can be amusing or infuriating in its unrealistic appraisals.  However, it is based on reasoning by analogy.

The prevalent Iranian understanding of war is predicated quite unsurprisingly on the Iraq-Iran War, which started thirty years ago.  To the Iranians, particularly those of Ahmadinejad's generation, this singularly bloody and inconclusive multi-year conflict is the paradigm of modern war.  The Iranians have produced a narrative of the war which celebrates their steadfastness, bravery, willingness to die, ability to accept fatalities unequalled since the brutal combat on the Eastern Front during World War II.  The narrative always concludes that the ability of Iranians to die in windrows and keep on fighting constitutes the strength of their nation and thus its ability to best the US or Israel or whoever.

The problem comes in that the analogy of the Iraq-Iran War is utterly, totally, and absolutely wrong.  The ground truth behind this evaluation is the simple fact that the war was not a modern war.  Rather it was a Medieval war fought with modern weapons.  This is a crucial distinction which renders the analogy fatally dangerous to the Iranian decision makers who rely upon it in making choices regarding the confrontation with the US and other Powers.

The Iraq-Iran War was Medieval in its essential nature.  There was no concept of strategy, operations, or tactics beyond that of hurling masses of poorly trained or completely untrained men in assaults on prepared positions.  In this respect the Iraq-Iran War was far below even the stereotyped and unsuccessful approaches to combat seen on the Western Front between November 1914 and early 1918.

Even the use of missiles during the so called "war of the cities" phase of the Iraq-Iran War did not differ from the use of trebuchets tossing corpses and incendiary payloads over the walls of fortified towns during Medieval campaigns.  There was no aspect of modern mobility, modern command, control, and communications, no correct coordination of movement and firepower.

In comparison, the battles of Crecy or Agincourt were modern.  At least these showed tactical and weapons employment features of a novel sort with the result the British won at low cost against a larger French force relying on outdated methods.

Ahmadinejad and company do not show any appreciation of the American way of war either in its classical sense as exhibited in World War II or even in Korea and Vietnam or in its more evolved form exhibited in both Iraq wars as well as in Afghanistan.  Ever since the mind altering experience of the War Between the States, the US has emphasized the expenditure of materiel over the sacrifice of American lives.

During World War II or Korea or even Vietnam, the US was willing and able to heave awesome amounts of lethal stuff down range if such would save American lives.  In these conflicts the US was relatively oblivious to collateral damage and civilian deaths--as the French in Normandy found out on and after 6 June 1944.  It was not that the US intentionally sought civilian collateral damage.  Rather, it was the technological limitations which precluded any true precision which might have spared lives and property.

The imperatives of changing international norms as well as realpolitik considerations in interventionary operations combined with a need to assure that every round fired had a maximum probability of scoring a first round kill to propel the development of ever more accurate weapons and munitions.  It is not that the US now wants to wage bloodless war, but the need to limit collateral damage while enhancing the potential of killing those in need of being killed have become preeminent.  The ideal weapon from the American perspective now is one which will kill the target first time, every time, without splattering any viscera on the "innocent" person standing at the target's shoulder.

The result is the capacity to inflict awesome devastation on a target.  Whatever must be hit will be hit.  And, if hit, will be obliterated (hopefully leaving enough DNA in the smear of protoplasm to allow identification).  Even hardened or mobile targets cannot escape engagement and obliteration.  A very great deal of money and brain power have been expended on assuring the ability to find, engage, and destroy even fleeting and intentionally elusive targets.  As much has been spent on developing means to penetrate hardened targets with non-nuclear munitions and pleasingly destructive effects.

Coupling this weapons and munitions approach with a highly evolved intelligence, command, control, and communication system gives the US a capacity to find, fix in place, and destroy targets which is hard to match and impossible to exceed.  This constellation along with the superb mobility and flexibility of US forces constitutes genuinely modern war.

While the Iranians may have progressed somewhat beyond the Tenth Century level of warfare, which constitutes their paradigmatic experience, there is no reason to assess their level of competence in modern war to be anywhere near that of the US or other civilized states.  As a result, any reasoning by analogy with the Iraq-Iran War will prove (literally) fatal to the Iranian regime.

Bad analogy brings bad results.  Or, should the Iranians insist on basing their calculus of defiance on their narrative, the results may as severe as the ending of Iran as a functioning state.

Oh, well, it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of guys.

ADMIN NOTE: Ignore the frustrations of the anti-spam comments as the Geek invites, welcomes and will post all on topic comments.

Hiroshima At Sixty-five

Given the current political fad so eagerly embraced and augmented by President Obama's recurrent rushes to say, "I'm sorry," it is not surprising that the Japanese are riled over the failure of the US to apologize for having dropped its first wartime atomic bomb on Hiroshima. There is a very good reason not to offer any sentiments of regret, even those of the most pro forma nature.

The reason?

None are needed. None should be expected. None are deserved.

As the Geek discovered when teaching classes in military and diplomatic history to students who included Japanese kids, the educational system in Japan has sanitized its presentation of the history of World War II to the point of utter absurdity. Intelligent, well-educated young Japanese had never been told, for example, of their country's culpability in the unprovoked aggression against China. Nor had they ever heard of the way in which the Imperial Japanese Army took over foreign policy with the view of inaugurating a period of conquest driven expansion in Asia and across the Pacific.

These students, some of whom had spent a year or more at prestigious Japanese universities, were clueless about the tortured process of diplomatic disinformation which preceded the attacks upon Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and Singapore. None had the slightest idea that the attack upon Pearl Harbor was carried out without any formal warning or ultimatum.

In a similar manner none had ever heard of the "Rape of Nanking," nor the "Bataan Death March," nor the brutal abuse and malignant killing of prisoners of war in Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Korea, or in the home islands. They were equally unaware of the manner of defense practiced by the Japanese armed forces and the horrific human costs both Japanese and Allied which those defense to the death tactics extorted.

Finally these students, and, by inference the larger Japanese public, had no knowledge of the plans laid by the Imperial high command for the final defense of the home islands. As a consequence, they had no awareness as to the cost in Japanese lives, primarily civilians dragooned into the defense efforts, that would have been had the war not been brought to an end by the twin atomic bombings of August 1945.

Literally millions of Japanese would have been killed in combat operations or would have died from disease or starvation incidental to the protracted war. US planners low-balled the estimate of American fatalities at roughly a half million. (Later, after the victorious Allies had had a chance to review what the Japanese planned and the resources for defense they possessed, it was concluded the Americans would have been lucky to get away with less than a million killed in action or died of wounds.)

As was hoped (but not really expected), the psychological shock of the two atomic bombings brought the Emperor to the side of the outnumbered "peace faction" within the government. This assured the war would end. The change in the mind of the Emperor did what nothing else did, not the first bombing alone, not the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, not the steady march of the Western allies to the home islands--it brought the war to an end.

The two bombs exacted a very large toll of lives. More than the Americans expected since the effects of radiation, both prompt and delayed, were very poorly understood. Leaving aside the delayed impact of ionizing radiation, the butcher's bill at Hiroshima was not out of line with those caused by the "conventional" firebombing of Tokyo in mid-March 1945 and, relative to the population, less than some of the other fire raids.

In any event, the fatalities resulting from the atomic bombs delivered to Hiroshima and Nagasaki were at least one order of magnitude less than the minimum body count which would have attended the execution of operations Coronet and Olympic. It is a truth not a mere assertion that the use of the atomic bombs saved many, many lives compared to the cost of invading.

