There is lots of good data on the number of executions carried out under color of law in every country in the world for almost every year, with a handful of cases like China, where the data is merely estimated.
There is far less easily available good data on the average time elapsed historically and in different countries between the offense, the conviction and the execution. Yet, this data shouldn't be terribly hard to secure for a good percentage of cases, and has the virtue that even a reasonably small survey sample has the potential to be a quite good estimate of the complete number in any given judicial system at any given time, because of the way a judicial branch bureaucracy works.
The data would seem to be a quite useful part of an index designed to measure the extent of due process in different criminal justice systems, or as part of an index designed to describe death penalties that are on the books in an empirical continuum basis, as opposed to an all or nothing basis. Countries with no formal death penalty, but high rates of in prison deaths of inmates, might be viewed a having de facto death penalties. Systems with low death penalty imposition rates, high rights of post-conviction death penalty vacations, and long post-conviction appeals processes might be viewed as de facto abolitionist. Each criminal justice system could be ranked on an apples to apples basis if the index was properly designed, with fewer countries ending up in a completely abolitionist stance. "Zero", would be the situation where life expectency in prison at every age, was equal to life expectency outside of prison, and there was no formal death penalty. A negative score might be assigned where life expectency in prison exceeded life expectency outside prison (a possibility in places like the United States where health care, shelter and food are legally guaranteed to those in prison but not universally available to those outside of prison who are under age sixty-five).
30 June 2009
Civil Litigation At Its Worst
A Monday decision by the Colorado Supreme Court, decided by a 4-2 margin, over whether a sanction for discovery violations and related misconduct by lawyers in civil litigation was too harsh (the majority ruled that it was), nicely illustrates what civil litigation looks like when the pre-trial process gets ugly, despite (or perhaps because of the fact) that the underlying case was a fairly low stakes affair. The damages sought in the case had a principal amount of about $23,000 (the dividing line between the limited jurisdiction county court and the general jurisdiction district court is $15,000) in what appeared to all of the judges involved at trial and on appeal, to be a relatively simple case with only a few couple of seriously disputed facts.
While the ruling was highly fact specific and hence has only modest precedential application, appellate rulings on pre-trial procedure are rare, so the impact may be disproportionate.
No one on the Colorado Supreme Court believed that sanctions of some kind were not justified in the case, but the Court stuggled with how to balance deciding the case on the merits whenever possible with the desire to give trial judges enough authority to encourage lawyers and their employers not to behave badly.
While the case was won by the side receiving the harsh sanction, one has to question whether the win was worth the fallout involved in being identified as someone who behaved badly in pre-trial litigation in a publicly reported Colorado Supreme Court decision, which amounts to the moral equivalent of a public reprimand, to that lawyer, who will still probably end up paying the monetary sanction that was upheld, will still probably get stiffed on the client's bill in the case, and may still experience retaliation from judges and opposing counsel who might otherwise not have been aware of the incident in future cases.
Also, while the trial judge's sanction relating to the merits of the underlying case was not upheld on appeal, that same trial judge will preside at trial if the case goes to trial, and going to trial before an unhappy judge who has wide discretion on many matters is rarely a desirable propect for a client or that client's lawyer.
In the same shoes (and I am not in the same shoes), I would probably have simply agreed to indemnify the client for any losses suffered in this relatively a low stakes case by an unfavorable ruling on the merits as a discovery sanction. Indeed, the basic premise behind to adversary system in civil litigation, which makes less sense in criminal litigation where malpractice settlements rarely make a defendant whole, is that money paid in a malpractice suit, or under the threat of a malpractice suit, from an attorney who is probably not judgment proof, allows a client to be made whole, even when the client is punished by a judge for a mistake or misconduct that is really the client's lawyer's fault.
While the ruling was highly fact specific and hence has only modest precedential application, appellate rulings on pre-trial procedure are rare, so the impact may be disproportionate.
