A gloom and doom moment.

Over at "The Corner" on National Review Online yesterday, they were having an interesting discussion on foreign nationals using military service as an avenue to citizenship. Just go scan the whole day yesterday to catch the discussion. Something Mark Krikorian said caught my attention:

Re: Military Path to Citizenship [Mark Krikorian]

Not only do I agree with Derb that recruiting foreign soldiers (Max Boot has been flacking an American Foreign Legion for a while now; see here) is a terrible idea, I'd go further and ask whether even legal residents who are not yet citizens should be permitted to serve in the military (for instance, see here).

If there's a problem in persuading enough Americans to fill the ranks, then the problem may be that our foreign policy is not be in line with our national character. One of the most important considerations in crafting a response to today's global jihad is whether that response is politically sustainable over the long term — and in a democracy that means whether enough of the public will support it for the many, many, many years the struggle against radical Islam is going to last. The kinds of sustained counterinsurgency and "nation-building" we are attempting in Iraq and Afghanistan, however advisable it may seem on paper, requires the American public to go along with things, for decades to come, that are simply contrary to our national character — like bribing tribal chieftains to kill troublemakers, killing lots and lots of civilians, ripping out the fingernails of bad guys to get them to talk, lying on a scale and with a sang-froid that would make even one of congressmen uncomfortable, and in general the permanent committment of large numbers of troops in very dangerous but very ambiguous situations.

Other countries, with a less moralistic character, may well be capable of sustaining this sort of thing over the long haul. Remember the Rainbow Warrior? The French secret service blew up the Greenpeace ship in New Zealand in 1985 to prevent it from interfering with nuclear tests in Polynesia, killing one of the 12 people aboard. Here, this would have been a big deal; in France no one cared — after all, that's the kind of thing you have to do when you're a Great Power, right? (I don't want to debate whether France is a great power; the point is that the French think they are.) Heck, it seems the brother of the current socialist (socialist) presidential candidate is the one who set the bomb, and no one cares.

My point is not that there's some clear popular will that's going to tell us what strategy to follow, just that if you're going to sail to windward, you at least have to take account of the wind. The difficulty Boot notes in increasing troop levels ought to be a clue that, while we're happy to sign on to kill Saddam or nuke Japan or burn Atlanta (sorry to you Georgians out there), not enough of our people are interested in playing nursemaid to a bunch of crazies to make that a sustainable policy. To ignore that, and call instead for the recruitment of foreign soldiers, stems from the same impulse as Brecht's crack about "dissolving the people and electing a new one" — if the American people aren't interested in signing up for police duty in Araby, lets find people who are.

That brought to mind an exchange I had with Ry, which I was working into a post. It's a bit muddled, but it isn't getting any better with me staring at it, either.

I *was* uncomfortable with the invasion. I don't like to see the US in that mode, absent the obvious provocations. I wasn't happy with Kosovo for the same reason.

Doesn't mean I don't recognize that good can come out of it - but in my heart of hearts, I don't like that role for us, "regime change." Doesn't mean I'm right, and it might well mean I'm not the guy to be President... 8^)

I know the "world is different now" argument *does* apply. That said, it's one thing to go in and kick someone's a$$ because they've obviously done something to you, and quite another to go kill someone because, well, they've talked badly about you, they keep bumping you in the subway, and you know they've keyed your car and TP'd your house, and now, because they said they're going to burn your house down you decide to pre-empt by going over to kill them, and, oops, they're a Hatfield, aren't they, Mr. McCoy? And I understand that "keying your car" and "TP'ing your house" trivializes death and destruction - but in the environment of relations between states, some stuff falls into the realm of "friction" - though if you are one of the molecules in that friction, it hurts.

I'm wary of the unintended consequences.

