Fighting Roadside Bombs: Part IV

This post concludes my coverage of Rick Atkinson's Washington Post series on the IED threat to international security. Atkinson's fourth article in the series continues his discussion of the Pentagon's dramatic policy efforts to adapt to improvised bombs. Frankly, much of the article repeats the main points raised by Atkinson previously. I did like this concluding passage, however:

At 9:30 p.m. on Monday, May 7, a convoy of four uparmored Humvees rolled through the heavily fortified gate at Camp Falcon in southern Baghdad before turning north onto Route Jackson at 35 mph. Each Humvee carried a jammer against radio-controlled bombs, either a Duke or an SSVJ. Each had been outfitted with Frag Kit 5, and a Rhino II protruded from each front bumper as protection against EFPs detonated by passive infrared triggers. As recommended, the drivers kept a 40-meter separation from one another.

The senior officer in the third Humvee, Lt. Col. Gregory D. Gadson, 41, had driven to Falcon to attend a memorial service for two soldiers killed by an IED. Now he was returning to his own command post near Baghdad International Airport. As commander of the 2nd Battalion of the 32nd Field Artillery, a unit in the 1st Infantry Division, Gadson was a gunner by training. But as part of the troop "surge" that President Bush announced in January, the battalion had taken up unfamiliar duties as light infantrymen in Baghdad.

After 18 years in the Army, including tours of duty in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and in Afghanistan, Gadson was hardly shocked by the change of mission. He knew that, proverbially, no plan survived contact with the enemy. Raised in Chesapeake, Va., he had been a football star in high school and an outside linebacker at West Point before graduating in 1989. The nomadic Army life suited him and his wife, Kim, who had been a classmate at the academy before resigning her commission to raise their two children.

In the darkness on Route Jackson, no one noticed the dimple in the roadbed, where insurgents had loosened the asphalt with burning tires and buried three 130mm artillery shells before repairing the hole. No one saw the command wire snaking to the east through a hole in a chain-link fence and into a building. No one saw the triggerman.

They all heard the blast. "The boom is what I think about every day," Gadson would say three months later at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. A great flash exploded beneath the right front fender. Gadson felt himself tumbling across the ground, and he knew instantly that an IED had struck the Humvee. "I don't have my rifle," he told himself, and then the world went black.

When he regained consciousness, he saw the looming face of 1st Sgt. Frederick L. Johnson, who had been in the trail vehicle and had brought his commander back from the dead with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Lying on the road shoulder 50 meters from his shattered Humvee, Gadson was the only man seriously wounded in the attack, but those wounds were grievous. Another soldier, Pfc. Eric C. Brown, managed to knot tourniquets across his upper thighs. Johnson hoisted Gadson, who weighed 210 pounds, into another Humvee, an ordeal that was "extremely complicated due to the extensive injuries Lt. Col. Gadson sustained to his lower extremities," an incident report later noted.

Thirty minutes after the blast, Gadson was flown from Camp Falcon to the 28th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad's Green Zone. For hours he hovered near death, saved by 70 units of transfused blood. "Tell Kim I love her," he told another officer.

Two days later, he was stable enough to fly to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany; two days after that, he reached Walter Reed, where Kim was waiting for him. On May 18, a major artery in his left leg ruptured; to save his life, surgeons amputated several inches above the knee. The next day, the right leg blew, and it, too, was taken off at the thigh.

Gadson would be but one of 22,000 American casualties from IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that isolated incident along Route Jackson on May 7 was emblematic of the nation's long struggle against roadside bombs.

He had been wounded despite the best equipment his country could give him and despite the best countermeasures American science could contrive. His life had been saved by the armored door that shielded his head and torso, and by the superior training of his soldiers, the heroic efforts of military medicine and his own formidable grit. He had lost his lower limbs despite flawlessly following standard operating procedure. He faced months, and years, of surgery, rehabilitation and learning to live a life without legs.

Gadson's war was over, but for his comrades and for the country it goes on. An additional $4.5 billion has been budgeted for the counter-IED fight in the fiscal year that began this week. JIEDDO [the Joint IED Defeat Organization], which started four years ago this month in the Pentagon basement as an Army task force with a dozen soldiers, now fills two floors of an office building in Crystal City and employs almost 500 people, including contractors.

The House Armed Services Committee concluded in May that the organization "has demonstrated marginal success in achieving its stated mission to eliminate the IED as a weapon of strategic influence." Others disagree, including England. "Monty Meigs was the best thing that ever happened to us," he said, "and to the [Pentagon], and to the guys in the field."

Whether because of the surge, or despite it, total IED attacks in Iraq declined from 3,200 in March to 2,700 in July, an 8 percent drop. IED-related deaths also declined over the summer, sharply, from 88 in May to 27 in September.

If heartened by the recent trend, Meigs [Retired Gen. Montgomery C., head of the Pentagon's counter-IED effort] is cautious. He notes that sniping, another asymmetrical tactic, tormented soldiers in the Civil War. "Snipers are still around, and they're darned effective," he said. "Artillery has also been around a long time. There are some tactical problems that are very hard to solve. There are no silver bullets, no panaceas."

Virtually everyone agrees that regardless of how the American expeditions in Iraq and Afghanistan play out, the roadside bomb has become a fixture on 21st-century battlegrounds.

I mentioned earlier how the IED threat demonstrates "the sheer horror of war." Lt. Col. Gadson's experience powerfully illustrates the point, but it also brings home the tremendous importance of defeating the IED scourge.

Overall, while the Akinson series is informative, the reporting focused too much on the bureaucratic impediments in combatting the roadside bombs. In Atkinson's conclusion above he notes that "total IED attacks in Iraq declined from 3,200 in March to 2,700 in July, an 8 percent drop" and "IED-related deaths also declined over the summer, sharply, from 88 in May to 27 in September." There's more to these numbers, especially the more-than 50 percent drop in fatalities indicated for last summer. Atkinson's analysis might have focused more on what ground-level adaptions U.S. forces were making, rather than the almost exclusive attention to the top-down developments coming out of Washington.

Perhaps Atkinson's goal was to contribute to the defeatist grip that's got a hold on much of the Democratic establishment. Stanley Kurtz, at the National Review last week, was critical of the Post's left-wing slant to its coverage of the war:

Today, on the front page of The Washington Post, we see the third in a three-part series on roadside bombs in Iraq. The stories in this series have been centered on the top half of the page and highlighted in red (a device I don’t recall seeing before). Next to that is a huge headline about allegations of killings In Iraq by Blackwater. Below that is a headline that reads "Most in Poll Want War Funding Cut." Meanwhile deep inside the paper, on page A14, we find the following article: "U.S. and Civilian Deaths Decrease Sharply in Iraq: American Military Credits Troop Influx." True, nestled between the other screaming headlines on page one, there is a brief minuscule teaser for this far more positive story about Iraq. Yet the bias here is clear.

If the top story is Iraq, then I don’t see how you can put those three stories on the front page, while burying the other one on page 14. Arguably, an actual report of substantial positive progress in Iraq is more important, and more dramatic, than any of those other stories...

Kurtz has a good point. Yet, I'm reminded of my analysis from the first entry in this series, where I suggested that the IED threat represents a first-order challenge to American military preponderance, in that it works to weaken U.S. military effectiveness in the weakest link of the overall chain of U.S. strategy: the contested zones. This Weekly Standard report from 2005 on the Pentagon's bureaucractic approach to the IED threat captures the priority of taming this threat:

THE IED IS ONLY A TACTICAL WEAPON, but it is also the only weapon that produces significant U.S. casualties. And because these casualties are the primary factor in eroding American public support for Operation Iraqi Freedom, this tactical weapon is capable of having a major strategic impact. The IED is capable of defeating the U.S. mission in Iraq if not checked by an effective tactical response.

