This Wall Street Journal ($) article relates the interesting story of Marine Colonel Joe D. Dowdy, who was relieved of his command during the U.S. invasion of Iraq last year. Not only is this a fascinating story about the pressures involved in commanding a Marine regiment in battle, but it also provides insight into the battlefield tactics that the U.S. military has executed brilliantly and effectively in the last three major military operations — Desert Strorm, Afghanistan, and the latest Iraq operation:

A potential 150-mile bypass around Nasiriyah didn’t seem feasible. Col. Dowdy wasn’t sure he had enough fuel and didn’t know what resistance he might face. The First Regiment was stuck.
The halt was anathema to Gen. Mattis, a devotee of a modern military doctrine known as “maneuver warfare.” Though Marines have practiced the technique for years, the Iraqi war was its first large-scale test. Instead of following rigid battle plans and attacking on well-defined fronts, this tactic calls for smaller forces to move quickly over combat zones, exploiting opportunities and sowing confusion among the enemy. The technique is summed up in Gen. Mattis’ radio call name: “Chaos.”

* * *

The issue of speed in Iraq remains in debate. Last fall, the Army War College, a Pentagon-financed school where officers analyze tactics, released a study saying there was little evidence that speed affected the outcome of the war. The stiff resistance outside Baghdad suggests U.S. forces may have done better by moving at a more measured pace, entering more cities, rooting out fighters and leaving more troops in the provinces to enforce order, the report said.
However, in another study yet to be finalized, the military’s Joint Center for Lessons Learned says speed was integral to U.S. military success in Iraq. In a speech in February, Adm. E.P. Giambastiani, commander of the Joint Forces, said speed “reduces decision and execution cycles, creates opportunities, denies an enemy options and speeds his collapse.”

As noted in this earlier post, the creative and effective military tactics used in the current Iraq operation and the two earlier operations were not embraced easily within the military establishment. Author Robert Coram’s book, “Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War,” presents a compelling story of how dedicated military experts outside of the Pentagon establishment fought over a 20 year period to change traditional Pentagon thinking on military tactics. As noted in the earlier post, appearances are deceiving with regard to the Pentagon, the special interests that attempt to control it, and the elected officials who attempt to lead it.
This is not a story that the mainstream media covers well, so Mr. Coram’s book and a few others are essential to an understanding of the way in which the U.S. Armed Forces confront issues of military tactics in modern warfare. It is particularly noteworthy that, during their service in the Reagan, first Bush, and current Bush Administrations, Messrs. Rumsfeld, Cheney and Powell have been leaders at the forefront of facilitating these new ideas on military tactics. Their support for those new ideas has often put them at odds with the Pentagon establishment, which is a “behind the scenes” conflict that the mainstream media has largely ignored. That is an important point to remember during this political season when these public servants will likely be accused of being lapdogs for the military establishment.

This NY Times article profiles the four victims of the Fallujah mob earlier this week in Iraq.
One can only hope that the blogger of questionable judgment described in this post reads the article and repents. Hat tip to the fine folks at Southern Appeal for calling out this appalling post.

Christopher Hitchens has an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal ($) today regarding the recent barbarism in Fallujah. Mr. Hitchens points out the following:

But this “Heart of Darkness” element is part of the case for regime-change to begin with. A few more years of Saddam Hussein, or perhaps the succession of his charming sons Uday and Qusay, and whole swathes of Iraq would have looked like Fallujah. The Baathists, by playing off tribe against tribe, Arab against Kurd and Sunni against Shiite, were preparing the conditions for a Hobbesian state of affairs. Their looting and beggaring of the state and the society — something about which we now possess even more painfully exact information — was having the same effect. A broken and maimed and traumatized Iraq was in our future no matter what.

And Mr. Hitchens concludes with this particularly insightful thought:

Fallujah is a reminder, not just of what Saddamism looks like, or of what the future might look like if we fail, but of what the future held before the Coalition took a hand.

David Warren’s newest piece comments on the news this week that the Arab League summit has been called off because of the desire of several participants to discuss further realignment of Arab states with the United States. Mr. Warren is his usual insightful self, and discusses George Shultz’s excellent op-ed from earlier this week. In concluding, Mr. Warren observes:

The issue is more fundamental than democracy, and glib rhetoric about democracy (from Bush and Blair, among others) has helped to obscure it. In the present circumstances of the world, where a suitcase nuclear bomb or vial of anthrax can open the gates of hell, we cannot afford to ignore breeding grounds for terrorists. Failed or rogue states — states unable or unwilling to deal with international threats as they form within their own territories — must be replaced with states that are able and willing. Hence regime change in e.g. Afghanistan and Iraq.

