Redstate

By Skanderbeg Posted in War — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

My, what a difference a year makes.

Do you remember? As 2007 dawned, there was nothing but wailing and hand-wringing on the matter of Iraq. The worst of the left cheered joyously for defeat, while even many on the right were going wobbly and looking for some only-modestly-bad way to make as un-messy an exit as possible. To add insult to injury, the Democrats had recaptured both houses of Congress and were itching to abandon the Iraqis and surrender; furthermore, some collection of over-the-hill has-beens, known as “The Iraq Study Group” had produced a bi-partisan blueprint for that surrender.

It was enough to remind one of the prophecies of Delphic Oracle to the Athenians in 480 B.C., after the Persians had forced their way past Thermopylae Pass and were moving south; as per Herodotus,

But all is ruined, for fire and the headlong God of War
Speeding in a Syrian chariot shall bring you low.

The “consensus” was that giving up was not a matter of if, but when – and under what detailed circumstances.

How could anyone talk about victory? Did anyone even consider the possibility of victory?

Read on.

Actually, at least one someone in fact did – on January 10, 2007, in this forum.

One year ago today, your humble correspondent posted a lengthy essay entitled, “Is Iraq This War’s Guadalcanal? (The Consequences of Victory).”

The opening flourish was:

When one is confronted with a difficult problem, it’s all-too-easy to begin looking at it through a microscope – and to thus forget about where it all fits into the bigger picture. It’s also easy to see the problem as being one of disaster prevention – and to concentrate on the consequences of failure.

But those are not the things from which triumphs are made. For example, in business a proper evaluation of dangers and risks is critical, but that alone will not do. One must always ask: Amidst those risks and dangers, what is the upside potential?

Maybe it’s time we reframed the Iraq problem. We’ve all discussed and debated the (potentially horrific) consequences of failure. But what is the upside potential? In other words, what might be the consequences of victory?

The primary opening arguments were two-fold. The first was that the “Iraq problem” had fallen into the hole of Washington navel-gazing, where it is believed that everything can be controlled deus ex machina from there, as if on brute, inanimate matter. The second was that Iraq had not become a much more difficult problem because of anything we had done; it was suggested that the core problem is that the enemy had unexpectedly – and unwisely – chosen to contest Iraq with everything they could throw at it.

Was there some parallel from an earlier war in this guise? The essay suggested that there was – Guadalcanal, in 1942 – 1943.

On August 7, 1942, in a hastily re-directed operation, the First Marine Division went ashore on Guadalcanal and seized a partially-completed Japanese airfield. Guadalcanal had considerable strategic potential to the Japanese, due to its proximity to the lines of communication between the United States and Australia; however, it was a very far-flung Japanese holding at the end of a very long and tenuous logistical string. As I wrote last year,

In the grand strategic scheme, this was a minor setback for Imperial Japan; Guadalcanal was on the fringe of the Japanese perimeter, and had been lightly-defended. With the main base at Rabaul remaining as a virtually-impregnable strongpoint, the best strategy would have been to forget about the Guadalcanal adventure.

But the Japanese high command immediately decided instead to contest Guadalcanal – vigorously. Fresh troops were rushed to Guadalcanal to prevent the Marines from securing the entire island, and Imperial Japanese Navy task forces steamed south to contest the seas around Guadalcanal and the eastern Solomons. The Americans countered with a similar build-up of troops and ships.

For the next six months, a titanic struggle raged for Guadalcanal. The Americans held the airfield and the territory around it, while the Japanese held most of the rest of the island; neither side was strong enough to dislodge the other. With control of now-operational Henderson Field on Guadalcanal and with dominance in aircraft carriers, the Americans controlled the sea and air by day. However, the dark of night neutralized American airpower; Japanese surface ships dominated the sea by night, and the cover of darkness allowed the Japanese to rush supplies and reinforcements down from Rabaul.

For months, fresh Japanese troops were continually thrown at the Henderson Field perimeter – and were bloodily repulsed. By January, it was becoming clear to both sides that the Americans were slowly gaining the upper hand – in particular, new American surface ships were arriving, and the Imperial Japanese Navy was losing its prior dominance of the night. The Japanese made one last desperate attempt to bring in more troops, but the convoy was intercepted by American aircraft and completely destroyed.

On February 7th, 1943, six months to the day after the Marines had stormed ashore, the Japanese withdrew their last troops from Guadalcanal under cover of darkness. There was no mistaking the outcome – the Americans had tenaciously fought their way to a significant victory, and the Japanese had been beaten.

The Japanese made a grievous mistake in deciding to so vigorously contest such a distant and peripheral outpost – and for this hubris they suffered a grievous and catastrophic defeat. To underline the extent of the catastrophe for Imperial Japan, I quoted the memoirs of Japan’s most accomplished flyer to survive the war, Saburo Sakai – who, after being badly wounded in an early air battle over Guadalcanal, returned to Japan and became a staff officer.

