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An Incivil Matter
The balloons went up. They were up nightly at the abandoned train station outside Haqlaniyah, Iraq. We were convinced it was a coded message. The colors of the balloons would change each night and their groupings also seemed more than haphazard. Our S-2 shop never did figure out the messages of the balloons, but we had every reason to believe those messages weren’t meant to be friendly to us.
We were the First Battalion, 23d Marines, a Reserve Marine Infantry battalion mobilized and deployed to take charge of about 100 miles of the Euphrates River from Haditha to a bit south of the City of Hit, back in 2005. The battles of Fallujah were over and, unknown to everyone except us, the focus of the enemy’s efforts was on Haditha. To this day most Generals don’t seem to acknowledge that fact, they just thought that an understrength battalion spread that thin must have been getting hit so much because we were reservists. We were understrength because they took one of our companies away from us to guard the Air Station at Al Asad. After we lost 48 dead and well over 100 wounded badly enough to be sent home, the lesson the Generals learned was to never put a reserve battalion on the line again. Strangely, they replaced our battalion with two full strength American battalions and three top notch Iraqi battalions, and Voilà! Peace broke out in the region. Let’s just say I disagree with the lesson to be learned.
One of the things people often complain about nowadays is the “Rules of Engagement.” Of course, the rules of engagement are classified, so unless you were there and briefed on the rules, you have no way of knowing what the rules were — but that never stops people from arguing about them. There are always rules of engagement of one kind or another, and when we were in Iraq, they were generally permissive compared to later years. What I didn’t like was not so much the Rules, but the attitudes of our Nation toward its use of the military.
The balloons were a symptom. But with the balloons, we weren’t sure something was up, we just suspected what they were used for. It’s the Mosques that angered me. Nightly the enemy used the minarets to announce to the cities their anti-American and anti-western propaganda and they’d urge the people to kill us. We weren’t allowed to do anything about it. Because we’re polite, I guess.
Forty-eight men in my battalion were dead. We were polite about it.
Another movie is coming out about Iraq, “Thank You for Your Service.” It’s probably meant as a tribute to the military, and perhaps many in the military take it that way. I don’t think I will. It’s another symptom of the attitude of our Nation and its use of the military.
The movie is about a soldier who does his duty and does it well. He’s not Audie Murphy, he’s an everyman who does good and faithful service and his comrades trust him. It’s another PTSD movie, perhaps, or at least another movie about how hard it is to come home from war. This rankles me. I want to see a war movie where the good guys don’t have problems adjusting. The conflict should be the enemy, not home. I guess that would require a different attitude of our Nation toward its use of the military.
Why do we have a military? I think I know. I don’t think our nation in general knows. We allow our military to fight an enemy by letting them preach their attacks on us with loud speakers from minarets. Why? Instead of cutting down balloons and running out the vagabonds squatting on the unused train station, we sit and wonder what they mean. Why? We invade a country and establish a local government that we allow to tell us what to do before the war is even completed? Why? We don’t require people that we conquer to observe the Bill of Rights and allow them to continue oppressing their people. Why?
Enemies don’t respect politeness. Our military does not exist to bring care packages to the world and prop up oppressive regimes and religions.
Why can’t Hollywood make a truly heroic war movie? Because we don’t win wars. We don’t win wars — not because we don’t have weapons and the mechanical ability to win wars. We don’t win wars and we don’t see heroic war movies because of the attitude of our Nation toward its use of the military.
Just as in recent politics we are seeing a new way of thinking that brought Trump to office in an effort to change the attitude of politics, we need a new way of thinking about our military. Our military needs more incivility.
