War is War

[Dayuhan]

Americans pride themselves in being so clever and good as to reap all of the benefits of an Empire without actually being Imperialists.

Anyone who thinks that is suffering under a monumental delusion. We don't get the benefits of empire. The benefit of empire was that you got to buy dirt cheap raw material from the colonies and the colonies were forced to consume manufactured goods from you. Anyone who's looked at our trade balance knows we are not reaping the benefits of empire. What good is an empire if it doesn't turn a profit? Isn't that the point? What benefit do we reap from our alleged pseudo-empire?

when there is push back we write it off to a hand full of radicalized bad actors rather than assessing it as a clear metric that we may be off track and need to redesign our program of engagement.

AQ is often described as a "push back" against provocation from the West, but I'm not at all sure that's accurate and I suspect that we may be trying to toss AQ into the same basket as Cold War resistance to western-sponsored dictators. That basket doesn't entirely fit: AQ is less a backlash than an proactive effort to pursue a specific agenda.

One has to read between the lines to extract clues as to WHY did this really happen, HOW did these people feel, What were the early signs of brewing trouble and HOW could these conflicts have been avoided; and so on.

With this I agree, but we also have to be very careful about imposing our own assumptions about what people feel and think. We often don't know what any given populace thinks. In any given populace there will be wide variations of interests and opinions, and these are often largely hidden from us. We sometimes assume that people think what we think we would think if we were in their place; a serious mistake.

We enable civil leadership to simply throw up their hands and say "oh my, some evil men have radicalized part of the populace and they are waging illegal acts of terror and war against the state, please go defeat them so that we can get back to business as usual."

That's a concise and accurate description of a type of intervention we've seen many times before: an allied government is threatened by growing insurgency, and we finally intervene to rescue it. That is not the position we are in now: in both Afghanistan and Iraq we did not intervene to rescue a threatened government, we intervened before the government existed. We cannot apply the former paradigm to the latter situation. It doesn't fit.

Is there any allied government today asking the US to send combat troops to rescue it from insurgency? I'd submit that while this framework applied to many of our cold war engagements, it's largely obsolete now. Which of our allies is now threatened by an insurgency that calls for more than limited FID - if even that - from us? If we want to get out of the COIN business, all we need to do is get out of the regime change business.

The only insurgencies that we have ever truly resolved are the ones where we ultimately (aside from the military action) actually fixed the governmental issues that were causing the problem.

Where have we ever actually succeeded in "fixing" another government?

There will also always be those like Mr. Dayuhan who say (reasonably) that we have no more right demand adjustments of governance than we do to invade with our armies.

The "right" is an abstraction, and infinitely arguable. The capacity is more important and easier to assess. It's all very well to talk about fixing other governments, pressuring them to govern better, forcing them to "listen to their populace", etc, but this assumes that they have the capacity to do what we want, and that we have the capacity to make them do what we want them to do. If one or both of these capacities is absent, we will not be able to translate that talk into effective action. I suspect that you consistently overestimate both capacities.