Military contractors raise a whole lot of questions when they’re used as widely as they have been in Iraq.

•Chain of command: Contractors aren’t part of it. If you’re military and you’re told to do something hazardous, you do it or else. The worst that can happen to a contractor who refuses to go into a danger zone—and this has happened—is that they lose their job.

•Fraud: We’ve lost hundreds of millions to fraud and mismanagement (military book-keeping is notoriously bad at keeping track of money), but the administration has very little interest in investigating it. One inspector general following the money trails was fired, and Bush recently made a signing statement saying he wasn’t bound by Congress’ creation of an Executive/Congressional panel to investigate profiteering and fraud.

•Special interests: Maybe it’s no surprise that the administration wouldn’t want to have a committee investigating well-connected corporate interests. Which leads to a further question: When you have corporations playing a role in a major military operation, is there a risk of lobbyists influencing policy?

•Crime: Repeatedly I keep reading cases of contractor employees who’ve committed a crime, or allegedly committed a crime, and nothing can be done: We won’t turn them over to Iraqis, they’re outside the military court system and prosecutors back home can’t touch them.

I think whatever our views on the Iraq war, we can all agree this is a bad thing.

And it can be a lot worse, as in the case of KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones, who says she was gang-raped by coworkers two years ago in the Green Zone.

After Army doctors performed a medical exam which allegedly confirms the rape, the military turned the kit over to KBR. Parts of the kit have now disappeared. Finding Jones had reported the rape, KBR put her in a shipping container without food and water for 24 hours.

The Justice Department hasn’t charged anyone, and ABC News has said they can’t find any government agency even investigating the case.

On the other hand, Mohammad Munaf and Ahmed Omar, two US citizens in Iraq who were accused of working with kidnappers, were taken by the military and held without charge. When their lawyers filed to set them free, they were turned over to the Iraqi courts (our government is trying to convince the Supreme Court that Munaf and Omar should have no standing in US courts because the military in Iraq are part of a US force outside American authority).

So we’re back to the special-interest issue: We can handle crimes committed by US citizens iin Iraq just fine, so long as the alleged criminals aren’t tied to powerful, influential contractors with deep connections to the US government. Go figure.

Sarcasm aside, if we’re going to use contractors, particularly contractors employing military force, there has to be a much clearer law covering what they’re obligated to do and how they’ll be punished if they commit crimes. And a heck of a lot better job at keeping control of the money.

There’s one thing Dick Cheney said about the Iraq War that I’d agree with: The ’smoking gun’ of another nation having nuclear weapons should never be a mushroom cloud over one of our cities.

In other words, if someone is about to make an imminent attack on the US, no question a pre-emptive action is justified.

In 2002-3, however, that wasn’t the principle we were operating under: Instead, we had Cheney’s 1 percent doctrine where if there was even a 1 percent chance of an enemy attack, we were justified in striking first.

The end result? A war where the American deaths alone have now topped 4,000, against an enemy who was never a threat to us: No ties to al-Qaida, no WMDs to give them if there’d been ties.

And we went in despite warnings that the Iraqi exiles were using us to advance their own agenda, despite more than one defector telling us there were no weapons, despite all the countless demurrals. At best, the Bush administration wilfully and foolishly believed all the facts that supported its case and nothing else; at worst, they lied through their teeth to justify sending in the troops (lied about the case for war, that is; accounts of one of Bush’s pre-war meetings with Blair show Bush had settled on regime change, then spent months assuring the American people he was trying to avoid war).

My point is, Cheney got it backwards: If we’re going to invade a country that hasn’t attacked us, we should be at least 99 percent sure we’re in imminent danger. That’s a 1 percent doctrine I can live with.

To paraphrase the blogger hilzoy, sometimes war is necessary. Sometimes it’s necessary to amputate all four limbs. Neither one should be done casually (would anyone accept “There’s a 3 percent chance you’ll die if we don’t turn you into a quadriplegic” as a rationale for an operation?).

But as we’ve seen, the past few years, it’s easy to come up with “conclusive” proof that there’s deadly danger; even before Bush, there were people in the intelligence community who knew they were better off finding the facts they’re told to find, not what was there.

