Justus For All

THE BELGRAVIA DISPATCH has some comments on the prisoner abuse scandal:

I am ashamed, of course. And profoundly saddened. Part of the reason this is happening too often? Untrained personnel, likely confused kids really, are being tasked with interrogations. But interrogators need to be trained to perform their tasks consistent with relevant law, convention, norms. They also need to be coached on best practices by which to extract information–mock executions not among them. Again, our force mix and too few troops in theater have, not only rendered securing victory harder, but also contributed to scandals like these because we never dedicated the proper quantum and mix of resources to the tasks at hand. Will someone ever be held accountable in the broad reaches above Brig. General Karpinski of Abu Ghraib notoriety? Don’t hold your breath. For Rummy, after all, accountability means, well, non-accountability (Except for assorted slaps on the wrist or jail time for some of the ‘bad apples.’ Many of them less guilty, if not vis-a-vis direct culpability, in terms of the piss-poor post-war assumptions that have led to the hoisting of large numbers of untrained personnel into difficult, unfamiliar situations. Situations that lend themselves to precisely the human rights abuses we are again hearing about now. Am I saying there is legal liability that resides directly with Rumsfeld via the chain of command? No, not necessarily. But there is certainly a more general failure of leadership and moral direction that is part and parcel of all of this. And in significant manner).

I agree with him totally on the basic cause of this scandal: soldiers who are not properly trained in interrogations, but I am not sure his root causes, i.e. not enough troops, have much to do with this problem. Would bringing in another 100,000 soldiers give us more, or less, trained personnel in interrogation, particularly in relation to the number of people who were detained?

I suppose one can argue, as some have, that if we had more troops there from the beginning the violence would be markedly less and thus the need for interrogations would be reduced. I don’t buy that argument. Iraq is a big place, with a large population, and in my opinion, more troops would simply mean more targets for the insurgents.

Now if we want to talk about some specific jobs for these troops you might convince me. One area that we seem to have been pretty lax in is controlling Iraq’s borders and keeping negative foreign influence out. Certainly I blame Iran and Syria for financing and coordinating a lot of the trouble that is in Iraq and better border control could go a long way to reduce this problem. I haven’t though seen any estimates on what it would take to effectively seal the borders and certainly the drain on our armed forces might be more dangerous than the unsealed borders themselves.

Of course the central point about more troops is that you can’t just magically create them in an instant. It takes at least a couple of years, probably longer if we are talking about an increase large enough to support 100,000 extra personnel in Iraq indefinitely. The numbers we have stationed in Iraq currently are already stressing our military capacity, so an increase in deployments seems to be exactly the wrong strategy for a war were endurance will probably be the key to victory. Depending upon how long you think our deployment in Iraq will be needed, trying to increase the size of our military at this point might be useless. I am not convinced that it is needed either, as I think Iraq, for all its setbacks, is headed in generally the right direction.

However, I do think that we need to increase our military nonetheless. Iraq (and to a lesser extent Afghanistan) has taught us some things. Nation building is integral to the successful prosecution of a modern war. Our military as it is currently constituted seems ill equipped to handle such a task. I think, as I have stated before on this blog, we need a new branch of the military that focuses on nation building. They would be a force that inhabits the grey area between a soldier and a policeman. Their leaders would study the concepts of nation building as vigorously as our traditional military studies how to defeat armies.

Yes this force would be expensive and take time to build. It is needed though in our modern world and the sooner we start to build it up, the sooner we will have it. It might require a tax increase to support and I, and I believe many others, who are opposed to tax increases in general would probably make an exception in this case (although I would prefer to cut some existing federal spending as well.)