Center for a New American Security

John Tirman has an important if flawed op-ed in today's New York Times. He urges U.S. military and political leaders -- as well as the general public -- to be honest about civilian casualties in war. Tirman argues that U.S. military officers need to be wary of civilian casualties for strategic reasons, and here the two of us are in violent agreement. Tirman also argues that the U.S. public and its leaders need to consider the total human cost associated with war for moral reasons, and here too we are in violent agreement. Whenever I speak about the war in Iraq -- whether it is over dinner with friends last night or on NPR a few weeks ago -- I always make sure I mention the terrible loss of Iraqi lives. We Americans have to be honest about this. Last night, someone asked me if I thought the Iraq War had been worth it, and though I said the Iraq war had accomplished certain things (the fall of Saddam, a nascent democratic system of government), it most certainly had not been worth it. The three pieces of data I went on to cite were a) the $1 trillion spent, b) the 4,484 U.S. military lives lost, and c) the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives lost. I could have gone on to cite coalition casualties, the Iraqi refugee crisis, and wounded soldiers and civilians, but you get my drift: I am sympathetic to the aim of Tirman's op-ed.

But then Tirman writes this:

In 2006, two separate household surveys, by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and by researchers from Johns Hopkins University, found between 400,000 and 650,000 “excess deaths” in Iraq as a result of the war. At the time, however, the commanding general in Iraq put the number at 50,000 and President Bush had claimed in late 2005 that it was just 30,000.

As Tirman has to know, that Johns Hopkins / Lancet survey was incredibly controversial when it was released and remains controversial today. It relied on cluster sampling, in Iraq, at the height of that country's civil war. I cannot think of a poorer environment in which one could do that kind of survey. Yes, it was peer-reviewed, but an academically sophisticated methodology cannot compensate for poor data. (Garbage in = garbage out.) Both Gen. Casey and Pres. Bush were likely much closer to the mark, as the iCasualties figures from the very height of the war in Iraq -- 2005-2007 -- are way lower than the figures from either of the studies Tirman cites. (And if Tirman thinks the Iraqi Min. of Health had the capacity, in 2006, to accurately measure the cost of the war on the Iraqi civilian populace, he needs to spend more time in peacetime bureaucracies in the Arabic-speaking world. I apologize for painting with such a broad brush, but those with experience dealing with large state bureaucracies in Egypt or Syria know of what I speak.)

Tirman's op-ed is basically a call for the United States to use violence more selectively, and it's a pity he overstates his case (as tends to happen in New York Times op-eds), because I agree with him. As has been demonstrated time and again, the use of indiscriminate violence in civil war environments confuses the population, scrambles incentive structures for behavior, and tends to inflame the population against the force using the violence. Selective violence is much more effective.

That's the strategic argument. The moral argument is that the U.S. public needs to understand the total human costs associated with its wars. That may lead the United States to be more selective as to when it applies U.S. military power abroad and how it does so. On the other hand, it might also lead the United States to think carefully about how it ends its wars as well. There is a fashionable sign in my neighborhood, for example, that reads "End the War in Afghanistan." I assume this sign is meant to read "End U.S. Involvement in the War in Afghanistan," because I myself am unsure as to whether or not the U.S. withdrawal will ameliorate or worsen the conflict there. Progressives like Tirman should keep that in mind: the U.S. military is only one actor in environments like Iraq and Afghanistan, and the U.S. presence is not the only driver of conflict. It is even possible -- whisper it -- that increased U.S. combat presence and operations might actually serve the interests of the civilian population in some cases. That's certainly the case, at least, in most stabilization operations.

Anyway, my congratulations to John Tirman for this important op-ed.

UPDATED: One of the folks in the comments section points out that Tirman directed the funding for the Lancet/JHU study. Well, that explains it! (I wish he would have disclosed this small but significant point in his op-ed.) Tirman apparently believes between 800,000 and 1.3 million Iraqis were killed in the war, which is a simply incredible claim. No one else puts the number that high. The Associated Press (110,600), the Iraq Body Count Project (103,536 — 113,125), and the Wikileaks logs (109,032) all put the number much, much lower. At what point does someone admit that their numbers just might be off and that their own study had deep flaws? I mean, only 87,000 death certificates were issued in the worst years of the war (2005-2008). Tirman might be the only guy left who references the Lancet/JHU study as having been sound.

