The Debatable Land

Michael Gerson Cares More Than You Do

Michael Gerson, formerly George W Bush's chief speechwriter, has been to the Congo. As you might imagine, it's pretty grim there. So, naturally, Gerson has this to say:

Security in eastern Congo is the prerequisite for political progress. Nkunda will continue to push until someone effectively pushes back. The Congolese army is incapable of defeating him. While the U.N. peacekeeping force is the reason that Goma was not taken, it does not have the political will and the capabilities to contain Nkunda. It lacks rapid-reaction forces and night-fighting capabilities.

This leaves one alternative -- a capable, hard-hitting European military force, supported by the United States, which would stabilize the situation, give the peacekeeping force some breathing room and put a limit on Nkunda's ambitions. But Britain and Germany, to their shame, have opposed this kind of "bridging force." (It is particularly obscene that Germany, of all nations, should lose its outrage at mass violence.)

OK! Now I suspect that Gerson also thinks that we should commit troops to the Sudan. And perhaps to Zimbabwe too. And of course he'd also want to see europe pour more soldiers into Afghanistan. But you can file this column in a drawer marked Pointless. I'm more sympathetic than some to humanitarian intervention, but where does Gerson actually think these troops will come from? Even if there was any great political or popular desire in Britain for intervening in the Congo - and there is, rather emphatically, none whatsoever - there simply aren't the troops to do it. The same might be said of the United States. We're over-stretched as it is. Gerson knows this, I assume, making his column more a matter of moral, concerned ostentation than any practical response to a ghastly situation.

Equally, as Gerson ought to know, it is precisely Germany's history that still makes the Germans reluctant to send their troops overseas. In any case, even assuming these mythical troops were available, what are they supposed to do?  Instead we have hand-wringing accompanied by a belief in military unicorns that can solve all the world's problems all the time. I'd also add that it's rather distasteful for Gerson to suggest that other countries' soldiers be sent off to die in the Congo simply so he can feel better about himself.

What's happening in Congo - or, to be more precise, what's been happening in Congo for more than a decade - is grim and desperate and horrid stuff. But there's a limit to what can realistically be done. Wishing for it to be otherwise when there is no prospect of it being otherwise strikes me as a rather pointless use of the Washington Post's op-ed page.

Over to you Mr Larison.

War and Memory

"Take a trip through the British countryside and note the number of war memorials and be struck by the number of names on each of them. Once, these hamlets and villages coughed up their sons and sent them off to France. And as the long lists of names attest, many of them never came back. To take one example from thousands: my own home town of Selkirk in the Scottish Borders lost no fewer than 292 men during the Great War. This from a town with no more than 6,000 people."

From my latest piece at Culture11, remembering the First World War.

The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep,
though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

John McCrae, 1915

Ypres, Loos, Somme, Arras...

Poppyman wants to know: have you got yours yet?

Winning and Losing in Afghanistan

A rather interesting development in Kabul. The French satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaînė (France's Private Eye) claims that the British Ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, has told the French that the war is lost. According to Le Canard:

The British ambassador and his deputy have in turn contacted me to pass on their analysis of the situation before the Franco-British meeting on Afghanistan. These were their main points:

-- The current situation is bad. The security situation is getting worse. So is corruption and the government has lost all trust. Our public statements should not delude us over the fact that the insurrection, while incapable of winning a military victory, nevertheless has the capacity to make life increasingly difficult, including in the capital.

-- The presence -- especially the military presence -- of the coalition is part of the problem, not the solution. The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime which would collapse without them. In doing so, they are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis (which, moreover, will probably be dramatic.

The British Ambassador also told the French:

The reinforcement of the military presence would have a perverse effect: it would identify us even more clearly as an occupying force and it would multiply the number of targets (for the insurgents).

We have no alternative to supporting the United States in Afghanistan... but we should tell them that we want to be part of a winning strategy, not a losing one.

"Within five or ten years from now... (it would be positive) if Afghanistan were governed by an acceptable dictator... This outlook is the only realistic one and we should prepare our public opinion to accept it... In the short term we should dissuade the American presidential candidates from getting more bogged down in Afghanistan.... The American strategy is destined to fail.

Now, of course, a) this may not be true and b) is only one, admittedly well-placed, man's view. Nonetheless, let's suppose that this is an accurate summary of the British Embassy's views. What does it mean?

At the very least one might hope it will cause some people to ask some questions. We like to think of Afghanistan as the "good" war. But what does that mean? Allied troops have been in Afghanistan for six years now and a military victory remains elusive. Is this merely a matter of resources? If it's not, then how useful are promises to pour more troops into Afghanistan? And what does victory look like anyway? How sustainable are current operations? In fact, are we more concerned with "winning" the "war on drugs" than with pacifying the Hindu Kush and Helmand province? To what extent is the drug war compromising our ability to achieve our other objectives? Furthermore, what sort of threat does the Taliban (and a rump al-Qaeda) in Afghanistan pose to the non-Afghan world? Is it containable absent a military occupation? How long should our current occupation last? Dare we tell the public? Can we win? What are the adverse consequences, if any, of winning?

