Northman's Fury

One of the biggest complaints that a lot of political bloggers have against the Mainstream Media, is that they report stories almost as if in a vacuum. They never dig into assertions made by spokespeople or give a proper context for a story. (What information they were supposed to dig up depends greatly on which side of the story the blogger happens to be on, but the complaint is the same across the spectrum.)

Take this story I came across yesterday about how the military's new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles are becoming a symbolic target now that they are being deployed to Iraq. Apparently it has something to do with the hype surrounding them, though the story says only about 225 are in Iraq at this point, so it may just be their rarity, or it may be that the insurgents know that large numbers of these vehicles are now in the pipeline and are refining their tactics to be ready for them, which would be my opinion.

Down at the bottom of the story I read this bit:

Brogan said the military and its contractors were working as hard as possible to get MRAPs to Iraq.

"We're going to get them there as quickly as we can," said Brogan, the head of Marine Corps Systems Command, which is in charge of procuring the vehicles for the military.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has made MRAPs the Pentagon's top procurement priority. In June, he said scores of Americans would die for every month of delay in getting MRAPs into the field.

Now that sounds really good, but you may wonder why this has become a priority now, four and a half years after the US invaded Iraq. If you didn't know better, you could assume these vehicles were some new design just recently developed to deal with the problem of roadside bombs in Iraq.

What's missing is context and history. In this case what's missing is the fact that the military commanders on the ground were asking for MRAPs as early as December 2003, and were well aware of them long before that, but it was only this summer that those in charge finally started to procure them.

"[S]cores of Americans would die for every month of delay in getting MRAPs into the field." Takes on an entirely different meaning now, doesn't it?

President George W Bush has warned a US withdrawal from Iraq could trigger the kind of upheaval seen in South East Asia after US forces quit Vietnam.

"The price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens," he told war veterans in Missouri.

Mr Bush said the Vietnam War had taught the need for US patience over Iraq.

So stick it out for another decade or two, I guess. I'm really curious where they're going to find the troops. More to the point, I give you Jim Henley:

The President is going to argue that after the US pulled out of Southeast Asia, millions of people died.

One more time. Millions of people died while we were there. A fair proportion of them were people we ourselves killed. In any reckoning of the costs of intervening and withdrawing from Indochina, those people count too. It’s a bizarre, narcissistic blind spot to imagine otherwise.

Which brings us to Iraq, per the President’s insistence. It is possible that if we leave, hundreds of thousands will die and millions be displaced. That has already happened under our government’s tender and expert care. There is no short-term prospect that it will stop happening. But I guess if you die while the US is around, you have the comfort of knowing we were trying.

As with so much else, this is just another way to keep the US staggering along in Iraq until Bush can pass the problem off to somebody, anybody, else, and hope they can pass the blame for the disaster off as well.

From FOXNews.com

Sens. Warner and Levin Travel to Iraq, Praise Surge Results

From McClatchy

Senators offer bleak assessment of Iraq after governor killed

The story from both articles is basically the same; while the "surge" is creating some military successes, there is no progress on the Iraqi political front and they saw little hope in its prospects. As I said about the upcoming September report, there will be enough points contained in it for both sides to latch onto to "prove" their side of the story. It's just that the side coming out of the White House and Fox News has to play down the really important points about the lack of political progress to make their case.

Victor David Hanson has an interesting article up arguing for a greater emphasis on the study of military history. I can't exactly recommend the article, because he sprinkles in all sorts of his regular ideological foolishness into the argument. This nugget in particular is just lovely:

The 2003 removal of Saddam refuted doom-and-gloom critics who predicted thousands of deaths and millions of refugees, just as the subsequent messy four-year reconstruction hasn't evolved as anticipated into a quiet, stable democracy-to say the least.

I get a picture of Hanson writing in Germany in 1945, "The swift conquest of France and crushing of several Russian armies in 1940-41 refuted those doom-and-gloom critics who predicted millions dead and the destruction of Germany, just as the subsequent messy attempts to establish a glorious thousand-year Reich over the last four years haven't evolved exactly as anticipated."

Anyway, I can't speak to the state of military history education in the US, but I do think that it is something people should learn a lot more about, if only because I think it is the general ignorance of such that allows people like Hanson to get away with their highly selective readings of it.

My recommendations are for two books not on Hanson's list. The first is Sun Tzu's "The Art of War"; short, philosophical, and ever contemporary despite it's being written 2,500 years ago, and Israeli historian Martin van Creveld's "The Transformation of War", which explores how warfare has changed and evolved over time, why the dominant form is no longer the state-on-state warfare the US military is trained for, and how assuming what worked in the past will work in the future is a good way to find yourself on the losing side.

Another Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan by a roadside bomb. It's the third such attack on Canadian troops in a week, though this was the first fatality. Going beyond that and looking at the fatality details for coalition troops as a whole, it appears that the roadside bomb is becoming an ever more popular way for the insurgents in Afghanistan to attack, no doubt learning from the example of what the Iraqis are doing to US forces there.

Such weapons are very difficult to deal with in a counterinsurgency situation. The strike without warning, and the people responsible for the attack are nowhere to be found afterwards. The frustration from that can lead to heavy-handed tactics when an enemy does appear, and such tactics alienate the people who are needed as an intelligence source to show you where the bombs are being planted. An ugly cycle.

As a side note, do you think Harper really should have linked the mission in Afghanistan with the complete disaster of the Dieppe raid?

UPDATE: That would be a no to the Dieppe/Afghan link.