Can we trust our intelligence services to evaluate the information honestly and accurately next time? Can we trust our elected officials to interpret it without imposing their own wishes on the facts? And when there are doubts and maybes and ambiguities, can we trust our government not to airbrush those out and announce the case for war is a “slam dunk?”

Unfortunately, the answer to all three is no—and that applies to any administration, not just this one. The Gulf of Tonkin incident happened under Johnson; Iraqis supposedly throwing Kuwaiti babies under incubators was the myth for Bush I; and (switching nations for a second), England went into World War One partly because of widly exaggerated stories about German brutality in Belgium.

So is there any way to reliably justify a pre-emptive strike? Or not?

A Washington Post story recounts the plight of Saman Kareem Ahmad, a Kurd who worked as a medal-winning US translator in Iraq for four years, relocated to America and now teaches Arabic to Marines heading to the battle front.

Ahmad applied for his green card, backed up by a sheaf of recommendations from the military, but was turned down as a member of the Kurdish Democratic Party — which Customs and Immigration Services decided qualifies as a terrorist group for trying to overthrow Saddam for years (it’s not officially classed as terrorists, but Immigration has the power to identify “undesignated terrorist groups.”), including anti-Saddam activity during the first and second Gulf War.

Yep, you heard me. Fighting in the same war against the same adversary as the USA has been classified as terrorism.

To add insult to injury, Ahmad’s entire family were wiped out by Saddam’s poison-gas attacks on the Kurds—you know, the ones that have been cited repeatedly over the past eight years as showing why we had to have regime change in Iraq?

At least one other Kurdish translater has been refused a green card on the same grounds.

The second thing we’ve learned is that insurgents—or guerilla fighters, as they used to be called—are darn hard to stop.

History should have already taught us that: It took three years of bloody, brutal fighting to put down the resistance movement in the Philippines after we took the islands from Spain. And in Vietnam, the insurgents won, even though, as has often been said, our forces won every pitched battle. So how do we do better next time?

A large part of that is tactics and strategy, from what I’ve read, but there’s also a bigger question: Should we be preparing to fight more of these wars?

An article in Christian Science Monitor today, for instance, discusses a proposal to create a 20,000 person corps of “combat advisers” to train foreign troops in counterinsurgency, and by so doing, also win “hearts and minds” to our side.

The article discusses the merits, but several military officers interviewed argue this is making the classic military mistake of assuming the next war you fight will be just like the last one: What if we pour our resources into fighting counter-insurgencies and terrorist campaigns and we’re faced with a conventional war next time?

Then again, what if it is another counter-insurgency next time?

I’m reminded of the 2002 war games in which the “enemy” army defeated the superior US forces at first by using boobytraps, suicide attacks, hand-delivering all messages so there was nothing to eavesdrop on–after which the rules were readjusted, or so one of the officers involved says, to make sure the US won.

It’s true, we don’t know what war we’re going to face next. So how do we prepare?

When Hilzoy on obsidian wings has something to say, it’s a pleasure to read:

“Invading Iraq was, obviously, completely different. Iraqis needed to set up a society virtually from scratch. They badly needed our help: help like ensuring basic law and order after the regime fell, and protecting infrastructure from looting. Even if we had not failed utterly to do those things, though, their task would have been immensely difficult. Imagine how much is presupposed by the fact that I can walk down a street in Baltimore and assume that no one will rob me, or bundle me into a car and hold me for ransom; or by the fact that people who own warehouses or equipment yards need to protect their property against small groups of people, but not against trained private armies. There are, after all, a lot of people who need money, and yet, oddly enough, very few of them do these things. A whole lot goes into making that true: culture, policing, a whole network of shared understandings and assumptions and social mores. In a country like Iraq, when you excise a tyrannical government, all of that is gone.

Likewise, consider how difficult the Democrats are now finding it to agree on a fair resolution of the problem of the Michigan and Florida delegates. What counts as fair? we wonder. Who can we trust? Different sides have different arguments, and many of them are colorable; and yet it seems awfully hard to adjudicate. Now imagine this situation, with the following differences: (a) it’s not just Michigan and Florida; the whole political system is up for grabs; (b) for that reason, there is nothing like the DNC rules to appeal to, or to base your arguments on; (c) if your side loses, you and those you love and your entire community might be killed; (d) the people on the other side are people you hate and distrust not the way people hate and distrust those who have pulled the odd unfair political trick or said something that seems way out of line, but the way people hate and distrust those who have killed their friends and families. Or, in brief: the stakes are life and death, not just for distant people but for you; there are no rules; and anything goes.