The Weekly Standard piece suggests that U.S. policy should cultivate more bottom-up efforts in adapting to IEDs (for an example of such initiatives, this report from Michael Yon). To its credit, the U.S. Army shows evidence of more attention to ground-level solutions to issues of asymmetrical warfare.

See my earlier entries in the "Fighting Roadside Bombs" series, here, here, and here.

Our Soldiers: Modern American Heroes

Observe the comments to my post yesterday, "Soldiers Die For Us: A Tribute to the Fallen":

Soldiers die for a lot of reasons. They die to protect their buddies. They die to expand the empire. They die to protect corporate profits. They die. But they do not die for us. They are not fighting for us. And nothing they are doing in Iraq is helping this country one bit. Their deaths are for nothing. They are not heroes. They are cowardly conquerors...

This kind of troop-bashing sentiment is common among the International ANSWER types. Yet, as Robert Kaplan notes in today's Wall Street Journal, denigration of the military is increasingly common among the transnational elite in America's top insitutions, especially the mass media:

I'm weary of seeing news stories about wounded soldiers and assertions of "support" for the troops mixed with suggestions of the futility of our military efforts in Iraq. Why aren't there more accounts of what the troops actually do? How about narrations of individual battles and skirmishes, of their ever-evolving interactions with Iraqi troops and locals in Baghdad and Anbar province, and of increasingly resourceful "patterning" of terrorist networks that goes on daily in tactical operations centers?

The sad and often unspoken truth of the matter is this: Americans have been conditioned less to understand Iraq's complex military reality than to feel sorry for those who are part of it.

Kaplan reports from the field that U.S. soldiers are looking for respect, not pity: "We are not victims," one battalion commander asserted. "We are privileged." Thus Kaplan continues:

The cult of victimhood in American history first flourished in the aftermath of the 1960s youth rebellion, in which, as University of Chicago Prof. Peter Novick writes, women, blacks, Jews, Native Americans and others fortified their identities with public references to past oppressions. The process was tied to Vietnam, a war in which the photographs of civilian victims "displaced traditional images of heroism." It appears that our troops have been made into the latest victims.

Heroes, according to the ancients, are those who do great deeds that have a lasting claim to our respect. To suffer is not necessarily to be heroic. Obviously, we have such heroes, who are too often ignored. Witness the low-key coverage accorded to winners of the Medal of Honor and of lesser decorations.

The first Medal of Honor in the global war on terror was awarded posthumously to Army Sgt. First Class Paul Ray Smith of Tampa, Fla., who was killed under withering gunfire protecting his wounded comrades outside Baghdad airport in April 2003.

According to LexisNexis, by June 2005, two months after his posthumous award, his stirring story had drawn only 90 media mentions, compared with 4,677 for the supposed Quran abuse at Guantanamo Bay, and 5,159 for the court-martialed Abu Ghraib guard Lynndie England. While the exposure of wrongdoing by American troops is of the highest importance, it can become a tyranny of its own when taken to an extreme.

Media frenzies are ignited when American troops are either the perpetrators of acts resulting in victimhood, or are victims themselves. Meanwhile, individual soldiers daily performing complicated and heroic deeds barely fit within the strictures of news stories as they are presently defined. This is why the sporadic network and cable news features on heroic soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan comes across as so hokey. After all, the last time such reports were considered "news" was during World War II and the Korean War.

In particular, there is Fox News's occasional series on war heroes, whose apparent strangeness is a manifestation of the distance the media has traveled away from the nation-state in the intervening decades. Fox's war coverage is less right-wing than it is simply old-fashioned, antediluvian almost. Fox's commercial success may be less a factor of its ideological base than of something more primal: a yearning among a large segment of the public for a real national media once again--as opposed to an international one. Nationalism means patriotism, and patriotism requires heroes, not victims.

Kaplan's piece is worth reading in whole, but the conclusion is particularly good:

The media is but one example of the slow crumbling of the nation-state at the upper layers of the social crust - a process that because it is so gradual, is also deniable by those in the midst of it. It will take another event on the order of 9/11 or greater to change the direction we are headed. Contrary to popular belief, the events of 9/11--which are perceived as an isolated incident--did not fundamentally change our nation. They merely interrupted an ongoing trend toward the decay of nationalism and the devaluation of heroism.

As Kaplan points out, the notion that there's been a "decay of nationalism" is contested. Yet on the question of the deligimization of state-based heroism, Kaplan's commentary here makes a compelling case to the contrary.

Soldiers Die for Us: A Tribute to the Fallen

Check out this YouTube, a tribute to the fallen:

Hat tip: Forward Deployed.

Also check out Chicago Ray's Wednesday Hero.

Fighting Roadside Bombs: Part III

Rick Atkinson's third installment of his Washington Post IED series takes a further look at the agonizing effort by U.S. officials to develop effective countermeasures to the threat of roadside bombs. Here's the introduction:

On Aug. 3, 2005, the deadliest roadside bomb ever encountered by U.S. troops in Iraq detonated beneath a 26-ton armored personnel carrier, killing 14 Marines and revealing yet another American vulnerability in the struggle against improvised explosive devices.

"Huge fire and dust rose from the place of the explosion," an Iraqi witness reported from the blast site in Haditha, in Anbar province. In Baghdad and in Washington, the bleak recognition that a new species of bomb -- the underbelly, or "deep buried," IED -- could demolish any combat vehicle in the U.S. arsenal "was a light-bulb moment for sure," as a Pentagon analyst later put it.

Of the 81,000 IED attacks in Iraq over the past 4 1/2 years, few proved more devastating to morale than that "huge fire" in Haditha. At a time when coalition casualties per IED steadily declined, even as the number of bombs steadily increased, the abrupt obliteration of an entire squad -- made up mostly of reservists from Ohio -- revealed that the billions of dollars being spent on heavier armor and other "defeat the device" initiatives had clear limits.

Haditha provided a light-bulb moment for insurgents as well. During the next year, underbelly attacks just in the Marine sector of western Iraq would increase from a few each month to an average of four per day. By early summer of this year, the underbelly IED -- considered a specialty of Sunni bombers -- was killing more American troops in Iraq than all other variants of roadside bombs combined.

A bomb with 100 pounds of explosives detonating beneath an armored vehicle was equivalent to a direct hit from a six-gun artillery battery, but with an accuracy no gunner could hope to achieve. A single 155mm artillery round, which by itself can destroy a tank, typically contained 18 pounds of explosives. "That's just a damned difficult thing to defeat," said Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson, the current chief of staff for the Multinational Corps in Baghdad.

Two weeks after the Haditha killings, Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, who headed the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, lamented the failure of American science to vanquish the roadside bomb. "If we could prematurely detonate IEDs, we will change the whole face of the war," he said. For "a country that can put a man on the moon in 10 years, or build a nuke in 2 1/2 years of wartime effort, I don't think we're getting what we need from technology on that point."

This installment of the series - with its detailed explication of the astonishingly raw firepower of the latest roadside explosives - really brings home the utter brutality of the IED threat to U.S. forces. To put it bluntly, this piece really captures the sheer horror of the war.

Also check this next quote on "explosively formed penetrators" (IFPs), the IED projectiles supplied to the Iraqi terrorists by Iran:

By late summer 2005, the explosively formed penetrator, like the underbelly IED, had become an appallingly lethal weapon for which there was no obvious countermeasure.

Although still a small fraction of all roadside bombings, EFP attacks since spring had increased from about one per week to roughly one every other day. When fired, the semi-molten copper disks struck with such violence that casualties tended to be higher and more gruesome than in other IED attacks. "This was beyond the capability of anything in our arsenal," an Army brigadier general said. "And, by the way, you can't armor your way out of this problem."

