Well. Here we are. I warned y’all when this began that I was not likely to update all that often, time being a luxury to me. But if I cannot match my fellow bloggers in frequency of output, perhaps I can try to match them in quality, and to deal with the Big Picture.
This seems as good a time as any to step back and look at a few things.
The Moral Equivalencies of Michael Moron
Shortly before docking and exploding at Lakehurst, NJ, totalitarian gasbag Michael Moore, accepting the Oscar for Best Faked Documentary, castigated the US government for liberating Iraq.
Clasping the podium with both trotters, Napoleon – I’m sorry, that was Orwell, wasn’t it. Ahem. Moore had had this
to say earlier at the, snort, Independent Spirit Awards (where all the indies independently just happened to goosestep to the same drummer):
Right. Snipers are rampaging through your school’s hallways, the SWAT Team and TacOps are coming, and Comrade Moore, the Oinker in Chief, tells the cops not to rescue you because their doing so would teach you and your fellow survivors, huddling under a library table, that ‘violence is an accepted means by which to solve a conflict.’
The real lesson for The Children – and isn’t it typically vicious of the Stupidest of All White Men, Michael Moore, to use this tragedy as freakin’ prop? – is in fact twofold. One, that there are no consequences to being a morally verminous gasbag as long as you mouth the approved pieties of the Left. And, two, that as long as you do so, you can lie and cheat and fake a ‘documentary,’ and be honored for it.
Thanks for the lesson there, Slim.
The Moral Authority of the UN
I see that some people, intelligent people, people not wholly disposed to regard this conflict as ‘unjust and evil,’ still have a hang-up over proceeding ‘without the UN.’ There is a sense that moral and political legitimacy derive, somehow, from the United Nations. This is inane as well as dangerous.
A little logic should clear things up. If the current operations – I’ll explain later why I use that phrase – are in fact just and ‘lawful,’ legitimate, they would not become more so simply because they had the imprimatur of Jacques Chiraq. If they were not just and legitimate, the UN could not, obviously, legitimate them.
Let us be clear. No principle of international law, no treaty obligations, no conventions, operate to transfer US or UK or Polish or Qatari or Spanish or Albanian or Kuwaiti or Australian or anybody else’s sovereignty to the UN. Each member state retains its sovereignty, and is entitled to act accordingly.
Yet there remains a notion in some quarters that diplomacy failed, that the current operations are illegitimate, that only the UN could baptize our arms with moral and political legitimacy….
Rubbish.
In the first place, had ‘diplomacy succeeded,’ it would not have called off the current operations, it would have hastened them, and we’d have a few more Coalition members.
In the second place, I will demonstrate below the legality and justice of the current operations.
And in the third place, would someone care to explain to me the alchemy by which a war its opponents think ‘base’ could be transmuted into ‘noble’ by the approval of Russia, France, or Communist China?
Let’s look at Our Gallant Allies the French, shall we?
They continue to try to play the part of a quasi-colonial power in what was briefly ‘French’ Africa while condemning the Coalition as imperialists: at this moment, without even the pretense of UN sanction, they are meddling – and meddling uselessly, and making things worse – in the Ivory Coast.
They have ‘some ’splainin’ to do, Lucy,’ as do the Germans, regarding the curious fact that despite a decade of UN sanctions imposed upon Iraq (and boy have those worked: a point to remember when the ‘anti-war’ crowd [they’re not anti-war, they’re pro-Saddam and anti-American] bleats about how to Win Without War, especially when you consider that these same shills and Saddamite lickspittles have spent the past decade decrying those very sanctions) – a decade of UN sanctions imposed upon Iraq pursuant to France’s and Germany’s own votes – they have somehow managed to export some 7 times the amount of, wink, nudge, purely civilian goods to Iraq as have, say, HM Government.
(And then, of course, there are Our Gallant Russian Allies and the GPS jammers, but that’s another story.)
And then there’s the revealing attitudes of M Chiraq and his government regarding ‘common security’ and human rights elsewhere than in his perfidy over Iraq. Take Zimbabwe, whose fascist dictator, Robert ‘Adolf’ Mugabe was supposed not to be allowed into Europe, per the EU. Guess who his best pal is? And when I accuse Mugabe of Hitlerism, that’s not a rhetorical trope: Mugabe is Hitler. Ipse dixit: he not only calls himself that, he boasts of it.
