I’ve already linked to this post from New Sisyphus in my brief commentiaries on the Watcher’s Council nominations below but I wanted to comment on the post at more length than would have been appropriate for that post. New Sisyphus is fed up with George Bush and how he’s handling the War on Terror. Here’s how he believes that Afghanistan should have been handled:
Afghanistan should have been invaded and occupied by a very large all-American army. Unlawful combatants, including Taliban spokesmen, should have been summarily shot, as is proper under both international law and the law of warfare as it has evolved. The war should have gone through Pakistan, laying to waste a government and a country that was the Taliban’s main enablers. The entire area should have been laid to waste, destroyed completely and utterly; and then, having delivered the short, sharp punic lesson, we should have withdrawn en masse.
I believe that New Sisyphus errs in presenting an approach that simply wasn’t an alternative.
If anyone has some evidence that there would have been domestic support for such a course of action, I’d certainly like to see it. What I recall from the early days of the invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001 was surprise at the speed of American action, relief that it progressed with relatively little loss of life, and generally tepid domestic support for a campaign against an obvious target.
The Afghanistan campaign was remarkably successful because it was fought, essentially, as an insurgency with the U. S. providing logistical and air support. Look at a map. Afghanistan is landlocked. There is simply no way of mounting the kind of attack in force that New Sisyphus suggests. Our agreement with Uzbekistan that enabled us to maintain the small base we had there was sufficiently tenuous that we’ve already been evicted. The Uzbeki leadership simply would not have accepted the kind of force that New Sisyphus proposes. I believe it also would have raised the hackles of both the Russians and the Chinese: I doubt they’d tolerate an American force of the size and kind envisioned on their very doorsteps.
The other alternative was fighting our way through Pakistan. Unfortunately, Pakistan has nuclear weapons and the fragility of the Pakistani state is such that I believe that their use would have been a first response rather than a last resort. We would, undoubtedly, have responded in kind and the level of carnage that would have ensued is simply unimaginable. There was insufficient domestic political support for that course of action.
I agree with New Sisyphus about the treatment of irregulars captured on the field of battle against U. S. forces. I believe, apparently as he does, that the value of the object lesson, i.e. that only nations make war, in all probability exceeded the value of the actionable intelligence that we might have obtained through interrogation. There is a complication: most of those captured appear not to have been taken on the field of battle but afterwards and summarily executing such would have been murder.
There’s also a problem with New Sisyphus’s prescription for U. S. behavior after the conflict. The United States is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions and once a territory has been invaded and occupied signatories have pledged to undertake certain obligations which preclude just leaving en masse as he suggests. In order to do as he suggests the proper course of action would be to abrogate the treaty before the invasion. Was there domestic political support for such a course of action?
It’s pretty obvious that New Sisyphus is not a Wilsonian—neither am I. I don’t have a Wilsonian bone in my body. But, to the apparent dismay of Jacksonians like New Sisyphus, President Bush very clearly is and always has been.
But New Sisyphus’s comments should serve as a warning to those who oppose Bush’s Wilsonian approach to the War on Terror. As I wrote some time ago, Hamiltonian realism is what got us into the fix in which we found ourselves in September 2001. I don’t believe we will or should return to it any time soon. If we reject the optimistic Wilsonian approach of bringing democracy to the Middle East we are left only with New Sisyphus’s Jacksonian approach or Jeffersonian isolationism or its modern day equivalent of which, as you may recall, President Bush warned us in his State of the Union address this year.
UPDATE:Â Blog-friend and fellow Watcher’s Council member Callimachus of Done With Mirrors has comments of his own on New Sisyphus’s post.
Very nicely dissected, extremely well argued. At the risk of being too demanding, perhaps you could direct me to an explantion of the ‘neo’ qualifier to your Jeffersonianism.
I haven’t explored it too much but I add “neo” to it because I’m not an actual isolationist. For example, I don’t believe in autarky (which a genuine isolationist would have to).
But I do think that a somewhat narrower construal of what constitutes American interests would be a good thing.
Understand.
Dave- a head’s up. Callimachus comments on the same article over at “Done with Mirrors”.
Thanks, kreiz. That it caught Callimachus’s eye as well confirms my belief in the importance of the post.
What this criticism leaves out–like all I’ve received to date–is the central point of my critique of Bush’s war strategy, i.e. that the war as it was executed bears no resemblance to the war as it was sold before a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001.
I have no wish to repeat all my posts that have appeared since “The Breach” here. Anyone who wants to read the argument as it has unfolded at my site may do so.
However, I will say this: Bush won an authorization for the use of military force that was extremely broad and very, very popular. How he chose to use that was a matter of his choice. Had we fought a larger war, I think he would have enjoyed the same level of support as that he gained for the “insurgency” type war that we in the end launched.
As for the “occupying power’s” obligations, I would only note that they only apply if you’re occupying and, further, as a good Jacksonian I don’t give two goddams about the Geneva Convention.
Given that no American POW–not one–has been treated under its provisions since the last Nazi took the last American prisoner, it has effectively been repealed with regard to American military action anyway.
However, I am willing to admit that the points raised about Pakistan are well-taken. As is obvious, the piece was written in haste and in anger and had I thought more about that context, I would have reached (I hope) the same sensible conclusions that you have.
Thanks, NewSisyphus. Despite my criticisms I suspect we agree more than we disagree except in one particular: my read is that Bush’s war support was extremely fleeting and would have been more so had he fought a “larger warâ€. Congressional support for the Authorization to Use Force, as we have learned, was, on the part of Democrats, entirely based on political calculation. For most there wasn’t a shred of conviction in it and I believe that the opposition to the policy that has mobilized since then would have mobilized that much faster.
Once you’ve removed the government of the invaded nation you are de facto the occupying power.
I’m a Jeffersonian and I like the Geneva Convention (and the United Nations and NATO and the WTO) if anything even less than you do. I’ve made the point you made above on the treatment of our POW’s on more than a single occasion. But I believe that you formally abrogate treaties rather than just signing them and ignoring them.
In my view Bush fought as much war as he could and still be returned to office. Yes, that was a cynical political calculation but that’s what politicians do, no?
For example, I believed in 2003 and still do that the only way to pacify Iraq was to go house to house and building to building and disarm and subdue the population. We would have taken a lot more casualties earlier on and so would the Iraqis and knees would have gotten wobblier a lot earlier. I turned to my wife when the announcement of the end of major operations came out and said “Our casualties have just begunâ€. Would we have taken fewer casualties overall if we had taken more at the outset (and given more)? I think so but I’m not a military expert.
I haven’t been disillusioned by Bush because I had few illusions about what he was or what he was likely to do to begin with—I didn’t vote for him the first time around. But the conditions were different in 2004 and John Kerry was patently such an idiot I couldn’t imagine circumstances under which I would have voted for him. Unfortunately, you choose between the Republican or the Democratic candidate who’s on the ballot not the one you’d like.