Like an invasion, the use of a prolonged maritime and aviation imposed siege on the home islands would have strengthened the political hand of the Imperial General Staff, particularly the Army. The Army high command more even than the Imperial Japanese Navy sought a war to the death, a war of sufficient length and cost to the Americans so as to preserve the honor of the Army and the "dignity of the Emperor."

The "dignity" and "honor" might have been preserved. Then again, they might not have been given the American view that the longer the war, the harder the peace.

The atomic bombs, both of them, not just the first one, the Hiroshima "Little Boy," obviated the matter of honor and dignity, made moot the human cost of a longer, harder, infinitely bloodier war. One of the greatest tragedies to ensue was the inability, no, the unwillingness of members of the American Left and the Japanese public to accept that the two atomic bombs were necessary weapons properly employed which served to save lives both American and Japanese.

An even greater tragedy comes in the willful ignorance of the Japanese public regarding their own history. It is this ignorance that propels the desire for an apology from the US for making the war shorter, less bloody.

It boggles the mind to hear demands for an apology. The US should apologize for ending a war which it did not start? A war which was forced on the US, the Chinese, the Australians, the British, the many people of Asia and the Pacific--for this we should apologize? We should apologize for the millions of Japanese then who were not killed because we ended the war by using the bombs--after issuing a clear warning? We should apologize to the many descendants of those undead Japanese who are alive today because we used the bomb rather than let the Army of the Emperor prolong the war to salvage their "honor?"

No apologies are required. None should be expected. None should be desired. And, no American today should even harbor the slightest twinge of guilt over our having ended the war in the way we did.

Certainly those of us who are alive today because our fathers or grandfathers did not die in the projected invasion should not regret but rather celebrate the courage of the Truman administration in making the decision to use the bomb--and end the war.

Travel Tips For The President

President Obama is off for a week in Asia. Along the way he will meet and butt heads with the jefes grandes of several key countries including Japan, South Korea, and China. Since the Nice Young Man From Chicago is both new at this sort of thing and is given to set piece speeches rather than interactions--and because he seems to have a reflexive need to apologize, the Geek with his customary modesty offers a few tips for the President Who Wishes Foreign Affairs Would Just Go Away.

Mr President, there is no need to apologize to Japan for (A) The Open Door Policy (remember that's the one which made eventual war between Japan and the US over the Empire's actions in China the next thing to inevitable); (B) The inconsiderate nature of FDR and the US Navy in parking all those darn battleships in neat rows at the 1010 Dock just inviting an unannounced Japanese attack; (C) The zeal, ferocity, and skill with which the US fought and defeated Japan in our private little part of World War II; (D) Using the atomic bomb on two Japanese cities (after all without the use of the bomb the war would have been far more deadly to both Japanese and American participants while, at the same time, the American public would not allow the Truman administration simply to blockade the islands and wait for starvation and disease to kill enough civilians so that the Imperial government would toss in the towel).

Mr President, there is no need to apologize to the Koreans--both North and South--for either the haphazard way in which the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee divided Korea along the 38th parallel. Likewise there is no need to say, "We're sorry," for Secretary of State Dean Acheson having failed to include South Korea on the American side of the line dividing the US from the Soviet spheres of influence although this oversight played a strong role in the approval of the Northern invasion by noted humanitarian and far-sighted statesman, Joseph Stalin.

There is also no need to apologize for the US and thus the UN having terminated hostilities in Korea via an armistice rather than a peace treaty. Neither the Communist Chinese nor the North Koreans were willing to do this, so why should the US and the South Koreans? Sure, the armistice made for a half century and more of conflict between the two Koreas, but it was the only viable option at the time. And, progress toward a permanent peace has been blocked far more by Pyongyang than Seoul during the past forty or so years.

Now, Mr President, don't go apologizing for American support of Chiang kai Shek over Mao during and after World War II. It was a good Democrat, FDR, who made the crucial decision in the first place even though our military commander in the region, Joe Stillwell, let FDR know in clear terms that Chiang was corrupt, brutal, inefficient, and not given to effective fighting against either the Japanese or his Communist opponents. At the same time the picture from both State Department and OSS personnel was quite positive to Mao and equally negative on the Nationalists.

After the war the Republicans (who you don't particularly like) in the China Lobby made diddly darn certain that the US would continue to pump aid to the ChiNats of Chiang. The Truman administration was excoriated brutally for not sending troops, and its attempts at political defense were unavailing. The Chinese intervention in the Korean War made it impossible for a more realistic appraisal of our relations with the "Two Chinas."

You, Mr President, know what politics and political fighting can be like, so no harm, no need for apology. At least not to the Chinese.

Apologies might be in order to the American public for the decisions made by your predecessors, Clinton and W. Bush. The trade liberalization with China so eagerly pimped by Mr Clinton and expanded (for different ideological reasons) by W. Bush has cost the US five million or more jobs, and, simultaneously provided China with the wherewithal to become a major military and diplomatic power. Sure, the lower cost of Chinese goods may have lowered costs to the consumer--but at what long term expense?

Keeping in the economic vein, it might be appropriate to apologize to the Chinese for your administration's efforts to keep the dollar "strong" and, therefore, the yuan "weak." If you were to follow your "apology" with actions designed to "weaken" the dollar and "strengthen" the yuan, the results might be good for the US.

Letting the dollar float, or, quite probably, go into a short duration free-fall would be good for all hands. It would lower the US trade deficit. It would lessen the Chinese (potential) leverage on our foreign policy by threatening to "dump" some of its trillion bucks in US Treasury Bills and Notes. Conceivably, it might move some manufacturing jobs back to the US.

With the sole exception of the dollar-yuan issue, Mr President, apologies ill befit an American president. Apologies are generally perceived in most of the world at both the popular and governmental levels as a sign of weakness. Whether you or any of your fellow "progressives" are enamored with the idea or not, the US is a Great Power.

Great Powers, and particularly the US, must take clear policy stands, stick to them, and act according to them in a predictable and consistent manner. Other powers, both Great and lesser, can then decide how they are going to respond to the US policies--whether, for example, to go along with them or oppose them.

You see, Mr President, a willingness--a perceived eagerness--such as you have exhibited to apologize for past American policies indicates a basic uncertainty on your part as to the American place in the world. It implies an inability to lead. It even implies a willingness to resign Great Power status.

The last time this happened in American history was in the wake of the Vietnam debacle and the Watergate Affair. Both Presidents Ford and Carter were seen as weak and vacillating with results which emboldened enemies ranging from Moscow to Tehran. Given the state of the globe today neither the US nor the rest of the world can afford another period of perceived irresolution on the part of the occupant of the Oval Office.

Being a Great Power does not mean that policy mistakes have not been made or that they will not be made in the future. But, being a Great Power requires never saying "We're sorry."

The Road To Victory

Well, bucko, how about a little bit of historically derived military theory? You know, strategy and all that. It might be rooted in the past, but the implications for today are as obvious as a hippo in the bathroom.

As the coach said, "We gotta get back to the basics!"

There is nothing more basic than understanding the four ways by which military strategy has sought victory during the long and very bloody history of the human race. While most of the examples referenced are drawn from Western experience, trust ole Doc Geek, war and the four avenues to victory have existed everywhere wars have been waged.

The most basic avenue to victory is that of annihilation. The target of military operations is the enemy's forces in the field. The goal is the total destruction of these forces in one climatic battle, or as an alternative, a short series of battles.

