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COMMENTARY
September 30, 2006
Armies are offensive
It is alleged, by former Lt. Gen. Mike DeLong, that Donald Rumsfeld once interrupted a briefing of his with the remark: “General, there was no verb in the last sentence.” The retired general gave this to CNN as evidence of Mr Rumsfeld’s obsession with trivial details.Let me explain the U.S. defence secretary’s curious remark. A sentence without a verb has no meaning. It is a waste not only of the speaker’s breath, but of his auditor’s time. As Harry Truman once said, being stupid “is hardly against the law for a general”; but it is an inconvenience. And the inability to form sentences is not trivial. There are a lot of retired generals in the U.S. just now -- Mr Rumsfeld may have the Guinness record for cashiering them -- and a lot of second-guessing about Iraq. The most serious criticism has come from former Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in north-west Iraq two years ago. He told the same TV network the U.S. is in a fix in Iraq, “because Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ignored sound military advice, dismissed it all, went with his plan and his plan alone." For a man who was in the field, and not in the Pentagon, this is an extravagant criticism. For those with some knowledge of Mr Rumsfeld’s working habits, it also comes as a surprise. He has a reputation for encouraging reasoned debate among his subordinates (as does his boss, George Bush). He suffers neither yes-men nor fools. But having made decisions, he sticks to them. He is, in short, the polar opposite of so many Clinton appointees. And they were getting in his way. The background assumption is that Mr Rumsfeld’s Iraq invasion plan went superbly for the first three weeks, but has been souring ever since. The conventional view, spread by now almost across the political spectrum, is that he foolishly resisted the demands of his generals for sufficient troops to protect the “post-war” peace. To start with, there was no single plan, and every plan made was modified in operation. To say Mr Rumsfeld stuck rigidly to his initial plan is to talk gibberish. But more fundamentally, any well-run military will be at its best fighting a war, and at its worst doing police duties. They are different operations in kind, requiring different skills. Our Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan are doing so well -- taking more casualties, but killing vastly more of the enemy, in proportion to their numbers -- because they are assigned a military role. Their job is to hunt down and kill Taliban, not to wait until the insurgency comes to them. Too much of the American Iraqi mission has consisted of being targets. It would not have been improved had more targets been supplied. Has this become a quagmire, like Vietnam? Yes, in one important sense. The American military in South Vietnam was hamstrung because, except for desultory bombing, they could not take the battle to the enemy in the North. Brave and capable soldiers were stuck in defensive configurations, while politicians in Washington micromanaged them, with a view to the polls and the CBS Evening News. Iraq is happily free of rainforest, but not of infiltration. There is an internal enemy, centred in the Sunni Triangle, but it, too, depends on foreign money and materiel. The further menace of a Shia underground, making reprisals against the Sunnis but also undermining the legitimate Iraqi government, has been added over time. Syria and Iran meddle on their own accounts, and act as conduits for the international jihadi networks. If we can’t take the war to them, we can’t win it. The degeneration of the trial of Saddam Hussein into a farce symbolizes what has gone wrong. Here is a man who should have been shot within a fortnight of capture, after a summary trial, if any. He and his surviving supporters should never have been allowed the luxury of a rallying point. By extension, persistent problems such as Fallujah needed definitive resolutions. We did not defeat Nazi Germany by trying to win the cooperation of local officials, or giving warnings to civilians that alert the enemy among them to flee or hide. We kept pounding till we saw the white flags, then interred whom we pleased. War is rough work, incompatible with the postmodern, “gliberal” mindset, that permits fighting only if there will be no casualties, and assumes all offensive warfare is morally tainted. Mr Rumsfeld has moulded a fine offensive army, but for diplomatic and political, rather than military reasons, it is being used only on defence. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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