Can't give this war away

Nathan Webster accompanied American troops in Iraq over three years, 2007-2009. Now he's building a book of his photojournalism and inviting us to be a part of it. You can learn more at Kickstart.com. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

One Bullet Away

I am hugely enjoying One Bullet Away, in which Nate Fick tells the story of his introduction to the Marine Corps in the summer of 1998. I was surprised and impressed that Officer Candidate School in the USMC sounds a whole lot tougher than the basic training I went through in the winter of 1956 at the hands of Korean War veterans who had learned the hard way that untrained troops are a menace to themselves and their comrades. Evidently the Marines never unlearned this basic truth.

I particularly liked what young Mr. Fick says about his motivation for joining up: "I wanted to do something so hard that nobody would ever talk shit to me." He was a junior at Dartmouth, and OCS was his summer vacation; he'll become a Marine second lieutenant in June 1999. This is the same Lieutenant Fick who was chronicled in the HBO mini-series, Generation Kill. As portrayed by Stark Sands, he's appealingly decent and thoughtful--and regularly rebuked by the headquarters POGs for caring more about his men than the orders he's been given. It will be interesting to see what the real-life Nate Fick says on this subject. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Nate Fick

Last night I watched the sixth episode of the hugely enjoyable Generation Kill mini-series. For the first time (I think), the sympathetic lieutenant's full name was spoken--previously it's been "Nate" or "Lieutenant Fick"--and I was sure I'd heard it before. So like a good child of the internet, I Googled the name, and sure enough: he's the author of One Bullet Away, which some of my classmates in War in the Modern World called the best of the 21st century accounts of warfare. I haven't read it but will soon be doing so. Meanwhile, I hope to catch the final episode of "Generation Kill" before heading off to Aspen for the annual ski week. It's a great show; pity about the title. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Mission almost accomplished!

The NYT is fretting this morning about how the president can claim credit for "delivering on his vow" to pull the combat troops out of Iraq, without risking the same premature jactation that bothered his predecessor.

Gosh, it will be a terrible waste of a war if Mr. Obama isn't able to claim credit for winning it! After all, he bucked the conventional wisdom and surged thousands of fresh troops into Iraq, thus snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat.... Or--wait a minute, wasn't that Mr. Bush? You'd never know, if the New York Times were your only source of news. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Turkey's pursuit of peaceful resolutions

Here's one that I missed, because it wasn't on the front page of  the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, my daily reading: a few days before Turkey led the rest of the world in condemning Israel for using violence to stop a blockade-runner heading for Gaza, the Turkish air force was bombing a neighboring country! This from the Daily Star of Beruit, dated May 21:

ANKARA: Turkish warplanes on Thursday bombed dozens of Kurdish rebel targets in neighboring northern Iraq, in one of the biggest raids in recent years, Turkish media reports said.

About 20 fighter jets took part in the operation that targeted positions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the Zap-Khakurk region of the Kurdish-held autonomous north of Iraq, the NTV news channel reported. 

Nearly 50 targets were hit in day-long missions carried out mainly on intelligence passed on by the Unites States, it said.

The Anatolia news agency reported that the strikes were ordered after a group of PKK rebels were detected on their way toward the Turkish border from their mountainous hideouts in northern Iraq.

NTV said the operation, the second this month, was believed to be a success although there was no immediate confirmation of possible losses to the rebels.

Evidently such bombing attacks are routine along the Turkish-Iraqi border. Can you imagine the universal condemnation that they would have aroused, if it had been Israel bombing Hezbollah targets in Lebanon?. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A Vision So Noble

This small book is the result of three years' work at King's College London (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Kings' College Online, since I never actually went to London). It combines my MA thesis with two earlier papers that I wrote for the program, and it went on sale on Amazon.com this morning: A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America's War on Terror.

I've blogged from time to time about John Boyd, but the short version is that he was a colonel who maddened the Air Force and attracted acolytes among its civilian employees for his outside-the-box thinking about aerial combat, maneuver warfare, and the ways in which wars, basketball games, and chess tournaments are won. Arguably he was the greatest American military thinker since Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. My task was to see how Boyd would have approached the War on Terror. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Surge worked. Get over it.

As a junior officer in the U.S. Army, Andrew Exum began blogging under the nom du web of Abu Muqawama, and he continues now that he’s an analyst at the Center for a New American Security. Mr. Exum is hardly on the same page as James Taranto, whom I also read every day—Andrew in the morning, James at happy hour—so I am always pleased when his perception matches mine. Here he is on the subject of The Surge:

"Ever since my friend and mentor Tom Ricks concluded at the end of his book The Gamble that the Surge succeeded tactically but failed strategically, it has been safe among others to say that the Surge -- for all the heroics of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps -- failed. Andrew Sullivan and Tom write this regularly on their blogs, and because they are serious people, others parrot what they say. At some point, though, evidence gets in the way of their conclusion."

