#[event: counterinsurgency part II] | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mariacallous · 2 years ago

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“War is a stern teacher,” Thucydides wrote nearly 2,500 years ago. Since then, great nations have often sought to learn lessons from the wars they waged, especially bad or stupid wars. But the same can’t really be said of the United States, which invaded Iraq 20 years ago as of Sunday. (March 19, 2003, marked the start of the “shock and awe” air war.)

Considering its long-term effects, the Iraq invasion amounted to one of the most consequential strategic misdirections in U.S. history. Yet there has been very little discussion about why that is—and why what happened two decades ago is not a history lesson at all but rather part of an ongoing class in current events.

The hubris and excess of the Iraq invasion—a later iteration of the “reckless audacity” that Thucydides, the Greek historian, ascribed to the warmongering Greeks in the Peloponnesian War—are still with us today, shaping our times. The aftereffects of Iraq dramatically reduced the position of the United States in the Middle East, most recently opening the way to China’s brokering of Iran-Saudi Arabia rapprochement. The unnecessary diversion into Iraq—and the drain on U.S. resources and attention that resulted from it—set the stage for Washington’s 20-year failure in Afghanistan, which left U.S. President Joe Biden humiliated when he precipitously withdrew all U.S. troops, declaring in August 2021 that he was putting an end to U.S. efforts “to remake other countries.”

The Afghanistan catastrophe in turn projected an image of panicky weakness from which Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have drawn false encouragement by invading Ukraine. (In speeches, Putin has also invoked the Iraq invasion to justify his own.) The self-created disaster of Iraq exposed U.S. military weakness, teaching the rest of the world how to outmaneuver and fight what was once considered an unassailable superpower. It arguably transformed American politics by helping to discredit the political establishment in Washington and open the way for former U.S. President Donald Trump and his “America First” neo-isolationism. Another little-noted domestic effect of the twin wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was that they dramatically worsened America’s opioid crisis, as a poorly prepared Department of Veteran Affairs chronically overprescribed fentanyl and other drugs to wounded and traumatized service members.

So, did any good come out of the Iraq War—a worthwhile lesson or two? Yes, but they’re not terribly encouraging. Indeed, a U.S. Army study found that “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” in the war.

Certainly, at least, Iraq is no longer ruled by anti-American tyrant Saddam Hussein. Instead, it is loosely governed by a squabbling collection of corrupt politicians who would likely be anti-American except that if they were, they’d be overthrown (either by Iran or the Islamic State) were it not for the roughly 2,500 U.S. troops who remain there.

Some military experts also believe that the U.S. military learned valuable lessons about the serious limitations of counterinsurgency operations. Even if the original invasion was a mistake, the United States managed to defeat both the Iraqi insurgency and the Islamic State occupation that followed. Still, those were hardly models of success or future strategy, notes C. Anthony Pfaff, a retired Army colonel who teaches at the Army War College. “What I don’t see is turning those operational successes into strategic ones,” he said.

Ironically, the most important lesson to be learned from the initial success of both the Iraqi insurgency and the triumph of the Taliban is how effective insurgencies can be against invading powers, like the French and Norwegians during World War II. “But we don’t like to talk about that too much because then we would be the Nazis,” said David Kilcullen, author of the 2020 book The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West.

Above all, combined with the United States’ earlier experience of losing in Vietnam, the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan proved beyond any remaining doubt that no amount of money and strength by a superpower will change the outcome on the ground without a legitimate government in place. And Washington has found itself unable to implement that in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

Even that lesson took a long time to learn, said Andrew Wiest, co-director of the Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Southern Mississippi. Wiest argues that for too long, the United States repeated the same mistakes in Afghanistan—open-ended support to an unsustainable government—that it did in Vietnam. Moreover, “the diversion to Iraq greatly impacted and perhaps even doomed the war in Afghanistan,” he told me in an email. This, Wiest wrote, “has not been debated enough.”

The question is whether any of these lessons will stick since the war is rarely discussed. Even now, there is no serious public debate about what went wrong. This is hardly surprising considering that, starting with Biden, many of the same officials and pundits who supported the invasion are still running things in government and the media. (This includes not only leading Republicans and conservatives but also leading Democrats, such as John Kerry, who is now Biden’s climate envoy.)

Amazingly, even the administration of George W. Bush, which launched the Iraq War, never gave “systemic thought to the fundamental challenge” of terrorism after 9/11, University of Virginia historian Melvyn Leffler writes in a new history, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq. As then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a memo that was leaked in October 2003, “we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror.”

No reliable “metrics” were ever found in the subsequent two decades. “We had all sorts of metrics and were constantly looking for more,” said Pfaff, who served in Army intelligence during the war, but “we could never figure out how to connect those metrics to strategic results.” Neither was any reason ever given for the Iraq invasion other than the administration felt an urgent need to reassert American power after the trauma of 9/11. After it turned out that fears of Saddam’s links to al Qaeda and his supposed cache of weapons of mass destruction were unfounded, the Bush administration pursued a vague, ill-thought-out plan of asserting American power and values in the region. That backfired too; by becoming an occupying power in the heart of the Arab world—often a brutal one, as the torture at Abu Ghraib and other prisons showed—Washington only touched off new waves of terrorism.

