Back in 2002, then aspiring US presidential candidate John Kerry began arguing that “the war on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering law enforcement operation”.

To my ear back then, this sounded like one of Kerry’s more thoughtful contributions. In the struggle against terrors of various sorts over many years, police-style actions of all sorts have usually trumped conventional military force. A series of 20th-century conflicts, not least Vietnam, demonstrates that armoured brigades or infantry platoons do their best work fighting conventional battles. They cannot successfully chase down loose-knit, decentralised networks of militants. Once militants decide to avoid fighting in the open, there are few hard targets for cruise missiles to pick out. Human targets prove even tougher to identify. Most targets are surrounded by civilians who do not react well to seeing Hellfires flying through their neighbours’ windows. You have to convince civilian populations in downtown Islamabad and Mogadishu to turn militants in – a task for which Private John Kryswicki from Duluth, Michigan is almost uniquely ill-equipped. So emphasising intelligence-gathering and law enforcement – “police work”, if you like – sounded the sensible option.

Yet Kerry’s phrase became an embarrassment to his campaign. Through 2004, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney relentlessly argued that September 11 gave the president not just the right but the duty to call out the troops. Declared Bush, to cheering audiences: “After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers”.

I was surprised by this revulsion against law enforcement and intelligence-gathering, not least because I had always thought of US law enforcers and detectives as fairly tough characters. Late-night reality TV shows like Cops depict them charging into situations and slamming suspects against car hoods. I’ve never seen those guys serve papers. What was so wimpy about policing?

The answer, of course, is that Americans wanted a dramatic response to September 11. Promising good police-work simply did not deliver the right gut response. Large-scale war did.

But a half-decade of pandering to US dismay is enough. Now, with the weaknesses of large-scale war against militant Islam horribly exposed, it’s time to find strategies that will work. It’s time to insist on the policing approach. Continue reading →

Back in late 2005, a brilliant young US moderate-left commentator named Matthew Yglesias and his colleague Sam Rosenfeld penned a prescient essay for The American Prospect called “The Incompetence Dodge”. They began by noting how many policy figures were coming to the conclusion that poor execution was damaging the conduct of the Iraq War. Among those using this argument were John Kerry, Hilary Clinton and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. Rosenfeld and Yglesias went on to argue that the execution of the war was largely irrelevant. The original decision to go to war was disastrous, they argued, and almost nothing done afterwards could save it.

In the 16 months since, the bungled-invasion meme has only gathered strength. It spread from the “liberal hawks” to conservatives such as Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol. Bob Woodward’s book State of Denial argued that high-level Washington incompetence was to blame. (The denial referred to in the title was George W. Bush’s denial that this incompetence needs to end, through the removal of people like CPA chief Jerry Bremer and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.) Thomas Ricks’ book Fiasco (discussed earlier at Troppo by Cam Riley) argued that the both the administration and the military got it wrong. A gaggle of conservative pundits started whining that the real problem was the Iraqi people, who were incompetent in executing their piece of the US plan.

And in the past couple of months George Bush has joined the push to treat the whole thing as an execution problem, sacking Rumsfeld and his two key US military commanders, and this week signalling a new approach and even taking a little blame for the current failure.

In the welter of analysis we are getting about the new approach in Iraq, it is important to keep Rosenfeld and Yglesias’s thesis in mind. Continue reading →

George Bush’s announcement of extra troops for Iraq is significant not for its announcements of actions, but for its official admission that Iraq is a horrible mess. See the official US government PDF for details. The scariest bit is the official admission that the Coalition cannot sensibly move responsibility for counterinsurgency to Iraq’s official army and police. The Iraqi government’s role has officially shifted to devising the strategy, though no-one really believes that. Latest statements on the Iraqi forces’ readiness hints that a full transfer of counterinsurgency responsibility is years away.

Before Christmas, Bush declared: “I don’t think the American people are ready to lose yet”. The latest announcement seems little more than a way of killing time, combatants and civilians until Americans are ready to lose.

So what’s the best way forward? I can’t think of one. Bush will send more troops, yet hardly anyone thinks another 20,000 troops will secure Baghdad. The Iraq Study Group made a bunch of suggestions that have already failed (“stand down as the Iraqis stand up”) or which Bush won’t brook (engage with Iran and Syria). The International Crisis Group has the most credible outline of a strategy, but it involves even greater changes to the US approach (example: “halting blind sweeps that endanger civilians, antagonise the population and have had limited effect on the insurgency”).

And yet the alternative – declare victory and go home – does seem to violate a serious ethical standard of responsibility, once summed up by Colin Powell for an unhearing George W. Bush as “you broke it, you own it”.

This, it seems to me, is the ultimate moral point in Iraq. If you invade a nation pre-emptively, causing an unavoidable spike in death and suffering, you create a heavy responsibility to create a better future for the nation you invade. Continue reading →