I don't pretend to know the answers to these questions. But I'd be interested in seeing them asked in Washington and London and Paris. The Ambassador, if he's been quoted correctly, may well be wrong. But what if he's right?

[Hat-tip: Art Goldhammer]

Stanislav Petrov Day

The Yorkshire Ranter explains why this matters and why we should all be grateful to this Soviet Air Force colonel.

Singapore Years

From the Telegraph's obituary of John Burrows, an intelligence officer who spent part of the war working at Bletchley Park:

In August 1939 he married Enid Carter, an employee of the British Sugar Corporation, and a few weeks later, on the outbreak of war, he volunteered for the Intelligence Corps. "When I joined the Army, I was a teacher of modern languages," he said. "I admitted to a working knowledge of German and was immediately posted to Singapore."

Relatedly, today's paper also carries an obituary for Phyllis Thom, who, like my grandfather, spent most of the war in a Japanese POW camp:

By 1944 death had become an everyday occurrence, and entries from Phyllis Briggs's diaries of the time convey the mixture of tragedy and black comedy that were characteristic of camp life.

"May 3 1944: Mrs Colley ill. Mrs MacLelland died. May 11: Mrs Curran Sharp died. I ate chopped banana skins for the first time, which helped to fill a corner. Every day fresh orders from the Japs about gardening and grass cutting. July 4: Felt ill and fainted again. The Japs complain that the children pull faces and laugh at them. More threats to cut rations. Mackenzie ill with dysentery. July 19: Still no rain – water ration reduced. Baby Darling died very suddenly. July 27: Grace Guer died. She had only been ill four days – a great shock to us all. She was young and pretty and had kept fairly fit. A high official visited the camp so we had to do up the dormitories and sweep the road. July 31: Capt Siki made a speech – the black market must stop – we continue to work hard and we must obey all orders."

At one stage there were so many dying that the grave diggers could not keep up: "In the end the children were the strongest and it was they who did the digging."

More Trouble in the Caucasus

Clumsy. Stupid. Counter-productive. Russian policy in Georgia has moved into a new phase. As I suggested yesterday, the Russians now seem determined to answer a Georgian miscalculation with one of their own. Yes, Russia is projecting "strength" by moving into indisputably Georgian territory, but at what cost? It may be that the Russians don't give a fig about what the West thinks, but in the longer run it seems that toppling Sakaashvili is an unnecessary over-reaction. Once the Georgians had offered their ceasefire (or been driven out of South Ossetia) a more prudent Russian response might have been to accept this. There's much to be said for quitting while you're ahead.

Anyway, I agree with everything the estimable Mr Poulos writes here. The Russians seem determined upon seeing Saakashvili's blunder with one of their own. But that does not mean that the immediate, even visceral anti-Moscow tilt favoured by some is or was the correct or sensible response. At the very least, one might hope there'd be some sense of priorities: what price Georgia when set beside, say, Russian help with Iran?

Equally, I agree with Mr Larison here. Russia's subsequent over-reaction does not excuse Georgia's initial provocation, nor indubitably cast it in a heroic, let's-admire-the-scrappy-wee-guy bronze.

The Temptations of the Leader Page

In an editorial written, judging from its cadences, by Leon Wieseltier, welcoming the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, The New Republic argues that:

Whatever one thinks of the war in Iraq, it is impossible to deny that it has had the effect of delegitimating "humanitarian intervention" for a new generation. This new diffidence must be resisted. It is what the mass murderers and the mass rapists are counting on. You cannot be against the genocide in Darfur and against the use of force to end it. Otherwise your opposition to the atrocity is purely gestural, and merely a display of your admiring sense of yourself. It makes no sense to be opposed to a problem and to its solution.

There may be something to this. But it might also be said that arguing for the use of military force when you know there is absolutely no prospect of that force being applied is itself  "purely gestural" and "a display of your admiring sense of yourself."

This, of course, is one of the weaknesses of editorials. And editorial-writers. It's always easier to make a case for a perfect something that has no chance of being done than for an imperfect, messy, less than entirely satisfactory, policy that could, with a dollop of luck, be followed to some kind of semi-acceptable outcome...

Cartooning the War

Via Andrew, a fascinating collection of cartoon maps from the First World War. This one, by the Dutch artist Louis Raemaekers, is, for obvious reasons, my favourite:

Whither Bosnia?

At Passport Lucy Moore says this Paddy Ashdown speech on Bosnia's future is " a compelling call". Maybe so. Ashdown argues:

Bosnia's predominantly Serb entity, Republika Srpska, Karadzic's creation, has seen the vacuum where will and policy should be. Its premier, Milorad Dodik, is now aggressively reversing a decade of reforms. He has set up the parallel institutions and sent delegations to Montenegro to find out how they broke away….

Meanwhile, in European capitals the growing view goes like this. We invested 13 years of hard work and huge resource in Bosnia. Now it is stable and peaceful and we are rather tired. Kosovo has proved it is possible to divide a country. What matter if Bosnia becomes another Cyprus?…

This is folly of a very dangerous order. What happens to the Muslim populations who have moved back to Republika Srpska, even to Srebrenica, if they are handed back to an exclusively Serb-dominated regime? What happens to Bosnia's shining star, the multi-ethnic, markedly successful sub-entity of Brcko, hemmed in by Republika Srpska? Is it to be handed over, too? I do not believe Bosnia is likely to go back to conflict; most of its people are just too war-weary. But the one event that could change that calculation in favour of blood would be to return to the old Karadzic/Milosevic plan to divide Bosnia.

