SubscribeFor misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.Costly Withdrawal Is the Price To Be Paid for a Foolish War
Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew University, is author of "Transformation of War" (Free Press, 1991). He is the only non-American author on the U.S. Army's required reading list for officers.Ah, I see you've just taken your source's attribution and lent it your imprimatur. Well, I still think it's a crap claim and would like to see substantiation. Maybe I'll write to The Forward.
What we might not survive is turning to the impeachment process every time we start to regret an election.
he can always claim that he was given intelligence that in good conscience he accepted as accurate
Definition of the trinity as "people, army, and government" seems to have originated in Harry Summers's important and influential study, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (1982). This version of Clausewitz's concept was derived from a secondary discussion in which Clausewitz developed a linkage between his "remarkable trinity" of war (violent emotion, chance, and rational policy) and the social trinity of people, army, and government. It appears in the introduction to Summers's book: "The task of the military theorist, Clausewitz said, is to develop a theory that maintains a balance among what he calls a trinity of war--the people, the government, and the Army."*5 That definition is repeated in On Strategy II: A Critical Analysis of the Gulf War: "Particularly apt was Clausewitz's emphasis on the `remarkable trinity' of the people, the government, and the army as the essential basis for military operations."*6 Using this concept of the trinity throughout both books with great success, Colonel Summers made it a valuable analytical tool. It is nonetheless an alteration of the concept as it is expressed in On War. Perhaps it would be more accurate to refer to the concept in this form as the "Summersian Trinity." It provides a wonderful example of the way in which thinkers in every era have effectively adapted Clausewitz's ideas to the peculiarities of the times. Unfortunately, such adaptations tend to have a counterproductive side effect: When times change, people remember the adaptations and forget the original, fundamental truth to which Clausewitz himself had pointed. The result is that Clausewitz is periodically declared obsolete.I guess this is sort of a derail, but I agree with Bassford and Villacres that this idea of 'non-trinitarian' war stems from a total misunderstanding of what Von Clausewitz meant by trinitarian war.
The "people, army, government" interpretation of the trinity has caught on among both proponents of Clausewitz and his critics. It has, for example, been enshrined in U.S. Army doctrine. On the less positive side, the "people, army, government" construct has been used by authors like Martin van Creveld and John Keegan to consign Clausewitz to irrelevance.*7 These writers like to claim that this essentially social paradigm is obsolete and so, therefore, is all of Clausewitzian theory. The state, in this view, is rapidly becoming irrelevant to warmaking, and distinctions between the "people" and the "army" are meaningless when wars are in fact fought not between states but between armed and irrevocably hostile populations. Thus future war, to use van Creveld's term, will be "non-trinitarian."
Some people claim that the US won the War in Vietnam, to which I can only say that I strongly disagree. Others argue that Vietnam differed from Iraq, saying that it was essentially a conventional war that was lost because the American civilian leadership failed to provide its Armed Forces with proper strategic direction. It is of course true that there are considerable differences between the two. Still, recalling Dayan’s observations, I think there are three main reasons why the similarities are more important.Why Iraq Will End as Vietnam Did By Martin van Creveld
First, according to Dayan, the most important operational problem the US Forces were facing was intelligence, in other words the inability to distinguish the enemy from either the physical surroundings or the civilian population. Had intelligence been available then their enormous superiority in every kind of military hardware would have enabled them to win the War easily enough. In its absence, most of the blows they delivered—including no fewer than six million tons of bombs dropped—hit empty air. All they did was make the enemy disperse and merge into the civilian population, thus making it even harder to find him. Worst of all, lack of accurate intelligence meant that the Americans kept hitting noncombatants by mistake. They thus drove huge segments of the population straight into the arms of the Viet Cong; nothing is more conducive to hatred than the sight of relatives and friends being killed.
Second, as Dayan saw clearly enough, the campaign for hearts and minds did not work. Many of the figures being published about the progress it was making turned out to be bogus, designed to set the minds of the folks at home at rest. In other cases any progress laboriously made over a period of months was undone in a matter of minutes as the Viet Cong attacked, destroying property and killing “collaborators."
Above all, the idea that the Vietnamese people wanted to become Americanized was an illusion. All the vast majority really wanted was to be left alone and get on with their lives.
The third and most important reason why I think Vietnam is relevant to the situation in Iraq is because the Americans found themselves in the unfortunate position where they were beating down on the weak. To quote Dayan: “any comparison between the two armies… was astonishing. On the one hand there was the American Army, complete with helicopters, an air force, armor, electronic communications, artillery, and mind-boggling riches; to say nothing of ammunition, fuel, spare parts, and equipment of all kinds. On the other there were the [North Vietnamese troops] who had been walking on foot for four months, carrying some artillery rounds on their backs and using a tin spoon to eat a little ground rice from a tin plate."