No one on the Colorado Supreme Court believed that sanctions of some kind were not justified in the case, but the Court stuggled with how to balance deciding the case on the merits whenever possible with the desire to give trial judges enough authority to encourage lawyers and their employers not to behave badly.
While the case was won by the side receiving the harsh sanction, one has to question whether the win was worth the fallout involved in being identified as someone who behaved badly in pre-trial litigation in a publicly reported Colorado Supreme Court decision, which amounts to the moral equivalent of a public reprimand, to that lawyer, who will still probably end up paying the monetary sanction that was upheld, will still probably get stiffed on the client's bill in the case, and may still experience retaliation from judges and opposing counsel who might otherwise not have been aware of the incident in future cases.
Also, while the trial judge's sanction relating to the merits of the underlying case was not upheld on appeal, that same trial judge will preside at trial if the case goes to trial, and going to trial before an unhappy judge who has wide discretion on many matters is rarely a desirable propect for a client or that client's lawyer.
In the same shoes (and I am not in the same shoes), I would probably have simply agreed to indemnify the client for any losses suffered in this relatively a low stakes case by an unfavorable ruling on the merits as a discovery sanction. Indeed, the basic premise behind to adversary system in civil litigation, which makes less sense in criminal litigation where malpractice settlements rarely make a defendant whole, is that money paid in a malpractice suit, or under the threat of a malpractice suit, from an attorney who is probably not judgment proof, allows a client to be made whole, even when the client is punished by a judge for a mistake or misconduct that is really the client's lawyer's fault.
Congrats To Colorado Pols
Colorado Pols has won a well deserved mention in Denver's 5280 magazine, who's "Top of the Town" lists are somewhat more serious and less ironic of those of free Denver tab, Westword which has "Best of Denver" lists instead.
Both are highly sought after and treasured for years afterward by local merchants.
Both are highly sought after and treasured for years afterward by local merchants.
Minnesota Race For U.S. Senate Over
As has been clear for months, Democrat Al Franken has defeated incumbent Norm Coleman (who has finally conceded) in the three way race for U.S. Senate by a little more than 300 votes, after a unanimous Minnesota Supreme Court rejected his election challenge. The decision comes about a week short of eight months after the election, and almost six months after the U.S. Senate convened in 2009. The Senate had the power to resolve the contested election, but refrained from doing so.
Franken will give Democrats a sixty vote filibuster proof majority in the U.S. Senate (although filibuster voters are rarely decided on straight party lines), something that will help President Obama win approval for is judicial nominees and help Democrats win approval for legislative priorities like health care reform (if they choose to exercise their power).
Franken's win appears to be the final piece Democrats needs to move the pro-union Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) with swift (five to seven days from card submission) unionization elections in lieu of the controversial but not terribly important "card check" provision which would dispese with unionization elections if a majority of employees signed pro-union petitions in advance.
Franken will give Democrats a sixty vote filibuster proof majority in the U.S. Senate (although filibuster voters are rarely decided on straight party lines), something that will help President Obama win approval for is judicial nominees and help Democrats win approval for legislative priorities like health care reform (if they choose to exercise their power).
Franken's win appears to be the final piece Democrats needs to move the pro-union Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) with swift (five to seven days from card submission) unionization elections in lieu of the controversial but not terribly important "card check" provision which would dispese with unionization elections if a majority of employees signed pro-union petitions in advance.
Defense Procurement Still Abysmal
* The F/A-18F was designed to be deployed as a carrier based multi-purpose jet fighter. It is being used instead to bomb suspected insurgents in Afghanistan. This probably isn't optimal, but makes bureaucratic sense. The Marines use F/A-18s before they are part of the Department of Navy which commissioned the design (most procurement happens at the service or department level within the Department of Defense). But, the nation needs ground troops to supplement an active duty Army that is too small to fight simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so it has used Marines who can also function as ground troops to Afghanistan to conduct counterinsurgency operations, and of course, the Marines used the equipment and systems that they have and have trained to use.