“Bush and his advisers never quite grasped that the anti-Americanism coursing through the Islamic world was not a result of Arabs hating American values but a consequence of their resentment of American deeds—Washington’s support of repressive regimes, its embrace of Israel, its sanctions policy in Iraq, its military presences in Muslims’ Holy Land (Saudi Arabia), its quest for oil, and its hegemonic role in their neighborhood,” Leffler writes.

The Iraq invasion “certainly takes the prize for lack of preparation. Yet what preparation there was sucked the air out of the Afghan mission from its beginning,” said James Dobbins, Bush’s former Afghanistan envoy. Harold Koh, a former senior official in the Obama administration, calls this the “original sin” of the war on terrorism after 9/11. “If we hadn’t invaded Iraq—and had we used the resources elsewhere and correctly assessed the situation initially—a lot of this would not have happened,” he told me on the 15th anniversary of 9/11.

Kilcullen said another problem is that because so many senior government and military officials signed onto the invasion, there was very little or no accountability afterward. He contrasts this with how other great powers, going back to ancient Rome and the Battle of Cannae, learned from their mistakes. “But that only works if you recognize you’ve been defeated,” Kilcullen said. “One thing we don’t do is punish generals for losing wars.”

Bit by bit, some of the more fervent supporters of the war are coming forward to concede how wrong they were. Among them is Washington Post columnist Max Boot, who once fiercely criticized any dissenters from the plan to invade. “I am a neocon no more,” Boot writes this month in Foreign Affairs, saying, “I now cringe when I read some of the articles I wrote at the time. … In hindsight, that was dangerous naiveté born out of a combination of post-Cold War hubris and post-9/11 alarm.”

Boot—who, as op-ed editor for the Wall Street Journal, published a prescient article by Brent Scowcroft, former national security advisor to former U.S. President George H.W. Bush, that warned of the coming disaster in Iraq—writes that he “discounted such warnings because I was dazzled by the power of the U.S. military after its victories in the Gulf War and the invasion of Afghanistan—and dazzled also by the arguments of neoconservative scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami that Iraq offered fertile soil for democracy. In hindsight, I am amazed and appalled that I fell prey to these mass delusions.” Boot also laments the fact that “many of my erstwhile ideological allies have not reached the same conclusions about the folly of regime change.”

Even so, Boot and others tend to ignore or play down the impact that Iraq had on the United States’ failed campaign in Afghanistan. Will Iraq turn out to be America’s Cannae—a folly from which it can still recover, as Rome eventually did when it destroyed Carthage? Or will the disaster of Iraq—and the so-called forever war that came out of it—turn out to be more like a modern-day equivalent of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, where the northern expansion of the Roman Empire was stopped for good at the Rhine by Germanic tribes in 9 A.D.? In other words, the Iraq adventure could prove to mark a decisive endpoint in the expansion of American influence in the Middle East.

Perhaps the best analogy from history, if there is one, is what happened when Roman Emperor Trajan mounted a full-scale invasion in 116 A.D. against the Parthian Empire in what is now Iraq, said Edward Watts, a historian at the University of California, San Diego, and author of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny. Four Roman armies managed to capture Ctesiphon (the Parthian and Persian capital on the outskirts of modern Baghdad), but faced with an insurgency, the Romans couldn’t hold the region and Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, pulled out.

“The lesson Rome learned was that it lacked the capacity to absorb the lands in Mesopotamia. That frontier remained a source of tension, with wars erupting with some regularity between Rome and the Parthians and, later, the Persian Empire for the next 500 years,” Watts said. “In a sense, Roman leaders recognized what George H.W. Bush did in 1990. It was—and is—much easier to invade Mesopotamia successfully than it is to hold it or establish a government there on your terms.”

This too has uncomfortable parallels to America’s late experiences in Vietnam and Iraq—especially in the arrogance and fecklessness of Rumsfeld, who was almost Romanesque in his hauteur. Determined to invade Iraq with a minimum number of troops because he believed the Afghan campaign against the Taliban was so easy that it hardly qualified as a war, Rumsfeld embarked on a series of reckless misuses of America’s military. Not only did he fail to follow up on the pursuit of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants at Tora Bora, Afghanistan, which could have ended the entire war against the terrorist group quickly, but he also decided that year to minimize stability operations and confine peacekeeping to Kabul, opening the way for the return of the Taliban. At the same time—while in denial about the Taliban’s growing strength—Rumsfeld turned his attention to making war on Iraq without an occupation plan. Having gone into Iraq, he then remained in denial of the growing insurgency there, which his policies did much to incite when he disbanded the Iraqi army and then treated its castoffs and many other ordinary Iraqi insurgents as terrorists or al Qaeda sympathizers. And as the consequences of Rumsfeld’s inattention to Afghanistan began to emerge in the mid-2000s, he continued to pretend that the country was stable, giving speeches saying how well Afghanistan was doing under America’s “modest footprint.”