Gee, the French fawning on a self-proclaimed Hitler. Who’d-’a’-thunk-it.
But then, this is Chiraq: a man who has clung limpet-like to office for one reason: as long as he’s in office, he can’t be prosecuted for his notorious personal graft and corruption.
Wherefore, then, would French approval have somehow rendered a blameful war blameless?
And then of course there’s the Germans. Allow me to quote some comments I recently made on Joschka Fischer’s moral authority, and that of any government that would accept him as a ministerial member:
Again, how is it that such a man could by his assent improve the moral position of the Coalition in these current operations?
This is the same UN that sat on its hands when Rwanda bled – for which the UN’s own inquiry blames, among others, Kofi Annan. This is the same UN that dozed through Srebenica and Kosovo, and the same EU that ignored what they could there, fled when confronted, and then tried to hold the US back from the only effective actions taken in the whole mess. And they now presume to be our moral tutors?
What it comes to, really, is this:
Who said that? Charles de Gaulle.
The Morality of the Current Operations
The current operations are being decried in some quarters as a war of aggression, a preemptive or preventative war, and one without foundation in international law.
This is horse manure.
To begin with, the current operations are not the start of a new war. They are the conclusion of an old one. As of 1991, all that was in place between the Iraqi regime and the Coalition was a suspension of hostilities, a ceasefire upon terms, a conditional armistice. Those conditions were not met. At that point, it was the right of any Coalition member to ‘recommenc[e] hostilities immediately’ (Hague Convention IV, Paragraphs 36 - 40) under the the laws of war. (Please note that as incorporated in, and excepted as amended or superseded by, the Geneva Conventions, the 1907 Hague Convention remains in force.)
Specifically, the Iraqi regime is in violation of, oh, damned near everything. (I am indebted to my colleague ‘McDuff’ for portions of this record: his moral practices and his somewhat rackety life may perturb some conservatives, though doubtless not Andrew Sullivan amongst ’em, but on this issue he is On the Right Side of History.)
The Iraqis are in violation of Paragraphs C.8 10, E.16, F.20 et seq., G.30, and H.32, among others, of Resolution 687, which established the ceasefire terms, adherence to which alone would protect Iraq from a resumption of hostilities.
Accordingly, the terms of Resolution 678, including the right to wage offensive operations (‘all necessary means’) against the regime, continue to apply.
Iraq is also in violation of or has violated with impunity the terms of Resolutions 692, 699, 700, 707, 949, 1060, 1115, 1134, 1137, 1154, 1194, 1205, and probably a few I’ve missed. When it was Bill Clinton – unilaterally – firing the missiles, the UN considered these breaches, without the need for a further resolution, more than sufficient justification.
As ‘McDuff’ laid it out elsewhere,
Iraq is in violation of just about every law of war.
It’s in violation of its obligations biological or chemical agents and weapons.
It’s violating, as to wounded prisoners of war, Geneva I.
It’s violating, as to all prisoners of war, Geneva III.
It’s ‘acting unlawfully in using the civilian population as shields to military targets, in their treatment of that population, and in using hospitals and burial grounds, among other sites, as military areas, depots, caches, or reserves,’ under Geneva IV.
And because ‘the 1929 Geneva Convention incorporates Hague IV, Arts. 1 and 2 of which provide that
And because [‘McDuff’ continues] … Geneva III, Art. 4, reiterates those qualifications;
Therefore the Iraqi regime and command authority are acting unlawfully in employing fedayeen and other unlawful combatants who do not carry arms openly, report to a chain of command, or wear any indications that distinguish them from the civil population – in addition to which such actions as false flags of truce or surrender, and the like actions taken by the Ba’athists in this conflict, have been forbidden since the signing of Art. 23 of the IVth Hague Convention in October of 1907.’
