We just passed the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, and the staff of Reason magazine have been looking back to 2003 to review their positions on the war in Iraq then and now. I figure I might as well go on the record about where I stood then and where I stand now.

Back then, I knew I didn't know enough to have a well-informed opinion (and I was still new enough to blogging to let that stop me), so I wrote very little about the invasion except for a tongue-in-cheek strategy suggestion. I was hardly a war booster, but if pressed I would have said that invading Iraq was probably a good thing.

To start with, getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a great idea. He was a tyrant and I say death to tyrants.

There were those who opposed the invasion on the grounds that Iraq was a sovereign nation which we had no right to invade. I had a simple answer to that: The only legitimate governments are democracies. Any government which is not of, by, and for the people is not a government we should respect. Dictators are the moral equivalent of gangsters, and Saddam Hussein was no more the legitimate ruler of Iraq than John Gotti was the mayor of New York.

What give us the right? I think everyone has the right. You don't need anybody else's permission to free someone from tyranny. (You wouldn't want to free someone against their will, of course, but in the absence of a clear and uncoerced statement to the contrary, I think it's safe to assume that people want to be free.)

Then why not invade some other dictatorship such as Iran, Syria, or "our friends" the Saudis? I wouldn't have a moral problem with overthrowing any of those governments, but an illegitimate government only keeps it from being immoral to invade, it doesn't mean we have to invade.

Just because we believe people would be better off if we invaded, doesn't mean it's our duty as a nation to do so. Even back then, it was clear that an invasion would have a cost in blood and treasure, and we owe it to our soldiers and our taxpayers not to squander what they give us on wars that do not serve our national interest. We should only invade Iraq, I thought, if it also served a legitimate national interest.

That's where the weapons of mass destruction came in. Keeping such weapons out of the hands of terrorists was a clear matter of national security.

Then there's the oil. Protestors can chant "no blood for oil" all they want, but that doesn't change the fact that American civilization will crumble if we don't get oil. The safety of our oil supply is a matter of national security as well, and if invading Iraq and setting up a free democracy will help stabilize the region, all the better.

I thought invading Iraq would serve a confluence of interests. A successful operation would

• overthrow a tyrant
• eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
• free the Iraqi people
• spread democracy in the middle east
• help stabilize the region
• safeguard our oil supply

But if an invasion is such a great idea, why wasn't I a war booster?

Well, although that list makes the invasion sound like a terrific idea, there's one very important point I left out which concerned me very much at the time: Invading Iraq and accomplishing the items on that list is only a good idea if it actually works.

The problem was, I knew far too little about the middle east, the Bush administration, and modern warfare to make many confident predictions. I was sure the initial invasion would sweep the Iraqi army from the battlefield, but when it came to picking up the pieces afterward, I had no idea what would happen.

The best I could figure out is that it all depended on the Iraqi people. If they welcomed us as liberators and enthusiastically started the hard work of building a free democracy, everything would be fine. But if they cooperated with an organized guerilla resistance movement, we'd be stuck in an ugly situation for a long time.

The best I could do was listen to what all sides were saying and decide who made the most sense. The Bush Administration had Colin Powell and access to everything our intelligence agencies knew about the middle east.  The anti-war crowd had Hollywood celebrities and giant paper-machete heads, and they seemed to think that insulting George Bush for not approving the Kyoto agreement was a compelling argument against the war. (I'm simplifying a bit.) Also, the anti-war crowd had been wrong every step of the way in Afghanistan.

At the time, I still believed that, whatever their faults in other areas, the Bush administration was serious about national security. Also, without free speech the Iraqi people couldn't tell us what they would really do if we invaded, but I figured our intelligence agencies had the assets and capability to make some really good guesses.

So, I figured the invasion would probably be successful, and therefore it was probably a good idea. I didn't love the idea, but I thought evertything would turn out better in the end.

Once the war was underway, as I expected, we quickly accomplished the first goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

Troublingly, the second goal, destroying the weapons of mass destruction, proved to have been unnecessary.

As the war dragged on, we went backwards on the last two goals, stabilizing the region and safeguarding our oil supply. As for the middle two goals, I'm not sure if what the Iraqis have now can really be called freedom, and I don't think we've impressed the Muslim world with the benefits of democracy.

Even after the war started to go bad, the question that kept nagging at me was "Would the world have been a better place if Saddam was still in charge in Iraq?" The answer, I thought, was "no."

But here we are after five years of violent confict and Iraqis are still dying, Iran is emerging as an unopposed power in the region, and the enemy has learned a lot about how to fight us. I'm beginning to think it's a no-win situation, and our best move is to admit it and cut our losses.

Of course, given my track record on this subject, it's just as likely that the resistance is going to collapse next month, the Iraqis will begin to build a working society, and the liberals will gain power in Iran.

It's probably better if you don't pay attention to a thing I say.

A friend of mine just reminded me of a great organization called Operation Support Our Troops-Illinois.

Founded in 2003 by Debi Rickert, OSOTIL sends out care packages to our troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. They follow Department of Defense security standards and guidelines. Most of the items they send are not available through the military supply system and are difficult to find locally.

Just to give you an idea, the current list of most desired items includes Canned Fruit, Crackers, Beef Jerky/Slim Jims, Nuts, Shaving Cream, Deodorant, Hand lotion, Body wash, Foot Powder, Socks, Cold drink mix, Gatorade, Coffee, Unscented baby wipes, Pringles, Peanut Butter, Jelly, Bug Spray, Fly Strips, Fly swatters, and Sunscreen.

That's just the top ten list. They accept a lot of other stuff as well.

