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Sherman's
300,000 and the Caliphate's Three Million
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When General William Tecumseh Sherman burned the city of Atlanta in
1864, he warned, "I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion
that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill
three hundred thousand I have told you of so often, and the further they
run the harder for us to get them." Add a zero to calibrate the
problem in the Levant today. War in the Middle East is less a strategic
than a demographic phenomenon, the resolution of which will come with the
exhaustion of the pool of potential fighters.
The Middle East has plunged into a new Thirty Years War, allows Richard
Haass, the president of the Council of Foreign Relations:
It is a region wracked by religious struggle between competing
traditions of the faith. But the conflict is also between militants and
moderates, fueled by neighboring rulers seeking to defend their interests
and increase their influence. Conflicts take place within and between
states; civil wars and proxy wars become impossible to distinguish.
Governments often forfeit control to smaller groups - militias and the
like - operating within and across borders. The loss of life is
devastating, and millions are rendered homeless.
Well and good: I predicted in 2006 that
the George W. Bush administration's blunder would provoke another Thirty
Years War in the region, and repeated the diagnosis many times since. But
I doubt that Mr. Haass (or Walter
Russell Mead, who cited the Haass article) has given sufficient
thought to the implications.
How does one handle wars of this sort? In 2008,
I argued for a "Richelovian" foreign policy, that is, emulation
of the evil genius who guided France to victory at the conclusion of the
Thirty Years War in 1648. Wars of this sort end when two generations of
fighters are killed. They last for decades (as did the Peloponnesian War,
the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars of the 20th century) because
one kills off the fathers in the first half of the war, and the sons in
the second.
This new Thirty Years War has its origins in a demographic peak and an
economic trough. There are nearly 30 million young men aged 15 to 24 in
Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, a bulge generation produced by pre-modern
fertility rates that prevailed a generation ago. But the region's
economies cannot support them. Syria does not have enough water to
support an agricultural population, and the displacement of hundreds of
thousands of farmers into tent cities preceded its civil war. The West
mistook the death spasms of a civilization for an "Arab
Spring," and its blunders channeled the youth bulge into a regional
war.
The way to win such a war is by attrition, that is, by feeding into
the meat-grinder a quarter to a third of the enemy's available manpower.
Once a sufficient number of those who wish to fight to the death have had
the opportunity to do so, the war stops because there are insufficient
recruits to fill the ranks. That is how Generals Grant and Sherman fought
the American Civil War, and that is the indicated strategy in the Middle
East today.
It is a horrible business. It was not inevitable. It came about
because of the ideological rigidity of the Bush Administration,
compounded by the strategic withdrawal of the Obama administration. It
could have been avoided by the cheap and simple expedient bombing of
Iran's nuclear program and Revolutionary Guards bases, followed by an
intensive subversion effort aimed at regime change in Teheran. Former
Vice President Dick Cheney advocated this course of action, but then
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice persuaded Bush that the Muslim world
would never forgive America for an attack on another Muslim state.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, warned Bush that America's occupation army in
Iraq had become hostage to Iranian
retaliation: if America bombed Iran, Iran could exact vengeance in
American blood in the cities of Iraq. Then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
Mike Mullen told Charlie Rose on March 16, 2009:
What I worry about in terms of an attack on Iran is, in addition to
the immediate effect, the effect of the attack, it's the unintended
consequences. It's the further destabilization in the region. It's how
they would respond. We have lots of Americans who live in that region who
are under the threat envelope right now [because of the] capability that
Iran has across the Gulf. So, I worry about their responses and I worry
about it escalating in ways that we couldn't predict.
The Bush administration was too timid to take on Iran; the Obama
administration views Iran as a prospective ally. Even Neville Chamberlain
did not regard Hitler as prospective partner in European security. But
that is what Barack Obama said in March to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg:
What I'll say is that if you look at Iranian behavior, they are
strategic, and they're not impulsive. They have a worldview, and they see
their interests, and they respond to costs and benefits. And that isn't
to say that they aren't a theocracy that embraces all kinds of ideas that
I find abhorrent, but they're not North Korea. They are a large, powerful
country that sees itself as an important player on the world stage, and I
do not think has a suicide wish, and can respond to incentives.
Bush may have been feckless, but Obama is mad.
With Iran neutralized, Syrian President Basher Assad would have had no
choice but to come to terms with Syria's Sunni majority; as it happens,
he had the firepower to expel millions of them. Without the protection of
Tehran, Iraq's Shia would have had to compromise with Sunnis and Kurds.