So far, so good. But, F-18s are not designed to spend the long time periods overhead often necessary for close air support (CAS) in counterinsurgency battles, so other aircraft had to fill in when the F-18s started to run out of gas in a recent battle in Afghanistan. What was called in? A B-1B bomber, which was invented for jobs like dropping nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union before stealth techology was invented.
B-1B bombers (which belong to the Air Force) are far less suited for close air support during counterinsurgency battles than F-18s. This is a job where one wants to fly slow and close to the ground so one can be sure one is hitting the right target before letting bombs go, and where smaller ordinance is usually better as it destroys only what you intend to destroy. Five to eleven dozen civilians, depending upon who you are talking to, were killed as the B-1B bomber blew up a mosque, a shrine, and other improved vilage real estate in the village of Farah in Afghanistan during a long battle with insurgents there, using very large for the purpose (500 pound and 2000 pound) -- which conceivably could have been served with guided artillery shells and armed drone aircraft, both of which are also present (although scarce) in Afghanistan.
One wonders, indeed, what a B-1B bomber loaded with 2000 pound bombs is doing in Afghanistan at, all as U.S. troops do battle with opponents who are infantry that have few weapons heavier than the equipment usually carried by paratroopers. The Air Force is also the reluctant owner of more than one hundred A-10 aircraft designed for precisely this job, and reportedly, in all of Iraq, there are only a few aircraft of any kind in the air in Iraq at any one time, some of which, if not all of which, are of the non-A-10 variety.
It is one thing to use less than ideal aircraft if the Air Force is maxed out, which it isn't in the combat aircraft department (although its cargo aircraft operation is spread quite thin). It is another thing to do so when you have an embarassment of riches in our aircraft fleet.
* House Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee chairman John Murtha, who has never met a weapons system that he doesn't like, has lost faith in the Marine's Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program after discovering 25 years into the R&D program (and several names later) that it is ill equipped to provide any protection to its occupants from IEDs and land mines. The EFV is meant to be something like the Army's Stryker, basically an armored personnel carrier, that serves as its own full speed landing craft. But, making the technology work has been challenging.
* Virginia class nuclear attack submarines cost $2.5 billion each to make, the production line is still open, and the current order from the U.S. government is two per year. Like everything else the Navy buys, it is grossly over budget, despite the fact that the design is well established.
The U.S. currently has 53 nuclear attack submarines. Two per year puts it on track to ultimately have sixty. One per year puts it on track to have thirty.
While attack submarines aren't sitting ducks like many surface warcraft of the U.S. Navy, they also aren't in high demand at a time when few potential opponents of the U.S. military have anything more potent than frigates, small coastal missile boats, and coastal, diesel powered submarines. Nuclear attack submarines were built to counter the then Soviet Navy, and Russia could still be a threat that would justify their existence (and China is trying hard to become such a threat), but a large scale naval conflict with Russia doesn't seem like the most likely scenario for the U.S. military right now and the cost of preparing for this contingency is very high.
So far, so good. But, F-18s are not designed to spend the long time periods overhead often necessary for close air support (CAS) in counterinsurgency battles, so other aircraft had to fill in when the F-18s started to run out of gas in a recent battle in Afghanistan. What was called in? A B-1B bomber, which was invented for jobs like dropping nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union before stealth techology was invented.
B-1B bombers (which belong to the Air Force) are far less suited for close air support during counterinsurgency battles than F-18s. This is a job where one wants to fly slow and close to the ground so one can be sure one is hitting the right target before letting bombs go, and where smaller ordinance is usually better as it destroys only what you intend to destroy. Five to eleven dozen civilians, depending upon who you are talking to, were killed as the B-1B bomber blew up a mosque, a shrine, and other improved vilage real estate in the village of Farah in Afghanistan during a long battle with insurgents there, using very large for the purpose (500 pound and 2000 pound) -- which conceivably could have been served with guided artillery shells and armed drone aircraft, both of which are also present (although scarce) in Afghanistan.