Back when armies were small and combat was always face-to-face, the battle of annihilation was quite possible. The most often used examples of the battle of annihilation were those of Hannibal against the Romans during the Punic War. Not once but twice Hannibal encircled and obliterated the hapless Roman legions, thus establishing the paradigm of what has been the general's wet dream ever since.

The growth of mass armies and industrialized warfare seemed to spell the end of annihilation as a viable avenue to victory. But, when a massive asymmetry exists in firepower, mobility as well as the integrity and efficiency of command and control systems, the battle of annihilation can still be brought to pass. This was demonstrated dramatically during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Now for the bad news. Annihilation does not bring victory in the sense of successful hostilities termination. What happened to Hannibal following his two splendid little victories? Yep, that's right, nothing. He and his small army wandered around Italy for awhile, went home, and eventually his successors were destroyed by a Rome which had never lost its political will even when its legions were gone.

You see the parallel with Iraq, right? No victory parade regardless of "Mission Accomplished" banners and presidential grins. The political will of those Iraqis who feared, loathed, or hated the US and other foreign interlopers made their position plain. Sectarian rivals (which really means political opponents) did the same. The result was no hostilities termination let alone conflict resolution. (That's right, the two terms are not identical with implications which will come later.)

Although the term got a bad rep during World War I and an even worse one in the course of the American War In Vietnam, attrition is a perfectly valid and often employed avenue to victory. Once again the target of military operations is the enemy's forces in the field. The goal is the progressive reduction of these forces over a relatively long time. This implies the winning side can kill its opponents faster than they can be replaced--and faster than the opponent can do the same to the eventual winner.

It is important to note that while the strategy of attrition is valid, it has never been responsible in and of itself for victory. Attrition has always looped into one of the next two avenues.

The third route to victory is erosion. Implementing the erosion strategy requires the target be the enemy's material capacity to wage war. This means destroying or disrupting the enemy's factories, agricultural base, transportation infrastructure, and other facilities critical to the continuation of the war. In the process, the enemy's forces in the field are attacked only in so far as doing such serves to overstretch and eventually break the lines of supply and the goodies fed into those lines.

The Anaconda Plan developed by Winfield Scott for defeating the Confederacy was primarily one of victory through erosion. The strategic bombing campaign of World War II, particularly in Europe, also sought victory by emphasizing erosion. The enormous resilience of industrial states with a large infrastructure and a population which can be mobilized effectively for the war effort can successfully resist erosion. This remains true even when it is multiplied in effect by attrition of the forces in the field.

What is remarkable about World War II in Europe is not that Germany was defeated. What is remarkable is the amount of time, effort, and blood the job required.

Parsed closely all three avenues outlined point to the supremacy of the final route to winning--enervation. Enervation, the progressive reduction of the enemy's political will to continue the war--is the most effective of the several alternative approaches. It is also the least well understood by military and governmental decision makers and planners. It is also the avenue least likely to be consciously chosen.

Even though the American War of Independence was won because the British elite lost the will to continue, Americans refused to accept the reality that it was not the Americans winning but the British losing which brought independence in its wake. Nonetheless, it was an American, William Sherman, who first implemented the strategy of enervation with deliberate premeditation.

Sherman, who had lived and worked in the south, understood the conflict of loyalties which could be created in the mind of Confederate troops if their homeland seemed wide open to Yankee threat. He conceived his March to the Sea as being the mechanism which would cause the collapse of morale in the Confederate forces as well as the will to continue the war in the minds of civilians generally.

The immense success of General Sherman's concept can be seen in several ways. One of the easiest is to look at one surrender. No, not the famous one of Lee to Grant. Rather the surrender to Sherman of Johnston's army, which at the time it surrendered was intact, under arms, well ordered, and securely ensconced in the mountains of North Carolina from which it could have waged guerrilla war for years. But, all hands saw no point in the exercise after the great sweeps of the March to the Sea and its successor, the March Upcountry.

Centralized, authoritarian regimes are both more and less able to resist enervation than democratic, decentralized ones. This can be seen in World War II.

The Germans never lost political will. Not until the Russian tanks and Mongolian infantry were in Berlin and the Anglo-American forces in Western and Southern Germany did the Nazi remnants toss in the sponge. Mass surrenders by German troops did not occur until the last few weeks of the war when the prospect of being taken captive by the Russians served as the stimulus to call out "Kamerad" as the Yanks or Brits drew near.

The Soviet central regime showed the same characteristic as their Nazi opponents. Once Stalin recovered his nerve a few days into the invasion, the Soviets never lost their will to resist and re-conquer. (Even if the Americans always feared the separate peace and based too much policy on this self-generated delusion.)

The story in Imperial Japan was quite different. Here the High Command, both civilian and military, was, in the main, in favor of fighting on even in the face of probable defeat. The bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima did not alter the views of these men. The mushrooms over Japan did change the mind of one man--the emperor. Hirohito made the call, "we must bear the unbearable, endure the unendurable."

On occasion enervation may occur without intent. This is what happened in August 1918 at the battle of Amiens. The British breakthrough so unnerved the war lords, Hindenburg and Ludendorf, that they advised the Kaiser the war must be ended as they could no longer guarantee the capacity of the Army to continue.

The German army had a lot of fight left in it as was shown in the aftermath of Amiens. The German population was suffering under the twin scourges of the "famine blockade" and the coming of the great flu pandemic, but the army could have kept on keeping on just as the Americans and the Allies expected. But, nerve once lost, political will once abandoned, cannot be regained. The road to Allied victory was paved by the weak knees of the German High Command.

The US lost its war in Vietnam through a case of self-inflicted enervation. This does not excuse nor ignore the raw fact that the US military fought the war in the wrong way so as to hand the political will advantage to the North Vietnamese. Nor were the antiwar protesters in and of themselves particularly responsible for the loss of political will stateside.

The sapping of American political will came from a complex of reasons poorly understood at the time and not deeply investigated by historians through the present. Basically, the combination of the draft, high American body counts, and the absence of any particular likelihood of anything approximating success were responsible for the steady loss of political will. Americans were used to "crusades" against an identifiable "evil" enemy against which we would muster all our strength and see "good" prevail in short order. We were not particularly enthused with limited wars in support of policy as the Korean War had shown a few years earlier.

Political will is a tough critter to target. This is particularly true when the enemy is a set of self-organizing groups bound together by nothing more tangible than a series of religiously rooted beliefs. In comparison to the motley and ever changing assemblage of Islamist jihadist groups and their individual members, the US is a soft target for enervation.

Absent the spur of an attack upon us or strong, decisive leadership capable of articulating a compelling reason for continuing a seemingly endless war with no prospect of anything approaching a "victory," American political will is fragile, easily enervated.

It is not surprising that support for the war in Afghanistan is slowly dropping. The surprise is that it lasted this long.

The US will not win against the Islamist jihadists whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere by enervating their political will--at least not in the foreseeable future. We can, however, defeat ourselves by losing our political will.

The real foreign policy challenge for President Obama and the others in his administration is not the specifics of a strategy for Afghanistan where success will remain quite elusive if one wants success to be defined by a Taliban surrender or the creation of a fully functioning state governed from Kabul. The real challenge is maintaining the political will of We the People lest we travel the avenue to victory called "enervation"--a victory for the jihadists.

