What Would Genghis Kahn and Others Do in Iraq?

There is, of course, a very long history of invading armies taking over new territory. Given that, and the trouble we've had in Iraq, I've wondered if there is an historical template for how to take over a defeated country and whether we ignored that historical template in Iraq. At one point I did some reading and sent a few emails around looking for answers. I managed to learn a little bit about how this was done in the past, but not enough.

So I was interested to see "How would four of the greatest war leaders in history have handled Iraq?" in the LA Times, particularly the first one on Genghis Khan's takeover of Iraq in the 13th century:

• Genghis Khan: Law and order, by Jack Weatherford
• Caesar: Diplomacy and power, by Adrian Goldsworthy
• Lincoln: Focus on the real foe, by Harold Holzer
• Washington: The crying game, by Joseph J. Ellis

Comments

[anne]

What is needed in Iraq is to leave immediately. What is needed is to end the killing and wounding of American soldiers, to end the psychological and moral suffering of the needless immoral tragic lunacy of occupying Iraq. We must leave Iraq immediately. That is precisely what is needed.

says...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/25/AR2006122500459_pf.html

December 26, 2006

The Freedoms My Brother Is Defending
By Emily Miller - Washington Post

Here is what my brother, a member of the Army National Guard, told me as he prepared to serve in Iraq this year:

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is who controls the armed forces. Civilian command of the Army is a cornerstone of our democratic system.

My brother told me that he takes his oath to defend the Constitution seriously and that he will fight and die if necessary to honor his commitment. When I asked him if he would be offended if I participated in activities opposing the war, he replied that it was not only my right but my obligation, and the obligation of all civilians opposing this war, to try to change bad policy. "Give us good wars to fight," he said.

While acknowledging that another possible moral option is to refuse to participate in a bad war, my brother chooses to place his oath to the Constitution and his belief in our democratic system at the pinnacle of his moral convictions. That some of us might differ with him is basically irrelevant -- we (most of us) are not faced with his decision.

For the record, he believes that the war on terrorism is necessary to deal with real threats facing the United States. He is not convinced of what Iraq has to do with the matter, which puts him fairly well in the mainstream of American opinion.

So it is terribly upsetting to me to hear that some people despair that there is "no point" to their soldier's death or wounding in the Iraq war. America does not have to be right in order for our soldiers' service to have meaning.

What I find offensive is the idea that we have to "follow through" in order to give their deaths meaning post hoc. It is dreadfully apparent from the Iraq Study Group report that Iraq isn't going to have a democracy in any meaningful time frame. Even if this administration does everything perfectly, the best-case scenario is that we might maintain the barest outlines of order.

Victory being out of the question at this point, the only democracy my brother is fighting for in Iraq is our democracy. The only constitution he is in Iraq fighting to defend is our Constitution. If my brother dies, it will not be for a mistake but rather because of his deeply held belief that the time it takes us as a people to figure out through democratic processes that we are wrong is more important than his own life.

This places upon us an obligation. My brother and other service members living and dead have given us the sacred responsibility to use the democratic means we have at hand to bring judgment to bear on whether any given war is worth our soldiers' lives....

[anne]

Oh, I am sorry, for some reason this persnickity computer lost my name.

[anne]

We must leave Iraq immediately, and though we will not, we will even surge absurdly, we must continue to call for leaving Iraq.

[ken melvin]

None of the above mentioned give cause to an unjust cause. Not even 'victory'. The problem is we should never, ever have invaded Iraq. Now, we must admit our mistake and get out.

[bakho]

I recently read the Weatherford book on Ghengis Khan. Very readable, excellent book.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/29/world/middleeast/29kirby.html?ex=1325048400&en=af8b302caefb0aa1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

December 29, 2006

Iraqi Sniper Fire Forces a Healer to Tend His Own Wound
By C. J. CHIVERS

Petty Officer Third Class Dustin E. Kirby, a Navy corpsman whose efforts to save a wounded marine in Iraq were covered in an article published Nov. 2 in The New York Times, was severely wounded by an Iraqi sniper on Christmas afternoon, his family and the Marine Corps said yesterday.

The bullet struck the left side of his face while he was on the roof of Outpost Omar, the position his unit occupies in Karma, a city near Falluja in Anbar Province.

His jaw and upper palate were damaged extensively, but after several operations he was conscious and on a ventilator in a military hospital in Germany, his battalion commander, Lt. Col. Kenneth M. DeTreux, said by telephone.

