September 26, 2006

Batiste

NOTE: Updated below.

My name is John Batiste. I left the military on principle on November 1, 2005, after more than 31 years of service. I walked away from promotion and a promising future serving our country. I hung up my uniform because I came to the gut-wrenching realization that I could do more good for my soldiers and their families out of uniform. I am a West Point graduate, the son and son-in-law of veteran career soldiers, a two-time combat veteran with extensive service in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, and a life-long Republican. Bottom line, our nation is in peril, our Department of Defense’s leadership is extraordinarily bad, and our Congress is only today, more than five years into this war, beginning to exercise its oversight responsibilities. This is all about accountability and setting our nation on the path to victory. There is no substitute for victory and I believe we must complete what we started in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Donald Rumsfeld is not a competent wartime leader. He knows everything, except “how to win.” He surrounds himself with like-minded and compliant subordinates who do not grasp the importance of the principles of war, the complexities of Iraq, or the human dimension of warfare. Secretary Rumsfeld ignored 12 years of U.S. Central Command deliberate planning and strategy, dismissed honest dissent, and browbeat subordinates to build “his plan,” which did not address the hard work to crush the insurgency, secure a post-Saddam Iraq, build the peace, and set Iraq up for self-reliance. He refused to acknowledge and even ignored the potential for the insurgency, which was an absolute certainty. Bottom line, his plan allowed the insurgency to take root and metastasize to where it is today. Our great military lost a critical window of opportunity to secure Iraq because of inadequate troop levels and capability required to impose security, crush a budding insurgency, and set the conditions for the rule of law in Iraq. We were undermanned from the beginning, lost an early opportunity to secure the country, and have yet to regain the initiative. To compensate for the shortage of troops, commanders are routinely forced to manage shortages and shift coalition and Iraqi security forces from one contentious area to another in places like Baghdad, An Najaf, Tal Afar, Samarra, Ramadi, Fallujah, and many others. This shifting of forces is generally successful in the short term, but the minute a mission is complete and troops are redeployed back to the region where they came from, insurgents reoccupy the vacuum and the cycle repeats itself. Troops returning to familiar territory find themselves fighting to reoccupy ground which was once secure. We are all witnessing this in Baghdad and the Al Anbar Province today. I am reminded of the myth of Sisyphus. This is no way to fight a counter-insurgency. Secretary Rumsfeld’s plan did not set our military up for success.

Secretary Rumsfeld’s dismal strategic decisions resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies, and the good people of Iraq. He was responsible for America and her allies going to war with the wrong plan and a strategy that did not address the realities of fighting an insurgency. He violated fundamental principles of war, dismissed deliberate military planning, ignored the hard work to build the peace after the fall of Saddam Hussein, set the conditions for Abu Ghraib and other atrocities that further ignited the insurgency, disbanded Iraqi security force institutions when we needed them most, constrained our commanders with an overly restrictive de-Ba’athification policy, and failed to seriously resource the training and equipping of the Iraqi security forces as our main effort. He does not comprehend the human dimension of warfare. The mission in Iraq is all about breaking the cycle of violence and the hard work to change attitudes and give the Iraqi people alternatives to the insurgency. You cannot do this with precision bombs from 30,000 feet. This is tough, dangerous, and very personal work. Numbers of boots on the ground and hard-won relationships matter. What should have been a deliberate victory is now an uncertain and protracted challenge.

Secretary Rumsfeld built his team by systematically removing dissension. America went to war with “his plan” and to say that he listens to his generals is disingenuous. We are fighting with his strategy. He reduced force levels to unacceptable levels, micromanaged the war, and caused delays in the approval of troop requirements and the deployment process, which tied the hands of commanders while our troops were in contact with the enemy. At critical junctures, commanders were forced to focus on managing shortages rather than leading, planning, and anticipating opportunity. Through all of this, our Congressional oversight committees were all but silent and not asking the tough questions, as was done routinely during both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. Our Congress shares responsibility for what is and is not happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Our nation’s treasure in blood and dollars continues to be squandered under Secretary Rumsfeld’s leadership. Losing one American life due to incompetent war planning and preparation is absolutely unacceptable. The work to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime was a challenge, but it pales in comparison to the hard work required to build the peace. The detailed deliberate planning to finish the job in Iraq was not considered as Secretary Rumsfeld forbade military planners from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq. At one point, he threatened to fire the next person who talked about the need for a post-war plan. Our country and incredible military were not set up for success.

