by Alex Evans | Aug 2, 2007 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
Included in Matthew d’Ancona’s highly readable report back from Gordon Brown’s trip to the US – the excellent news that GB has become a devotee of leading 4GW theorist David Kilcullen (about whom we first posted in April):
[Brown] has been impressed by the work of David Kilcullen, a former Australian army officer and academic anthropologist who now works for the US State Department and is the senior counter-insurgency adviser to the multinational force in Iraq. Kilcullen’s core belief is that the war on terror is better described as a ‘global counter-insurgency’: he refers to the ‘information battlefield’ but insists that the West’s strategy must be radically localised; each region, each village, needs a different counter-terrorist tactic.
The Brown camp agrees that the propaganda campaigns adopted by Bush’s long-time ally Karen Hughes, the US under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, have been much too centralised and old-fashioned. The Kilcullen Doctrine on winning ‘hearts and minds’ is based not on making local people feel affection for you, but on persuading them that you can protect them better than the enemy. In Iraq, Kilcullen wrote in June, ‘protecting and controlling the population is do-able, but destroying the enemy is not’.
Meanwhile, young Muslims drawn to the flames of Islamism — in West Yorkshire as much as Basra — have to be targeted for ‘ideological conversion’, a process Kilcullen compares to the tactics used to keep young men out of street gangs. Easier said than done, of course. But this is the way Brown’s counter-terrorist thinking is heading: away from invasions, ‘crusades’, and ‘shock and awe’ and towards something that owes much more to a Cold War theorist such as George Kennan than it does to Donald Rumsfeld or, indeed, to Tony Blair.
by Alex Evans | Jul 31, 2007 | North America, UK
Most coverage this morning of the Bush-Brown summit at Camp David stresses the extent to which both men were at pains to defuse any perception of a bust-up. But Benedict Brogan (the Daily Mail’s political editor and one of the best bloggers around on UK politics), who has been travelling with the Brown party, has a slightly different take in a series of posts on his site. He reports:
As he races back to the airport in another sirens-blazing motorcade, Mr Brown will be entitled to congratulate himself on the way his first visit to the US went. Much of what he wanted to achieve was presentational: he and his officials sweated the imagery of the Camp David visit, and I hear there were grim faces in the White House contingent when they discovered Mr Brown planned to read a fairly blunt statement at yesterday’s press conference. “It was designed to be uncomfortable, and it had to be done,” one British source told me. Desperate to cling on to British support as Iraq implodes around him, Mr Bush was willing to tolerate just about anything from his guest. He now knows that he will get plain speaking, rigorous formality, and little else. In exchange, he talked up Mr Brown’s personal qualities, and offered that Britain is also America’s “single most important strategic relationship”.
Another subtle shift picked up on by various US foriegn policy Kremlinologists: Bush too said that the US-UK relationship was “our most important bilateral relationship”. As the FT noted, “…the usual formula is to say ‘there is no more important relationship’ than that between the US and Britain – a form of words that can include other partners.”
Practically zero coverage of the Brown visit on the US blogosphere, though.
by David Steven | Jul 31, 2007 | Conflict and security
The Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins first described the idea of ‘brittle power’ in a book published twenty-five years (!) ago. Modern energy systems, he warned, were highly vulnerable to shocks, ‘easily shattered by accident or malice.’
In a recent interview with the excellent Grist magazine, Lovins describes his efforts to promote a more resilient energy system in Iraq:
Some of us have made three attempts at [bringing decentralized power to Iraq] and there’s a fourth now under discussion. The first three attempts, the third of which was backed by the Iraqi power minister, were vetoed by the U.S. political authorities on the grounds that they’d already given big contracts to Bechtel, Halliburton, et. al to rebuild the old centralized system, which of course the bad guys are knocking down faster than it can be put back up.
(more…)
by David Steven | Jul 30, 2007 | Conflict and security
According to Wesley Clark, in the weeks following 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld was hoping to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, [with] Iran.”
Clark’s account in full:
About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
by Alex Evans | Jul 26, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa, North America
We haven’t tended to engage much with Iraq on GlobalDashboard, in my case largely because I’m not sure I have much to add – though I’ve long felt that Democrats calling for withdrawal don’t seem to have much of a strategy underpinning their position. But when two serious experts on completely opposite ends of the political spectrum say the same thing on the same day, then it’s at least worth a listen.
First up, Bill Clinton’s National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, had this to say in an FT piece on the 23rd, co-authored with Bruce Riedel at Brookings:
A clear US commitment to a complete, irreversible withdrawal from Iraq may now be the only way to develop a regional concert of powers that could work with Iraqis to try to stabilise the country and cauterise the conflict.
The continuing US and British occupation is a roadblock to that co-operation. The galvanising impact of a decision to depart unequivocally can be the last best chance at preventing the conflict from boiling over beyond Iraq to the whole region. How we design and implement our departure is our last significant remaining leverage.
Meanwhile, our favourite grandfather of fourth generation warfare, Bill Lind, has a piece in the 30 July edition of the American Conservative entitled “How to win in Iraq”, which he previews on his blog:
The central strategic question is, how can a state be re-created in Iraq? There is no guaranteed answer; it may not be possible. What is guaranteed, however, is that the United States cannot do it. The problem is legitimacy. To be real, a future Iraqi state must be perceived by Iraqis as legitimate. But anything the United States, as a foreign invader and occupier, creates, endorses or assists automatically thereby loses its legitimacy.
What the U.S. must therefore do is get out of the way. When elements in Iraq move to re-create a state — and those elements must be independent of the current al-Maliki government, which, as an American creation, has no legitimacy — we have to let them try to succeed. There is, in turn, only one way for us to get out of the way, and that is to get out of Iraq, as rapidly as we can.
