America's virtual empire: U.S. soldiers are great warriors, but unwilling imperial guards. If we want to secure our interests, we must draw on other sources of power

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2003 by Wesley (American computer scientist) Clark

And despite all the evidence pointing to the unsuitability of the Army to a long overseas deployment, no extra resources were provided to prepare for a drawn-out campaign. Instead, U.S. foreign policy has become dangerously dependent on its military. The armed forces are now practically the only effective play in the U.S. repertoire. Only they have the personnel, funding, and transportation to deliver relief supplies; organize training for armies and police; install communications and power; advise ministries of justice, health, and finance; build bridges; support election efforts; and inoculate and treat host populaces. Yet such problems are not among their primary missions. The troops often resent being asked to tackle these issues, to which they bring, often very understandably, a narrow, almost mechanical approach. For all their versatility, they lack the knowledge, skills, staying power, and scale to manage seriously a large nation on a continuing basis. They are unable to foment deep-rooted political development. They lack the skills and experience to revise constitutions, rework property laws and criminal statutes, and methodically bore into the deepest aspects of the societies. Troops are not police officers; the kind of investigations and anticorruption efforts essential in nation-building are largely beyond them.

The reliance on the U.S. military feeds another unfortunate trait: the tendency toward unilateralism. In the conduct of military operations, the United States has no peer. No other nation can muster the intelligence capabilities, logistics, firepower, and deployable forces that we possess. But by neglecting diplomatic levers and exhausting other international alternatives, the Bush administration has left itself without the numbers to effectively secure our gains. When, after capturing Baghdad, the military tried to impose security, it lacked sufficient forces to do the job--it simply couldn't occupy the breadth of the country, search for weapons of mass destruction, and simultaneously guard the immense spread of civil facilities and infrastructure needed for the successful transition to an authentically Iraqi government. And when they went "onto the offensive" by conducting sweeps and searching homes, they often lacked the interpreters to explain to families what they were doing and why--a classic mistake in a counter-guerrilla effort. They offended local leaders, and swept up the innocent and uninvolved. Even straightforward self-defense, like returning fire if fired upon, cannot hut over time inflict even more casualties upon innocent civilians, as well as arouse popular anger that will be very hard to assuage.

As of today, the best hope seems to lie in turning over political authority to a selected Iraqi council as rapidly as possible, and securing a new U.N. mandate which would provide the legitimacy needed for other nations to send in troops and provide financial assistance. At the same time, we ought to create sufficient Iraqi security forces to relieve U.S. troops--an approach which, in early September 2003, the president finally announced that he was prepared to follow. But even if we are able to significantly draw down the U.S. military commitment in Iraq over the next year or so, our ground forces will have been stretched tight and will likely need several years and unanticipated additional resources to recover fully. So soon after the defeat of Iraq, the vision of U.S. armed forces as the heart of a new empire--as a liberating force sweeping through the Middle East, brushing aside terrorist-sponsoring regimes to create a new American empire of Western-style democracies--seems to be fading fast. The transformation of the region seems a generation away.