Larger post has lots of good points, one footnote, though.
Libya was largely on France's initiative and with French jets. The US did not disagree, but it's not right to say that one started in the Pentagon.
No general ever got passed over for promotion by advocating for more intervention.
That was kind of an up-or-out situation.
If the point of the war(s), in the public mind, is to prevent 9/11 style attacks on the continental US -- well, are we losing, really? OK, we haven't succeeded in remaking those societies into something benign-to-us, but who ever actually believed that was going to happen?
I don't think I expected the remaking of societies into something benign to us, but somebody proclaiming a new, a more extreme than Al-Queda, caliphate with a physical territory they could defend for many years strikes me as failure in a pretty unambiguous way.
I think a lot of people believed/believe it. These things are confusing as hell - it's much easier to vaguely trust what you're told.
That's just evidence that those people are crazy, isn't it?
8 to 6.
To 7, you don't think that was just a convenient self-deception to justify kicking the shit out of them? I think there's a very strong overlap between the people who wanted to kick the shit out of those countries, and those pretending it would ultimately be for their own good.
I'd be very sceptical of an argument that volunteer militaries are inherently worse at fighting than conscript militaries. Historically speaking, the way that modern conscript militaries beat modern volunteer militaries, on the rare occasions they did, was to drown them in corpses.
The final point is a very good one. There's no strategy! (I'm trying to wade through Hew Strachan's "The Direction of War", and he makes the point again and again that the UK and US governments simply don't understand what a strategy is, and therefore never have one.)
1: The French couldn't do it without American help to suppress air defense and provide command and control. And I'm not blaming the Pentagon, I'm blaming Obama.
The infamous Tom Freidman "suck on this" clip from an interview with Charlie Rose (he says it near the end). I had never listened to the context but is actually interesting in a bloodthirsty American exceptionalist way*.
A couple of notable things:
1) I had not noticed that it was from April 2003 before, Rose starts it out with "now that the war is over... and there's trouble with the peace..."
2) Near the end Friedman claims "we could have hit Saudi Arabia... could have hit Pakistan." Oh you pathetic lyying piece of shit.
It is surely a symptom of our times that for several decades the NY Times had the Three Morons from Hell as their "leading" columnist (Dowd & Brooks the other two).
*Also see some neo-con's (Michael Ledeen I think) "every dew years pick up some small crappy country and throw it against the wall."
(I'm trying to wade through Hew Strachan's "The Direction of War", and he makes the point again and again that the UK and US governments simply don't understand what a strategy is, and therefore never have one.)
See also: Brexit.
If the point of the war(s), in the public mind, is to prevent 9/11 style attacks on the continental US -- well, are we losing, really?
I want to buy your rock.
It would be irresponsible not to have frequent, public speculation from high administration officials that we might invade Saudi Arabia.
Stand by my prediction, there is a good chance that in 60 years American Exceptionalism will be regarded as something akin to Nazism. Not that we are necessarily "worse" than anyone else but that we have the means to do such great damage and our minds are utterly clouded with our general "rightness."
As B&T regulars were fond of quoting:
A standing army is like a standing member. It's an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.
- Elbridge Gerry
Wasn't the 2nd amendment originally supposed to provide well-regulated militias, in place of an army? Rather than the modern sense of providing the right to machinegun country music fans?
18.2: Yes. A fear of standing armies was a very big thing among the people who had parts in Hamilton.
2nd 6.
5: This is what I meant by conflating CT and COIN. On the COIN side the US seems to be failing across the board (at at least the grand-strategic if not strategic and operational levels). But on the CT side there have indeed been no more 9/11s and IIRC no substantial jihadi attacks in the US.
Not the actors, but the people the actors were playing.
17. Doubt it. Many Chinese and Russians also believe that their countries are exceptional. I think that as long as there is a plausible belief that your capital is the center of the world, and a large proportion of the population does not have meaningful contact with other places, then solipsism.
10: I don't think the point is that volunteer armies are better on a per soldier basis, but that when you have a volunteer army, you are going to have numbers along with a large commitment of the resources of the society.
13: wasn't that Jonah Goldberg?
18: I think that's the consensus view among historians. Translated to present day, isn't that the National Guard? Are there any credible alternative viewpoints than this?
Define credible.
10: The corpses were going to happen anyway. We figured shooting a couple of Nazis before becoming a corpse was a better way to ensure the survivors would have children to nurse after the war.