Former Secretary of State George Schultz, now a distinguished fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is inarguably a great American. In this extraordinary Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed, Mr. Schultz uses his depth and experience to give us the big picture on why the decision to go to war in Iraq was the correct one. Mr. Schultz begins by pointing out the devastating effect that Islamic fascists have had on the state system, which is the bedrock of international relations:

Today, looking back on the past quarter century of terrorism, we can see that it is the method of choice of an extensive, internationally connected ideological movement dedicated to the destruction of our international system of cooperation and progress. We can see that the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 2001 destruction of the Twin Towers, the bombs on the trains in Madrid, and scores of other terrorist attacks in between and in many countries, were carried out by one part or another of this movement. And the movement is connected to states that develop awesome weaponry, with some of it, or with expertise, for sale.
What should we do? First and foremost, shore up the state system.
The world has worked for three centuries with the sovereign state as the basic operating entity, presumably accountable to its citizens and responsible for their well-being. In this system, states also interact with each other — bilaterally or multilaterally — to accomplish ends that transcend their borders. They create international organizations to serve their ends, not govern them.
Increasingly, the state system has been eroding. Terrorists have exploited this weakness by burrowing into the state system in order to attack it. While the state system weakens, no replacement is in sight that can perform the essential functions of establishing an orderly and lawful society, protecting essential freedoms, providing a framework for fruitful economic activity, contributing to effective international cooperation, and providing for the common defense.

Mr. Schultz goes on to provide a compelling background to the Bush Administration’s decision to use force in Iraq, noting Saddam Hussein’s violation of the 1991 cease-fire and 17 U.N. Resolutions, and the consistency of the Bush Administration’s decision with prior actions that the U.S. government had taken during the Clinton Administration. Mr. Schultz notes the highlights:

Where do we stand now? These key points need to be understood:
? There has never been a clearer case of a rogue state using its privileges of statehood to advance its dictator’s interests in ways that defy and endanger the international state system.
? The international legal case against Saddam — 17 resolutions — was unprecedented.
? The intelligence services of all involved nations and the U.N. inspectors over more than a decade all agreed that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to international peace and security.
? Saddam had four undisturbed years [from 1998 when he threw out the weapons inspectors to 2002] to augment, conceal, disperse, or otherwise deal with his arsenal.
? He used every means to avoid cooperating or explaining what he has done with them. This refusal in itself was, under the U.N. resolutions, adequate grounds for resuming the military operation against him that had been put in abeyance in 1991 pending his compliance.
? President Bush, in ordering U.S. forces into action, stated that we were doing so under U.N. Security Council Resolutions 678 and 687, the original bases for military action against Saddam Hussein in 1991. Those who criticize the U.S. for unilateralism should recognize that no nation in the history of the United Nations has ever engaged in such a sustained and committed multilateral diplomatic effort to adhere to the principles of international law and international organization within the international system. In the end, it was the U.S. that upheld and acted in accordance with the U.N. resolutions on Iraq, not those on the Security Council who tried to stop us.

Finally, with the depth of insight of one who has lived and studied an earlier dark time in the world’s past, Mr. Schultz concludes as follows:

Sept. 11 forced us to comprehend the extent and danger of the challenge. We began to act before our enemy was able to extend and consolidate his network.
If we put this in terms of World War II, we are now sometime around 1937. In the 1930s, the world failed to do what it needed to do to head off a world war. Appeasement never works. Today we are in action. We must not flinch. With a powerful interplay of strength and diplomacy, we can win this war.

The always entertaining physicist Gordon Prather pens this piece on Richard Clarke and the “Vulcans” in the Bush Administration.

A decade ago, fresh from a disastrous intervention in Somalia, the Clinton Administration and the United Nations failed to intervene in Rwanda, and the result was one of the worst episodes of genocide of the 20th century. In 1994, Rwanda’s president was mysteriously assassinated, and an existing civil war between the two main ethnic groups — the Hutu and the Tutsi — turned into a campaign of genocide, which the rest of the world largely ignored. An estimated 800,000 people (mainly Tutsis) were murdered in 100 days.
In this interesting post, Daniel Drezner addresses the long-term implications of the world’s tepid response to the Rwanda genocide. Given the ongoing genocide currently taking place in Sudan, and the potential for it in places such as Iraq, one is certainly justified in asking: When will the world learn?

