More McCain

by publius

Hilzoy made several good points about McCain’s “not that important” line this morning. But I want to add a few more (or at least elaborate on them).

First, I understand (and sympathize with) the argument that context matters. One of the most patently unfair aspects of YouTube politics is that candidates can be demagogued for chopped phrases that make perfect sense in context. But that said, life is unfair. Them’s the cards and candidates have to adjust. And so unfair or no, one skill that today’s political candidates must have is an ability to talk about an enormous range of issues on the fly without making a gaffe (which is pretty frickin’ hard if you think about it). McCain is simply not very good at this critical game.

Second, and more importantly, context doesn’t help him here anyway. That’s because (as Hilzoy explained) McCain’s statement is misguided even if you stipulate to everything the campaign is saying. What McCain meant, we’re told after the fact (again), is that troop presence doesn’t really matter assuming there are no casualties. The implication is that there’s nothing wrong with keeping a long-term military presence there (e.g., Korea, Germany) so long as things are quiet.

I’m sorry, but that’s a deeply troubling position — and it’s just wrong, for a number of reasons. For one, our presence is harmful even assuming casualties drop to zero. Think about our occupation of Saudi Arabia following the Gulf War. No casualties there — but our very presence on holy soil radicalized a certain young wealthy Saudi who went on to do bad things.

In fact, once you get beyond the whole Mickey Mouse “they’re evil” bit, you’ll see that most militant Islamic terrorism stems from perceived foreign occupation of Muslim soil (Afghanistan/USSR, Lebanon/Israel, PLO-Hamas/Israel, Chechnya/Russia, Iraq/United States, Kashmir/India). It’s obviously good if there are no casualties in Iraq, but our presence will nonetheless radicalize parts of the region (much like an object lodged in the skin triggers an immune system response). We might not suffer immediately, but there will be long-term consequences.

In addition, and as I’ve explained before, our presence creates a giant “moral hazard.” Because our troops are providing an artificial security blanket, Iraqis are more willing to take reckless action and are less willing to come to a political agreement. The longer this goes on, the more those political and ethnic fault lines will harden, thus making political agreement even more difficult to achieve.

And let’s not forget the ponies underlying McCain’s whole assumption in the first place. The idea that we could keep a massive presence there and receive no casualties is, frankly, absurd. Iraq is not Japan, and it’s not Germany. It's a different place. It's ethnically diverse and the shadow of colonialism looms heavy on its people’s consciousness.

The reality is that McCain has no plan whatsoever for bringing anyone home, ever. McCain — like Bush — has adopted a “leave ‘em there and pray” strategy.

I have a few more observations but I’ll save those for later tonight.

Comments

[Adam]

Even the assumption of no-casualties is problematic considering how hostile the area is. You could have made the same argument about, say, Somalia during the Clinton Administration -- and look how well that turned out.

[publius]

thought i did that?

[redwood]

I don't buy it.

If the government representing a nation is legitimate--and the house of Saud is--than Osama's beef is with them, not us.

However, if a legitimate government wants us out and if we don't leave--as with Cuba and Guantanamo--our continued presence injures the lessor nation's identity and undermines our moral authority as the original de-colonializers.

It makes a sham of sovereignty and in turn invites an valid objection.

that's the dangerous part.

[ffl]

McCain — like Bush — has adopted a “leave ‘em there and pray” strategy.

One could argue that McCain believes it is in our national interest to let all those "hostiles" over there know that we have troops in the area that could take them out in short order if necessary.

However, since McCain is no longer a maverick, but just another dumb republican we can't assume he has a brain.

Whoever feels that it is better to bring them all the troops back here and let the hostiles build up their strenth so they can commit another 9/11 should vote for Obama, not McCain.

I can't speak for McCain, but I think he believes we should kill the bad guys before they do so to us. Not sure where Obama stands on those who might do us harm.

[now_what]

Think about our occupation of Saudi Arabia following the Gulf War

The United States of America did not "occupy" Saudi Arabia.

Just saying.

[Nombrilisme Vide]

If the government representing a nation is legitimate--and the house of Saud is--than Osama's beef is with them, not us.

In principle, yes. If we want to assign responsibility for stationing military forces in a foreign country where we are requested to station them by a "legitimate" government (and we'll assume for simplicity that there was no coercion involved in initial or continued deployment, and that we freely and honestly express a willingness to leave if requested to), then yes, responsibility is indeed with the host nation. But that's only in principle, and only for assigning responsibility. In practice, if you want foreign troops removed from a nation freely hosting them, responsibility really doesn't matter. What matters is convincing one or the other nation to withdraw them or request their withdrawal. You can then choose to convince one of the two states based upon which would to your eyes be easier or less expensive (by whatever standard) to convince, and convince that one regardless of whether or not it is the one "responsible".