Probable Reactions To A Proposed US Course----

There was a time when the Geek feared and loathed more than any other imaginable words, a tasking which started, "Estimate probable reactions to a proposed US course of action." Those dull, heavy, pedestrian words sent far more chills down the Geek's back than the shrill shriek of a fragment passing a few inches from his ear.

The cause of fear was simple. There is no way the estimate writer could possibly be both right and certain as to his correctness. Neither could the senior level "decider" personnel.

That is the horrid, brutal truth about policy choices. They are never certainly correct, no matter how carefully they are researched, staffed, and refined. There is, in fact, as we all should know, nothing more inherently risky in life than making a choice, a decision. Particularly if that decision involves something of greater, more lasting import than what to eat tonight, which sneakers to buy, or, even whether or not to accept a date.

There are three bases for the risk residing in decisions.

The first is that every choice made limits the number of future options. The result is a cone. At the top, the number of possible options is wide. Each decision, each specific option selected, results in the cone becoming ever more narrow. Finally, at the bottom tip, the options are effectively reduced to zero or, best case, one.

The second reason decision making is so darn risky is that both the direction and the magnitude of the response(s) to the choice cannot be accurately predicted. This is the necessary consequence of the reaction being essentially non-linear in nature. This means that there is no direct, predictable linkage or proportionality between the input (the decision) and the output (the reaction(s) by the target of the decision and others.) The relation between course of action and response(s) to that course is what math types call a "chaotic" or "emergent" system.

(A parenthetical note: One can be certain that a coercive decision, a course of action intended to apply pressure on the target will result in enhanced opposition to the desired result. To put it simply, pressure consolidates long before it fragments. The analogy between the process of turning loose snow into an ice ball and the effect of coercion on a target is precise.)

The third reason is the nature of human group dynamics. This is a universal, running from the smallest, most informal groups to the largest, most complex. All human groups are self-organizing systems which means they are all emergent in nature. Self-organizing systems are dynamically stable, ever changing, and remarkably immune to external pressure.

(Don't believe the old Geekmo? Check it out for--and on--yourself. Presuming you are alive, your body, your mind, your personality are all self-organizing emergent, dynamically stable systems which can resist an extraordinary amount of external threat and assault--at least by a virus and other icky little critters even if not fast moving pieces of metal.)

The three features of the context surrounding each and every policy choice, each and every "proposed US course of action" conspire, no, combine, to assure that the Law of Unintended Consequences will be invoked to greater or lesser extent. That's right, each and every option chosen will call in the Unintended Consequences in all their many forms and furies.

"Prove it, Geek!"

Well, bucko, the Geekmeister can try. Fortunately this is not a court of law and proof beyond a reasonable doubt is not required. History abounds in examples, indeed it can be argued fairly that most of the dismal history of the human race is the record of the Law of Unintended Consequences being applied and the effects of its application. The Geek will confine his examples to a few from recent US foreign policy.

When the US blithely announced the "Open Door" policy regarding China, it (inadvertently or not) established a cone of options regarding its relations with the emergent Japanese Empire. This high spirited action of attempting to provide a level playing ground so that all countries could plunder China equally rather than allowing only one to do so cast the US in the role of special protector of the territorial integrity and governmental sovereignty of an enormous land mass filled with people who owed no particular allegiance to a rapidly transforming governmental system which was both in the process of self-organization and establishing existential or at least functional legitimacy.

The Open Door was intended to be a sort of warning shot across the bows of both Germany and Japan. The latter was still in the process of self-organization following the Meiji Restoration, which meant it was in the full bloom of new nationalism and its concomitant, militarism. The American course of action increasingly was seen in Tokyo as an attempt to limit the "natural growth" of the new Empire.

The Naval Arms Limitation Treaty of the Twenties was not so much the "step toward peace" that it was touted to be as another course of action which both limited the cone of options and stimulated the Japanese to a non-linear reaction. The reaction was to exploit the categories of warship not covered by the Treaty, submarines and aircraft carriers, as well as to cheerfully violate on a wholesale scale the provisions of a later agreement barring fortification of Pacific Ocean possessions.

The unforeseen (but eminently foreseeable) rise of National Socialism in Germany coupled with the Great Depression and the triumph of the Army in internal Japanese politics to provoke the Japanese multi-step invasion of China. The US had few "courses of action" available to it.

The course of action selected was a continuous ramp-up of economic sanctions. Starting with chopsticks and ending with a total embargo on the sale of scrap metal and refined petroleum products, the sanction regime was truly (to use SecState Clinton's term) "crippling." This left the Japanese with few responses possible.

Tokyo had precisely two choices at the bottom of the cone: A humiliating capitulation to US policy demands or war. They chose war hoping that the US, being preoccupied with the greater threat presented by Nazi Germany and stunned by the naval attacks on Pearl Harbor and the invasion of the Philippines, would accept an accomplished feat.

The Japanese were wrong in their hope. But, the resulting war opened the door in China not for a universal opportunity for exploitation but for the success of the Communists of Mao. War, more than any other human interaction is an emergent system, with consequences which are totally non-linear and, thus, impossible to predict. The ChiComs were a self-organizing system existing in a resource rich environment, thus, their success was both certain and easily predicted, as some US diplomats and military personnel did (at later great personal cost.)

At war's end when the US made a set of casual, off-hand decisions, it insensibly created cones of options with respect to both the Korean peninsula and Indo-China. The US was preoccupied with the "big matters" of dividing Europe, the beginnings of the Cold War, and converting from a wartime to a peacetime economy; the margins of Asia simply were too unimportant to deserve any real attention. (Not unlike Osama bin Ladin's declaration of war on the US in the mid-Nineties.)

Had it not been for the context of the rapidly blooming bifurcate world of the Cold War, the hasty and negligent decisions regarding the division of the Korean peninsula and the repatriation of the Japanese forces in Indo-China would not have mattered. But, the context made these two courses of US action--dividing the Korean peninsula at the thirty-eighth parallel and allowing the Chinese Nationalists and British to temporarily occupy Indo-China while ignoring the de facto government in the north of Vietnam headed by Ho Chi Minh--"world historical" in effect.

Both cones rapidly narrowed until the US seemingly had no options except war. In the case of the slow slide into war in Vietnam, the US effort at coercion resulted in a non-linear increase in North Vietnamese will to resist, to accept pain, to endure, to outlast, to win.

The same narrowing cone of options, non-linear response, and self-organization can be seen in miniature in the months leading up to Operation Just Cause when the US military became the world's largest SWAT team in Panama. It can be seen in larger form with the US course of action regarding Cuba and, years later, Iran following the Islamic Revolution.

In these last two examples, Cuba and Iran, the net effects of the assorted US courses of action have not only been to limit options, but also to strengthen the adversaries. Both Cuba and Iran following their respective revolutions were self-organizing systems. Their processes of self-organization were facilitated by the US opposition. Even when the American actions were relatively low scale in impact (as in severing diplomatic relations), the consequences were non-linear in effect. Greater actions, such as sanctions, had greater but still not truly linear results.

In a very real sense, the Law of Unintended Consequences dictated what has happened in both countries. They exist in their present form in large measure because of US actions over the years.

Enough said.

The real deal is how decision makers can limit the application of the Law of Unintended Consequences. How they can choose policy options which have a less open ended, less non-linear outcome?

The very first requirement is to recognize that human systems are self-organizing. This means there are very real limits as to what can be imposed from without. The historical record demonstrates convincingly that outsiders can only effect the self-organizing features of a target population on the margins. The pace of events can be accelerated or retarded--slightly. The precise direction of self-organization can be modified--slightly. But, self-organizing systems cannot be started or stopped simply by external parties--unless the outsider is willing and able to create a desert and call it peace.

