Repeating Failures
Joshua Foust on Mar 03 2008 at 5:01 pm | Filed under: Around the Web, Foreign affairs
David Axe gets it right:
Here’s why bombing won’t work: Somalis aren’t stupid. They know that the U.S. is behind the Ethiopian invasion. This, in part, drives the present insurgency. Bombing some town to kill a handful of suspected terrorists will only add fuel to the fire, deepening the very hatred that helps create the terrorists in the first place. Bombs are no longer a reasonable solution to Somalia’s problems. In fact, they only make the problems worse. On Monday we maybe killed a couple terrorists, and created a hundred more.
He provides more context, including his own reporting trip there in November, to back up this assertion. But since have we found a problem around the world we didn’t first try to bomb away?
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One nit… I think that we assume that terrorists are created by attacks but I’m not convinced that it’s true any more than it’s true that terrorists are poor boys who grew up in bad circumstances. Has anyone actually done a study to see what leads to terrorist political violence?
But that’s a nit.
My larger point is that we do, in fact, compulsively do first what doesn’t work and doesn’t help. Not usually bombing. Sanctions. But bombing too.
The error, I believe, is because we think that the general procession of half-measures are a… procession. Items on a line starting at low and going to high.
It’s the hammer and nail “thing.” When all we have is a hammer, all problems are nails. And we absolutely insist on viewing ALL of our diplomatic and foreign policy tools as a series of the SAME tool…. hammers. Starting with a little hammer… sanctions…. and a slightly bigger hammer…. secret military aid…. to a slightly bigger hammer…. bombs. etc. And maybe after it’s all screwed up… that “last resort” of war.
Because war should always be a “last resort”, right?
But if we could get over this habit of seeing all problems as the same type of problem that calls for the same progression of escalating identical solutions until getting to the solution that is strong enough to work… we’d be far better off.
Instead of a little hammer, perhaps we need a screw driver or a planing tool or a crow-bar.
Or to leave well enough alone.
I also think that by doing “small” things we fool ourselves into thinking we’re off free, morally, for having not done the big thing. Sanctions is a big culprit this way. Sanctions work by causing misery… it’s the only way they work. But no one asks, like they do for war, if the situation demands Sanctions. Sanctions are not only easy… they’re automatically “moral” and everyone involved can congratulate themselves on being modern and enlightened and not war-like.
Synova, I have said the same thing, but less clearly, over and over. I should just stop writing and send you into the gap. Very well put.
David, like Joshua, gets only half of it (and consequently both of them get it utterly wrong). What they get is the part where the US action is always fraught with peril and represents an invitation to counteraction from the adversary. Yet note that when the guerrillas kill local people –almost always more viciously and less discriminatingly– this is in practical effect assumed to have no influence on popular sentiment at all (or at least goes unmentioned). The adversary is automatically assumed to have the sympathy of the people. Untrue. It’s why the Awakening in Iraq took a certain sort of analyst completely by surprise.
There’s more than one combatant in Iraq and Somalia. It’s not just the US and her allies. In conflict people get killed. When you attack your adversary, he will fight back. That’s preconditional, not any kind of insight. But ordinarily, the guerrilla reaction will be blinder and more bloodthirsty given his technical and command and control limitations. The great merit of military intervention is its ability to provoke direct confrontation with the guerrillas and the great weakness is…well, people back home get upset about the casualties (degraded political resolve for conflict attrition) and then analysts come along and draw all the wrong conclusions from it (counter-policy emerges).
As to Axe’s allegation that it’s the United States that created “the mess”… Ignorance or fantasy, deliberately applied. Those are the only two options from which to describe that kind of analysis. As bad as when Joshua was last seen promoting Axe’s equally sad and silly argument that Petraeus was a liar and the surge was actually a secret fraud (a favorite theme of certain company).
A little early for the ad hominems, isn’t it Lee? Besides, you forgot to mention the time I was openly shilling for Iran.
As for Somalia: I wonder if you actually read these links. Because your comment is pretty disconnected from Axe’s, and my, argument.
Interesting. I could only say the same of you and with greater justice. My criticism was right down the line against Axe’s argument. I wonder, is it possible you don’t read your own links?
Let’s see: this argument is that misunderstanding the nature of the civil war in Somalia led to the U.S. backing a foreign invaders’ brutal occupation, creating Islamists in the process. You respond that it is simply blaming America for all the evils in the world and neglecting the evil things done by “the guerillas” (a serious student of recent Somali history would call them what they are: one of many, competing, mostly-equally matched militias vying for control).
Axe’s point, which I second here, is that the ICU—the Islamic Courts Union—brought Shari’a, yes, but also brought stability, and the Somalis, after over a decade of brutal warfare, valued stability more than the ability to walk the streets without a veil. The U.S.’s decision to fund Ethiopia’s invasion, Axe’s argument, which again I second, goes, not only did not address an actual Islamist threat (there remains no proof the ICU had ties to Al-Qaeda, or anyone else save its funding from Eritrea), but created the situation in which it seems an actual Islamist threat is emerging. Subsequent bombing of the very insurgents we thought we were defeating then seems a bit self-defeating, given the many other innocent people whose lives are further ruined in the process.
That’s getting it only half right but utterly wrong? I fail to see your connection to reality. And I must have missed your years of research in Somali politics and many trips to the country to interview locals. I can’t say I’m an expert, but I have studied Somalia for years, as has Axe… and he has done us the courtesy of actually going there in person to see what normal people think. And they don’t like us or our proxy war.
Ordinarily, yes, the guerilla reaction is harsher (according to whose standard? There are plenty of conflicts in which the state and the guerilla re equally vicious and brutal—from China in 1950 to Vietnam). Except here, where Axe’s point is specifically that it is not—the guerillas have been LESS brutal than the U.S. and her proxies.
But all you see is America-bashing. Which, again, is why I wonder if you actually read these things or just comment according to your biases.