Apropos of American fighting tactics—which bear on the question of strategy—read Bing West’s stories in Slate at:
http://slate.com/id/2109447/entry/0/

and the previous two days entries accessed at the bottom of the page. I’m not sure that we CAN’T take these folks out a bit at a time.

NO ONE predicted we could do what we did in Afghanistan with the resources we used. Anyone guessing such an outcome with such forces would have—quite reasonably—been derided as a fantasist. I’m not sure that proves any point but this—-I’m not so sure you guys are right about Iraq. I think this is a complicated variant on a whole new ballgame in military strategy and tactics.

Seriously, now, we forget how absolutely astonishing and unpredictable the Afghan operation was. I know Mr. Auster has acknowledged the force of it, but I’m not sure you are using all the lessons from it to draw your conclusions about Iraq.

An awful lot of this stuff is improvisation with new weaponry and techniques and strategies that evolve from them. As it should be. How would pummelling Fallujah into the ground indiscrimately help anything? Would it be more “forceful”? I doubt it. I think we’re looking at something like Tet. The “insurgents” are throwing everything they have into the balance now, because they MUST. Let’s see where it gets them!

Jeff

I’d like to believe that Jeff is correct, but if he is, why has it taken the American forces all these months—18 months?—to get around to this? Bush has not led. Leadership is explaining what you’re about, and bringing people with you. Bush just gives boilerplate about staying the course, but so undemanding and rah-rah has the right half of America become that boilerplate satisfies them.

Who wants to volunteer for untried theories of warfare unless they are designed to reduce the volunteer’s casualties? Pummeling Fallujah into the ground is unnecessary as similar actions have always been. I am sure our military knows this but not the media. Pummeling is a red herring pushed by the non-American media and the dominant American liberal media.

We have always had enormous military advantages in the anthill of Iraq, and Mr. Auster is merely questioning Mr. Bush’s failure to use them 18 months earlier. He has not suggested pummeling anything (although I would if it were effective). Mr. Bush is finally using our advantages to great effect, it would appear. Neither Mr. Auster nor many have a clue as to why this was not done 18 months earlier. I can only conclude massive foolhardiness. Indeed, a welcome victory at a low cost in American lives will serve as evidence of Mr. Bush’s foolish behavior: my guesses are he hears what he wants to hear or is overawed by an intellect such as Carl Rove. That is, he is weak on some leadership qualities.

Would anyone during the halftime of a football game have been unable to give the OK to go into Fallujah 18 months earlier?

As to Mr. Henri’s point, there are always Bush fans who inform us that everything Bush does, especially when it seems to make no sense, is part of some incredibly clever, multi-part strategy he has worked out.

Mr. Auster’s point becomes clear if one imagined Clinton were president and had acted as Bush has acted. NR, NRO, Sean Hannity, et al, would be vilifying Clinton, and rightly so, as a mushy-headed liberal bleeding heart North Vietnamese sympathizer. (I would have responded sooner but somehow the Net is not always compliant.)

Paul Henrí wrote:

“Pummeling Fallujah into the ground is unnecessary as similar actions have always been.”

I dimly recall a rather large city, Dresden was the name, that became a much, much smaller city after RAF and USAF were done with it. The consesus seems to be it helped quite a bit.

Couple cities in Imperial Japan had brief experience with pummeling of radioactive kind. Perhaps it was unnecessary, but I note that enemy promptly capitulated.

In recent time, an old butcher of Syria, the father of the current young butcher, leveled a small city of 10,000 as a mild rebuke for questioning his leadership style. No such questioning has occured since.

It is not obvious to this observer that leveling Fallujah ia necessarily an inferiour option compare to the option we are pursuing.

Mik echoes my position exactly.

Why should we waste one American life on piddly Fallujah? We have warred around it and basically have left it alone for the entire campaign. Now that Bush won re-election, he apparently feels it is politically viable to lose American soldiers (Marines, mostly) lives there. How disgusting!! Tell me, why isn’t the following question being pummeled on The White House spokesmouth and others:

Q. Why aren’t Iraqi troops going into Fallujah ahead of our troops?

The answer to this of course is the fact the Administration is trying to conceal—that the Iraqi forces are scared crapless and would either refuse to go in or would likely join the enemy and fight us. What kind of “democracy” are we talking about here? The kind where an “army-in-training” can’t be trusted? It sounds to me as though we are wasting invaluable American lives in an exercise of futility. Something is very wrong here. 24 boys lost there already.

Mik raises important points. Perhaps my thoughts will induce further discussion.