Read the whole thing.

For my earlier entries in this series, click here and here.

Fighting Roadside Bombs: Part II

This post continues my coverage of Rick Atkinson's series on the IED challenge and the U.S. military. In his second article Atkinson elaborates in some detail Defense Department efforts to counter the increasingly deadly effects of the IED threat to U.S. forces in Iraq.

Eliminating the IED problem was given top priority, although Atkinson argues that most of the various programs to combat the scourge were mostly ad hoc and unsuccessful. Atkinson also notes a particularly troubling development in the last couple of years involving newer explosive devices supplied to insurgents through the Iranian arms pipeline:

More than 250 American soldiers would be killed by another type of IED that was spreading across the battlefield and against which even the best jammers proved useless.

The first confirmed EFP -- explosively formed penetrator -- had appeared in Basra on May 15, 2004, and [Pentagon IED Task Force director Joseph] Votel had briefed Vice President Cheney in late June on the phenomenon, using a model to demonstrate how it worked. The weapon, which fired a heavy copper disc with devastating impact, typically used a passive infrared trigger that detonated the bomb when a sensor detected radiation from a warm passing object, such as a Humvee. Because no radio waves were involved, jammers had no effect.

A Defense Intelligence Agency weapons team had noted in the late 1990s that EFPs with infrared triggers were used by Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces against the Israelis in southern Lebanon at least as early as 1997. The few EFPs that were in Iraq during the early summer of 2004 invariably appeared in Shiite-controlled areas near the Iranian border, such as Basra and southeast Baghdad. That suggested "international linkages" to Iran, Votel told Cheney.

A colonel at the Israeli Embassy had repeatedly warned the task force about infrared-triggered EFPs. "He and other Israelis were pounding on the desk, saying, 'Listen, we've already been through this historically. This is what's going to happen next,' " a task force officer later recalled....

By early 2005, what one officer had described as "an ominous thing on the horizon" was moving to the foreground in Iraq. Most EFPs were built with several pounds of pure copper, either milled or punched with a 20-ton hydraulic press into a concave disc with a 140-degree angle, two to 11 inches in diameter. Triggered by the infrared sensor, a blasting cap in turn set off explosives packed behind the copper disc -- known as a liner -- inside a steel or plastic pipe. The detonation wave, moving at 8,000 meters per second, struck the liner, which inverted into a tadpole-shaped slug.

An EFP eight inches in diameter threw a seven-pound copper slug at Mach 6, or 2,000 meters per second. (A .50-caliber bullet, among the most devastating projectiles on the battlefield, weighs less than two ounces and has a muzzle velocity of 900 meters per second.) Unlike an armor-killing shaped charge, the EFP warhead did not turn into a plasma jet, but remained semi-molten. Copper was preferred because it is ductile and malleable, and does not shatter like steel. Typically fired at ranges from five to 10 meters, the slug could punch through several inches of armor, spraying metal shards across the crew compartment....

Debate intensified within the U.S. government over Iran's role in distributing EFPs. [General John] Abizaid was skeptical until British troops reportedly captured a cache of copper discs along Iraq's southeastern border. Other evidence accumulated. For example, according to a former DIA analyst, the C-4 plastic explosive found in some EFPs chemically matched that sold by Tehran's Defense Industries Organization and identified by specific lot numbers. Intelligence also indicated the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was training and giving explosives to certain Iraqi Shiite groups, a senior DOD official said.

Read the whole thing. Abizaid counseled against military action to stop Iranian arms shipments to Iraq, arguing that "You know they're doing it, but you don't know that you want to go to war over it."

There's been some suggestion that Iranian-supplied munitions account for 70 percent of current U.S. casualties in Iraq. It seems to me, contrary to Abizaid, that this is something we'd want to go to war over.

For the previous post from this series, click here.

Fighting Roadside Bombs

Rick Atkinson at the Washington Post has a series up this week on how the U.S. military is meeting the challenge of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the current generation of warfare.

The first installment ran Sunday under the title, "The IED problem is getting out of control. We've got to stop the bleeding." Here's an excerpt with some background to the issue, which picks up after Atkinson's discussion of Iraq's unsecured ammunition depots, the basic supply source for the insurgency's bombing campaign:

In the summer of 2003, pilfered explosives appeared in growing numbers of IEDs. Main Supply Route Tampa, the main road for military convoys driving between Baghdad and Kuwait, became a common target. Three artillery shells wired to a timer west of Taji, discovered on July 29, reportedly made up the first confirmed delay bomb. Others were soon found using egg timers or Chinese washing-machine timers.

Radio-controlled triggers tended to be simple and low-power, using car key fobs or wireless doorbell buzzers -- Qusun was the most common brand -- with a range of 200 meters or less. Radio controls from toy cars beamed signals to a small electrical motor attached to a bomb detonator; turning the toy's front wheels completed the circuit and triggered the explosion.

U.S. troops dubbed the crude devices "bang-bang" because spurious signals could cause premature detonations, sometimes killing the emplacer. Bombers soon learned to install safety switches in the contraptions, and to use better radio links.

Camouflage remained simple, with bombs tucked in roadkill or behind highway guardrails. (Soldiers soon ripped out hundreds of miles of guardrail.) Emplacers often used the same "blow hole" repeatedly, returning to familiar roadside "hot spots" again and again. But early in the insurgency, before U.S. troops were better trained, only about one bomb in 10 was found and neutralized, according to an Army colonel.

Coalition forces tended to concentrate at large FOBs -- forward operating bases -- with few entry roads. "Insurgents seized the initiative on these common routes," according to a 2007 account of the counter-IED effort by Col. William G. Adamson. "The vast majority of IED attacks occurred within a short distance of the FOBs."

Each week, the cat-and-mouse game expanded. When coalition convoys routinely began stopping 300 yards from a suspected IED, insurgents planted easily spotted hoax bombs to halt traffic, then detonated explosives that had been hidden where a convoy would most likely pull over.

By the early fall of 2003, IED attacks had reached 100 a month, according to a House Armed Services Committee document. Most were a nuisance; some proved stunning and murderous. A large explosion along a roadbed near Balad in October of that year flung a 70-ton M1A2 Abrams tank down an embankment, shearing off the turret and killing two crewmen. Even more horrifying was a truck bomb at 4:45 p.m. on Aug. 19 that demolished the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing the U.N. special representative and 22 others.

Day by day, as Adamson would write, "the concept of a front, or line of battle, vanished" in Iraq, giving way to "360-degree warfare."

The article is worth reading in its entirety.

One of the most important conclusions to be drawn here is how gravely serious a threat the IED crisis poses for U.S. forces and overall military priorities. There's a massive amount of unsecured ordnance in Iraq, and roadside bombs have become far and away the most significant source of American casualties. High-level Defense Department strategic planning to fight the IED scourge is discussed in terms of scale relative to the Manhattan Project. Indeed, elimination of the IED threat is now top national security policy, and par with the extermination of Osama bin Laden.

I have a couple of quick thoughts about the piece. My first consideration is how the IED crisis affects U.S. planning on Iranian counterproliferation. The article notes, for example, that perhaps as much as 1 million tons of explosives in Iraq were thought to be unsecured in 2003, a situation arising out of the U.S. military's constraints in providing comprehensive post-conflict stablity in Iraq after initial combat.