I want to highlight three op-eds on the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. The first is by Brett McGurk, an early supporter within the Bush Administration for the "Surge" who later helped negotiate the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement. (People in position to know about such things often credit McGurk, along with fellow NSC staffer Elissa Slotkin, as having been the U.S. official most responsible for the successful 2008 negotiations.) McGurk argues forcefully and persuasively against those -- such as Fred and Kim Kagan or Max Boot -- who have argued that an extension of U.S. forces in Iraq was possible or that Iran has won (and Obama has lost) the Iraq War:

[Our] trying to force an agreement through the Iraqi parliament would have been self-destructive. That had nothing to do with Iran and everything to do with Iraqi pride, history and nationalism. Even the most staunchly anti-Iranian Iraqi officials refused to publicly back a residual U.S. force — and in the end, they supported our withdrawal.

McGurk, bear in mind, is an interested party here, so caveat lector. All the same, knowing his reputation and experience, I trust the narrative he advances. Reidar Visser, meanwhile, argues that Chris Hill was the U.S. official most responsible for "losing" Iraq. I loudly voiced my own objections to Hill's appointment in 2009, but I am not sure I completely buy Reidar's arguments. Still, Reidar is an incredibly knowledgeable scholar on Iraq whose opinions are always grounded in fact and careful investigations.

Which brings us to the final op-ed, which I am only including because it highlights what a predictably partisan clown Charles Krauthammer has become in his advanced years. Krauthammer knows Iraq about as well as I know Washoe basketweaving traditions.* That doesn't stop him from weighing in, though, with typically thunderous certainty, about how the president lost the Iraq War. It's enough to have made Steve Metz wonder over Twitter whether or not Krauthammer is a secret Washington Post plot to discredit serious conservative thought. 

*To clarify, I know nothing about Washoe basketweaving traditions. I'm sure they are great, though.

I cannot decide whether to join in with all the hyperventilation over our withdrawal from Iraq (Ex. A, Ex. B) and ink a deal with Regnery for A Victory Lost: How Obama Defeated the United States in Iraq, and Murdered Puppies or take the time to defend the administration. The former would probably be a lot more fun, but some lingering sense of responsibility leads me to do the latter. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I have disagreed with the Bush and Obama Administrations pretty regularly on issues related to Iraq and Afghanistan, but I thought the Bush Administration did things pretty well regarding Iraq from 2006 onward and that the Obama Administration was correct to complete the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in compliance with the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the Bush Administration.

Let me just say a few things in response to some of the criticism of the Obama Administration by its neo-conservative critics (many of whom I respect and largely agree with on other issues).

1. Iran did win the Iraq War -- but in March of 2003, not November of 2011. If we were trying to contain Iran, knocking off that regime's mortal enemy in 2003 probably wasn't the hottest idea. A democratic, Shia-majority Iraq was always going to be friendlier with the regime in Tehran than a Sunni Arab-minority regime. You can still support the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 for any number of reasons, humanitarian or strategic, but you cannot then also complain years later about how Iran is empowered. Of course Iran is empowered. That was an obvious, easily-predictable risk we ran from the beginning.

2. Iraq is a sovereign nation, right? By our design, right? Well, if you are going to bust the Obama Administration's chops for not staying in Iraq, you then have to explain to me how we were supposed to stay in Iraq over the objections of the Iraqis themselves. My stance on staying in Iraq has always been that it was worth discussing -- so long as Iraq's leaders were willing to explain our continued presence in Iraq, in Arabic, to their constituents on live television. Anything else would be perceived as a continued occupation, exposing remaining U.S. troops to continued violent attacks. My college buddy Yochi Dreazen, who served as the Wall Street Journal's bureau chief in Iraq for two years at the height of the war, returned recently and discovered a massive disconnect between the debate in Baghdad over U.S. troops in Iraq and the debate in Washington over U.S. troops in Iraq. While we Americans were arguing over whether or not we should stay, the Iraqi voice was clear: they wanted us to go. I want to hear the administration's critics respond to the united opinion of Iraq's elected leaders and populace: are we to keep military forces in Iraq over the objection of the Iraqis themselves? If so, how is this not a new occupation? And does this Iraqi sovereignty we fought so hard for now not matter because of the threat posed by Iran? Because the one thing that drives me nuts about these criticisms of the Obama Administration is that they never allow space to discuss Iraqi sovereignty -- which matters in 2011 in a way that it did not in 2006.