OSOTIL has drop-off locations for goods all over Illinois, or you can just send them money using PayPal to help cover their $2400/month shipping bill. Details for all of this are available on their home page.

If you're not from Illinois, then check out the national parent organization, Operation Support Our Troops

Wretchard at The Belmont Club points to an article in the Sierra Vista Herald about an address by Qubad J. Talabany, a representative of Iraqi Kurdistan, to a U.S. military Training and Doctrine Command Cultural Awareness Summit:

In 1974, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger led the United States away from supporting a Kurdish homeland.

After the first Gulf War against Iraq in the early 1990s, “we believed (President George) Bush senior,” Talabany said. When the current President George H.W. Bush’s father called for Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein and promised support, the Kurds and Shiites in southern Iraq did, only to see the United States turn its back.

The end result was Hussein killed thousands of Kurds and caused others to flee into the Turkish mountains for protection, where many died of exposure.

...

“We didn’t trust the United States after that,” Talabany said.

But with the full commitment of American forces finally toppling Hussein in 2003, Kurds once again were willing to take a chance on America.

If the United States decides to pull out before the job is done, “we Kurds want guarantees we will be protected,” he said.

If the Democrats succeed in getting the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq, they need to ensure that we leave behind enough forces to protect the Kurds. All the good things we say we want for Iraq—democracy, freedom, wealth—the Kurds have been building for themselves. When we invaded, they really did welcome us a liberators. We owe them our support.

Via Lindsey Bayerstein comes this link to photographs of U.S. soldiers receiving care at Walter Reed Hospital. (The whole Washington Post article is here).

If you prefer something more abstract, check out icasualties.org. As I write this, there are 3133 confirmed U.S. war dead. Here's a list of all of them.

The same site shows 23,471 wounded in combat, and another 6,835 with non-combat injuries bad enough to need medical air transport.

We can stop all this bloodshed, just by leaving.

(See also this companion piece.)

Everyone who's talking about Iraq is talking about "the surge" and whether it will work. Taken literally, that's a silly question. Of course the surge will work: The surge is just a troop movement. It's difficult to move 21,500 troops—and everything they need to fight a war—to the other side of the world, but it's the kind of difficult thing the U.S. military is very, very good at. It's going to happen.

So the surge will work, but the surge is not the plan. Baghdad is the plan. Instead of talking about the surge, we should be talking about the Baghdad strategy.

The plan is to secure Baghdad. Our troops will attempt to kill or chase away most of the enemy insurgents and prevent them from re-entering the city. Planners say that will require putting five additional bridades of U.S. soldiers into Baghdad. Rather than pulling those soldiers away from other duties in Iraq, the plan is to keep our existing forces in place and bring in additional troops to support the additional operations in Baghdad. That's the surge.

If you think this would have been more effective three or four years ago, you're in good company. A lot of people who support the broad goals of the war are not happy with the way it's been fought. (I haven't followed the war in detail for a long time, so I can't claim to have been calling for reform, but it did seem like our military goals became a lot less clear after the first few months. I assumed it was just me, and maybe it was.) I'm sure the historians will figure out how it went wrong, but I think it's more than just a coincidence that the U.S. military is once again seizing the initiative now that Rumsfeld is gone.

Our new Baghdad forces will be accompanied by a large portion of the new Iraqi army, bringing the total of additional forces in the capital city to over 40,000. Smaller forces will be sent to help pacify Anbar Province and to interdict enemy infiltration into Iraq over the borders with Syria and Iran.

Actually, some of this activity has already started:

U.S. and Iraqi troops moved into a Sunni neighborhood in southern Baghdad on Thursday, while insurgents struck back with car bombs that killed seven people. In southern Iraq, British troops sealed off the border with Iran to prevent weapons smuggling.

Helicopters buzzed overhead as a joint U.S.-Iraqi force headed into the Dora neighborhood - a longtime Sunni militant area - on the second day of a long-awaited security operation in the capital, according to Iraqi officials. U.S. troops searched three Shiite areas Wednesday, meeting little resistance in house-to-house searches.

The Interior Ministry also said U.S. and Iraqi forces were sweeping through four main districts, including Sunni and Shiite areas, seizing weapons and ammunitions.

It's unfortunate that so much of the focus in the media and in Congress has been on the surge rather than on the new strategy the surge is supporting. It has lead to a lot of discussion about the number of troops in Iraq, with very little discussion of what they should be doing there.

I don't know much about military matters, so I have no idea how the new strategy will work out. Maybe it will work, maybe it's too late, and maybe it would never have worked. But it's what we should be talking about.

Some people are talking about pulling out of Iraq. As much as I'd like us to be out of that war, I can't make myself believe that withdrawing from Iraq is the right thing to do.

Yes, I'm certainly willing to believe that we'd be better off if we had never invaded Iraq, and I might even be willing to believe that the Iraqis would be better off if we had left Saddam Hussein in charge. But we can't undo the things we've done. We can't put Iraq back together the way it used to be.

We can only try to control what happens next.

Here's the problem with withdrawing our troops from Iraq, in a single paragraph from an article about something else:

AQI is both feared and hated,” Capt Broekhuizen said, referring to Al Qaeda in Iraq. “They’ve been running a brutal terror campaign. No city leaders are left here who will take a leadership role.” Marines from Golf Company said they recently fished two bodies out of the local river: a man had been decapitated, and his 4-year old tied to his leg before both were thrown into the river and the little boy drowned. The killings were a product of Al Qaeda terror.

If we leave Iraq now, we will be leaving it in the hands of the people who did that. We will be giving the beheaders control over the lives of 26 million people.

