There seems to be a couple of the more foundational points about this whole issue that don’t get much attention by anyone.
Q’s:
1. What justifies the use of U.S. military force?
2. Can an insurgency be won by military force?
A’s:
1. According the U.S. Constitution, the purpose for funding, equipping, and training military forces is to defend interests of the U.S nation-state. While humanitarian disasters, genocide, and other assorted nastiness is unfortunate, yea even catastrophic, it does not justify the spilling of the lives, blood, and treasure of the nation. This question of Jus Ad Bellum, the justice of war, if given any attention at all these days is usually quickly whisked away with a “Yes, but we’re there now” comment. And while this is most definitely true, we do now have the tiger by the tail and it behooves us to understand if we really needed to poke the big kitty in the eye or not to perhaps prevent such hubris in the future. Further, we are there…and to simply walk away w/o creating a stable foundation for the Iraqi society to continue from is unjustified on any basis, political, moral, strategic, or otherwise.

2. Terrorism, counter-insurgency, irregular warfare, etc is nothing new. They are tactics that have been used by sundry groups of hominids possessing less power and technology than their opponents down through history.
The historical options for dealing with the “terror tactics” via more conventional military approaches are a) the stronger power tires, redefines “victory” and goes away, or b) the stronger power annihilates the large majority of the enemy population. See the Romans for the first 800 years or so of their history and the U.S. versus the Apaches, 19th century. (Geronimo and his warriors make Al Quaida look like a bunch of choir boys.)

The cancer analogy seems to fit all to well in this scenario. To destroy a tumor (conventional target set) is relatively easy for advanced technology. To destroy every last cancer cell and prevent it from regrowing somewhere else is not. Of course, one sure-fire way to kill the cancer is to blow the brains out of the cancer patient…a “baby and the bathwater” kind of argument, at best.

Do I have all of the answers? If I did, I’d sell a book myself. But I do know that such questions as these need to be examined…and not simply assumed.

What a marvelous idea!!

It would be interesting to provide a “mapping” or some other suitable annotation that indicates those recommendations, guidances, etc, that the current administration DID cherry-pick (to prolong Baker’s fruit salad analogy), the extent to which their execution was complete or half-hearted, what the consequential outcome was as compared to expectations, etc. In addition, I’d be interested in those points they said would be executed upon, but nothing happened.

In short, as someone who spends his days thinking about business process metrics, it would be fantastic to see an integrated “scorecard” of ISG recommendation follow-up, as well as an updatable dashboard of progress across key metrics as a consequence of their (in)actions.

Fantastic idea.

Chris Hanna
Chicago, IL

PS Saw your movie on Sundance last night — LOVED IT! Vehemently recommended it to my Harpers-and-Lapham-Quarterly-reading brothers…..

Thank you for your efforts. We’ll keep the lights from going out. e

Sincerely,

Ron McAllister

Simon

1. people are ill-informed (‘stupid’);
2. they are also fearful (perhaps because of being ill-informed);
3. fear leads people to develop collective received ‘opinions’;
4. ‘stupidity and fear’ are by-products of social manipulation, combined with a low self-awareness that allows for unchallenged opinions to spread;

What kinds of questions can be asked from such a viewpoint? Which cultural forces can move the ‘stupid and fearful’ towards becoming ‘informed and assertive’?