If there is any enduring lesson from the Iraq debacle, it may be that—as Biden indicated after pulling out of Afghanistan in 2021—the U.S. military will no longer be at the cutting edge of American influence abroad.

“As we turn the page on the foreign policy that has guided our nation the last two decades, we’ve got to learn from our mistakes,” Biden said. U.S. influence will no longer come “through endless military deployments but through diplomacy, economic tools, and rallying the rest of the world for support.”

Perhaps. But the question going forward is whether America’s national security intelligentsia will ever fully grapple with the end of the United States’ total military dominance, the so-called smart bomb era that began with swift victory in the first Gulf War—especially since the return of industrialized warfare in Ukraine means a whole new rethinking is necessary. Without fully learning the lessons of the last few decades, it is doubtful that Washington will ever understand the lessons that lie ahead.

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queernuck · 5 years ago

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So do you see any cognitive dissonance with worrying about internet "fascists" reblogging a post, while promoting an instrument of torture employed by the Cheka? That "cool ass knuckleduster" was likely used to beat and bludgeon innocent people marked for death by the Bolsheviks.

oh dont worry, it wasnt internet “fascists” in a sense where im talking about a conservative military historian or, say, someone i just dont get along with. i mean an honest-to-goodness fascist, i mean someone genuinely invested in the growth and spread of fascist ideology, who believes in the kind of ideology that leads to neoliberalism extending into fascism (as it does in the current structure of neoliberal hegemony, the exact kind of ideals that saw Allende deposed in favor of Pinochet, that sees Neo-Confederate police chiefs working with alphabet agencies) but has such an overflowing death drive, has such a libidinal investment in the emergence of fascism that they are unable to even keep themselves contained to the vulgarities of contemporary conservatism with its worrying about neomarxists and so on, when contemporary discourses give them as much of a fascist vocabulary as ever before

one could say that this is as good of a time as ever to look at juxtaposition, irony, and the examination of historical art-objects (paintings, films, architecture, music, and so on) as part of critique, discussing what counts as rebellious and what counts as hegemonic, and for that matter the way in which an empty condemnation of the figure of the “tankie” is something that far too many land on in an attempt at critique, an empty one at that.

Brutalist architecture, often associated with Soviet and post-Soviet governments despite its prevalence in the West and other spheres of influence, is a vastly misunderstood style of architectural development which provides numerous means of “reading” a building in the postmodern sense, an exercise which is often rejected by contemporary development as useless in favor of incredibly bland duo-postmodern architecture, the reactionary turn in architecture that various forms of gentrification have driven, the impetus to put a kind of apparent-scientific and anti-artistic touch onto architecture on college campuses, of corporate headquarters, the vaporwaveization of the architectural field into an empty exercise in signification and resignification through the writing of various corporate creeds on the very buildings within which these actions are planned. This misunderstanding, an inability to read the potentiality of the building as brutalist text, one to be overgrown with ivy and which forces certain sorts of engagement by those within, is one fundamental to contemporaneous thought, the post-postmodern, the post-socialist turn seen in NATO geopolitics as ideology.

I enjoy posting pictures of various militaries, of various armed forces, that are currently engaged in that NATO-dictated order of battle, be it American, British, French, or some other current-or-foreign colonial-unto-neocolonial force. I have some pictures ready to go of Soviet forces in Afghanistan, and have plenty of pictures like those of unified forces from Bosnia and Herzegovina deployed to Afghanistan that work as part of looking at exactly what war and moreover policing, the militarization of police over the course of the past half-century, and the police-like quality of military occupation, the transition of American forces into a hybrid of elite soldiers and stereotypical donut-eating cops before they come home and join police forces themselves, an interest in the aesthetics of these mundane, accepted brutalities as carried out specifically because of how they represent hegemony, the realization and enacting thereof, the way in which hegemony is developed and defended in a contemporary sense, as part of questioning the exact same kind of ideologies that build those new corporate monuments, apartment blocs that are only striking in how they displace already-existing expression, the way in which areas like Brighton Beach have all kinds of uneven development, an interest in exactly what kinds of ideological maneuvers are seen in how the city becomes a zone of war for neoliberal capital, how forces maneuver in ways influenced by the IDF’s readings of Deleuze and the 75th Ranger Regiment and Delta Force’s readings of their own white supremacist missions from Somalia to Syria, and the way in which technology, techniques of interaction and the very means of recognizing humanity are often dragged through this space: we would be remiss without mentioning how “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” became a referendum on gay personhood almost by accident it seemed, despite coming so soon after the enormous and principled antiwar movement whose common refrain seemed to be “DON’T JOIN, DON’T GO!”, who seemed to understand that there was not something “worth” joining for, that this had been true all throughout the wars of the 90s, back into Kosovo, the non-events of the Gulf War (a kind of television improvisation that set the field for discourses of Modern Warfare)