One wonders, indeed, what a B-1B bomber loaded with 2000 pound bombs is doing in Afghanistan at, all as U.S. troops do battle with opponents who are infantry that have few weapons heavier than the equipment usually carried by paratroopers. The Air Force is also the reluctant owner of more than one hundred A-10 aircraft designed for precisely this job, and reportedly, in all of Iraq, there are only a few aircraft of any kind in the air in Iraq at any one time, some of which, if not all of which, are of the non-A-10 variety.
It is one thing to use less than ideal aircraft if the Air Force is maxed out, which it isn't in the combat aircraft department (although its cargo aircraft operation is spread quite thin). It is another thing to do so when you have an embarassment of riches in our aircraft fleet.
* House Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee chairman John Murtha, who has never met a weapons system that he doesn't like, has lost faith in the Marine's Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program after discovering 25 years into the R&D program (and several names later) that it is ill equipped to provide any protection to its occupants from IEDs and land mines. The EFV is meant to be something like the Army's Stryker, basically an armored personnel carrier, that serves as its own full speed landing craft. But, making the technology work has been challenging.
* Virginia class nuclear attack submarines cost $2.5 billion each to make, the production line is still open, and the current order from the U.S. government is two per year. Like everything else the Navy buys, it is grossly over budget, despite the fact that the design is well established.
The U.S. currently has 53 nuclear attack submarines. Two per year puts it on track to ultimately have sixty. One per year puts it on track to have thirty.
While attack submarines aren't sitting ducks like many surface warcraft of the U.S. Navy, they also aren't in high demand at a time when few potential opponents of the U.S. military have anything more potent than frigates, small coastal missile boats, and coastal, diesel powered submarines. Nuclear attack submarines were built to counter the then Soviet Navy, and Russia could still be a threat that would justify their existence (and China is trying hard to become such a threat), but a large scale naval conflict with Russia doesn't seem like the most likely scenario for the U.S. military right now and the cost of preparing for this contingency is very high.
Sanford Keeps Digging
Governor Sanford, a Republican of course, needs to learn the First Rule of Holes and fast.
Hummer Deal Falls Apart
A recent deal in which a Chinese company would buy GM's Hummer division has fallen apart in the face of a Chinese government veto citing the environmental impact of Hummers unless negotiators can secure a reversal of this position.
The company has just six variants in all of two models of vehicles, and the total number of sales for the division are modest: "Following the historic record high of 82,380 annual sales of the vehicle in 2006, Hummer’s popularity has continually declined, and in the year before last and last year, the sales figures were 66,345 and 37,573 respectively.” Hummer's sales were about 1% of the General Motors total North American sales in 2008.
A single Indiana factory has enough capacity to make the entire Hummer division's new vehicles. A purchase of the division by a buyer who kept the current factories where Hummer makes its vehicles in place would save about 3,000 jobs. The small scale of the operation makes in a manageable bite for a smaller industrial company.
The company has just six variants in all of two models of vehicles, and the total number of sales for the division are modest: "Following the historic record high of 82,380 annual sales of the vehicle in 2006, Hummer’s popularity has continually declined, and in the year before last and last year, the sales figures were 66,345 and 37,573 respectively.” Hummer's sales were about 1% of the General Motors total North American sales in 2008.
A single Indiana factory has enough capacity to make the entire Hummer division's new vehicles. A purchase of the division by a buyer who kept the current factories where Hummer makes its vehicles in place would save about 3,000 jobs. The small scale of the operation makes in a manageable bite for a smaller industrial company.
Iraq War Winds Down
Today, U.S. soldier in Iraq, a force about 131,000, left Iraqi urban areas to great Iraqi jubilation. A final withdrawal is scheduled for eighteen months from now, and the good faith with which U.S. soldiers are leaving Iraqi cities offers some reason to expect that the final withdrawal deadline will have meaning as well.
U.S. troops deaths have been at a sustained low level, with some every month, but fewer than one a day in every month, since May 2008. The total U.S. death sine March 2003 when the war began is 4,318. If the war continues at is current rhythm, or winds down as U.S. troops grow less involved and withdraw, the total number of Iraq War deaths is likely to not exceed 5,000.
