Left holding the Bagh, Dad
I was and am staunchly opposed to the whole Iraq endeavour. Not on moral grounds, mind you — I never followed this whole “illegal war” “false pretenses” thing; that’s basically par for the course with wars. But on practical grounds it seems bloody useless. So I was never keen on the whole mission. That said, however, I am not entirely sanguine about the “pull out now!” notion. Whether from the Libertarian Party or the Clinton ex-DOD folks, these pullout plans all seem to have nearly as optimistic a view of the American public and leadership as the “they’ll greet us with flowers” boys did about the fuzzy-wuzzies.
However nauseating the rhetoric of “show our resolve” vs. “embolden our enemies,” there’s something to it. Sure, Iraq may be atupid and pointless military endeavour, a net drain on our national interests. But if some actual enemies of America take from it even the narrowest possible lesson — “the US can be dissuaded from stupid and pointless military endeavours through gratuitous bloodshed” — that’s bad.
Why? Because this will not be the last stupid and pointless military endeavour the US attempts. The US always has another pointless war — from invading Canada (twice) to the Philipines to Kosovo to Somalia, there’s always one more. And the folks fond of a given stupid and pointless war are seldom the ones who die from it, more’s the pity. Any theory of the resolution of Iraq must also contain a theory of the Next Pointless War (NPW).
Pointless Wars are different from wars over actual strategic interests. In a war with actual interests at stake, an enemy can take for granted that the US is serious and unlikely to be deterred. An enemy whose loss is certain is, with a few exceptions, unlikely to fight back.
In PWs, by contrast, if the enemy cannot discern any real US interests, his entire strategy depends on his guess as to how rational the US is. The more rational, the more casualties the US will suffer as the enemy tries to make clear that the costs outweigh whatever trivial benefits are at stake. By contrast, the more irrational the US appears, the less the enemy is likely to think can be accomplished by fighting back. In a pointless war, the best strategy is to appear utterly immune and insensitive to incentives.
Notice in the article that Justin just linked the unstated assumption. Deutch trades off the credibility loss of failing to stabilize Iraq against the credibility loss of running away. It may well be that in absolute terms, these are similar losses of credibility. But it seems to me that the former, by implicating American political leadership, might provide incentives against the NPW, whereas the latter makes the NPW both more likely and more likely to involve serious bloodshed. Awful as the thought may be, it is possible that every American death in Iraq is saving more than one American life in the Next Pointless War by demonstrating that when the US goes in for pointless military adventurism, it really means it, no matter how silly it is.
If this seems like a foul little mixture of the Ledeen Doctrine and the strategic irrationality of the Cold War, well, it is. Until there is a way to prevent the US from entering pointless wars, there is a genuine strategic interest in making the US seem pigheaded, bloody-minded, and almost comically unwilling to see the writing on the wall — “resolute,” in the current rhetoric. So long as there is an infinite stream of NPWs on the horizon, this “resolve” serves a real strategic purpose. Until the NPW problem is solved (and I suspect it never will be), it is possible that an Iraq pullout is a bad idea precisely because the war was a bad idea in the first place.
Comment by alex —
July 16, 2005 @ 9:23 pm
The loss-of-face argument (which is all this is, despite the new party dress) has been advanced for every PW to date.
I would like to plug an obscure book: Loren Baritz’s “Backfire, A History of How American Culture Led US into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did.” I am certain it is out of print, but a decent library can dig up a copy. It will alternately distress and horrify you, regardless of your stance on the Iraq war.
Comment by William —
July 16, 2005 @ 9:42 pm
There are other actors in this world other than just the USA and the enemies of the USA. How would allies, trading partners, competing major powers [China, India, Russia] view an irrational USA. Fear does not lead to support or even cooperation. It leads to arms races, ostracization, and “piling on” when the USA is no longer the world’s lone superpower. Many in the “West” are already dreaming of a counterweight to moderate/constrain what already looks like an irrational and violent USA.
Comment by globecanvas —
July 16, 2005 @ 9:56 pm
For god’s sake, can’t you see that solving the Next Pointless War Problem is contingent on ending the Current Pointless War? You say we can’t end this war because it increases the expected cost of the next — fine, I’ll grant that, but isn’t it even more plainly obvious that ending this war has far more direct effect on the expected cost of this war?
Comment by Protagoras —
July 16, 2005 @ 10:01 pm
Quite a lot of historical wars came about or were extended needlessly because political leaders of different countries are extremely bad at figuring out one another’s intentions. This doesn’t seem to depend a lot on how many signals they send one another; signals have a long history of being misinterpreted. Thus, I have little hope that your proposed strategy of trying to send a signal that the U.S. has resolve will work; the next guys are extremely likely to assume their situation is different, rather than concluding that the U.S. simply can’t be deterred by violence.
Oh, and BTW, as one of those advocating withdrawal, I have to say I don’t have any rosy optimism about what the result will be. It appears most likely to me that Iraq will become somewhat Iran-like, and there may well be considerable violence before it reaches that point. I simply don’t believe leaving our troops in has much hope of leading to a better outcome at this point.
Comment by Boron —
July 16, 2005 @ 10:04 pm
This is ridiculous slippery-slopism – we’re never going to make future pointless enemies forget about Vietnam or Somalia, and Iraq is distracting our forces from our non-pointless enemy, Osama. I think enough is enough.
Comment by Barry —
July 17, 2005 @ 8:17 am
It’s actually worse than the standard face-saving/credibility argument, which implies that failure to defend non-vital interests will lead to enemies assuming that the US doesn’t have the will to defend its vital interests. E.g., if you’re in prison, and somebody steals something without you fighting him, you’ve probably just been demoted to b*tch.
