#1
Machiavelli should only be objectionable to those who are naive and idealistic. If you boil down his arguments, he says the following:
1) The world is an imperfect, corrupt and treacherous place. Therefore a good leader must take these conditions into account, and even use them to his advantage.
2) A bad leader tries to pretend otherwise, and force others to accept unrealistic goals, which is why he fails. He wants to be loved by the public.
3) The public neither knows, nor wants to know, the processes of government. However, they like to pretend that they know. They want government to "work". How it does it is of little concern.
4) There are many forms a government can take; but the rules governing it remain the same.
All told, there is not very much that, taken with a grain of salt, is terribly offensive.
#2
"2) A bad leader tries to pretend otherwise, and force others to accept unrealistic goals, which is why he fails. He wants to be loved by the public."
So Machiavelli knew Jimmuh the Peanut?
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
12/30/2007 13:58 Comments ||
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There are lessons to be learned from the dazzling success of the surge strategy in Iraq.
Lesson one is that just about no mission is impossible for the United States military. A year ago it was widely thought, not just by the new Democratic leaders in Congress but also in many parts of the Pentagon, that containing the violence in Iraq was impossible. Now we have seen it done.
We have seen this before in American history. George Washington's forces seemed on the brink of defeat many times in the agonizing years before Yorktown. Abraham Lincoln's generals seemed so unsuccessful in the Civil War that in August 1864 it was widely believed he would be defeated for re-election. But finally Lincoln found the right generals. Sherman took Atlanta and marched to the sea; Grant pressed forward in Virginia.
Franklin Roosevelt picked the right generals and admirals from the start in World War II, but the first years of the war were filled with errors and mistakes. Even Vietnam is not necessarily a counterexample. As Lewis Sorley argues persuasively in "A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam," Gen. Creighton Abrams came up with a winning strategy by 1972. South Vietnam fell three years later when the North Vietnamese army attacked en masse, and Congress refused to allow the aid the U.S. had promised.
George W. Bush, like Lincoln, took his time finding the right generals. But it's clear now that the forward-moving surge strategy devised by Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno has succeeded where the stand-aside strategy employed by their predecessors failed. American troops are surely the most capable military force in history. They just need to be given the right orders.
Lesson two is that societies can more easily be transformed from the bottom up than from the top down. Bush's critics are still concentrating on the failure of the central Iraqi government to reach agreement on important issues -- even though the oil revenues are already being distributed to the provinces. We persuaded the Iraqis to elect their parliament from national party lists (reportedly so that it would include more women) rather than to elect them from single-member districts that would have elected community leaders more in touch with local opinion.
But the impetus for change has come from the bottom up, from tribal sheiks in Anbar province who got tired of the violence and oppression of al Qaeda in Iraq, from Shiites and Sunnis who, once confident of the protection of American forces and of the new Iraqi military, decided to quit killing each other. They did not wait for orders from Baghdad or for legislation to be passed with all the i's dotted and t's crossed.
Our own recent history should have taught us that bottom-up transformation, in local laboratories of reform, can often achieve results that seemed impossible to national leaders. At the beginning of the 1990s we seemed to have intractable problems of high crime and welfare dependency. Experts argued that we couldn't hope for improvement. But state and local leaders got to work and showed that change for the better was possible. They included Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson on welfare and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on crime control and many others, mostly Republicans but many Democrats as well. The federal government came charging in only after success was achieved in states and cities across the country. By now welfare dependency and crime have fallen by more than half, and they have virtually disappeared as political issues.
Lesson three is that it doesn't pay to bet against America. As Walter Russell Mead explains in his trenchant (and entertaining) "God and Gold: Britain and America and the Making of the Modern World," first Britain and then America have built the most prosperous and creative economies the world has ever seen and have prevailed in every major military conflict (except when they fought each other) since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Many of those victories have been achieved in conflicts far more grueling than what we have faced in Iraq.
Some of George W. Bush's critics seem to have relished the prospect of American defeat and some refuse to acknowledge the success that has been achieved. But it appears that they have "misunderestimated" him once again, and have "misunderestimated" the competence of the American military and of free peoples working from the bottom up to transform their societies for the better. It's something to be thankful for as the new year begins.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/30/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Gen. Petraeus is a brilliant counterinsurgency strategist and was the right man at the right time.