As grave a potential situation as those numbers reveal, the issue of unsecured munitions should not be construed as precluding any Iranian complicity in the number and serverity of recent IED attack on American forces. Unfortunately, at least one hard-left blog has cited Atkinson's piece as evidence that the administration is trumping up evidence against Iranian support for insurgents in Iraq - the purpose of such assertions being to delegitimize a U.S. military response to Iran's campaign of killing U.S. forces in Iraq. Yet, as I noted yesterday, the U.S. military has been gathering increasing evidence of an Iranian arms pipeline to Iraq, and American forces have begun to step up countermobilization activities along the Iraq-Iran border.

A second aspect to the roadside bomb threat relates to the broader international theory of America's global military preponderance. The U.S. currently enjoy strategic unipolarity in the international realm. The implication of this, as Barry Posen pointed out in in his 2003 article, "Command of the Commons," is that in the air, land, and sea, the U.S. currently faces no immediate challenges to its national security from any potential great power adversary in world politics.

Posen's research shows, however, that U.S. primacy is substantially compromised by peripheral adversaries who wage wars against the U.S. in the "contested zones":

The closer U.S. military forces get to enemy-held territory, the more competitive the enemy will be. This arises from a combination of political, physical, and technological facts. These facts combine to create a contested zone—arenas of conventional combat where weak adversaries have a good chance of doing real damage to U.S. forces. The Iranians, the Serbs, the Somalis, and the still unidentified hard cases encountered in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan have demonstrated that it is possible to fight the U.S. military. Only the Somalis can claim anything like a victory, but the others have imposed costs, preserved at least some of their forces, and often lived to tell the tale—to one another. These countries or entities have been small, resource poor, and often militarily “backward.” They offer cautionary tales. The success of the 2003 U.S. campaign against the Ba’athist regime in Iraq should not blind observers to the inherent difficulty of fighting in contested zones.

Posen's piece appeared four years ago, at the time of the earliest stage of Iraq's insurgency. Yet as we now know, the Iraq war clearly constitutes a "hard case" of successful asymmetrical warfare, waged by an impacable array of terrorist forces - backed by both state and non-state actors - determined to fight a ruthless campaign of intimidation, insecurity, and murder, the ultimate object of which is undermine support for the Iraqi government, and bring about a civil war victory of nihilist darkness.

The stakes in fighting the threat of roadside bombs are great, not just for Iraq, but for the future of American military leadership and global order.

Stayed tuned for forthcoming posts on Atkinson's series on the IED challenge.

Candidate for Best Essay of the Year: Owen West on America's Civilian-Military Divide

A Maggie's Farm post last week argued that Kay Hymowitz's recent piece, "Freedom Fetishists," was a candidate for "best essay of the year."

I like Hymowitz. But when I first read Owen West's Wall Street Journal commentary article last week, "Our New National Divide," I was immediately seized by the vital importance of his essay, and I see it as a top candidate in any best essay competition.

West is a U.S. Marine veteran who served two tours of duty in Iraq. He argues that the U.S. has become deeply divided between American soldiers (and their warrior ethos) and everday civilians who have become not only indifferent to the sacrifices of those under arms, but even hostile.

West relates the story of Maj. Douglas A. Zembiec, a consumate American warrior, who once said, "One of the most noble things you can do is kill the enemy." Zembiec had built up a phenomenal reputation among fellow Marines, and when he was was killed in combat earlier this year, a deep loss was felt among those who shared the uniform. It's unlikely that such similar sense of grief and loss would be felt among the general population:

Here in the United States, the vast moral chasm that so clearly separates the combatants in Iraq is too rarely discussed. Disillusion with the entire effort has obscured and in some cases mutated the truth that small numbers of evil men tilt entire populations. Many Americans, including prominent senators, cringe when they hear about warriors like Zembiec going door-to-door, notwithstanding the fact that most Iraqis in the neighborhood greet them as deus ex machina.

Nearly six years into the war on terror--which is being fought by less than 30% of the military and less than one-half of 1% of the nation--and the stark irony of America in modern war has emerged. Our professional warriors who take the most risk believe the nation must commit to a long-term fight that includes Iraq in some form. Overall support for the endeavor wanes with distance.

This divergence isn't new. Those who have battled the enemy up close have always been more heavily invested in the cause. What's different is that in past wars, the nation was tied to its soldiers and had a familial barometer. Today most Americans have never met a Gold Star family, let alone shaken the hand of a fallen soldier. The military community is increasingly insulated even as the burden of global war swells. Within it there are those who drift in and out of the fight according to orders. But there is also a group that is distinctive--those who join the military to hunt the enemy for a living, and for the rest of us. Doug Zembiec was such a man.

West goes on to make an especially important point on the significance of the controversy surrounding MoveOn.org's attack on General David Petraeus:

Monday's MoveOn.org advertisement, which depicted Gen. Petraeus as a traitor, has been dismissed by Sen. Reid as an inconsequential distraction. But according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan research group, the ad reflects the growing distrust of a Democratic Party that may be taking cues from its leadership. Last month 76% of Republicans expressed confidence in the military to give an "accurate picture of the war," while only 36% of Democrats did.

This explains the collective skepticism surrounding Gen. Petraeus's comments but does not excuse it. For while the country can thrive as a politically divided nation, its ability to defend itself diminishes alongside faith in the fidelity of the military. The unbalanced portrayal of the conduct of our soldiers has done damage enough. To impugn our warriors' motives as political is thoroughly corrosive and hurts all Americans.

Read the whole thing. While West's piece is just a brief newspaper commentary article, his underlying message is a profound statement on our national duty to understand and revere our military personnel and the proud service they provide to our national health and security.

General Petraeus to Recommend Troop Reductions

Cross-posted from The Oxford Medievalist:

ABC News is reporting that General David Petraeus, in his highly-anticipated September report to Congress on the status of the surge, will recommend a drawdown of troops by March, if not sooner. There's not much news in this - the surge was always meant to be a temporary operation, hence calling it the "surge." And besides, a lack of additional troops means there's really no way to increase or sustain the effort far beyond spring 2008. What is newsworthy, though, is that the other reason why Petraeus will call for troop reductions is that the surge is working, and violence in Iraq is down to 2006 lows, a point ABC does, in fact, report. The drawdown will probably be to "pre-surge" levels (around 130,000 troops), which still won't satiate the anti-war activists who want a complete withdrawal. But by recommending troop reductions by next spring, with some modest reductions to possibly begin in December, it will buy some political breathing room in the U.S. Congress (ironic, because that's what the surge is meant to do in Iraq.) Granted, it's not what Democrats like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi wanted when they started the process of attempting to legislate defeat. But, faced with increasing news that the surge is accomplishing results, including the General's own report, they'll be forced to accept Petraeus' recommendations that troop reductions begin...when they were to begin all along. In short, despite the hopes of the nutroots, their Democratic majority will be powerless to end the surge - Petraeus and the Iraqis will get the time they needs to continue making progress in Iraq.

Cross-posted from The Oxford Medievalist.

MoveOn Punishes Clear Thinking Democrats

This morning's Wall Street Journal nails it with their analysis of MoveOn.org and its attacks on congressional Democrats reporting recent progress in Iraq:

In the Hell Hath No Fury sweepstakes, groups like MoveOn.org are gearing up to take on a new set of perceived traitors in their midst--Democrats who have acknowledged some success from the troop surge in Iraq.

Chief among the targets is Washington Congressman Brian Baird, whose indiscretion was recognizing progress on the ground, despite having initially opposed the surge and having opposed the war in the first place. After a recent trip to Iraq, Mr. Baird said: "One of the things that gets very little attention is that virtually every other country I visited says it would be a mistake to pull out now."

We hope he took his flak jacket home from Baghdad. MoveOn is rolling out an ad this week in Mr. Baird's Washington district, in which a former soldier tells of being shot at in 2003 by the Iraqis he had fought to liberate and calls America's continued presence in the country "wrong, immoral and irresponsible." What does this have to do with the wisdom--or lack thereof--of the current strategy? Nada, which tells you something about MoveOn's honesty....