Now, these are just the ways in which I would respond to the critics of the administration, who otherwise raise good points about U.S. interests, the threat posed by transnational terrorist groups, and Iranian influence in the region. Overall, though, I was convinced by the arguments made by Doug Ollivant, one of the men who worked on the Iraq staff of the Bush Administration's National Security Council. Read his essay -- which I am now posting for the second time -- and tell me why he is wrong.

Having pretty carefully considered the arguments for and against leaving troops in Iraq beyond this year, I ultimately found Doug Ollivant's argument to be the most persuasive. So I support the president's decision to end U.S. military involvement in the war in Iraq. But wars, like history, do not stop when America decides it no longer wants to be involved. This is worth remembering, both in terms of what is taking place in Iraq today as well as what might take place in Afghanistan in 2014. So by all means, say U.S. involvement in the war has ended. But think carefully before saying the war has ended.

Ready?

1. This nonsense about adding new medals to recognize service in Iraq and Afghanistan is just as ridiculous as people have been saying, and for even more reasons. The way the U.S. military has divided up the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into arbitrary phases is unnecessary and confusing. Ask a soldier if they have served in either country, and they will likely say, "Yes, two deployments to Iraq and three to Afghanistan" or something similar. They do not say, "Well, let's see, I had one deployment as part of the Liberation, one as part of the Transition, one deployment that overlapped between the Surge and Iraqi Sovereignty ... and then I deployed to Afghanistan as part of the Consolidation." That's silly. Just award one medal for service in each combat theater, and if you want to keep score beyond that, well, that's why God invented service stripes and valor awards.

2. I have mixed feelings about the news that the White House will now issue condolence letters to the families of soldiers who have committed suicide. First off, I care a lot less about condolence letters than I do about investing in psychological screening and counseling to reduce the number of suicides in the first place. Second, not all suicides are the result of combat stress. (One study demonstrated that "79 percent of army suicides occurred within the first three years of service, whether soldiers were deployed or not.") I have known soldiers who have died in Afghanistan in helicopter accidents and soldiers who have died in stateside helicopter crashes. Although neither crash was directly caused by enemy action, the families of the former received condolence letters. The families of the latter did not. If you're going to start writing letters to the families of all soldiers who commit suicide (where indirect cause of death cannot be clearly determined), should you not also start writing condolence letters to the families of all servicemen who die while serving on active duty? And what about the soldier who returns home from war, horrified by what he has seen, gets really drunk and dies (and maybe kills a few others) while driving under the influence? Does that guy's family get a letter? I mean, where do you draw the line between those who receive condolence letters and those who do not? My man Yochi Dreazen gets deeper into these questions in this National Journal article.

3. Speaking of PTSD, if a U.S. soldier wrote a difficult, painful-to-read, searingly honest essay on his or her struggle with PTSD, no one would tell that soldier that he or she does not have the right to write such an essay because they failed to also consider the effect of the war on innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. People would just accept that everyone has the right to share his or her own personal narrative, and that when people are brave enough to open up about their personal experiences, we should all give them the space to do so. Which is just one of the reasons why the outrage over Mac McLelland's essay annoys me.

There are two items of note I want to highlight to which I was not able to draw attention while traveling. The first is this post by my friend Steve Negus on Issandr's blog on how Libyan rebels are learning to fight by ... playing video games. Alternately fascinating and hilarious.

The second item to which I want to draw your attention is this paper by Doug Ollivant* for the New America Foundation challenging the "new orthodoxy" about what led to the dramatic drop in ethno-sectarian violence in Iraq in 2007. This is an excellent paper. Doug knows enough to know that we cannot definitively determine what caused the 2007 drop in violence, but he advances what he calls "an alternative, counter-narrative" to those offered by Tom Ricks, Bob Woodward, Kim Kagan, Linda Robinson and others.** (Which is in itself interesting in part because Doug is one of the heroes of these other narratives -- most especially that of Robinson.)

Doug is one of the smartest thinkers on counterinsurgency I know***, and his piece is littered with interesting observations, though again, it is as tough to prove Doug's narrative is any more valid, given the lack of evidence, than that of Tom Ricks or, say, Peter Feaver. There are just too many variables out there, and as I have argued ad nauseum, the best we can hope to do in the absence of causality is to establish correlation among all the things that happened.

