What If Iraq Had Been Involved in 9-11? How Would We Have Managed the Occupation?
This is a question I used to ask a lot about five years ago, at the point where it had already long become clear that Iraq was a fiasco. I want to bring it up again apropos of an exceptionally frightening post by Matt Yglesias about how we should reorganize our force structure.
Matt starts out saying that having a robust COIN capability is dangerous, because having the capability will encourage policymakers to use it, and COIN (a) doesn’t work very well when it works at all; (b) has massive collateral costs diplomatically and in terms of readiness for “real” war; and © is hugely expensive.
But then, correctly, he points out:
That said, wars undertaken for perfectly good reasons of collective self-defense can swiftly turn into situations that require post-conflict stabilization. North Korea might attack South Korea in a way that demands response, and the response could well lead to the collapse of the DPRK state requiring the victorious allies to administer former DPRK territory. So it’s not smart to just say “COIN is bad, so let’s make sure we can’t do it and then hope for the best.”
So, what do we do? Apparently, in Matt’s opinion, we should develop a kind of “national gendarmie” that sounds like a cross between the FBI and the National Guard, filled with military police that could be deployed domestically as well as internationally.
The idea of such a force for domestic deployment is pretty clearly a solution – and a patently dangerous one – in search of a problem. We’ve already got a quasi-military domestic police force, called the DEA. How’s that been working out, lately? In those terms, I file this under “latest Matt Yglesias brainstorm for re-colonizing Detroit” and leave it at that.
But it’s not obvious that it’s relevant internationally either. Which is why I bring up my hypothetical question.
Before that, let’s turn to North Korea. There are a number of big problems associated with planning for the demise of the Hermit Kingdom. What happens if the Kim family doesn’t go quietly, and the regime ends by launching an attack on South Korea? Who will maintain order in the North post-collapse? How will humanitarian assistance to the North be delivered post-collapse? How will economic and political integration with the South be managed? For none of these problems is a massive infusion of American military police a terribly useful solution. Obviously, they would neither prevent nor fight a war. Neither could they be helpful in managing the political and economic integration of North and South. Maintaining order and delivering humanitarian assistance, meanwhile, would require two things that an American police force would not have: massive numbers and intimate knowledge of the country. The two powers best-suited to provide these are China and South Korea.
None of this is to say that America has no role to play. China’s primary goal right now is to assure the continued viability of their North Korean ally, and their secondary goal is to be sure they don’t create more trouble than they are worth. Assuming the Chinese come to accept the inevitability of collapse of the North (and all this discussion is academic until that happens), China’s goals would shift to assuring that a reunited Korea would be free of American troops and free of nuclear weapons. American diplomacy could be extremely helpful in reassuring China that we would not intend to station troops in a united Korea, and in reassuring South Korea that we would continue to guarantee their independence as part of collective security arrangements, so that they would not need an independent nuclear deterrent. In the event of an unfolding humanitarian disaster, the American navy is vastly better-placed to deliver pretty much whatever is needed more rapidly and efficiently than anybody else, and there may be other logistical assistance that would be optimal for America to provide. But Yglesias’s assumption that America either needs to or is ideally positioned to provide large numbers of people to perform routine police functions strikes me as peculiar – unless, that is, the underlying assumption is that America must run any effort to manage a post-collapse North Korea, in which case, yes, providing most of the boots will turn out to be critical. But why should we make that assumption unless we haven’t changed our security doctrine in any fundamental way, and still believe that if there’s a problem somewhere we have to be in charge of solving it? Or unless we do intend to station troops in a post-unification Korea, the only purpose of which would be to threaten China?
So now we’ll return to Iraq. Suppose Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9-11 plot. In that case, the Iraq War would have been as necessary as the Afghan War, and would have enjoyed similar across-the-board support domestically, and at least very broad acquiescence internationally. But then what? That domestic and international support would have essentially no significance for our ability to manage the post-war order within Iraq?
Would a massive gendarmie have helped? Only if you believe that the problems we ran into in Iraq were primarily a matter of maintaining public order rather than a problem of political conflict. And I think the preponderance of evidence points to the latter rather than the former (though the former didn’t help, obviously).
America’s problem in Afghanistan is not fundamentally that we didn’t have enough troops to maintain order for many years (thought that also didn’t help). Our problem is that we’re backing a weak central government identified with a coalition of minority ethnic groups, and the majority ethnic group is fighting against that government. That’s a likely losing hand, even if we played it better than we did. Our problem in Iraq was that although we were backing the majority ethnic/religious group, that group was dominated by political factions allied with another country that we didn’t want to see dominate the country – Iran. Had we reconciled ourselves to an Iran-dominated Iraq earlier, it would have been much easier for us to extricate ourselves from that conflict. But a huge influx of military police will not win the Afghan War now, and it would not have won the Iraq War had they been deployed in 2004.
Matt starts out by asking the right questions. We want to avoid counter-insurgency situations. But sometimes they are “thrust upon us” – and then what do we do? It seems to me, the right answer has two parts. First, be very careful about concluding that such a situation has actually been thrust upon us. Are we actually obliged to become an occupying power? Is there any other entity, national or supra-national, who might be more appropriate to serve that function, assuming someone has to? How much would it cost us, in terms of achieving concrete policy objectives, to decline the part? Second, assuming there really is no alternative, how can we effectively thrust that situation onto somebody else in rapid fashion?