What happens next...is genocide.

[Update: See also this companion piece.]

This is the second installment of a series of modest proposals for victory in Iraq.

Proposals for changing our Iraq strategy have often been given simple names such as Go Big (send more troops), Go Long (plan a permanent occupation), or Go Home (the core of my previous proposal). I guess this proposal's simple name would be Go Nuclear.

Many people claim that this is a war against Islamofascism—the desire by some Islamic leaders to conquer the world and convert it to Islam—and that it's our job to fight it. I've also heard people claim that Islamic culture (or maybe it's Arabic culture) is oriented to respect power and authority, not democratic cooperation, meaning that the hoards of people fighting for our Islamofascist enemies won't recognize the advantages of a western liberal democracy and won't take an opportunity to form one.

In other words, if we believe these two theories, our enemies are an implacable foe who would rather fight than live a better life. They cannot be bargained with or reasoned with. They feel no pity or remorse. They are not deal makers or coalition builders. And they seek to destroy our civilization. Our only recourse is to defeat them by force of arms.

Then that should be our strategy.

The United States has a stockpile of about ten thousand nuclear warheads. According to our arms reduction plans, we're planning to reduce this stockpile considerably. One way of doing so is to expend the warheads in the middle east. Think of it as an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

President Bush has offered his plan for Iraq, and in fielding criticism of it, Press Secretary Tony Snow has said anybody who didn't like it should offer a better one. I'm rising to that challenge with a series of modest proposals addressing not just the conflict in Iraq, but the emerging larger war against Islamofascism.

My first proposal is simple: We declare victory and go home. This is completely different from "cut-and-run."

People say we haven't won in Iraq, but that's rigid literalist thinking. Just because we haven't succeeded at every single one of our goals doesn't mean we haven't scored some meaningful victories. Consider:

• The United States no longer neads to fear Iraqi weapons of mass descruction.
• Saddam Hussein is dead. There's your regime change right there.
• Iraq is no longer a military threat to other nations in the region.

We should just put those victories in our pocket and leave.

True, Iraq is not a peaceful democracy like we were hoping, but is that a real problem? If you live in Iraq, then obviously yes. That's why so many people who advocate a withdrawl are insisting it will make the Iraqis stand up for themselves. They don't want to be blamed for the chaos and bloodshed that will follow our departure.

That's where my plan differs from cut-and run: Under my plan, we don't pretend to care what happens in Iraq after we leave. So let me restate my original question: True, Iraq is not a peaceful democracy like we were hoping, but is that a real problem for us?

I don't think so, because I don't think Saddam Hussein was feeling very victorious as they tightened the rope around his neck. From his point of view, it didn't matter if we stayed or left. All that mattered is that we'd been there and kicked his ass.

We no longer care what mattered to Saddam Hussein, but we do care what matters to other people like him. When we declare victory and leave Iraq, we want to leave behind a message that matters to people like Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadi-Nejad, Syrian President Bashar al-Asad, and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.

That message is simple: Piss us off and we'll fuck you up.

Sure, we may not replace you with a peaceful democracy, but we will replace you. In the process of doing so, we'll destroy your military and kill a whole bunch of your supporters and probably you too. Heck once your supporters realize they're going to die because of you, they just might do the job for us.

In short, this is a strategy of deterrence. We want our enemies to believe we'll destroy them if they misbehave. Hopefully this will discourage them from misbehaving so we won't have to go through the wearying exercise of destroying them.

One of the biggest advantages of this strategy is that it's quick. If we're going to declare victory and go home without rebuilding anything, we can get it over with in a jiffy. We could have left Iraq three years ago, pausing only to shoot Saddam on the way out so he didn't regain power during the descent into chaos.

Alternatively, since we would have finished the job so quickly, we could have done a few more jobs. Why try to threaten and deter other countries when we have plenty of time to destroy them? In the four years we've been fighting in Iraq, we could have destroyed Syria, Iran, and the parts of Pakistan we don't like.

There are a few downsides to this strategy.

First of all, Al-Qaeda will see our withdrawl from Iraq as a victory for them. Even worse, some of the very people we're trying to frighten will see this as an Al-Qaeda victory and won't think we're all that scary because of it. Maybe we need to stage a big attack on Al-Qaeda to show them we mean business...but then we're not really going home, are we?...I still need to work on this part of the plan...

The second problem is that Iraq didn't really do anything to piss us off right before we attacked them. Oh, they've been shooting at our aircraft in the no-fly zone for years, interfering with weapons inspectors, and causing all kinds of trouble, but it's not like we were responding to a sudden change in their behavior. That's going to make it hard for other countries to tell when we're pissed off at them until we actually blow them up...which defeats the purpose of having a deterrent.

Fortunately, having just watched the DVD of Snakes On a Plane, I think we can borrow a solution from Mother Nature. Rattlesnakes shake the rattle on their tail just before striking. It's a built-in reflex, so when a snake shakes its rattle, you know it's not bluffing. Other animals have recognizable pre-attack behavior as well, such as screeching birds or growling dogs. We need to find the equivalent of an animal's attack cry for an American military attack, so our enemies will know when we're serious.

I have an idea about that, and a Democratic congress is a start. We should also elect a Democratic president. Then, if our enemies do something to piss us off again, we scare the crap out of them by electing ourselves another Republican from Texas. Or maybe we elect Jeb Bush. He's another Bush (and you know how those Bush guys are about middle eastern wars) plus he's from Florida, so you know he's much crazier than his brother.