Some of the more interesting observations, though, concern Afghanistan, from where Doug recently returned after a year spent as John Campbell's counterinsurgency advisor. Here are a few choice excerpts. This first one echos a point I made yesterday:

The President’s statements have been ambiguous, ever since his West Point speech of 2009, during which he both authorized an increase in troop strength, and gave a July 2011 date for the beginning of their withdrawal, recently confirmed in an address on the future of the war. This mixed message from the President (which continues to resonate despite post-Lisbon Conference messaging about 2014, and not 2011, being the key date) has been echoed by his administration. This ambiguity is almost certainly driven by the desire to reconcile the largely incompatible goals of permanently and decisively denying al Qaeda safe havens and Taliban establishment in Afghanistan, while simultaneously avoiding long-term intervention and nation building at astronomical cost. So in short, while the troops have arrived in Afghanistan, the unambiguous message of support and presence that accompanied the 2007 Iraq surge has not. We should not be surprised when politicians in both Afghanistan and Pakistan react accordingly.

This second bit is more sobering:

...it is unlikely that a push of more forces, better tactical counterinsurgency, and the arrival of a highly talented commander can compensate for a lack of political commitment and absence of shared goals between the host nation and the intervening power.

Read the whole paper here, watch Doug run his yap here, and many kudos to the New America Foundation for giving such a smart scholar-practitioner a home.

*Hahahaha, I love Doug like a brother, but he needs to change his profile picture. "Oui, c'est moi. Je suis au musée du Louvre parce que je suis un homme de culture. Regardez l'angoisse sur mon visage parce que je ne peux pas se permettre une coupe de cheveux."

**Carl Prine dings me for citing Robinson and Ricks in my recent IFRI paper (in his otherwise very touching, thought-provoking post), but I did write that this was an incomplete sample and not a full review of the literature. At least I did in the initial draft I turned in.

***It struck me as so weird and stupid that Doug is set up as some kind of anti-COIN rival to my boss (and his longtime friend) John Nagl in this snarky, argumentative National Journal piece. Doug is as much a card-carrying COINdinista as anyone, and those who understand the continued scholarly and policy development of counterinsurgency know there are genuine operational and strategic differences of opinion concerning COIN and how it should be applied in Afghanistan. (Big footprint with lots of general purpose forces? Small footprint with more special operations trainers? Some combination of both? All of that is counterinsurgency -- it's just different ways of doing it.) More to follow on this...

First off, many thanks to those of you who either attended yesterday's conference or followed proceedings on our website or via Twitter. I will be sure to post the conference videos when they are on-line, and C-SPAN covered the entire event, so when you have insomnia this weekend and are flipping through channels, do not be shocked to see me or Patrick Cronin talking at you.

Second, I finally got around to reading Sarah Stillman's excellent and important article on the treatment of third-country nationals serving in support capacities for the U.S. military in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The New Yorker has locked this article, which is silly, because this article has real policy relevance yet most of the people who need to read the article do not subscribe to the New Yorker.

In summary: third-country nationals serving in support functions in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan often suffer horrific abuses. This will not surprise many of you, but it should make you angry, because your tax dollars are helping fund those carrying out the abuses.

The United States has chosen to do two things in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have led to a situation in which the U.S. military is obscenely dependent on labor from places like Fiji, Sri Lanka and the Philippines -- often not to do work directly related to combat but to instead support a bunch of stuff unrelated to killing the enemy or supporting the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan.

On the one hand, we have decided that U.S. men and women serving on large forward operating bases and airfields should have as many of the comforts of home as possible, to include TGI Fridays, Burger effing Kings, etc. (Needless to say, the grunt walking point in Paktia gets none of this.)

On the other hand, a lot of the regular support functions -- like, operating regular chow halls and laundry services -- are not carried out by U.S. servicemen but, again, by third-country nationals.

The people who perform these functions and work at the Burger effing King are not from Kansas or California (or, importantly, Kandahar or Konar) bur rather from South and East Asia. Big contractors farm out contracts to sub-contractors, which in turn farm out contracts to smallish recruiters all over the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The potential for fraud, waste and abuse -- to say nothing of human trafficking -- is both obvious and immense. Many (most?) of these third-country nationals are lied to prior to their arrival about their jobs, the location of their work, their living conditions, and their compensation.

Decisions made in defense policy and war-making have consequences and trade-offs. This is a truism, but an important one. When you buy a bunch of tanks, for example, that might mean you cannot afford to buy a new aircraft carrier. When you decide to turn an artillery battalion into light infantrymen for the sake of the war in Afghanistan, you accept their artillery skills will suffer.

