The real test of statesmanship – no matter how unpopular the recognition of needed action may be among the blinkered paragons of contemporary conventional wisdom – is to note and act on the problems before they overwhelm the state.
Here's a recitation of some strongly held but ill-founded beliefs, part of the core of a national mythology:
Our equipment is the most sophisticated and effective in the world. We easily whipped one of the largest armies in the Middle East, not once but twice, and we have now clearly mastered a once difficult and ugly situation in Iraq. Success in Afghanistan will not be far away, once we devote the proper resources there. Those who take comfort in the last three sentences are the people who need to read and consider the contents of this book the most.
The Pentagon's military leadership comes in for harsh criticism and is lambasted severely for laying the blame at the feet of the Cheney Administration after the fact from the "comfort of a retirement pension."
At the start of the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon’s senior military leadership failed to warn the nation’s civilian leaders of the tremendously difficult mission they were being asked to perform. Indeed, most of the military hierarchy did not even comprehend the difficulties of those missions and misperceived that the key issue was the number of military personnel sent to invade and then occupy an alien land in the Middle East. And then, many of them publicly complained that the civilian leadership had made a mess of things, saying so from the comfort of a retirement pension.
The highest level of condemnation targets the national security strategy pursued by leading democratic and republican politicians and raises the question of the competence of these leaders to understand and implement a national security strategy.
Perhaps most damning of all, America has permitted itself, and most leaders from both political parties have aggressively pursued, a national security strategy that has torn us apart domestically, isolated us from our allies, made us an object of disrespect in the eyes of those uncommitted to our cause and caused our enemies to find motivation for greater action on their own part. In fact, it is not even clear whether our national leadership understands what an effective national security strategy is, much less how to put one together and exercise it effectively.
Those who would counter such criticisms invoking the glorious memories of Gulf Wars I and II are quickly disabused of those illusions.
And what of the great victories in the Persian Gulf, the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait and the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein’s hostile regime? Don’t those U.S. operations prove our armed forces’ historic superiority? America did quickly
beat Iraq’s armed forces in 1991, and in the early phases of the 2003 invasion, but those victories were both incomplete and against forces best characterized as grossly incompetent – perhaps even the “most incompetent in the world.”1 Against the best of Saddam Hussein’s forces, the so-called Republican Guard, America’s military commanders in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 failed to capture or destroy the Guard as the single prop to Saddam’s regime that enabled him to survive the war. In 2003, the Army’s most senior commanders again made fundamental tactical, operational and strategic errors, and in one situation virtually panicked when faced with an enemy that was virtually immobilized by its own incompetence.2
The architects of the current war in Iraq slickly proclaim victory in sight thanks to the success of the “surge” there. Politically motivated to their very core, they studiously ignore the internal dynamics in Iraq and the region that have been inestimably more powerful in lowering the violence there. Blind as the proverbial bat, they and even opponents to the Iraq misadventure now proclaim that more of the same in Afghanistan will rescue the collapsing situation there. As Pentagon wags used to remark inside the building, “it’s data-free analysis and analysis-free decisions” that are driving U.S. policy.