Couldn’t have said it better myself. We had the right to resume hostilities, the ceasefire terms having been broken. The enemy is conducting hostilities in an unlawful manner. And in addition to what may be called the ‘legalities’ of the matter, Annan and the UN have heretofore invoked ‘equity,’ saying that mass human rights violations and genocide allow other powers to intervene in guilty regimes’s territories, a ‘developing international norm in favour of intervention to protect civilians from wholesale slaughter’ (note, please, that this played into the Clinton Administration’s and the then-Congress’s previous policy of deposing Saddam by any means necessary: the current Administration is carrying out a bipartisan policy agreed to before it took office). Now, Annan and the UN may wish they had not said that, now that it has come back to haunt them; but they did, and that too has some precatory force in international law.
In short? We’re right. And we shall prevail.
The Strategy of the Current Operations
The duke of Wellington was wont to observe that the most important things in warfare were knowing where you were, where the enemy was, and what was on the ‘other side of the hill.’ After all, as he observed, ‘it’s not every general who, having gotten a thousand troops into the Green Park, could get them out again.’
One of the most profound lessons of the Crimean War, notably in the debacle of the Light Brigade, was that detailed orders, by the time reached the field commanders, had been superseded by events, such that to follow them was positive folly. That may be one reason Wellington frowned upon the idea of picking off Bonaparte at Waterloo: the commander on the tactical offensive, having made his dispositions, really had not a great deal more to do (and in fact, every time Boney intervened that day, he ended up making things worse). R. E. Lee felt the same way: he gave his orders to and outlined his basic plan to his subordinates, and then left matters in their hands, simply because micromanagement in those days would have been not only ineffective, but fatal.
Obviously, much has transpired since then. Aircraft require commanders now to think in an added dimension: up. The rifle revolution presaged technical developments in rate and weight of fire that have had significant impacts upon the ‘battlespace,’ as it is now modishly called. Mechanization has altered much of the way the warfighter conducts his actions. But I think we are seeing in the current operations in Iraq what may be a quantum shift in warmaking, one so far to some extent un- or under-remarked.
There is a sense in which the operations now under way reflect a very Anglo-American way of making war. Some commentators have, inevitably, compared this to the PTO ‘island-hopping’ campaign of the Second World War, but I find better parallels elsewhere. As I write, it appears that elements of the ‘Republican Guard’ (snort) have left their prepared positions to head south, to an area of perceived weakness. This means that they have strung themselves out, inviting air attack, and are flanked by 3d INF DIVN elements able to pivot on their axes and take them in flank. It also means they have left hardened defensive positions. I trust they will pay a fatal price, and I think they are going to.
George Patton referred to the Maginot Line as a testimony to folly, a blind faith in fixed positions in a time of mobile warfare. And there has been a Pattonesque quality to the operations so far. But Patton, as a boy, as the heir of men who commanded troops in Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Army, later II Corps, Army of Northern Virginia, sat at the knee of and absorbed the tales of an old family friend, John Singleton Mosby. If Gulf I was effectively the Battle of Chancellorsville writ large, the current operations bear a striking affinity to Stonewall’s Valley Campaign, and we seem to have ‘flanked the enemy right out of their boots,’ as if the Iraqis were commanded by Banks or Fremont.
The fact is, Jackson and Forrest, Sherman, Grant, and Grierson, and above all Lee, had a predilection for doing just the sort of thing we are doing now. Flanking the enemy. Making him react. Dividing our own forces, even at the (putative) risk of defeat in detail, to ambush and trap, to mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy. Casting off concerns about bases and lines of retreat, and striking deep into the enemy’s heart. People sometimes speak of Grant as a cold, mechanical master of attrition: they should study the Wilderness Campaign, in some ways a mirror image of Lee’s Maryland and Pennsylvania campaigns. These are spearheads, not a steamroller.
And of course, there is now a groundswell of concern: have we enough troops? Are we about – as the Left guiltily half-hopes – to invoke Nemesis, by our ‘hubris’ – or, if you like, for conservative neurotics, is the perfidy of the French and the Turks now to be paid for in blood?
I think not. As I write, massive violations of the laws of war are occurring on the part of Iraqi elements: false surrenders, unlawful combatants, terrorist activities. This is their only available force-multiplier.