Being able to look at, examine, meet these critiques, to see objects that represent a kind of knowing self-reference like NKVD agents who received commemorative knuckledusters (ten years after the revolution began, mind) that were more likely to see use as paperweights than as actual weapons, the kind of nakedness of the ideological seen there, the parting that occurs is, very much, something worth preserving, something worth interrogating just as design and its influence goes into the very concept of weapons design: what does it say, what does it imply that derivatives of the AR-15 have become so ubiquitous alongside various Kalashnikov-patterned weapons, even to the point where one sees militaries adopting AR-patterned rifles in 7.62x39? What does the rejection of the HK416, the 5.56x23, and the 300 BLACKOUT round alike by GIGN, instead adopting CZ BREN rifles in that very same calibre, the notorious 7.62x39 say about the state of terrorist assemblages today, where GIGN is concentrated on city-based operations and 7.62x39 is especially effective against vehicles, when vehicle-based attacks have become far more common in response to developing tactic and counter-tactics? What can we learn through study of this? That police, intelligence agents, state forces of various sorts, would find some kind of rejoicing in their own actions, would band together and see themselves as a force against an indeterminable Other is hardly new, and is seen plenty in the weird company the CIA enjoyed keeping during the 1960s as it played Gladiator in Italy while scoring acid on the West Coast, examining how and why and with what means wars are fought is part of studying the enemy, learning their tactics and identity, being able to develop from this a kind of reterritorialization in culture, fashion, in antifascism.

Even the US Military admits that, in looking at counterinsurgency, the work of Mao is some of the best when it comes to proscribing a program for guerrilla warfare, and it was former Maoists in Angola who became the favorite collaborators of the CIA. World War II is perhaps the best example of recapture tactics being used on a large scale: while the PPSH was a phenomenal weapon, Russian troops were by no means against using captured MP40s, and used them well to kill plenty of Nazis. Stocks of captured MP40s were important to Yugoslav Partisans, along with cheaply-manufactured Sten guns, the likes of which we are likely to see alongside clandestine Glocks and AR-15s and M11s in any kind of upcoming insurgency within the United States. Reading gun magazines is fucking grating, given the editorial slant of even issues devoted to AK variants (which remind one of the endless brutalities of the Soviet regime while failing to mention even a single misdeed by the US or any remotely related force, many of whom ran dedicated death squads with plenty of AKs in hand!)

When it comes to the DPRK, to Cuba, to the aesthetics and philosophy and anti-philosophy of Maoism, of Maoist struggle (including Maoists against the CCP and the aesthetics of the CCP and the PLA itself throughout history, including current developments in weapons technology) and furthermore the way in which one looks at countries such as say, Russia or China as counter-hegemonies to US Hegemony (that are rearticulated as hegemonic forces themselves, reminding one that hegemony is neither good, nor bad, but again not by necessity good even in reversal, as it implies a certain strategic power as laid out by Laclau and Mouffe) and of course the Orientalist concept of power and “despotism” as occasionally named in Deleuze and Guattari but the sort of Orientalist fetishization that one sees in complete, uncritical refusal of even a cursory glance at exactly what acts such as Chinese “counter-terrorism” entails or any attempt at analyzing Hong Kong coherently (coherent analysis of such a large movement built around a spontaneous series of events, acts of assembly as part of a movement developing and demonstrating over time, one claimed across the political spectrum in Western discourses that read it in relation to numerous neoliberal forces) one must engage in an analysis that critiques state power, the enforcement thereof, and the various means by which this develops through at least some kind of act of reterritorialization due to the near-inherent liberalism and eventual fascist recapture of posting such critique on capitalist spaces like any website of note

so, as a means of questioning, as a means of presenting an alternative to those wishing to engage, question, deny, argue, and interact with an object such as those knuckledusters that is not going to implicitly support not only a fascist order of power but a fascist who themselves posted the knuckledusters with “this machine kills comrades”, who rejoices in the very kind of bloodshed you stand so principled against? I have no qualms about that.

I am not against finding new weapons, I very much want to “find” many of the weapons I post pictures of in the hands of dead cops and treat them as they deserve to be treated. That BREN in 7.62x39 I mentioned earlier? I want one! I want a Zastava M76 in 8mm because that is such a strange example of how the AK Pattern was adopted by various socialist nations based on their own doctrines, and I sure as hell wanna rob someone who has a Tavor or Galil ACE because I am not gonna break BDS just for a cool rifle. Organizations like the EZLN and the NPA have no qualms about using captured weapons, and why should they? good rifles are good rifles. And looking at the aesthetics of war and hegemony in current contexts in order to juxtapose that with the cyberpunk futures we imagined and the post-cyberpunk Virtual Hyperreality we find ourselves in now, the infinite expanse of Silicon Valley to Hipster Runoff from Brooklyn now gentrifying Queens, learning the language of the enemy is important.