That, of course, was precisely the problem. In private life, an adult who keeps beating down on a five year old—even such a one as originally attacked him with a knife—will be perceived as committing a crime; therefore he will lose the support of bystanders and end up by being arrested, tried and convicted. In international life, an armed force that keeps beating down on a weaker opponent will be seen as committing a series of crimes; therefore it will end up by losing the support of its allies, its own people, and its own troops. Depending on the quality of the forces—whether they are draftees or professionals, the effectiveness of the propaganda machine, the nature of the political process, and so on—things may happen quickly or take a long time to mature. However, the outcome is always the same. He (or she) who does not understand this does not understand anything about war; or, indeed, human nature.
In other words, he who fights against the weak — and the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed — and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force however rich, however powerful, however, advanced, and however well motivated is immune to this dilemma. The end result is always disintegration and defeat; if U.S. troops in Iraq have not yet started fragging their officers, the suicide rate among them is already exceptionally high. That is why the present adventure will almost certainly end as the previous one did. Namely, with the last US troops fleeing the country while hanging on to their helicopters’ skids.
For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.This is rhetoric at its fiery best. A call to action must be stern and unyielding. To say "please express your disapproval for your sub-optimal war" isn't going to stir anyone's blood.
I think he is refering to Teutoburger Wald which occured in 9 A.D.
How can this war not be called logistically brilliant?
Also, I suppose if he'd said "the most foolish invasion," we could include everyone's invasions into Russia.
You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia," but only slightly less well known is this: "Never go in against a Sicilian, when death is on the line."
1939 to 1945 - six years... so the Iraq War has already taken 1/3 as long as WWII.
The "war" is long over.
It is completely absurd to compare WWII to the conflict in Iraq.
Smith calls the new kind of conflicts "war among the people". They are fights, he says, which, even if successful from the western point of view, usually provide only a step towards the desired end, rather than delivering it at once by military means. They are fights taking place among the people, both in the combat arena and in the world at large. (This is one reason why the media are even more important than in previous conflicts.) They are fights that are often episodes of violence in a long process of confrontation rather than definitive struggles. They are fights where the conventional side, especially if it is western rather than, say, Russian, Indian or Chinese, tries hard to keep both its own casualties and its equipment losses to an absolute minimum. They are fights involving the constant adaptation and reshuffling of weapons and tactics designed for other purposes. And they are fights in which the sides are rarely single states, but rather multinational coalitions and sub-state parties and movements.What is it good for?
There are striking similarities between some of Smith's and Shaw's principles. Smith's "among the people" is close to Shaw's idea of "global surveillance war", in which a conflict is fought under the critical gaze not only of the people among whom it is being waged and the people in intervening nations but of the world as a whole. Above all, Smith's emphasis on force protection chimes with Shaw's central concept of "risk-transfer war". But where Smith sees this as simply a logical consequence of the value and scarcity of military assets in western societies, Shaw goes beyond that to identify what he regards as the key problem at the heart of the way recent conflicts have been conducted by western countries.
In the aftermath of Vietnam, Shaw believes, the west came up with a formula for making war that was felt to be both sustainable at home and likely to be effective. It used technical superiority and, in particular, air power, to destroy enemy combatants without incurring serious casualties. Indeed, it privileged its own military personnel to the point of a readiness to inflict "collateral" damage on civilians that could otherwise have been avoided. It used new ways of controlling the media, including embedding reporters, to dominate the "narrative" of wars, so as to build support at home and suppress the views of opponents. In this way, risks have been transferred from politicians to their soldiers, then on to enemy soldiers and finally to non-combatants. These were wars with varied purposes, but many liberals were attracted to the idea that the military could be used to stop conflicts and to discipline or even unseat oppressive regimes.
Kosovo was the acme of such wars, with not a single allied soldier lost. The Falklands, much earlier, was close. The two Gulf wars seemed to fit the template - but not if you saw them as one conflict and counted the civilian losses not only of the two periods of combat but of the sanction years and of the occupation, a still mounting total. Shaw's conclusion is that even when such wars "work", they are still degenerate. When they do not, the degeneracy is compounded, and when terrorists strike in western capitals it is clear they have understood the vulnerabilities the new way of war was intended to protect as well as their opponents have. Shaw concludes by calling for the strenuous avoidance of war, even if the use of force is sometimes unavoidable. Smith concludes by calling for force to be used only when it is fitted into more realistic and more responsible political strategies. In the end, there is not much in it. There are no magic, painless wars, and we are at a point, both agree, for reassessment and reflection.
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posted by herting at 5:47 PM on November 29, 2005