OK, well, the press should take some responsibility, but it will also be the bureaucracy:

Iraq has shown that the DoD bureaucracy is too big, too slow and out of touch with the realities of the modern battlefield.

Up until just recently the military was built for a set-piece battle against like forces. But our enemy does not want to cooperate with the geniuses in the Pentagon who came up with the plans and procured the equipment to execute those plans and developed training platforms to prepare soldiers for those plans.

The bureaucracy–even in combat–is staggering. To get some things done the request has to go through 15! steps of approval.

One Company Commander summed it up like this:

“They trust me with the lives of 100 men, humvees, weapons, ammo, civil affairs negotiations, classified intelligence, radios, everything. But I cannot be trusted with $20k worth of Dinar to hire a crew to build up an IP station?”

So, if Turkey is doing hot pursuit into Iraq, why is it we’re not going after the safe houses in Syria?

Michael Yon has a first-hand account of a quick-thinking American officer, and a blow against corruption in Iraq. It’s hard to imagine a story like this coming from CNN. Hit his tip jar.

The comments in the other post were getting out of hand, particularly after it was Instalinked. But there was an earlier comment there that I really shouldn’t let stand unchallenged, now that I have a break for the weekend.

The other point, separate from the moral issue raised by Bill, is that torture does not provide useful information. That according to experts.

So when you torture you are doing it not for the information content you wish to derive, but rather the sheer pleasure it gives the torturer. We don’t need that pleasure given that we claim we are better than Al-Qaeda.

I don’t accept the conclusion, because I don’t accept the premise.

First, “the experts” disagree on the value of information gained by torture. Certainly, it’s obvious that there is no guarantee that information gained under duress is valid. On the other hand, that doesn’t imply that no information gained under duress is valid. And we aren’t talking about inquisition, or confessions, here. We are talking about actionable (and often verifiable) information. For instance, if someone in custody knows the location of a kidnap victim, or a planted nuclear weapon, and they are unwilling to reveal it, what are we to do? If we get the information by duress, and we go to the location and find the victim or bomb, then apparently the information was both valid, and useful. Is the commenter really attempting to argue that because it was obtained by unsavory means that it is not?

Now whether or not it’s immoral to attain such information by such means is a separate and debatable issue (unfortunately, we live in a complex world in which “it depends”). But to say that one cannot obtain “useful information” by such means is nuts. Even if “the experts” say it (and I don’t think they all do, with due respect to Senator McCain, who is admittedly made of tough stuff). As commenter Cecil Trotter points out, George Tenet (is he an “expert”?) claims that Khalid Sheik Mohammed revealed a great deal of useful information under duress.

The notion that, even if we concede that we torture captured illegal combatants (I don’t, at least not as a matter of policy), it is only because we are sadists, and that Dick Cheney enjoys a good cigar, and quaffs an infant smoothie, while watching people being tortured, is nuts. We are in a war. If we attempt to get information out of people using duress, it is because we seek the information, not because we like people to suffer. This is Bush (and Cheney) derangement, pure and simple.

However, human nature is human nature. And in recognition of the latter we have the Third Geneva Convention.

There seems to be a single-minded focus on the Geneva Conventions as protectors of prisoners’ rights, even for prisoners who behave in utter violation of those Conventions. To do so is to display a profound ignorance of the primary intent of the Conventions, which were an attempt to reduce the impact of war on innocent civilians, a concept that our enemy holds in utter contempt.

This subject has been discussed multiple times in the blogosphere over the last few years, but apparently many of the commenters either haven’t read, or have read and forgotten, or lacked the reading comprehension to understand it.

The Conventions require that combatants fight in recognizable uniforms. Why? So that it makes it easier to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and to reduce the incidents of collateral casualties.

The Conventions require that combatants not wage war from designated sanctuaries such as churches, mosques, hospitals, or ambulances. Why? I’d like to think that the answer is obvious.

The Conventions require that those waging war accept the Conventions. Why? Because if not, then there is no point in having them, since people who violate them would still be granted the benefit of them.

Since 911, in the face of the most ruthless enemy imaginable, who would wipe us off the face of the earth with the flick of a finger had they our power, we have fought the most humane war in the history of humankind. We have spent untold billions of dollars to develop precision weaponry that can destroy a building while leaving another one right next to it intact, that can destroy a tank while leaving a car sitting next to it unscratched. We (and the Israelis) will send in troops and risk their lives to take out specific terrorists, when we could instead simply wipe out a neighborhood, safely from the air. Why? Simply to avoid civilian casualties. We have rules of engagement that put our troops at further risk, so that we don’t accidentally hit a civilian.

But we have an enemy that not only hides in mosques and ambulances, and behind women’s skirts, but one that rejoices in deliberately murdering civilians, even of their own religion.

When people unthinkingly demand that we grant the rights of standard POWs stipulated by the Conventions to illegal combatants, they are in effect demanding that we violate the Conventions, and they are in fact undermining the purpose of the Conventions. This isn’t about having “moral authority” in the eyes of the world (a dubious premise, anyway, given how little moral authority most of the world has). That’s like worrying about what gangsters think about our occasional speeding tickets. No, it’s about trying to enforce the rules of war that were an (admittedly paradoxical) attempt to civilize it.