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networkingdefinition · 5 years ago

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Military Operations Quotes

Official Website: Military Operations Quotes

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• A military operation involves deception. Even though you are competent, appear to be incompetent. Though effective, appear to be ineffective. – Sun Tzu • Climate Change is a national security issue. We found that climate instability will lead to instability in geopolitics and impact American military operations around the world. People are saying they want to be perfectly convinced about climate science projections. But speaking as a soldier, we never have 100 percent certainty. If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield. – Gordon R. Sullivan • Dominicus Corea had a posthumous son, Lewis Corea who became the Dissawe of Uva. Sir Paul Peiris wrote that `With the disappearance of Dominicus Corea, came a short lull in military operations of which the Portuguese officials availed themselves to give free rein to that rapacity which so frequently disgraced their careers in the East’. Dominicus Corea was succeeded by his brother Simon, as Dissawe of the Sat Korale, Kotte and Sitawaka. – Dominicus Corea

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• I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taliban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat. My mother made me breakfast and I went off to school. I was afraid going to school because the Taliban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools. – Malala Yousafzai • I had an opportunity to express my views, yes. I agreed with the approach which we took, namely, to make a distinction between the loss of life of the Chinese pilot and our military operations outside territorial waters or territorial limits. – Henry A. Kissinger • If I had undertaken the practical direction of military operations, and anything went amiss, I feared that my conscience would torture me, as guilty of the fall of my country, as I had not been familiar with military tactics. – Lajos Kossuth • I’m just very wary that once you start military operations in any country, it’s very difficult to predict what the outcome is. – Abdallah II • In a military operation, the command and control elements are a legitimate target. – Stephen Hadley • It is hard as an American to support the failure of American military operations in Iraq. Such failure will bring with it the death and wounding of many American service members, and many more Iraqis. – Scott Ritter • It’s perfectly natural to desire more troops when engaged in a military operation facing serious obstacles, and the more troops you have, probably, the [lower the] risk of causalities. – Zbigniew Brzezinski • Look what happened with regard to our invasion into Afghanistan, how we apparently intentionally let bin Laden get away. That was done by the previous administration because they knew very well that if they would capture al Qaeda, there would be no justification for an invasion in Iraq. There’s no question that the leader of the military operations of the U.S. called back our military, called them back from going after the head of al Qaeda. – Maurice Hinchey • Military metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological “defenses”, and medicine is “aggressive” as in the language of most chemotherapies. – Susan Sontag • Military operations cannot be tidy or free of friction – particularly in a coalition whose contributing nations see the campaign through national prisms. – Mike Jackson • Odyssey Dawn? That’s not a military operation. That’s a Carnival Cruise ship. – Stephen Colbert • Oil is also essential for military operations. No other substance, no other raw material, is so vital for the prosecution of warfare, than petroleum. And the United States being the world’s only global power, is totally dependent on petroleum. – Michael Klare • OK, so $1 trillion is what it costs to run the federal government for one year. So this money’s going to run through September of 2016. Half of the trillion dollars goes to defense spending and the Pentagon. The other half goes to domestic spending – everything from prisons to parks. So there’s also about 74 billion in there that goes to the military operations that we have ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria. – Susan Davis • Our task was not to conduct a full-fledged military operation there [in Crimea], but it was to ensure people’s safety and security and a comfortable environment to express their will. We did that. But it would not have been possible without the Crimeans’ own strong resolution. – Vladimir Putin • Out of my desire to complete Iraq’s independence and to finish the withdrawal of the occupation forces from our holy lands, I am obliged to halt military operations of the honest Iraqi resistance until the withdrawal of the occupation forces is complete. – Muqtada al Sadr • So the important thing in a military operation is victory, not persistence. – Sun Tzu • The Air Force is pulling nine cargo aircraft from military operations to support President Obama’s stepped-up visits to campaign events. Good, now he can carry his entire ego with him on the trail. – Fred Thompson • The British were indeed very far superior to the Americans in every respect necessary to military operations, except the revivified courage and resolution, the result of sudden success after despair. – Mercy Otis Warren • The Defense Department’s plan to ban newspaper reporters from pool coverage of military operations is incredible. It reveals the administration to be out of touch with journalism, reality and the First Amendment. – Arthur Ochs Sulzberger • The Halifax area has long played a major role in Canada’s military operations, being the port of departure for convoys, naval task forces and army units over the past 100 years or so. – Willie Morris • The logistic requirements for a large, elaborate mission to Mars are no greater that those for a minor military operation extending over a limited theatre of war. – Wernher von Braun • The military operation in Lebanon was the most successful military operation in recent Israeli history. Many in Israel don’t recognise that. – Ehud Olmert • The reality of Canadian history is that we’ve been willing to do the important things the world demanded of us: fighting in World War II, in Korea, in the Balkans, where we were involved in offensive military operations, and in Afghanistan, where we have made disproportionate contributions. – Chris Alexander • The struggle to maintain peace is immeasurably more difficult than any military operation. – Anne O’Hare McCormick • There are markets extending from Mali, Indonesia, way outside the purview of any one government which operated under civil laws, so contracts weren’t, except on trust. So they have this free market ideology the moment they have markets operating outside the purview of the states, as prior to that markets had really mainly existed as a side effect of military operations. – David Graeber • There are three ways that men get what they want; by planning, by working, and by praying. Any great military operation takes careful planning, or thinking. Then you must have well-trained troops to carry it out: that’s working. But between the plan and the operation there is always an unknown. That unknown spells defeat or victory, success or failure. It is the reaction of the actors to the ordeal when it actually comes. Some people call that getting the breaks; I call it God. God has His part, or margin in everything, That’s where prayer comes in. – George S. Patton • There has never been a military operation remotely approaching the scale and the complexity of D-Day. It involved 176,000 troops, more than 12,000 airplanes, almost 10,000 ships, boats, landing craft, frigates, sloops, and other special combat vessels–all involved in a surprise attack on the heavily fortified north coast of France, to secure a beachhead in the heart of enemy-held territory so that the march to Germany and victory could begin. It was daring, risky, confusing, bloody, and ultimately glorious [p.25] – Tom Brokaw • There is a great inertia about all military operations of any size. But once this inertia has been overcome and underway they are almost as hard to arrest as to initiate. – Ernest Hemingway • Thus, though I have heard of successful military operations that were clumsy but swift, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays. – Sun Tzu • War on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering, law-enforcement operation. – John F. Kerry • We citizens don’t need to know every detail of every military operation in this new kind of war. Nor should the media tell us and hence our enemy. – David Hackworth • When you decide to get involved in a military operation in a place like Syria, you’ve got to be prepared, as we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, to become the government, and I’m not sure any country, either the United States or I don’t hear of anyone else, who’s willing to take on that responsibility. – Colin Powell • You know as well as I do that counterinsurgency is a very nuanced type of military operation. – John Abizaid • You must all be aware that modern war is not a mere matter of military operations. It involves the whole strength and all the resources of the nation. Not only soldiers, but also all citizens without exception, take part. – Chiang Kai-shek

