Hearts & Minds in the Land of the Blind
The current lack of coherent US foreign policy is nothing new. During the Iraq War, it eventuated in the development of the policy of counterinsurgency warfare as proposed by Gen. David Petraeus. The Sicilian saying, “In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king,” played out with Petraeus capturing military and civilian leaders who were desperate for a blue print for increasingly frustrating wars, putting him on a pedestal as a “celebrity general.” A close reading of the David Petraeus-John Nagl writings in The US Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual develops a roadmap for endless war based upon information operations -- propaganda -- and a closer reading of their references actually takes us to David Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare, which serves as the basis for Petraeus-Nagl thinking. Unfortunately, Galula’s masterful and beautifully written manual is based upon a response to Communism, particularly of the Chinese Communist ”threat” of the middle part of the last century. The extrapolation of Galula to modern day Islamic terrorists is a sleight-of-hand act of intellectual dishonesty by Petraeus, who must know better from his academic training at Princeton. However, we were operating in the “land of the blind.”
The Petraeus counterinsurgency fiasco reinforces the value and importance of returning to Clausewitz today. If the Department of State is incapable of developing a foreign policy, the Department of Defense will fill the void. And this is just what happened. The war makers became the policymakers, and it has not been pretty. John Nagl also wrote Eating Soup with a Knife, named after TE Lawrence’s appraisal of the futility of traditional forces against his guerrilla Arab troops. Ironically, while stationed in Tikrit, Iraq, a translator helped me eat as the locals did—a bowl of lentils mixed with a bowl of rice. Here was a soup I could have eaten with chop sticks.
If Sun Tzu were to tweet today, he’d say, “Know thyself, know thy enemy—fight a hundred battles, win a hundred victories.” Sun would be disappointed in America’s efforts. The lack of knowledge of the Islamic world is well known. Certainly the general surprise by the US government and military about the rise of ISIS raises any eyes that were still closed. The lack of knowledge has confined the US to a reactionary role. A principle of US military power has been “audacity” and without knowledge of the enemy, this attribute becomes non-existent on the modern battlefield.
The tiny Guide for US service members in Iraq from WW-2 had more pertinent information about the culture and tribalism in Iraq than modern military guides. And there remains the comment to Emma Sky, a British anthropologist assigned to Gen. Raymond Odierno, by the General along the lines of “gosh, we didn’t know anything about the people or the culture we were involved with.” Of course Gen. Odierno was the Chief of Staff of the US Army. His colleagues occupy all the high offices in the US military. No failure goes unrewarded. We have an entire general staff of leaders who have lost two wars and were clueless on the way to defeat.
Then-CENTCOM Commander Gen. John Abizaid referred to the military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan as “a long war.” This was not a popular phrase with President George W Bush, and shortly thereon, we had a new CENTCOM Commander. General Abizaid, of Arab background, was our last best wartime leader, combining war fighting with knowledge of the enemy and the culture we were involved in. So much for Sun Tzu’s exhortation to, “know the enemy.”