Read now. Weep later.

What follows is about the most intelligent piece I've seen in a newspaper in many years. Read it, print it, file it. In ten years, read it again and sadly say to yourself, "If they had only listened".

'They Are All So Wrong'

Four years after 9/11, Washington keeps courting strategic error.

BY MARK HELPRIN Friday, September 9, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

September 11 was not so much a discrete event as part of a continuum. It was the result of broad strategic failures that, preceding it by decades, continue to this day and are likely to continue on. It is as if the country has lost, as exemplified by the Left now out of power, a great deal of the will to self-preservation, and, as exemplified by the Right now in charge, not a little of its capacity for self-defense. Our politics and policies have somehow been parceled out to opportunists like Michael Moore--purveyor of conspiracy theories and hatreds, whose presentation, unclean in every respect, is honored nonetheless by the controlling rump of Democrats--and to Bushmen like "Kip" Hawley of Homeland Security, father of the proposal to allow carry-on ice-picks, bows and arrows, and knives with blades up to five-inches long.

For more than 20 years prior to September 11, Islamic terrorists imprisoned and murdered our diplomats and military personnel, destroyed our civil aviation, machine-gunned our civilians, razed our embassies, attacked an American warship and, in 1993, the U.S. itself. For varying reasons, none legitimate, we hesitated to mount an offensive against the terrorists' infrastructure, hunt them down, eliminate a single rogue regime that supported them, or properly disconcert our fatted allies whose robes they infested. This was comparable in its way to Munich. Only in 2001, when it became obvious to any rational being that we must, did we retaliate, but even then in the face of domestic pressure to judicialize the response, which was exactly what we had done all along.

The underlying corollary to this reflex of appeasement is the notion that our military options are constrained financially, as if we are not a nation of stupendous wealth and it has not been the American tradition since the Civil War to spend, in support of war, with the intensity of war itself. In 1945, we devoted 38.5% of GNP to defense, the equivalent of $4.76 trillion now. The current $400 billion defense budget is a twelfth of that and only 3.2% of GDP, as opposed to the average of 5.7% of GNP in the peacetime years between 1940 and 2000. A false sense of constraint has arisen in every quarter of society. It is the ethos of the administration, the press, the civilian side of the Pentagon, and many of the prominent uniformed military brought to high rank in recent years.

They are all so wrong. In violating established tradition and throwing aside advantage and elemental common sense, they waste American lives. And for what? What moral construction would allow anyone to spend more than 2,000 dead and tens of thousands of wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan--so far--while insisting without major exception that cutting costs is a virtue? When is holding back from one's troops at war the reinforcements, armor and basic equipment they need a virtue rather than a sin?

Is it not the duty of the secretary of defense, his chiefs, and the wide array of generals to press energetically--even to the point of resignation--for whatever is necessary (not the minimum, but a safe surplus) to support the armies in the field? If they do not, who will? Had the president gone to Congress on September 12 and asked for almost anything, he would have been granted it. But he never did. This was a fundamental strategic error. If you must go to war, do not do so hesitantly, with half a heart. And in answer to the rationale that the casualties of this war are relatively light, one does not decently measure casualties against those of previous wars, but in terms of whether they can be avoided.

Apart from the paucity of armored vehicles, body armor, and other staples of battle, the chief problem of prosecuting the Iraq war has been the size and scale of the force. Despite inaccurate claims of unprecedented speed in the advance to Baghdad, the three weeks of halting action it took to get there, with lines of supply that are to this day poorly protected, were both spur and instruction for the insurgency. In what is only apparently a paradox, the military objective should have been less the conquest of territory and echelons than of morale, and, to accomplish this, territory and echelons would have to have been subdued with the blinding speed, shock and awe of the Six-Day and Gulf wars. The instant the Arab world realized that the promised shock and awe had not materialized, the insurgency was born.

We then nurtured it by deploying a fraction of the ratio (10:1) long experience indicates is necessary for suppression; by dismissing the enemy as mere "thugs," when, although they are thugs and worse, they have the thousand-year motivation of their civilization defending its heartland from Persians, Mongols, Shiites, and now Christians; and by gratuitously elevating our aims from the purely defensive to the transcendental, while steadily diluting the little power we have in the hope of forcing the entire Arab and Muslim worlds to a new politics. From a country where they have been held down in their beleaguered enclaves for two-and-a-half years, how are 140,000 soldiers to transform the highly aggressive and deeply rooted political cultures of 1.2 billion people?

Ceaselessly, we court strategic error. At the end of the Cold War, assuming that history had concluded, we discarded too much military power. This continues through the present, rationalized by reference to transformation. But it is yet further error to believe that military-technical evolution can make up for the kind of deficiencies and poor strategic judgments from which no machine can save an army. Continual and remarkable innovation is both indispensable and expensive, but President Clinton required budgetary choice between innovation and everything else, and his successor has yet to disagree. The root of the error that offers transformation as a substitute for so much that is crucial is the conviction that having both would exceed reasonable military expenditures and somehow break the common weal.

