Stardate 20040502.1837

(On Screen): This site has a page called "The Essential Library" where I keep local copies of a few particularly perspicacious articles I found myself linking to again and again. So I wanted to make sure I had copies of them all just in case the originals went offline for some reason.

One of those is Power and Weakness, an analysis of some deep differences in outlook between leaders in Europe and leaders here in the US. When I first read it I thought it was significant and perceptive and extremely persuasive, and two years have not dimmed its importance. That article earned my respect for its author, Robert Kagan.

Kagan has written an editorial for the WaPo, where he contends that the Bush Administration is going wobbly on the war. He puts in words some of the fears I've entertained about the recent uprising in Iraq and how it is being dealt with.

The biggest danger from the uprising by militant Sunnis in Falluja and al Sadr's extremist Shiite militia was that it could embolden others and begin a general uprising. But that's very much a matter of momentum and perception, and the initial decision to stabilize the situation and to execute a controlled pause of about a week before reacting was probably a good one. By the time our forces began efforts to destroy the insurrection, that particular danger was pretty much gone.

And this uprising had the potential to actually be a significant opportunity for us to eliminate the hard core of the opposition facing us, since that hard core had obligingly changed from "voicers of dissent" (which we must tolerate) into "armed insurgents" (which we would be free to crush).

Of course, there were other hazards. Heavy handed military operations in Najaf could have been viewed by Shiites as desecration of holy sites, for instance, and might well have set off a more general uprising.

When militants in Najaf, or in Falluja, or in the other hotspots, started using mosques as de facto military bases, which is a war crime under the Geneva Convention, then under the Convention it was entirely permissible for us to bomb them out of existence. But if we did so, then afterwards there would be no evidence that they had been used for military purposes. On the other hand, there would be plenty of evidence that where a mosque had once stood there remained only rubble and that we were the ones who had done it. And the world's press was on a hair trigger, looking for any opportunity to publicize any such cases if they could.

Thus it was an unfortunate reality that such militarized holy places still had to be treated with some deference by us.

There were other constraints on our response as well. I understand these things. I also understand that to fight and win a guerilla action in an enemy city without losing a lot of your own men, and without immense numbers of civilian casualties, requires patience.

So I was willing to cut them slack; I didn't mind if apparent progress was slow as long as I believed that our forces were still trying to eliminate the insurgents. But the events of the last couple days no longer make me confident that such is still their intention. I've been reading Wretchard's commentary on the fighting in Falluja, and I sincerely hope he's right. But I've also seen other reports which have disturbed me.

It's not like I think the press has suddenly stopped trying to paint the situation as black as it can, of course. I understand the risk of becoming too depressed about the situation after reading the deliberately slanted reports from Reuters. But there are some things which come through, both in the microscopic about this particular crisis and more globally on the overall management of the war, which are causing me some trepidation.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I'm afraid we're being too "nice". I think we're trying too much to be cooperative and understanding. We seem to be worrying more and more about "how they would react to us" and less and less about "getting them to worry about how we would react to them".

It feels like the edge is off. There's a certain ruthlessness needed to fight and win a war, and in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration showed that ruthlessness. But now it feels like that's beginning to fade. It feels like the fire is going out.

It feels like the Bush Administration has decided to put the war onto the shelf until after the election. That's what it feels like. And that worries me. This war is much too important to permit such considerations to affect its prosecution.

Bush has always had quite a hands-off executive style, but now it is almost as if he is not even involved. Kagan says:

But Bush himself is the great mystery in this mounting debacle. His commitment to stay the course in Iraq seems utterly genuine. Yet he continues to tolerate policymakers, military advisers and a dysfunctional policymaking apparatus that are making the achievement of his goals less and less likely.

He makes that comment within the context of discussions of Iraq, but it seems to me as if it's true more broadly.