Pres. Bush, Sen. McCain, the armed forced and the American people deserve credit for persevering through difficult times to achieve something really remarkable.
The majority of Iraqis also deserve respect for demonstrating resolve in continuing to vote and join both the police and military forces under risk of death. On a basic societal level they show an economic and political resiliency which is encouraging.
#2
If you look here on the burg, you'll see comments to the same effect - the the society over there is tribal, and we needed to get the village elders and tribes involved.
I remember reading and posting such quite a while back here on the 'burg.
Its the desk-bound paper pushers and Clinton-era ass covering generals in the "Big Army" that didnt have a frikken clue.
The 3rd ACR commander, COL McMaster, showed them how it should be done a couple years ago, but the a-holes didnt want to learn. To this day they have blackballed him for a well deserved promotion to BG, because he made them look so bad by being right when their "Fort Apache" tactics were wrong.
#3
Colonel H.R. McMaster, adviser to General David Petraeus
By Laura Rozen
October 18, 2007
Mother Jones: Do you think the strategy in Iraq is working better now?
Colonel H.R. McMaster: Well, one of the things to remember is that the nature of the conflict does not remain static. One of the fundamental conceptual flaws in our efforts so far, and really even more so, the popular understanding of the war, is that we thought linearly about it. We thought that we could sort of program out a future course of events based mainly on what we decided to do, forgetting the interaction with various enemies within Iraq and then also interaction with other destabilizing factors and other causes of instability and violence. So what has occurred is that over time, the nature of the conflict has changed. And most recently, in the last year, the conflict shifted from what had been predominantly an insurgency, or the problem of insurgency and counterinsurgency, to a communal struggle for power and survival. Of course, to address that civil conflict would take a different kind of approach to the problem. And then it wasn't just, of course, the communal struggle, but it was also still an insurgency. It was still also an insurgency that had allied itself and established alliances in communities with transnational terrorist organizations affiliated with Al Qaeda. This is Al Qaeda in Iraq and there were external sources of instability, not only in the form of this transnational terrorist organization but also Iran's efforts to destabilize Iraq through its sponsorship of extremist Shiite militias and the so-called special cells situated in the Mahdi Army and the role of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard corps generally. They keep the cycle of sectarian violence going to advance their agenda through not just military action or sponsorship of proxies in Iraq, but also infiltration of certain governmental organizations and security institutions. And political parties. All of this is happening in the context of a weak state that lacks the capacity to do what needs to be done to stabilize the situation.
MJ: So far it doesn't sound like there's a lot to work with.
HRM: There's a lot to work with, but there are no easy solutions. There really is a lot to work with, because in Iraq, despite this cycle of sectarian violence that has sort of created the chaotic environment and the descent into chaos you witnessed late last year, the vast majority of Iraqis don't want this kind of violence, obviously. They want to live normal lives. They want a better future for their children. This kind of ethnic and sectarian tension that leads to this kind of violence is not natural among Iraqis. This is something that has been deliberately incited by Al Qaeda in Iraq.
MJ: Yes, but how is the sectarian violence different from so many other civil-war-type conflicts we've seen in Bosnia and Lebanon and other places? The population, of course, doesn't want it.
HRM: Right. That's why it's important to intervene in a way that allows you to establish peace to break that cycle of sectarian violence and to lift the pall of fear off those populations, to defeat this campaign of intimidation and coercion that allows these terrorists and militias and criminal gangs that have grafted themselves onto this problem. You have to be able to defeat that.
MJ: And you guys have had big success doing that in Anbar? Is that right?
HRM: Yes, it's a huge success in Al Anbar province and there are also successes that were underreported, or maybe not fully understood, previous to that in Ninewa province, which is where our regiment operated and where the First Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division operated before us in Mosul. They really stopped this cycle of ethnic violence predominantly in Mosul between Kurds and Sunni Arabs and other sub-communities within that city of two-and-a-half million people. The success in Anbar has now spread to Baghdad, Babil, Diyala, and Salah ad Din provinces. Ours and Iraqi forces have been able to break that cycle of sectarian violence and create the conditions for sustainable stability in some of the most critical mixed-sectarian areas. This approach of emphasizing population security, breaking the cycle of sectarian violence, rekindling hope among the population, lifting the pall of fear off the people, and then actively engaging the various communities to bring about political accommodation is working at the local level. What's key now is to sustain that effort at the local level and try to elevate those successes to the national level. Now, one of the things that is going for the Iraqis, and for us in that connection, is how tired they are of the violence. The number one cross-cutting issue is security. My personal experience in Ninewa province has been that at the most fundamental level people don't really care if it's a Shiite, a Sunni, a Kurd, or a Turkoman that's providing them security, as long as that force treats them with respect.