But they fail to recognize the far superior force-multiplier possessed of the Coalition: information technology. The old dilemma: discretionary orders to commanders who may blunder or, more to the point, cannot see the Big Picture, versus attempted micromanagement that falls prey to the gap between order and execution: this dilemma has been polled, its horns chopped off. Now the full Grantian, Shermanesque weight of the entire force can be applied when and where and as the commander wishes on a moment’s notice, while subordinates, now possessed of the same real-time information as GHQ has, are freed up to use Jacksonian initiative in the pursuit of plans so audacious as to be worthy of Lee. The two strands of the Anglo-American way of war – for let us not slight the similar developments amongst the British and the Australians, from Wellington through to Slim, Allenby, and Monash – have come together, and braided into a noose for the enemy. Instantaneous communications coupled with real-time information on positions, dispositions, and alignments, may be the most significant change to warmaking since gunpowder, or possibly since the first projectile. We are witnessing, I would submit, the birth and baptism of a profound revolution in warmaking, which will change the balance forever – and in favor, inherently, of free societies, in which alone such information revolutions can flourish, and take hold.
That should cause all of us to watch events in awe.
This seems as good a time as any to step back and look at a few things.
The Moral Equivalencies of Michael Moron
Shortly before docking and exploding at Lakehurst, NJ, totalitarian gasbag Michael Moore, accepting the Oscar for Best Faked Documentary, castigated the US government for liberating Iraq.
Clasping the podium with both trotters, Napoleon – I’m sorry, that was Orwell, wasn’t it. Ahem. Moore had had this
to say earlier at the, snort, Independent Spirit Awards (where all the indies independently just happened to goosestep to the same drummer):
‘The lesson for the children of Columbine this week is that violence is an accepted means by which to solve a conflict.’
Right. Snipers are rampaging through your school’s hallways, the SWAT Team and TacOps are coming, and Comrade Moore, the Oinker in Chief, tells the cops not to rescue you because their doing so would teach you and your fellow survivors, huddling under a library table, that ‘violence is an accepted means by which to solve a conflict.’
The real lesson for The Children – and isn’t it typically vicious of the Stupidest of All White Men, Michael Moore, to use this tragedy as freakin’ prop? – is in fact twofold. One, that there are no consequences to being a morally verminous gasbag as long as you mouth the approved pieties of the Left. And, two, that as long as you do so, you can lie and cheat and fake a ‘documentary,’ and be honored for it.
Thanks for the lesson there, Slim.
The Moral Authority of the UN
I see that some people, intelligent people, people not wholly disposed to regard this conflict as ‘unjust and evil,’ still have a hang-up over proceeding ‘without the UN.’ There is a sense that moral and political legitimacy derive, somehow, from the United Nations. This is inane as well as dangerous.
A little logic should clear things up. If the current operations – I’ll explain later why I use that phrase – are in fact just and ‘lawful,’ legitimate, they would not become more so simply because they had the imprimatur of Jacques Chiraq. If they were not just and legitimate, the UN could not, obviously, legitimate them.
Let us be clear. No principle of international law, no treaty obligations, no conventions, operate to transfer US or UK or Polish or Qatari or Spanish or Albanian or Kuwaiti or Australian or anybody else’s sovereignty to the UN. Each member state retains its sovereignty, and is entitled to act accordingly.
Yet there remains a notion in some quarters that diplomacy failed, that the current operations are illegitimate, that only the UN could baptize our arms with moral and political legitimacy….
Rubbish.
In the first place, had ‘diplomacy succeeded,’ it would not have called off the current operations, it would have hastened them, and we’d have a few more Coalition members.
In the second place, I will demonstrate below the legality and justice of the current operations.
And in the third place, would someone care to explain to me the alchemy by which a war its opponents think ‘base’ could be transmuted into ‘noble’ by the approval of Russia, France, or Communist China?
Let’s look at Our Gallant Allies the French, shall we?
They continue to try to play the part of a quasi-colonial power in what was briefly ‘French’ Africa while condemning the Coalition as imperialists: at this moment, without even the pretense of UN sanction, they are meddling – and meddling uselessly, and making things worse – in the Ivory Coast.
They have ‘some ’splainin’ to do, Lucy,’ as do the Germans, regarding the curious fact that despite a decade of UN sanctions imposed upon Iraq (and boy have those worked: a point to remember when the ‘anti-war’ crowd [they’re not anti-war, they’re pro-Saddam and anti-American] bleats about how to Win Without War, especially when you consider that these same shills and Saddamite lickspittles have spent the past decade decrying those very sanctions) – a decade of UN sanctions imposed upon Iraq pursuant to France’s and Germany’s own votes – they have somehow managed to export some 7 times the amount of, wink, nudge, purely civilian goods to Iraq as have, say, HM Government.
