Realism

 

Bucha, Ukraine, photo by AP via Arab News.

When I said I'd "loudly opposed" every US war since before Michael Tracey was born, I wasn't being totally honest, and I think I need to revise that a little: I didn't make as much noise over Grenada or Panama as I probably should have, because I expected them to end quickly and didn't think a lot of people would get hurt, in which opinion I was basically right, though of course every death is a bad thing (and estimates of Panamanian civilians killed run anywhere from 300 to 3,000, which would make it a lot worse than the way I remembered it), and I really didn't oppose the first Gulf War at all, not properly speaking.

Clausewitz was exactly wrong, as I've said before: politics is war continued by other means, not the other way around. And when the situation comes back down to war, that's a regression—a failure of politics; at least one of the parties blundered, and it shouldn't have happened. The Reagan and G.H.W. Bush administrations made a series of errors in encouraging and abetting Iraq's long and disastrous war on Iran, which left Iraq in a dire economic situation, hugely indebted to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, even as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were working with the US to keep oil prices low; and the Bush administration made a crucial error in 1990, in failing to make it known to Saddam Hussein that seizing Kuwait would bring a war on. It was a mistake similar in kind, if not degree, to the mistakes the World War I Allies made with Germany between 1919 and 1938.

That said, once Hussein really did seize Kuwait, I accept that the war really did have to be fought, and that the US and allies did a relatively good job of minimizing the horror and destruction (3,664 Iraqi civilians killed in Operation Desert Storm, alongside anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 Iraqi troops), especially in bringing it to an end in six months and limiting the goals to the liberation of Kuwait, which was protected from further incursion with the establishment of a no-fly zone. Every war is bad! But this one could have been so much worse, as we learned 12 years later when the neoconservatives of the G.W. Bush administration were given a chance at a do-over.

Another example of an inevitable war is the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Leaving aside the question of how much US meddling (from 1979) contributed to the creation of the abominable Taliban regime in the first place, something really did have to be done to respond to the 9/11 terror attacks, if only for domestic political purposes (which is in the end pretty much what it came down to). But failure to set limited objectives, bad intelligence and poor planning, and the distraction by the totally unnecessary, and criminal, 2003 Iraq invasion led the W administration into a 20-year fiasco.

 Gideon Rose of the Council on Foreign Relations ("The Irony of Ukraine: We Have Met the Enemy, And It Is Us"), in a piece in Foreign Affairs and on radio appearances last weekend and today, has been working through the uncanny way Vladimir Putin has seemed determined to replicate all the catastrophic mistakes the US has made in foreign policy since taking over for the French in Vietnam 60-odd years ago—getting captured by wishful thinking

In April 2003, for example, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice succinctly captured the George W. Bush administration’s take on postwar Iraq: “We fundamentally believe that when the grip of terror that Saddam Hussein’s regime has wreaked on its own people is finally broken and Iraqis have an opportunity to build a better future, that you are going to see people who want to build a better future—not blow it up.” Civilian leaders in the Pentagon, meanwhile, convinced themselves that their special military operation could be wrapped up quickly and cheaply. “The idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces I think is far off the mark,” testified Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a few weeks before the invasion. “To assume we’re going to pay for it all is just wrong,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz chimed in.

betting against nationalism (Vietnam is the prime example, but our conflict with Iran, never quite amounting to war is another really important one, and I think it really applies to Iraq Afghanistan as well, even though there never seemed to be a nation in either of those places, a kind of negative nationalism in which old enemies found themselves hating the invader even more than they hated each other)

People fighting foreigners on their own turf are highly motivated, as the impassioned Ukrainian defenders holding off lackluster Russian attackers have shown yet again. Whatever the war’s endgame, it will not yield a loyal new province for Moscow.

and above all not having a plan for what happens when it's over

The original war termination plans for Vietnam amounted to “pound the enemy harder and hope he gives up.” In the Gulf War, the plan for postwar Iraq amounted to “hope Saddam is toppled in a military coup.” Postwar planning for the invasion of Iraq was so risible it occasioned then-Major General David Petraeus’s now-famous lament: “Tell me how this ends.”

Rose's advice to us isn't exactly new, and it isn't very pleasant: that we have to do some of that thinking for Putin, imagine his situation, and help figure out an off-ramp in which he isn't too humiliated.

Which is really hard to listen to, in this week when we're living with the photographic evidence of the Russians' genocidal intention from the pictures out of Bucha, when what we really want is to see Putin in the dock in The Hague in a jumpsuit and leg irons and put away forever (not that it was ever going to be easy—another similarity between Russia and the US is that they've always refused to join the International Criminal Court too), but the war has to end. 

The killing has to stop, Ukraine has to have some kind of security guarantees, the people have to come home and rebuild, and it has to never happen again. That means continuing to arm Ukraine at an ever-accelerating rate and continuing to tighten the vise of sanctions, but it also means imaginative discussion of how the war ends.  If that also means Putin "gets away with it", as he's gotten away with destruction on a similar scale in Syria, I'm sorry, it's not right. It's not right that Henry Kissinger is still alive and unhumiliated either, or Richard Bruce Cheney. There's something to be said for negative whataboutism, to be honest—I don't want to get bogged down in arguments over who is more evil, Cheney or Putin, but I will say that Russia is a country that has never known rule of law, and the difference between what was done to Iraq and what is being done to Ukraine may have more to do with that than personal differences between the two men. 

But as we know, Russia has lost the war already—the only problem is that it could take the Ukrainians ten or twenty more years to win it, just as it took the Vietnamese (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria may well never recover at all from the horrors perpetrated on them by the US and Russia). I'm confident President Zelenskyy understands this, and very hopeful President Biden and the other NATO powers too as well, and would like for everybody out here in the Interether to understand it too. It's better to stop it now.