Several days after my arrival at Toyohashi, [Commander] Nakajima wordlessly showed me the report of our withdrawal from Guadalcanal on February 7, 1943, exactly six months after the Americans had landed. The radios blared of strategic withdrawals, of tightening our defense lines, but the secret reports revealed a staggering defeat and appalling losses.

Two full divisions of Army troops were gone, annihilated by the savagely fighting enemy. The Navy had lost the equivalent of an entire peacetime fleet. Rusting in the mud off Guadalcanal were the blasted hulks of no less than two battleships, one aircraft carrier, five cruisers, twelve destroyers, eight submarines, hundreds upon hundreds of fighters and bombers, not to mention the crack fighter pilots and all the bomber crews.

What had happened to us?

And I answered Sakai’s rhetorical question thusly:

What had happened was that the Japanese high command had made the mistake of throwing everything they had at a distant outpost of limited strategic significance. They had also fatally underestimated both the capability and the tenacity of their American adversaries, who persevered beyond expectation and inflicted a crushing and irreversible defeat on Imperial Japan.

And what of Iraq?

So let’s think of Iraq as Guadalcanal. The enemy shouldn’t have chosen to fight there, but they did. They chose to turn Iraq into a major battlefield – not us. We still can – and should – win. When we win, we will probably all – like the Americans after Guadalcanal – breath a sigh of relief that somehow it all ended up turning out okay.

But for our enemies, defeat in Iraq will be for them what defeat at Guadalcanal was for Imperial Japan – crushing, catastrophic, and cataclysmic. That is the “upside potential.” Those are the consequences of victory. And these alone are reason enough to push on boldly.

That sounded pretty outlandish one year ago, but it turned out to be pretty much spot-on, didn’t it?

And amid much talk at the time that the objective was a civic reconstruction of Iraqi society, the argument was made that the objective should be to find and destroy the enemy. To wit,

Victory will be when the enemy is beaten.

This is basically what General Petraeus and our troops have done. Though there were extra troops and other very positive changes in strategy, the main – and possibly still-unappreciated – aspect of General Petraeus’ strategy was to defeat the enemy - as all other objectives could only follow that achievement.

This is how you win – and this seems to have worked.

Is this battle won and over? In warfare of this kind, history shows that “insurgencies” don’t reach well-defined ends, with either surrender ceremonies or the signing of a “peace agreement.” Insurgencies tend to go to defeat almost adiabatically, slowly fading away.

That seems to be happening – but of course we face a clever and ruthless enemy. They may try to regroup and make yet another “push-back” in Iraq. Or they may decide that the time is ripe in potentially-greener pastures. One strangely prescient-but-ominous comment last year was to note that:

And let’s not forget that al-Qaeda has been everywhere all-but-invisible over the past few years, except in Iraq – something unlikely to be merely coincidental.

This no longer seems to be holding. The enemy may be in the process of concluding that Iraq has become a costly symbol that now offers little, while Pakistan might be a more worthwhile investment of time and effort – due both to Pakistan’s much-larger population and of course its small nuclear arsenal. And some old instincts developed over the past more-than-twenty years just keep tingling in my mind, that at some point something robust will have to be done in Lebanon’s Beka’a Valley.

To close this hopefully not-too-immodest retrospective, I’d urge everyone who finds the time to link back and read last year’s essay to continue down and read through the forty comments that it generated. Those are perhaps even more interesting reading than the essay itself.

Oh, one last thing that we need to be sure that we understand. During the six-month-long struggle for Guadalcanal, things were touch-and-go. However, viewed after the fact, there is one clarion point that needs to be understood - at no point were we losing.

One year ago, and too often this year, there was a strange belief that we were “losing” the war. There have been very tough stretches where it seemed that things were going nowhere; that much is true, but at no time were we or have we been losing the war. The enemy has been able to create mayhem, but at no time was there even the remotest chance that they could drive us from the field.

As Vince Lombardi said, “Winning isn’t everything – it’s the only thing.” Let’s make sure that this one stays won.

Update

I hashed that together last night for posting this morning; this morning, there is a surprisingly similar (in tone if not content) one-year-review by Senators McCain and Lieberman. I’ll just provide a couple of quotes here that jibe with this discourse and the one from one year ago:

In Congress, opposition to the surge from antiwar members was swift and severe. They insisted that Iraq was already "lost," and that there was nothing left to do but accept our defeat and retreat.

In fact, they could not have been more wrong. And had we heeded their calls for retreat, Iraq today would be a country in chaos: a failed state in the heart of the Middle East, overrun by al Qaeda and Iran.

Instead, conditions in that country have been utterly transformed from those of a year ago, as a consequence of the surge. Whereas, a year ago, al Qaeda in Iraq was entrenched in Anbar province and Baghdad, now the forces of Islamist extremism are facing their single greatest and most humiliating defeat since the loss of Afghanistan in 2001.

....

The war for Iraq is not over. The gains we have made can be lost. But thanks to the courage of our troops, the skill and intellect of their battlefield commander, and the steadfastness of our commander in chief, we have at last begun to see the contours of what must remain our objective in this long, hard and absolutely necessary war -- victory.

Victory.