It was a cold and rainy night in Baghdad in November of 2003. I had been “in country,” as the military saying goes, only a few days, and I was waiting to board a flight on a C-130 to Mosul which as it turned out would never take off. U.S.
The sadness of this column is profound. It reminded me of and confirmed how shocked I was that Bremer had removed the middle class Iraqi leadership, thus leading to the formation of the Sunni resistance in Iraq, especially ISIS. And Cheney the war criminal, at his peak. Thanks, as always, for your writing.
A great piece of writing, Lucian. Here in Krakow, I see the refugees everywhere I go. Usually a woman with one, two or three children, many of whom congregate twice daily in the center of Rynek Głowny, the main market square, for demonstrations. As a novelist, I’m used to trying to imagine my way into the minds of others, but so far my imagination seems to be failing me when I look at these women and children.
As cold blooded as this may seem, I believe Putin has blundered into a once in a century opportunity for his foes to degrade and defeat him and blunt his delusions of grandeur to create a new Mother Russia under a new Vladimir the Great. He chose to invade a country where the people are determined not to allow him to succeed at whatever the cost to them.
The Ukrainians have proven to be superior fighters on the battlefield even when out numbered and out gunned ten to one. Putin is now mired in Eastern Ukraine with his troops and generals digging it to what can become a new Flanders Field East IF. IF we stop giving the Ukrainians half vast support and recognize we are in a proxy war where thousands of Ukrainians are willing to die and kill a lot more Russians in the process if we will just supply them with the weaponry to do so.
No need for American boots on the ground. The Ukrainians have proven they are willing to die to protect their MotherLand. We should flood them with more counter battery shoot and scoot systems. Longer range anti aircraft and anti cruise missile systems and, yes, land based anti ship missiles to turn the entire Red Black Sea Fleet into submarines. This war is going to drag on and on and we have the opportunity not just to bloody Putin and his military but degrade it so it lacks any ability for him to project power in Eastern Europe for years to come. By then he will be gone and , hopefully, saner heads will prevail.
Time for us to put up or shut up. What kind of war is this? The kind which can turn the tide of history if we seize the opportunity and give aid and assistance to a brave and courageous people willing to do the fighting and dying for their nation.
The most frustrating thing to me is the fact that all that is required to stop the senseless criminal destruction and murder in Ukraine is for one small piece of lead to be placed between one man's ears. We all know it, but so few will admit to the simple truth of the solution. Diplomacy be damned, he doesn't respect borders or sovereignty, uses toxins and radioactive agents to poison on foreign soils. Kill Putin.
I gotta recall the film, Wag the Dog. What is a trillion dollar a year military good for if it can’t stop this, or GIVEN 20 YEARS even defeat a bunch a bearded troglodytes armed with pea shooters and Toyotas? The world is insane.
Its not a "war", Lucian. It's truly a "special military operation". Putin is correct.
Because in a true "war", no expensive cruise missiles or other such long-range weaponry would be wasted on civilians or shopping centers, hospitals, libraries and universities and other non-military targets .
Putin's logic is clear: cause as much terror and chaos as possible in order to subdue the Ukrainians! It's psychological warfare.
The underlying strategy of this entire obscene effort is to create an unimpeded land bridge for the transportation of oil and gas to Europe, China and India.
There is a difference between Republican administrations and Democratic administrations when the American government finds itself in a war fighting situation. Republicans want to be seen as hanging tough, but the people they appoint to manage the war invariably seem to be more interested in milking the system for perquisites instead of getting the job done. Iraq went south because those in charge in the White House and in the Pentagon were more interested in preening and building personal empires than completing their assigned tasks at the least cost of life. Author Thomas Ricks described the incestuous nature of the enterprise, filling personnel slots with evangelicals and Republican loyalists who had no discernible qualifications for the work they were hired to do.