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equitiesstocks · 5 years ago

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usnewsaggregator-blog · 7 years ago

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Amid dialogue of service and sacrifice, how one general remembered his fallen

New Post has been published on http://usnewsaggregator.com/amid-dialogue-of-service-and-sacrifice-how-one-general-remembered-his-fallen/

Amid dialogue of service and sacrifice, how one general remembered his fallen

The death of four American soldiers in Niger this month has prompted an important national dialogue about service and sacrifice.

I have seen that sacrifice up close for many years covering conflict around the world. For me, one of the best and most vivid examples of the respect that these heroes and their families deserve came in 2004.

The commanding general of the 1st Cavalry Division at the time, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, lost 168 soldiers under his command during that violent year in Iraq. It ripped his heart out.

As he prepared to fly back to Ft. Hood, Texas, for a memorial service honoring the fallen, he sat in his Baghdad headquarters reading through an inch-thick stack of index cards. Each card had the name of a soldier who was lost, along with the names of the surviving family members.

Chiarelli wept as he read the cards, memorizing the names on each one.

I wrote about this memory in my book, “The Long Road Home.”

“The thought of not recognizing a mother or a spouse or a child who’d lost a loved one sickened him. He thought of his own wife and the three children they had raised together. If my child had been killed, I would expect his commander to know me, and to know how my son or daughter had died, Chiarelli thought. If it were my child, I wouldn’t care much that there were 167 others. For me, there would be only one loss that really mattered.”

As the country continues to discuss the Oct. 4 events in Niger, I encourage us all to remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to protect the values the United States holds so dear, and those families who will forever live with the loss.

The complete epilogue, which recounts Chiarelli’s story, is below. I urge you to read it and watch the upcoming National Geographic Channel miniseries based on “The Long Road Home,” which begins Nov. 7.

DEEP INTO A LUKEWARM February night in 2005, Major General Peter Chiarelli sat behind the sagging piles of sandbags that fortified his Baghdad headquarters, staring at an inch-thick stack of index cards. The commander of the First Cavalry Division was only weeks away from the end of his year in Iraq, but the cards he was holding took him back to the beginning, to those first bloody days of April 2004.