Also see some neo-con's (Michael Ledeen I think) "every dew years pick up some small crappy country and throw it against the wall."
Max Boot, I think.
It's interesting to think about the different courses taken by Switzerland and the US. Two of the most heavily armed countries in the world; both wealthy federations; both historically committed to isolationist policies. I suspect that the answer for why they diverged so much is "The Second World War" but I should probably read the John McPhee book regardless.
Anyway, I don't know who Michael Ledeen is. Boot is in the news lately so I recall the name and his book (Savage Wars of Peace).
24: Yes, which is why states use them to fight total wars against other states. They maybe aren't so good for long term long-intensity stuff; witness Vietnam.
I'm thinking size and location maybe played a role.
I don't think the United States could have fought Vietnam without a draft.
Actually Vietnam was largely high-intensity. Never mind.
25, 29:
Well, I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
However, that is taken from a Jonah Goldberg piece at NRO.
Partial points for Ravenclaw, none for Hufflepuff.
I guess Grenada counts, because they made a Clint Eastwood movie about it.
A friend has some thoughts on COIN.
If my friend is correct, it suggests another reason why the US needs to exit most sites of the GWOT. What it takes to win would be, from my perspective, unacceptable.
27: and where were you in the emotional labor thread???
Being emotional with babies or labor isn't the Soviet way.
I feel like the draft would not have prevented the Iraq War, which was of course a gigantic strategic disaster. It might have caused an earlier withdrawal from Iraq, but, having invaded, it does seem like in retrospect just making the country ISIS-available was a disaster, so not sure how that weighs in. It's actually not clear to me that the low intensity engagements in places like Niger are going badly, but that's mostly because I don't know anything about them. Afghanistan has been terrible from the perspective of creating a stable Afghan government and peaceful happy Afghanistan but not bad from the perspective of "at least people aren't attacking the West from there" -- though obviously at enormous cost.
Basically, my half-baked take is that the disasters in US foreign policy are big jingoistic self-righteous wars in foreign lands. Those initially have popular support and a draft wouldn't change anything. Any given use of the professional army in more hidden foreign engagements might or might not be a good idea (or done effectively by the US military) but the hidden-ness doesn't seem like the problem. The biggest strategic disasters seem to be when we make a big splash about fighting big wars (Iraq, Vietnam) that make no strategic sense. And intense publicity of foreign engagements ("our boys were shot in Niger! BOMB NIGER NOW) seems like, given the tastes of much of the US electorate and political class, a bad idea.
The thing linked in 39 seems obviously right to me, as a matter of history.
Yeah, if you think massive conscript casualties are going to turn people against a war that they would otherwise support, look at Britain* during the First World War. What turns public opinion against wars is losing. The Vietnam War had majority public support in the US until about 1970, when it became clear that victory wasn't possible.
The counterexample is France in Indochina - fought entirely with volunteers, most of whom weren't even French, and the French public still hated it, to the point where people in France boycotted blood donation drives until they were given assurances that none of the blood collected would be going to treat wounded French soldiers.
*Britain, not the UK. Conscription was never introduced in Ireland.
43.1: OEF Trans-Sahara has been going since 2007. One used never to hear of it, now one does. This implies to me that things are getting worse. Not to mention the need for French intervention in Mali in 2014, and the emrgence of Boko Haram from c 2009.
45.2: Interesting. 39 is good.
45.2: Did they use conscripts in Algeria, and was it comparably unpopular? AIUI they did at least win that one militarily.
I think it's possible that if there were a standing draft, the enthusiasm for war might be somewhat blunted somewhat over time.
I bet if there was conscription the Air Force could have a very good bake sale.
I was going to say an advantage of the draft might be less reverence for and more willingness to demand results from or fire generals, but maybe that's more of a cultural shift as we didn't regard the military very highly in the 20's and 30's either.
48: yes: the Algerian war was fought by conscripts. Unlike IndoChina, Algeria was supposed to be a part of France. It's been a long time since I read A Savage War of Peace, but my memory suggests that, like Vietnam, the war became unpopular when it seemed impossible to win.
I think it's possible that if there were a standing draft, the enthusiasm for war might be somewhat blunted somewhat over time.
That certainly worked for Prussia. Eventually.
Prussia wasn't a democracy for most of that time, and an extremely limited one for the rest.
