Our Curiously Desultory War
Training for war, I spent an afternoon in an army classroom listening to presentations on improvised explosive devices and the insurgents who plant them. Droning through one of the inevitable PowerPoint presentations, a sergeant first class read directly from the slide in front of us: The insurgency, he read, will probably die down after we capture Saddam Hussein. Except that the class was taught this October, a couple of years after that former dictator had been dragged out of his spider hole. The sergeant stopped for the briefest moment, mumbled that the slides were a little out of date, and went right on reading.
In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird describes the war in Iraq as an effort to "preserve modern culture, Western democracy, the global economy, and all else that is threatened by the spread of barbarism in the name of religion." Those would be some pretty big stakes. But from where I sit, the operation of the institutional machinery behind the war has all the markings of a halfhearted hobby, a project undertaken and promptly regretted but not yet possible to quit. Something significant has been lost between the declaring of war and the waging of it. The slides are all out of date, and no one can quite be bothered to rewrite them.
Preparing for a bitter and knotty counterinsurgency against an enemy that mixes with the civilian population and strikes mostly with hidden bombs, we ran the familiar battle drills on moving through the woods in a wedge formation, reacting to contact and flanking enemy bunkers under the cover of suppressing fire. What we didn’t get was even a single class on language – even to learn a very few useful phrases in Arabic – or on the principles and practice of counterinsurgency. We trained to fight the Wehrmacht.
If we trained for the wrong enemy, we also trained for the wrong battlefield. Camp Shelby, Mississippi, where my battalion trained, is thickly vegetated and brutally humid – and the principal place the army is using to prepare National Guard and reserve troops for combat in the cities and deserts of Iraq. I was constantly reminded of the late David Hackworth's discussion of his training for combat in Vietnam, which took place in a mock Vietnamese village in the snow of the Pacific Northwest.
These tensions between idea and action – between the thing needed and the thing chosen – have also been all over the newspaper for quite some time. I remember reading in September that the U.S. and Iraqi militaries were sweeping the Iraqi village of Tal Afar clear of insurgents for the second time in a year. The operation was, of course, a total success. By October I was reading about suicide bombings in Tal Afar. We are, as the military axiom has it, mistaking motion for action.
That's a choice I hope we won't continue to make. The current choice is not, as it is so often represented, between staying the course or quitting; the choice is between quitting or raising the fight to the level of its rhetoric. Staying the course is just a slower and more carefully veiled way of giving up, a retreat on longer terms. Stern talk is as cheap as any other form of talk.
Assuming the validity of the goal, we would have defeated the insurgency in Iraq with steps that we have never apparently begun to take in earnest. One would have been to declare a national emergency in language skills, rapidly building a training infrastructure to expand our pool of highly proficient Arabic speakers in the military and the diplomatic corps. Another would have been to quickly develop and sustain an intellectually disciplined counterinsurgency doctrine that showed up every day in the training or ordinary soldiers and their leaders. Did we mean to do all of this, or any of it, or did we not?
Sitting these days on an army forward operating base in Kuwait, I have weekly access to hip-hop nights and spa days; I have ice cream at every meal, and Burger King in the mini-mall. Couples pair off in the movie room, blinking at the light and untangling their bodies as the movies end. And we all wait for the next move, in a setting that feels more like high school than a war. To frame this effort as critical to our national well-being while simultaneously allowing it to shamble along lethargic and undefined is to suggest that we never really meant what we said about the meaning of our curiously desultory war in the first place.