Months earlier, Chiarelli had moved from the large tent where he’d lived and worked when he first arrived in Iraq; his new headquarters was inside a long row of buildings near the ornate Baghdad “water palaces” used by Saddam Hussein. The former Iraqi president, captured several months prior to the arrival of the First Cav, now sat alone in a prison cell within the same compound, surrounded by First Cavalry soldiers.

Chiarelli’s own office bore no markings of war. A huge mahogany desk and conference table, shipped to Iraq aboard a military cargo plane, dominated the room. Computers and phones lined the desk, along with a cupful of candy for visitors. An American flag hung on the wall, and a half-empty box of Chiarelli’s beloved cigars sat on a table underneath. It could have been the office of a patriotic executive in Cleveland. Only the fifty-four-year-old general himself, seated behind his desk long after midnight, provided clues that this was a combat zone. After a day in the field, a layer of dust covered Chiarelli’s desert fatigues; a 9mm pistol hung from his shoulder holster; mud filled the crevices of his knee-high tanker boots. And then there were the index cards he held before him.

Chiarelli had asked his aide to prepare the cards, and he’d begun to put in extra hours memorizing the information they held. But now he was struggling. Though it had been a wrenching year full of pain and loss and heartache, he now realized he was still not prepared for the emotional wallop these cards delivered.

Each bore the name of a soldier. These men and women had come to Iraq thinking they would be part of a reconstruction mission, and had been sent back home in flag-draped coffins. Typed beneath each name were a few words about how the soldier had died and what family members were left behind. The fallen soldiers were all husbands or wives, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters. Many had been killed by an enemy they probably never saw.

Generals don’t like to cry. But Chiarelli, a charismatic and physically imposing officer, had found himself crying often during his deployment. As he read the names of his fallen soldiers now, his eyes grew moist and his back stiffened. He had attended every memorial service in Iraq, save for one when his helicopter broke down and he couldn’t get there in time. He wept on each occasion; this night was no different.

The cards for the soldiers killed on that first night of battle were at the top of the stack. Not since Vietnam had the First Cavalry suffered so many casualties in a single day. Number one was the card for Sergeant Eddie Chen, the first soldier shot that night. Next came the cards for specialists Stephen Hiller, Ahmed Cason, Robert Arsiaga, and Israel Garza. There were cards, too, for Corporal Forest Jostes and Specialist Casey Sheehan, who died within a few hours of each other; and for Mike Mitchell from the tank division.

For Chiarelli, that Sunday night in April had been the most difficult of the war. The families back in the States had been devastated by the losses, especially because they came so soon after their loved ones had left home.

Chiarelli had been in constant touch with his wife, Beth, who had helped care for the families. Like his soldiers in Iraq, the spouses at Fort Hood bonded together in tragedy. But those painful first days for the families and the soldiers were followed by many more. Chiarelli’s First Cav soldiers had fought for eighty straight days to retake Sadr City. That fight was followed by another violent surge in August in Najaf, which brought on another sixty days of combat. And then there were the daily IEDs, the improvised explosive devices that killed more soldiers than anything else in Iraq.

The violence that began with the ambush of Lieutenant Shane Aguero’s platoon claimed the lives of 168 soldiers from the First Cavalry Division over the course of the yearlong deployment and left about 1,900 wounded. By historical standards, the casualty toll was not so high. During the seven years the First Cav was deployed in Vietnam, from 1965 to 1972, the division lost more than 5,000 soldiers, with more than 26,000 wounded. More than 19,000 American soldiers died during just six weeks of fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium in World War II. But for General Chiarelli, the eight U.S. soldiers who died in Sadr City on the night of April 4, 2004, carried momentous significance. He had spent thirty-one years in the army, and until that night no soldier under his command had been killed in combat.

Black Sunday, Chiarelli realized, had marked a turning point for the U.S. military in Iraq. It was the day the war took a horribly unanticipated turn, shifting from a peacekeeping mission into a full-fledged fight against an insurgency. Across the country, facing a new enemy, the United States soon found itself, again and again, in the same position as Aguero’s platoon in that Sadr City alley: ambushed, unprepared, bloodied, and alone. Chiarelli had brought his First Cavalry soldiers to Iraq with the expectation of a reconstruction and stabilization mission, one for which they would be welcomed by the Iraqi people. Instead, they were forced to fight a war to which their combat training did not apply. After Vietnam, the U.S. military had vowed never to wage a counterinsurgency war again—indeed had largely stopped preparing for the possibility. In the year since Chiarelli had arrived in Baghdad, however, he had learned what so many commanders before him learned, and always the hard way: The enemy has a vote.

Chiarelli hadn’t personally known any of the soldiers who died on April 4, though by the end of the year their names were ingrained on his consciousness. It would take some work to learn the stories of the other 160 soldiers he had lost that year as the insurgency took root.