(And then, of course, there are Our Gallant Russian Allies and the GPS jammers, but that’s another story.)
And then there’s the revealing attitudes of M Chiraq and his government regarding ‘common security’ and human rights elsewhere than in his perfidy over Iraq. Take Zimbabwe, whose fascist dictator, Robert ‘Adolf’ Mugabe was supposed not to be allowed into Europe, per the EU. Guess who his best pal is? And when I accuse Mugabe of Hitlerism, that’s not a rhetorical trope: Mugabe is Hitler. Ipse dixit: he not only calls himself that, he boasts of it.
Gee, the French fawning on a self-proclaimed Hitler. Who’d-’a’-thunk-it.
But then, this is Chiraq: a man who has clung limpet-like to office for one reason: as long as he’s in office, he can’t be prosecuted for his notorious personal graft and corruption.
Wherefore, then, would French approval have somehow rendered a blameful war blameless?
And then of course there’s the Germans. Allow me to quote some comments I recently made on Joschka Fischer’s moral authority, and that of any government that would accept him as a ministerial member:
According to such sources as Bettina Rohl – Ulrike Meinhof’s daughter – and Margrit Schiller of the Red Army Faction,
one of the primary accessories (before, during, and after the fact) and supporters of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Army Faction, the Revolutionary Cells, and the PLO / Fatah / Black September terrorists:
a man who attended the 1969 PLO Conference that resolved on the annihilation of the State of Israel and as many of its Jewish citizens as possible – that being the year the Saudis began funding the PLO;
a street-fighter, a Strassenkampfer, who assaulted and injured policeman Rainer Marx in April 1973 during a Frankfurt ‘demo;’
who in a 1976 Frankfurt riot over the death of Meinhof in the prison she so richly deserved to rot in, threw Molotov cocktails at the police;
an individual who ran a safe house for the Revolutionary Cells and Red Army Faction during their alliance with the PFLP;
a man who ran in tandem and personal friendship with its Hans-Joachim Klein, who assisted, as a Revolutionary Cells ‘soldier,’ in the Munich Olympics Massacre and personally aided Carlos the Jackal in the 1975 Vienna OPEC meeting raid-cum-assassination-attempt; and
a creature who was the partner and ally of Wilfried Boese, one of the Revolutionary Cells terrorists who carried out the Entebbe hijacking that had as its aim the slaughter of all the Jews aboard that aircraft:
was and is one Joschka Fischer, now the Foreign Minister of a Germany increasingly inimical to the United States. Thus far has the Wahhabi net and the corrosive reach of Saudi gold stretched. And at all times, since 1969, these actions and connections were sponsored by Saudi money – and I mean the money of the regime and of the Saudi princes personally – and Saudi Wahhabi ideology (ditto).
(Why we let that son of a persona non grata bitch Fischer into the country, UN sessions or no UN sessions, is beyond me. Actually, why we don’t – maybe not now, but soon – indict him, Arafat, the PLO, and the entire House of Saud for crimes against US citizens and diplomats stretching back forty years is beyond me, and prudential considerations be damned; but I guess I’m more of a ‘cowboy’ than is President Bush.)
Again, how is it that such a man could by his assent improve the moral position of the Coalition in these current operations?
This is the same UN that sat on its hands when Rwanda bled – for which the UN’s own inquiry blames, among others, Kofi Annan. This is the same UN that dozed through Srebenica and Kosovo, and the same EU that ignored what they could there, fled when confronted, and then tried to hold the US back from the only effective actions taken in the whole mess. And they now presume to be our moral tutors?
What it comes to, really, is this:
It goes without saying that under no circumstances will [this nation] accept that a collection of more or less totalitarian states and past masters of dictatorship and newly invented states . . . should dictate the law to it.
Who said that? Charles de Gaulle.
The Morality of the Current Operations
The current operations are being decried in some quarters as a war of aggression, a preemptive or preventative war, and one without foundation in international law.
This is horse manure.