Published in Military
This is partly because it’s harder than in most places to succeed as an legitimate entrepreneur. It’s hard to get going in the export services sector after decades of Saddamite abuse of the education system, up to and including the total shuttering of schools; high skill labor, particularly competent management, is incredibly expensive and hard to come by. It’s hard to get going in the agriculture sector because Saddam literally salted the earth. It’s hard to get going in manufacturing without strong transport infrastructure and reliable power. Exports in general were delayed by the state’s disengagement from the global economy. It’s hard to get going in domestic services when personal disposable income is so low. Worse, AQ and others particularly targeted successful entrepeneurs and successful economic ventures. All of these things have been getting better, but it takes time. The vicious circle of having most of the people you know who went out on a limb and created value failing being replaced by the virtuous circle most of the people who did that succeeding is gradually taking place.
Sure. Saddam’s destruction of the accounting system is a particularly big deal here. It’s worth recalling that most places have either struggled with this stuff or had massive skilled foreign involvement.
To an extent. I think it’s a matter of gradually shifting the incentives; we still have plenty of people like that in the US, but the system is amazing because we have enough people who act as entrepeneurs. Obviously, the number of American entrepeneurs is dramatically smaller than the number of American mooches, but it doesn’t need to be huge.
When the government is corrupt and incompetent, when everyone cheats, it becomes extremely difficult to succeed without cheating. One of the central benefits that the US provided Iraq was a considerably improved database of Iraqis, which helps somewhat but was still being somewhat sequestered from general government use in 2011. It’s my hope that at some point we’ll see the money being put in to equip and train the food and welfare systems to distribute exclusively on the basis of iris scans. Having more people in the banking system and more of the banking system integrated and properly supported by IT helps. Having a more experienced and trained tax collection system, too. One of the helpful things is how much of this stuff is sort of on rails; just relieving the horror should be enough to get much of the country to gradually revert to the mean on the areas like welfare corruption where it has been well outside international norms. The dramatic rate of change in the numbers of trained, competent, bureaucrats has more impact over the medium-long term, even when that rate declines, than it does in the short term. Etc. etc.
I don’t agree with you assessment of the education system. Schools were very important to the Iraqis in Anbar province and they had a system of national testing that we helped accommodate. I lived in a hydroelectric dam that was filled with Iraqi engineers. Iraq is not like Afghanistan. The people are generally educated. Afghans are mostly feral.
This is a hypothetical, so take it for what that’s worth, and would anyway have been ‘above your pay grade’.
We should have been much rougher on the Iraqis – militarily, politically, economically. They needed a MacArthur from us, they got dithering milquetoasts. That civilizational confidence thing. The tells are in your comment – ‘encouraged politicians’, ‘helped reform’, ‘encouraged and organized’, etc. We kicked their asses (not hard enough) and that entitled us to do things like dismantle the energy sector outright and by command. No such.
The one thing that would have sunk regime risk to the point where private equity and assets might have stayed would have been outright US control for a period of years. We threw it away.
People keep banging in about civilizations confidence. What about civilizational inclination or capacity?
Iraq is enormously better off than Afghanistan, to be sure. Afghanistan is enormously better off than it was; 800% GDP growth since liberation is a pretty big deal. It’s still not enough to bring it up to American standards; Iraq was closer to America in 2001 than Afghanistan was to Iraq.
It’s not often that I say this, but this really was the fault of imperialism. Afghanistan had been the center of various empires, less impressive than Baghdad, but nonetheless impressive. The chief asset for the region was the Silk Road; essentially all East-West trade went through there. Then Europeans built empires and trading systems that were more efficient than land travel; Afghanistan has been poor since, becoming one of the poorest and least educated parts of the world even before the Taliban set about deliberately making them less educated.
Baghdad, on the other hand, remained a regional capital. The late 20th century problems killed off the financial industry that used to dominate their economy (and, over time, various other industries), but there’s a limit to how fast you can degrade a people. Saddam engaged in routine shuttering of schools, particularly during the Iraq Iran war on a nationwide basis, then on a regional basis during the 1990s. Because Saddam centralized the economy and brought more of the country under the government, there was a replacement of local schooling with state education in large parts of the country, so you’ll find some willing to praise his education policy, but if you look at the people who run things, they’re either ex-pats, young enough to be educated after liberation, or old enough to have been educated before Saddam. There’s a huge donut hole of middle aged management and professionals. In the same way as life was better for people in the Soviet Union after Stalin than it was in Zaire, though, Iraqis were night and day better off than Afghans.