Indeed it does—unless, as Andrew wryly remarks, you keep moving the goalposts. So here’s a tip of the virtual hat to the American servicemen who made it possible, and to the American president who had the wisdom to change his strategy and the courage to double down on his investment in Iraq. The Surge worked. Get over it. (Tom Ricks, by the way, is another blogger that I check more or less daily. I was impressed by his book, though skeptical of its conclusion, as I pointed out in my review for the Weekly Standard.) Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Iraqi takeout

It seems that Iraq veterans have acquired a taste for shawarma, a spicy grilled-lamb sandwich popular in the Middle East. Here the US Marines get a fix at a fast-food stand operated by Crisantos Hajibrahim and his wife. But here’s the thing: Mr Hajibrahim (of Palestinian and Mexican heritage) himself served a four-year hitch in the USMC ... and the family stand is located at Camp Pendleton, California. Only in America! See the story in the Wall Street Journal. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Congratulations ...

... to the people of Iraq, who came out in force yesterday to vote in a new Parliament, despite the bombs that were supposed to spoil the election. "The shrugging response of voters [to the spoiling attacks] could signal a fundamental weakening of the insurgency’s potency," notes the NYT. Well, cheer up: Joe Biden can always claim it as a victory for this administration.

... and congratulations also to the foolishly named Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which for a change gave its best-film Oscar to a film of some significance, The Hurt Locker. It's a worthy salute to the men whose courage brought Iraq to the point where it can choose its future, and never mind who takes the credit. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker is a worthy film, and I hope it wins the Oscar Best Picture award. Unusually, for a leading nominee, it's already out in DVD--I rented it from Netflix, and the link is to Amazon.com. That's a measure of how badly it did in theaters, while The Avatar packed them in. One sighs for the future of America!

Except for the customary and almost reflexive distaste for the place in which they find themselves ("I hate this fucking country!"), the film and its heroes have nothing to say about the long-running combat in Iraq. In this, it oddly reminded me of Japanese films about that country's long war--not only postwar ones like The Burmese Harp, but also films made during the 1931-1941 entanglement in China. The war is simply there, like the landscape. Even when we ignore it, it continues.

Indeed, so convinced was I that events were simply unfolding in front of me that I never noticed that one of the British headhunters encountered midway was played by Ralph Fiennes. The encounter was improbable, but the long-distance battle that ensued was utterly convincing. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The good war in Iraq

I just got around to reading the transcript of Joe Biden’s appearance on Larry King Live. It’s priceless:

I am very optimistic about -- about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.

I spent -- I've been there 17 times now. I go about every two months -- three months. I know every one of the major players in all of the segments of that society. It's impressed me. I've been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.

This is the same Joe Biden who told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in 2007 that neither Hilary Clinton nor Barack Obama was fit to be president because:

Look, the fundamental disagreement I have with my colleagues up here [Ms Clinton and Mr Obama] is that they seem to cling to the fundamental strategic mistake that everyone on both sides plays to, and that is that there is any possibility in the lifetime of anyone here of having the Iraqis get together, have a unity government in Baghdad that pulls the country together.

That will not happen, George. It will not happen in the lifetime of anyone here.

During the 2008 campaign, Messrs Obama and Biden argued that the good war in Afghanistan had been scanted because of the demands of the bad war in Iraq. Now that Mr Bush’s “surge” in Iraq has proved to be a qualified success, while the ‘Stan has gone from bad to worse, Mr. Biden has simply switched the wars around: Iraq good, Afghanistan bad. Worse, it's even possible he believes it. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Think COIN but practice FID

The more ingrained an institution, the more impenetrable its jargon. The U.S. Army that I reluctantly served in the 1950s was bad enough, but today's military has a language of its own. Take the headline above: It's inaccessible to most of the world, but it happens to be very good advice. It comes from a Green Beret colonel who argues that the Army's current fascination with counter-insurgency (COIN) is all very well, except that most of what American troops are called upon to do isn't countering insurgency at all. COIN, as we read on the Foreign Policy website, is what a government and military do when they are threatened within their own borders. So the COINsters in Iraq are the Iraqis; in Afghanistan, the Afghans. What the Americans and other outsiders are trying to do in those countries is better defined as Foreign Internal Defense--hence the FID. The colonel argues:

Tactically, the indirect approach requires clear-eyed recognition that U.S. capacity will be applied through -- and not around -- the host nation. This paradigm seems simple, but it runs counter to U.S. military "can-doism" and requires a long-term view and immense operational patience. The indirect approach does not satisfy appetites for quick, measurable results.

Robert Haddick of Foreign Policy adds that this is a hard sell to an administration that has already announced the date when the troop drawdown is to begin. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford