Max Boot
The conservative foreign policy analyst on Bush's 'surge,' fighting insurgency, and why the Democrat
In his new book, War Made New, neoconservative military historian Max Boot takes a look at 500 years of technology and warfare and concludes that "we can't afford to be sanguine." Arguing that too many believe the United States' vast economic power is the most important element to ensuring our safety, Boot says we need to also maintain the world's most powerful military, claiming that history is littered with powerful empires brought low by smarter, smaller forces: "If we do in fact stint on military power, we could end up paying a devastating price, as have previous great powers whether it be the Spanish, the Hapsburgs, the British, or Russians."
A columnist for the Los Angeles Times, it's easy to imagine Boot would be a big supporter of Bush's war in Iraq. But, in fact, he says there's much to critique. He might not have delivered us from Rummy, but Boot's opinions carry some weight; he's a senior fellow for national security studies at the non-partisan think tank Council on Foreign Affairs, and in 2004 Boot was also named as one of the United States' 500 most influential foreign policy analysts by the World Affairs Council.
-Mindy Farabee
CityBeat: What's your take on President Bush's surge proposal?
Max Boot: Well, I'm not convinced it will work, but I hope that it will, and there's a chance that it will. Clearly, we have to do something different from what we are doing right now, because what we're doing is not working. I've been saying for a year now that we need to either downsize to move U.S. troops out of a combat situation and focus primarily on training Iraqi forces or increase the size of the force so they can actually bring security to some significant part of the country. Part of the question I would have is whether the 21,000 troops is going to be sufficient to bring security to Baghdad. Right now we have about 18,000 troops there, so this would certainly increase the prospects of securing at least a good chunk of Baghdad. That's not necessarily going to win the war as a whole or bring violence to a halt, but it's probably the best case scenario, in that it will buy time for the government of Iraq to make some difficult political choices and train some Iraqi security forces so that they can take on more of the burden as time goes by. Otherwise we're leading inexorably to defeat which would have calamitous implications for the region.
Is this move designed to buy time for President Bush, so that Iraq doesn't completely collapse on his watch?
That doesn't comport with my sense of President Bush. I don't think he would do something that blatantly political and cynical. If anything his fault has been in the other direction, he's been very rosy-eyed about the situation in Iraq and very convinced that victory is still within grasp. I think he's doing what he's doing because he genuinely thinks it will improve the situation, not because he's trying to kick the ball down the road and leave the next administration to deal with it. For starters, he's not facing re-election. He has a lot of latitude in terms of what he does, and he's shown himself willing to make gutsy decisions that are not necessarily the politically easy choices. If he were simply looking for the politically expedient way out of it, he would just adopt the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group and begin a pullout.
Is President Bush too rosy-eyed about our prospects in Iraq or do you think he's in denial about the graveness of the situation?
President Bush's mindset is that victory is still possible; we don't have to accept defeat. I don't know if that's right or not, but I think that those who oppose the surge option have an obligation to say what's their preferred option. Simply throw in the towel and concede defeat? Maybe that's what we have to do, but I don't think that President Bush is convinced of that, and I'm not sure that the majority of the American people are convinced of that.
You quote a general in your book saying that the time has passed when we could lose the first battles in a war and still stagger to victory. Right now, however, it seems we won initial battles and yet are staggering to defeat. Is technology good at achieving early success but not good at sustaining it?
We've gone too far maybe in one direction. What you're talking about is this post-Vietnam phenomenon where the Army remade itself so that it would be able to be successful in the early stages of a war, and that was primarily to be able to counter the Red Army in Europe, because they didn't want to fight a four-year-long war against the Soviet Union. They wanted to be able to stop the Soviet invasion of Western Europe very quickly and decisively, so that's what they concentrated on. They created the best conventional war fighting force in the world whose prowess was demonstrated against the Iraqi army in 1991 and 2003, but the big blind spot they had was their force was really not configured for counterinsurgency and for stabilization and peacekeeping assignments, which is, of course, exactly what we're facing now.
I don't think it's any coincidence that's what we're facing now, because our enemies have assessed our weaknesses and our capabilities and they realize it's suicidal to face the U.S. military with a conventional military adversary. That's something the Iraqis, the Serbs, and others have tried to do and failed miserably, whereas those who have fought unconventionally - whether it be the Vietnamese, the Somalis, or others - have had more success against the United States. It's hard to reconfigure a military like ours, but that's what we're having to do on the fly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In War Made New, you say that creating our huge, well-appointed bases like the Green Zone, which include amenities like lobster dinners and Wal-Marts, are akin to carrying the city of Atlanta around with us. Could these "mini-Americas" aid insurgencies by provoking resentment among the Iraqi population?
There's no question that's the case, and I think a lot of the ways that we've operated in Iraq have been counter-productive because such a huge percentage of American money and personnel have been sucked up in establishing and defending these giant bases, whether it's the Green Zone or various forward operating bases scattered around the country. Any expert in counterinsurgency will tell you that in order to combat an insurgency, you have to be out operating among the people, and we're not operating among the people, we're cut off from them. By and large, people in Iraq only see Americans when they're careening down the street in armed convoys, which leads to traffic snarls, collisions, shooting of civilians, and other problems, so that definitely doesn't enhance their respect for us.
You write in your book that due to their lack of checks and balances, autocracies have a tendency to lead their countries into ruinous wars. So, are you happy to have a Democratic congress back?
I'm not unhappy. It kind of depends on what they do. If they engage seriously in the debate, I think they could have a useful function and force the administration to justify and clarify it's thinking, which is something that the previous Congress didn't do a very good job of.
Published: 02/01/2007
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