Having made many wrong choices, we find ourselves at yet another strategic crossroads, where invisibly to the general public we are about to choose wrongly again. We are reshaping the military into a gendarmerie, configured for small wars, counterinsurgency, peacekeeping and nation-building, all at the expense of the type of force that could deter or defeat a rising China. Although we need a gendarmerie, we cannot do without heavy formations and the many additional ships required for a navy--now less than half the size of the Reagan fleet and shrinking--to exploit our natural advantage in the Pacific.

The U.S. will chase every terrorist mouse (which is good, unless it means also neglecting the core competencies of the armed forces), while lessening and dispersing its power, and moving from previous centers of gravity (Europe, the Western Pacific) to Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. This will create a long and open alley through which China will run. Among other things, by placing markers in every trouble spot, we will probably be tied down and distracted, taxingly and often, to our enemies' delight.

When China completes its run up the broad alley we have afforded it, it will much sooner be the other pole in a once-again bipolar world, which will create the opportunity for terrorists in the guise of liberation movements to gather under its wing, as they did with the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. Ironically, in reconfiguring the military to focus primarily on terrorism, we may not only give China a great opening, but create for the terrorists a new lease on life.

The war in Iraq has been poorly planned and executed from the beginning, and now, like a hurricane over warm water, the insurgency is in a position to take immense energy from the fundamental divisions in that nation. The rise of Chinese military power, although lately noted, has met with no response. America's borders are open, its cities vulnerable, its civil defense nonexistent, its armies stretched thin. We have taken only deeply inadequate steps to prepare for and forestall a viral pandemic that by the testimony of experts is a high probability and could kill scores of millions in this country alone. That we do not see relatively simple and necessary courses of action, and are not led and inspired to them, represents a catastrophic failure of leadership that bridges party lines.

Perhaps this and previous administrations have had an effective policy just too difficult to comprehend because they have ingeniously sheltered it under the pretense of their incompetence. But failing that, the legacy of this generation's presidents will be promiscuous declarations and alliances, badly defined war aims, opportunities inexplicably forgone, ill-supported troops sent into the field, a country at risk without adequate civil protections, and a military shaped to fight neither the last war nor this one nor the next.

Katrina and the Waves

No, this is not a nostalgia piece about 1980’s one-hit wonder bands. Rather, this posting represents my first dip back into the political realm, after a summer of book reviews and travel postings. I will make this quick.

If anyone is wondering about the difference between Democrats and Republicans, one need only look at the mismanagement of the Katrina disaster by Louisiana state and local politicians and compare with (a) Guiliani/Pataki after 9/11; and (b) Haley Barbour in Mississippi. Who would you rather be in charge of the first response if your community were devastated?

In New Orleans, the corrupt mayor did not even use the plan that had been developed and tested for the specific scenario that unfolded. Hundreds of city school buses were moved to the lowest lying area of the city, and were never used to evacuate people as called for in the plan. Those buses are under water now. Even though in previous hurricane, when 10,000 people were evacuated to the Superdome and security problems resulted, the mayor did nothing this time around to provide security there.

On Saturday, the President had to demand that the incompetent Democrat governor to order an evacuation. She did not ask for the National Guard and federal troops until after the storm, even though Bush had given her the authority to do so two days before the hurricane. The mayor did not even contact the National Hurricane Center when Katrina was bearing down on his city. To this day, the governor and the mayor are in a public dispute over whether to force people out of their homes. That probably won’t do much to instill confidence among their constituents.

Hillary Clinton, of course, is saying that FEMA should be taken out of the Department of Homeland Security. Never mind that Hillary voted to have FEMA a part of the Department in the first place! The Department itself was Joe Lieberman’s pet project. Bush agreed to create it in the spirit of bipartisanship, even though he opposed the concept from the beginning. So it’s Bush’s fault that FEMA is less effective as part of Homeland than it was when it was an independent agency?

As for the President, he should have returned from vacation a day earlier, if for no other reason than to avoid the bad PR. Does Bush want to make Michael Moore’s job easier? The federal response was about 24 hours behind where it should have been, so Bush doesn’t get a free ride from me either. He probably should fire the heads of Homeland and FEMA and replace them with professional executives, rather than lawyers. The guy at the head of FEMA is clearly way out of his element.

As for rebuilding New Orleans, I’m not sure why we should put tens of billions of dollars and thousands of lives in the path of another hurricane. The French Quarter and other areas on relatively higher, more valuable commerical and historic land, could be walled off with bigger, stronger levees. But perhaps much of the population that lives in the most vulnerable areas should be disbursed to safer locations. Tear down the Superdome and build a new stadium in Baton Rouge. Maybe then the Saints could actually have a winning season.