President Bush has offered his plan for Iraq, and in fielding criticism of it, Press Secretary Tony Snow has said anybody who didn't like Bush's plan should offer a better one. I'm planning to answer that challenge in a series of modest proposals. This is just background.

Jennifer the Feral Genius wrote in her blog:

...I can’t quite bring myself to believe we’re going to hit Iran. I’d never be able to defend this position in an actual debate, though, because my reasoning amounts to me waving my hands in the air and sputtering “We can’t! Our military's stretched as it is! We don't have the ability!" ...

It depends what we're trying to do. Do we need to conquer and rebuild Iran? Or do we just need to damage it a bit? Building an entire democratic nation is hard, but our military finds it pretty easy to hurt people and break things.

Military planners differentiate between control and denial. It's the difference between using an asset yourself and preventing your enemy from using it. For example, if your enemy has people and supplies crossing a bridge over a river, it may be enough to simply blow it up with a guided bomb from an aircraft, thus denying it to your enemy. But if you want to use the bridge yourself, you probably need to capture it with ground troops. Control is a lot more difficult than denial, and it's important not to confuse the two.

Arguably, that's been the problem with the war in Iraq. Denying control of Iraq to Saddam Hussein was easy. Controlling it ourselves...that's a lot harder.

(Al-Qaeda has the same problem. They have been able to deny us complete control of Iraq, but captured Al-Qaeda communications indicate they are frustrated by our ability to keep them from gaining control.)

As I understand it, the Cold War shaped the U.S. military to perform a role that was ultimately defensive in nature. We expected an attack on Europe from the Soviet Union, and our military goal was to thwart that attack. To do that, we were going to counterattack and destroy the military forces of the Soviet Union. This counterattack would almost certainly have involved an invasion of the Soviet Union, but our invasion was only for the purpose of stopping their invasion. We had no designs on Soviet land, people, or natural resources. Our goal was to stop the invasion, not take over the country. The U.S. military is designed to attack our enemies but not to conquer them.

By 1990, our military had evolved to to perform this role very well. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, we counterattacked into Iraq and destroyed much of the Iraqi army in only a couple of months.

Note that when we re-invaded Iraq in 2003 we continued to use the terminology of defense. A "preemptive" attack is a counterattack that is launched to stop an enemy attack before it starts. During the Cold War, if we had seen the Soviet army massing for an invasion of Europe, we might have decided to preempt that attack by attacking first. In Iraq, our counterattack was nominally intended to preempt terrorist use of chemical and biological weapons.

By this time, our military had become even more effective at destroying enemy forces, and within three weeks the Iraqi army was destroyed or driven from the field of battle.

President Bush has taken a lot of abuse over the "Mission Accomplished" banner, but in many ways it was accurate. U.S. military forces exist in their current form for the purpose of destroying other nations' military forces, and by that standard, they had accomplished their mission.

Unfortunately, destroying the Iraqi army was not the only thing we had planned to do, but the U.S. military wasn't designed for nation building.

President Bush has announced his plan for victory in Iraq, and I'll say this about it: It sounds like a plan. Maybe the news sources I usually read have all been omitting this stuff from other reports, but this is the first thing I've heard about the war in Iraq since the initial invasion that sounds like actual military planning.

When I first started hearing about the 20,000-troop surge, the reports seemed to imply that this would be little more than a broad increase in troop levels—a few extra companies for every commander.

That wouldn't be much help. In almost any war, you want to concentrate your forces in order to overwhelm the enemy at a particular location, and you want to choose the location that will do the most good.

The new plan seems to do that. Some of the troops are headed to Anbar Province to make sure it doesn't fall to the heavy concentration of Al-Qaeda forces there. Nearly all the rest of the troops—probably about 15,000 I'm guessing—are headed for Baghdad.

I'm not saying this is a plan for victory, because I sure don't know enough to tell, but at least it sounds like a plan. 20,000 more troops in all of Iraq won't do much good. 15,000 more troops in Baghdad...that might make a big difference.

John Ruberry links to a Sunday Times report that Israel is planning a nuclear strike on Iran.

I'm not sure what to make of this story. Israel planning to nuke Iran just is the inevitable consequence of Iran's threatening to develop nuclear weapons. Iranian leaders have been calling for Israel's destruction for years. Now that they are acquiring the means to do so, Israel is making plans to nuke them first.

Iran wanted to be a nuclear power. Well, that's how it works. Now you have enemies that plan nuclear wars against you—balance of terror, mutually assured destruction and all that. Welcome to the nuclear club.

It's hard to know how serious Israel's plans are. A nuclear war will happen fast, and there won't be much time for thinking about it when it starts. Therefore any country that has nuclear weapons is going to have planning staff to decide how to use them. When not fighting a nuclear war (which is, so far, thankfully, always) the staff conducts wargames and puts together canned plans for attacking enemies. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that the U.S. also has a plan for a nuclear attack on Iran.

(Heck, I have a plan for a nuclear attack on Iran, but that's a topic for another post...)

A conventional bombing attack against Iranian nuclear facilities would require a huge force. The United States could do it easily, but Israel would have a hard time conducting such a large air operation. Israel is therefore planning an alternative attack using small nuclear bunker-buster bombs in the one-kiloton range, according to the article.

The middle east has been a troubled region for a long time, and it may be about to get even worse. If Israel launches a conventional air strike against Iran, the Iranian leadership will have just minutes to decide whether to let it continue or to try to stop it and then hope the Israelies don't have the willpower to use their nuclear strike plan.

If Israel does nuke Iran, the Islamic powers will go insane, which would be bad for U.S. interests in the region. This raises the possibility that the United States should destroy Iran's nuclear facilities in a conventional attack so that the Israelies won't do so in a nuclear attack.