This argument says that the US not demonstrating an irrationaly level of commitment to something not worth it will lead to people assuming that the US will not demonstrate an irrational level of commitment for the next thing not worth it.
Comment by Iron Lungfish —
July 17, 2005 @ 10:55 am
First of all, let’s make something clear about Pointless Wars: regardless of the Face-Saving argument, all Pointless Wars end in a pull-out and a loss-of-face precisely because they’re pointless. Truly pointless wars, in which there’s no clear objective or set of objectives to be accomplished, exhaust a nation’s resources until they can only end in a pull-out. Iraq, sooner or later, will end this way. .
Second, as Protagoras has cogently pointed out, I don’t think many or even most of the withdrawl-advocates are expecting Iraq to stabilize without a US presence. They’re expecting that it will destabilize eventually, with or without the US, that in fact the US presence is merely exacerbating the situation at this point, and that the US should cut its losses and pull out while it still has a functional military. This isn’t a happy ending by any definition, but it is better – and more “face-saving” – than the alternative, which is an even more humiliating withdrawl after an even more prolonged and bloody insurgency we have no idea how to put down.
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Third, your picture of how the enemy responds to rational and irrational wars is backwards. Take the most rational war you can imagine – a war to defend territory. The enemy has to inflict massive amounts of damage to get a country to stop defending itself. In an irrational war, where a nation has nothing really at stake for itself but is expending its own resources for the sake of that war, an enemy can massively erode support for that war by inflicting far less damage, as is happening in Iraq. Compare support for fighting the Iraq war today with, say, support for fighting the Nazis in England during World War II and I think you’ll get the picture.
Comment by Iron Lungfish —
July 17, 2005 @ 10:56 am
That should be “I don’t think most, or even many, withdrawl advocates.”
Comment by Bryan —
July 17, 2005 @ 12:30 pm
so in other words the U.S needs to present a theory to the enemy combattants of the NEXT Iraq as to how to get rid of the invaders. So how about this, American troops march through baghdad and sexually assault everyone in the capital. Then they leave, taking with them any new bars of soap they have found.
Once this has been achieved we can expect that in the next pointless war rather than doing their utmost to kill as many invaders as possible the people of that as yet undetermined country will immediately turn, drop trou and say let’s get on with it while holding up an untouched package of Dove.
Actually my theory is that if someone invades my country I will try to kill as many of them as possible. Because if they all get killed the invasion is done with. And there is no argument for only killing 20% of them or something that would persuade me.
Comment by Eric —
July 17, 2005 @ 6:01 pm
Strategic irrationality is what C.S. Lewis called a “desperate remedy”:
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“I am not allowed to be too prudent. I am not allowed to use desperate remedies until desperate diseases are really apparent. Otherwise we become just like our enemies–breaking all the rules whenever we imagine that it might possibly do some vague good to humanity in the remote future.” -Ranson, in That Hideous Strength
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Sure, pigheaded pesistence in a lost cause might marginally improve our chances in future lost causes. But if you truly think this war is stupid and pointless, what gives us the right to keep killing Iraqis on their own soil?
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It’s one thing to bend the rules to avert a specific, horrible consequence–thermonuclear war, perhaps, or the proverbial “ticking bomb”. But discarding moral rules is dangerously seductive, as many modern conservatives so eagerly demonstrate. Torture to stop a ticking bomb quickly becomes torture of civilians picked up in random sweeps, and Mutually Assured Destruction to avert an apocalypse becomes a license to invade countries on a whim.
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The only moral reason to keep fighting is if we believe it will lead to stable, prosperous Iraq–and if we’re prepared to pay a deep price with our blood and treasure. If we’re not prepared to put everything on the line, selflessly, we should pack up and go home.
Comment by Hesiod —
July 17, 2005 @ 7:47 pm
Wrongo.
That’s the same arguemnt the neocons and the Likudnics made when Ehud Barak decided to cut Israel’s losses and pull out of Lebanon.
As soon as he did, however, Syria’s reason for being there also dissappeared. Now, Syria has been forced tro withdraw all of its troops from the country.
Setting a timnetabel for withdrawl is the most sensibel course of action. The Iraqi nationalist insurgents (as opposed to the Jihadiss) have even floated a FIVE YEAR withdrawl timetable.
I don’t think we’d need more than two. But they are more flexible than Bush and Cheney apparently.
Comment by Ray —
July 18, 2005 @ 3:25 am
You’re assuming that it is even possible for the US to ‘tough it out’ to a point where a withdrawal will not be seen as a retreat. At what point do you think the US can credibly declare victory?
Comment by Leonard —
July 18, 2005 @ 10:55 am
There is certainly a way to prevent the US from entering NPWs. It is for us to fear them, as we did, for example, from ~1970-1990. Why? Because we lost. Losing PWs gives us the right mindset for the NPW, which is thereby prevented.
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Even under your silly assumption of unchanging American stupidity and perfidy, for your argument to go through, you need argue more than simply that costs bourne now reduce future costs. You need to argue that costs now more than offset future costs.
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I don’t think they do. That is, give me a figure. How many American lives does one boy dying in Iraq, today, save in 2010? How many dollars does my dollar now save?
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In any case, the future is not scripting as you imagine. We can say no to NPWs. Yes, it is true that there are no powerful institutional brakes on America making war. And democracy does make it harder, but it does not make it impossible.