[DaveC]

The idea that we could keep a massive presence there and receive no casualties is, frankly, absurd. Iraq is not Japan, and it’s not Germany. It's a different place. It's ethnically diverse and the shadow of colonialism looms heavy on its people’s consciousness.

Is this an argument for racial purity in Iraq? Kind of reminiscent of the "get out of Rwanda now" logic.

[DonkeyOdie]

It was my understanding that bin Laden was already a bit radical before Desert Storm (i.e.; the muhjahadeen in Afghanistan/the first attack on the WTC), but your point is taken.
Also remember that he requested that the aforementioned muhjahadeen be allowed to liberate Kuwait and oust Saddam so as not to have infidels on sacred land.
Could be wrong on that, but I know some of it to be true, at least.

[ThatLeftTurnInABQ]

If the government representing a nation is legitimate--and the house of Saud is--than Osama's beef is with them, not us.

However, if a legitimate government wants us out and if we don't leave--as with Cuba and Guantanamo--our continued presence injures the lessor nation's identity and undermines our moral authority as the original de-colonializers.

It makes a sham of sovereignty and in turn invites an valid objection.

that's the dangerous part.

redwood, there is a lot of wisdom in what you wrote.

Where things get more complicated (as I see it) is that "legitimacy" is not a binary thing. Some states enjoy a great deal of legitimacy, others have little (and are unlikely to last long), and some fall in between these extremes.

The excruciating part of our current dilemma in Iraq is that the Maliki government falls in that gray in-between zone. It clearly does not enjoy much legitimacy with some segments of the population, but not to such an overwhelming degree that the case for abandoning it and allowing it to be replaced by a much more legitimate successor is a no-brainer. Hence the dilemma.

My feeling is that at some point fairly soon (i.e. within the next couple of years) a more legitimate and popular government in Iraq will replace the current government, but I do not know by what path that will happen. It could occur because once US forces exit the country the current govt. adapts to survive and prosper on its own by cutting deals and bringing in allies. Or it could happen that the current government is wholesale replaced, either peacefully or violently, or both in fits and starts.

At this point I think anyone who claims that they can predict what will happen is deluded and probably not a good source for advice. If ever a situation required flexibility and a willingness to learn from and adapt to events as they unfold, this is it.

IMHO as always.

[Adam]

publius, I may be splitting hairs, but I took you to be making a point about the vulnerability of troops in Iraq -- the hostile environment, etc. IOW, there's no way to bunker down enough to avoid all attacks on the troops. Which is a fair point.

I just think there's something else there, though I'm not sure I'm verbalizing it properly. The lasting lesson of Somalia, for me -- again, not to put too fine a point on it -- isn't just about the dangers to the troops; it's also about perceptual issues. There weren't that many troops stationed there, but the imagery of what happened was just devastating.

One thought I'd had was that there's in some respect an inverse relationship between the number of troops stationed there and the impact of each loss. Drawdown really is all-or-nothing in this case, I think.

[Quiddity]

Let's not forget that having those troops over there costs a whole lot of money!!

[Anarch]

There weren't that many troops stationed there, but the imagery of what happened was just devastating.

Thankfully, the Bush Administration learned the lesson of Somalia: don't let people see the imagery.

[publius]

adam - that makes sense.

and yes, I shouldn't have said occupation, but hopefully that doesnt detract from the point.

[Blackburn]

"Think about our occupation of Saudi Arabia following the Gulf War. No casualties there..."

Though the numbers pale in comparison with casualties in Iraq, 19 servicemen were killed, and many dozens wounded, in the bombing of Khobar Towers.

[KathyF]

John McCain knows as well as I do--I hope--that we are only in Germany because the German government wants us there. Same as the UK government, which, as far as I can tell, still wants us here. If they said tomorrow that we are no longer welcome on German soil, we'd have the haulers out to Kaiserslautern faster than a Mercedes S-class can chew up the autobahn.

The Iraqi government is very close to saying we're no longer welcome there. Does he intend it to be an occupation after all for 100 years? Doesn't sound like a casualty-free environment to me.

Yeah, he's confused.

[Daniel Merritt]

Redwood -

I think there are two sorts of worries. The first is about people's morally legitimate worries, or at least potentially morally legitimate anger/problems. The second is about anger without a legitimate reason.

These get confused too often, I think. You've probably noticed the bait-and-switch on this that lets dittohead conservatives get away with "you just hate America and think the terrorists are right!!!" whenever someone asks how an American policy will play in the Middle East, or if it will radicalize anyone.

My impression was, at least for the purposes of this post, publius was just skipping past the first part, and talking about anger that we didn't need to give moral weight to, but should still be a factor in our strategic calculus. If the benefits we gain from bases in even a more peaceful Iraq (at least compared to the second best alternative) don't outweigh the problems created by stirring up that hornet's nest, there's no reason to contemplate staying.