Mr. Baird is hardly alone in his assessment of progress in Iraq, even among Democrats. In the past month, Senate Democrats Carl Levin, Hillary Clinton, Dick Durbin, Bob Casey and Jack Reed have all acknowledged progress on the ground--though many still downplay the overall chances of success.

Representatives Keith Ellison (Minnesota) and Jerry McNerney (California) recently returned "impressed" by what they'd seen, though they were careful to temper their statements for any perceived optimism. After watching U.S. soldiers greet Iraqis in Arabic with "peace be upon you," Mr. Ellison reported that "they would respond back with smiles and waves" before quickly adding, "I don't want to overplay it." It's a measure of how far the antiwar left has moved the debate on Iraq that Mr. Ellison doesn't want to sound too enthusiastic about the chances that the U.S. might actually win.

The Journal's editorial provides more support for the notion that hard-line antiwar groups will do just about anything to deny the reality of military progress in Iraq; and they'll relentlessly smear anyone in power who deviates from the assumed netroots dominance of the "progressive" policy agenda.

What's so amazing about this is that many of the Democrats who've reported progress harbor strong left-wing credentials. (Keith Ellison's an American Muslim who's co-sponsored a House impeachment bill alleging high crimes and misdemeanors against President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney!)

Click here to view MoveOn's dishonest anti-Baird advertisment.

In my earlier posts on FireDogLake, I noted how wildly unhinged these hard-line radical attacks on war supporters have become (see here and here). Yet, the scope and vehemence of the antiwar project is astounding, and it's vital that pro-war supporters counter such left-wing hatred and propaganda.

Rumsfeld Revisited

There's an excellent debate on civil-military relations in the Bush administration in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.

The exchange covers Michael Desch's earlier article on the administration, "Bush and the Generals," which argued that normal tensions between civilian policymakers and the military's general staff were exacerbated by the adminstration ideological campaign to transform the military and privilege civilian battle judgements over that of the uniformed personnel.

A noteworthy segment in the current exchange is Mackubin Thomas Owen's assessment of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's tenure. Owen's generally optimistic on the efficacy of civilian leadership; he looks at a number of historical examples, bringing his case up to the current administration:

In the case of Rumsfeld, it is clear that he was guilty of errors of judgment regarding the conduct of the Iraq war. However, as case after case makes clear, Rumsfeld's critics were no more prescient than he. Rumsfeld failed to foresee the insurgency and the shift from conventional to guerrilla war, but so did his critics in the uniformed services. The army's official historian of the campaign has placed the blame for this failure squarely on the army. "Reluctance in even defining the situation," the historian writes, "is perhaps the most telling indicator of a collective cognitive dissonance on the part of the U.S. Army to recognize a war of rebellion, a people's war, even when they were fighting it."

Critics also charge Rumsfeld's Pentagon with shortchanging the troops in Iraq -- by, for example, failing to provide them with armored Humvees. But a review of army budget submissions even after the war had turned into an insurgency reveals that the service's priority was to acquire big-ticket items. It was only after the danger of improvised explosive devices became obvious that the army began to push for supplemental spending to "up-armor" the utility vehicles.

And although it is true that Rumsfeld downplayed postconflict stabilization operations, it is also true that he was merely ratifying the preferences of the uniformed military, which has a cultural aversion to such operations. The real villain in this case is the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine -- a set of principles long internalized by the U.S. military emphasizing the requirement for an "exit strategy." When generals are thinking about an exit strategy, they are not thinking about "war termination" -- how to convert military success into political success.

In retrospect, it is easy to criticize Rumsfeld for pushing General Tommy Franks, the combatant commander, to develop a plan for a force smaller than the one called for in earlier plans, as well as for his interference with the time-phased force and deployment list (TPFDL), which lays out the schedule for deploying forces. But that charge focuses on the consequences of the chosen path (attacking earlier with a smaller force) while ignoring potential drawbacks of the alternative -- for example, that taking the time to build up a larger force would have meant losing the chance for surprise.

The debate over the size of the invasion force must also be understood in the context of the state of civil-military relations at the end of Clinton's presidency. Rumsfeld was correct that civilian control of the military had eroded during the Clinton years. When the army did not want to do something -- as in the Balkans in the 1990s -- it would simply overstate the force requirements: "The answer is 350,000 soldiers. What's the question?" Accordingly, Rumsfeld was inclined to interpret the army's call for a larger force as another case of foot-dragging. In retrospect, Rumsfeld's decision not to deploy the First Cavalry Division was a mistake, but at the time it was not unreasonable to argue that the TPFDL (like the "two major theater war" planning metric) had become little more than a bureaucratic tool that the services used to protect their share of the defense budget.

Uniformed officers have an obligation to stand up to civilian leaders when they think a policy is flawed. They must convey their concerns to civilian policymakers forcefully and truthfully. If they believe the door is closed to them at the Pentagon or the White House, they also have access to Congress. But the U.S. tradition of civil-military relations requires that they not engage in public debate over matters of foreign policy, including the decision to go to war. And once a policy decision is made, soldiers are obligated to carry it out to the best of their abilities, whether their advice has been heeded or not.

Read the whole thing.

For my earlier post on Desch's "Bush and the Generals, click here.

While I admire Desch's political science expertise, I'm not convinced his analysis of the Bush administration is free of hostily to the president's neoconservative foreign policy project.

Integrity Redacted: Brian De Palma's New Film

Cross-posted from The Oxford Medievalist:

It is fitting that an anti-war propagandist would first showcase his latest portrayal of U.S. soldiers as heinous savages to a foreign audience:

A new film about the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers who also murdered her family stunned the Venice festival, with shocking images that left some viewers in tears.

"Redacted", by U.S. director Brian De Palma, is one of at least eight American films on the war in Iraq due for release in the next few months and the first of two movies on the conflict screening in Venice's main competition.

Inspired by one of the most serious crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, it is a harrowing indictment of the conflict and spares the audience no brutality to get its message across.

I said not too long ago that TNR's Scott Thomas Beauchamp debacle signified the opening salvo of the anti-war left's strategy to discredit the Iraq war by attacking our troops. De Palma's effort is simply a continuation of that theme: attack the war by attacking the military. Clearly, the rape, torture and murder of an Iraqi family by U.S. soldiers is a horrible, horrible thing - words can hardly describe my disgust. But De Palma, using this terrible incident (his own fictionalized account, no less), tries to make it representative of our military, in order to indict American involvement in Iraq. Make no mistake: this isn't about illuminating a tragedy in order to hold our soldiers to a higher standard. People like De Palma could care less whether our soldiers perform admirably or horribly; with bravery and valor, or with malice and hate. And it's certainly not about illustrating the plight of the Iraqi people. If it were, we'd have seen a movie highlighting the cutting off of faces with piano wire, the cooking of children, and the strapping of a suicide vest to a handicapped boy, among the many other atrocities that have been perpetrated by al Qaeda terrorists and insurgents - atrocities that will only be committed on a larger scale should De Palma's propaganda succeed. Oh, BTW, De Palma does, apparently, include footage of al Qaeda beheadings, but disgracefully implies the U.S. is to blame for them.

Really - ask yourself, is it about ignorance, or arrogance? Is the vanguard of the anti-war left really ignorant about the Iraq War, or are they simply arrogant, agenda-driven propagandists? What De Palma really cares about is ending the war, a war, any and every war. Because for him and the rest of the irrational anti-war left, military force is never justified, but it's especially egregious when it's an American war. All you need to know about De Palma, his film, and the anti-war left comes from De Palma's own mouth:

"The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people," he told reporters after a press screening.

