Duh.

Edward Luttwak tells a story about the early efforts to conjure “democracy” in Afghanistan. When he was informed of the intended plan to turn Afghans into Swedes, he responded at Council: Very well, you must kill 75% of the Afghan Males for 3 generations, and completely erase all traces of Islam. Luttwak was forthwith ejected from the meeting and banned from the premises. Please be certain this is the policy all the way down…and only relaxes when they not only step in the shite but are mired in it…

Who are now getting a crash course in DC, or at least the NG is.

As for an utter lack of historical comprehension, even our own history in Iraq, that came later at at a heavy cost in our own blood, never mind the Iraqis’.

However, sir, I must differ on a variation of this point: the Arabs are terrible at war. The Arabs are terrible at Western War, or the Soviet Version of War, but quite excel, sir, at their own version of war, indeed as D’aesh/ISIS showed in Syria and Iraq with rapid swarming columns, mission-type orders given electronically and such. Of course, they had the tutelage of ah, er, unnamed parties under the command of the present SECDEF. Where they seem to have broken down was logistics, in particular columns of trucks as resupply being easy meat for air. The other mistake being taking and trying to hold cities — because if there’s one thing America and the West are good at, it’s pounding static positions to dust.

It has cost us an awful lot, though. Look at the post-Desert Storm negotiations with both the Iraqis and our own side–Nobody in the American military really grasped the fundamental point that they were not fighting off the “evil hordes” of a totalitarian despot a la Adolf Hitler, but instead, were intervening in a civil war between equally abhorrent assholes who’d fallen out after the failed outcome of the Iran-Iraq War.

Because, that’s what it was–The Arabs basically hired Jimmay Cahtah, PBUH as their proxy catspaw to neuter the Iranians, who they were shit-scared of. Carter fell for it, did his thing, and they created an enemy far more dangerous and lethal than the Shah ever would have been. Not to mention, killed a shit-ton of innocent Iranians caught up in the chaos. That backfiring on them, they then used Hussein’s Iraq as their hired thug to take out the perceived-to-be-weakened Iranians, and discovered two things: One, the Iraqis were horribly inept at war, even with all the Soviet tutelage money could buy, and that the Iranian mullahs were willing to expend Iranian lives with Soviet enthusiasm.

Eventually, the war petered out with an inconclusive outcome, and the idiot Gulf Arabs thought that they were in a position to call all the “loans” they’d made to the Iraqis back. Didn’t work out so well–Absent the US intervention in Desert Storm, most of the Gulf would have gone under the incompetent governance of Hussein, and we’d be dealing with that to this day. The Saudis play politics, but they don’t do it very well at all–They’ve had their successes, but they’ve also had commensurate spectacular failures and miscalculations of a legendary nature.

Which went right over the heads of the politically-inept and unaware American officers negotiating the cease-fire and other things at the end of Desert Storm. They let the Iraqis keep rotary aviation, which they then used to crush the very same people they’d encouraged to revolt against him. Which, of course, led to severe trust issues later during the 2003 invasion…

Which, unbelievably, the majority of the American officers I served with did not remember, or ever know about. I remember sitting in the pre-war briefings, hearing how we were going to waltz in and get instant cooperation with all these oppressed Kurds and Marsh Arabs, and then raising my little hand to ask “Uh, hey… Do you guys remember what we did to them, like around a decade ago…?”. I got universal blank looks, and then we moved on.

Surprise, surprise… Turned out, we didn’t really get really good cooperation from anyone but the Kurds, and even they weren’t too sure about us.

Gotta tell you what… The American military is really only good for certain specific tasks, and at least two major things they should be able to do are emphatically things they ain’t good at: One, looking forward and projecting from known information to get an idea of how things are going to eventuate, and two, understanding politics or how other people are gonna think. An awful lot of those officers I mention above were guys who were sure that the people who “rose” against Saddam and then got chopped when we didn’t fulfill our promises of support would forgive and forget on this iteration in 2003.

Didn’t happen. None of what they expected did. There was only one guy, a low-level light colonel in our Engineer Brigade, got it right. He sat there in our basecamp in Kuwait before we went north, and basically laid out exactly what was going to transpire over the next three years. He was only off on one thing, which was the timeline on which we’d start to see EFP-based IEDs show up. He thought they’d manage that about six months ahead of when they actually did…