Interesting times.

President Bill Clinton's enactment of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy on homosexuality has been criticized by a lot of gay rights supporters on the grounds that it requires gays to stay in the closet if they want to stay in the military.

I always felt this was a little unfair because "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was a lot better than the previous military policy, which might be characterized as "Ask, then Discharge" (or before that, "Investigate, then Imprison"). A gay person wanting to serve in the military before 1993 could only do so by lying when questioned about it. Now at least they weren't supposed to be questioned. Clinton's new policy may have required gays to stay in the closet, but the old policy used to pull them out of the closet even if they were willing to stay in.

It turns out there may be another advantage to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" that I didn't even think of (but should have):

Last year I held a number of meetings with gay soldiers and marines, including some with combat experience in Iraq, and an openly gay senior sailor who was serving effectively as a member of a nuclear submarine crew. These conversations showed me just how much the military has changed, and that gays and lesbians can be accepted by their peers.

This perception is supported by a new Zogby poll of more than 500 service members returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, three quarters of whom said they were comfortable interacting with gay people. And 24 foreign nations, including Israel, Britain and other allies in the fight against terrorism, let gays serve openly, with none reporting morale or recruitment problems.

I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces. Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job.

That's from a New York Times op-ed column. The writer is retired Army General John M. Shalikashvili, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Before "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," people who opposed gays in the military could claim that it might undermine the moral, discipline, and efficiency of the United States military, and that it was foolish to conduct social experiments in such a vital institution. What "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" did was allow us to conduct that experiment. Gays could serve in the military and then come out of the closet so we knew who they were.

One benefit of this was information: After a decade and a half of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" the results of the experiment are in. Gay soldiers don't have problems serving in the military, and the straight soliders don't have problems serving with the gay soldiers.

I think this will bring an end to the military's opposition to gays in the service, and Congress will follow their lead. It may not have happened as soon as it could have, but I think it will happen.

(Hat tip: Ronald Bailey)

Saddam Hussein
1937 - 2006

Way back in February of 2003, I published my modest proposal for a victory in Iraq. Basically, I noticed that Saddam Hussein didn't care what we did in Iraq as long as he thought he was still in power. So we take that to an extreme:

My proposal is that we follow a strategy of encroachment. We just slowly keep creeping into Iraq, building air bases and fuel dumps, military hospitals, roads, bridges, rail links, civilian aid stations, and whatever else we can think of until we control 90% of Iraq without firing a shot.

I'm hardly an expert on military matters, so I was just making stuff up for the fun of it, and a couple months later it didn't matter because our forces captured Baghdad in only three weeks of fighting.

The way things have gone in Iraq since then, however, I'm beginning to think my plan wasn't so silly after all.

As our forces crept into Iraq, they would presumably have run into all the problems we're seeing now, except on a much smaller scale because initially they would have occupied only a small fraction of the country. They'd have had a much better American-soldier-to-insurgent ratio, so they would have a pretty good chance of defeating the insurgency, especially since it's a lot easier to adapt operations to a small theater than a large one.

Once the insurgency was crushed, our forces could have gone about the process of setting up a working civilization of sorts, with schools and hospitals and trained police and a new Iraqi army to prevent future insurgencies. Only when all this was accomplished would our forces have invaded a little further and repeated the process.

I think the military calls this concentrated piece-at-a-time approach defeat in detail. In my little software engineering world, we call it iterative development. There are three principle advantages of an iterative approach that seem to apply here.

First, with an iterative approach you discover problems early and you can quickly adapt your solution to overcome them.

Second, an iterative approach gives you the option of changing the scope of the problem you're trying to solve. One of our goals in Iraq was to establish a western-style democracy as a demonstration of a better way for other countries in the region to follow. If we had used in iterative approach, we would quickly have discovered that this was a lot harder in some parts of Iraq than in others. We could have withdrawn from the difficult regions and focused our efforts where they'd do the most good. In other words, we'd have built a democracy from the green zones and left the red zones to Saddam.

(This is similar to modern armor doctrine in which enemy strongpoints are bypassed in favor of achieving other battlefield goals. The strongpoints are then isolated and reduced by follow-on forces.)

Third, an iterative approach keeps your initial commitment small so that if you decide the problem is unsolvable, the cost of giving up is not too high. If you're going to give up anyway, it's best to do it as soon as possible to limit your casualties. (The ideal, of course, is to quit before you start.)

Since I know so little about warfare, this is all just mental games. It's a bit of tongue-in-cheek hindsight on a terrible situation. Someone with real military skills could probably trash my ideas easily, unless they found them too incoherent to analyze (i.e. so bad they're not even wrong).

I knew that when I started this post. Now that I've written it, however, I'm starting to believe that maybe there's some core bit of a good idea here.

In any case, I'm planning to write a few more modest proposals for winning in Iraq, so stay tuned.

While people all over the blogosphere are arguing what to do about Islamofascism—the desire and attempt by some Muslims to force Islam on everybody else in the world by conquest or terror—I think Lindsay Beyerstein, who is skeptical about the threat (or even existance) of Islamofascism may have nevertheless hit on the perfect strategy to combat it:

The answer is not military conflict in Afghanistan. The answer is taking gender-based oppression into account in refuge claims. We could "rescue" every oppressed Afghan woman who wants asylum by simply opening our doors to all female refugees from Afghanistan, and any other regime that doesn't afford full civil rights to women.