There are a lot of nations in the mid-East where we need, and intend, to induce changes. The status quo can no longer be tolerated, because it has become a mortal threat to us. So among those nations, there are basically three kinds of reactions.

First, some will cooperate with us seriously and will embrace reform. Such governments should be rewarded and supported, and for the most part that's what has happened. Which is why we recognize that Qaddafi hasn't suddenly become an angel, but we must still seriously reward him. In the short run that means perpetuating his power in Libya, and that's unfortunate. But it's also acceptable because if our overall program succeeds, then liberalism and reform will come to Libya just as it will to every other part of the Arab world, slowly and insidiously, but also unstoppably.

On the other hand, some will openly defy us, and they have to be crushed. That is one of many reasons why we had to destroy the governments of the Taliban and Saddam. If they don't come around on their own or get deposed by native revolution, the current governments of Syria and Iran will eventually have to suffer the same fate.

The third case is those who try to delay, who try to straddle the fence. They may make a handful of token police raids on locals which are then claimed to be "militants", whether they actually were or not, as a way for them to try to relieve the diplomatic pressure. Implementation of token reforms is another kind of smokescreen.

This is where I think that the Bush administration has failed. In an SOTU speech, Bush famously (or notoriously) said to the leaders of the world, "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." But he no longer seems to be following through on that.

In particular, it is regarding Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan where I think the Bush administration has failed the worst.

Each of those is a separate case, and there are complicating factors in all three cases. Egypt is our "friend", which we know because we give several billion dollars in aid to the government there every year. There is a strong strain of Islamism present in Egypt which so far has not become a threat to the government, and if the Mubarek government became shakey there is definitely a threat that Islamists might try to take over. On the other hand, it's not like we've been getting much in exchange for our generosity, given that Mubarek has been acting more and more French in his attempts to derail our plans.

Unfortunately, what this smells like is old-style "but he's our son-of-a-bitch" cynical realpolitik which is part of how we got into the mess we're in. (There were good reasons to do that in some cases during the Cold War, but the Cold War is now over.) Bush himself made a speech in which he said that we would no longer support despots simply because they were friendly. Why is Mubarek being given a pass?

Pakistan is also a complex problem, in part because there isn't really a single government. In a real sense, Pakistan's ISI is a parallel shadow government which has its own military forces and which implements its own foreign policy, and it is totally dominated by Islamists. The ISI has heavily supported Islamic terrorists operating in Kashmir, and the ISI provided heavy support to the Taliban during the Afghan civil war in the 1990's.

And the situation is made even more tricky by the existence of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

I genuinely think that Musharraf wants to clean things up. He apparently wants to be Pakistan's Ataturk, but his hold on power is a bit shakey and there are distinct limits on what he can and cannot really do. That said, some of what's come out recently about Pakistan suggests that he's getting a pass, too.

The Pakistani role in the nuclear black market was critical, central, and essentially unforgivable. And once it was all revealed, the handling of it was not acceptable. Why did the US support and defend, rather than bitterly condemn, the decision to give a blanket pardon to Abdul Qadeer Khan? If something like that had happened in Iran instead, would the Bush administration have been as solicitous?

Powell visited Pakistan a few weeks ago, and it seems likely that part of his mission was to apply pressure. So just before he arrived, suddenly the Pakistani government announced that it was engaged in a massive campaign against al Qaeda militants, and there were intimations that they had cornered a big fish. After Powell had visited and left again, that campaign rather unraveled, and it seemed that it hadn't really been as aggressive as it was presented as being. And there were no further mentions of the big fish.

It's difficult to escape the conclusion that the whole thing was a Potemkin offensive whose sole purpose was to defuse any pressure Powell might have tried to apply. And it's also difficult to escape the conclusion that it worked.

With regard to Saudi Arabia, I have long defended the early decision to softpedal there. You have to pick your fights and if you try to pick too many at once you can screw yourself over.

