#13yearoldme

There were three things that made me want to pick up this book: 1) that I was twelve when the Iraq war started, and for much of it was only hazily informed as to its specifics to the point where I repeated the standard liberal line: that it should never have been started; 2) that it’s interesting, as a person who works in a sector designed to criticize institutions, to look at one of the most flawed—and protected—institutions of all, the military; 3) I am nostalgic for the day I first heard about this book, while driving with my dad to go hiking in our crisp, beautiful Northeast winter.

This book revolves around David Petraeus and his groupies (no, not Paula Broadwell, although she doesn’t get left out) who would eventually hijack military strategy and make counterinsurgency—a dirty word since Vietnam—a viable, widespread military doctrine. Vietnam was quickly buried in the archives of military history from the 1970s on, seen only a mistake that was not to be repeated. Military academies taught classes on the moral ethics of the war, but wouldn’t touch the strategy side of the conflict. The assumption was that counterinsurgency had not just failed, but had been a humiliation—and so it was easier not to teach it. The American military overlearned the lessons of Vietnam, making dogma of the idea that a war like that could not, would not, ever be initiated by the United States again.

So when, with Rumsfeld leading defense policy on the blind belief that two wars could be won and stable regimes established with a quick ground war and incredibly accurate air weaponry, and then, when things didn’t turn out that way—David Petraeus and his cohorts were ready to step in. They were ready to advance an idea of counterinsurgency that wasn’t really new, just buried and out of print—in its most derivative form, this is the old “hearts and minds” trick, of combining development, building projects, wells, electricity, and food with “shooting the bad guys,” so that you win the population of a country to your side and force the insurgency out. 

And I’m glad I read this book, precisely because of that knee-jerk, childhood reaction I always had to the war, the thirteen-year-old who just thought: who the hell started this shit to begin with? Because what the 22-year-old me can also now think, is: what happens when it’s already started?

And that’s not to say that Kaplan gives unambiguous approval to the generals and analysts who crop up in this book—he criticizes Petraeus for lying to President Obama about the possibility of a successful surge in Afghanistan, and clearly makes the point that counterinsurgency is useful to have on hand when putting out a fire, but is simply not a viable military doctrine—something that destroyed some of its creators (Petraeus in particular).

But it IS to say, that this forced the 22-year-old me to think about the decisions that people, and particularly people in power, make. Because when Saddam is gone but people are still slaughtering each other in the streets of Baghdad, some people would still choose to declare victory—or even failure—and just come home, leave the country to shit and let the soldiers lick their wounds. But there were also people trying, even (and perhaps particularly) within these big bad institutions of defense, military, state, to set a bad thing a little bit right—making tough decisions within the uncomfortable parameters they’ve been given.