Because systems are self-organizing, it is critical to act as soon as possible while the emerging system is new, friable, and most susceptible to inducement or coercion. The only two profitable areas which can be addressed are the new leaders or the context from which the new self-organizing system draws its membership. Since each system--and each leader--is unique, there is no "one size fits all" approach or combination of approaches which will be viable. Each must be addressed in terms relevant to it and it alone whether those terms are soft or very, very robust.

The second requirement which must be met if the Law of Unintended Consequences is to be limited in its application is the narrowing of decisions. Decisions, the course of action, must be sharply focused, narrow in application, and directed toward a limited, even a very limited, goal--an achievable end, not a global one. For example, in Afghanistan the goal of killing Talib and Taliban leadership as well as that of al-Qaeda was appropriate, but the open ended notion of nation building was not.

By narrowing the focus it is possible to reduce to a manageable level the probabilistic smear of reactions. The broader the goal, the fuzzier the focus of the course of action, the more impossible it is to evaluate probable reactions--other than to say they will be bad if not worse for us.

Government leaders seem to have a pathological need to believe that the apparatus they control is somehow both all-powerful and always right. The governments of major countries have this pathology to a high degree. They are to be pitied for this delusion.

The reality is that self-organizing systems have a power far surpassing that of any government or any armed force--unless the goal is to work with the emergent system on the margins, to smooth the roughest edges, to advance favorable trajectories with the goal that the favorable ones will crowd out the unfavorable ones. That reality loops to another one, one which is particularly detested by decision makers who crave certainty (and they all do.)

The second reality is simply that events never play out according to either desires or intents. As Clausewitz correctly observed, "no plan survives first contact with the enemy," no attempt to impose external will on another nation will go according to planned intent. Dynamic stability, which is the normal course of human organizations, assures resiliency--and resistance.

There it is. The general answer to the requirement that one assess "probable reactions to a proposed US course of action." Now you are smarter than the Deep Thinkers in Beltway Land.

Learn From The Past--And, Then, Get Over It

Release the "atrocity" pictures! Don't release the "atrocity" pictures! Prosecute the "torturers!" Don't prosecute the "torturers!" Nancy Pelosi is a down-to-the-bone liar! Nancy Pelosi was the innocent victim of CIA misleading obfuscations!

Along with those battling slogans, buried in the midst of the shouts of accusation, is the single most important issue regarding "torture" or "enhanced interrogation techniques" or the commission of "atrocities." Also lost in the fog of accusation, counter-accusation, and tear filled wails over the (mis) conduct of US personnel both military and civilian is a single, unpleasant but very plain truth.

First, the issue which really matters. It is best put as a question: Does the mix of stress filled techniques reportedly used by American interrogators produce better, more accurate, more useful information in a more rapid way than methods which do not rely on physical pressures?

Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who worked the USS Cole bombing case among others, maintains that the measures used by CIA interrogators were inherently ineffective compared with other, less physically stressful means. Former Vice President Cheney vehemently disagrees with this. In the ex-veep's view the robust methods produced vital, life-saving, actionable information when milder techniques failed.

Unless and until the documents demonstrating the accuracy of Mr Cheney's perspective emerge, the Geek, using his direct and vicarious experiences, will have to lean toward the view expressed by Ali Soufan. There is, however, one very important caveat: The Geek never had to deal hands on with a hard-core leadership cadre from an Islamist jihadist group. Nor, has his years of research dealt in sufficient, verifiable detail with the experience of those who have had to interrogate Islamist jihadists.

The historical record coming from such venues as the Algerian War of Independence and the ongoing Israeli counter-terror and counterinsurgency efforts provide a very fuzzy image of mixed results. Indeed, one can find apparent support for both the Cheney position and that of former Special Agent Soufan.

For example, during the Battle of Algiers the French forces used genuine torture on a wide spread basis. The French methods went far, very far beyond those employed by the Americans. Arguably the extreme methods used by French troops did produce actionable intelligence. It is equally to be argued that the consequences of the use of torture outweighed, both politically and psychologically, what ever positive results may have been achieved.

Perhaps the most important unintended, perhaps even unforeseen consequence of the French use of torture was the erosion of support for continuing the counterinsurgent campaign in Algeria among the members of the French elite, the country's academic, press and political classes. The emergence of knowledge regarding the methods used by the Paras in Algiers ignited a fire of condemnation which in turn caused a further factionalization of public opinion both in France and throughout the West.

Another, almost as important a consequence, again neither intended nor, perhaps foreseen, was the "free pass" given to the Algerian insurgents, the National Liberation Front, for their use of torture, summary executions and indiscriminate lethal violence against civilians. This Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card looped together with the Algerian Arab Muslim population's increased willingness to side with the National Liberation Front's war of independence.

All in all the French military success in the Battle of Algiers, brought about in large measure through the vigorous use of intelligence obtained in part from the use of torture was more than offset by the loss of political will in France and the increase in political will among the native Algerian people. The Law of Unintended Consequences can assure that battles "won" can result in wars which are well and truely lost.

The former Feeb was, perhaps, warning of this possibility.

The possibility, battles "won" so that wars are lost, would be enhanced significantly by the release of the "atrocity" imagery sought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Human Rights Watch (HRW). The release would serve no useful purpose, despite the beliefs of these groups and others of like mind.

The release would, as SecDef Gates warned weeks ago and President Obama asserted yesterday, would cause an upsurge, quite probably of a dramatic sort, in actions against the US and its troops. Certainly, given the history of such triggering acts as the release of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison photos or even the Danish cartoons, the release of the currently contested images would make the tasks of bringing stability to Afghanistan and Pakistan much more difficult.

As was the case with the French in Algeria, these photos would serve to convince many to overlook the far, far worse violations of human dignity and rights committed on a daily basis by Taliban, al-Qaeda and other Islamist jihadist entities. The use of these photos to infuriate the easily infuriated people who have a desire to lash out at the Great Satan through martyrdom operations would be easy.

The net effect of any release would not only be more American deaths. No. The net effect would be the prolongation, perhaps the expansion of Islamist jihadist actions. This means, quite simply, a hell of a lot more death. A hell of a lot more fear. A hell of a lot more human misery. More deaths, more misery, more fear, more pure human suffering without any redeeming result.

The seekers after their version of Truth should consider these implications. This is particularly the case for outfits such as HRW which proclaim their concern for human rights, since the most basic right of all is the right to be left to live.

While either losing or refraining from exercising the "right" or, better, the desire to embarrass, to humiliate the United States may deny a measure of emotional satisfaction, it would have the benefit of saving lives, lessening fear, reducing misery. And, isn't that a higher goal than getting one's rocks off bashing Uncle Sam?

The sad, underlying reality which rests, unspoken under these photos is that in all wars, at all times, involving the soldiers and para-military forces of all combatants, atrocities have been committed. In all the wars of the Twentieth Century, the memoirs, the combat diaries, the oral histories of those at or near the sharp edge of battle are universally redolent of atrocities. No armed force has been immune to the killing of civilians, the slaughtering of those who have or are trying to surrender. None have failed to mistreat prisoners of war. None have been absolutely scrupulous in their observance of the laws, customs, niceties of war.

US troops have been no different from those of other nations. Yes, times and sensitivities of a culture, a society may change, but the actions of those at war change far less.

