Two absolutely must-read columns were published in Sunday’s Washington Post Outlook section.

The lead essay (“What’s an Iraqi Life Worth?“) by Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, notes that the media attention on recent atrocities in Iraq misses a far more common, but in some ways more disturbing, problem: the accidental killing of civilians. These acts are not perpetrated by soldiers and Marines running amok. They are the result of simple miscalculation, error, the so-called fog of war.

In his book, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, Bacevich dwells on the idea of defense transformation. One of the champions of this idea, Albert Wohlstetter, wanted to make the use of military force more palatable to policymakers and the public at large, but he recognized that people were understandably troubled by the killing of innocents. Precision guided weapons supposedly provided the answer, of war that could be made perfect and clean, targeted to the point where civilian casualties could be reduced or even eliminated.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, one of the leading advocates of the Iraq war, credited his mentor Wohlstetter with making it possible. This was “Albert’s vision of future wars”, Perle said in May 2003, “That it was won so quickly and decisively, with so few casualties and so little damage, was in fact an implementation of his strategy and his vision.”

Bacevich, who graduated from West Point and retired from the Army at the rank of colonel, is correctly skeptical of such fantastic notions. He knows that there will always be mistakes in war. The misplaced artillery round. The precision guided bomb that goes off-course, or that was incorrectly targeted. The car speeding toward a checkpoint that is filled not with murderous terrorists, but rather with a family desperate to return to their home before curfew, or to the hospital to deliver a new baby. What are the soldiers who are manning the checkpoint supposed to do? Assume the best, hold their fire, and risk being killed? Assume the worst, open fire, and risk killing innocents? Our men and women in uniform are placed in a position where they are forced to make dozens of life and death decisions every day. Most, by dint of training, sound judgement, courage and luck, choose wisely. But they cannot be expected to be perfect.

(For more on Bacevich’s fine book, you can read my review published in the Summer 2005 issue of The National Interest, or watch an event hosted at Cato last year, with the author, and commentator James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly.)

For all of the focus on what Americans have spent in blood and treasure in Iraq, the costs endured by the Iraqi people have largely escaped scrutiny. We don’t even have reliable figures on the number of Iraqi civilians that have been killed since the war began in March 2003.

But the advocates for war with Iraq wanted it that way. They were openly disdainful of attempts to quantify the costs of war to the United States. They refused to even contemplate the costs for the people of Iraq. They could not credibly claim to be providing a great good if tens of thousands of Iraqis would likely die in the process. And yet certainly that many have died. The president in December 2005 guessed that 30,000 civilians had been killed. And the killings continue, with no end in sight.

Which leads to the other must-read, Fred Kaplan’s War Stories column (“Fighting Insurgents, By the Book“). Kaplan focuses on the Army’s new field manual for counterinsurgency, written by two highly respected officers, Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus and retired Lt. Col. Conrad C. Crane. The manual documents the countless pitfalls of counterinsurgency, the dos and don’ts. There are useful historical parallels, not just to the United States in Vietnam, but also to Napoleon in Spain. Of the need for cultural awareness and understanding. Excessive force is usually counterproductive. A defection is better than a surrender, a surrender better than a capture, a capture is better than a kill. The broader themes that run through the manual are also important:

these kinds of wars are “protracted by nature.” They require “firm political will and extreme patience,” “considerable expenditure of time and resources,” and a large deployment of troops ready to greet “hand shakes or hand grenades” without mistaking one for the other.

 

The field manual, and the debate surrounding its (not yet public) findings, forces to the surface the extremely difficult questions that must be answered by all political leaders, Democrat or Republican, who would take the nation to war. Kaplan expertly identifies the two most salient questions: 1) Can American armed forces maintain such exacting standards over a long, hazy conflict?; and 2) Can Americans maintain a long-term commitment to civil or insurgent wars at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and perhaps tens of thousands of lives?

Kaplan doesn’t answer, but he notes considerable ground for skepticism. One consultant on the field manual project, who spoke to Kaplan on condition of anonymity, guessed that if the experts had been asked these two questions, they likely would have “put in some caveat like ’If the nation and its leaders are not prepared for the long, hard fight that counterinsurgency entails, they should not begin it in the first place.’”

Seems like a pretty important caveat to me. I close with this. In a study published by the Army War College in December 2005, David C. Hendrickson and Robert W. Tucker survey the criticisms of the conduct of the Iraq war, particularly the by-now familiar charge that the planning for the post-war period was hopelessly deficient. (For links to the paper, along with additional commentary, visit The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.)

Hendrickson and Tucker conclude:

Though the record of Iraq war planning [deserves scrutiny] critics also have neglected the larger lesson that there are certain limits to what military power can accomplish. For certain purposes, like the creation of a liberal democratic society that will be a model for others, military power is a blunt instrument, destined by its very nature to give rise to unintended and unwelcome consequences. Rather than “do it better next time,” a better lesson is “don’t do it at all.”

I agree.

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