Secrets of Failure

I wasted an hour or two this morning listening to the Sunday AM talk. An array of politicians and generals seem (finally!) to have absorbed the lesson that things are going very badly. All, though, and especially the military guys, keep making the same idiotic mistake: thinking that some kind of "standing up" an Iraqi army is a solution, as if some amount of training and equipment is suddenly going to make these soldiers loyal to a government that doesn't really even exist. We don't even have a puppet government there, merely a figurehead, and a collection of interests pursuing their own mutually hostile agendas. Oddly enough, the two who came closest to understanding this were two of the right-wing crackheads who got us into this mess (George Will and Bill Kristol).

Nobody involved seems to have a clue as to what makes for a stable state, especially a stable state in a land bitterly divided. Let me just mention a few basics: a) a monopoly on the use of force, b) Unifying principles, c) A mutual bargain between the government and the citizenry, a quid pro quo, d) Clear lines of authority.

The US understood this in Germany and Japan after WW II, but failed miserably in this regard in Vietnam and Iraq.

The stupidity of Bush and Cheney is the American peoples fault. The ignorance of American Generals is an institutional fault. West Point, and the other service academies and schools, need to start serving up some history on the successful occupations of WW II and the catastrophic failures of Iraq and Vietnam.