Worse yet, the American military establishment had become a rotating carousel of careerists, metaphorically seated astride wooden horses that automatically rose and ascended, while their riders look to collect the proverbial brass ring as they rotated through the theater of operations. Officers needed combat experience (at least on paper) in order to get promoted; and with promotion, they were in line for prestigious jobs elsewhere in the military, whether it was in congressional relations, becoming a military attaché and some American Embassy overseas, weapons development programs, or that last fall back of the declining career, public relations. No such career advancement opportunities glittered in the futures of ordinary soldiers and their noncommissioned officers who were destined to soldier through multiple deployments, each one more deadly than the one before. Had these men and women been on active duty during World War II, a substantial fraction of those that survived wounding an action would have been buried near where they fell.
At least during World War II, troop commanders who did not perform well were relieved of their commands and transferred to less challenging assignments. But by Vietnam, the military, the Army in particular, had quietly abandoned the practice of firing commanders who performed poorly. Now, with military operations being micromanaged from Washington, savvy officers cultivated career politicians to be their 'rabbi', i.e., someone who would advance their careers and protect them from the consequences of their missteps or inadequacies. At the same time, those officers would provide political support to their political mentors, especially when at some time in the future those officers would find themselves in charge of multibillion-dollar weapons acquisition programs that the politicians could take credit for. Concomitantly, truly insightful and creative officers, such as Colonel John Boyd, were left to languish in obscurity until they were forced into an early retirement. Col. Boyd's contributions to American military doctrine were enormous, in particular, Boyd's conception of the OODA Loop, a mnemonic for describing a commander's
engaging in focused analysis, decision making, and taking action before his adversary can effectively react. Throughout his career as an Air Force officer, Boyd had to deal with the active hostility of top Pentagon brass. The OODA Loop and other significant contributions to American war-fighting capabilities were taught in the respective service academies, and yet, Boyd died in relative obscurity and poverty.
By the time the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came on the scene, the Soviet Union had imploded, and what was left was a Russian state that had no means available to challenge the United States for military supremacy. The Russians were not even competitive two decades later, as their abysmal performance in Ukraine amply demonstrated.
I came across a book by a former army intelligence officer, Richard A. Gabriel, who also became a Professor of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester New Hampshire. Professor Gabriel caught my attention when his lectures on the History Channel explain the military realities of ancient warfare as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. I was fascinated by his lectures. On the strength of those lectures, I purchased his study on the relative ineffectiveness of the American military in recent decades, published under the title, Military Incompetence, Why the American Military Doesn't Win. Basically, Gabriel suggests, the military doesn't win because they become risk aversive for political reasons. If something goes wrong, there are no penalties for failure, no matter how justified those punishments might be. Instead, the officer is permitted to continue until rotated out at a future time when nobody is paying attention. The generals take care of their own.
And so it goes. Fighting doesn't cease, but it becomes like background radiation, like the furniture in the room that nobody notices until somebody trips over it. In Iraq and Afghanistan, our troops have suffered death and injury through thousands of roadside ambushes, betrayals by supposedly 'friendlies', roadside accidents, and a number reasons why soldiers get injured in war zones. And that does not even begin to cover the psychological damage, the PTSD, that may suddenly rear its head once the soldier returns from overseas deployment. The point is that the American national interest no longer predominates as something the American leadership is willing to fight and die for, as opposed to common soldiers or national guardsmen.
Nowadays we hear appeals from self-help veterans groups to assist those who have been wounded in action. These poor souls are nothing like what I used to see in the aftermath of World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam — although the survival rate steadily improved so that soldiers who had been medevacked out of firefights could be reasonably assured that they would be on the surgeon's operating table within an hour after being wounded. But the scars of these wars never truly heal. Service members come home to an indifferent public, a perfunctory, meaningless 'Thank you for your service', but few civilians really care. The war hasn't affected them at all.
The Iraq and Afghan wars were different, primarily because all personnel were volunteers. The vast majority of Americans do not volunteer for the military; in fact, there is a cultural subset of American citizens, and those who hope to become citizens, who volunteer for the military because they are culturally conditioned to think of military service as 'the family business'.