The message to patriarchal regimes: Keep this up, and we'll take all your women and children. Heck, if you don't knock off this tin-pot dictator shit, we'll take all your scientists, all your engineers, all your doctors, and all your journalists--regardless of gender! Our gain, your loss.

Sounds like a plan to me.

I don't write a lot about the Iraq war—because I don't have a good understanding of what we're trying to do there or how well it's working—but I think the situation is pretty screwed up. However, one of the things that worries me most about the Democratic sweep back into Congress is that they'll screw up Iraq too, but in a new and different way.

I am concerned, in particular, that our enemies will be emboldened if we leave the area without a clear victory. I've heard that when President Ronald Reagan pulled our troops out of Lebanon after the Marine barracks was bombed, a lot of our potential enemies in the region saw that as proof that the United States would back down if they suffered enough casualties.

According to Mark Bowden in Black Hawk Down, Somali warlords in Mogadishu specifically planned to pin down and kill a bunch of American soldiers, even at great cost to their own forces, because they were pretty sure it would create pressure for President Bill Clinton to remove our forces from the area.

If we let our enemies do that to us again in Iraq, we'll be sending them a message that violent opposition to U.S. interests is a strategy that works. We will be rewarding them for killing our troops.

On the other hand, it's hard for me to disagree with what Senator Carl Levin said at a recent press conference, especially the second quoted paragraph:

"Most Democrats share the view that we should pressure the White House to commence the phased redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq in four to six months -- to begin that phased redeployment, and thereby to make it clear to the Iraqis that our presence is not open-ended and that they must take and make the necessary political compromises to preserve Iraq as a nation," Levin said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. "We cannot save the Iraqis from themselves.

"They, and they alone, are going to decide whether they're going to have a nation or whether they're going to have an all-out civil war," he said. "We have given them the opportunity, at huge cost of blood and treasure, to have a nation, should they choose it. But it is up to them, not us, not our brave and valiant troops -- it's up to the Iraqi leadership: Do they want a civil war or do they want a nation?"

It seems our choices are to leave and appear weak or to stay and keep paying the price in blood. These are not good choices.

Maybe we'll luck out. Maybe our talk of a phased deployment will embolden the Iraqis to step up and pay the price to stop the violence.

We could use a bit of luck right now.

Uh, we may be at war with North Korea. Sort of. Actually, Kim Jong-il seems to think he's at war with, well, everybody:

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea said Tuesday it considered U.N. sanctions aimed at punishing the country for its nuclear test "a declaration of war," as Japan and South Korea reported the communist nation might be preparing a second explosion.

The North broke two days of silence about the U.N. resolution adopted after its Oct. 9 nuclear test with a statement on the official state news agency, as China warned Pyongyang against stoking tensions.

"The resolution cannot be construed otherwise than a declaration of a war" against the North, the statement said. North Korea is known officially as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The chief U.S. nuclear envoy, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, said the North's response was "not very helpful."

So...has North Korea declared war on the entire United Nations? Or just the Security Council?

The last time something like this happened was when Noriega declared that Panama was in a "state of war" with the United States. We invaded almost immediately.

I think this is just Kim Jong-il running his mouth off as usual. But now that he's more-or-less a nuclear power, people pay some attention. For example, China, his biggest supporter in the region, is now slowly backing away, like someone beginning to realize that their eccentric friend may actually be dangerously crazy.

With a little luck, some of his military people—who would bear the brunt of any warfare—will take the initiative and assassinate him. Then again, he and his father probably made sure that people with initiative were kept out of the high ranks of the military for exactly that reason.

The world-wide scientific analysis of the North Korean nuclear test is starting to come in, and it's developing in an interesting direction. It appears, at least so far, that the blast was small, possibly less than 1 kiloton.

By comparison, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was 15 kilotons, and the United States' first test at Trinity, over 60 years ago, was 18 to 20 kilotons. Most U.S. nuclear weapons today are capable of yields over 100 kilotons, with many in the 300 kiloton range. Much larger weapons have been built, including a variety of strategic weapons in the 5000 to 15000 kiloton range.

So what does the low yield of the North Norean test mean? I've heard a number of possible explanations:

• Mismeasurement. Something has caused a false low estimate of the blast. As more and more people analyze the seismic shock wave, this seems less unlikely.

• Fizzle. The Norks were trying for a typical 10-20 kiloton test blast, but the bomb didn't work right, resulting in a very small blast. This seems a little unlikely because atom bombs aren't all that hard to build once you have the fissionable materials. No other country has had a failure of their first test. Then again, this is North Korea we're talking about. The likely launch vehicle for a nuclear weapon, the Taepodong-2 missile, failed its big test last July.

• Fake. The unit of weapon yield, the kiloton, means literally the explosive power of 1000 tons of high explosive. To fake a 1-kiloton test blast, the North Koreans would simply have needed to bury 1000 tons of high explosives and set it off. Note that they were quick to announce that no radioactive materials leaked from the test site, which would certainly be true if none was ever produced.

• Suitcase Nuke. The blast was small because the weapon was small. The North Koreans are developing small portable nuclear bombs that are intended to be smuggled to their targets by spies or—in the worst-case scenario—by whatever terrorists North Korea's crazy leader sells them to.

• Artillery Shell. An alternate explanation for a small weapon is that the warhead is intended to be fired by artillery, which would limit its size.

If the North Korean nuke is intentionally small, the last possibility makes the most sense.

Whenever the Daily Show has a Republican guest and they start talking about the war in Iraq, Jon Stewart likes to stump them by asking why the U.S. isn't doing something about the serious threat of North Korea. For some reason no one ever explains it to him, even though the answer is pretty simple.