Petty Officer Kirby, 22, of Hiram, Ga., was assigned to Weapons Company, Second Battalion, Eighth Marines, serving as the trauma medic for the company's Second Mobile Assault Platoon. It was his second tour in Iraq. He had married weeks before leaving the United States in July....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/world/middleeast/02medic.html?ex=1320123600&en=672f013573f7887e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

November 2, 2006

Tending a Fallen Marine, With Skill, Prayer and Fury
By C. J. CHIVERS

KARMA, Iraq — Petty Officer Third Class Dustin E. Kirby clutched the injured marine's empty helmet. His hands were coated in blood. Sweat ran down his face, which he was trying to keep straight but kept twisting into a snarl.

He held up the helmet and flipped it, exposing the inside. It was lined with blood and splinters of bone.

"The round hit him," he said, pausing to point at a tiny hole that aligned roughly with a man's temple. "Right here."

Petty Officer Kirby, 22, is a Navy corpsman, the trauma medic assigned to Second Mobile Assault Platoon of Weapons Company, Second Battalion, Eighth Marines. Everyone calls him Doc. He had just finished treating a marine who had been shot by an Iraqi sniper.

"It was 7.62 millimeter," he continued. "Armor piercing."

He reached into his pocket and retrieved the bullet, which he had found. "The impact with the Kevlar stopped most of it," he said. "But it tore through, hit his head, went through and came out."

He put the bullet in his breast pocket, to give to an intelligence team later. Sweat kept rolling off his face, mixed with tears....

[marcel]

Questions about the title: Who is this Gengis Kahn? a military leader for the Maccabees? an insurgent leader fighting to establish a Jewish state during the middle ages in what later became Birobidzan? or maybe "a light unto the nations" of Europe during the dark ages? In any event, the surname Kahn suggests that he was a direct descendant of Moses' brother, Aaron.

[anne]

Ken Melvin

"None of the above mentioned give cause to an unjust cause...."

[Ninjaplease]

Genghis Khan probably would have gone into Iraq-Iran-Turkey-Syria-Jordan-Lebanon, crushed all the people there including and especially civilians.

The British would have armed all groups, factions, tribes and let them have at it.

[Isabel]

"How would four of the greatest war leaders in history have handled Iraq?"

Sorry, but this tickles my funny bone: Lincoln? Washington?? Among the four greatest war leaders in history??? Whose history????

[anne]

Isabel:

"Sorry, but this tickles my funny bone: Lincoln? Washington?? Among the four greatest war leaders in history??? Whose history????"

We are so comically and thoughtlessly or ignorantly arrogant, and of course the question is slanted to war war war.

says...

"So what might Lincoln do today?

First, focus on the real enemy: terrorists"

Article is crap - for example the above statement shows Bush invaded the wrong country by Kincoln's atandards.

[Richard]

To ask the question is to beg the question: by asking what would certain military leaders of the past have done presupposes or at least foregrounds the military solution as "the" solution.

There is no military solution to the reckless use of a military. It really is that simple.

Why do we not ask, rather, what Ghandi would have done, or what Martin Luther King would have done? Why ask what Lincoln could have done when we could ask, instead, what early American Presidents, faced with a weak country and internal divisions, chose to do? They chose to negotiate, negotiate and negotiate, they chose to focus on what was important to policy and common goals, they chose to focus on alliances that would enhance both security and stability.

[Emmanuel]

I'm with Anne -

Q: What would Michael Jackson do?
A: Just Beat It.

[Bruce Wilder]

Isabel, Lincoln and Washington were among the greatest war leaders in human history.

My country may have come to a sad and decrepit state today, indeed, but most of Europe and Asia has experienced worse, some far far worse, and none better.

[Bruce Wilder]

Looking to competent leaders as examples for Bush seems a triumph of hope over experience.

It is for us to act, not to wish impotently for a magical transposition.

Let us look to the examples, which may instruct us: Charles I, perhaps, or Louis XVI.

[Bruce Wilder]

I only read the column by Harold Holzer on Lincoln, and thought less of Holzer for it.

In our incipient fascism, it has become popular to imagine Lincoln as the prototype of the Imperial President, trampelling civil liberties. Holzer reinforces this image, making the Lincoln the subject of sentences bettered headed by Congress. And, the piety of Lincoln, a life-long agnostic, to my mind, contrasts starkly with the sanctimoniousness of Bush. But, those objections are mere quibbles.

The big difference between Lincoln's Civil War conduct and Bush's, aside from Lincoln's brilliant rhetoric, was that Linclon's Union conducted the Civil War with a clear strategy. That strategy was the last gift of the ancient Winfield Scott, hero of the Mexican War and, possibly, the most brilliant strategist ever to head the American Army. Popularly referred to early on, as the Anaconda Plan, it provided that the Union blockade the Confederacy and divide the Confederacy by capturing the Mississippi River.