To begin with, the current operations are not the start of a new war. They are the conclusion of an old one. As of 1991, all that was in place between the Iraqi regime and the Coalition was a suspension of hostilities, a ceasefire upon terms, a conditional armistice. Those conditions were not met. At that point, it was the right of any Coalition member to ‘recommenc[e] hostilities immediately’ (Hague Convention IV, Paragraphs 36 - 40) under the the laws of war. (Please note that as incorporated in, and excepted as amended or superseded by, the Geneva Conventions, the 1907 Hague Convention remains in force.)
Specifically, the Iraqi regime is in violation of, oh, damned near everything. (I am indebted to my colleague ‘McDuff’ for portions of this record: his moral practices and his somewhat rackety life may perturb some conservatives, though doubtless not Andrew Sullivan amongst ’em, but on this issue he is On the Right Side of History.)
The Iraqis are in violation of Paragraphs C.8 10, E.16, F.20 et seq., G.30, and H.32, among others, of Resolution 687, which established the ceasefire terms, adherence to which alone would protect Iraq from a resumption of hostilities.
Accordingly, the terms of Resolution 678, including the right to wage offensive operations (‘all necessary means’) against the regime, continue to apply.
Iraq is also in violation of or has violated with impunity the terms of Resolutions 692, 699, 700, 707, 949, 1060, 1115, 1134, 1137, 1154, 1194, 1205, and probably a few I’ve missed. When it was Bill Clinton – unilaterally – firing the missiles, the UN considered these breaches, without the need for a further resolution, more than sufficient justification.
As ‘McDuff’ laid it out elsewhere,
Iraq is in violation of just about every law of war.
It’s in violation of its obligations biological or chemical agents and weapons.
It’s violating, as to wounded prisoners of war, Geneva I.
It’s violating, as to all prisoners of war, Geneva III.
It’s ‘acting unlawfully in using the civilian population as shields to military targets, in their treatment of that population, and in using hospitals and burial grounds, among other sites, as military areas, depots, caches, or reserves,’ under Geneva IV.
And because ‘the 1929 Geneva Convention incorporates Hague IV, Arts. 1 and 2 of which provide that
Article 1. The laws, rights, and duties of war apply not only to armies, but also to militia and volunteer corps fulfilling the following conditions:
To be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
To have a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance;
To carry arms openly; and
To conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
In countries where militia or volunteer corps constitute the army, or form part of it, they are included under the denomination ‘army.’
Art. 2. The inhabitants of a territory which has not been occupied, who, on the approach of the enemy, spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading troops without having had time to organize themselves in accordance with Article 1, shall be regarded as belligerents if they carry arms openly and if they respect the laws and customs of war;
And because [‘McDuff’ continues] … Geneva III, Art. 4, reiterates those qualifications;
Therefore the Iraqi regime and command authority are acting unlawfully in employing fedayeen and other unlawful combatants who do not carry arms openly, report to a chain of command, or wear any indications that distinguish them from the civil population – in addition to which such actions as false flags of truce or surrender, and the like actions taken by the Ba’athists in this conflict, have been forbidden since the signing of Art. 23 of the IVth Hague Convention in October of 1907.’
Couldn’t have said it better myself. We had the right to resume hostilities, the ceasefire terms having been broken. The enemy is conducting hostilities in an unlawful manner. And in addition to what may be called the ‘legalities’ of the matter, Annan and the UN have heretofore invoked ‘equity,’ saying that mass human rights violations and genocide allow other powers to intervene in guilty regimes’s territories, a ‘developing international norm in favour of intervention to protect civilians from wholesale slaughter’ (note, please, that this played into the Clinton Administration’s and the then-Congress’s previous policy of deposing Saddam by any means necessary: the current Administration is carrying out a bipartisan policy agreed to before it took office). Now, Annan and the UN may wish they had not said that, now that it has come back to haunt them; but they did, and that too has some precatory force in international law.
In short? We’re right. And we shall prevail.
The Strategy of the Current Operations
The duke of Wellington was wont to observe that the most important things in warfare were knowing where you were, where the enemy was, and what was on the ‘other side of the hill.’ After all, as he observed, ‘it’s not every general who, having gotten a thousand troops into the Green Park, could get them out again.’
