Conservatives love ripping on the French. In the aftermath of 9/11, when W was building his coalition to go to Afghanistan and then Iraq, the French were famously reticent – which bade many conservatives to start referring to The French as “cheese eating surrender monkeys”, among other things.
(As we’ve noted in the space in the past, this is also a reference – largely mistaken – to World War II. As illiterate as Liberals are about history, let it not be said that some conservatives don’t have their blind spots as well).
Conservatives who criticize the French are blinded to the key fact that the French stance was not a bug – it was a feature.
In 1986, the great military historian Edwin Luttwak wrote the classic, seminal book “The Pentagon and the Art of War”. In the book, Luttwak affixed the blame for five straight American military debacles (Vietnam, the Mayagüez incident, Desert One, Reagan’s Lebanon operation and the successful but sloppy and costly invasion of Grenada) to the fact that America had no strategy – or, rather, an underlying strategy that was entirely based on refighting a worldwide conventional war, like World War II.
In short, America’s defensive posture did not have a clear goal that related to the world we were in in the 1980s, and our military was not built, equipped or trained to accomplish the things it did face.
The military and our government – in large part through the auspices of the Goldwater Nichols legislation in the late 80s, fixed that – for the time being, anyway. The well oiled US military and diplomatic machine that shipped overseas in 1992 to crush Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was largely a product of Goldwater Nichols.
Fast forward 20 years – the last 13 of them at war. We have no strategy for dealing with the current situation that faces us in the Middle East; the president says so, and for a change, I believe him.
Do you think the president, or John Kerry, or for that matter Hillary Clinton can answer what our “national interest” is in northern Iraq and Syria right now? Much less how to pursue it?
Say what you will about the French – but they always have a clear-cut, well thought out idea of what “French national interests” are. When the French regained their sovereignty in 1945, Charles De Gaulle – a military man – sought to never, ever repeat the rudderless miasma of all French policy in the thirties – and the achieved it, and left a legacy that has largely honored that ideal.
Forget about Barack Obama’s “red lines” drawn in dry erase marker; French national interests are circumscribed with thick, high contrast black lines.
If something takes place outside that thick, black line? The French don’t care, and won’t waste time, blood or treasure on it.
Something slips across that thick black line?
The French deal with it. Sometimes they deal with it via means that would offend American sensibilities, to say nothing of legalities; diplomatic muscle, paying proxies to do very, very dirty work, helicopters full of commandos or a well-placed sniper bullet or a battalion of the Foreign Legion debouching from airplanes to push the offenders to the other side of the black line – dead or alive, they don’t much care.
Thing is, America has defined its national interest behind thick black lines, and made it stick, in the past; the Monroe doctrine was a good example. Manifest destiny and it’s Jacksonian undercurrents are, perhaps, examples we might be a little less proud of.
Defending the nation and its vital interests is one of the very, very few legitimate reasons to have a government at all; the free market does just about everything else better. Especially in America. Or at least it did.
But in this area, the French have it all over us.
Whenever I have read stories with the theme of “Leadership Crisis”, or been involved with or observant of businesses in crisis, it nearly always comes back to “Leadership” that failed to define the vital interest, priorities and objectives of the enterprise through either word or deed. How many businesses fail due to leadership not defining (or even understanding) what the business actually does, what its goals are, etc?
Mitch, you knew I couldn’t pass this one without taking a swing! For the past 15 (of 28 years) DoD has stuffed my head full of techniques for deveolping strategies. Strategies from “how to pass an inspection” to how to fight WWIII. Following 9/11, as the good navel-gazers that we wre, we all went to work developing solutions for our Middle Eastern quandry. Of course we had an extra decade and a half of doing the ‘military’ thing which played so well in the first WW-storm ass kicking, but we, in uniform were very aware of our limitations to conduct nation building without a, highly unlikely, full national effort. We understood the relatively short-term memory of most americans and their general distaste for protracted military engagements.
Enter the Pentagon and the defense-infrastructure team…in order to best counter our assymetric threat, we quickly realized that huge amounts of money would need to be shifted into other-than-sexy-weapons programs and, quite frankly, out of the pentagon. The type-A, ultra-competitive, personality make up of your standard issue military personnel would never let that happen and as long as the money kept flowing in under various ‘war on terror’ appropriations that kept jobs booming in congressional districts,….no one cared to entertain the idea that some day we would have to take a pause, reset the force, and, god forbid, pivot elsewhere.
I think the time has come. One only has to look at the ‘debt-clock’ to realize that the ‘drunken sailors on liberty’ have about shot their wad!
So DoD (well the bean counters anyway) is/was fairly happy to let the administration put the brakes on Operations and pull the boys out, but we, as an international superpower, haven’t developed any more useful tools with which to handle the region. Further, we’ve shaken the confidence of our closest allies and encouraged the assholes of the world by making public statements about what we won’t do and how long they have to wait until we won’t be there. CLOWN ACT!
The need for a Grand (National) Strategy is apparent and I have no doubt that many of the high paid think tanks around the belt-way have people working day and night trying to develop something. The problem internally is our ultra-sensitive political climate combined with a mentality that puts keeping ones party in power above the national good (my opinion based up some of the filters I’ve seen ideas viewed through). Viewing our country as a force for evil/wrong doing in the world completely warps the perspective of how we engage even the most deserving-of-a-good-killing SOBs on the face of the planet. Afterall, they’re just misunderstood freedom fighters employing the only means they have to fight the evil goliath that merely wants to take their mineral wealth and keep them poor—AHHHHH!!!
My guess is that until we have our own regime change, we won’t see a clear, concise approach to any international strategy because our current admin has to remain obtuse in order to keep its base from deserting. The time for clarity has come and may be on its way out the door and into the ‘too late sucker’ parking lot. I hope we can right the ship soon, but have predicted a possible decade to recover internationally for each 4-year term.
that is all
Mitch, you knew I couldn’t pass this one without taking a swing!
I was kinda hoping this would be the post that’d draw you out!