Fixing problems like these is orders of magnitude more difficult than anything we did in the first Gulf War. And no amount of purely military skill or power will do the trick.

In a sane world, we could count on people with high policy-making positions to know these things, and to bear them in mind. Apparently, we don’t live in a sane world. We live in a world in which Danielle Pletka, “vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute”, can describe mistakes she made before the Iraq war as follows:

“Looking back, I felt secure in the knowledge that all who yearn for freedom, once free, would use it well. I was wrong. There is no freedom gene, no inner guide that understands the virtues of civil society, of secret ballots, of political parties.”
The appropriate next sentence would be: Of course, the fact that I thought there was a freedom gene means that I am a complete idiot, so having confessed this in the New York Times, I plan to retire to a life of small good works, carefully chosen so that my complete ignorance of human affairs and my staggering lack of judgment will henceforth be unable to do anyone serious damage. Alas, Ms. Pletka does not seem to have drawn the appropriate conclusion.

Having been completely let down by our government, by many policy analysts, and by a lot of people in the media, we have to remember these things ourselves. War sucks. It is horrendously destructive to everyone it touches. It can shatter entire societies. Sometimes it’s necessary, just as sometimes it’s necessary to amputate all your limbs, but that doesn’t make it any less awful. It should never be undertaken lightly — and it was certainly advocated lightly by a lot of conservatives. (Ledeen Doctrine, anyone?)

There should never be a rush to war, any more than there should be a rush to an outbreak of plague, or having your city hit by an asteroid, or any other utter catastrophe. Any time people seem to be rushing to war, that is a time to stop short, catch your breath, and think things through as carefully as you possibly can. Because if people are rushing to war, they have probably gone collectively insane, and it is imperative not to join them.

If the case for war is not clear, it is probably wrong. (For instance: “Though as a realist, I felt queasy about the “democratic peace theory” behind the war (”only despots make war, while democracies are inherently pacific”), I hesitantly thought, Why not? Maybe the fall of this horrifying regime would serve as an example to all the other despotisms in the neighborhood.” — “Why not?” is never, ever a good enough reason for a war.) If the case for war rests on magical thinking, it is certainly wrong. And if it relies on the idea that a country can be reconstructed essentially from scratch without enormous effort and commitment and skill and luck, then it rests on magical thinking.

If any good can come of this war, it would be that we remember these things.

***

I can’t write this without quoting Richard Cohen again:

“I owe it to Tony Judt for giving me the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade, who, wrongheaded though he might have been, neatly sums it all up for me: “You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.”"
Wouldn’t it be nice to think so?

Richard Cohen: you were wrong to be wrong, and wrong yet again for choosing a self-gratifying fantasy over an honest acknowledgement of that fact. The idea that there is anything noble about wrongly advocating war, or that when you feel a weakening in your resolve to send good men and women to their death, the right response is to “(steady) myself by downing belts of inane criticism”, is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. The heroes are the men and women, Iraqis and American, who have died*, in part, because of fantasies like these.”

For my column this week, I chose to rip into Bush’s speech on how brilliantly he’s leading us to victory, and McCain’s enthusiasm for keeping the war going. So my backup column idea—things we’ve learned from the war—is going here. Which is good, actually, because I have more space, though I’ll still be breaking it up into parts.

The first thing we’ve learned: Boots on the ground matter.

To occupy and pacify a foreign country takes manpower—unfortunately, a lot more than we were willing to commit at the start of this venture (though I’ve heard it argued that given Iraq’s underlying instabilities, we still might not have been able to pull it off). So one question our military planners need to consider is where we’re going to find the men for the future.

The last time this subject came up, one conservative informed me that he didn’t see much chance of another occupation any time soon (this was well before Bush had put Iran on his hit list, or I imagine I’d have gotten a different response). The trouble is, that’s not something we can predict: Did anyone foresee America’s first war of the 21st century would be with Afghanistan?