The primary missions of U.S. troops in Iraq these days appears to be to protect the U.S. force still there, to prepare the civilian government and its military to take over control, to suppress and discourage violence that gets out of hand, and to intercept and remove from the scene, foreign fighters, more or less in that order. More succinctly the goal is a retreat in good order. The current agreement on the status of forces in Iraq gives the Iraqi civilian government more power and respect, narrows the immunities of U.S. troops and their contractors, and reduces the frequency of potentially deadly direct interactions between U.S. troops and the Iraqi people.
Broad ambitions of state building have been replaced by narrow ambitions of training wheel removal. Notions of Iraq as a regional model of an Islamic democratic state, an important oil trade partner for the U.S., a center for a middle class economy as opposed to an oil economy, an ethnically diverse melting pot, or a long term trusted military ally of the U.S. have all faded. Iraq's basic infrastructure and economy have still not recovered to a pre-invasion state of affairs.
The withdrawal of U.S. troops over the next eighteen months isn't expected to be complete, high profile or precipitous. There may be 30,000 or so troops left when it is over.
The Iraqi civilian government is no world model, but, it appears that it is close to being able to stand on its own two feet after six and a quarter years of occupation. Most of the "Coalition of the Willing" has left already. President Obama's stated policy is to leave Iraq so that the military can refocus on Afghanistan, where we have been at war even longer, since late 2001.
The old regime is routed. The Iraqi military has had almost all of its heavy weapons destroyed or denied to it, leaving it little more than a national SWAT team. While violence and suicide bombings are still routine, some semblance of order has been restored to most of the country, outside select flash points, symbolic and urban centers, the tail end of campaigns of ethnic cleansing in neighborhoods that have already crossed tipping points, and violence directed at impotent minorities like gays, journalists, independent politicians and intellectuals.
Refugee flight and internal ethnic violence from earlier in the conflict has sent the Iraqi middle class most abroad, with large clumps of it in Syria and Jordan, and has dramatically increased ethnic segregation within the country and within neighborhoods in the largest cities. A few large cities like Baghdad have recently walled neighborhoods in which ethnic minorities have taken shelter, akin to airlift era Berlin, or Warsaw's early Nazi era Jewish quarter, and these may even turn out to be stable enclaves. Similar enclaves have endured at various times and places throughout the last last few thousand years. But it does not look likely that these cities will return to the widespread ethnic integration geographically that existed before the Iraq War that is winding down today.
The diaspora of middle class Iraqis bears watching in the years to come. Despite Saddam Hussein's genuine and brutal faults as an authoritarian leader, his regime had created, particularly in Baghdad, one of the largest economic centers in the Middle East in industries other than oil, which had been supported by a large, multi-ethnic educated class of middle class business people, professionals and skilled government workers who operated in some semblance of law and good order. This middle class has been thrust into exile for the most part, living in privation, often abandoning major components of their wealth like homes, land and large furnishings, prostituting their daughters and wives, and interrupting the educations of their younger children in favor of saving their lives from Iraqi militias. But, these most promising people of Iraq could also lead an economic renaissance for Jordan, Syria and other places they have congregated, if they can manage to use the resources that they could salvage, their skills and local good will to get back on their feet.
While the division of Iraq into true sovereign states seems unlikely in the near future, Kurdistan has been autonomous and relatively functional, to the point of being a de facto state of its own, since the conflict began.
The Southeast, meanwhile, right up to Baghdad itself, has become are fairly cohesive Shi'ite political units, even though sometimes brutal internal fights for political control continue between the political parties there. They have been largely unoccupied by foreign troops (previously led by the British) for many months now. This largest faction in the national government, which also has control in many provincial governments which it seems inclined to exercise appears to have generally favorable inclinations towards its better established Shi'ite democratic theocracy to the East, Iran.