[Daniel Merritt]

ffl: Let me tell you about a magical world that corresponds to what you're saying.

Hundreds of thousands of troops in top-of-the-line equipment stand ready at the Iranian border. Strike teams of fighter-bombers stand by with the exact locations of all Iranian nuclear-related facilities, ready to launch a quick strike if necessary.

More amazing yet, hundreds of American secret super-gunship-transports buzz across the Middle East. Inside, using a special "Jihad-o-Meter (TM)", well-trained technicians detect the brainwaves of anyone who hates America and plans militant action, zooming in on their position and depositing crack forces to fight them over there before we have to fight them here. This is lucky, because all our enemies are linked together in a Middle East wide pooling of resources and intent, regardless of Sunni and Shi'ite or organizational rivalry. Furthermore, if we weren't constantly intercepting them, they would be able to access their secretly stashed rocketships, which would allow them to immediately reach and attack America.
.
.
.

Now, back to the real world. Our military is heavily overstretched. Iran has much better opportunities to attack our forces in Iraq than we have to attack across the border into Iran; our forces in Iraq are in no shape to launch a new military offensive. Vast numbers of insurgents in Iraq have turned to violence due to our presence, and have attacked us there. Were we to leave, most would lack the motivation or capabilities to continue to attack America, although some hardcore few could be expected to join larger terrorist organizations. Of course, even this could have been avoided by not invading Iraq in the first place, or by having some workable post war plan that wouldn't alienate its entire population.

Both North Korea and Iran - plus Russia and other larger and smaller rivals - feel less constrained and, dare I say it, emboldened. The United States military, long a gigantic stick hovering in the background, is bogged down in Iraq, overstretched, humbled, and unable to find enough new recruits while their assignment might be consecutive tours of duty in Iraq. American diplomatic power, once capable of forging mighty coalitions, is also shattered, and our worldwide image is at a historic nadir. Our attention is diverted and we continue to squabble with our allies over issues both petty and grand.

Al Qaeda & similar groups have suffered heavy blows in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and Afghanistan, but Al Qaeda has likely fled into Pakistan's border region. The Pakistani government has essentially ceded control over this area, and due to diplomatic sensibilities the U.S. can't enter. They're still hunted, but much of the attention is elsewhere, and various extremist groups been able to pull off several spectacular attacks in the years since on European, Indonesian, and Arab soil. Their primary problems stem from other Muslim groups and countries that have turned against them once they started hitting "infidel" Muslim targets. Other terrorist organizations that focus on Israel rather than the United States have seen a succession of triumphs. Partly thanks to the naive pressures of the incompetent American government for quick elections, they have seized power democratically in parts of Lebanon and Palestine.

_________

Alright, seriously, do you think Iraq is some sort of 'interdictor magnet' for terrorists? That in order to reach America from abroad, you have to go through Iraq first? That thanks to our presence in Iraq, we can enter the entire Middle East (Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan) and hunt for terrorists?

The whole idea of "fighting them in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here" simply makes no sense, since we aren't fighting the same people (even Al Qaeda in Iraq is a mostly homegrown organization using a 'brand name', would never have existed without the invasion, and is despised by even Iraqi insurgents; the "Sunni Awakening" against foreign fighters would've happened a lot sooner if we'd left Iraq). There's no reason terrorists have to go through Iraq to the continental United States. We have all the same capabilities to try to foil that by disrupting terrorist organizations & destroying terrorist assets without occupying Iraq.

America is geographically and demographically (we don't have a local, disaffected, radical population) a much harder target for radical Islamic terrorist groups, so mostly they've hit elsewhere: places like Europe, Indonesia, Pakistan.

[Xeynon]

It’s obviously good if there are no casualties in Iraq, but our presence will nonetheless radicalize parts of the region (much like an object lodged in the skin triggers an immune system response). We might not suffer immediately, but there will be long-term consequences.

This is true; the problem is, absent some sort of major energy breakthrough that makes the petroleum-based economy obsolete overnight, I really don't see any way we can avoid it, whether we've got troops in Iraq itself or not. The greater Middle East is simply too strategically important to take ourselves out of position to safeguard our interests there by having zero troops on the ground throughout the region, and I don't see any reason to believe Muslims inclined to listen to bin Laden's rhetoric in the first place will be any less fanatical in their opposition to our presence if it only extends to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Yemen, etc., but not to Iraq.

In addition, and as I’ve explained before, our presence creates a giant “moral hazard.” Because our troops are providing an artificial security blanket, Iraqis are more willing to take reckless action and are less willing to come to a political agreement.