One need not have any sympathy for the monstrous Karadzic and Milosevic (Sasha Hemon's NYT op-ed is, as Moore says, worth reading on this front) to wonder what's so special about Bosnia? That is to say, from the outsider's perspective, if, as the Kosovar example has demonstrated, Serbia's territorial integrity is of no great import then why must Bosnia's be considered sacrosanct. Or, to put it another way, if it was illegitimate, even criminal, to compel Bosnian Muslims to remain citizens of a country they no longer wished to call home, why is it considered perfectly acceptable to prevent Bosnian Serbs from breaking away and either rejoining Serbia or having their own little independent state?

It's not clear to me that you can deny the Serbs that right simply because they committed the great majority of the monstrous war crimes that scarred Yugoslavia 15 years ago.

And, having visited Northern Cyprus last year nor is it clear to me that it would matter very much (in the grand scheme of things) if Bosnia did in fact "became another Cyprus".

A Wartime Christmas

All the London papers' obituary pages reward close attention, but the Daily Telegraph remains peerless in tracking the lives and, obviously, deaths, of WW2 servicemen. These accounts of remarkable derring-do and extraordinary achievement under testing circumstances naturally seem more, not less, vital as the number of survivors dwindles. Thus this charming anecdote from today's obituary of Lieutenant 'Polly' Perkins, a motor torpedo boat captain who won two DSC's:

On December 18/19 1944, by which time he had been promoted to command the long-range MTB 766, Perkins was hiding in the fjords during an operation to land and recover agents in Norway.

He sent a rating ashore to obtain some Christmas trees for the forthcoming festivities. Three small saplings were brought on board but when the boat returned to Lerwick for a debrief on how the operation had gone, Perkins was persuaded to give up two of the trees to the senior Norwegian naval liaison officer.

One subsequently found its way to King Haakon VII and the other to the Norwegian prime minister, both of whom were in exile in London. Perkins dined out on his claim that this was the origin of the Norwegian custom of sending a Christmas tree to Trafalgar Square every year since 1947.

The Rhetoric of War

Breaking News: George W Bush is not Henry V. Shocking, I know. According to former General Ricardo Sanchez:

Among the anecdotes in "Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story" is an arresting portrait of Bush after four contractors were killed in Fallujah in 2004, triggering a fierce U.S. response that was reportedly egged on by the president.

During a videoconference with his national security team and generals, Sanchez writes, Bush launched into what he described as a "confused" pep talk:

"Kick ass!" he quotes the president as saying. "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal."

"There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!"

Of course, Donald Rumsefeld and the President did take the view, back when they planned the invasion of Iraq, that "the fewer men, the greater share of honour..."

France and Collaboration

As an addition to this post on wartime France, Clive Davis directs one to this Max Hastings op-ed from a couple of years ago that makes similar points:

Hearing a recent conversation about collaboration, I made myself unpopular by suggesting that, if Britain had succumbed to Nazi rule, our own people would have behaved pretty much as the French did. Anthony Eden is seldom quoted with respect these days. Yet the former foreign secretary made an impressive contribution to Marcel Ophüls' great film on wartime France, Le Chagrin et la Pitié. He said, in impeccable French: "It would be impertinent for any country that has never suffered occupation to pass judgment on one that did." Here was wisdom.

It is extraordinarily difficult to resist tyranny ruthlessly enforced, especially in a densely populated country with little wilderness. In order to eat and provide for one's family, it is necessary to earn money. All commerce and industry must be conducted according to the will of the occupiers. A man who owns a business will find that he has no business, his employees no work, if he does not accept dictation. Members of a family that owns a house are liable to find it burnt about their ears if they commit, or are even deemed to have acquiesced in, acts of resistance. Some people may feel brave enough to accept such consequences for themselves, but would they inflict them on their children?

Quite so.

Iraq and conservatism?

At Tapped Mori Dinaeur says no-one should be surprised by John McCain's lack of interest in policy detail. Well fine. The there's this, however:

After Iraq and Katrina, I don't think the public needs to be convinced of the link between conservatism [and] the failure of government.

Half of this, at least, is entirely wrong. The Iraq War has little or nothing to do with conservative, or governmental failure, rather it was the result, in more than just part, of an overweening, arrogant belief in the power of government to achieve anything it set its mind to. Granted, the Bush administration didn't foresee the problems that would arise and are properly culpable for that (me too, for that matter), but there's little that's recognisably conservative about the war, at least in terms of any conservatism of restraint, modesty and prudence.

As for Katrina: well maybe (and certainly I think Dinauer is right to suppose that the public blames the federal government for the debacle) but there is, of course, or at least there used to be, the question as to whether disaster relief is a matter the federal government should be taking the lead role in. That, of course, is an exceedingly old-fashioned view.