I do know we aren't "Edwardian and earlier" Britain. We don't do "The Long Game" well, especially if it involves shooting, as the Brits did while building the Empire. We can do the Cold War pretty well, but a seeming never-ending Hot War? Of course, I don't think any major nation, in this kind of media environment, can do so except perhaps China. Taking down a nation like Iraq and rebuilding it into something more like a western democracy is a decades-long process - and whatever it grows into, it's going to look like an Arab/Middle East/Muslim Democracy, not a western-style. And no one, except Imperial Britain, has really interested in the job in that way and over those time-spans. The French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgians... were all more about stripping the riches and shipping them home (which, ironically, is what we keep getting accused of) than developing markets, which was the Brit interest. Which is one reason why the former Brit colonies are, on the whole, more successful than those places where other colors flew.

Iraq could still tip either way, but I strongly suspect it's gone far more down the path that I thought it would likely go than it did down the path the people who decided on the invasion thought it would go.

This was more than regime change - it was a culture change. And that takes a long time - even when it comes from within, much less is imposed from without.

Unless you go the Carthage, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan route of death-dealing, which either eliminates the issue by leaving "no stone standing, one on the other," or creates a tipping point. We did neither in Iraq. And we weren't prepared to. We were expecting a response more along the lines of France in 1944 than what we got, which was Germany 1945... without the full imprint of military disaster upon the vanquished, because we weren't able/willing, nor did we want to, inflict the requisite amount of damage.

We essentially expected Saddam's people to rise in revolt. I would note the Germans didn't. And while the French did, in a fashion, after we invaded, they did so to throw out the *foreign* invader. If we had been removing an Iranian-led regime, this would have gone differently, I think. As it is, it's gone somewhat as I expected/feared in very broad terms - and while I'm willing to pay the cost, the US as a people don't have a good track record in this kind of thing... my concern from the get-go. And I don't often publish stuff like this, because the leftoids will seize on it for all the wrong reasons. That, of course, is a major problem with discourse these days - you can't have a chat like this in public, without someone trying to turn it into "See? Throw the bums out and run away!" which is not what I'm saying. But the Army AAR process doesn't work well in the political world. Which is too bad, because it really does do a pretty good job of getting at problems and solutions, and applying the lessons learned to the future. At least in the narrow sense of unit training and event analysis.

Sigh. So, the big guys can't admit to mistakes (and this doesn't matter which party is in power) without it being presented as proof positive that the whole idea was wrong, bad, evil, and in fact, the bums should be impeached and thrown in jail because they didn't do it our way (leave aside that that way hadn't worked either, that's *different*). I live in the belly of the beast. Those "what went right/what went wrong, and how do we do it better" discussions take place all the time - but stay inside, because if we let them slip out, the political opposition misuses the discussions - again, regardless of which party is in power. But if you think there is no internal self-examination going on, or that Rumsfeld completely squashes dissent, you aren't paying attention. LTG Petraeus, who has not always been complimentary of the way things happened during the initial stages of the campaign in Iraq - is in charge of writing Army doctrine and the education system. That's not where you put people to silence them. I'm sure among my military readers we can come up with other examples that are similar - and we can come up with examples of people who *have* been sidelined. My point is - nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems from the outside looking in. But the external environment makes it very difficult to engage in any form of nuanced discussion - and actually, that does lend itself to reinforcing the bubbles - which isn't what we want, is it?

My brief email exchange with Mark Krikorian ended this way:

Me:

Bingo.

Exactly my concerns about us engaging in nation building that gestates from us having destroyed the initial nation, so to speak. Not because it isn't necessarily needful, but because I'm not convinced we'll finish what we start - and if we won't, we shouldn't start.

Cheers,

Jonah's Military Guy

Mark Krikorian's response:

Yes, that's what I was trying to get at -- nation-building and the like may be a great idea in political science class, but if our national character makes it unlikely that we'll be able to stick it out to the end, don't go down that path.

Therein lies the rub. If you're President Clinton, you just go with the herd, and do what the polls tell you. If you're President Bush, you try to lead the herd down a different path.

And, as President Bush is finding out - inertia, especially when a lot of the bigger steers in the herd are stubborn and contrary simply because it's easier to be contrary than offer true enlightened opposition, can be very very hard to deflect.

Sadly - the lesson the political class is likely to take away from it is... leadership is too hard, lets just ride the wave.

Which is *not* how I define their role.

Update: I would note I wrote this *before* I read the Blogfather's piece.