Will the Death of Journalist Open the Door to Conciliation?

On Friday January 19, Hrant Dink was killed outside the offices of his newspaper, Agos in Istanbul. Dink was a Turk of Armenian decent and a critic of Turkey’s official disavowal of the World War I era Armenian Genocide.
The Ottoman Empire took the initiative of clearing Armenian influence from its empire. A large population of Armenian were removed from Anatolia and placed in the deserts of what is now Syria and Turkey. Many of these Armenians were killed en route; some died of starvation in the concentration camps in the deserts while others were merely taken out of the camps and shot.
While the estimates of deaths differ, Efraim and Inari Karsh, in their book Empires of the Sand say all estimates, “paint a stark picture of a national annihilation of unprecedented proportions.” The British Parliamentary Report of 1916 places the number slain at 600,000 and deported at 600,000. Meanwhile, the Protestant Mission in the Ottoman Empire places the number uprooted to 1,396,000 (600,000 killed, 796,000 deported).
The Turkish government has long denied that genocide happened or that if death and deportation happened it should not be called genocide. “Nationalists consider such statements an insult to Turkey's honor and a threat to its unity.” Those that speak out to define the actions of genocide are often threatened and scorned. Mr. Dink was no different. He often received threats and complaints. Yet, he continued to work to get the Turkish government to accept the history of the situation.
The fact that the Mr. Dink’s presumed killer is a teenager tells much to the observer. The young are often recklessly idealistic. They are also less attuned to the nuances of issues. Therefore the teenager perhaps was strongly offended by Mr. Dink’s attack upon Turkey’s National Myth.
Unfortunately, the Turkish national myth is tied in with the end of the First World War. Prior to the World War I, Turkey as a nation-state did not exist. Instead, an imperial regime with the Sultan at its head stood in Istanbul. The Ottoman Empire nominally held North Africa and most of what we know of as the Middle East and the Balkans.
But, as the war ended sections of the Ottoman Empire were lopped off. First the Balkan states, then Arab States, then North Africa – all that remained was what we now know of as Turkey. And, the new Turkish state defined itself as Turk –exclusively. This has led to its problems with the Kurds whom the Turkish myth refers to as “Mountain Turks.” It is in this national myth that the Turkish nationalists find problems with admitting the Armenian genocide existed. The new Turkey is not one that would commit such a genocide; therefore, one must say it did not exist.
However, I find this an error in thought. The genocide was, in deed, not committed by the Turkish state. It was committed by the Ottoman state. The current Turkish state should not be held responsible even for the actions of its forefathers in the 30s and 40s, much less that of the Ottoman Empire almost 100 years ago.
It is in this sense that both Turks and Armenians should look to find a middle ground. Armenians should know and understand that the Turkey of today is not the same state that committed the horrible atrocities. Much of the Turkish government looks to making forward progress and liberal rights inside the nation-state, especially as it seeks membership into the European Union.
Turks cannot continue to ignore the existence of such a genocide, but should accept it as the tragedy of the past it is. It should become a rallying cry for the Turkish state. This type of act is what separates the Turkish nation-state from the imperial, weak multiethnic state of the sultans.
Unfortunately, it is not that easy. An acceptance of this crime could lead to demands of recognition of similar, if not as horrific, crimes committed by the Turkish nation-state, specifically in Kurdistan. But, it could lead to one small step in solving the Turkish state’s overarching issues of legitimacy, not only with ethnic Armenians but with world opinion and the European Union.

Bush's New Strategy

First and foremost I would like to apologize to those who supported the war in Iraq before it began. I really did not think that people actually believed the United States’ plan would work. Apparently even Donald Rumsfeld though that what would happen is we send in the troops; kill Saddam; establish a democracy; and, then, leave. I thought people would have seen the obvious issues with said plan. But, apparently people did believe that such a plan was going to work, and I’m sorry for calling it imperialist thinking. I mean I cannot get six people to get to the same restaurant so easily. I recently informed of my error in thinking that everybody knew we were gonna get stuck there. In the future, I will spell out the problems we are going to face and challenge the plan versus what I thought were the ulterior motives behind it.

