Liberals and Strategy

The best outcome of the Presidential election this year would be a Republican President.  This is not only because I do not agree with the policy prescriptions of the two Democratic candidates, though the idea that a larger more activist government is in our best long term interests is problematic.  Nor is it only because, if nothing else, the last 20 years of Washington governance has shown us that whenever a single party controls the executive and legislative branches, spending goes out of control in almost inverse proportion to accountability.   The most serious concern I have with a potential Democratic administration is the failure of either candidate to articulate a coherent strategic vision.  This is worrisome.

At the moment there are good reasons to expect that our next President will be a proud, anti-war liberal.  While it is certain that events can always intervene in surprising ways, either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama must be considered to have the advantage over presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, or Mitt Romney in the unlikely event he stages a remarkable come back.  The likelihood of a Democratic liberal President raises some important concerns.  The recent past, at least since Vietnam, offers an extensive body of evidence supporting the contention that liberals do not and, perhaps can not, think strategically.  History during the Carter years, the Clinton years, and most recently, the Olmert years in Israel, suggest that the disinclination to think strategically may be related to some fundamental tenets of their ideology.

I do not mean to imply that Republicans are all great strategic thinkers; I have yet to see much evidence that John McCain has thought deeply about the strategic implications of Iraq or the greater ideological war on Islamic terror, nor has Mitt Romney given much evidence to a future oriented strategic vision, but both have the virtue of clearly identifying who we are fighting and can agree on the strategic implications of abandoning the Iraq front.  That is more than Barack Obama evinces; Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, sometimes appears to recognize how devastating a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would be but too often appears committed to do whatever is most expedient politically in the short term.  That suggests that even if she has a strategic vision (and I don't think her strategic thinking extends beyond strategizing her own political self-interest) it will be hostage to her political ideology.

Liberal political strategy emerges from their conception of a world populated by a minority of the successful versus the majority who are marginal; in other words, whether or not they see successful people, capitalists, as evil, lucky, or simply well connected, the successful either by design or accident, necessarily oppresses the victims of the world.  Their policies follow from this core belief.  This cripples their ability to use or meaningfully threaten the use of force.

First, the liberal can not tolerate casualties.  Force then must be exercised in ways that minimize, or better yet completely avoid, collateral damage.  Since in any sustained conflict, casualties are inevitable, for the liberal the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force with  a very small window of operations, is a baseline constraint.  Thus, even if and when the decision to apply force is made, it will of necessity be short term, with short term goals, and with the minimal likelihood of long term, ie strategic, impact.

Even the Bosnia model of Bill Clinton will be of limited effectiveness since that campaign depended on the news media's inability to generate images of victims.  Our enemies have learned much in the last few years and images of innocent victims, whether real or staged, are now part of any conflict the West becomes involved in.

Consider the Israel-Hezbollah war of summer 2006.  In that case the government of Israel, run by liberals who had no militray experience or expertise, with no sense of how short term reactive decisions would impact the long term strategic outlook, turned an opportunity into a disaster which continues to erode Israeli security and deterrence.

If the Jew has always been the "canary in the coal mine" viz civil society, Israel could well be thought of as the "canary in the coal  mine" of nations.  They live in a very bad neighborhood where both short term planning and a long term, strategic, perspective are crucial necessities.  Israel has been "blessed" with a liberal leadership under Ehud Olmert and in the summer of 2006, as documented by the Winograd Report, the incompetence of that government, with a Secretary of Defense whose expertise was running a labor union, was on full display in the war with Hezbollah.  The performance of that government illustrates everything that can go wrong when a liberal government feels forced to go to war and yet does not show the ability or inclination to confront the strategic implications of their policies.  Two salient sections from the report: [All emphases mine-SW]

12. Let us start with the Prime Minister.

a. The Prime Minister bears supreme and comprehensive responsibility for the decisions of 'his' government and the operations of the army. His responsibility for the failures in the initial decisions concerning the war stem from both his position and from his behavior, as he initiated and led the decisions which were taken.

b. The Prime Minister made up his mind hastily, despite the fact that no detailed military plan was submitted to him and without asking for one. Also, his decision was made without close study of the complex features of the Lebanon front or of the military, political and diplomatic options available to Israel. He made his decision without systematic consultation with others, especially outside the IDF, despite not having experience in external-political and military affairs. In addition, he did not adequately consider political and professional reservations presented to him before the fateful decisions of July 12th.

c. The Prime Minister is responsible for the fact that the goals of the campaign were not set out clearly and carefully, and that there was no serious discussion of the relationship between these goals and the authorized modes of military action. He made a personal contribution to the fact that the declared goals were over-ambitious and not feasible.

d. The Prime Minister did not adapt his plans once it became clear that the assumptions and expectations of Israel's actions were not realistic and were not materializing.

e. All of these add up to a serious failure in exercising judgment, responsibility and prudence.