McClellan, early in charge, preferred a march on Richmond, with a Grand Army of irresitable numbers, to "send a message" of intimidating "shock and awe" to the Confederates. McClellan's plan, with McClellan in charge, failed of execution. But, to McClellan's credit, he allowed Scott's plan to go forward as well, and it was Scott's outline, which was followed to win the war.

It is one of the enduring myths of the Civil War that the North possessed overwhelming material superiority, but this is simply not true. The American South, mobilized early, was rich, vast and The Confederates were advantaged to be fighting in defense. Given the task of conquest before it, the Union's advantages were scarcely adequate at the beginning of the War. The difference between the Union and the Confederacy, which eventually manifested in overwhelming force, was that the Union intelligently mobilized its resources, and was able to gradually diminish the Confederacy's capabilities and resources, by striking the Confederacy where it was vulnerable and grinding away.

It wasn't just Scott's outline for military movements, as brilliant as that was. Since this is an economics blog, it may be worth noting that the Union was far more practical in mobilizing its resources. A currency, and national banking system to support it, was organized, despite the ideological distate of those tasked to do it. Taxes of all kinds were raised, substantially, including the first income tax. One of the nation's leading bankers organized massive bond drives to borrow money for the war effort, with remarkable efficiency. A system for directing the operations of the nation's railroads was put in place. The northern economy would grow substantially by war's end, with increasing population, output, and exports, despite the huge draft of manpower into the army and navy.

The Confederacy, by contrast, failed to mobilize its resources. It began the war with a ill-conceived effort to withhold cotton from the European market, at the very time it needed the resources cotton could buy, doing the job of the Union blockade before the Union had the ships to enforce it. Blind in one eye, and not seeing with the other, Jefferson Davis sent as diplomatic emissary an arrogant advocate of reopening the trans-Atlantic slavetrade to antislavery Britain. The plutocratic planters, who populated the Confederate Congress, refused to tax themselves -- the only people with money -- preferring a flood of paper money and worthless bonds, and an in-kind tax on poor farmers, which would license pillage by the Confederate Armies. The Confederacy never adequately organized its vital railroads, and suffered throughout the war from shortages of foodstuffs and such a basic (and abundant) commodity as salt, because of distribution bottlenecks. Blockade running, a vital source of munitions and arms and other critical supplies, was left to private profit to organize, with the predictable result that perfume and silk remained available to the fashionable ladies of Charleston and Richmond, to the end.

Militarily, Scott's Anaconda Plan led the Union forces to focus their limited resources in making discernible progress on concrete goals, the achievement of which had the effect of diminishing the Confederacy's resources. The Union was free to try again and again, and fail again and again, to capture Vicksburg, then Atlanta and, finally, Richmond, with each hard victory marking certain progress for the Union cause and an amputation for the Confederacy.

At bottom, though, even before all considerations of the mechanisms of strategy, the Confederacy operated under the fatal handicap of one of the worst causes for which men have ever fought: the overthrow of a constitutional democracy for the sake of slavery.

[adam]

glad you posted this one mark. interesting. i liked the genghis kahn best but would like to know if he faced the sunni/shia problem that is basically the problem we have there today.

also, all four examples are pre-mao. he wrote the book on insurgency and the world hasn't been the same since. current technology available to insurgents (remote detonation of very powerful explosives and advanced communnications are two biggies)

another template that i've heard is bosnia. it wasn't perfect but is working.

the pentagon does recognize and is addressing and training for a military that does a better job of post war nation building. (our military can basically take down any other on the planet but handling what comes after is the rub).

one thing none of the 4 leaders did was fire the general in charge of rebuilding and appointing an atty named paul bremmer.

there were many republicans that fought this idea during the clinton years and bush originally ran on a no nation building platform but has since done a 180 (rather quietly, it was never mentioned in '04).

[adam]

the last two paragraphs of my post above should be reversed. not sure how i messed that one up.

[ilsm]

A little reading on the Hugilu Khan movement.

The Shi'a were on the Mongol side as were many christians in the area.

The Frankish Lavant benefitted and the Mameluk victory meant they left the Franks alone for a while. The christians sided with the Mongols.

Of this post half the references are brutal conquerors: the Khan and Caesar.

Washington actually is more like the insurgants.

Lincoln is most useful as he moved to heal and win the 'hearts and minds' to our temperament.

I should think we do as the Mongols.

Only expose a bunch of severed heads on pikes and bodies in gibbets to honor our Anglo Saxon mentors, a modest amount of drawing and quartering as well!!