During World War II, no one objected to Life magazine having a photo spread which showed among other images, a picture of an attractive young woman writing a letter to her guy over in the Pacific area of operations. On her table was a skull. It was identified as the skull of a Japanese soldier sent to her as a token by the guy "Over There." There were few objections to this clear violation of the American Articles of War (and moral sensitivity.)

During the American effort in Vietnam there were rumors, reports and periodic photos of grunts with trophies. Strings of ears, fingers or other members retrieved from the bodies of dead Viet Cong or North Vietnamese troops were whispered about, talked of and photographed to the revulsion of a few, the anger of some and either indifference or flat out glee to many.

In both of these previous American wars, the atrocities and violations of law were balanced in the public mind by accounts of despicable behaviour by the opposition. It was not so much that two wrongs were seen as making a right so much as that the wrongs committed by Americans were more than overmatched by those committed by the enemy.

From all reports the images in controversy today do not come within long, long cannon range of the photos in Life magazine in WW II. There are none showing grinning grunts with a string of Iraqi body parts held out for the camera like a prize swordfish taken off Florida.

The problem comes in the lack of countervailing imagery. The photos of women disfigured by acid attacks, the mutilated bodies of Americans killed in action--or killed after having been captured by the Islamist jihadists. There are no photos of Iraqi men, now fingerless or (in a couple of cases) lacking lips because they had been caught in the sinful act of smoking.

Again the argument is not that two wrongs make a right. The argument is that war itself is an atrocity rich environment in which American and other Western forces are remarkably restrained even by the (sometimes) absurd standards of today--particularly as held by the Blame America First crowd.

ACLU, HRW and kindred groups want the pictures released to the world not because it will somehow serve truth and justice. It has been acknowledged that Americans who have been proved to have violated the Laws of Land Warfare, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, have been dealt with appropriately. Justice and transparency have been served.

A similar case can be made against the proposal that a "Truth Commission" be established to root through the "torture" allegations and defenses. No truth will nor can emerge from such an exercise. It would inevitably be incomplete since some, (most?) information which might be relevant to an inquiry must of necessity be classified. Without an absolutely, utterly full release of all data and documents, can the conclusions of any "Truth Commission" be evaluated, let alone trusted. (And, who can ever be sure that all relevant documents have been released?)

Any "Truth Commission" no matter how allegedly "non-partisan" would inexorably dissolve into the usual slinging of diatribes between "progressives" and "reactionaries." Only those hostile to the US and the West would benefit from the ensuing search for truth, accountability and transparency (to employ the customary buzz words.)

Embarrassing and humiliating the United States is not a worthy goal. Placing the troops of the US and its allies at greater risk for no reason beyond satisfying emotional needs or political agenda imperatives is not laudable. Provoking more violence, more death, more fear, more misery is not an appropriate activity for groups committed to the protection of human rights.

It is for many (including the Geek) unfortunate to leave the issues of "enhanced interrogation techniques" unaddressed in totality. It may be unpleasant to accept the reality that American troops can, on rare occasions, perpetrate actions which can be seen legitimately as atrocities.

But, it is important, very important, to recognise that US personnel and institutions learn from experience, admit mistakes, try not to repeat them. It is just as important to realise and even celebrate the vast gulf which separates our conduct of and behavior in war from that of the Islamists jihadists we oppose.

Those Darn Pesky Civilians

No matter where you look, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Gaza all you see are those doggone civilians getting in the way of a good, honest war. It's getting so a commander can't order up an air strike or an artillery stonk without some bunch of civvies getting blown up. Heck, darn near any snuffy who wants to bust caps after taking fire is going to find some local yokel standing there, picking his nose and blocking a clear field of fire.

Then there are the other civilians. This bunch wouldn't get caught dead in a combat zone. They value their butts too much for that to happen. No. With exceptional bravery this crew stays far, far away from wherever the bullets fly and bombs blow. This civilian assembly is comprised of the High Minded who worry overtime about the effects of war on civilians.

Not to oversimplfy matters, the Save The Innocent Civilians Coalition is at root the anti-war component of the Society of the Perpetually Indignant and Concerned whose wrinkled foreheads and lips ever pursed in disapproval use the plight of civilians caught in the battle zone as the tool of choice to end all wars now. They make no distinction among wars. From their perspective there is no such thing as a justifiable war, not even one undertaken in national self-defense.

The purported "humanitarian crises" which are an automatic part of all wars, and an important aspect of guerrilla, insurgent and similar conflicts provide a mediagenic cover story for the genuine goal of ending war as a feature of human experience. Ironically, one of the major consequences of the STICC campaign is to prolong war so that more civilians suffer more death, fear and misery.

Going to the videotape we quickly discover that with the possible exception of the 150 years separating the end of the Thirty Years War and the start of the Wars of the French Revolution, civilians in the form of impediments, refugees and corpses in the wake of armies have always been a feature of conflict. Civilians have often been the direct targets of military operations.

Whether Sherman's campaign against civilian morale and political will embodied in both the March to the Sea and the subsequent March Up Country, or the Prussian counter-partisan efforts in the Franco-Prussian War a few years later, the intentional targeting of civilians has been a feature of modern war. The refugee generation effects of the German advance across the Low Countries and France in 1940 and the later British firebomb raids against German civilian residential districts brought the intentional targeting of civilians to a new high (low?) in military strategy.

During World War II the High Minded were conspicuously silent in denouncing the "humanitarian crises" which characterised the war. They were equally speechless in the years immediately following V-E Day. Literal hordes of Displaced Persons (DP's they were termed by lips curled in disdain) thronged through the wreckage of Europe. The diseased and famished in the millions crowded DP camps (many of which were former Nazi KZ Lagers) with nary a whisper of concern.

The lowering of the Iron Curtain announcing the onset of the Cold War changed that. Reasons of state, the need for political stability as seen from Washington brought the plight of the Displaced Persons to the center of the stage. Humanitarian relief efforts culminating in the more or less altruistic capstone of the Marshall Plan sought to bring order, health and eventually even prosperity to the displaced, the war ravaged, the hopeless of Europe.

In a delightful exercise in cynical and self-serving politics, the Soviet Union sponsored front groups which sought to offset not only the effects of the Marshall Plan but also the American nuclear superiority with a "peace offensive" which focused on the effects of war, particularly one in which the US would use its atomic weapons on the civilians of Europe and, by implication, the rest of the world. With remarkable rapidity the High Minded signed on to the Stockholm Peace Appeal and its successors.

The rights and immunities of civilians caught in war became a new and growing focus of those who opposed war, all war under all conditions, against any enemy, even a country given to aggression. Horror stories (some of which were true) abounded as wars proliferated on the margins of the Cold War.

Credence was immediately, seemingly automatically and without question, granted to the claims by North Korea and China that the US was engaging in biological weapons in the Korean War. The patent absurdity of the North Korean and Chinese accusations met no pushback from the High Minded.

New stories of atrocities committed by the Israeli forces during the War of Independence were circulated and believed without investigation. While some of the atrocity tales were absolutely true, no mention was made of the role played by the Arab states in the movement of Arabs from the new state of Israel. Apparently the High Minded of the STICC persuasion never met a negative view of the Americans, or the Israelis which was disbelieved.

Neither did they meet a narrative of atrocious behaviour by Soviet or Soviet leaning states which they found credible. The same might be said of accounts of cruelty or human rights abuses suffered by civilians at the hands of authoritarian regimes in the Arab or Asian or African states.