Many, including me, consider Dresden to be a tragic, barbaric act. Slaughterhouse 5 is a novel that illustrates the utter waste of German civilians and American prisoners of war. The city was specifically saved until the end, for “greatest effect.” It was not an industrial city but was a city of beauty and culture. Pummeling like that has never worked. Recall Monte Casino, Tokyo, Leningrad, Berlin, and Stalingrad, for example. Indeed, the rubble provides refuge to the defenders. Nuclear pummeling is another story, I admit. Such combat is beyond my sphere of thought, yet I must deal with it.

I agree Japan needed nuclear destruction. Realize though we had no more atomic bombs after Nagasaki and would not have had any for about another year. So we were lucky Hirohito decided to surrender because the Japanese military would not have surrendered. My point is we can’t assume our immense brute force will save American lives. If we had publicly, as we ended up doing privately, granted surrender terms to Japan, we might have ended the war in the Pacific much sooner.

I agree leveling Fallujah is a moral military objective, if it will not hinder us and we have given proper warning. I don’t know whether it will hinder us or the citizens have been given proper warning. We have huffed and puffed so many times, I am not sure I would believe a “final warning.” But yes, I agree in kill or be killed.

As Mr. Auster has previously pointed out, the incoherence of the Bush strategy in Iraq is that it seeks to create a democratic society before the enemy is defeated. You cannot engage in reconstruction while simultaneously fighting the war, at least not if the fighting and rebuilding are occurring in the same place. Leaving aside the quixotic goal of imposing a democracy on a semi-tribal, anti-American, anti-Christian culture, Bush & Co. seem to be treating the present fight against the insurgents in Fallujah as if Iraq contained a finite number of terrorists such that we could kill X number in one place this week, then go to Mosul next week and kill Y number, until we have reduced the insurgency to a manageable size. Iraq’s borders with Syria and Iran are wide open and the number of foreign fighters that can stream back and forth is virtually unchecked. I fail to understand how pummeling Fallujah, while allowing untold numbers of insurgents to flee to other cities, and in the absence of a comprehensive campaign to fight the insurgency in more than one city at a time, can seriously address the security problem in Iraq. Moreover, the Bush claim that the present fight in Fallujah is about the January elections is ridiculous and certainly not even the most committed Bushites can believe that an election is going to solve anything in Iraq, except perhaps to give us an excuse to cut and run.

Manny has pretty well summed up the issue as I see it.

Mr. Levin asks:
“Why aren’t Iraqi troops going into Fallujah ahead of our troops?”

It is possible that the key to understanding Afghanistan vs. Iraq is buried in this question, rather than in technocratic explanations involving new weapons systems and management-of-war innovations.

Maybe my comment was too cryptic.

It is a feature of the “put up a show of leadership” corporate manager that he does not know or care much about the unique aspects of the people he is “leading”. They are merely fungible parts in a production machine. Comparing Afghanistan to Iraq solely on the grounds of weapons systems and battle tactics is a perfect example of the technocratic managerial approach. Afghanis and Iraqis are interchangeable raw materials, people stuck in the stone age but who, if you scratch the surface, want “freedom” underneath; and that desire for “freedom” can be tapped to the advantage of the technocratic manager.

Someone who is a genuine leader would not be taken in by all of this. With all of the genuine technical innovations (and they are legion), at the end of the day the difference is between very, very different groups of people with very, very different expectations and motivations. A _manager_ doesn’t see that, he just sees interchangable “human resources”. A _leader_ would see that, would understand that it is far more important than anything technical, and would make his decision whether or not to lead, and how to lead, based on who he was leading.

In Afghanistan we didn’t lead, but we did “manage” some people in a direction they wanted to go, were well motivated to go. That does not appear to be the case in Iraq. And if that is not the case, it will make all the difference in the world. All the high tech toys and battle tactics will amount to nothing.

Manny makes a number of good points but I take exception to this:

“certainly not even the most committed Bushites can believe that an election is going to solve anything in Iraq, except perhaps to give us an excuse to cut and run.”

10-15 years ago I was close enough to a couple elections in countries where elections were never held or not held for 60 some years.

There is a certain magic associated with the very first free election. Elected leaders instantly become much more legitimate than predessesors. Granted, it was in East European countries with Christian, is somewhat faded background. Magic doesn’t last, as excitement fades away and promised improvement usually don’t materialize, at least not quickly enough.