53: I should re-watch The Day of the Jackal.
A democracy, tempered by Edward Fox in a cravat.
BTW, Moby was totally right about Blue Velvet.
That link in 39 was interesting. The nature of the insurgency in Afghanistan today is just so different from the one in, say, El Salvador. You can't win over people who might be sympathetic to the Taliban by making democratic reforms. You can buy warlords, I suppose. Apparently, the ISI (or whoever else) pays more than we're willing to match.
The war in Yemen is basically one deposed dictator vs. his now-deposed hand chosen successor. I think "our" side is still amazed that army units loyal to Saleh didn't desert him wholesale 2 years ago, and haven't even now. 'Just a little more bombing, a little more cholera, a lot more starvation, and they'll switch sides' seems to be the strategy.
I think the U.S. is moving well along toward creating the same kind of divide France developed between the Revolution and the Dreyfus Affair (or later?). I'm not a real expert on France, but I'm hoping that along with a decline from the ranks for first-rate powers, we also get good architecture and popular fiction that doesn't involve vampires fucking.
The French divide that gave rise to the terms left and right. I was thinking the French case might be more similar than other left/right divides because of the role religion has come to play in the American right.
62: Why are you hoping that? Also from what exceedingly little I know the French party system of that era (or any other) doesn't map onto the American in any useful way.
I worry about religion mapping nearly 1 to 1 onto left-right politics. That might be be exactly what happened in France, but it seems to be part of it. I'm not hoping that such a mixture of religion and politics will happen in the U.S. I'm asserting it has happened and hoping that at least we'll get a better culture along with the destruction of domestic consensus and democratic norms.
Also, MAGA seems as fucked up a thing for a democracy to elect as Napoléon 3.0.
Are you also hoping for a quasi-fascist Pentecostal administration in the rump of the country which remains unoccupied by Nazi Canadians?
Also, I have bad news on the architecture front.
I hadn't really gone down to that level of detail.
7,000 US soldiers died in Iraq and Afghanistan compared to 50,000 in vietnam and 300,000 in WW2. this reduces the pushback a lot even if there was a draft.
69: I'm guessing a lower-quality conscript force would see more casualties. And it's hard to quantify, but my impression is that Western societies generally value lives a lot more than they did 40 years ago, much less 70.
I feel like the best analogy to MAGA is Latin America, where there's a long tradition of electing completely preposterous morons.
Peron, but with a larger, gaping asshole.
Are you also hoping for a quasi-fascist Pentecostal administration in the rump of the country which remains unoccupied by Nazi Canadians?
A Pence Administration would be fine with Nazis, but Canadians?
71: And Berlusconi? He was an old, sleazy, financially corrupt racist populist who appointed woefully unqualified loyalists to major government positions and was extremely vain about losing his hair. I suppose on the other hand that Berlusconi had the media on-side (through ownership), was relatively intelligent and successful prior to his involvement in politics, and for all his faults had a measure of self deprecating humour*.
*In the wake of the Ruby Heartstealer scandal**, he once apparently told a joke to a journalist that went something like this: In a poll of 18-25 year olds, when asked if they would be willing to sleep with the Prime Minister, 85% of respondents answered "Ugh! No! No way!" The other 15% responded "What -- again?"
**So far Trump has not attempted to get an underage prostitute out from police custody by claiming that she's related to the Egyptian president.
75** - So far as you know, anyway.
Good point. However, he hasn't tweeted about it yet, announced it on a live mic, or casually fessed up to it in an interview, so I think I'm on relatively solid ground here.
Also Trump would probably be surprised to learn that Egypt has a president, given his reaction to finding out that Xi wasn't the king of China. I mean, how many countries in the world can copy the US like that??
Xi who has, btw, not only not anointed a successor but also written his name into the constitution, along with Mao and Deng. Anyone got a silver lining for me?
You're safer than people on Kinmen and Matsu.
79: It's early days, but so far he hasn't managed anything on the scale of Tiananmen, or any of Mao's greatest hits.
Just in case, maybe learn to make steel in your backyard.
81: Although maybe I'm unfairly discounting whatever is happening in Xinjiang.
I think it's pretty obvious that Trump has been involved in criminality. But probably just the boring, conventional kind. I don't see him getting invited to anything as romantic as the P2 lodge.
In Spanish, P2 is funny because it sounds like the word for "farts".