Center for a New American Security

What's a normal contingent

What's a normal contingent of policy and Army forces?

10,000 U.N. Peace Keepers?

Come on Andrew forget

Come on Andrew forget Galula, his was a method to support a policy of imperialism. Of course with regard to Algeria pacification doesnt mean national self determination but rather more subordination to the French Empire. It was DeGaulle who had the vision and strength to see that the whole thing was not worth it, the FLN had not been defeated, and that France must withdraw to save itself. Perhaps President Obama can learn something from DeGaulle instead of his senior Generals and battery of tactical experts who continue to put forward a one way only approach to Afghanistan.

gian

Two words or phrases, both

Two words or phrases, both of which might be lost in translation, or suffer (perhaps) from deliberate (or accidental) ambiguity.

"Most"

"take care of itself"

I saw two people annointed experts on COIN (one a former practitioner), by some element or elements of the national security apparatus, argue (or at least the former practitioner) that the threshold for - well, if not victory, then something - should be an acceptable level of violence.

I fear I merely beg AM's question - although at least I'm not talking about the Burlington Coat Factory - but does that level of violence occur before, during, or after most of said contingent has left?

And what does "take care of itself" mean? If that includes torture by the ISF, but a stable Iraq (say, one without IEDs), does that include taking care of itself, and/or an acceptable threshold of violence? Should one use qualitative measures, quantitative measures, some combination of the two, or some form of verstehen (which probably is another way of saying, in this context, qualitative measues) to measure whether Iraq is taking care of itself? (I'm picking nits, but, you know, I'm a former debater (primarily parliamentary), and we aim for the points we might be able to win.)

Finally, let's be realistic - even if there is not a single US boot on the ground (other than the Marine Security Guards) - the US won't hesitate to (say) use drones (to say nothing of, perhaps, putting boots on the ground, if only in short-term DA missions).

Furthermore, to play off the term "realistic," how will the US act with respect to *outside* actors - i.e., in the international sphere. I'm guessing like any other hegemon that can largely do what it wants - protect it from unwanted influence. Given Iraq's physical location (I hate the term geopolitical), though, it's not clear the extent to which transnational actor might play a role in Iraqi affairs; the concept of "normal" assumes a polity existing in isolation.

ADTS

Contrary to what gian p

Contrary to what gian p gentile claims the FLN was militarily defeated 1958 and reduced to a handfull (but still active) militants in Tunisia unable to cross the Maurice line. De Gaulle was right to abandon the idea of Algeria as a French departement. But the aftermath was a catastrophy (very much like Vietnam minus Saigon's fall) because of the hastened withdrawal. It permiited a coup of left-wing FLN extremists who developed the best "Cuban" style bureaucratic dictatorship. These people are still screwing up Algeria and are unable to develop it. They created the conditions for an horrible unnecessary civil war against the Islamists. Algeria is today a dump compared to Morocco and Tunisia, despite a bigger territory, better agricultural resources and most of all sitting on huge gas reserves. Maybe all this could have been avoided if the French had better organized the transition to independence.

To De Gaulle's defense must be said that he had to face a military coup and a huge internal communist threat, which is not the case in today's USA.

Besides, being lectured about French "imperialism" by the greatest imperialist power "evah" (or maybe from the UK?) is typical of the antifrench rethoric, so let skip it. Even if Obama could learn something from De Gaulle (which I seriously doubt) and avoid the mistakes he did in the Algerian aftermath, it's not sure that an early withdrawal would be the solution. On the contrary it's probable that if a De Gaulle "equivalent" had been in charge after 9/11, the French Afghanistan engagement had been much bigger

Re: Col. Gentile....It is

Re: Col. Gentile....It is nice to see someone in print remind people that David Gulala was operating in a defense of empire conflict. It is difficult to think of any such conflicts in which the Nationalists (i.e. insurgents) did not eventually win. In other words, counterinsurgency in the name of empire is not likely to succeed. Friendly critics of COIN would do well to examine these failures as well as the pitfalls of indirect rule. Too much of contemporary nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan has occasional flashes of the likes of Lord Lugard; a scary proposition. This is not, however, to be taken as a broad attack on COIN but rather an in house critique.

Victory is an end worth the

Victory is an end worth the price paid to reach it. By that standard, victory in Iraq for the United States ceased to be a realistic objective sometime in 2005.

This is not a point I'd care to beat soldiers now leaving Iraq around the ears with. They did their duty, and their part to keep a very bad situation from becoming worse. From the standpoint of American national interests, though, this ship ran hard aground in Iraq right from the start. It absorbed the entire attention of the American government's senior levels for many months at a time, vacuumed up vast sums of borrowed money, and burned through the lives of several thousands of American soldiers. No outcome now possible in Iraq comes close to redeeming the mistakes that laid this cost upon the country.

You mean Iraqi Foreign

You mean Iraqi Foreign Minister and Dictator Hoshyar Zebari?

Hasn't Zebari been in office longer than any other Iraq Government Official, since the start of the war? He's been in longer than two terms and should probably consider alternative employment.....don't you think?

Doesn't Iraq have a democracy? Wasn't that what this war was found over, an insane militant dictator or was it about those WMD's? I'm starting to forget? Zebari and Chulabi are both starting to look like pretty slick matchstick men.

ADTS, in my opinion Zebari should resign and enjoy his retirement and visit his family in the United States. He's got lots of family in the in States and should probably spend time teaching and being a good mentor for some young aspiring Iraqi Diplomat.

Something to get your mind

Something to get your mind around.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870412560457545016271486772...

It is not about what you win, it is about what you don't lose.

Where is the battle field ? .....it is between our ears.

@ French Visitor (mind ye

@ French Visitor (mind ye I'm partial to the Frogs, or at least yer women),

Empires or Hegemony's (H) die bloody deaths.

Mencius, that's wonderful -

Mencius, that's wonderful - John Foster Dulles - 'cause that jackal got his start in Iraq aka Mesopotamia in the post World War One era, when the victors moved to seize control of the Middle East oil concessions that Germany had desired.

You gotta know a little history to understand. Churchill takes the British Navy to petroleum - faster ships, more maneuverable - in the early 1900s. This means that the Hostmen of Newcastle lose their coaling contracts for British ships, and it means that Britain is now completely dependent on Middle Eastern oil.

Germany wants a place in the sun, so it builds the Berlin-Baghdad railway to bring oil to fuel industrial development. The British and Russians are opposed. The first military engagement of World War One takes place in Iraq. You've seen "Lawrence of Arabia?" That whole story was a minor sideshow in the struggle for control of Middle Eastern oil - Iraq was where the central action took place.

So, Dulles? This is his brother, actually - but it's an amazing repetition of history:

"But the oil potential of Mesopotamia was not forgotten. In late 1915 and 1916, a British official and a Frenchman hammered out an understanding for the postwar order in Mesopotamia. Known by their names as the Sykes-Picot agreement, it rather casually assigned Mosul in northeastern Mesopotamia, one of the most promising potential oil regions, to a future French sphere of influence... The issue became more urgent in 1917 when British forces captured Baghdad."

French imperialism! British imperialism! German imperialism! To the victor go the spoils - but American imperialism? We're "spreading democracy!"

"...But oil exploration and production in Iraq could not begin without a new, sounder concession granted by the government. For one thing, Washington consistently refused to recognize the validity of the 1914 grant to the Turkish Petroleum company. Allen Dulles, the chief of the Division of Near Eastern Affairs in the State Department, carefully monitored the long negotiations for the U.S. government. In 1924, he told Teagle [head of Standard Oil] that the United States government believed that the Turkish Petroleum Company's claim to a concession was "invalid". . . . Yet the various Iraqi cabinets, fearful of nationalist sentiments and domestic criticism - which sometimes expressed itself in the form of assassination - were most reluctant to take responsibility for signing over a revised concession to the foreigners."

That's no radical liberal, but rather Carnegie oil industry historian Daniel Yergin. The Dulles Brothers are quite a pair - one went on to fame as head of the CIA from 1953-1961 - an era during which he had the nationalist leader of Iran, Mossadegh, removed from power in the first of a long string of CIA-sponsored coups. These guys also initiated MK-ULTRA, which began the CIA torture program that eventually arrived at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Full circle - and the Iraq hydrocarbon law today? The Iraqi Parliament won't pass it for the same reason as in 1924 - they're afraid of outraged Iraqis going all berserk as a result.

I thank commenters upthread

I thank commenters upthread for their thoughts on my comment here. As AM has posted again on this subject I will add any additional thoughts I have to that thread.

John Foster Dulles and

John Foster Dulles and Algeria.

For instance:

The war for Algeria between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) sparked a bureaucratic war in Washington concerning the level and type of contacts that the United States should establish and maintain with the Algerian rebels. Because the US Department of State recognized Algeria's status as a Department of France, the US Consulate-General's office in Algiers fell under the auspices of the Bureau for European Affairs (EUR). Sensitive to French strategic, economic, military, political and psychological stakes in Algeria, EUR opposed any public embrace of the FLN.(10) But the political and military spillover effects of the Algerian war throughout the Arab world made this issue a hot topic for the Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs (NEA), as well as for the Africa Bureau (AF), to which Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya were relocated following the creation of AF in 1958.(11) Subject to a different set of pressures and concerns, NEA, the Africa Bureau, and the US Mission to the United Nations (USUN) believed Washington should adopt a stridently public anti-colonial stand on the Algerian question and to expand official contacts with the FLN in order to insure a pro-West, or at least neutralist, independent Algeria.