Halfway through the stack, Chiarelli came across the name of Captain Dennis Pintor. Everyone had known Pintor. The 1998 West Point graduate was a superb leader and a gifted athlete. He had been a company commander under Colonel Robert Abrams, and Chiarelli had heard the excruciating details of Pintor’s death from Abrams himself, who had known Pintor since the young officer entered the army and had considered him a friend. Chiarelli recalled how Pintor’s death had brought a replay of some of the horror Abrams had experienced in the Eagle base aid station on April 4, the first time the brigade commander had seen any of his soldiers die.

On the October night in 2004 when a roadside bomb tore through Pintor’s Humvee, Abrams was sitting in his base camp less than a mile away. Abrams had become accustomed to the sounds of war, but this blast was so powerful it shook the thick concrete walls of his headquarters, and he immediately inquired about the blast.

“Sir, it’s bad,” the voice on the radio said. “It’s Dennis.”

Abrams paused. “Dennis?” he barked. “Dennis Pintor?” His eyes filled with such intensity and pain that it was impossible for others in the room to look away. Initially refusing to believe that his friend had been killed, Abrams decided he had to see for himself. Forcing himself to stay calm, he walked quickly to the base medical station where the soldiers had been taken. For the next two hours, inside that trauma center, Abrams saw images that reminded him of the horrors of Black Sunday. The soldier who’d been next to Pintor in the Humvee was lying in pieces. Dead. His legs—boots still on—and his severed arm had been placed next to his body. Another soldier lay nearby, moaning in pain; he would die a day later.

Then he saw what he’d come to see, what he’d dreaded seeing: Pintor’s lifeless remains, his body blown apart.

Dennis was gone.

Pintor’s company had been so devastated by the loss of the three soldiers that night that Chiarelli himself boarded a helicopter and flew down to visit them. Inside a makeshift chapel, the general sat down with eighty young soldiers and talked intimately with them, saying how important their work was, how proud he was of them. Months later, in the stillness of his office, Chiarelli took another look at Pintor’s card:

Survived by wife, Stacy, and four-year-old daughter, Rhea.

All the soldiers in Pintor’s battalion knew about little Rhea. The young captain had used his home video camera to tape a skit for a going-away party for a fellow officer. On the night of the party, Pintor rewound the tape too far, and instead of seeing soldiers hamming it up, the partygoers saw Pintor’s daughter happily collecting Easter eggs.

“There she is, ladies and gentlemen,” Pintor had said, beaming. “Rhea Pintor waving to her daddy!” For a moment, the soldiers watching the video were taken back to their own loved ones.

Chiarelli would have no trouble recalling Stacy and Rhea Pintor. He thought again about some of the others who’d been left behind. Stephen Hiller’s wife, Lesley, and their kids. Eddie Chen’s parents, who thought their son would be attending law school after his stint in the army. Casey Sheehan’s mother, Cindy, who’d become an outspoken antiwar protester in the months after her son’s death and a vocal critic of the First Cavalry Division that Chiarelli led. He didn’t judge her; he’d never lost a child, and he respected her right to grieve the way she wanted to grieve. He hoped to meet her at an upcoming memorial service at Fort Hood, to tell her that her son had died an honorable death, but he doubted she would come.

Chiarelli wanted to meet all the families, to know all the families. The thought of not recognizing a mother or a spouse or a child who’d lost a loved one sickened him. He thought of his own wife and the three children they had raised together. If my child had been killed, I would expect his commander to know me, and to know how my son or daughter had died, Chiarelli thought. If it were my child, I wouldn’t care much that there were 167 others. For me, there would be only one loss that really mattered.

ON APRIL 4, 2006, exactly two years after Black Sunday, Chiarelli stood on the parade ground at Fort Hood, under a clear blue sky, facing the families of his fallen soldiers and those who had come to honor them. The “Gold Star” families—those who had lost a soldier in Iraq—sat together on folding chairs arranged in neat military rows. It was on this parade ground that many had said goodbye to their departing soldiers for the last time, and it was here that the fortunate ones had welcomed them back home. Behind Chiarelli was a magnificent black granite monument, etched with the names of 168 First Cavalry soldiers who had died in Iraq. In the preceding year, Chiarelli had taken operational command of all U.S. forces in Iraq, but he had returned to Fort Hood this day to dedicate the monument.

The First Cavalry Division band played Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” Then it was Chiarelli’s turn to speak. None of us here today will forget the sacrifices of these Americans. Pride is not a powerful enough word to describe how I feel about each of them. We remember them, not only for who they were, but also for what they stood for. They were rooted in duty, love of country and “service to others. We pray that the families will find some measure of peace in knowing that their loved ones represent the very best this country has to offer, and that they lived and died as heroes. We hope their loved ones, the husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, children and friends, will find comfort in knowing we will never forget their sacrifice. I see their young faces in my mind’s eye every day of my life. That will never change.

Lieutenant General Chiarelli met with as many families as he could after the memorial ceremony. Hours later, the general, still thinking of the soldiers’ names on the black granite wall, kissed his wife goodbye, boarded a plane, and headed back to Baghdad.”

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