MJ: Is that really true of the Sunni tribal sheikhs?
HRM: If you have a force that's professional, that's well led, that treats people with respect, that's not advancing a narrow sectarian agenda in a way that's destabilizing to the situation, people will accept that force after a period of learning about that force and meeting the people. It doesn't happen easily, and it takes what we call an information campaign, a real effort to reintroduce the Iraqi population to their own security forces. When we first went to Iraq we thought, "Hey, there is a big part of this culture that has to do with mediation and we're going to have to look for Iraqi mediators to really help us with the population." What we have found is that we were the principle mediators in many cases between the Iraqis and their own security forces and their own government, and so you have to almost embrace that role. Now you don't want to create dependency. A big part of this problem is not just the capability of Iraqi security forces but their legitimacy. One of the ways to do it is you recruit from the population. What we found is probably the best setup is a combination of indigenous forces, mainly in the police force, but also some outside forces too, that help insulate these security forces from some of the tribal pressures associated with criminality, for example, or a particular tribal agenda. So you don't want a homogeneous force, but a force that is, at least to some degree, representative of the local population.
MJ: What signs do you see that Iraq is making progress poltically?
HRM: It will take time to develop the institutional capacity so the government can perform at the base level. This is one of the problems with the previous strategy. What I mentioned before was the evolution of the conflict to a conflict that involved communal struggle as well as insurgency. And then the other aspect of it was that our strategy was to rapidly transition to security forces that not only lacked the capacity but also the willingness to do what was necessary. Many of these security forces were infiltrated by malign sectarian organizations. On the government side, the strategy was to rapidly transition to this so-called "unity" government that lacked not only the intuitional capacity but also the willingness to do what was necessary because the way the ministries were divided up between certain organizations that were endeavoring to extend patronage networks and consolidate power, rather than operate effectively as a government ministry. The transitioning as an end in and of itself can't really allow us to achieve an outcome in the country consistent with what I believe are Iraqi interests and certainly a situation that would be inconsistent with our national interests.
MJ: Does the U.S. have the capacity to continue its troop commitment at this level, or do troop levels have to come down a bit? If that's the case, can the military continue to foster the kind of security successes on the local level that you've been describing?
HRM: I think it is certainly feasible and even likely that if we were able to sustain an effort, perhaps not at the same level we have now but at a slightly reduced level, that you could achieve the condition of really sustainable stability. That's basically a level of security that permits a level of economic and political development to succeed and also sets the conditions for the kind of political accommodation that's necessary between the various communities. Essentially, you recognize that many of these differences won't be resolved for a generation, but you move that battleground from a military battleground to a political battleground through aggressive mediation and diplomacy, which is a big part of what we have to do in the region to help move these communities to political accommodation, to get the neighbors to play a more productive role. That includes the neighbors who have exhibited malign intentions there, Iran and Syria, but also our friends in the region. The important thing to remember is war does not progress linearly. The future course of events is going to be very difficult to predict with a high degree of precision.
MJ: What about the so-called Washington clock?
HRM: I think that the key element that has been missing is again that the nature of the conflict was evolving faster than we were adjusting to the evolved nature of that conflict. I think that was very much apparent to journalists, to politicians, to the American people generally, and to any keen observer of the conflict. It was clear to them that the strategy was no longer addressing effectively the fundamental causes of instability. I think now we are pursuing a strategy that does address those fundamental causes of instability. The question remains whether or not we're going to be able to succeed, will the strategy prove adequate to this very complex and daunting and difficult task? I believe that certainly it does have a very strong chance of succeeding if we possess the will to see it through. And that's the fundamental question, you know? It is a fundamental question.
MJ: Quantify the type of commitment we'd need to see this through? Ten years, tens of thousands of troops?