[ilsm]

Some excellent insight on insurgency and the waste of using cold war tools and methods in Iraq.

http://www.d-n-i.net/richards/richards_neocons_neolibs.ppt

[Isabel]

I'm not saying that apples are beter than oranges, Bruce Wilder, but after Gengis Khan and Caesar wouldn't one expect... Alexander the Great, for example?

[Don]

Very nice comment on the Civil War, Bruce Wilder. Really though, as far is went, the stategy of the initial conflict of the Iraq War worked. It seems the interesting parallels woould be between Reconstruction and the post-"end of major combat operations" phase in Iraq. i think in both cases, no matter how brilliant the leadership, maintaining public support long enough to finish the job was/is impossible. After U.S. Grant left the White House, we left the minority to the tender mercies of the majority, a moral failure perhaps close to our failure to deal with slavery in the 1700's. Even if Bush finds a new Strategy (or someone tapes it to a 2x4 and whacks him over the head with it) that is reasonably effective, I just don't see American troops in Iraq long enough to bring it to fruition.

[Lafayette]

anne: "We must leave Iraq immediately,"

This sounds like a broken record repeating the same rant ad nauseam.

Do you believe that by repetition, the message obtains legitimacy? Nothing could be further from the truth.

Leaving Iraq now will ensue a chaos and causing the deaths of thousands of Iraqis. America should have thought of this consequence before entering. If American boys are dieing, it is because their leadership has thoroughly bungled this war - but that does not reduce by one iota America's responsibility to avoid an Iraqi civil war for which Uncle Sam is the blamable party.

If it is blood that you want apparently, you would do better to rant about Dubya being impeached for war crimes, since HIS invasion of Iraq was against an international treaty that America signed (the UN Charter).

[Lafayette]

EV: "What Would Genghis Kahn and Others Do in Iraq?"

Genghis Kahn was a brute to those who were brutish. He was, in fact, a very good leader of his people and much admired.

I suggest he would simply take the Sunnis and simply remove them from Baghdad into their own enclave or asking that a "brethren" country (Saudi Arabia, Syria?) accept them.

Apartheid is the only practicable solution in Iraq, given the idiocy of the Sunnis to continue killing the majority Shiites. They are simply bringing the "final solution" down upon themselves.

The Shiites are simply waiting for American resolve to dissipate (meaning lead-head's departure in 2008) - they will do then what is necessary to preserve their people. The Kurds will look on with pleasure, contributing thier Shiites to the exode, and feeling secure that the oil in Kirkuk will remain theirs.

Can anyone blame the Shiites (or the Kurds). Didn't America put its Japanese "citizens" into concentration camps - for their own safety? Didn't Saddam contain the Kurds into a sanctuary north of the oil fields?

The precedence is there (in both countries concerned) and I suggest that it WILL be employed.

[Lafayette]

BW: "Let us look to the examples, which may instruct us: Charles I, perhaps, or Louis XVI."

Louis XVI lost his head at the guillotine. Surely, we can do better than that? ;^)

[Lafayette]

EM/WP: "America does not have to be right in order for our soldiers' service to have meaning."

How trite. America involves itself in a war with just about every other President. This war is the second that has been perpetrated upon the American public by a president employing illicit means (the first having been that of Vietnam, by another Texan - LBJ).

And, what does the American public think? That, at first, it was worthwhile to kick some "towel-headed ass", but now it "aint worthwhile" because the war cannot be won? Is that the ultimate criterion, whether a war can be won? Regardless of its morality? Or, even, legality?

Has no one in that God-fearing land of the US not understood the difference between GW1 and GW2? The former was sanctioned by the UN, because the UN Charter had been violated. (I quote from Article 2, paragraph 4 of that document: "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.") The latter was not.

The US thinks of itself as a land of law. But, when some lead-headed president "decides" that the country is under attack, he simply surrounds himself with a legalistic wall of words (misrepresenting the facts) that abrogates the UN Charter ... and he sends in the boys.

The immorality of this action is blatant, particularly in light of the suspicion that the Texan gunslinger was avenging himself for Saddam's attempt upon his father's life in Kuwait (April, 1993).

This sort of direct response from a Banana Republic is laughable. But, from the most powerful nation on earth it is lamentable. The US signed a document that gave to the UN the right to determine sanctions against a nation that invades or attacks another signatory nation. The crime of a war of aggression is listed in Article 5.1 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (RSICC) - but America has blithely decided NOT to recognize that court. Anyone wondering why?

The matter might seem Orwellian. Apparently, before the law (as translated into the foundational charter of the UN), "all animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others".

Others might simply see it as the dumbing down of America.