Much as I oppose the Iraq war, I do believe taking out the Taliban was justified (though Bush’s decision to pull out and attack Saddam has allowed the Taliban to resurrect since). It may not be the last time we need to occupy a foreign country, and while I’d prefer that be a last resort, it’s an option that should be on the table. So how do we maintain an army big enough to occupy a country without breaking under the burden as we seem to be doing in Iraq?

Recruit more people? Extremely expensive, not just in what it takes to convince people to sign up, but in the potential costs of benefits if they stay in.

Use mercenaries—er, private contractors? Also expensive, though I’ve been told the higher rate of pay for Blackwater agents is balanced out in the long-term by our government not having to shell out for benefits, and we simply don’t have enough control over them. If we’re fighting a war, the people in the field need to be directly answerable to their superiors, not sheltered by the legal maze that seems to surround the security contractors and protect them from liability.

Can we increase the size of the reserves, so we have the manpower ready when we need it? Military veteran/writer Phillip Carter (of the excellent site Intel Dump has argued that while it seems logical, it won’t work: It would require massive changes in the way the military equips its reserves, and probably higher pay, enlistment bonuses, etc.—and those run into the problem that the full-time Army is supposed to receive a better deal than one-weekend-a-month reservists (note: I have no first-hand experience, so if I’m misreading Carter’s depiction of the reserves—in the pro-draft article mentioned below—feel free to point it out).

Revive the draft? I’m strongly opposed to this myself, but Carter, in a Washington Monthly article makes a good case. I’m still opposed, but I have enough respect for his analysis that it deserves mentioning.

The current approach—prolonging deployments, the use of stop/loss—isn’t sustainable, and I think it’s also immoral and unfair to the troops, the equivalent of a draft but falling on people who’ve voluntarily committed themselves to the service.

So what’s the best solution? Any suggestions?

Iraq-war supporter Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute on the next president’s Iraq policy: “No one would be so stupid to come into office, see what the situation is, and then do the wrong thing.”

Like say, responding to an attack on a terrorist group by invading a country that had nothing to do with the terrorists?

Or a pundit who continues to champion the occupation of Iraq long after it’s failed?

Of course, in the eyes of war supporters, the situation ALWAYS requires us to stay in Iraq: Either everything is improving so much, we need to allow a few months for it to work out or everything went wrong but we have a new strategy so we need to allow a few months to fix things. Anything so long as the balls stay in the air, and the troops stay out in the Middle East. The only “wrong” decision is the sane one, the one most Americans support: A gradual withdrawl.

From John McCain adviser Max Boot: “If we manage to stabilize the situation in Iraq and manage to get casualties close to zero, I don’t think the idea of having troops there is terribly controversial.”

Wow, who would have thought it? Of course, that’s like saying “If we could make people immune to all known diseases and give them the power to heal all their injuries, I don’t think people going without health insurance will still be an issue.”

Remember the huge 600,000 collection of Iraqi documents gathered after the war? The ones some right-wingers predicted would vindicate Bush’s decision to invade by showing the al-Qaida/Saddam link?

The Pentagon concludes there was no such link (as reported this week by the McClatchy Newspapers). None. Whatsoever. Saddam supported some Middle Eastern terrorists (which isn’t news, of course), but not al-Qaida (and one of the groups, the Iranian terrorists in exile MKE, were supported by the USA as well).

According to one blogger–the McClatchy article doesn’t say so–there’s nothing that indicates Saddam ever tried to have the elder Bush assassinated either.

Of course, it will be no surprise to most of America that there is no Saddam/al-Qaida link, just as most Americans probably know that “al-Qaida in Iraq” has nothing to do with al-Qaida, contrary to John McCain’s recent statements.

To the minority that still supports Bush’s war, on the other hand, any statements that Saddam wasn’t hand in glove with al-Qaida and didn’t have a vast stockpile of superweapons now hidden in Syria (or wherever) is just part of the liberal media coverup.

So if everyone either knows what I just said or refuses to believe it, was there any point to posting it?

But this quote in an article in this weekend’s Daily News really offended me. An unnamed Defense Department official, objecting to Sen. Jim Webb’s bill to boost veteran’s educational benefits, asked “Why would anybody stay for another deployment when they can go out on a four-year free ride?”

It’s fair to debate or disagree about the level of benefits veterans receive, but “free ride?” I think military veterans have pretty much paid for what they receive.

No wonder this guy wanted stay anonymous.