Troop actions
Now, let’s get to the President’s speech. Here’s the new “strategy.” The United States will send over 20,000 new troops into Iraq. The majority of which (5 brigades ) will go to Baghdad in order to help secure the capital. These new troops will have a clearly defined mission:
1) clear and hold neighborhoods that have insurgents
2) assist and train the Iraqi army to do the same.
Also, 4,000 more troops will be moved to the Al-Anbar province, which the United States has had difficulty securing. Connect American troops to the Iraqi Army. One American brigade will be assigned to each Iraqi division (2-4 brigades in a division).
These American troop movements will work in concert with Iraqi military innovations. The Iraqis will appoint a new Military commander for Baghdad – as well as deputy commanders. They will send 15 new brigades of both Army and national police. These brigades will work from local police stations acting in with American military to clear and hold neighborhoods. They will also open checkpoints and engage in what we know as “community policing” by going around neighborhoods showing security.
While, George Bush has declared this an entirely new strategy, it is not. The strategy is still the same and as far as I can tell the tactics are not really that different. The troop levels are not above the most we have placed in the country at any one time. It will bring troop levels up to around 150,000 troops. Yet, this is still too low according to many experts.
At least two experts who were decision makers regarding Iraq felt that this troop strength was too low. The first was the former American proconsul for Iraq, Paul Bremer, had told the defense establishment that it would be impossible to win the war with the low troop level. MSNBC reports that Bremer felt it would require at least 500,000 troops to secure Iraq. While this may seem like a rather large number, the Army Chief of Staff in 2003, General Eric Shinseki, told a Congressional committee “several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq.”
These troop estimates have long been rejected by the Bush administration. In 2003, then Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz told the House Budget Committee:
it is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in a post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army--hard to imagine.
Wolfowitz, in fact, felt that the US would need less than 100,000 troops to secure Iraq. Of course, the White House has axed many of those who argued for the lower troop levels. Rumsfeld left after the midterms and Wolfowitz was kicked upstairs to the World Bank.

The Blame Game
Many people, including the Iraq Study Group have said that we should not dwell on the past or attempt to place blame on past errors. They seem to echo Zorba Canavaro when he said, “There you are, after all this, talking about the old agreement; that’s buried long ago.” Well, I am dwelling on the past and placing blame. The previous strategies are wrong! We saw both Bremer and Shinseki declare that the US would need a lot more troops to secure Iraq. And as far as the tactic of “clear and hold” there is nothing new under the sun here.
In an op-ed piece for the Bangor Daily News, which was reprinted by the Small Wars Journal, Dr. Carlos Yordan stated the US needed as many troops as Bremer called for. He cites Justin Quinlivan, a researcher at the RAND Corporation, who studied peacekeeping operations throughout the 1990s. “Quinlivan’s research shows that the chances of achieving post-conflict stabilization dramatically increase when interveners were willing to deploy 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants in post-war societies.” According to Yordan’s calculations it would require 500,000 troops – interesting, Bremer’s estimate – to secure the entire nation. A quick look at Baghdad shows that – with around 7 million inhabitants – it would take 140,000 troops to secure the capital alone.
The other question is the “clear and hold” tactic. I would be willing to guess this tactic was a main line of thinking for millennia. We would probably see Xerxes using it in the Persian War and Hannibal in the Second Punic War. Where the problem lies is in the United States’ inability to use it successfully in Iraq. Now, Bush has declared the gloves have come off. Bush said that there were too many restrictions placed on American troops before. They could neither hold areas that had been cleared nor could they enter certain neighborhoods of Baghdad to fight the insurgents.
Jason Wildhagen has described the unholy alliance in Iraq that deemed this approach necessary. The Anti-American, Muqtada al-Sadr, is a Shiite cleric and leader of the Mahdi Army, the largest insurgency group in Iraq. Yet al-Sadr’s power “has forced Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to maintain a careful balance between his interests in American support and support of al-Sadr and his followers.” This has meant that the United States has not been allowed to enter Sadrist neighborhoods to track down insurgents. Now I ask, is that not like telling American troops in France, “sorry, guys, you can’t enter Nazi held territories?”
I am playing the blame game:
1) The administration told us that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, when, in fact, it did not! The CIA white paper on the subject declared, Iraq “has expanded its chemical and biological infrastructure under the cover of civilian production.” It also said, “Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents.” Well, where are they?
2) The administration said that the US would be able to enter Iraq, set up a democratic government and then leave – within months of the invasion. Experience from Viet Nam to Germany and Japan should have told them this was wrong.
3) The administration toed the line saying it would not take that many troops to hold Iraq. This ideal was held by the neoconservative base, who had apparently neither studied the actions of intervention nor ever served in the military.
4) While Zorba is probably one of my favorite literary characters, I would not let him run a military intervention. One needs to learn from the mistakes not merely say that maybe they were made.

A Way Forward
Many people are saying instead of purely blaming the administration for failures, we should come up with our own ideas. Alright, I’ll play ball. I have three strategies that could work. (Four if you include “don’t go there in the first place.”)

STRATEGY #1 – SEND ENOUGH TROOPS: According to both the Army Chief of Staff and Justin Quinlivan, it would take a lot more troops to “win” in Iraq. Send the 500,000 troops that would be required to control the insurgency. An Iraqi National Army is a good idea. But, look to Afghanistan. The United States allowed the Northern Alliance made up of Tajik and Uzbek tribesman to smoke out Osama bin Laden in Eastern Afghanistan. We are still waiting for that to work.

