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Politics and war, Iraqi
style
By Stephen Blank
Carl
von Clausewitz teaches us that war is the continuation
of politics (or policy) by other means. Among other
things, this means that the political objectives,
institutions and the policies of a government that go to
war exercise a continuing influence over the nature and
scope of military operations.
Culturally, this
is a hard idea for the American military and political
leaders to accept in its entirety, and the
manifestations of that difficulty go back years. But the
validity of Clausewitz's insights have already been
established in the first days of the coalition war
against Iraq. Indeed, there is a direct correlation
between US policy and diplomacy before the war and the
nature of the operations mounted by the coalition since
the fighting began.
Whether or not one accepts
the legitimacy of the coalition's arguments in favor of
war, it is undeniable that there exists widespread
international public and governmental opposition to this
war. Moreover, it has long been recognized as well that
when it comes to public diplomacy, or the propagation of
the rightness of its arguments, American policy has been
tone deaf, if not worse, throughout much of the Islamic
world. This much is visibly true regardless of the
merits of the case for either side. But due to that
failure of US and UK diplomacy to persuade broad masses
of people and many important states of the rightness and
legitimacy of their cause, the coalition has entered
into war under the shadow of this deficit in
international support and legitimacy.
As a
result, it appears that military planners have been
extraordinarily constrained in the development of their
target sets to avoid striking civilian targets. This is
not to say that the coalition would not have done so
anyway. Normally in a professed war of liberation,
indiscriminate targeting of civilians reduces support
for the supposed liberators who are targeting innocent
civilians. But had the coalition started the war without
this deficit in support by the global public and
interested states, there is little doubt that it could
have more thoroughly prosecuted the war.
While
the precision strike weapons in its possession allow the
coalition members to calibrate their hits to an
unprecedented degree, the need not to alienate either
ordinary Iraqis or international opinion has clearly
constrained military planners. They knew beforehand and
now know for sure that Iraq, like other so-called
asymmetric enemies in the Third World or Serbia,
collocates its military vehicles, installations, strike
platforms, command and control centers etc amid civilian
targets, using them as human shields and in order to
rain down upon these hapless victims enemy strikes that
will discredit the opposition and strengthen Saddam
Hussein and his henchmen.
Were there more
support globally for the coalition, it undoubtedly could
have risked striking at more of these targets and of
producing unintended civilian casualties and "collateral
damage". Instead, news reports make clear that these
military platforms and weapons, interspersed among the
civilian population, have been able to impede the
progress of the coalition's armed forces to a certain
degree and to inflict casualties on them.
These
limitations on targeting missions and target sets
clearly owe something to the prior failure to attain
large-scale international support and confirm the close
linkage between politics and war postulated by
Clausewitz. Thus political considerations have helped to
constrain strategic and tactical options. But they also
have led to some other revealing discoveries.
First of all, this practice of collocating
civilian and military facilities has led to evidence of
preparation for chemical warfare since coalition forces
have found what appear to be chemical warfare suits and
paraphernalia at an Iraqi hospital. They have also
encountered the use of human shields by Iraqi forces who
have mingled among civilians compelled to stage a fake
surrender only to start firing on allied forces.
These kinds of Iraqi operations also confirm the
primacy of politics and its linkage to warfighting.
Clearly for Iraq this is a total war, for if Saddam
loses, he and his regime are gone forever. Accordingly,
all operations are directed towards displaying,
reinforcing and manifesting the regime's control of the
population and ability to coerce it into defense of the
state.
Likewise, the discoveries in the hospital
evoke the image of a state whose purpose, other than
glorification of Saddam, is war. Like one of his heroes,
Stalin, Saddam has striven to optimize a permanent war
economy or mobilization state. And he has done so -
certainly in the past - by stockpiling and developing
weapons of mass destruction to use against his internal
and external opponents.
Thus the operations
planned or carried out by Iraq in this and other wars
also remind us that policy must guide war lest it become
war for its own sake, as has happened in Iraq and in
other countries at other times. Indeed, when war becomes
the purpose of the state, then only military action by
some superior power can bring that nightmare to a close.
But that conclusion, too, only further validates
Clausewitz's logic. For the state that brings down the
regime that is "out of control" does so in order to
return us to a status quo where the ends of policy and
of politics are pursued by political means. Whatever
other benefits accrue to Iraq, its neighbors and
partners from the end of the Ba'ath nightmare, we need
to ensure that the new state is one whose raison d'etre
is not war but politics, and that the military remains
an instrument of state power, not its most visible
manifestation.
Stephen Blank is an
analyst of international security affairs residing in
Harrisburg, PA.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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