Shock, awe, disaster and humiliation

The 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq

Bombs hitting Iraq government buildings on first night of the war in 2003

One of the great ironies about U.S. support for Ukraine in its war to defend itself against Russian aggression is the growth of what I’ve come to call weapons porn.  I’ve been guilty of it myself, having written multiple columns explaining what the HIMARS rocket system is, how far it can shoot, how accurate it is, what its capabilities are vs Russian rocket systems.  I did the same thing for the 155 mm howitzer that has been in the U.S. arsenal since World War II, explaining how much its modernized version, the M177 model, improved accuracy, how new munitions had extended its range and lethality.  See?  I got to use a wonderful munitions porn word there in the first paragraph:  lethality.

At least once a week, probably even more, there have been stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post and on CNN and MSNBC about how the U.S. and countries in Europe have agreed to start shipping this or that new weapon to Ukraine.  All these weapons are supposed to increase Ukraine’s ability to fight the Russians and win the war. The latest weapons reported to be in the supply pipeline to Ukraine are the American Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the 8-wheeled Stryker Fighting Vehicle, and the M-1 Abrams tank.  Poland and Slovakia recently announced they are sending Russian Mig-29 fighter jets, and voices are raised almost daily in Ukraine and here at home advocating supplying Ukraine with U.S. F-16 fighters.

What these stories do not tell you is that every weapon we have sent to Ukraine, and the similar weapons supplied by NATO, were used by the U.S. and our allies in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

It was a mistake, and it was a big one, in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to believe that if we just sent more troops and more howitzers and more tanks and more Bradleys and if we just flew more combat missions with our incredibly sophisticated jet aircraft and dropped more JDAM smart bombs and fired more Hellfire smart missiles that we would win those wars.  We tried all of it.  We tried troop “surges” – remember how they were going to “turn” the war(s) and “make the difference?”  We tried more tanks, more howitzers, more combat sorties by F-15’s and F-14’s and our F-117 Stealth fighters.  We tried various tactics – I loved “clear, hold and build” – that was the one that was supposed to solve all our problems in Iraq.  If we could just “clear” out those pesky insurgents and “hold” our positions and then help the needy locals “build” back their lives…that was the ticket!

But mainly it was weapons.  We had the big ones, the powerful ones, the deadly ones, and we had more of them, so it was inevitable that we would win, wasn’t it?

Remember “shock and awe?”  That was how Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz advertised the strategy they took when invading Iraq with only 140,000 troops.  Our ability to shock them and awe them with all our smart bombs and big, accurate, deadly weapons would have them throwing up their hands and welcoming us as saviors?  Remember that?

Well, in Ukraine, that tactic is the one used by Putin, and it didn’t even get him as far as it got us in Iraq.  At least we “took” Baghdad.  We didn’t know what to do with it once we got it, but goddamn it, we took it!  Putin thought the same thing about Kyiv.  He would just sweep in with his larger army with more troops than Ukraine could ever put in the field and his big scary weapons and the war would be over in five days, or so he was told by the geniuses in his ministries of defense and intelligence.

Ahhh, the best laid plans of mice and men...  That old shibboleth holds as true today as it was for us in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.  And the same goes for the weapons. 

But this time, we are really, really hoping that what happened to us in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan will happen to Russia in Ukraine, that if we send Ukraine enough weapons and ammunition that Putin and his army will have to abandon their tanks and armored personnel carriers and rocket launchers on the battlefield and turn tail and go back where they came from.

I’m not here to say that it’s of no use to supply Ukraine with weapons and ammunition.  It’s absolutely essential.  But we should be wary of thinking that it is some kind of all-encompassing answer to that war.  Just having deadly weapons and lots of them didn’t win our last three wars.

Because Russia is a nuclear power and Putin and his cronies have threatened to use so-called battlefield nukes several times, we are caught in the classic dilemma of having to, in effect, fight with one hand tied behind our backs, the one hand being that we cannot commit our troops and brutal airpower to help defend Ukraine because we’re afraid it might set off a planet-destroying nuclear conflagration.

That’s where the phrase “pitiful helpless giant” came from.  Our own nuclear arsenal doesn’t make us bigger and more powerful; instead it constrains us to use our conventional arsenal.  There’s another good one.  Why is it that we use language like “conventional” to describe the incredibly deadly weapons we’ve supplied to Ukraine?  What’s conventional about weapons like the HIMARS rockets and howitzers – all of which are American-supplied – the Ukrainian military has used recently to kill or maim as many as 100,000 Russian soldiers in the battle for Bakhmut?  They are only conventional in that they are not nuclear.  I’ll buy that.  But deadly?  I’m not sure it means much to the dead and wounded soldiers on either side of this war that what made them bleed and die was just old-fashioned conventional weapon like the 155 mm howitzer that has been in use since World War II. 

I think it would behoove us on this anniversary of the war in Iraq to stop and consider the abject horror of it all.  I admit to making fun of Rumsfeld and the rest of them by using their “shock and awe” in the title of this piece.  But wars and weapons of war – any wars, all wars, and all weapons – have one purpose and one purpose only:  to kill people.  In Ukraine, they are killing the Russian enemy in service of defending their own country, so it is the case that Ukraine’s war against the Russian invaders is wholly justified.

But Putin’s war is not, and neither were the wars we waged against Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.  The New York Times tied itself in knots yesterday trying to determine why we went to war against Iraq.  It was truly a fool’s errand, including the necessity to quote some of the fools who got us into that war.

We should never have to ask ourselves that question again – why we did something as stupid as invading three countries thousands of miles from our borders, each one of them on utterly spurious grounds.  George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell should have considered themselves lucky that they weren’t charged at the Hague with war crimes like Putin has been.  Having good intentions like fighting communism or hunting for WMD’s or punishing terrorists for attacking us on 9/11 doesn’t cut it. 

War should be a final option not an allegedly easy solution.  Having just written about the 6,000 years of wars in recorded history in the cradle of civilization, it’s unlikely that mankind will abide by this rule I cited any time soon.  But there is always hope.