STRATEGY #2 – LEAVE: This is the dreaded “cut and run” strategy that Republicans say liberals are pushing. Well, they are right, what they are wrong about is its effectiveness. This is the only strategy fair to the American troops there and the Iraqis, because at the current rate, eventually it will be the only choice left. Thinkers dating back as John Stuart Mill have found intervention wrong and ineffective. Mill saw three things could happen if a nation intervened to rid another’s of a repressive government. 1) The intervener may have to rule like an imperial power. 2) The intervener could spark a civil war involving rivalries it either ignored or did not see. 3) The intervener may be able to only keep peace by sending more and more troops into the country of intervention. If you noticed all three of these possible problems have come to pass. All the US can do if it wants a strong democracy (or any democracy) in Iraq is allow it to be created from the bottom up. It cannot be created by the barrel of a foreign gun.

STRATEGY #3 – THE COMBINED ACTION PLATOON: I well know that nobody in this White House is going to follow the strategy of non-Imperialism. Therefore, I must push for a tactic that has less chance of failing in the War in Iraq. This is the Combined Action Platoon (CAP). Max Boot describes the effectiveness of this tactic in The Savage Wars of Peace, and all discussion of it is taken from his work. It was used sparingly in the Viet Nam War. What the CAP did was to combine Vietnamese and American squads into one platoon. As a village was secured, the CAP would then live in the village. It would build fortifications that would not allow the Viet Cong to attack. Then via actions similar to local policing, it would gain the trust of the local citizens.
Why did the CAP not work? The American generals looked to “big war” tactics to win the war. General Westmoreland declared that he did not have enough troops to put a squad (4 squads in a platoon) in every village in Viet Nam.
What the United States can do is to slowly secure each individual neighborhood. Then, control it allowing for a change over from American troops to Iraqi troops in each individual neighborhood and hamlet, as the trust of the people are made. Then, the Americans move on to the next neighborhood or hamlet. But, what this requires is for the American troops to live and maintain a daily presence in the village or hamlet or neighborhood. This means they cannot be unapproachable and they cannot take extended tours of the Green Zone.
Unfortunately, it is more than likely that this will fail. There is no way that the American military and the Bush White House could sit around and wait for these small changes to win the war. Their past failures and lies have spent all political capital on this issue that they had. Now, nobody can trust the small steps that this would have to be “winning.” Even this will take far more than 150,000 troops to achieve. If one puts 12 American men and women and 12 Iraqi soldiers in every small neighborhood in Baghdad alone, it would take close to 200,000 troops – ignoring the rest of the country.

Perhaps, if the administration had not spent the last four years misinterpreting, misrepresenting and flat out lying about the chances of victory. Or if it had not completely ignored experts to only listen to those that fit the Cheney-Rumsfeld plans. Or, if it had not bungled even that plan. Maybe, just maybe, the people of the United States could trust them. But, I am sorry Mr. Bush we don’t.



_________________________________________________________________________________
It’s not actually a new strategy. It’s new tactics. The strategy is still to prop up the democratic government and train the new Iraqi army to do so when we leave.
For those without military training – or who are merely want to know –
brigade is from 3000-5000 troops made of 2 or more regiments;
regiment is from 2000-3000 troops made of 2 or more battalions;
battalion is from 300-1000 troops made of 2-6 companies;
company is from 60-250 troops made of 2-5 platoon;
platoon is the smallest whole form of troops made up of 25-60 troops.
Wikipedia has a good breakdown of all of this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_unit
Associated Press (January 9, 2007) “Pentagon: Bremer suggested more troops in ’04” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10777239/
Eric Schmidt (2003). “Pentagon Contradicts General on Iraq Occupation Force's Size.” New York Times (February 28, 2003). http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/consequences/2003/0228pentagoncontra.htm
Paul D. Wolfowitz (2003) “HEARING before the Committee on the Budget, House of Representatives, February 27, 2003.”
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=108_house_hearings&docid=f:85421.wais
Nikos Kazantzakis (1952) Zorba the Greek. Trans. Carl Wildman. (Simon & Shuster: New York). 199.
Carlos Yordan (2005) “Are More Troops Needed in Iraq?” pp. 25-26. Small Wars Journal vol. 4 [February, 2006]. 26.
Jason Wildhagen (2006). “Iraq: Analysis of a ‘Failed State.’” (Unpublished Paper). 5.
Central Intelligence Agency (2002) “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs.” 1.
CIA. 3.
Germany was under direct military control from 1945 through 1955 when the Allied High Commission was finally disbanded. Yet, The Treaty on Final Settlement With Respect to Germany that ended nominal Allied military control was not signed until September 12, 1990!
John Stuart Mill (1868). “A few words on Nonintervention” pp. 368-384. Essays on Politics and Culture. Ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb. (Peter Smith: Gloucester, 1973).
Max Boot (2002). The Savage Wars of Peace. (Basic Books: New York). 304-309.