Our country has yet to mobilize for a protracted, long war. I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the Administration did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq. Secretary Rumsfeld failed to address the full range of requirements for this effort, and the result is one percent of the population shouldering the burdens, continued hemorrhaging of our national treasure in terms of blood and dollars, an Army and Marine Corps that will require tens of billions of dollars to reset after we withdraw from Iraq, the majority of our National Guard brigades no longer combat-ready, a Veterans Administration which is underfunded by over $3 billion, and America arguably less safe now than it was on September 11, 2001. If we had seriously laid out and considered the full range of requirements for the war in Iraq, we would likely have taken a different course of action that would have maintained a clear focus on our main effort in Afghanistan, not fueled Islamic fundamentalism across the globe, and not created more enemies than there were insurgents.

What do we do now? We are where we are, plagued by the mistakes of the past. Thankfully, we are Americans and with the right leadership, we can do anything. First, the American people need to take charge through their elected officials. Secretary Rumsfeld and the Administration are fighting a war in secret that threatens our democratic values. This needs to stop right now, today. Second, we must replace Secretary Rumsfeld and his entire inner circle. We deserve leaders whose judgment and instinct we can all trust. Third, we must mobilize our country for a protracted challenge, which must include conveying the “what, why, and how long” to every American, rationing to finance the totality of what we are doing, and gearing up our industrial base in a serious manner. Mortgaging our future at the rate of $1.5 billion a week and financing our great Army and Marine Corps with supplemental legislation must stop. Americans will rally behind this important cause when the rationale is properly laid out. Fourth, we must rethink our Iraq strategy. “More of the same” is not a strategy, nor is it working. This new strategy must include serious consideration of federalizing the country, other forms of Iraqi national conscription and incentives to modify behavior, and a clear focus on training and equipping the Iraqi security forces as “America’s main effort.” Fifth, we must fix our inter-agency process to completely engage and synchronize all elements of America’s national power. Unity of effort is fundamental and we need one person in charge in Iraq who pulls the levers with all U.S. Government agencies responding with 110 percent effort. Finally, we need to get serious about mending our relationships with allies and getting closer to our friends and enemies. America can not go this alone. All of this is possible, but we need leadership and responsible Congressional oversight to pull this off.

Full transcript here. If any readers have the transcript of the actual Q&A of the hearing (the above quoted language is just the opening statement), as well as that of the other witnesses, please E-mail or post link below. Many thanks in advance.

UPDATE: Thanks to the readers who suggested via E-mail I get the transcript via Lexis-Nexis, but I'm traveling overseas without easy access, which was why I was shopping around for a link. Meantime, however, Travis Sharp of the Iraqi Insider blog has more on Batiste's testimony, including this snippet from another witness, Colonel Hammes, who stated rather succinctly: "We have articulated a clear-hold-build strategy, but we have taken away the money for build and the troops for hold.” Put differently, our Administration pretends they have the will to prevail, and a convincing plan to get us there, but they aren't devoting the resources to do so, and therefore the "plan" (Batiste's delicious and appropriate use of quotation marks in his opening statement says it all) is unconvincing, to say the least. We have at least moved away from Rumsfeld grotesque obstinacy in refusing to acknowledge even that we face a serious insurgency, and so have moved in the right direction with "clear, hold, build", sound counter-insurgency doctrine, and one of our key strategies in theater. But, as always with Rumsfeld, we're under-resourcing it, so that improved strategy is nonetheless not effective enough in persuasively changing the course of the conflict.

That is to say, the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika are only pretending to have the sang-froid and will and staying power and Churchillian courage to prevail in Iraq. But they are being dishonest with us. They are empty suits, presiding over a failing strategy, none of them with the energy or intellectual courage to own up and demand either that the nation sacrifice and devote adequate resources to the effort, or failing that pursue a convincing alternative strategy. Of course, it's not all their fault, as they are bowing to some realities, one suspects. If Bush gave a speech calling for re-institution of the draft, or implemention of a war tax, or even less dramatic moves but nevertheless ones that demanded more sacrifice (sending another 50,000 troops in, with casualty rates inevitably increasing, especially if we adopted less conservative force postures in keeping with best counter-insurgency practice) one presumes the nation would turn on the war all the faster (though if such moves changed the tenor of the war for the better perhaps support would not drop as much as one might suspect, although one would need real leaders at the helm explicating the need persuasively, which we don't). Worth noting too, Rove would allow none of it, with midterms looming in November.

