27 January 2008
Arrogance of a Tired Superpower
In her OpEd in the January 26, 2008 Wall Street Journal, “Don’t Short-Circuit the Surge,” Kimberly Kagan displays the arrogance that characterizes leaders of empires that have shrunk from their predominance in the world. A modern self-confidence to assert their preferences in world order is being felt by the other two superpowers—Europe and China--not to mention the “second world” powers, as Parag Khanna defines them in his article in the January 27, 2008 New York Times Magazine, “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony.” The tendency of the withering hegemon and its apologists to dismiss the status and motivations of rival states and important interest groups elsewhere dies hard.
Why does Ms. Kagan assume that the reduced violence in response to the “surge” was forced and not purposefully chosen by a rational and influential Iraqi interest group? Students of war seem to accept as military doctrine the need to depersonalize the opposition or the indigenous population in a conflict situation. These actors are treated as part of the problem, not the key to its solution. Having introduced its armed forces into Iraq, the U.S. decided that whatever that country’s problem was had a military solution. If we accept the presence of our military there as a fait accompli, we necessarily prejudge the definition of success—the establishment of an American model of civil order by force of arms.
Ms. Kagan’s mistake is to circumscribe the issues in the Iraq War as purely military ones. General Petraeus is right to define his job within the scope of the mission he has been given. It is the responsibility of civilian strategists and the rest of us to instruct the Secretary of
Defense and the President that that mission is wrongly defined.
In her OpEd in the January 26, 2008 Wall Street Journal, “Don’t Short-Circuit the Surge,” Kimberly Kagan displays the arrogance that characterizes leaders of empires that have shrunk from their predominance in the world. A modern self-confidence to assert their preferences in world order is being felt by the other two superpowers—Europe and China--not to mention the “second world” powers, as Parag Khanna defines them in his article in the January 27, 2008 New York Times Magazine, “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony.” The tendency of the withering hegemon and its apologists to dismiss the status and motivations of rival states and important interest groups elsewhere dies hard.
Why does Ms. Kagan assume that the reduced violence in response to the “surge” was forced and not purposefully chosen by a rational and influential Iraqi interest group? Students of war seem to accept as military doctrine the need to depersonalize the opposition or the indigenous population in a conflict situation. These actors are treated as part of the problem, not the key to its solution. Having introduced its armed forces into Iraq, the U.S. decided that whatever that country’s problem was had a military solution. If we accept the presence of our military there as a fait accompli, we necessarily prejudge the definition of success—the establishment of an American model of civil order by force of arms.
Ms. Kagan’s mistake is to circumscribe the issues in the Iraq War as purely military ones. General Petraeus is right to define his job within the scope of the mission he has been given. It is the responsibility of civilian strategists and the rest of us to instruct the Secretary of
Defense and the President that that mission is wrongly defined.
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