Much of North Korea's national security depends on the fact that Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is only 30 miles from North Korea. It has 10 million inhabitants, and an additional 13 million people live in its suburbs. All of these people are within range of about 700 North Korean artillery guns and missile launchers. North Korea simply has 23 million hostages, half the population of South Korea, that it can start killing in the event of a U.S. attack.

By building nuclear weapons small enough to fire at South Korea from existing artillery and short-range missiles, North Korea would be strengthening their deterrence against an attack from the United States military.

My best guess, however, is that the North Korean nuke was a fizzle.

This is bad news:

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea said Monday it had performed its first-ever nuclear weapons test, setting off an underground blast in defiance of international warnings and intense diplomatic activity aimed at heading off such a move.

The North Korean statement said there was no radioactive leakage from the test site.

An official at South Korea's seismic monitoring center confirmed a magnitude-3.6 tremor felt at the time North Korea said it conducted the test was not a natural occurrence. The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition his name not be used, because he was not authorized to talk about the sensitive information to the media.

Australia also said there was seismic confirmation that North Korea conducted a nuclear test.

Kim Jung-Il has been claiming North Korea had nuclear weapons for a while now, but when it comes to nuclear weapons, you're not for real until you set one off. The final analysis isn't in yet, but it looks like this is for real.

Of course, joining the nuclear club has a downside. If the U.S. didn't have plans to nuke North Korea till it glows before, they're gonna start making them now.

Update: According to an AP wire report, South Korean analysis indicates the test happened at 8:36 pm CDT. The ground shock from the blast has now reached seismic sensors in the United States. With numerous other seismic detections near the Korean peninsula, sketchy reports say that early analysis shows it was a small nuclear blast, possible indicating a "fizzle."

North Korea is claiming no leaks from the test site. Such leaks are not generally dangerous, but analysis of their composition would give experts in other countries a better idea of how well the bomb worked.

A bunch of people out there, mostly from the right wing, have started referring to the collection of Middle East conflicts as "World War III." That's nonsense. Not because this couldn't be the start of another world war—who can tell?—but because we've already had World War III.

We called it the Cold War. Sure, it didn't result in a world-wide eruption of total warfare (thank God) but almost every country was involved in some way or another. The United States was involved in two major conflicts during this war, suffering 54,000 war-dead in the Korean War and and 58,000 in the Vietnam War. Our allies suffered additional casualties in the thousands, including thousands dead or injured by left-over land mines. Our enemies got the worst of it though, with a combined death toll of 2 to 4 million.

(But do we count the Khmer Rouge? They took over Cambodia as we pulled out of the area and promptly decimated it. I mean that in the ancient literal Roman sense: They executed about 10% of the Cambodian population of 7 million and then they killed another million through policies that lead to starvation and disease.)

The U.S. wasn't much involved in fighting the communist insurgency that became the Greek Cival War, but about 50,000 people died in that war. The list of people killed in side conflicts goes on and on, 75,000 in the El Salvador civil war, a half million in the Angolan civil war...

We may not have called it World War III as we lived through it, but with everybody in the world picking sides and millions dead, that's what it was.

I don't know if we're at the start of another World War now, but if we are, it's World War IV.

White House press secretary Tony Snow had this to say when asked for the President's reaction to news that the U.S. military had suffered its 2500th death in Iraq:

"It's a number," said Tony Snow, the White House press secretary.

"Every time there's one of these 500-benchmarks, people want something," Snow added at his near-daily press briefing at the White House. "The president would like the war to be over now. Everybody would like the war to be over now."

He's got a point. 2500 is a nice round number, but it's not terribly significant by itself, except to the news media. 2500 deaths is just an arbitrary number, worse than 2499 deaths but not as bad as 2501 deaths.

Then again, the So-Called "Austin Mayor" Blog has a point too.

Larger ImageLCPL Thomas Amos

Tommy is the son of a couple of good friends of ours. He returned to the United States this week, and his mother and father are driving to Camp Lejeune this weekend to see him. He's got a new baby daughter that he hasn't seen yet, but she's too young to make the trip.

As I write this, Britain has 40 dead from a series of bombings. The BBC found a note on an Islamist website that claims the attack for al-Qaeda:

In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate, may peace be upon the cheerful one and undaunted fighter, Prophet Muhammad, God's peace be upon him.

Well isn't that a nice way to start a message claiming responsibility for a terrorist attack?

Nation of Islam and Arab nation: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge against the British Zionist Crusader government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh, yes. Wouldn't be Islamist terrorism if they didn't mention the Jews.

The heroic mujahideen have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters.

Uh, "fear, terror and panic"? From the Brits? I doubt it.

I'm not saying that nobody in Britain is scared today. Of course they are. But...let's not forget that these are Brits. Londoners. They've been bombed before.

The German Blitz during World War II lasted eight months, damaged a million houses, and killed 43,000 people. It was intended to knock Britain out of the war. It didn't. I don't think it will this time either.

We have repeatedly warned the British Government and people. We have fulfilled our promise and carried out our blessed military raid in Britain after our mujahideen exerted strenuous efforts over a long period of time to ensure the success of the raid.

We continue to warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all the Crusader governments that they will be punished in the same way if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. He who warns is excused.

"He who warns is excused"? This is just a version of what every two-bit creep says to the cops as they put the cuffs on. "I told him I'd stick him if he didn't shut up!"

If issuing a warning made it okay, then the Islamists ought to excuse the United States for the invasion of Iraq, right? That came after years of warnings, some of them even from the U.N.