One of the most profound lessons of the Crimean War, notably in the debacle of the Light Brigade, was that detailed orders, by the time reached the field commanders, had been superseded by events, such that to follow them was positive folly. That may be one reason Wellington frowned upon the idea of picking off Bonaparte at Waterloo: the commander on the tactical offensive, having made his dispositions, really had not a great deal more to do (and in fact, every time Boney intervened that day, he ended up making things worse). R. E. Lee felt the same way: he gave his orders to and outlined his basic plan to his subordinates, and then left matters in their hands, simply because micromanagement in those days would have been not only ineffective, but fatal.
Obviously, much has transpired since then. Aircraft require commanders now to think in an added dimension: up. The rifle revolution presaged technical developments in rate and weight of fire that have had significant impacts upon the ‘battlespace,’ as it is now modishly called. Mechanization has altered much of the way the warfighter conducts his actions. But I think we are seeing in the current operations in Iraq what may be a quantum shift in warmaking, one so far to some extent un- or under-remarked.
There is a sense in which the operations now under way reflect a very Anglo-American way of making war. Some commentators have, inevitably, compared this to the PTO ‘island-hopping’ campaign of the Second World War, but I find better parallels elsewhere. As I write, it appears that elements of the ‘Republican Guard’ (snort) have left their prepared positions to head south, to an area of perceived weakness. This means that they have strung themselves out, inviting air attack, and are flanked by 3d INF DIVN elements able to pivot on their axes and take them in flank. It also means they have left hardened defensive positions. I trust they will pay a fatal price, and I think they are going to.
George Patton referred to the Maginot Line as a testimony to folly, a blind faith in fixed positions in a time of mobile warfare. And there has been a Pattonesque quality to the operations so far. But Patton, as a boy, as the heir of men who commanded troops in Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Army, later II Corps, Army of Northern Virginia, sat at the knee of and absorbed the tales of an old family friend, John Singleton Mosby. If Gulf I was effectively the Battle of Chancellorsville writ large, the current operations bear a striking affinity to Stonewall’s Valley Campaign, and we seem to have ‘flanked the enemy right out of their boots,’ as if the Iraqis were commanded by Banks or Fremont.
The fact is, Jackson and Forrest, Sherman, Grant, and Grierson, and above all Lee, had a predilection for doing just the sort of thing we are doing now. Flanking the enemy. Making him react. Dividing our own forces, even at the (putative) risk of defeat in detail, to ambush and trap, to mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy. Casting off concerns about bases and lines of retreat, and striking deep into the enemy’s heart. People sometimes speak of Grant as a cold, mechanical master of attrition: they should study the Wilderness Campaign, in some ways a mirror image of Lee’s Maryland and Pennsylvania campaigns. These are spearheads, not a steamroller.
And of course, there is now a groundswell of concern: have we enough troops? Are we about – as the Left guiltily half-hopes – to invoke Nemesis, by our ‘hubris’ – or, if you like, for conservative neurotics, is the perfidy of the French and the Turks now to be paid for in blood?
I think not. As I write, massive violations of the laws of war are occurring on the part of Iraqi elements: false surrenders, unlawful combatants, terrorist activities. This is their only available force-multiplier.
But they fail to recognize the far superior force-multiplier possessed of the Coalition: information technology. The old dilemma: discretionary orders to commanders who may blunder or, more to the point, cannot see the Big Picture, versus attempted micromanagement that falls prey to the gap between order and execution: this dilemma has been polled, its horns chopped off. Now the full Grantian, Shermanesque weight of the entire force can be applied when and where and as the commander wishes on a moment’s notice, while subordinates, now possessed of the same real-time information as GHQ has, are freed up to use Jacksonian initiative in the pursuit of plans so audacious as to be worthy of Lee. The two strands of the Anglo-American way of war – for let us not slight the similar developments amongst the British and the Australians, from Wellington through to Slim, Allenby, and Monash – have come together, and braided into a noose for the enemy. Instantaneous communications coupled with real-time information on positions, dispositions, and alignments, may be the most significant change to warmaking since gunpowder, or possibly since the first projectile. We are witnessing, I would submit, the birth and baptism of a profound revolution in warmaking, which will change the balance forever – and in favor, inherently, of free societies, in which alone such information revolutions can flourish, and take hold.
That should cause all of us to watch events in awe.
posted by Markham at 14:19
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