While late to the game, Sunni Iraqis in the West appear to have come to terms with the legitimacy of the regime and secured some sort of meaningful self-government and control in the West. These Sunnis appear to have made some common cause with the Syrians whose Baathist regime is the only one left in the region, after the Sunni led Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein was deposed. Many Sunni activists appear to prefer a Caliphate, in imitation of the theocratic and royalist regimes of their middle eastern neighbors, but this seems unattainable in a region where warlords and elected officials collaborate to impose order.
There are still flash points, like Kirkut, an oil rich town whose future as Kurdish or Sunni is still in dispute, but they are beginning to look like the last embers of hot conflict in the country, rather than like fault lines or like the destination cord for a power keg of violence. There are also a few small regions in the central-eastern part of the country that have retained some semblance of a ethnically mixed population, and it is not clear that this equilibrium will be stable. The winners in these areas seem likely to be the Kurds and Shi'ites, as they hold all the cards in the national government which is in the best position to impose settlements in these cases.
The reasons for bringing the Iraq War were always dubious. Claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or ties to the 9-11 terrorists were not true. The atrocities from his regime avenged after the U.S. occupation in war crimes tribunals were mostly stale. While Iraq was authoritarian and violated civil liberties, it was less of an offender in this respect than neighbors like Egypt and Saudi Arabia whom the U.S. counts as allies. We can't even reasonably hope to leave Iraq as good as we found it. The new Iraq will be poorer, less educated and skilled, militarily weaker, and more ethnically divided both psychologically and geographically. Iraq will have greater democracy, and probably, once things settle down, even greater due process in its court system. With any luck, it will spend a decade or two focused on trying to establish a stable regime and rebuilt, leaving its neighbors, including Israel, a little safer from any military threat it may have presented before the invasion.
Viewed on a cost-benefit basis, however, it will be hard to say that the U.S. will be better off from this conflict than it would have been if it had never participated. The war was accomplished with almost no non-military domestic sacrifices like rationing, tax increases, an increase in the size of the active duty regular military, or a draft. While 9-11 changed American life and thinking, the Iraq War just slowly fed a perception of the George W. Bush regime's incompetence and cruelty.
I suspect that the biggest long term impact on the U.S. of the Iraq War will be on the way that the U.S. military thinks about warmaking. This was the conflicts that taught the U.S. that it can no longer fail to plan for counterinsurgency operations. Iraq, Afghanistan and Somoli piracy have capped off decades of smaller low intensity conflicts fought by U.S. troops since the Vietnam War. U.S. military planners are now aware that one of their major obligations is to develop doctrines, training and equipment in each of its services, which is more appropriate for counterinsurgency missions and other low intensity asymmetric conflicts, and have been given the opportunity to try out new doctrines and equipment in the "sandbox" of Iraq while developing NCO and junior officer skills in the face of a real war instead of training exercises. U.S. military planners have also learned the risks inherent in overreliance on the National Guard of the type seen in Iraq.
Iraq has pointed out the need for low explosive power high accuracy ordinance, the threat posed by IEDs and infantry based mortars and anti-armor weapons to lightly armored Humvees and military trucks, the importance of language skills, cultural skills and ally building strategies, the risks of using helicopters rather than fixed wing close air support aircraft against tanks, the importance of securing logistical convoy missions, and the importance of having a plan to occupy an area after seizing it in an invasion fought with major military force. Iraq has reaffirmed the system of field hospitals it created, but has also forced greater attention to the harms caused by brain injuries from closed head wounds. Iraq has debuted widespread use of land and air based drones in war, and the military potential of the "smart bomb." U.S. troops have relearned how to conduct urban combat and modified their equipment accordingly for the task.
The next generation of military planners will be less impressed by big ticket weapons systems designed to do battle with the Russian and Chinese military juggernauts and more impressed by more modest and less expensive innovations that will give small units an edge fighting forgettable wars in third world countries. This will take time to make its way into the culture of the slow moving military bureacracy, but that is where we are headed.