At Town Hall, Thomas Sowell writes about the controversial shooting in Fallujah:

Why any such terrorists should be captured alive in the first place is a real question.

Because we're the good guys. That's what good guys do.

Later, Sowell writes:

The Times of London refers to a Marine "killing an unarmed man in cold blood." If that was his purpose he could have opened fire when he entered the room[.]

That's what I mean. Look, if we're not going to be the good guys, if we're not going to try to preserve some sense of justice or mercy, then the Marine should've done exactly that. Even better, why don't we avoid the dangerous infantry actions and just burn the whole city of Fallujah from the air?

But he didn't, and we don't. Because we're the good guys.

If you want a more practical reason, letting the enemy surrender discourages them from fighting to the death and, inevitably, taking a few of our guys with them. We want each enemy fighter to know that he can simply drop his weapons, raise the white flag, and the war will be over for him.

There will be plenty of time for killing people later. The idea of civilized behavior in wartime always erodes as the war drags on. By the end of World War II we were killing enemy civilians by the tens of thousands with napalm and nuclear fire.

For whatever it's worth, the incident sounds like a routine combat misunderstanding. The Marine must have noticed that these men didn't have weapons, but believing them to have been shooting at Marines only minutes before, he probably concluded they were hiding their weapons. No one at the time seemed to know this was a different group of enemy who had been disarmed much earlier by someone else. I'm just guessing, but once you think the enemy are hiding weapons, and you see one of the ones you thought was dead start to move, shooting probably seems like the smart move.

At worst, this was bad decision making under stress and uncertainty. That's almost a definition of war.

Pro-war people in the blogosphere and elsewhere have been warning that letting aggressive evildoers have their way in hopes of appeasing them is foolishness. They will take what we give them and then demand even more.

Point 1: Before the last Gulf war went hot, President Bush and his advisors were concerned that Saddam would back down. This would have been a huge problem because one of the reasons for going to war was to permanently reduce Saddam's war-making capabilities. Just before the war started, Saddam gave in and started withdrawing troops. President Bush responded by moving the line in the sand and saying that removing the troops wasn't good enough after all, they also had to leave all their equipment behind in Kuwait.

Point 2: I've heard, although I can't find a reference, that when the allies called a cease-fire in the last Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's reaction was one of jubilation:  "We've won!" It didn't matter how many Iraqi soldiers had died, or how many of their tanks had been destroyed. From Saddam's point of view, as long as he was alive, he was winning. I believe that as in the last war, the coming battle is not about Iraqi sovereignty, it's about Saddam's survival.

Point 3: We've been fighting Saddam for years. Our air force has been blowing stuff up for so long that Saddam doesn't even bother to complain about it anymore.  Again, I believe he doesn't care because the destruction of a radar installation in southern Iraq doesn't affect him personally.

Put all this together, and it looks like it's Saddam Hussein who's following a policy of appeasement.  We've been flying over Iraq and bombing stuff for the last twelve years, and we've probably had special forces in Iraq for weeks now.  Heck, the Strategy Page reports that there's an obvious U.S. airbase already built inside Iraqi borders. Part of the reason all this is possible is that the bulk of the Iraqi ground forces have been withdrawn to the capital and are arrayed in two rings around Baghdad. Saddam has essentially already conceded all the rest of Iraq to U.S. forces.

My proposal is that we follow a strategy of encroachment. We just slowly keep creeping into Iraq, building air bases and fuel dumps, military hospitals, roads, bridges, rail links, civilian aid stations, and whatever else we can think of until we control 90% of Iraq without firing a shot.

What about Baghdad? Saddam is trying to force our armies to fight a gritty urban street battle against prepared positions if we want to defeat his forces in the capitol. How do we overcome that? Simple: we don't. We take the whole rest of the country, isolate his troops in Baghdad, and then wait for them to either attack us on our terms or run out of fuel. We can play that game a lot longer than they can.

Us civilians have been putting up with silly security procedures in airports and other public places, and our Congress is talking about all kinds of impositions on civil liberties, but some folks running the military have other worries. While their fellow soldiers are risking their asses on the front lines of this thing, they're worried that PFC Hicks in the next shower stall might be looking at them a little funny.

Guys, maybe this is not really the best time to be dismissing Arab language specialists for being gay. I mean, you folks in the military got hit pretty hard when this thing started...you do realize that There's a War On, don't you?

The good professor discusses Eric Alterman's analogy between Iraq and Vietnam. He asks,

So, the question raised by the Vietnam analogy here is: Are we serious about winning? And who, exactly, is going to intervene on a massive scale to stop us if we look like we're going to win big?

Well, there are several places from which opposition could arise. Most obviously, there are the other Islamic nations, one of whom (Pakistan) has nuclear weapons. They haven't shown a lot of teaming skills, but they might be able to pull something together if they see the United States as a common threat. There are other countries that might be interested in helping to pummel us. China always comes to mind, as do various parts of the former Soviet Union if the wrong type of people gain power. Also, given their reaction to Israel's fight with terrorists, we should keep a careful eye on Europe. I'm sure they could use a big strategic partnership with the OPEC countries, and some of them have caused trouble before. In combination, these countries could be a serious threat, especially since they can pile on with the opportunistic abandon of a bar fight: If our forces get sucked into the Middle East more than we expect, we could lose our strategic mobility, tempting countries like North Korea to make their move.

None of these disasters, however, are imminent. China is focusing on local matters, Europe seems resigned to complaining without doing much, the Arab countries have no powerful unified military organizations, and there's no talk of them ganging up on us. So the answer to the question "who...is going to intervene" is that no one will intervene if we act before our enemies coordinate their efforts.