During the years of American involvement in the Wars in Vietnam the US was recurrently damned for "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" for its forces' employment of napalm or tear gas. Despite the exceptional care the US exhibited in its conduct of air operations against North Vietnam, the American fliers and those who commanded them were repeatedly accused of causing unnecessary civilian casualties and misery. The STICC camp frothed and spewed over each and every civilian casualty which might have occurred at the hands of American forces.

At the same time silence reigned over the recurrent violations of the laws and customs of land combat committed by the North Vietnamese forces or the Viet Cong guerrillas. Not a single word was made of the civilian slaughters which were repeatedly committed by the anti-Saigon forces.

The Mai Lai massacre was rightly and resoundingly condemned, not only by the High Minded it might be noted, but also by members of the American military. However, the literally dozens of Mai Lai level killings conducted by the Viet Cong or the Peoples Army of North Vietnam went by unnoticed and uncommented upon by the fine folks of STICC.

(Can we say, "Double standard?")

The double standard was at work during the long and bloody years of the Iraq-Iran War. Both the European and American members of STICC seemed to be out to a very long lunch during this exsanguinary and ultimately inconclusive effusion. Long range and highly inaccurate missiles fell on Iranian cities. The mullahs of Tehran rounded up brigades of child-soldiers and sent them into the electrified swamps as human minefield clearing units. The Iraqis used chemical munitions against unprepared Iranian troops--and their own dissident citizens.

The High Minded yawned and looked elsewhere. Only when an American warship caught in a fit of buck fever shot down a civilian Iranian airliner did the Protectors of Human Rights Everywhere sit up, take notice and shout, "War criminal!"

The US inspired coalition which waged the 1991 war to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait was relatively immune to the usual accusations of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity." There were several reasons for this (temporary) immunity. The first and most basic was that the war was fought in deserted country. The pesky civilians were conspicuous by their absence. Also important was the obnoxious nature of the Iraqi regime. Saddam was such a totally unpleasant person that it was hard to work up sympathy for the Iraqi civilians. Finally, the war was over with quickly.

(Another, perhaps far from unimportant contributory factor was the recently concluded collapse of the Soviet Union and the confusion this engendered in the minds of many High Minded people.)

In the wars of recent years from the First Intifada through to the current affrays in Afghanistan and Pakistan, civilians, civilian corpses and the clamor of "humanitarian crisis," "crimes against humanity" and shrill denunciations of the US or Israel have become the common themes. The TV images of Israeli soldiers shooting at insult, rock and Molotov cocktail throwing Arab teenagers sensitized the eyes and minds of the world's public--particularly the opinion molding elite--to the fundamental asymmetry of the Mideast conflict.

From that beginning the double standard demanded by the High Minded of STICC has grown to monster proportions. The adversaries of the West, particularly those who oppose the US and Israel have become increasingly sophisticated in the use of civilians, their misery, fear and death, as weapons of war. Taliban, al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist jihadist horde have discovered and are effectively exploiting the key vulnerability of Western military doctrine--the use of firepower and technology to limit friendly casualties to a politically acceptable level.

In pursuing the exploitation of this vulnerability, the assorted adversaries which includes the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the pioneer of many of the use-civilians-as-weapons tactics, have been powerfully assisted by the High Minded, by the members of STICC. To put the matter simply but not oversimplified, without the force multiplier provided by the anti-war advocates working under the cover of concern for civilians and avoidance of humanitarian crises, the efforts to exploit the critical vulnerability of the Americans (and others) would have gone in vain.

It is of more than passing interest that the High Minded never, but never, demand the trigger pullers and suicide bombers and fighters who hide behind women and children to conform their tactics to the customs and laws of land warfare. There are never any calls that the fighters of LTTE or Taliban or al-Qaeda or Hamas or Hezbollah show even the most rudimentary respect for the presumed immunity of civilians from military operations.

Hamas, which acts under the color of being the de facto government in the Gaza Strip, is never denounced by the High Minded for having taken no effort to separate their fighters from the civilian population. Not even the United Nations has noticed that Hamas both allowed and encouraged the "defense forces" of the Gaza Strip to place their bunkers, fighting positions, munitions dumps, rocket launching facilities in the midst of densely populated residential areas.

Of course, Hamas wanted their trigger pullers intermingled with civilians. Naturally Hamas wanted their rocket launching teams to set off their deadly missiles from the courtyards of mosques, schools or housing complexes.

To do any thing else would be to expose their brave and fearless fighters for Palestine to the overwhelming capacities of the Israeli Defense Forces. By sticking offensive capacities in civilian centers Hamas sought to both neutralise Israeli capabilities and place a (false) onus on the IDF for any and all civilian deaths and injuries.

The High Minded played along with Hamas. This is not to the credit of the anti-war and humanitarian crisis dreading crowd. Regardless of the lofty minded nature of the goals when they climbed into bed with a criminal terrorist group, the High Minded, the STICC members, besmirched themselves and their cause.

By being in large measure responsible for the Israeli government calling off Operation Cast Lead before the military capacities of Hamas had been degraded fatally, the High Minded have assured that more civilians will die, more will live in fear, more will be miserable. They have assured the war will last all the longer. Great job, people!

Taliban and its kindred groups are doing the same in Afghanistan and Pakistan. While decrying the US air strikes in Afghanistan, no one either in Afghanistan or elsewhere in the world has demanded that Taliban stop using civilian residential compounds as bases of fire. Nor has there been any demand that Taliban call for a truce when the American or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops return their fire.

By the customs of land warfare, Taliban should call for a brief truce during which the civilian occupants of the compound can be evacuated to a place of safety. If Taliban had any ethic transcending survival and victory or even the slightest shred of genuine concern for the well-being of their fellow countrymen, they would remove the civilians before the shooting started.

It is Taliban, not the United States and its allies, which violates the doctrine of proportionality in the hills, deserts and villages of Afghanistan. It is Taliban, not the US and its allies, which seeks civilian deaths as a necessary adjunct to combat.

It is Taliban which, like LTTE and Hamas, seeks to blunt the military advantage enjoyed by its enemy though using civilian as shields. Taliban, again like LTTE and Hamas or Hezbollah, seeks victory through the exploitation of civilian corpses and the sympathy of the High Minded, the efforts of the anti-war people hiding behind the tenets of STICC.

Contrary to the innuendo of the High Minded or apologists for the Islamist jihdist groups, American military doctrine and the operations or tactical expressions of doctrine well recognise the immunity of civilians as well as the doctrine of proportionality. It is Taliban, al-Qaeda, LTTE, Hamas and the rest of that monstrous regiment that do not.

The United States must push back against the innuendo and accusations of the adversaries as well as the High Minded tergiversators of STICC in both public and private diplomacy. We must forswear apologies and explanations. Rather the necessary message the US (and others) must deliver repeatedly is this: We take all possible precautions to avoid civilian casualties, misery and fear, but we will neither place our troops at inordinate risk nor unnecessarily prolong the war in order to give our enemies an advantage.

We Americans will not play the game according to the other side's rules. We will not allow their lack of ethics, their intentional use of civilians as weapons of war give them any advantage.

To do so is to surrender to evil.

The President Misuses History One More Time

In common with most politicians (OK, most people) the current POTUS likes to select snippets of history which line up with whatever position he is arguing or justifying at the moment. At last night's prime-time news conference, Mr Obama took a historical leap to support his contention that outlawing "torture," even when effective in acquiring information was a good idea because it was moral.