That sort of self-selection and self-isolation came back to bite us in the January 6 Insurrection, where members of the alt-Right paramilitary groups predominantly included former service members. These men represented a hard-edged Rightist political identity, almost identical in outlook to that of the German Frei Korps that coalesced in the early days of the German Revolution of 1918 that brought about the Weimar Republic. We know what the denouement was then, and what we are facing now. Not coincidently, those Frei Korps members also bought into the 'stab in the back' conspiracy theory promoted by reactionary elements in the German military and former Imperial government, much the same as we are seeing today in right-wing circles here at home.
When President Biden terminated American military presence in Afghanistan, Republicans and other right-wingers went ballistic. To my mind, that was the only sane thing to do to stanch the bleeding, and to move away from a constant war footing of diminishing returns that was proving to be utterly incompetent to achieve the even modest objectives that we profess to have when those wars began. Like Iraq, some fraction of the people we encountered as part of our military mission saw an opportunity to better their lives by aligning themselves with the mission, and eventually seized upon their chance to emigrate here, to begin new lives as newly minted American citizens. We saw the same phenomenon in Afghanistan, people desperate to leave because the Taliban would punish them for betraying Afghanistan's 10th-century social structure and values. Throughout the weeks of chaotic departures, we would frequently hear about the threats to Afghan women who, if they did not leave, would be forced back into the cultural abyss that our presence in Afghanistan allowed them to escape from. I sympathize, but that's not why we go to war; and that's not a reason to stay in a war that ultimately is not in America's national interest.
America may be the magnet for people all over the world who want to come here, because we are an entrepreneurial society, and because ambitious people see our homeland as the perfect place to make their fortunes. That doesn't help the eighty percent of our population who are stuck in dead-end jobs, and who are living paycheck to paycheck. To those among the twenty percent who are better off, these people have become invisible. It is those 'left-behind's' who flocked to Donald Trump siren call. Their resentments are well-founded and palpable. We need to think about that. Many of those recently arrived people have become media stars in their own right. I see that happening on MSNBC and elsewhere. There is nothing wrong with getting high visibility jobs on political talk shows; but it does make a statement to people born and raised in Ohio, or Tennessee, or West Virginia who are not so blessed. The visuals are saying something different, if we turn off the sound, and think about who else might be watching, other than those already committed to the message that is being broadcast. And, for every one of those immigrants who come here in pursuit of liberty, there may be an equal number of people, like Rupert Murdoch and his ilk, who come here to exploit our weaknesses. Something to think about.
The bullies with armies try to take what they want. What they can’t have they destroy. Just like we wrecked Iraq and Afghanistan. Ukraine (what’s left of it) is being driven into the arms of the EU. Putin’s destruction of Soviet era infrastructure is a profound betrayal of laborers who sacrificed so much to rebuild the USSR after WWII. Will we humans ever learn? Not without a full reckoning and reparations.
Another great column. It appears to me that Russia is following the playbook the Romans used in Carthage, and are systematically destroying the civilian infrastructure and civilian population. I see little chance of success for the Ukrainians if things continue as they have been. The Ukrainians simply do not have the military resources or sufficient personnel to defeat the Russians over the long haul, and even if they somehow pull this off, they will not have much of a country to go back to. I am looking forward to some expanded analysis and commentary from you.
You were looking for a plumbing wrench and the soldiers were looking for weapons of mass destruction. America’s voters should have been looking for integrity in leadership, but, alas . . .
One wonders who was responsible for the order to have 24/7 Fox "entertainment" on the TVs; what was their objective(s) and motivation for that order. Seems to me that what they broadcast is not news but rather opinion and propaganda.
The sadness of this column is profound. It reminded me of and confirmed how shocked I was that Bremer had removed the middle class Iraqi leadership, thus leading to the formation of the Sunni resistance in Iraq, especially ISIS. And Cheney the war criminal, at his peak. Thanks, as always, for your writing.
Disbanded the Army instead of hiring them...dumbest move ever!
Pay them ? Yes!!