In military analysis this is known as defeating your enemy in detail. This is something which appears at all levels, from the very top level of strategy all the way down to operations involving no more than a squad or two of men or a handful of tanks, and what it means is that if you face an enemy which is about as strong as you are, or who may even be much stronger, you may still be able to get a local superiority of power against one part of the enemy's force, permitting you to crush it.

That's what Napoleon tried to do in the Waterloo campaign. He faced an Anglo-Dutch army and a Prussian army which between them significantly outnumbered his French forces. But he also stole a march on his enemies, and June 16 Napoleon sent a small part of his force under Ney to make a demonstration against the Anglo-Dutch force at Quatre-Bras while Napoleon himself tried to crush the Prussians at Ligny with the bulk of the French Army. However, though the fighting at Ligny was fierce, the Prussians were not broken.

So the next day, he switched. A small force was placed under command of Grouchy to pursue the Prussians, while the bulk of the French forces ended up facing the Anglo-Dutch in what we now call the "Battle of Waterloo".

Napoleon tried twice to defeat his enemies in detail. But he ultimately failed on June 16 when three quarters of the Prussian force finally arrived and attacked the French in the flank. The combined power of his enemies were simply too great, and the French army was badly defeated.

And in a sense, the French loss at Waterloo was itself an example of defeat in detail. The Prussian I Corps, the last to arrive on the battlefield, significantly outnumbered the French forces it faced and managed to break the French line. As Prussian forces began to rush through the gap to fan out in both directions to roll up the French, most of the French force routed.

In WWII in 1939 and 1940, the Germans used this approach strategically. Germany was able to take the Sudetenland because German diplomacy prevented any simultaneous combat with France or the UK. German forces overran Poland while a smaller holding force engaged in "sitzkrieg" along the French border. Once the Polish campaign was completed, most of the forces involved then moved to the south and were essential in defeating France.

And while all of this was going on, the German government had neutralized any threat from the Soviet Union with secret agreements, and the Kriegsmarine had strict orders to not provide Roosevelt with any substantial pretext for entering the war.

Germany was defeated ultimately because it ended up having to face the USSR, the UK and the US simultaneously.

If we were too ham-handed we could also end up picking too many fights at once and find ourselves overwhelmed. So I understood that in 2001, and in 2002, and in 2003, that we had to let the Saudis wait. Last July, I thought that the Bush administration had decided that the time had come to deal with it.

But somehow it didn't work out that way.

Just as in Pakistan, there's a major power struggle in Saudi Arabia. One one side you've got Crown Prince Abdullah and on the other you've got Prince Nayef, the interior minister.

The Saudi state is a fragmented entity, divided between the fiefdoms of the royal family. Among the four or five most powerful princes, two stand out: Crown Prince Abdullah and his half-brother Prince Nayef, the interior minister. Relations between these two leaders are visibly tense. In the United States, Abdullah cuts a higher profile. But at home in Saudi Arabia, Nayef, who controls the secret police, casts a longer and darker shadow. Ever since King Fahd's stroke in 1995, the question of succession has been hanging over the entire system, but neither prince has enough clout to capture the throne.

And though it is by no means clear that Crown Prince Abdullah is actually our friend, Prince Nayef is emphatically not one.

The two camps divide over a single question: whether the state should reduce the power of the religious establishment. On the right side of the political spectrum, the clerics and Nayef take their stand on the principle of Tawhid, or "monotheism," as defined by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the eponymous founder of Wahhabism. In their view, many people who claim to be monotheists are actually polytheists and idolaters. For the most radical Saudi clerics, these enemies include Christians, Jews, Shi`ites, and even insufficiently devout Sunni Muslims. From the perspective of Tawhid, these groups constitute a grand conspiracy to destroy true Islam. The United States, the "Idol of the Age," leads the cabal. It attacked Sunni Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, both times making common cause with Shi`ites; it supports the Jews against the Sunni Muslim Palestinians; it promotes Shi`ite interests in Iraq; and it presses the Saudi government to de-Wahhabize its educational curriculum. Cable television and the Internet, meanwhile, have released a torrent of idolatry. With its permissive attitude toward sex, its pervasive Christian undertones, and its support for unfettered female freedom, U.S. culture corrodes Saudi society from within.