"The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war," he said.

De Palma's goal is to end the war, despite the atrocities that will occur at this point after a U.S. withdrawal. How can he say in the same breath that he cares about the plight of the Iraqi people and that he wants to motivate an end to the war because of this plight? Understand that the plight of the Iraqis is just a convenient vehicle with which to push his anti-war agenda. That U.S. soldiers tragically committed a rape and murder just make De Palma and the anti-war crowd lick their chops. As De Palma himself said, "I knew I had a story."

De Palma's an old hand at this sort of propaganda: he made the 1989 film Casualties of War, which also sought to portray American soldiers as bloodthirsty rapists.

Cross-posted from The Oxford Medievalist.

Iraqi Civilian Deaths as Surge Progress Indicator?

In a report yesterday, Tina Susman of the Los Angeles Times wrote that war-related civilian fatalities in Iraq increased for a second month in a row, and the increasing numbers demonstrated the Bush administration's surge strategy had proved ineffective in stemming terrorist violence.

Needless to say, Susman's slanted journalism got signifcant play in the top-dog, hard-left blogosphere. War opponents - increasingly desperate to paint the war as hopelessly lost - seized on passages like this:

Bombings, sectarian slayings and other violence related to the war killed at least 1,773 Iraqi civilians in August, the second month in a row that civilian deaths have risen, according to government figures obtained Friday.

In July, the civilian death toll was 1,753, and in June it was 1,227. The numbers are based on morgue, hospital and police records and come from officials in the ministries of Health, Defense and the Interior. The statistics appear to indicate that the increase in troops ordered by President Bush this year has done little to curb civilian bloodshed, despite U.S. military statements to the contrary.

But if one continues reading Susman's article, the piece indicates that there's little consensus among the U.S. military and outside monitoring groups on the efficacy of civilian death totals as an indicator of the progress on the troop surge:

Military officials have said the security plan is showing progress because the number of attacks on civilians has decreased and sectarian killings have dropped. The security plan, which began in February, has put an additional 28,500 U.S. troops in Baghdad and other trouble spots.

The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, is expected to cite such indicators when he presents an assessment of the security plan to Congress this month.

The U.S. military says the numbers it gathers are lower than those provided by Iraqi ministries, but it does not release them. But it has said that the monthly civilian death toll from sectarian killings, which do not include all bombings, has dropped to about 1,000 per month from 1,200 per month early this year.

Read the whole article. As is the case with earlier Susman articles, she spins her reports with misleading titles and leads.

The following passage is in fact one of the most significant of the article, and it should have formed the basis for a more objective overview of the difficulties of measuring gains in security on the ground:

Various factors can skew the numbers. Baghdad, usually the most violent part of the country, experienced a four-day curfew in June after the bombing of a key Shiite shrine in Samarra, north of the capital. Other cities also were under curfews, which helped keep violence at bay.

Please recall that we're talking about gross statistics on the tragic loss of human life. Thus it's somewhat unfortunate that troubling data like this is being spun by war opponents whose ultimate concern is destroying the Republican war machine in Washington, not the human rights of the Iraqi people.

The stakes are extremely how now, of course, with the highly-anticipated release of the Petraeus Report next week. Thus, any bit of news construed as favorable to the increasingly fanatical antiwar left (see here, here, here) needs to be dissected and placed in the overall context of the slow but difficult job of consolidating Iraqi security and bolstering Iraq's rough steps toward democratization.

News From Iraq: Veterans and Dead-Eyed Men

If you haven't visited Acute Politics, an outstanding military blog providing ground-level reports from Iraq, this week's entry was excellent:

It wasn't a good night to have a new LT on patrol. Our LT was was out with us, of course- the new guy would be leading the platoon coming to replace us. We were on a mission that could easily turn bad- as it happened, everyones night but ours was bad. We waited around at a Combat Outpost for hours for our Marine attachments to resolve some equiqment issues, cleared our route, and went home. One of our sister platoons ended up MEDIVACing two men on a helicopter after an IED strike, while another route clearance team out of Falluja was hit multiple times, and an EOD team hit a bomb that flipped a Cougar and sent two techs to the hospital.

The new LT asked "Is it always like this?" His eyes had the dawning realization that he was now at war- that he was about to begin a year of one of the most dangerous jobs in Iraq. The "Oh shit" look, we call it. It's the moment when you realize that these heavy armored trucks are not the panacea that Senators and Army trainers make them appear, not when faced with a determined and ingenious enemy. It's what you get when you see something go wrong for the first time, and the guys around you accept it with a quiet prayer and stoic determination, rather than any outward signs of shock or fear. It's the moment that makes you stop and wonder "Oh shit... what did I get myself into?"

I remember when that moment first came for me - it was right after we got to Ramadi. The Transfer of Authority ceremony had just finished, officially putting my battalion in charge of route clearance operations across a broad swath of western Iraq. I saw an old friend from ROTC back in college, and went over to talk to him. He'd been a platoon leader for the last year, and he looked a hundred years old. The last time I saw him was two years prior, just before he left for his final training as an officer before going to his first command. Then, he'd been lively and vibrant and (dare I say it?) he was a little bit of a dork. Always clowning around, that sort of thing. Now, he looked dead, and I knew that the last year had taken something out of him that the years ahead would be hard pressed to put back in.

The circle has turned, now, as it always does. Now, we are the veterans - the calloused, dead-eyed men who just want to turn over the mission and go home. There's so many things that wear men down - the slow, slippery slope of progress, the questioning and lack of support in news from home, the steady churn replacing wounded (and God forbid, dead) men. The lack of sleep, the hectic stress of changing missions, the broken men, broken families, broken children.

I hope these new guys make it through all right, but for now, we just want to go home.

Head on over there and leave a comment of support. With milblogs like these, folks back home get to know something about the convictions and courage of the military personnel laying their lives on the line for American national security.

Rudolf Giuliani and American Foreign Policy

Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and a current candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, has laid out his foreign policy in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. He argues for a synthesis of realism and idealism in foreign policy, melding both orientations together while avoiding the extremes of each.

Giuliani minces no words when he declares that the U.S. is engaged in an epic battle against the forces of global destruction. America is mounting a defense against the "Terrorists' War on Us." We are still in the early stages of this war, he argues, and new ideas are needed to succeed in beating back the nihilist forces arrayed against us.

I like Giuliani's statement on the nature of the adversary:

They follow a violent ideology: radical Islamic fascism, which uses the mask of religion to further totalitarian goals and aims to destroy the existing international system. These enemies wear no uniform. They have no traditional military assets. They rule no states but can hide and operate in virtually any of them and are supported by some.

Giuliani goes on to note that our missions in Afghanistan and Iraq are just but difficult, and we must not waver in our efforts to defeat the terrorists threatenting those nations, and the U.S. must remain deployed for some time after victory to guarantee security and firmly plant democratic instituions.

Giulani's essay is wide ranging. He notes the current strain on our military, and the need to rebuild our forces for a stronger defense. He's clear on the WMD threat facing the nations of the world and proposes to build on the Bush administration's efforts to mount a ballistic missile defense against rogues states who delevop delivery capability to destroy the American homeland.

Giulani recognizes that the U.S. has an interest in deeper diplomatic engagement in international affairs, and he's clear to note that the United States can negotiate with nations without giving up our vital interests. Negotiations with adversaries, especially, can be linked to the preservation of America's military, economic, and moral values, and we can enter talks ready to walk away if our interests aren't satisfied.

Giulani's realistically clear on the danger of negotiating with our most implacable opponents. Here's what he says about negotiations with Iran:

Diplomacy should never be a tool that our enemies can manipulate to their advantage. Holding serious talks may be advisable even with our adversaries, but not with those bent on our destruction or those who cannot deliver on their agreements.