Anybody reading today buy Halliburton stock?
The kind of war like so many in human history . . . caused by a man's ego.
A great piece of writing, Lucian. Here in Krakow, I see the refugees everywhere I go. Usually a woman with one, two or three children, many of whom congregate twice daily in the center of Rynek Głowny, the main market square, for demonstrations. As a novelist, I’m used to trying to imagine my way into the minds of others, but so far my imagination seems to be failing me when I look at these women and children.
The survivors you see will develop a strong desire for revenge.
As cold blooded as this may seem, I believe Putin has blundered into a once in a century opportunity for his foes to degrade and defeat him and blunt his delusions of grandeur to create a new Mother Russia under a new Vladimir the Great. He chose to invade a country where the people are determined not to allow him to succeed at whatever the cost to them.
The Ukrainians have proven to be superior fighters on the battlefield even when out numbered and out gunned ten to one. Putin is now mired in Eastern Ukraine with his troops and generals digging it to what can become a new Flanders Field East IF. IF we stop giving the Ukrainians half vast support and recognize we are in a proxy war where thousands of Ukrainians are willing to die and kill a lot more Russians in the process if we will just supply them with the weaponry to do so.
No need for American boots on the ground. The Ukrainians have proven they are willing to die to protect their MotherLand. We should flood them with more counter battery shoot and scoot systems. Longer range anti aircraft and anti cruise missile systems and, yes, land based anti ship missiles to turn the entire Red Black Sea Fleet into submarines. This war is going to drag on and on and we have the opportunity not just to bloody Putin and his military but degrade it so it lacks any ability for him to project power in Eastern Europe for years to come. By then he will be gone and , hopefully, saner heads will prevail.
Time for us to put up or shut up. What kind of war is this? The kind which can turn the tide of history if we seize the opportunity and give aid and assistance to a brave and courageous people willing to do the fighting and dying for their nation.
Just like Vietnam, take a couple of hundred dollars device to destroy a million dollar vehicle. Sooner or later the treasury is emptied.
The most frustrating thing to me is the fact that all that is required to stop the senseless criminal destruction and murder in Ukraine is for one small piece of lead to be placed between one man's ears. We all know it, but so few will admit to the simple truth of the solution. Diplomacy be damned, he doesn't respect borders or sovereignty, uses toxins and radioactive agents to poison on foreign soils. Kill Putin.
Do you think he has a food taster?
Yes. Plural.
Rim shot!!!
I gotta recall the film, Wag the Dog. What is a trillion dollar a year military good for if it can’t stop this, or GIVEN 20 YEARS even defeat a bunch a bearded troglodytes armed with pea shooters and Toyotas? The world is insane.
Its not a "war", Lucian. It's truly a "special military operation". Putin is correct.
Because in a true "war", no expensive cruise missiles or other such long-range weaponry would be wasted on civilians or shopping centers, hospitals, libraries and universities and other non-military targets .
Putin's logic is clear: cause as much terror and chaos as possible in order to subdue the Ukrainians! It's psychological warfare.
The underlying strategy of this entire obscene effort is to create an unimpeded land bridge for the transportation of oil and gas to Europe, China and India.
It's all about the Rubles!!
There is a difference between Republican administrations and Democratic administrations when the American government finds itself in a war fighting situation. Republicans want to be seen as hanging tough, but the people they appoint to manage the war invariably seem to be more interested in milking the system for perquisites instead of getting the job done. Iraq went south because those in charge in the White House and in the Pentagon were more interested in preening and building personal empires than completing their assigned tasks at the least cost of life. Author Thomas Ricks described the incestuous nature of the enterprise, filling personnel slots with evangelicals and Republican loyalists who had no discernible qualifications for the work they were hired to do.