This NY Times article examines an American cultural phenomenon that several historians are noting — that is, a national culture of shifting blame, which is reflected best in American politics.
Along those lines, several friends of this blog have asked why I have not commented on Richard C. Clarke’s testimony earlier this week before the 9/11 Commission. Actually, there are several reasons. First and foremost, numerous other bloggers have already done an outstanding job in tracking the various issues raised by Mr. Clarke’s testimony, notably Glenn Reynolds and Daniel Drezner. I could not improve on their efforts.
However, I must admit that I am somewhat frustrated by the way in which the issues that Mr. Clarke’s testimony raised have played out in the mainstream media. I concede that much of the media storm is a byproduct of the 9/11 Commission hearings and the related television coverage. Regrettably, most folks do not take the time to research these issues on their own, so their impressions and views toward the issues are often formed through television viewing and commentary. That is unfortunate because television, for business reasons, tends to sensationalize news such as Mr. Clarke’s testimony when, in reality, such testimony does not relate anything particularly new. Thus, people who evaluate such issues through the prism of television tend to believe Mr. Clarke is revealing something not previously known when, in fact, he is not.
The fact of the matter is that, long before Richard Clarke’s testimony this week, the U.S. Government and intelligence community’s failure to deal effectively with the actions and threats of Islamic fascists had been well-documented. Gerald Posner’s excellent “Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11” relates how the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks was systematic and had its seeds for failure sown repeatedly in twenty years of fumbled intelligence investigations and misplaced priorities. Similarly, Laurie Mylroie’s “The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks: A Study of Revenge” and “Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror” both describe in excrutiating detail how the U.S. government’s approach to dealing with Islamic fascism has been compromised by restrictions placed on the intelligence agencies and political wrangling. Finally, former CIA agent Robert Baer’s “See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism” insightfully relates from the “ground floor” how each administration over the past 25 years allowed the intelligence agencies to become a political football, which directly led to the substandard intelligence that facilitated the 9/11 attackers’ success. These are just a few of the recent books that have examined the same issues that were raised during this week’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission.
Inasmuch as I have read the foregoing books and several others on these issues, Mr. Clarke’s testimony was not particularly insightful or noteworthy to me. I will read his book eventually to compare his insights to those contained in the books mentioned above, and I will post about it when I am through.
However, in the meantime, to the extent that Mr. Clarke’s position is that the Bush Administration is more culpable for the 9/11 attacks than any one of the previous five (three Republican, two Democrat) administrations, his position is fundamentally flawed. America’s intelligence failures over the past generation have been the result of a litany of bipartisan mistakes. If Mr. Clarke is suggesting that the Bush Administration’s failures in this area are any more egregious than those of its predecessors, then he is doing his country a grave disservice and, in fact, is engaging in precisely the type of political posturing that has been so damaging to the intelligence community over the past 25 years.
Courtesy of Phil Carter and Mark Kleiman, the most insightful commentary that I have reviewed on the 9/11 Commission hearings to date comes from UCLA School of Public Policy professor Amy Zegart, author of “Flawed by Design” that deals with the national security process. Professor Zegart — who had Condi Rice as her thesis adviser — makes the following observations about the national security process, and what happens when government fails to establish clear priorities for the intelligence community:

. . . The [9/11] Commission asked the wrong question. Was terrorism a priority? Of course it was. The real question is how many other priorities both administrations were confronting. I’ll tell you: too many.
Clinton wrote a Presidential Decision Directive in 1995 that sought to establish clear priorities for the intelligence community. There were so many in the top tier, they actually divided them into Tier 1A and Tier 1B. But it gets better (or worse). There was also a Tier 0, apparently for the very very very top priorities. Note to self: when you can’t list priorities with regular numbers, you haven’t really made priorities.
As time passed, priorities were added to the list but old ones were never removed. By 9/11, the National Security Agency had roughly 1,500 formal requirements, and developed 200,000 “Essential Elements of Information.” I’m not making this up. See the Congressional Intelligence Committees’ Joint Inquiry Report, December 2002, p.49. Intelligence officials told Congressional investigators that the prioritization process was “so broad as to be meaningless.”
This is not new. For the past 50 years, there have been more than 40 major studies about the intelligence community. A common theme among them has been the spotty and fleeting attention policy makers have given to setting intelligence priorities. One former senior intelligence official told me that during the Cold War, he was asked about the state of the Soviet economy exactly once, when the Secretary of Defense wanted to convert rubles to dollars for a budget presentation to Congress.

Professor Zegar hits the nail on the head. Rather than finger pointing, the 9/11 Commission needs to recommend a basic procedure by which the government establishes clear priorities for the intelligence community. As Mr. Carter points out, if you prioritize everything, you effectively prioritize nothing. Hopefully, the Committee will rise above the usual political posturing and focus its recommendations on revamping and reinvigorating an intelligence community that we have allowed our political leaders to eviscerate. The success of the war against the radical Islamic fascists depends on it.

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest at NRO is here.

This Daniel Pipes post nails the answer.