Iran is a case in point. The Islamic Republic has been determined to attack the international system throughout its entire existence: it took U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979 and seized British sailors in 2007 and during the decades in between supported terrorism and murder. But Tehran invokes the protections of the international system when doing so suits it, hiding behind the principle of sovereignty to stave off the consequences of its actions. This is not to say that talks with Iran cannot possibly work. They could -- but only if we came to the table in a position of strength, knowing what we wanted.

Read the whole essay. Giuliani lays out a number of additional and important areas of international life in which the U.S. can exert leadership. His is an ambitious foreign policy that will protect America's national interests.

See also my earlier posts on the Foreign Affairs Campaign 2008 series:

"Mitt Romney and American Foreign Policy."

"Barack Obama and American Foreign Policy."

Iraq Progress Causing Fits on the Left

I haven't finished reading the Der Speigel article on the dramatic progress of U.S. forces in securing large sectors of Iraq. It's worth noting some points about it now, however.

The piece opens with a discussion of the consolidation of peace in the city of Ramadi just weeks after a series of deadly U.S. firefights with insurgents. Just prior to the engagement locals said the area was a virtually uninhabitable security nightmare. Here's a key synopsis of the argument, especially as it relates to the enduring meme on the left that the war is "lost" :

Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq -- it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq -- not just Anbar Province, but also many other rural areas along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers -- are essentially pacified today. This is news the world doesn't hear: Ramadi, long a hotbed of unrest, a city that once formed the southwestern tip of the notorious "Sunni Triangle," is now telling a different story, a story of Americans who came here as liberators, became hated occupiers and are now the protectors of Iraqi reconstruction.

Der Speigel's article joins a growing number of reports indicating that the surge is working. This USA Today article notes that the incidence of large-scale, al-Qaeda style truck bombings have declined by about half since early this year. Michael Yon, as well, continues to provide his online dispatches, which paint not only military progress, but political movement as well.

With the increasing frequency of positive reporting on the Iraq project, I'm sometimes blown away at leftist efforts to discredit the good news. A troubling case in point is this post by TRex over at FireDogLake.

TRex attacks Michael O'Hanlon in regards to his recent New York Times article making the center-left case for progress on the surge. Apparently, in an interview with Glenn Greenwald of Slate, O'Hanlon was peppered to the point of exhaustion regarding his on-the-ground research methods in Iraq. Most of O'Hanlon's sources for the update apparently were American, so TRex attacks him as a liar in his post:

I’ve been waiting for what seems like ages for Glenn Greenwald to publish the column detailing the results of his interview with feted “war critic” turned Iraq War cheerleader Michael O’Hanlon, and boy howdy, it doesn’t disappoint. You can read Greenwald’s column here with a full transcript of the conversation available here.

One by one, my man G2 demolishes the pillars supporting the conventional wisdom about O’Hanlon and Pollack’s wildly mendacious Op-Ed, “A War We Just Might Win” until finally, poor O’Hanlon must have desperately wanted to curl up and hide, whimpering, underneath the table. This is why over at Sadly, No! they call Greenwald, “Glennzilla”.

The lies are so thick on the ground around this issue that it’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with one of the more glaring falsehoods, that O’Hanlon and Pollack (both from the pro-Iraq-War “liberal” think tank, the Brookings Institute) were “fierce critics” of the president’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq.

Read the rest. TRex is mad because O'Hanlon since 2003 - in his periodic New York Times updates - has been a sober skeptic on the possibility of U.S. success in the war, and now he's changed his stripes. Maybe O'Hanlon's in fact a fire-breathing Cheneyite under cover at the liberal-leaning Brookings institution. It's all so subterranean!

The problem is that TRex has only succeeded in demonstrating how well he can work to impugn someone's reputation. He compares O'Hanlon's reporting with Judith Miller's New York Times articles making the case for Iraqi WMD in the run-up to the war. That ought to get the radical hordes fired up!

Unfortunately, the evidence is coming in too strongly for TRex to even have a shred of credibility. His post looks like a desperate rear-guard attempt to spin success into failure. Liberals are quaking that the U.S. might win in Iraq.

One might expect if the left "supported the troops" they'd be applauding at the news of American and Iraqi progress. Given FireDogLake's project (and I'm sure many others in the left blogosphere), that'd be a bad bet.

Hat tip to Jules Crittenden.

Civilian Casualties and U.S. Conduct in Iraq

Colin Kahl, writing in the new International Security (PDF), provides an outstanding examination of the U.S. military's record of minimizing noncombatant casualities in the Iraq war.

Kahl's research shows that while the war has resulted in a heavy loss of civilian life, U.S. forces in Iraq have a better record of limiting noncombatant fatalities than in America's previous wars. Further, a powerful norm of noncombatant immunity has generated tremendous collective expectations for combat behavior that conforms with international human rights standards.

Here's the comparison of the record in Iraq to earlier wars:

The number of documented fatalities attributable to U.S. forces or crossfire in Iraq is much lower than those for many other U.S. military campaigns of the last century where civilians were clearly targeted. During World War II, for example, U.S. and British forces engaged in strategic bombing against German and Japanese cities, killing more than 1 million noncombatants. In a single night of U.S. firebombing over Tokyo in 1945, at least 85,000 people, mostly civilians, were incinerated—nearly 21 times the total number of civilian deaths from U.S. air strikes in Iraq through the end of 2006 (according to IBC data), and 6–10 times the total number of Iraqi civilians killed by all U.S. ground and air forces or crossfire in the first three and one-half years of the war. Although some might argue that improvements in precision-guided munitions account for the majority of this historical difference, many of the noncombatant fatalities from bombing during World War II were the result of attacks aimed at destroying enemy morale, not incidental by-products of crude targeting and guidance technologies.

Perhaps the most telling comparisons, however, are to the U.S. wars in the Philippines and Vietnam, the two most significant foreign counterinsurgency campaigns in U.S. history. In the Philippines between 1899 and 1902, approximately 16,000 guerrillas were killed and at least 200,000 civilians perished (out of a total population of 7.4 million in 1900). U.S. forces engaged in the widespread destruction of crops, buildings, civilian property, and entire villages as forms of collective punishment against families and communities suspected of supporting insurgents. Hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians were moved to concentration camps to separate them from guerrillas, and ablebodied men who dared to venture outside of these “protected zones” were assumed to be enemies and could be shot.

In Vietnam, the United States also fought in ways that put civilians directly in the crosshairs. Almost 750,000 North Vietnamese troops and Vietcong were killed during the war, and a conservative estimate of civilian deaths from violence in South Vietnam places the total at 522,000 (out of a total population of 16 million in 1966). U.S. troops fighting in Vietnam relied on massive firepower directed on occasion at targets in densely populated areas. U.S. forces established “free fire zones” in some areas, allowing anyone not wearing a South Vietnamese military uniform to be shot. The U.S. military used more than 29 times the tonnage of incendiary bombs in Vietnam as it did in World War II, and sprayed toxic defoliants on land in South Vietnam that was home to about 3 percent of the population. U.S. forces were also involved in many cases of outright murder and several incidents of mass killing. In the most notorious case, at My Lai on March 16, 1968, as many as 571 unarmed men, women, and children were massacred by a platoon of U.S. soldiers. Recently declassified records show abuses were documented in every U.S. Army division deployed to Vietnam.