HRM: Well, I think the commitment is much more than military. The security aspect of the strategy has to be very closely connected to what we're doing in many areas including development of Iraqi rule of law, local governance, movement towards political accommodation, and the diplomatic aspect of this problem. You can sustain an improved security situation with a reduced number of forces over time if you can make progress toward political accommodation, because that ameliorates one of the fundamental causes of violence and conflict. Once that is addressed effectively then you don't need as many forces to conduct area security and counterinsurgency operations. So that's just one variable. Another one is obviously the capability and legitimacy of Iraqi security forces, which also could shift dramatically over time.
#6
A big part of this problem is not just the capability of Iraqi security forces but their legitimacy. One of the ways to do it is you recruit from the population. What we found is probably the best setup is a combination of indigenous forces, mainly in the police force, but also some outside forces too, that help insulate these security forces from some of the tribal pressures associated with criminality, for example, or a particular tribal agenda. So you don't want a homogeneous force, but a force that is, at least to some degree, representative of the local population.
The Donks have no one in their ranks or whores in their pay who are competent enough to handle real military grand or operational strategy. They got themselves some real nice palace guards, but nothing in the down and dirty where the bayonet meets the ribs leaders.
Thought this might be timely given the Benazir Bhutto investigation. Mehsud is a part of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and has links to Matiur Rehman. If al-Qaeda indeed ordered the assassination of Bhutton, Rehman very likely was involved, and that makes Mehsud's involvement possible. So here is some background on the man.
By Anthony Bruno
"Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Koran extols Muslims to wage jihad. We only fulfill God's orders. Only jihad can bring peace to the world...We will continue our struggle until foreign troops are thrown out. Then we will attack them in the US and Britain until they either accept Islam or agree to pay jizya (a tax in Islam for non-Muslims living in an Islamic state)." These are the words of Baitullah Mehsud, militant leader of the Mehsud tribe of the Pashtun ethnic group, from a BBC interview in January 2007.
Baitullah Mehsud is not a household nameyet. Terrorist leaders tend to be nameless and faceless until their deeds earn them infamy. Osama bin Laden's name was largely unknown to the public until Sept. 11, 2001. But with General Pervez Musharraf's recent imposition of emergency rule in Pakistan and his desperate struggle to hang onto power, Baitullah's name has begun to emerge in daily news reports coming out of Pakistan. Some portray him as an annoying stone in Musharraf's shoe, just one of several problems confronting the general. But others see Baitullah as a pivotal figure who could tip the political balance in Pakistan toward militant Islam and spark terror attacks throughout the world.
Baitullah commands a force of 20,000 to 30,000 fighters in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. He has dispatched suicide-bombers to kill Pakistani police and soldiers in Swat, Kohat, Bannu, Dera Ismail Khan, and Peshawar. On August 30, his forces brazenly captured 213 Pakistani soldiers and held them hostage for two months until his demands were met. One day after declaring the current state of emergency, General Musharraf reached a settlement with Baitullah, exchanging 25 militants in government custody for the captured troops. Musharraf later admitted that these men were trained suicide bombers, and one of them was under indictment for participating in a suicide bombing. As part of the deal, Baitullah agreed to expel foreign militants from his territories and stop attacking the army. But Baitullah has signed peace accords with the Pakistani government before and reneged on his word.
Baitullah has no formal education or religious schooling but is a natural leader with keen political instincts. He controls a critical battleground in the war on terror, South Waziristan, a tribal territory in Pakistan on the Afghanistan border about the size of New Jersey. The Taliban currently thrive in this region and Al Qaeda is welcome there. There's a better than even chance that Osama bin Laden is living somewhere in Waziristan under Baitullah's protection.
#2
Blah, blah. What a puff piece. I've seen this before. He killed Bhutto and now he's in the cross hairs. Bad news, Baitullah, as soon as you become a household name, it means your days are limited.
There's a better than even chance that Osama bin Laden is living somewhere in Waziristan under Baitullah's protection I suspect within a year or two at most, Baitullah will be "living" with him.
#3
sorry, I guess I was being a bit tired and cranky. It's an interesting and informative article. But these guys are little more than intelligent barbarians. And as soon as their name and atrocities become known by the civilized west, they are dead men walking. It's spears v/s laser guided munitions. They aren't even close to being as big and important as they think they are.