Worse yet, the American military establishment had become a rotating carousel of careerists, metaphorically seated astride wooden horses that automatically rose and ascended, while their riders look to collect the proverbial brass ring as they rotated through the theater of operations. Officers needed combat experience (at least on paper) in order to get promoted; and with promotion, they were in line for prestigious jobs elsewhere in the military, whether it was in congressional relations, becoming a military attaché and some American Embassy overseas, weapons development programs, or that last fall back of the declining career, public relations. No such career advancement opportunities glittered in the futures of ordinary soldiers and their noncommissioned officers who were destined to soldier through multiple deployments, each one more deadly than the one before. Had these men and women been on active duty during World War II, a substantial fraction of those that survived wounding an action would have been buried near where they fell.
At least during World War II, troop commanders who did not perform well were relieved of their commands and transferred to less challenging assignments. But by Vietnam, the military, the Army in particular, had quietly abandoned the practice of firing commanders who performed poorly. Now, with military operations being micromanaged from Washington, savvy officers cultivated career politicians to be their 'rabbi', i.e., someone who would advance their careers and protect them from the consequences of their missteps or inadequacies. At the same time, those officers would provide political support to their political mentors, especially when at some time in the future those officers would find themselves in charge of multibillion-dollar weapons acquisition programs that the politicians could take credit for. Concomitantly, truly insightful and creative officers, such as Colonel John Boyd, were left to languish in obscurity until they were forced into an early retirement. Col. Boyd's contributions to American military doctrine were enormous, in particular, Boyd's conception of the OODA Loop, a mnemonic for describing a commander's
engaging in focused analysis, decision making, and taking action before his adversary can effectively react. Throughout his career as an Air Force officer, Boyd had to deal with the active hostility of top Pentagon brass. The OODA Loop and other significant contributions to American war-fighting capabilities were taught in the respective service academies, and yet, Boyd died in relative obscurity and poverty.
By the time the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came on the scene, the Soviet Union had imploded, and what was left was a Russian state that had no means available to challenge the United States for military supremacy. The Russians were not even competitive two decades later, as their abysmal performance in Ukraine amply demonstrated.
I came across a book by a former army intelligence officer, Richard A. Gabriel, who also became a Professor of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester New Hampshire. Professor Gabriel caught my attention when his lectures on the History Channel explain the military realities of ancient warfare as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. I was fascinated by his lectures. On the strength of those lectures, I purchased his study on the relative ineffectiveness of the American military in recent decades, published under the title, Military Incompetence, Why the American Military Doesn't Win. Basically, Gabriel suggests, the military doesn't win because they become risk aversive for political reasons. If something goes wrong, there are no penalties for failure, no matter how justified those punishments might be. Instead, the officer is permitted to continue until rotated out at a future time when nobody is paying attention. The generals take care of their own.
And so it goes. Fighting doesn't cease, but it becomes like background radiation, like the furniture in the room that nobody notices until somebody trips over it. In Iraq and Afghanistan, our troops have suffered death and injury through thousands of roadside ambushes, betrayals by supposedly 'friendlies', roadside accidents, and a number reasons why soldiers get injured in war zones. And that does not even begin to cover the psychological damage, the PTSD, that may suddenly rear its head once the soldier returns from overseas deployment. The point is that the American national interest no longer predominates as something the American leadership is willing to fight and die for, as opposed to common soldiers or national guardsmen.
Nowadays we hear appeals from self-help veterans groups to assist those who have been wounded in action. These poor souls are nothing like what I used to see in the aftermath of World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam — although the survival rate steadily improved so that soldiers who had been medevacked out of firefights could be reasonably assured that they would be on the surgeon's operating table within an hour after being wounded. But the scars of these wars never truly heal. Service members come home to an indifferent public, a perfunctory, meaningless 'Thank you for your service', but few civilians really care. The war hasn't affected them at all.
The Iraq and Afghan wars were different, primarily because all personnel were volunteers. The vast majority of Americans do not volunteer for the military; in fact, there is a cultural subset of American citizens, and those who hope to become citizens, who volunteer for the military because they are culturally conditioned to think of military service as 'the family business'.