That sounds callous, but I don’t think it needs to be. Is there any reason to assume that we would handle an occupation of North Korea better than South Korea would? Is there any reason, assuming South Korea needs more boots on the ground to provide basic order than they can provide, to assume that the United States would be a less-provocative provider of said boots than some combination of friendly countries like Canada and the Philippines?
If our interests are genuinely aligned with a variety of other participants in the international arena with regard to a particular situation, then we can save ourselves a great deal of money and manpower if America doesn’t behave as if it needs to run everything, but instead tries to leverage our strongest assets for mutual benefit. If our interests are not genuinely aligned, then behaving as if we expect to run everything is certainly going to be provocative, and may blind us to the need to manage conflicts between our interests and other actors’, to our mutual detriment.
ThinkProgress is blocked here or I’d have made a nasty comment about Yglesias’ odd disbelief in posse comitatus when that post came into the RSS.
I’m not sure your assessment of the source of trouble in Afghanistan is universally loved (or indeed loved much outside of Bob Blackwill); Afghanistan has a history of nationhood older than America’s and I think reconciling ethnic factions is not a priori the problem it is in Iraq; it’s a hard comparison to make.
But thinking about which comparisons are and which aren’t easy may lead to to why one presumes America has to play a significant leadership role — in the Korea example you give, America would have to play a significant (and probably a leadership) role because (1) the Japanese would shit glass if we didn’t, (2) current practice with the South Koreans sort of assumes it, and (3) South Korea would I suspect actually prefer that, as a means of setlling issues with China (remember it has, for example, territotial disputes) indirectly, and is used to working those through America.
And that’s the problem: you have two countries, the ROK and Japan, which basically look to the US as a global hegemon to mediate crises. I agree it doesn’t have to be that way and long-term US plans should try to alter our role. But mid-term planning — the kind of, ``What reasonably do we expect our military to need to do in the time for which I can budget?’‘ question — proobably is poor planning if it doesn’t recognize that US involvement probably demands a significant role, not a ``bit player’‘ status.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 7, 07:23 PM · #
A small quibble: in what sense is DEA quasi-military? The fact that they have guns, or that they operate internationally?
— Klug · Jan 7, 10:54 PM · #
Merry christmas and Happy New Year!
— handbags2006 · Jan 8, 05:02 AM · #
The last thing I would want is for the U.S. military to be put in charge of shooting obstreperous Koreans in a unified Korea.
Koreans are nationalistic, hard-working, smart, and stubborn. They are not the people you want for enemies in the 21st Century.
— Steve Sailer · Jan 8, 06:15 AM · #
You assume that the decision to impose our troops in selected wars comes from a rational basis. However, in responding to the 9/11 attack, former President Bush decided not to follow Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar into Pakistan because Pakistan was our ally and the attackers were on Pakistan’s sovereign territory. This is not how to win a war. Bush came into office wanting to bring down Saddam Hussein so as to show he was a bigger man than his father, the first President Bush, who promised the Kurds and Shia that if they revolted against Hussein, the United States would back them and, when they did, we abandoned them. When Bin Laden and Mullah Omar crossed the border into Pakistan, the second Bush found a convenient lie to invade Iraq and we did so. The idea that all we had to do was take Hussein down and Iraq would run itself in imitation of the United States was so foolish (particularly with the dismemberment of the Iraqi government to get rid of all Baathists) that we ended up in the mess we have been in since then. It seems that from the very start of both wars, we have not had any wisdom or sense. Since when do you respect a border if your enemy is on the other side of it? Did we and our allies insist on fighting Nazi Germany only in Germany, rather than in the rest of Europe because the invaded countries had sovereign borders? Did we insist on fighting Japan only in Japan rather than in the Pacific islands because they had sovereign borders? We can never win the Afghan war because Pakistan is backing the Taliban in order to keep India out of Afghanistan. So here we are. We are firing many of our state workers because the states are bankrupt, and the states cannot rely on any more federal stimulus, but we are still fighting two so-called wars because we don’t want to see the inevitable defeats once our troops leave. We have blessed Iran by giving it a Shiite neighbor in Iraq and blessed China, Iran, and Pakistan by giving them total access to Afghanistan. What difference does it make if we have police or military if we are going to shoot ourselves in the foot as a national tradition?
— LDM · Jan 8, 08:52 PM · #
“former President Bush decided not to follow Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar into Pakistan because Pakistan was our ally and the attackers were on Pakistan’s sovereign territory. This is not how to win a war.”
Pakistan and nukes and a relatively unstable political system. Just so you know.
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 9, 05:28 PM · #
I visited North Korea (as a tourist) last year. I know a little Korean – not much – but enough to know that the first question every security guard, soldier and shop assistant asked my guides when I was ushered towards them was, “Is he American?”. When they were answered in the negative they visibly relaxed.
North Koreans have been schooled from childbirth to believe that US soldiers are bloodthirsty brutes who habitually caved in the skulls of infants with the butts of their rifles during the Korean War, and still subjugate the South Koreans 60 years on.
Even allowing for the likelihood that some North Koreans see through the brainwashing from their leaders, the presence of US soldiers north of the 38th Parallel, even in a relatively peaceful post-collapse scenario, would – I fear – be wildly problematic at best, and unbelievably incendiary at worst.
— Andy H · Jan 10, 03:48 PM · #