This is an issue with our current deployment, but unless I'm mistaken an indefinite 150k+ troop presence is not what McCain is envisioning. He's talking about a small advisory/tripwire force akin to our presences in Korea, Japan, and Germany, which wouldn't be large enough to police the entire country. How we transition between what we've got now and McCain's envisioned scenario is a thorny problem and one he has yet to address, but assuming we could do it (which granted is a big assumption), I don't think we'd have a serious issue with the Iraqis continually refusing to take responsibility for their own security, just as we haven't had serious problems with South Korea refusing to invest heavily in its own military just because we've got 35,000 troops there.

The longer this goes on, the more those political and ethnic fault lines will harden, thus making political agreement even more difficult to achieve.

Possibly - or, if the Maliki government achieves effective control over the entire country and a political/economic structure in which the interests of all factions are fairly considered is given time to incubate, the Iraqis might decide that hashing things out politically rather than militarily really is a better way to address their differences. History suggests, unfortunately, that the doom-and-gloom scenario is more likely, but there have been cases of ethnically and/or religiously disharmonious nations evolving into something resembling functioning democracies after a modicum of civil strife rather than collapsing into outright civil war in the aftermath of the withdrawal of a colonial power (India, Indonesia, Kenya, Philippines, Argentina, etc.) I'm not convinced Iraq is doomed to fall into the former camp.

The idea that we could keep a massive presence there and receive no casualties is, frankly, absurd.

True enough, but he's not talking about keeping a massive presence there.

Iraq is not Japan, and it’s not Germany. It's a different place. It's ethnically diverse and the shadow of colonialism looms heavy on its people’s consciousness.

This is true of most of the countries in the Middle East where we have troops, yet for the most part, citizens of those countries do not target our troops if they perceive their presence as in their national interest. I think we ought to leave it up to the Iraqis to decide if they want us there or not (though I'll be perfectly happy to see us out if they say they don't).

[hilzoy]

Xeynon: "I don't see any reason to believe Muslims inclined to listen to bin Laden's rhetoric in the first place will be any less fanatical in their opposition to our presence if it only extends to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Yemen, etc., but not to Iraq."

I don't think this is right. Saudi Arabia is sui generis: it includes Mecca and Medina, and is holy ground. American presence there is, religiously, unlike American presence anywhere else. Iraq, for its part, is different from a hypothetical peaceful presence elsewhere in being an occupation.

I do not know that our presence in Kuwait and Qatar has drawn anything like the kind of criticism that our presence in SA and Iraq has done. (Turkey would likely be even less controversial, not being an Arab country.)

[Jesurgislac]

Xeynon: I think we ought to leave it up to the Iraqis to decide if they want us there or not

Well, if the occupation were to be terminated on that basis, it would have ended by 2005: indeed, if Bush hadn't been determined to delay elections in Iraq until his own reappointment procedure was safely over, the occupying forced would have been gone before November 2004.

But enough of fantasies. It would be great if the world's only remaining superpower really would just remove an unwanted military occupation from a country just because the inhabitants don't want it there. On that we are in agreement. But the US won't do that - at least, the US under Bush won't - so saying "I think we should get out if the Iraqis want us to go" is kind of like saying "I think we should impeach Bush". Of course the occupation should end since the Iraqis want it to: of course Bush should be impeached: and ponies for all, too, please.

[Batocchio]

Thanks. I wrote a post about McCain's "100 years" comment a while back that made the same basic point - he was taken out of context, but in context his answer was a poor and misleading analogy, a dodge, and his actual Iraq policy made little to no sense. He has no exit strategy, and doesn't even want one. At best his policy is unwise, but I argued he also consistently ignores dire realities in Iraq. (Not that that's liable to shock anyone here.) But I've certainly found that the more ya examine McCain, the worse he looks. Even the more charitable, comprehensive looks at his Iraq policy (and many other policies) just don't come out positive.

[redwood]

Daniel: My impression was, at least for the purposes of this post, publius was just skipping past the first part, and talking about anger that we didn't need to give moral weight to, but should still be a factor in our strategic calculus. If the benefits we gain from bases in even a more peaceful Iraq (at least compared to the second best alternative) don't outweigh the problems created by stirring up that hornet's nest, there's no reason to contemplate staying.

okay, I'll pull back, as your reading is faithful to publius's larger point.

and I confess that I'm biased against those cost/benefit analyses. I don't know what to do with the question of how to value human life. How many deaths in Iraq are too many?

I prefer a rule. And I would prefer that angry transnational Sunni terrorists take up their beefs with the governments that lease us the bases.

I'm waffling on hilzoy's observation that Mecca is sufficiently distinct and important that, even if the Saudis lease us a base near there, we should not accept it. Rumsfeld agreed with her, evindently, because, if memory serves, he shuttered a bunch of them.

no offense, hilzoy.

[dubiousraves]

Why do we still have troops in Germany and Japan, anyway?