#4
WG, I agree with your comments. Mehsud will get whacked at some point, either because he's insufficiently loyal to al-Q, or because he starts to imagine himself as the new emir with the gold-pipped, curly-toed slippers (these two possibilities are not mutually exclusive), or because someone in the Coalition forces just across the border finally is allowed to turn the man into cranberry jam.
In the meantime, this was the best background piece I could find.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/30/2007 12:13 Comments ||
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#5
sorry. The article was a great find! I wasn't my intention to criticize the info, - I just was expressing frustration how they always make these goat-herders look like these super-hero warriors. Please forgive!
Axis Of Evil: If Iran has suspended its nuclear weapons program, what are the Russians shipping advanced air defense systems to protect? The National Intelligence Estimate didn't predict the Cuban missile crisis, either.
Earlier this month, in a move oddly hailed by the Bush administration, Russia announced that it had delivered the first of 80 tons of enriched uranium to fuel the soon-to-be-completed nuclear reactor at the Iranian port city of Bushehr. Iran also announced it was building a second, 360-megawatt nuclear plant.
Putting the best light on the Russian sale, President Bush made the point that if the Iranians are buying enriched uranium from Russia, they don't need to enrich it themselves.
But the fact that they are doing both should raise red flags, particularly with respect to the recent National Intelligence estimate that said Tehran had shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
Another red flag should be raised by a statement Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najar read on state radio last Wednesday. Though Moscow has since denied it, Najar said Tehran had contracted for the purchase of Russia's state-of-the-art S-300 air defense system. The S-300 is a much more powerful and versatile weapon than the Tor-M1 missile systems that Moscow supplied earlier this year and which are capable of hitting airborne targets at altitudes up to 20,000 feet. The S-300 is capable of downing aircraft, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles at a distance up to 95 miles and at altitudes up to 90,000 feet.
Russia completed delivery of 29 mobile Tor-M1 (SA-15 Gauntlet) short-range surface-to-air missiles in January, part of an arms deal worth $700 million. The Tor-M1 is part of a nationwide air defense system clearly designed to prevent a repeat of Israel's 1981 strike against Iraq's French-built Osirak reactor. That's an awful lot of firepower to protect a peaceful nuclear power program.
The Bushehr deal supposedly has safeguards: Iran would return spent fuel rods to Russia, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has surveillance cameras at various Iranian nuclear facilities. But as noted by Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center who served under Bush 41, the deal brings Tehran frighteningly close to a nuclear warhead. "At any time while it is loading the fuel," he told the Washington Times, "Tehran could seize it and have enough uranium to fuel its centrifuges at Natanz to make up to 150 crude nuclear weapons."
A year after Bushehr is brought on line, a third of its fuel in the form of near-weapons-grade plutonium is scheduled to be removed from the reactor enough to make 20 nukes. For a single bomb, Iran would simply have to divert just 5% of the spent fuel.
Along with its continued large purchases of Russian air defense systems, Iran continues with a robust missile program that is probably not meant to put an ayatollah on the moon. While everyone made nice concerning Middle East peace at the recent Annapolis conference, Iran tested a new missile, the Ashoura.
The Ashoura uses solid fuel, meaning it has an easier and quicker launch sequence that is harder to detect. Its 2,000-kilometer range is capable of reaching Israel, U.S. bases in the Middle East and eastern Europe. Oddly enough, that's where we plan to deploy 10 missile defense interceptors and a tracking radar in Poland and the Czech Republic, respectively over strenuous Russian objections.
As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger noted in a Washington Post op-ed, the NIE focused narrowly on the building of warheads, perhaps the easiest and shortest part of developing a nuclear capability. Clearly Tehran has continued with the other two parts: production and acquisition of fissile material and development of missile delivery systems.
National Intelligence Estimates have been wrong before. On Sept. 19, 1962, a NIE reassured us that while it would give the Soviets a military advantage, "the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range missiles in Cuba . . . would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it."
Let's not underestimate either Moscow's intentions or Iran's.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/30/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Since the assassination of Czar Alexander II, history has shown the most accurate assessments of Russian intent are those framed in the light of worst case scenarios. Iranian intent is much more obvious.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