But when the focus in the news is on how awful we are, and how it’s all our fault that Muslims murder Muslims in Iraq, and the more they murder each other, the more news it makes in the western press, and the more we are blamed for it, it is giving the enemy exactly the kind of propaganda they want, and feed on. Only when the news media start to tell the whole story of what’s going on over there will we start to win the real war that we’re losing in the media, even as we win it on the ground.

J. D Johannes says that the pacification is spreading from Anbar. If so, it would confirm my theory about the evolution of cooperation.

Hey, it worked for them the first time:

Despite their utter, unconditional capitulation, the Democrats insist this fight is not over. They live to surrender another day.

…Tet, the all-out communist offensive of February 1968, is remembered as a military failure for the North Vietnamese that was ironically their greatest political victory. An Iranian-backed campaign this summer could be the same for both Iran and America

Yes, a civil war in the Arab world:

Seventy percent of insurgents fighting in Iraq come from Gulf countries via Syria where they are provided with forged passports, an Iraqi intelligence officer alleged in a published report Wednesday.

I don’t understand why we aren’t doing anything about this.

I should also repeat, as has been noted before, that 911 and the “War on Terror” is indeed an Arab/Muslim civil war that they’ve been exporting along with their oil.

Except with a lot lower casualty rate. Strategy Page says that the Iraqis are finally getting fed up with the violence:

American military commanders and diplomats continue to remind Iraqi politicians that the biggest problem in the country is corruption. That’s hard for many Iraqis to accept, since stealing whatever-you-can-get-your-hands-on has been a tradition for so long. Many Iraqis assume it’s the natural order of things, and consider the Americans insane, or disrespectful, with all their talk of honest government. The message, however, is getting through, as it becomes obvious that Iraqs new democracy won’t work with the traditional Iraqi attitudes towards dishonesty in politics. This new attitude is being reflected in many ways. There are more corruption investigations, arrests and prosecutions. The corruption is still there, but it’s becoming politically incorrect. Meanwhile, everyone is getting more patriotic. It’s no longer cool to take orders from Iran. So Muqtada Al Sadr, and his Mahdi army, are becoming less a tool of Iran, and more a mainstream Iraqi political movement. Sadr is even sitting down and cutting deals with Sunni Arab politicians. At the same time, the Mahdi Army is being purged of factions that don’t go along with the new peace and reconciliation approach. Those radical factions are still killing Sunni Arabs, while Sunni Arabs and al Qaeda continue to slaughter Shia Arabs. This is not popular with Iraqis in general, and the terrorists are increasingly seen as a public menace that all Iraqis must unite to destroy.

We won Iwo Jima. Some will argue, of course, that the analogy is more apt than it seems, because it was an unnecessary battle. But that was only clear (to the degree that it is true) in retrospect, and there’s little point in carrying the analogy too far.

Melanie Phillips writes about liberalism versus Islamism. Sadly though, many who (mistakenly) call themselves liberals seem to think that George Bush is the enemy.

Bill Whittle’s latest essay reminds me of this post that I wrote a couple years ago on the pacification of Iraq:

One of the interesting things about [Tit for Tat] is that the more similar algorithms it has to deal with, the better it does. Put in an environment of non-cooperators, it has a much harder time, but it can still be more successful than them, and if it has a few others to cooperate with, it can survive even in a sea of non-cooperators.

Non-cooperators, on the other hand, don’t do well in a cooperative society. A non-nice strategy (one that always, or occasionally, or randomly defects unprovoked) won’t do well in a world of TFTs, because after the first time they get screwed by it, they will not cooperate with it again, at least until it changes its ways. So while it gets a big payoff the first time, it gets a much smaller one in subsequent exchanges, whereas the TFTs interacting with each other always get the medium benefit.

Thus, it’s possible for a small group of cooperators to “colonize” a larger group of non-cooperators, and eventually take it over, whereas a group of non-cooperators invading a larger group of cooperators will not thrive, and will eventually die out. This is the basis for Axelrod’s (and others’) claim that there is evolutionary pressure for cooperation to evolve.

This may hold the key to fixing Iraq, and ultimately the Middle East. While there’s a lot of bad news coming from that country right now, the fact remains that much of it is calm and at peace–that part doesn’t make the news. It may be that nationwide elections won’t be possible in January, but certainly it should be for some regions (particularly the Kurdish region).

In fact, there were national elections in January. But this provides a possible key to a metric of success. Instead of counting suicide bombings and violence levels (which the terrorists can maintain at an almost arbitrary level as long as there are a few of them around, due to entropy), as the media does (because if it bleeds it leads), it would be more useful to measure how small an area they appear in, and how large a one is relatively peaceful, as Anbar now seems to be, based on Michael Yon’s reports of boredom there.

[Update a few minutes later]

Hmmmm…just one more thought. Is the Anglosphere a “tit for tat” culture and legal system? I wonder if it’s ever been discussed over here?