In the same way, if you're going to outsource so much of these wars, that's fine in theory. (Although, again, don't get me started on Burger effing King, or running convoys through an IED-littered road in order to deliver big-screen televisions to a FOB.) But you also need to be prepared to train a division's worth of contracting officers to oversee all of these contracts and subcontracts. Capitalism is amoral. Left to its own devices, the capitalist system will not just do the right thing. If you care about things like values -- to say nothing of spending tax-payer money wisely -- you need to invest in oversight. You can't just farm out all these contracts and assume people you've never met will behave in a moral, responsible manner toward their fellow human beings.

Those who care about these things, meanwhile -- and I would hope those people include people in the executive and legislative branches of our government -- need to read this article.

Longtime contributor to the blog Erin "Charlie" Simpson is back with a guest post for the ages...

Instead of going line by line through MAJ Thiel’s SWJ paper (which I characterized on the Twitters as “horrible, terrible stats work”), I’d like to offer some general guidelines for policy-relevant, conflict research. As Ex will tell you, I am not an Iraq expert. But I know a little bit about COIN and another bit about quantitative research.

1) Big Claims require Big Methods. I’m not one to argue that sophisticated statistics can answer all of our research and policy questions. But if you want to wade in on one of the biggest (conflict) policy debates of the last 10 years, you best bring a lot of stats firepower. Correlations among yearly, national data won’t cut it. There are people who do this for a living: Ivy League professors, Army ORSAs, DIA analysts, DARPA geeks, think-tank types. And they do it with care and sophistication. Learn from them, understand the data and model choices they make, and realize the complexity and contingency of the problem at hand. We cannot adjudicate these complicated causal claims with descriptive statistics.

2) Avoid Sigacts. Sigacts suck. I’m sorry. But they do. They are a function of our presence. More troops (outside of more bases) leads to more sigacts? <sarcasm>You don’t say!</sarcasm> Sigacts are as much a measure of our presence as they are of violence.* (There are also a ton of non-violent sigacts reported. So make sure you knock out those key leader engagements and non-battle injuries before you run your analysis.)

*And as we know, COIN isn’t just about violence (if you’re a Kalyvas person, you know violence has a non-monotonic relationship with control such that low-violence doesn’t always mean good things). So, sigacts are a bad measure of violence and violence is an unreliable measure of stability or “progress” or whatever. But that’s a slightly different debate.

What I'm trying to say here is: Moneyball that shit and find the COIN version of on-base percentage or WHIP.

3) Correlation is not causation. We all know this. But did you also know that low correlation does not preclude findings of causation? Two variables may appear to have a low correlation – until you control for various background conditions. Sometimes this can be tested with jury-rigged chi-square analysis (stratifying one of the variables of interest into various segments -- for example, divvying up Iraqi provinces by #’s of battalions present in 2006 and seeing if there are statistically different levels of violence in 2007). But the only real way to determine which variable among many has a causal effect is with something like regression analysis – correlation won’t cut it.

4) Model specification matters. Ok, so now you want to run some regressions? Which kind? For most conflict data, you won’t want ordinary least squares (OLS). In the parlance of our time, you’ll need to consider the underlying “data generating process.” How do the data come to be observed, and which models’ statistical assumptions best match that process? In general conflict researchers should evaluate various time series, time series-cross sectional, and count models (ie, Poisson) for their work.

5) Level of analysis matters more. How do you plan to aggregate your data? In many instances conflict researchers will want to look at how violence changes across time and space. Global investigations of violence (think Correlates of War or Fearon-Laitin style research) will look at the country-year. That is, annual level national data. This data is usually pre-collected and easy to work with. But if you’re focusing on Iraq or Afghanistan, you need subnational data. And while these wars are long, 5-10 years doesn’t generate enough data points for a useful time series. The more dynamic the conflict, the more detailed you want the data. So you need to dig down to province-month or district-week. (In Afghanistan, sigacts are relatively stable at the district-week level. If you’ve got some data or computing horsepower, you can even carve up the whole country into 10kmX10km grid and go from there.) Unfortunately, that means your other variables need to be measured at the same level, which can be tricky. But them’s the rules.