13. The Minister of Defense is the minister responsible for overseeing the IDF, and he is a senior member of the group of leaders in charge of political-military affairs.

a. The Minister of Defense did not have knowledge or experience in military, political or governmental matters. He also did not have good knowledge of the basic principles of using military force to achieve political goals.

b. Despite these serious gaps, he made his decisions during this period without systemic consultations with experienced political and professional experts, including outside the security establishment. In addition, he did not give adequate weight to reservations expressed in the meetings he attended.

c. The Minister of Defense did not act within a strategic conception of the systems he oversaw. He did not ask for the IDF's operational plans and did not examine them; he did not check the preparedness and fitness of IDF; and did not examine the fit between the goals set and the modes of action presented and authorized for achieving them. His influence on the decisions made was mainly pointillist and operational. He did not put on the table - and did not demand presentation - of serious strategic options for discussion with the Prime Minister and the IDF.

d. The Minister of Defense did not develop an independent assessment of the implications of the complexity of the front for Israel's proper response, the goals of the campaign, and the relations between military and diplomatic moves within it. His lack of experience and knowledge prevented him from challenging in a competent way both the IDF, of which he was in charge, and the Prime Minister.

e. In all these ways, the Minister of Defense failed in fulfilling his functions. Therefore, his serving as Minister of Defense during the war impaired Israel's ability to respond well to its challenges.

The report documents that the government of Ehud Olmert went to war in a reactive, almost reflexive, fashion.  There was no careful meshing of military and political goals and methods.  The government established unrealistic and unrealizable goals and then failed to meet them.  By establishing such goals, the Irsraeli political defeat was assured.

The related trends of casualty aversion, unwillingness to coutenance long term applications of force, and the inablity to manage the information war all combine to make "liberal foreign policy" oxymoronic.  The inevitable conclusion of our inability to sustain a strategic foreign policy is that the West can only respond to threats with brief and measured spasms of activity.  We can toss some cruise missiles into pharmacuetical plants or empty camps in the dessert but have foreclosed any possibility of more robust and sustained repsonses.  This will work to create a meta-stable balance of attrition until our enemies pass an unspecified threshold.  Richard Fernandez describes the conundrum for the West and, unknowingly for them, our enemies:

Israel's right to self-defense has been gradually delegitimized by the political fashions in the West. The process will continue to the point where either Israel loses the right of self-defense altogether or reasserts it in a spasm, an event which will shake the region to its foundations. Perhaps the real significance of Israel's population centers coming within terrorist rocket range is that it will leave it with no room to retreat. The last "give" will have gone from the system and it will be an accident waiting to happen. While Israel's enemies may imagine themselves ascendant, objectively speaking their combat power vis-a-vis the IDF is surpassingly small. They may unwittingly take themselves past the limits lulled by the past into thinking the future will always be more of the same. And like a man who imagines that a startled tiger is retreating before him out of fear of his puny muscles, many unpleasant surprises may be in store.

Until international diplomats can find a way to repeal the laws of physics and the human desire to survive, building peace in the Middle East will depend not only on guaranteeing the existence of Palestine but also the existence of Israel.

My focus here is on Isreal's war with Hezbollah as a prototypical liberal response to an intolerable attack.  I believe this is generalizable to the Democratic approach to the war in Iraq, yet it goes far beyond that theater in the war against Islamic terror and I will address some of those issues tomorrow.

[In order to save time and energy, please note that this is not a defense of the War in Iraq.  The argument that the war was misguided or poorly executed is irrelevant to the question.  The war, whatever its failings, was clearly part of a strategic plan.  If the plan was problematic, it needs to be replaced by a better strategic vision, not by a lack of one; at the moment neither Democrat is offering evidence of strategic understanding.]