Back to the Real War–Part 4
In the course of the war in
The other day, one of them—Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies—posted one of his useful set of reflections: “American Strategic, Tactical, and Other Mistakes in
Perhaps he was inspired by the contretemps between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over whether the mistakes in
Set aside for a few minutes the litany of the woebegone Catholic Church and read “A Litany of Errors.”
Why does a “litany of errors” make me thng of the Syllabus of Errors. I wonder if a “corrected” view of that document will ever be drawn up.
Oops! For “view” read “version”. Another error!
The article does not list the abuses and torture that U.S. forces committed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere — surely a grave wrong, mistake, error, or whatever word we choose. It occurred as individual tactical mistakes by lower-ranked personnel, but certainly you could speak of higher officials making strategic errors by, for instance, exempting U.S. forces and their captives from the Geneva convention.
This sort of list raises the question of what the coalition did right in Iraq. I’m not sure how to make such a list or what to put in it. For instance, do you include things as basic as finding Saddam Hussein, or holding elections? Still, it would be important to compare such a list against any list of errors.
Another question this list raises is whether the war could still be thought of as right in principle but wrong in strategic and tactical execution. So much emphasis on the incompetence of the leaders and their plans is just a prelude to looking at the morality of the intentions. If the intentions were wrong, then perfect execution would be the last thing we want.
A thought-provoking article.
I wondered myself about the Abu Ghraib lacuna. Perhaps Cordesman simply doesn’t see it as a policy of the war, but rather an accident of the war.
For a time, the media attended to the instructions of Bush and Rumsfeld on these matters and how they would be read by the military. That seems to have disappeared from the front pages. But on the torture chain of command as much else, this administration has a lot to answer for–and whether we like it or not, so do we U.S. citizens.