This is bureaucratic gobbledegook, of course - it's just something I found in a Google search. Note the phrase "public embrace of the FLN." Thus this "bureaucratic war in Washington" is over whether Foggy Bottom, which is already screwing the FLN five times a night in private, should show up in public with the tramp on its arm. In other words, the options are: Washington should privately support the FLN and publicly deny it, or Washington should officially order France to surrender Algeria, a department of France, to its little brown Ay-rab brothers.

If France had still been a genuine sovereign country in the '50s and '60s, it would long since have broken relations with Washington over this matter. Supporting rebels in someone else's country is quite simply an act of war. If A can commit an act of war against B, without B going to war against A, B is at least under the suzerainty of A. The genius of De Gaulle, as a politician, was his ability to take it in the ass from the Anglo-Americans on a daily basis, while looking and acting like a big strong man.

Of course the mask of sovereignty has long since been dropped - France is ruled from Brussels. The real power belonged not to De Gaulle, but Monnet. A Foggy Bottom man to the inner pelvic girdle. And as for the Algerians, they are on their way to getting all the other departements. As Jean Raspail put it: la patrie trahie par la République. Is there still a testicle or two in France? I'll believe it when I see it.

What Moldbug in his endless

What Moldbug in his endless look for other's cojones doesn't understand is the ability of Europeans to take it up the ass and survive, while the US probably won't in a similar situation, like the current Saudi or Chinese sodomizing. So once again lecturing should be avoided.

The US dirty tricks on France are only part of the fair game between old friends. Moldbug seems to forget that for example France's departure from NATO (inclusive base removals from French territory) - not to mention the recent Iraq "no-no" - demand more balls than what other nations (specially the UK) secretly long to do but don't dare. That's probably what the US can't stand, being told that it is not exceptional after all.

Another, even by French standards, royally screwed nation is of course the UK, starting with the Suez crisis where the US basically ruined the remaining Empire, through ambiguous statements regarding the Falklands (Monroe anyone ?) until the de facto Obamian dismissal of the special relationship. Are there any balls left in the Kingdom, Cameron ?

France isn't ruled from Brussels. France "rules" (after a little conventional German armtwisting) the IMF, the ECB and the WTO (check all 3 presidents). France will be the president of the G20 soon and later the G8.

But no need for bragging even if I do wonder if this constant bashing (in most cases contradicted by simple fact-checking) doesn't bottom in a secret jealousy regarding the size of our testicles. How can you explain it another way ?

Oddly enough, McCain

Oddly enough, McCain received a bit more money from employees of the State Department than Obama. From fewer donors, but still a surprise. Ron Paul received $500 from one dude. No hits for Ralph Nader (or Kucinich) from State, but it may have less coverage further back.

of course the above comments

of course the above comments are my own personal views and do not reflect those of the US Army, ISAF, or DoD. :o)

Now that's a typical French

Now that's a typical French attitude - we got screwed, but it's okay! Because Britain got screwed harder. Factually, I can't argue with that. Sexually, it still leaves me wondering about those testicles.

Brussels may be ruled by Frenchmen. Technically, Jean Monnet was a Frenchman. Technically, Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian. The mandarins of Brussels are not terribly concerned about ethnicity - why should I be? Their worldview is the worldview of Jean Monnet, which was that of John Foster Dulles.

The early Cold War establishment, although it looks like a forest of giants by today's standards, was not by historical standards a period of Great Men and Big Ideas. (Or if it was, the Great Men preferred not to have their names in the paper.) Rather, it's a period of bureaucratic intrigue. Trying to identify any substantive difference between the ideologies of Eisenhower, Dulles and Kennedy is a fool's errand. Money quote from the previously linked doc:

Despite what appeared to be a pro-French/anti-FLN US policy during the Eisenhower administration, both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles opposed colonialism on moral grounds.(16) More practically, they realized that French colonialism tainted the Western alliance and opened the area to communist penetration. Dulles privately agreed with many of the points raised by Kennedy in his Algeria speech, but disapproved of JFK's tactics.(17) Pressing for a change in French policy toward Algeria was `the kind of work that is not necessarily effectuated with a brass band'.(18)

In the case of the Algerian rebellion, Eisenhower and Dulles demonstrated an ability to differentiate between communism and revolutionary Arab nationalism.(19) Working quietly behind the scenes, while prodding France to abandon Algerie francaise, the Eisenhower administration established contacts with the FLN. Although the FLN accepted support from Egypt and the Eastern bloc, US officials realized that military realities necessitated this strategy of survival. They felt confident, however, that the FLN represented a moderate nationalist force. The FLN's rejection of communism as a foreign ideology and the predominance within the rebel organization of the moderate faction, led by Ferhat Abbas, encouraged Washington in this line of thinking.(20)

