William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst. His forthcoming book is "Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World." E-mail: warkin@igc.org.
Los Angeles Times
September 5, 2004
SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. — Almost three years ago, soon after the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks in New York and Washington, I began to write a twice-a-month
column for the Opinion section on military affairs and the war on terrorism.
This is the last in that series of columns and — with terrorism continuing
to haunt the nation's thoughts, as well as the presidential campaign — it
may be worth looking back at what we have learned. Think of it as looking back
in order to look forward more clearly.
Failing to learn from the past
may not always condemn us to repeat it, as George Santyana famously suggested,
but it does mean our journey forward will be rougher. With that in mind, here
are five lessons for the struggle ahead, based on the experience of the last
three years.
First: Beware the Next Big Thing.
On the military
side of the war on terrorism, the Next Big Thing has been U.S. Special Forces.
President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld jumped to embrace
special ope rations in the Afghanistan war and expected them to play a
substantial role in rooting out Iraqi die-hards. At first, the ninja warriors
did seem to personify 21st century military transformation. And the shadowy,
no-rules ethic of special ops nicely paralleled the president's "bring 'em to
justice" thinking.
But the special operations strategy is essentially a
SWAT team approach: Highly trained operators swoop down on the enemy and clean
house. It works well for the police, because the bad guys are usually holed up
somewhere. You can't surround a whole city or country, though. By the time we
kick in the doors, the bad guys have often scattered. Or they were never at
that particular address to begin with; witness the still-futile search for Osama
bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar.
Second: What you don't know can be
bad, but what you think you know can be worse.
Administration officials
have tied themselves in knots trying to explain why they were so sure Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Faulty intelligence is the scapegoat
these days.
Certainly the intelligence community has shortcomings, and
its senior officials happily joined the groupthink syndrome by shading their
assessments to fit their bosses' preconceptions. But the truth was not hard to
come by at the time. Two weeks before the Iraq war in March 2003, I wrote,
"There is simply no hard intelligence of any such Iraqi weapons." That
statement remains uncontrovertible. The proof of what intelligence analysts
really knew — and didn't know — was revealed by the fact, reported
in my column then, that "there is not a single confirmed biological or chemical
target on their lists, Air Force officers working on the war plan say."
A president or a military leader who operates on the basis of what he thinks
must be true, instead of the specific details of what is known and not known, is
headed for trouble.
Third: Be a little skeptical about people with
"inside" information. (Even though low- level military insiders spoke the truth
when they told me there was no hard evidence of Hussein's supposed weapons of
mass destruction.)
Looking back now, I can see that much of the
griping about how Rumsfeld and company were planning the war was parochial to
the Air Force or Army.
I missed the real message: Rumsfeld and his team
were impervious to any views other than their own. Because of their love of
secrecy and contempt for debate, they simply tuned out any naysayers warning
about what to expect in postwar Iraq. That was true even when the warnings of
postwar trouble came from tough-minded military advisors, not those wimpy
experts from the State Department and academia.
Fourth: Changing a
long-standing policy on the basis of immediate circumstances is not a good idea.
It's hard to think long-term in the midst of a crisis.
In March 2002, I
was able to describe classified details of the Bush administration's Nuclear
Posture Review that revealed its decision to increase the role of nuclear
weapons in military planning. I said then, and believe now, that the
administration's decision to redefine nuclear weapons requirements — a
redefinition that makes their future use more likely — was a panicky
overreaction to Sept. 11.
We have continued to move down the path of
developing more usable nuclear weapons. And we are shortchanging far too many
efforts that would reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the first
place.
It's a decision that may reduce America's security in the long
run, not the least by persuading rogue states that they must accelerate the
quest for nuclear weapons of their own.
Fifth: Never mistake a mirror
for a window.
With dismaying frequency, Bush, Rumsfeld and senior
military leaders have made critical decisions on the basis of what they thought
was a clear view of their adversaries — looking at the enemy through an
open window, so to speak. In reality, they were looking at a mirror and seeing
fuzzy i mages of themselves.
Consider the question of whether we have
too few troops in Iraq. Coalition forces are sometimes spread thin. But the
problem in Iraq is not too few troops, or even too few allies. It's that we've
persisted in seeing our enemies as mirror images of ourselves and tried to fight
them as though they were us.
Senior officials talk about Iraq as part of
something fundamentally different from past military challenges. But they fight
it like a conventional war: From the beginning, our strategy was to engage the
enemy in battle, win a crushing victory and reap the fruits of unconditional
success. Thus, field commanders have talked of "victories" in Najaf and
"strategic progress" in Fallouja. Meantime, soldiers continue to die by the
ones and twos on conventional infantry patrols.
Unfortunately, our
adversaries are not interested in engaging us head-on. That's why the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon happened in the first place.
Because we have been unable to break out of our old mind-set, it's actually a
blessing we don't have more troops in Iraq. The fact that the coalition force
is relatively small is one reason that, on average, fewer than two soldiers are
being killed each day, compared to the 30 American soldiers who died each day
during the peak of U.S. fighting in Vietnam in 1968.
What is true
militarily in Iraq is also true politically, there and in the rest of the Arab
world: We keep thinking that, deep down, our adversaries are really just like
us. In reality, for the present and for the foreseeable future, most of the
Islamic world is not — and does not want to be — like us. It has
profoundly different values and priorities. Thus our entire strategy is
predicated on a mirror-picture that we will someday "defeat" the increasingly
angry anti-American mob of Iraqi nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists, with
democratic stability miraculously arising from the ashes.
Unfortunately,
John F. Kerry doesn't really offer a different view. He promises to execute
his plans better, but that may not help much if the underlying vision of the
situation is off.
Both presidential candidates, and both parties, seem
to have accepted the idea that the war on terrorism is part of a larger clash, a
titanic struggle for national survival. There's a seductive ring to such a
battle cry. Part of the American character — and human nature generally
— likes a call to heroism. But there's another part of our character that
favors taking a deep breath, looking at things as they are and figuring out a
practical solution. To me, the final lesson of the last three years is that
this is the voice we need to hear.