U.S. troops deaths have been at a sustained low level, with some every month, but fewer than one a day in every month, since May 2008. The total U.S. death sine March 2003 when the war began is 4,318. If the war continues at is current rhythm, or winds down as U.S. troops grow less involved and withdraw, the total number of Iraq War deaths is likely to not exceed 5,000.
The primary missions of U.S. troops in Iraq these days appears to be to protect the U.S. force still there, to prepare the civilian government and its military to take over control, to suppress and discourage violence that gets out of hand, and to intercept and remove from the scene, foreign fighters, more or less in that order. More succinctly the goal is a retreat in good order. The current agreement on the status of forces in Iraq gives the Iraqi civilian government more power and respect, narrows the immunities of U.S. troops and their contractors, and reduces the frequency of potentially deadly direct interactions between U.S. troops and the Iraqi people.
Broad ambitions of state building have been replaced by narrow ambitions of training wheel removal. Notions of Iraq as a regional model of an Islamic democratic state, an important oil trade partner for the U.S., a center for a middle class economy as opposed to an oil economy, an ethnically diverse melting pot, or a long term trusted military ally of the U.S. have all faded. Iraq's basic infrastructure and economy have still not recovered to a pre-invasion state of affairs.
The withdrawal of U.S. troops over the next eighteen months isn't expected to be complete, high profile or precipitous. There may be 30,000 or so troops left when it is over.
The Iraqi civilian government is no world model, but, it appears that it is close to being able to stand on its own two feet after six and a quarter years of occupation. Most of the "Coalition of the Willing" has left already. President Obama's stated policy is to leave Iraq so that the military can refocus on Afghanistan, where we have been at war even longer, since late 2001.
The old regime is routed. The Iraqi military has had almost all of its heavy weapons destroyed or denied to it, leaving it little more than a national SWAT team. While violence and suicide bombings are still routine, some semblance of order has been restored to most of the country, outside select flash points, symbolic and urban centers, the tail end of campaigns of ethnic cleansing in neighborhoods that have already crossed tipping points, and violence directed at impotent minorities like gays, journalists, independent politicians and intellectuals.
Refugee flight and internal ethnic violence from earlier in the conflict has sent the Iraqi middle class most abroad, with large clumps of it in Syria and Jordan, and has dramatically increased ethnic segregation within the country and within neighborhoods in the largest cities. A few large cities like Baghdad have recently walled neighborhoods in which ethnic minorities have taken shelter, akin to airlift era Berlin, or Warsaw's early Nazi era Jewish quarter, and these may even turn out to be stable enclaves. Similar enclaves have endured at various times and places throughout the last last few thousand years. But it does not look likely that these cities will return to the widespread ethnic integration geographically that existed before the Iraq War that is winding down today.
The diaspora of middle class Iraqis bears watching in the years to come. Despite Saddam Hussein's genuine and brutal faults as an authoritarian leader, his regime had created, particularly in Baghdad, one of the largest economic centers in the Middle East in industries other than oil, which had been supported by a large, multi-ethnic educated class of middle class business people, professionals and skilled government workers who operated in some semblance of law and good order. This middle class has been thrust into exile for the most part, living in privation, often abandoning major components of their wealth like homes, land and large furnishings, prostituting their daughters and wives, and interrupting the educations of their younger children in favor of saving their lives from Iraqi militias. But, these most promising people of Iraq could also lead an economic renaissance for Jordan, Syria and other places they have congregated, if they can manage to use the resources that they could salvage, their skills and local good will to get back on their feet.
While the division of Iraq into true sovereign states seems unlikely in the near future, Kurdistan has been autonomous and relatively functional, to the point of being a de facto state of its own, since the conflict began.
The Southeast, meanwhile, right up to Baghdad itself, has become are fairly cohesive Shi'ite political units, even though sometimes brutal internal fights for political control continue between the political parties there. They have been largely unoccupied by foreign troops (previously led by the British) for many months now. This largest faction in the national government, which also has control in many provincial governments which it seems inclined to exercise appears to have generally favorable inclinations towards its better established Shi'ite democratic theocracy to the East, Iran.