6) Regression has limitations, too. If you’re doing some sort of “policy evaluation” chances are we didn’t randomly assign the policy “treatment.” What does that mean? That means we probably spent development money in the most violent areas. Or established joint-security stations in safe areas first. Or otherwise implemented a policy based on the very thing you’re trying to study. From a causal inference perspective, that’s a humdinger. One set of solutions is to “match” or pair districts based on their “propensity for treatment,” which can deal with some of the non-random assignment problems. (See Gary King’s paper on health policy evaluation in Mexico for a good example.) There is a lot of good work that needs to be done in the realm of conflict research. Let’s figure out how to do it well.

(Those interested on the academic side may want to get involved in the Minerva-grant funded Empirical Studies of Conflict project run by Jake Shapiro, Eli Berman, Joe Felter and Radha Iyengar. Otherwise, talk to me about cool kids at Caerus Associates.)

From Abu Muqawama: check out Mike Few in SWJ while you're at it. Also, there is a good conversation on Twitter between @drewconway, @charlie_simpson, @abumuqawama, @chrisalbon, @jay_ulfelder and others on this post.

Look, my employer does not take institutional positions, but if you are going to ascribe them to us, please do your homework:

1. U.S. News: "Patrick Cronin, a senior director at the Center for a New American Security, an elite perch for the kind of liberal interventionists who rallied the nation to war in Libya..."

First off, RTFM: does it look to you like we are brimming with enthusiasm for military intervention in Libya over here at 1301 Pennsylvania Avenue NW? And have you ever read anything Patrick Cronin (Bush Administration appointee, by the way, hardly a liberal interventionist) has ever written?

2. Salon: "Some who supported the Iraq war dissent from the Obama's administration maneuvers into Libya. The Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum, Time's Joe Klein, the young group of bloggers known as the "Juicebox Mafia," and the counterinsurgency fetishists at the Center for a New American Security have all been skeptical or outright hostile to American participation in Libya. Whether because of concerns of imperial overstretch, fears of another long-term occupation, or simple post-Iraq humility, these one-time liberal hawks have traded in their wings."

Dude, if you want to flatter me by blaming me for the president's decision to commit more resources to war in Afghanistan, fine. And the title "counterinsurgency fetishist" is frankly awesome and needs to go on all my business cards. But I don't even know where to start with what else was written. Should I mention that our CEO was a platoon commander in the U.S. Marine Corps when the nation went to war in Iraq and that our president was a battalion operations officer in the U.S. Army? Should I mention that I was a Ranger platoon leader at the time? If by supporting the Iraq War you mean actually fighting then okay. How about I just point out that CNAS was founded four years after the Iraq War began? What the heck, Kerry, did you guys lose all your fact-checkers over there at Salon?

Let me conclude by saying, once again, that CNAS takes no institutional positions on anything except keeping cold beer in our fridge.

We all learned different lessons from our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. One lesson I learned was that you should always robustly plan for stabilization and reconstruction operations to follow the conclusion of major combat operations. But with that lesson in mind and being fully aware of the costs associated with properly resourced, comprehensive stablization operations, another lesson I learned is that you should be very, very cautious about intervening in the first place.*

Here's Max Boot in today's New York Times:

To avert the worst, we must work with the nascent opposition government, the National Transitional Council, to develop a plan for a post-Qaddafi state. It is also vitally important that Western special forces, Arab soldiers or both begin arming and training the rebel fighters. They must be able to not only help toss out Colonel Qaddafi but also maintain law and order in the new Libya.

 

Like such other post-conflict states as Kosovo and East Timor, post-Qaddafi Libya will most likely need an international peacekeeping force. This should be organized under the auspices of the United Nations, NATO and the Arab League — a step that will require amending the Security Council resolution, which forbids a “foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.”

Max and I have agreed more than we have disagreed about what to do in Afghanistan and Iraq after the United States and its allies intervened in both places.** But there is no way the U.S. Congress will authorize or fund the kind of comprehensive stabilization operations about which Max is writing here. (To say nothing of the United Nations, the Arab League, or many other NATO member states.) He and others who have advocated on behalf of military intervention in Libya should have known this prior to the intervention.

*Although I have a lot of tactical, operational, and theoretical lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan that might interest readers of this blog, at the end of the day, my personal lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan boil down to the following: "Well, this has been hard, bloody, painful and expensive. Let us think very hard before ever doing it again."

**I did not support going to war in the latter on strategic grounds, but since I was a lowly 1st lieutenant at the time, I kept my mouth shut. Which is a hard thing for me to do.