Regardless, what we have now is not quite 'stay the course', or the comically desperate sounding 'adapting to win', or some such soundbite. What we are doing, really, is half-assing along as best we can without truly summoning all the national reservoirs of power (military, economic, diplomatic, humanitarian) to really have a real go at prevailing, assuming one believes there is still a shot at eking out a victory, an issue where intelligent people (as the previous thread indicated) can disagree. At some point, we either step up, talk to the Iranians and Syrians so as to get more intelligent about pursuing a regional strategy, make clear and signal to Iraqis we're there to truly prevail by sending in more forces, and otherwise get more serious (more robust force posture to truly "clear", not via endless rounds of whack-a-mole, but with a convincing footprint and level of sustained effort through entire areas of concern simultaneously, more funds for reconstruction and infrastructure to effectively "build", increasing American embeds operating with both Iraqi Army and even Police units so as to help develop more of an indigenuous "hold" function, and so on)--or we need to think much more about pursuing an intelligent withdrawal strategy--if perhaps we don't think the additional effort is worth it (perhaps presiding over a confederation, but holding out the prospects of a unitary state in the future, a la Dayton, is worthy of more thought). Either way, the rough status quo, with a couple soldiers dying a day, dishonors their sacrifice, because it is a sacrifice made in vain. And our leaders are not honest enough to come clean with us about this, or if they think they are being honest with us, it is only because they are living in a deluded fantasy land where fundamentalist-style verities reign, rather than the grim realities presented by the empirical evidence around them.

P.S. Bob Geiger's has got all the "YouTube" links here.

Hammes's quote is remarkable. Good for him.

He has a great book too.

Posted by: Chris at September 27, 2006 05:40 PM | Permalink to this comment

Precious! Now Gregory is parading forth "expert" parrots who squawk out his party line, just like the big media. Perhaps he should rename his blog "Mini-Spiegel." Let the NIE and all history since 2003 be damned! Gregory wasn't wrong when he so confidently and militantly promoted going to war in Iraq. No! Winning was a near certainty, but that evil Rumsfeld, against all odds, unpredictably and incomprehensibly turned out to be so incompetent that he upset the apple carts of even such peerless military geniuses as Gregory. And what is Gregory's counsel now? Steady, boys? No. Hold fast? No. It goes something like this: "It's still possible to win in Iraq, but only if Rumsfeld and the military blindly and absolutely follow my advice in every detail. Otherwise, we are simply throwing away our national treasure and the lives of our young soldiers." For those of you unversed in the intricacies of political euphemisms, the translation, dumbed down for those of us with no intellectual pretensions, is "cut and run!" That's life in a modern democracy, my friends. Deal with it, and think twice the next time a self-proclaimed genius suggest that a war would be a fine idea.

Posted by: Helian at September 27, 2006 07:54 PM | Permalink to this comment

Helian, you ridicule Batiste as a "expert" parrot. Is this because you ridicule the US Marine Corp in general, or him in particular? Would you mind filling in some background on why you despise the US Marine Corps, or why you despise him in particular, to help us understand how your hatred originates?

Posted by: hank des moinse at September 28, 2006 02:51 AM | Permalink to this comment

There is another way to look at these events.

Presume, for the sake of argument, that the Bush administration is not interested in winning any war, but quite the contrary is interested in prolonging all wars as long as possible. Assume that the ideal state of affairs for the Bush administration is perpetual war, fought with a minimum of troops, and a maximum of rhetorical flourish.

Why would the Bush administration adopt this strategy?

First, because it is the best possible strategy for the purposes of domestic politics, both short-term and long-term. It assures a permanent Republican majority, and a helpless, floundering Democratic opposition (I use the term "opposition" loosely).

Second, a perpetual war creates the environment in which unitary executive theory may be both practiced and legitimated, perhaps institutionalized for decades to come.

Third, It creates an environment in which government lawlessness may become the norm, and accustoms and conditions the population to arbitrary Executive authority.

Fourth, it transforms the Presidency into a Commander-in-Chief. The Presidency is no longer a constitutional, political office, but a military office (the Banana Republic model).

Fifth, it divides voters into those who support part or all of this program, and those who don't, and voters spend their energies attacking each other rather than providing any meaningful check or oversight upon actual political developments.

Sixth, it diverts the attention of the population from other issues: budgetary, health care, energy, education, etc. A Commander-in-Chief can hardly be expected to address in detail health care issues in "a time of war" or in the midst of the "ideological struggle of the 21st Century."

I'm sure you can think of other advantages. But, if viewed from this perspective, Rumsfeld has been perfectly competent: He has perpetuated the Iraq cauldron well beyond any initial expectations. Good job, Don!

Posted by: MD at September 29, 2006 08:39 PM | Permalink to this comment