In order to foster the FLN's moderate nationalist orientation as well as to prepare for the possibility of a French disaster and precipitous pullout from Algeria, in November 1956, Secretary Dulles authorized regional bureau-level discussions with FLN representatives at the State Department.(21) To mollify the French, Dulles agreed to keep Paris informed of all US-FLN contacts. Then, in May 1958, Dulles authorized the US embassy in Tunisia to establish discreet contacts -- although not to involve the US Consulate-General himself -- with FLN officials in Tunis.(22) Secretary Dulles also refused a French demarche to revoke the travel visas of FLN representatives in the United States, who were engaging in highly successful `propaganda' activities at the United Nations.(23) While the French were annoyed with the State Department's practice of maintaining contact with dissident groups, under the direction of the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, the CIA established covert ties with the FLN that continued to expand even after the State Department closed the door on the FLN in the spring of 1959.(24)

By closing the door on the FLN, and by continuing to arm the French and to defend France at the United Nations, the Eisenhower administration appeared to have subordinated moral and regional political considerations to alliance politics. That is, the Eisenhower administration was held hostage by the `NATO imperative'. Washington's French tilt was reinforced by the return to power of General Charles de Gaulle following the collapse of the French Fourth Republic in May 1958. Since mid-1957, President Eisenhower and the State Department believed that only Charles de Gaulle could solve the Algerian problem.(25) With the creation of the French Fifth Republic and the concentration of power in the hands of a strong French president, Eisenhower and Dulles felt much more confident deferring to de Gaulle (than they had with his predecessors) on North African affairs and agreed to maintain a low profile on Algeria. (26)

Again, this is of course Atlanticist propaganda. But it's not hard to read between the lines. Frankly, studying Galula without understanding this political big picture is an exercise in historical masturbation. The key fact about the FLN is that it had patrons in Washington. That's why it won - regardless of military details, torture, no torture, etc, etc.

Since De Gaulle was

Since De Gaulle was repeatedly elected and only left when one of his referenda failed, it might be more apt to deem (metropolitan) France a nation of quislings.

How - specifically - does

How - specifically - does having ties with the people in the U.S. state department enable the FLN to win? The U.S. is still giving money to the French. I haven't seen evidence that the U.S. was giving any material aid to the FLN. I guess talks could help the FLN morale, but that's a stretch.

People in a war want to be on the winning side. They like the strong horse. They can see that eventually State will find a way to give Algeria to the FLN, so they want to side with the FLN and be a big part of this big happy bandwagon. And this is not just true for Algerians - it is just as true in the Quai D'Orsay.

And indeed, that's exactly what happened. France won the war and then surrendered. So did the British in Kenya, the Dutch in Indonesia, and - heck - the Americans in Vietnam. Why?

Because that's what international public opinion wanted. International public opinion had come to believe that colonialism was an antiquated moral obscenity. Why?

Because international public opinion is a product of the international press, and the international press had come to believe that colonialism was an antiquated moral obscenity. Why?

Because journalists are people and people like power. Journalists already have a lot of power, of course, but there are a lot of journalists and they are all competing. By taking power away from those who have it, you show that you have power yourself. Hence, all those involved in freeing Algeria from the French (or South Africa from the Dutch, or Greece from the heathen Turk) felt the rush of power in their testicles. That this power was entirely fallacious and masturbatory - that the international press had no influence over the FLN, whose atrocities were a thousand times worse than those of the French - was unfortunate, but it was still power rather than no-power.

Of course, it was not just the press that jumped on these bandwagons, but all of educated, fashionable civil society. It is impossible to separate the opinions of the press from those of the State Department, or those of any sophisticated international intellectual. No one chic or respectable in France supported the OAS. That was left for the likes of Pierre Poujade - basically, Sarah Palin as a Frog.

Yet when the Germans were in town and looked like winners, educated, fashionable Parisian intellectuals bent over and spread it for them. Conclusion: everyone loves a strong horse, especially a French girly-man. This is how you will know the New World Order is over: when all the opportunists depart it. It will look awfully bare without opportunists. So many of its paladins know, in their hearts, that they themselves are opportunists, but are just as confident that everyone around them is a true believer.

And indeed, that's exactly

And indeed, that's exactly what happened. France won the war and then surrendered

Why are you blaming State and Dulles then? It seems that the French people are primarily to blame. The journalists and intellectuals who inform them receive secondary blame.

Is your take that State acts as a subconscious, spontaneous coordinator - whoever state legitimizes, the press legitimizes, and when the press legitimizes a faction the people soon vote to give that faction control of the colony?