SWJ Small Wars Survey 2012

[Dayuhan]

Americans were quite content with friendly relationships with illiberal and non-democratic regimes for the sixty years prior and to this day. So I very much doubt the assertion that "American politics" somehow requires any new government to be "recognizable" as democratic.

You're missing the point. If the US is going to install a new government in a conquered country, Americans expect at least an effort to make that government recognizably democratic. Past involvement with dictatorships has left a lot of bad feeling and resentment, our people know that, and they don't want to see it repeated. Certainly in Iraq the "easiest" way to provide immediate governance would have been to leave the army intact, find a reasonably amenable dictator, and let him have at it. Not so long ago we'd have done exactly that. Can't do it today because it's not politically acceptable on the home front.

This has nothing to do with whether or not we are willing to deal with or work with non-democracies. The question is whether it would have been domestically acceptable to install a non-democratic government in a conquered territory. The simple answer is "no".

That certainly smacks of Orientalism. What features of North African, Arab, and Central Asian societies make them "not amenable to centralized control by anything but main force"?

I said nothing generic about "North African, Arab, and Central Asian societies". I referred to Iraq and Afghanistan. I think even a quick look at their recent histories and built-in ethnic/sectarian issues will explain why setting out to provide stable governance in either was a silly task to take on.

I never made any assertion to the contrary. My argument has consistently been that the US military has failed accomplish the mission given to it. I'm not concerned with their necessity; though once committed to action, achieving a favorable outcome regardless of the original cause(s) becomes a necessity.

The forst step in accomplishing a mission and providing a positive outcome is assigning a realistic, practical mission that's achievable with the resources and time we're willing to commit. Fail there, and everything else down the line will reflect that failure. We failed there, big time.

Then that's a problem of military culture, which is influenced by the senior military leadership. General Shinseki testified to Congress that "hundreds of thousands" of troops would be needed for Iraq. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz disagreed. It can't be determined who was right because the military plan that was executed was itself painfully inadequate, wasting precious time between the collapse of the Hussein regime and the re-establishment of order.

Hindsight is 20:20. Certainly mistakes were made, but the task of "restoring order" was also quite predictably much more difficult than civilian leaders, many of whom seemed convinced that Iraqis would be dancing in the streets, welcoming us into Baghdad, and jumping on board our program, wanted to believe.

I suppose it is when you assume that these countries "are inherently unstable societies not amenable to centralized control by anything but main force." Transfers of power occur frequently. Machiavelli discussed it in some detail hundreds of years ago. There was some serious error in planning for not anticipating that a new government will need to be established after demolishing the old one. Since you agree that stable governments do not "appear from thin air", why didn't the military anticipate and plan for a transfer of power? The political leadership made such preparations, including the establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the facilitation of Iraqi government working groups. But the military did not provide the necessary security measures to assist the political process. Why?

Plans were made. The plans made were completely unrealistic, based on absurd assumptions passed down from above.

Whether or not stable governments can evolve in these societies is a moot point. Of course they can. The question is whether an outside power can impose stable government, and the simple answer is "no". The act of imposing governance and the presence of an occupying power in environments like this effectively guarantees instability and resistance. Efforts to "build a nation" instead of recognizing that nations and governments have to grow through a gradual organic process assure resistance and failure. We couldn't install stable governments, neither could anyone else. It was an idiotic task that should never have been taken on.

The question that needs to be asked is not why the mission failed, but why the mission was undertaken in the first place.