War in Iraq

I will hold Mark Helprin's coat when he does battle with any lit'ry artist in the world. But lately when I read his policy analysis, I think that it is like eating a magnificent pastry by a superb pastry chef; delicate, crisp pastry, lots of pungent cream, and not a lot of nourishment.This essay is a case in point. Beautifully written, of course. But I am not sure what he wants.

He says the war in Iraq was a "war of sufficiency" rather than what it should have been, a "war of surplus". This is linked to a call for the Army to be a lot larger. Well, I agree that the Army should be larger; though not as large as Helprin thinks it should be, which I believe based on previous articles of his is on a scale approaching that of the Korea-era army. Still, he observes that the Army is dangerously stretched at 23 total combat brigades, when only nine are available for deployment. True. But doesn't that indicate that there wasn't much to play with in the invasion of Iraq? The President needs some kind of strategic reserve, no?

So with this war of surplus, what should we have done? Helprin tells us also that occupying Arab countries is simply hopeless, they're too backwards. So I guess we were supposed to conquer them with a force larger than we have; burn their cities; plough them under; sow with salt; repeat. I mean, on 9/12 it sounded like a good plan, but surely that's not a way to move towards any sort of future?

And on the other end of the spectrum from Mark Helprin, we turn to this truly apalling article in the Speccie on the attitudes of the German elite towards the United States. If half of it is true, it's awful.

Take these two paragraphs:

With every reverse, or seeming reverse, that the Americans suffer in Iraq, the schadenfreude in Germany reaches new heights, or depths. The Germans hope the Americans will fail in Iraq. They expected them to lose the war, and now they expect them to lose the peace. Such views are not, of course, unknown in Britain, but are far more widespread in Germany. They are accompanied by an astonishingly low estimate of the Americans’ abilities, lower even than the BBC sometimes conveys.

Whenever I visit Berlin I try to see my friend Dr Tilman Fichter, a veteran Social Democrat. We usually walk round the gardens of Schloss Charlottenburg, which are looking more and more beautiful, for they are being restored to their 18th-century form. Dr Fichter on this occasion excelled himself. He is full of acute insights into German politics, but considers the American armed forces to be of no value whatever. As he himself put it, ‘Even a British Boy Scout troop is a more military formation than the American army today.’ He believes the Germans would be prepared to serve in Iraq as long as a British general was in charge of the country.

Apparently even when he's in the gardens of the Schloss Charlottenburg, ol' Doc Fichter still manages to stay inside his own little dream world. Now, how the hell did he get in there?