Iraq: Endgame Conservatives or Wilsonian Policy

This is a response by Jed Babbin to a Rich Lowry article on NRO(subscription).

Interesting stand points. No doubt the Bush policy is Wilsonian in nature, in that it's idealistic and promotional of democracy. I must say I don't mind idealism as long as your actions are firmly planted in reality. I'm not convinced that the Bush policy is as firmly set as I'd like.

Babbin makes me a bit nervous in that he seems to think the only way to stop an insurgency is to stomp the hell out of it and move on. I don't see this as very realistic, especially when insurgencies typically are hidden guerrilla fighters. You can do some things, but just shooting isn't going to be what wins. It strikes me as a misunderstanding of guerrilla warfare. Here is his discussion of the lessons learned from Vietnam.

We don't, like Lowry, completely mistake Vietnam. Lowry accuses us of missing the point that we only began to win in Vietnam when we "started to fashion a true counterinsurgency strategy focusing on hearts and minds, on holding territory and on training Vietnamese security forces." Endgame conservatives understand the principal lesson of Vietnam is something else entirely: if you fail to prosecute a war in the manner that will produce victory decisively, you will lose it inevitably. Iraq, by the President's and Lowry's formulation, is a self-imposed quagmire. They believe that unless and until we establish democracy there we cannot prosecute the war against the other national sponsors of terrorism. We are now at the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion, almost five years since 9-11. If we had prosecuted this war as we did World War II, we would not be facing a pre-nuclear Iran, Syria's Bashar Assad would be only a bad memory and Saudi Arabia would have been forced to cease its support of terrorism. And Iraq would be a much more peaceful place, closer to the goal Messrs. Bush and Lowry seek.

The "hearts and minds" campaign in Vietnam was essentially irrelevant to winning or losing. What lost the war was President Johnson's gradualist approach to fighting it. LBJ was a stringless yo-yo. His stop-and-start, fight today, negotiate tomorrow and fight again the next day strategy, if you can call it that, was a disaster. When we pounded the North, we moved toward victory by depriving the insurgents (and the regular North Vietnamese forces) of the support on which they depended. When LBJ sputtered and stuttered, we lost what we had gained and gave the enemy time to recover and retake the offensive.

Lowry's formulation is, at its core, colonialist. He writes, "The project in Iraq is an attempt to shift the terms of the competition to who can better deliver peace, prosperity and representation." How shall we compete for hearts and minds of the Muslim world by offering Western democracy in a culture that, even at its most benevolent, cannot separate church from state? The only way would be to re-create the British Raj of colonial India. Would Lowry commit the hundreds of thousands of troops and tens of thousands of civilian bureaucrats to running a colonial government in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia for the next hundred years? I doubt it. And neither should anyone else interested in winning this war. We cannot and should not abandon Iraq. There, we should stay the course at least until the terrorist regimes that surround it are removed and their interference in Iraq ended.

I think that Babbin doesn't completely understand the benefit and purpose of the "hearts and minds" campaigns. You can go to the links I provided in this entry to look at a discussion of the British counterinsurgency tactics used in Malaya. He is correct that LBJ fumbled around and failed to allow the generals to fight the war. But then, the guerrilla war was in effect and would clearly have been run in the north when the US invaded. It strikes me that Babbin's view of fighting and winning in Vietnam is naively simplistic.

I understand that the Marine Corps Small Wars Manual has some policy on counterinsurgency and the tactics that include "hearts and minds." I haven't read it myself, but I did find the 1940's issue that will be interesting to review.

Go ahead and review the discussions yourself. I'd like to know some more information on the Wilsonian policy. I know I have to read up on WWI directly related to Wilson's policy, but that is still somewhere in a very large reading pile.