It’s also true that there were a good number of engineers; Saddam put a lot of effort into national greatness projects and the oil ministry was the one ministry professionally run throughout his reign. The world’s largest irrigation plant (that salted and destroyed much of the farmland), the world’s largest mosque (unfinished and unsafe, but politically impossible to demolish, taking up a substantial chunk of Baghdad; I was across the street from it and admit to quite enjoying it aesthetically), the world’s largest any number of things.
North Korea has bucketloads of engineers, too; it’s a mark of American freedom that we have so few, and a key reason for our prosperity. Iraq is pretty good at the things that Stalinist dictatorships prepare you to do; power plants have been built at a fair rate of knots. When I was saying that they weren’t prepared to export services because the education system suffered, I meant that the education system suffered in ways that left them unprepared to export services; there’s not a lot of financial, software, or management expertise. The one exception, tourism, is something that should take off when the place ceases to be seen as violent. Iranians already vacation there in substantial numbers, but there should be more in the future.
I think that this would be true only if the US had been willing to send civilians in the numbers required to competently run the country. Without people trained in, say, sewage management, taking over the management of sewage would not be without risk.
With a lot of the reforms that took time, it was in part a matter of education and practice. We were able to significantly help leading financial professionals by providing them with materials suitable for high school and by explaining concepts that you’d learn in community college. In 2011. The stock exchange wasn’t an engine for growth, for instance, because you need a pool of people who know how to trade for an exchange to be useful. That was one of the few things that really was mandated by the US, down to the last detail (well, except the lack of an insider trading law, allegedly because one of the people in charge was ideologically opposed to them), but because 100% of the effort went into getting the institution right, 0% into supporting the people who ran it and used it, it was a white elephant.
Rousseau notwithstanding, we are not all born with the knowledge of how to live in a fair and free civilization, particularly not one as complicated as modern society. It’s not enough to tell people to go be capitalist if they don’t understand what that means (see also, Russia). You have to build the capacity to do that, too.
As an aside, it’s not just that your advice is above my pay grade, but also that I was, for these purposes, an Iraqi; I was a direct employee of the Iraqi government (or, rather, of an Iraqi government owned bank that provided advice to the government). I fully agree that we should have had less separation between US and Iraqi governments, but I believe that a substantial part of that was because the State department simply didn’t show up with numbers of people prepared to stay in country for a while and build.
I agree almost entirely with your points except that Afghanistan has been poor since long before Alexander. Perhaps not all of Afghanistan, but certainly Helmand Province. The place has no plants without irrigation. I’m not saying no usable plants, I’m saying no grass, weeds or tumbleweeds. Nothing. There are no rocks. It is all leftovers of sediment from some prehistoric body of water. Despite the popularly held belief, Afghanistan gets conquered by everyone that wanders by, but the lack of any reason to stay causes them to leave again. There is no reason to be a human and be in Afghanistan.
There isn’t much reason to be there today, but Afghanistan has been a founder of religions, Zoroastrianism being only the most notable, and the center and birthplace of empires, the Kushans being only the most notable. Having a monopoly on global trade really did yield benefits. I agree with you that everyone who was anyone has conquered them (most of the most recent incarnation of historical Afghanistan is Pakistan today, in part for that reason), but they’ve also conquered their neighbors on a reasonably regular basis. Some of the earliest agriculture in the world was in Afghanistan (obviously, Iraq beat them to it, but nowhere in, say, Europe, or the Americas, did).
It’s the opening of maritime trade that did it. I’m happy to accept that Helmand was an exception to the general rule of ancient Afghan success, but until America every empire had pockets of poverty that were comparable to the ugliness of those who lived outside of imperial jurisdiction.