Maurice Stoker Interviews a Spy - 3

MS: I don’t think I understand. The President claims we are at war.

K: In a formal way, we are at war. There’s been a document signed that the President can claim is a declaration of war. Course, his claim’s so broad this war could be engaged against any nation he doesn’t like. And it could go on as long as the White House wants to use it as an excuse to extend its authority. But I leave that to the lawyers to sort out.

In a real sense, we’re not hardly at war. There’s no real battlefield except Iraq … the only place the Army doctrine’s being tested. The war in Afghanistan is meaningless, since we either have to stay there forever or it reverts to warlords. But Iraq is all or nothing … a gamble with a huge chance of blowing up in our faces.

MS: How is this test being conducted in Iraq?

K: Consider the four tenets of Army doctrine as applied to low-intensity warfare. These are what Chesty Puller called small wars … fought in Nicaragua in the 1920s … which came to be distilled in the Marine Corps Small War Manual. Army could’ve used ‘em in Vietnam, but they chose not to. Now they’re applying it in Iraq, though they aren’t admitting it. In fact, they’ve modified it into a new doctrine, which they consider tailored to using technology to reduce troop levels … so-called force multipliers. Sometimes technology’s a crock … like when the Serbs fooled our heat seekers by setting bonfires. After our bombardment did nothing but stir up dirt … next day we found out we hadn’t damaged their armor or their troops or anything but a bunch of trees.

MS: Could you expand on this for us?

K: In principle it’s a four step program … we can apply it to all war types, including low intensity conflict like Iraq. First step’s intelligence study and analysis of potential battlefield. This was done poor in Iraq … filtered through delusional ideology … saw it as a conventional war ending in the hero worship and adulation of the WWII liberations of Europe.

This step hasn’t even been taken in the so-called war on terror.

Second step’s to establish conditions for dominance of the battle area … gain and keep the initiative. Course, that’s always the goal … nothing new. In low-intensity conflicts like Iraq it should involve training friendly forces, whatever that means with the proliferation of religious militias. Unfortunately, in Iraq that step failed completely because the military thought that by defeating Saddam’s military it had been accomplished. Stupids in control, so to speak. People like to point to the Vietnam debacle as too many civilians micromanaging the war … tying the military’s hands … but that’s another crock of crybaby blubbering. Fact is, the Iraq fiasco’s been far more micromanaged than Vietnam was … with the complicity of kiss-ass generals who worry more about keeping their jobs than the troops.

Third stage is operations, which sort of slipped up on us in Iraq. In fact, it was the Iraqi insurgents who chose when to begin this stage, not us. Supposedly this would be where the national elections … protected by those troops we never trained … elected a government of the people, etcetera. But with the sectarian split, that’s an unlikely outcome. Course, we can debate the existence of a government of the people in the US, too, since from my vantage point the US governmental structure is pretty alienated from its citizens. There is a pronounced split, I think … one thing seems certain: all sides want to choose security over liberty … Probably old Ben Franklin’s rolling over in his grave.

MS: He said that any people that chooses security over liberty deserves neither, or something to that effect.

K: He published a work saying any nation making such a choice deserved neither … . He didn’t write it himself.

Anyway, forth stage’ll be withdrawal of troops, maybe to invade Iran or Syria.

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