While late to the game, Sunni Iraqis in the West appear to have come to terms with the legitimacy of the regime and secured some sort of meaningful self-government and control in the West. These Sunnis appear to have made some common cause with the Syrians whose Baathist regime is the only one left in the region, after the Sunni led Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein was deposed. Many Sunni activists appear to prefer a Caliphate, in imitation of the theocratic and royalist regimes of their middle eastern neighbors, but this seems unattainable in a region where warlords and elected officials collaborate to impose order.
There are still flash points, like Kirkut, an oil rich town whose future as Kurdish or Sunni is still in dispute, but they are beginning to look like the last embers of hot conflict in the country, rather than like fault lines or like the destination cord for a power keg of violence. There are also a few small regions in the central-eastern part of the country that have retained some semblance of a ethnically mixed population, and it is not clear that this equilibrium will be stable. The winners in these areas seem likely to be the Kurds and Shi'ites, as they hold all the cards in the national government which is in the best position to impose settlements in these cases.
The reasons for bringing the Iraq War were always dubious. Claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or ties to the 9-11 terrorists were not true. The atrocities from his regime avenged after the U.S. occupation in war crimes tribunals were mostly stale. While Iraq was authoritarian and violated civil liberties, it was less of an offender in this respect than neighbors like Egypt and Saudi Arabia whom the U.S. counts as allies. We can't even reasonably hope to leave Iraq as good as we found it. The new Iraq will be poorer, less educated and skilled, militarily weaker, and more ethnically divided both psychologically and geographically. Iraq will have greater democracy, and probably, once things settle down, even greater due process in its court system. With any luck, it will spend a decade or two focused on trying to establish a stable regime and rebuilt, leaving its neighbors, including Israel, a little safer from any military threat it may have presented before the invasion.
Viewed on a cost-benefit basis, however, it will be hard to say that the U.S. will be better off from this conflict than it would have been if it had never participated. The war was accomplished with almost no non-military domestic sacrifices like rationing, tax increases, an increase in the size of the active duty regular military, or a draft. While 9-11 changed American life and thinking, the Iraq War just slowly fed a perception of the George W. Bush regime's incompetence and cruelty.
I suspect that the biggest long term impact on the U.S. of the Iraq War will be on the way that the U.S. military thinks about warmaking. This was the conflicts that taught the U.S. that it can no longer fail to plan for counterinsurgency operations. Iraq, Afghanistan and Somoli piracy have capped off decades of smaller low intensity conflicts fought by U.S. troops since the Vietnam War. U.S. military planners are now aware that one of their major obligations is to develop doctrines, training and equipment in each of its services, which is more appropriate for counterinsurgency missions and other low intensity asymmetric conflicts, and have been given the opportunity to try out new doctrines and equipment in the "sandbox" of Iraq while developing NCO and junior officer skills in the face of a real war instead of training exercises. U.S. military planners have also learned the risks inherent in overreliance on the National Guard of the type seen in Iraq.
Iraq has pointed out the need for low explosive power high accuracy ordinance, the threat posed by IEDs and infantry based mortars and anti-armor weapons to lightly armored Humvees and military trucks, the importance of language skills, cultural skills and ally building strategies, the risks of using helicopters rather than fixed wing close air support aircraft against tanks, the importance of securing logistical convoy missions, and the importance of having a plan to occupy an area after seizing it in an invasion fought with major military force. Iraq has reaffirmed the system of field hospitals it created, but has also forced greater attention to the harms caused by brain injuries from closed head wounds. Iraq has debuted widespread use of land and air based drones in war, and the military potential of the "smart bomb." U.S. troops have relearned how to conduct urban combat and modified their equipment accordingly for the task.
The next generation of military planners will be less impressed by big ticket weapons systems designed to do battle with the Russian and Chinese military juggernauts and more impressed by more modest and less expensive innovations that will give small units an edge fighting forgettable wars in third world countries. This will take time to make its way into the culture of the slow moving military bureacracy, but that is where we are headed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