So perhaps there's concern that if we push too hard, and demand too much from Abdullah, that we could weaken his position and hand the nation to Nayef.

Even so, I think we've been cutting Abdullah and the "moderates" (as it were) too much slack. They did everything they could to try to prevent the invasion of Iraq, for instance, and even though they have finally begun to face their own problem with terrorist attacks domestically, it still seems as if there is a lot of posturing going on.

Just as with Pakistan, it seems as if the Saudis are making announcements intended to make it seem as if they're cooperating and helping and considering reform.

They warned us not to push too hard for reforms, in February, and in April. They promise reform, as long as it's not much and not fast. They claim they have been cracking down on local militants, even though it's not clear that's of much interest to us. (Why should we thank them for removing the weeds from their own yard, given that those weeds seem to be more of a threat to them than to us?)

And the Saudis now have their own version of Kerry's "I voted for it before I voted against it" claim. Despite the fact that the Saudis appear to have done everything in their limited power to try to prevent us from invading Iraq, now they are trying to claim that they were secretly helping us.

Or rather, "U.S. and Saudi officials" are now saying that. And it may even be true. But I don't consider that to be enough to balance their earlier obstructionism which forced us to build a new regional command center in Qatar, because we knew we would not be permitted to use the previous one in Saudi Arabia.

How much pressure can we put on the Saudi "moderates" before it becomes counter-productive? I don't think we're close to that line. But those in the know may have other opinions. So let's let that part of it go for a moment.

Instead, let's focus on one specific question: Why is Prince Bandar still the Saudi Ambassador to the US? We don't have to accept him. We can say "no" and force the Saudis to send someone else.

Bandar's activities in the US have been shady. But he's also been ambassador to the US for a hell of a long time, and has built up an enormous circle of "friends" with whom he has access and influence.

There's also something of an open secret in Washington that top members of the State Department who during their service say and do things the Saudis like have a good chance of landing fat consulting contracts with the Saudis after they leave government service. Bandar is almost certainly part of that, and it's a big factor in the general rot in State, which is long overdue for a major housecleaning.

I can't see why this nation can't inform the Saudis that we want a new ambassador, and that we expect them to replace their ambassador at least once every three years, to prevent buildup of a new widespread circle-of-influence.

Prince Bandar is a snake. Why is he still here?

More generally, when will the Bush Administration finally get around to dealing with the core problem facing us: the Saudi deal-with-the-Wahhabist-Devil and their ongoing practice of providing funding to support export of Wahhabist extremism all over the world? Before this war can end, that is one of the things which has to stop.

The biggest long term benefit from crushing the Taliban, crushing Saddam, and rewarding Qaddafi, is to establish a strong precedent for others in terms of what they can expect from us. But by letting Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia get away with murder (and in that I'm not speaking figuratively), we blow that precedent.

Instead, we establish an entirely different one: we make clear that we can be mollified by empty gestures and insincere promises. That is not the message we want to send to the governments of that region; it will ultimately cause far more damage than we would suffer even if all three of those nations were ultimately taken over by radical Islamists.

What I sincerely hope is not the case is that Bush and/or his campaign strategists have decided that we Americans can be mollified by empty gestures, insincere promises and tough talk. This war isn't even close to being over, and this is no time for Bush to start taking his foreign policy cues from Senator Kerry.

Update: Amish Tech Support has some comments.

Update 20040503: Aziz Poonawalla talks about Prince Bandar.
David Weisman comments.

Update: TMLutas comments.

Update: IndustrialBlog comments.

Update: Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of other commentary about this general question.

Update: Steve Green comments.

update 20040504: David Schuler comments.