What I have always stood for is that we must change ourselves, not work so hard to change others to suit us. When I say the US must change the nature of its relationship with the Saudis I mean we must change our end of it. As to the relationship between the Saudi government and their own populace, that is a conversation for the President to have with his counterpart in private. But the primary reason he does not have it is because the military has kidnapped COIN as warfare and their domain.
To claim that military can simply declare some aspect of governance as warfare, write a manual about it and thereby convert it to warfare is absurd. Stable governments with solid relationships with their populaces are conducting COIN every single day and we don't call that warfare when they are doing it effectively. It is only when the civil leaders lose control of the populace to such a degree that violent challengers emerge and calls upon the military to help defeat the products of their failures that we recognize the condition as insurgency, declare it to be warfare and pass the lead off to the military. That clean break and conversion from governance to warfare is a fiction. Manuals such as 3-24 contribute to that fiction.
What is next? Will the military publish a manual that declares that support to natural disasters, or smaller civil emergencies such as the LA riots are warfare as well? When insurgency goes violent it is indeed often warfare by the populace against the state; but it is the rare situation that I would recommend to a government conducting COIN as warfare against their own populace.
But this gets us back to the role of an intervening power and what their mission is in that intervention. The intervening power is supporting the COIN force (the Host Nation), even when they have decimated that host nation government as we did in Iraq. Simply because the Host Nation government ceases to exist it does not suddenly make the intervening government the host nation. They have the mission, but not the status. To assume the status is create impossible conditions of illegitimacy that will feed the insurgent movement.
So long as we continue to look at COIN in the context of warfare and a mission that an intervening government has the status to implement we will struggle with this mission. Similarly, until we hold our allies to task for their responsibility in creating conditions of insurgency within their states; and hold ourselves responsible for the role US foreign policy over the past 100+ years has played in contributing to the conditions leading to current illegal violence directed at the US we will struggle with the GWOT as well. I really don't see a down side in demanding greater accountability in civil government.
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