I don’t know if free election will have the same effect in primitive Muslim society of Iraq. CIA and Middle East academics have totally failed us. We don’t know how Iraqis will react to a free election. Given conspiratorial insanity Arab world is swimming in, I would guess that there is only a small probability that Iraqis will recognize elected goverment as legitimate.

Prabaly there is 80-90 percent chance that new goverment will be considered US puppet and no improvement in situation on the ground will result.

Political leadership and statesmanship are a unique sphere of human activity. Success in business, academia, entertainment, etc., might or might not translate to any success at all in political leadership.

In particular, there is a huge difference between wartime leadership and business leadership. If a business introduces four new products over the next five years, and three of them succeed and one of them flops, then it just discontinues the flop ASAP and reaps the profits from the other three. The CEO is widely hailed for being “bold” and “decisive”. There were probably naysayers in the case of each of the four products. One group was right, in respect to the flopped product, but so what?

On the other hand, if the USA gets involved in four foreign military adventures over a decade, and one of them turns into a flop, the costs are enormous. Lives are lost, military morale and recruitment plummet, alliances are strained, enemies are made, and national prestige and national unity are reduced.

Bush is praised by his sycophants for being “bold” and “decisive”. By all accounts, there is not a lot of debate and obtaining of second opinions before decisions are made. Unfortunately, the costs are not quite the same as a failed marketing campaign.

In connection with Mr. Coleman’s comment, it was after reading the interview of Bush in the September 6 Time and the more recent long article on him in the New York Times magazine that I got a clearer sense of how his mind works that really troubled me. According to him, it’s a combination of instinct to make a decision, and prayer to make him feel confident in the decision. This fit and explained so many things he had done, where it seemed there was no serious thought about a course of action either before the decision or afterward.

But how does this “instinct plus faith” approach fit with the technocratic management style that we’re supposing he follows? I assume that business techniques emphasize careful thought about all the options and negative possibilities of a given course of action.

I guess my main point is that _leadership_ and _management_ are two very different things. Technocratic management can be done very well, or it can be done very poorly, and it is a necessary component of running a business (and presumably a government). But it is not a substitute for leadership.

Some of the most effective corporate leadership I have seen has involved a CEO who is a visionary leader and a COO or other leutenant who is a great manager. Finding both in one man is rare, though it does happen.

A three-star general of my acquaintance once said that a truly great general is lazy: he lets his lieutenants do all the busy work of management and concentrates on leading. A truly great lieutenant is a workaholic. No doubt some of Bush’s lieutenants are great managers, but in the man himself I don’t see the quality of leadership. I see the same sort of papered-over facade of fake-it leadership that is often on display by corporate managers who, irrespective of their technocratic management abilities, are not effective leaders.

The man very obviously does not _want_ to lead. He wants to make decisions and have people follow them; but he does not want to lead.

The Bing West article that Jeff links at the top of this thread is basically in agreement with me. West says that the U.S. armed forces can win battles in Iraq, but they can’t win the war in Iraq, only the Iraqi people can do that, and it’s not clear that they have the will to do that.

In other words, it is not within our power—certainly given our present level of forces and the level of violence we’re willing to use—to win this war. Q.E.D.

“The man very obviously does not _want_ to lead. He wants to make decisions and have people follow them; but he does not want to lead.”

This matches Bush’s own recent statements about himself and the presidency. Over and over, he emphasizes that he sees his job as “making decisions.” Yeah, he makes the decisions, but he doesn’t adequately explain them or try to bring people along with them.

I recommend a made-for-tv movie (available at a good video store) called “The Crossing,” starring Jeff Daniels as George Washington. It’s about the crossing of the Delaware and the battle of Trenton. It shows Washington making his decisions and then bringing along his lieutenants by persuasion. The movie gives a sense of what leadership is.

As usual I’m a bit off-topic., but if you want a blow-by-blow account of what is happening in Iraq, you might try this website - http://www.healingiraq.blogspot.com. I don’t know how to make links here, so I hope you manage to access it.

The host is a young Iraqi dental student named Zayed who has been keeping this “diary” since the war began.

Myriam, thank you for the link. It certainly adds a does of existential reality to the neo-con’s theoretical universe. Sadly, we rarely consider how our grand schemes look at ground level to the people who are just trying to provide for their families and survive day-to-day. I don’t think most Americans realize just how chaotic and hellish life has become in Iraq, even in areas that we presumably control.

Why am I suddenly getting an image of Bush as bald with a crown of hair in the shape of pointy horns on his head?
And why do the words “Dilbert’s boss” keep echoing?

Now I have an irrepressible image in my mind of Vice President Cheney as Dogbert.