Iraqi Sunnis would not have allied with ISIS against the Iranian-backed
regime in Baghdad. A million or more Iraqis would not have been displaced
by the metastasizing Caliphate.
The occupation of Iraq in the pursuit of nation building was colossally
stupid. It wasted thousands of lives and disrupted millions, cost the
better part of a trillion dollars, and demoralized the American public
like no failure since Vietnam – most of all America's young people. Not
only did it fail to accomplish its objective, but it kept America stuck
in a tar-baby trap, unable to take action against the region's main
malefactor. Worst of all: the methods America employed in order to give
the Iraq war the temporary appearance of success set in motion the
disaster we have today. I warned of this in a May 4, 2010 essay entitled,
General
Petraeus' Thirty Years War (Asia Times Online, May 4, 2010).
The great field marshal of the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, Albrecht
von Wallenstein, taught armies to live off the land, and succeeded so
well that nearly half the people of Central Europe starved to death
during the conflict. General David Petraeus, who heads America's Central
Command (CENTCOM), taught the land to live off him. Petraeus' putative
success in the Iraq "surge" of 2007-2008 is one of the weirder
cases of Karl Marx's quip of history repeating itself first as tragedy
second as farce. The consequences will be similar, that is, hideous.
Wallenstein put 100,000 men into the field, an army of terrifying size
for the times, by turning the imperial army into a parasite that consumed
the livelihood of the empire's home provinces. The Austrian Empire fired
him in 1629 after five years of depredation, but pressed him back into
service in 1631. Those who were left alive joined the army, in a
self-feeding spiral of destruction on a scale not seen in Europe since
the 8th century. Wallenstein's power grew with the implosion of civil
society, and the Austrian emperor had him murdered in 1634.
Petraeus accomplished the same thing with (literally) bags of money.
Starting with Iraq, the American military has militarized large parts of
the Middle East and Central Asia in the name of pacification. And now
America is engaged in a grand strategic withdrawal from responsibility in
the region, leaving behind men with weapons and excellent reason to use
them.
There is no way to rewind the tape after the fragile ties of
traditional society have been ripped to shreds by war. All of this was
foreseeable; most of it might have been averted. But the sordid players
in this tragicomedy had too much reputation at stake to reverse course
when it still was possible. Now they will spend the declining years of
their careers blaming each other.
Three million men will have to die before the butchery comes to an
end. That is roughly the number of men who have nothing to go back to,
and will fight to the death rather than surrender.
ISIS by itself is overrated. It is a horde enhanced by captured heavy
weapons, but cannot fly warplanes in a region where close air support is
the decisive factor in battle. The fighters of the Caliphate cannot hide
under the jungle canopy like the North Vietnamese. They occupy terrain
where aerial reconnaissance can identify every stray cat. The Saudi and
Jordanian air forces are quite capable of defending their borders. Saudi
Arabia has over 300 F-15′s and 72 Typhoons, and more than 80 Apache
attack helicopters. Jordan has 60 F16′s as well as 25 Cobra attack helicopters.
The putative Caliphate can be contained; it cannot break out into Saudi
Arabia and Jordan, and it cannot advance far into the core Shia territory
of Iraq. It can operate freely in Syria, in a war of attrition with the
Iranian backed government army. The grim task of regional security policy
is to channel the butchery into areas that do not threaten oil production
or transport.
Ultimately, ISIS is a distraction. The problem is Iran. Without Iran,
Hamas would have no capacity to strike Israel beyond a few dozen
kilometers past the Gaza border. Iran now has GPS-guided missiles which
are much harder to shoot down than ordinary ballistic missiles (an
unguided missile has a trajectory that is easy to calculate after launch;
guided missiles squirrel about seeking their targets). If Hamas acquires
such rockets – and it will eventually if left to its own devices – Israel
will have to strike further, harder and deeper to eliminate the threat.
That confrontation will not come within a year, and possibly not within
five years, but it looms over the present hostilities. The region's
security will hinge on the ultimate reckoning with Iran.
David P Goldman is Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy
Research and the Was Family Fellow at the Middle East Forum. His book
How
Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) was published by
Regnery Press in September 2011. A volume of his essays on culture,
religion and economics, It's
Not the End of the World – It's Just the End of You, also appeared
that fall, from Van Praag Press.
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