The contrast between the current Iraq war and previous U.S. counterinsurgency campaigns is striking. Adjusted for population size and duration, civilian deaths in Iraq through the end of 2006 were 11–17 times lower than in the Philippines. Because available data for the Philippines do not separate casualties caused by U.S. forces, this estimate is based on all violent deaths in Iraq. This certainly underestimates the difference between the Philippines and Iraq because, in the former case, anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that U.S. troops were responsible for a much higher percentage of total deaths. In the case of Vietnam, extrapolations from available hospital records suggest that at least 177,480 South Vietnamese civilians were killed by U.S. bombing and shelling. Controlling for population and duration, Iraqi civilian fatalities ttributable to direct U.S. action and crossfire through the end of 2006 were 17–30 times lower than those from bombing and shelling alone in Vietnam. Without adjusting for population, the average monthly deaths are still 10–16 times lower than in Vietnam.

Outside the U.S. context, contemporary Russian counterinsurgency efforts in Chechnya offer an even starker contrast. In the two Chechen wars (1994–96 and 1999–present), the Russians used an extraordinary amount of indiscriminate firepower, including intensive artillery and aerial bombardment in dense urban settings. The lowest estimate of civilian deaths attributable to Russian actions through 2003 is 50,000 out of a total Chechen population of approximately 1 million (other estimates place the death toll for the two wars as high as 250,000). Even the most conservative estimate is 100–175 times the U.S.-caused toll in Iraq through 2006 (controlling for duration and population). Given the nature of the conflict, the number of civilians killed in Iraq, however awful, is not sufficient to suggest systematic U.S. noncompliance with the norm of noncombatant immunity. On the contrary, compared with conflicts where civilians were directly targeted, Iraqi casualty data provide some indirect evidence for U.S. adherence.

Kahl takes a look at a range of factors contributing to the high level of American compliance with the laws of war in minimizing noncombatant casualties. There has been an almost incredible effort by the American military to prevent unintended death. Steps to this effect include developing "off limits" targeting protocols and preapproved "strike lists"; embedding operations observers with forward-deployed troops to facilitate the designation of insurgent targets versus civilian assets; and the deployment of precision-guided weaponry and mitigation practices.

The author suggest that as ambitious and effective as these noncombatant protection practices have been, there remain a number of cases of U.S. noncompliance with international standards of civilian protection. These instance include collateral damage casualities reaching totals outside of acceptable levels, escalation of force incidents after the initial stage of major combat (where U.S. forces often overreacted to perceived threats emanating from civilians), and the military's practice of mounting large-scale offensive operations in the earlier years of the counterinsurgency period, which were widely criticized as inadequately planned to avoid noncombatant fatalities.

Yet, events like the 2005 Haditha atrocity have been relatively rare events throughout the U.S. deployment. These tragedies have generated widespread media coverage, and military officials have worked even more diligently to guarantee against additional episodes of U.S. noncompliance. Additionally, criminal investigations are launched at the outset of allegations of noncombatant deaths at the hands of U.S. soldiers.

What's noteworthy as well is that military analysts have suggested that the U.S. has done so well in adhering to international norms against civilian killing that rules to limit such incidents indeed may have placed U.S. forces at a tactical disadvantage. Under rules of engagement carefully proscribing when American troops may use deadly force, significant numbers of insurgent and militia members have survived engagements with U.S. forces, melting back into the general population to fight and kill another day, and to destabilize the Iraqi population.

Kahl provides a powerful quote that capture the ethos of compliance among the American military in Iraq. In describing what he expected of a company of paratroopers as they prepared for the assault on Samawah in 2003, a captain of the 82 Airborne announced:

I need guys who can hit targets. I need guys who will do anything to protect their buddies. I need guys who are ready to kill. . . . And I want you to remember something. You are Americans. Americans don’t shoot women and children. They don’t kill soldiers that have surrendered. That’s what the assholes we’re up against do. That’s what we’re fighting. We’re gonna do things differently. But if your life is in danger, you shoot. And you shoot to
kill.

The bottom line is that the popular perception on the left of the U.S. military in Iraq as an occupation army committing wanton atrocities across the civilian space in Iraq is wrong. The U.S. has not engaged in an indiscrimate campaign of gross human rights violations. There have been a number of highly publicized cases of U.S. violations of international rights standards - Abu Graib, for example - but these case have in fact been substantial anomolies in an otherwise U.S. regime of aggressive compliance with the laws of war.

Critical commentators in the left-wing press, academe, and among the radical antiwar contingents would do well to read this research and evaluate U.S. practices for what they are: Agressive tactics for protecting civilian life in wartime, and the judicious development and extension of rules of engagement and protocols advancing the cause of America's just war mission in the liberation of Iraq.

Update: Who links to this post?

Central Sanity: "Soldiers and Civilians."

Chicago Ray: "Wednesday's Hero Blogburst."

Right Truth: "Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps Now Terrorist Organization."

Does the United States Have a Responsibility to Respond to International Crises?

Americans are turning isolationist, according to today's New York Times poll on the conflict in the Middle East. Here are some of the poll's findings:

Americans are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the state of affairs in the Middle East, with majorities doubtful there will ever be peace between Israel and its neighbors, or that American troops will be able to leave Iraq anytime soon, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

A majority said the war between Israel and Hezbollah will lead to a wider war. And while almost half of those polled approved of President Bush’s handling of the crisis, a majority said they preferred the United States leave it to others to resolve.

Over all, the poll found a strong isolationist streak in a nation clearly rattled by more than four years of war, underscoring the challenge for Mr. Bush as he tries to maintain public support for his effort to stabilize Iraq and spread democracy through the Middle East.

The concerns expressed over the direction of foreign policy also highlight some of the pitfalls facing Republicans as they head toward the November elections with national security front and center.

A majority of respondents, 56 percent, said they supported a timetable for a reduction in United States forces in Iraq, a question the two parties have been sparring over, with the White House and most Republicans in Congress taking the position that setting a timetable would send the wrong message. More than half of that group said they supported a withdrawal even if it meant Iraq would fall into the hands of insurgents.

Americans support the idea of putting an international peacekeeping force on the border between Israel and Lebanon to calm tensions there, the poll found, but most do not want United States troops to be a part of it.

By a wide margin, the poll found, Americans did not believe the United States should take the lead in solving international conflicts in general, with 59 percent saying it should not, and 31 percent saying it should. That is a significant shift from a CBS News poll in September 2002 — one year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — when the public was far more evenly split on the issue.

Yet, in the latest poll, 47 percent gave Mr. Bush good marks for handling the situation in Israel, with 27 percent disapproving and 26 percent saying they did not know. That was the highest registration of approval for the president in any of the poll’s performance measures.

Mr. Bush has experienced a slight increase in his overall job approval rating since the last New York Times/CBS News poll, in May, indicating that the steady erosion in his support over the last year has leveled off and even improved by a few percentage points. Thirty-six percent of those surveyed said they approved of the way he was doing his job, up from 31 percent in May.

I find these results troubling. Since World War II, the United States has pursued a foreign policy of internationalism. America's forward role in the world since 1945 -- as the international system's great democratic superpower -- contrasted dramatically with the dark isolationist turn the U.S. took in the 1930s after World War I. American policymakers learned key lessons from the interwar experience, one of the most important being that the interests of the world community are best served through the benign hegemony of U.S. leadership. We saw overwhelming evidence of this with the defeat of Soviet tyranny and expansionism with the end of the Cold War, as well as in the dramatic growth of global economic prosperity through successive rounds of U.S.-led trade and financial liberazation in the global political economy.

The public shift toward isolationist tendencies -- which comes in tandem with growing nationalism and protectionism characterized by the collapse of the Doha Round of current trade negotiations -- may threaten continued U.S. leadership in providing public goods of global security and economic prosperity (it's welcomed, though, that a large plurality supports the administration in its hard-line stand with Israel in the current conflict).