The president averred that no less a statesman and nationalist than Winston Churchill refused to continence the use of torture against German prisoners of war or detainees during the height of the Blitz. Purportedly the reason for this stance was its immorality.

Let's go to the videotape.

If, indeed, the oft repeated but never properly documented Churchill tale is true, there is a very good reason for refusing to torture or otherwise "intensively interrogate" Luftwaffe prisoners--other than the fact there was no intelligence imperative to do so. The mistreatment of German PoWs would result in the similar mistreatment of British soldiers, seamen and airmen in Nazi hands. The fear of quid pro quo was an absolute deterrent--on both sides of the battleline.

Churchill's lack of concern over morality per se is readily demonstrated from the well-documented historical record.

The British PM had no problems with authorising the fire bomb raids against the civilian residential districts of German cities. The intent of the attacks was put forth bluntly in numerous internal memorandums. The intent was to kill as many civilians as possible. And, terrorise those who were not killed.

Unlike the Blitz where the German bombing of purely civilian targets (defined here to be limited to residential districts and excluding civilian facilities such as railroads, docks and warehouses which had military utility) was the result of technological deficiencies which precluded accurate bombing of war related factories, the British air effort as it matured in 1942 was deliberately aimed at killing and terrorising the civilian population of Germany. The British knew what they were doing. They knew so well that they lied to the American government and public.

The British government from the PM on down believed (correctly) that the Americans were too High Minded and otherworldly to understand and support the terror campaign. So, the British referred to it as "the worker de-housing program." Churchill and the others did this with a straight face.

In the interests of inter-Allied cooperation and harmony, the administration of FDR did not dissent from the British effort. However, when the Brits tried to convince the Americans to join with them in incinerating German men, women and children, the attempt failed. Our ostensible reason was the unsuitability of American aircraft and crew training to missions other than daylight precision bombing.

The real deal was different. The senior leadership of the Air Force as well as the civilians in charge of the government recoiled at the notion of intentionally targeting civilians. While none of these men were opposed to killing civilians, they did insist that such be an ancillary, a corollary to the bombing of factories or other infrastructure components directly useful to the war effort.

The reasons for rejecting a pure counter-civilian terror campaign were twofold. The first was the belief it would not work. The reasoned conclusion that far from undercutting morale or war production, a terror effort would strengthen both. The accuracy of this view was amply demonstrated by post-war analysis of production statistics that proved production went up along with the tonnage of bombs dropped and number of workers "de-housed."

The second reason was moral. There were men, both in uniform and in mufti, who would not continence direct attacks on civilians. This course of action, even if effective, would be morally wrong.

It is evident that Churchill did not buy the morality argument for a nanosecond. But, he needed the US and was unwilling to argue the morality issue with FDR, although there are hints that he wanted to.

If Winnie was annoyed at our moral sensibilities in the area of terror bombing, he would have thrown a hissy-fit over our reaction to his big idea for (a) revenging the Blitz and (b) making D-Day unnecessary. Winston Churchill, the alleged paragon of morality according to the president's understanding of history, wanted to bomb Germany's urban areas with anthrax.

That's right, bucko, anthrax. Its qualities and characteristics were well known to the British. The boffins of that "tight and sceptered isle" had experimented with it in the pre-war years. It had been successfully weaponized. An early production plant was churning the spores out in limited quantities at an old immigration inspection station in Canada.

The Americans, working from British specifications, were in the process of building an industrial production plant capable of making the bug in ton quantities when Churchill developed (Whether on his own or through the machinations of his science advisor, Lord Cherwell, is unclear.) his notion of using biological warfare to devastate the German population.

Even the architects of the "worker de-housing program" were shocked and horrified by this idea. Apparently morality is flexible. Burning civilians to death is OK. Germs are not OK.

The argument against the anthrax employment was based, however, not on matters of morality as it was well understood that such would cut no ice with Winston. Rather, the British opponents contended correctly that use of anthrax would render large parts of Germany uninhabitable for generations after the war. This effect would run counter to Churchill's post-war goal of stopping the plague of Bolshevism east of the Elbe.

At the same time the Americans, having caught word of Churchill's idea, dragged their feet in getting the Pine Bluff production facility on line. Without American industrial grade production, there simply would not be sufficient agent to undertake the scheme. This deliberate slow-down was undertaken with the tacit approval of FDR, whose moral sense would have been outraged by the concept.

Yes, bucko, FDR was a very moral man when it came to methods of fighting war. Don't believe this?

Come with the Geek to the island of Iwo Jima. The Navy and Marine Corps planners knew that this island would be an extremely tough place to take. It was very heavily fortified with miles of deep tunnels and hundreds of well sited bunkers. Further, the place was exceptionally well defended by over 22,000 troops who were quite willing to die in place. Thus, it would be very costly in American lives.

The planners suggested that the US stand off-shore and drench the place with mustard agent. They argued that the nature of the defenses and the utter absence of civilians as well as the prior use of chemical weapons by the Japanese in China combined to make Iwo Jima the perfect place for the US to resort to chemical means.

The capstone of the planners' argument was simply that the use of mustard gas would save American lives. Potentially, the landing would be unopposed.

FDR said, "No." He would not go down in history as the first American president to authorise the use of chemical weapons in a non-retaliatory context. His reasoning was strictly moral in its basis.

The moral sensibilities of FDR were responsible for 6,825 American combat deaths.

Whether that exchange was justified can be argued endlessly.

Fairness requires mentioning that FDR raised no moral objection to the use of mass firebomb raids against Japanese cities. These raids were far more destructive than their equivalents in Germany burning square mile after square mile of predominantly civilian residential districts. President Roosevelt accepted the argument that the Japanese scattered small factories throughout these residential areas. That was true, but it can be argued that the killing of more than 100,000 civilians in one raid on Tokyo was not morally justifiable.

Certainly, FDR's successor had no moral qualms regarding the use of nuclear bombs on Japanese targets in the hope that doing so would save the US from the enormous losses forecast to accompany an invasion of the home islands. The moral correctness of Truman's decision can be and has been debated without any resolution for the sixty-four years since the mushroom clouds grew over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

President Obama was poorly advised to cherry pick his history. Not only did he pick the wrong cherry, the internal contradiction of his position on the use of "torture" in the interrogation of captured terrorist suspects illustrates the the problem of using morality as a basis for policy.

Prohibiting the use of mustard agent against Iwo Jima cost American lives. Its use would have saved an unknowable number of these.

Similarly, the use of nuclear weapons against Japan saved an unknowable number of lives, both American and Japanese. The non-use of this option might have resulted in no additional loss of life given the collapsing nature of Japanese political will and economy under the twin pressures of the blockade and Soviet invasion of North China. We will never know. History's tape runs in one direction only with no rewind possible.

The president acknowledged that the use of waterboarding and other, similar methods did provide useful information. Information which may well have saved lives. At the same time Mr Obama implied that the use of "torture" lessened American security by eroding the firm moral foundation which separates us from our Islamist enemies.

This (to quote one MSM outlet) "nuanced" view of the torture controversy has not ended debate and doubt over whether the morality of means outweighs considerations of effectiveness. It is a question which is fundamentally unanswerable.

It is an ancient question, asked countless times over the centuries. Does the end justify the means or do evil means pollute even the most worthy of ends?

The president provided no answer. He didn't even ask the question correctly.