That sort of self-selection and self-isolation came back to bite us in the January 6 Insurrection, where members of the alt-Right paramilitary groups predominantly included former service members. These men represented a hard-edged Rightist political identity, almost identical in outlook to that of the German Frei Korps that coalesced in the early days of the German Revolution of 1918 that brought about the Weimar Republic. We know what the denouement was then, and what we are facing now. Not coincidently, those Frei Korps members also bought into the 'stab in the back' conspiracy theory promoted by reactionary elements in the German military and former Imperial government, much the same as we are seeing today in right-wing circles here at home.
When President Biden terminated American military presence in Afghanistan, Republicans and other right-wingers went ballistic. To my mind, that was the only sane thing to do to stanch the bleeding, and to move away from a constant war footing of diminishing returns that was proving to be utterly incompetent to achieve the even modest objectives that we profess to have when those wars began. Like Iraq, some fraction of the people we encountered as part of our military mission saw an opportunity to better their lives by aligning themselves with the mission, and eventually seized upon their chance to emigrate here, to begin new lives as newly minted American citizens. We saw the same phenomenon in Afghanistan, people desperate to leave because the Taliban would punish them for betraying Afghanistan's 10th-century social structure and values. Throughout the weeks of chaotic departures, we would frequently hear about the threats to Afghan women who, if they did not leave, would be forced back into the cultural abyss that our presence in Afghanistan allowed them to escape from. I sympathize, but that's not why we go to war; and that's not a reason to stay in a war that ultimately is not in America's national interest.
America may be the magnet for people all over the world who want to come here, because we are an entrepreneurial society, and because ambitious people see our homeland as the perfect place to make their fortunes. That doesn't help the eighty percent of our population who are stuck in dead-end jobs, and who are living paycheck to paycheck. To those among the twenty percent who are better off, these people have become invisible. It is those 'left-behind's' who flocked to Donald Trump siren call. Their resentments are well-founded and palpable. We need to think about that. Many of those recently arrived people have become media stars in their own right. I see that happening on MSNBC and elsewhere. There is nothing wrong with getting high visibility jobs on political talk shows; but it does make a statement to people born and raised in Ohio, or Tennessee, or West Virginia who are not so blessed. The visuals are saying something different, if we turn off the sound, and think about who else might be watching, other than those already committed to the message that is being broadcast. And, for every one of those immigrants who come here in pursuit of liberty, there may be an equal number of people, like Rupert Murdoch and his ilk, who come here to exploit our weaknesses. Something to think about.
The bullies with armies try to take what they want. What they can’t have they destroy. Just like we wrecked Iraq and Afghanistan. Ukraine (what’s left of it) is being driven into the arms of the EU. Putin’s destruction of Soviet era infrastructure is a profound betrayal of laborers who sacrificed so much to rebuild the USSR after WWII. Will we humans ever learn? Not without a full reckoning and reparations.
Godzilla Meets Bambi
That’s what kind of war it is.
Heartbreaking
You speak such a profoundly sad truth 😢
This is a particularly great column, Lucian. All so sad and Orwellian.
Lucian,
Another great column. It appears to me that Russia is following the playbook the Romans used in Carthage, and are systematically destroying the civilian infrastructure and civilian population. I see little chance of success for the Ukrainians if things continue as they have been. The Ukrainians simply do not have the military resources or sufficient personnel to defeat the Russians over the long haul, and even if they somehow pull this off, they will not have much of a country to go back to. I am looking forward to some expanded analysis and commentary from you.
Lucien, what you wrote about a map Cheney brought into GWB’s office divided into sections with names of American oil companies, is that for real?
Yes, it's right out of a major book written about Bush’s first Secretary of the Treasury.
It’s also in a movie about Dick Cheney named Vice, I think on Netflix.
You were looking for a plumbing wrench and the soldiers were looking for weapons of mass destruction. America’s voters should have been looking for integrity in leadership, but, alas . . .
One wonders who was responsible for the order to have 24/7 Fox "entertainment" on the TVs; what was their objective(s) and motivation for that order. Seems to me that what they broadcast is not news but rather opinion and propaganda.