I was watching a show on PBS recently about Iraq; in it, the reporter traveled around the country and spoke with Iraqis. Few of them had anything good to say about the occupation. The most common characterization of the occupation forces was that of the jackbooted American soldier kicking in some unsuspecting Iraqis' door at two in the morning.
Now, there are lots of doors that need to be kicked in at two in the morning. But there are also lots of innocent doors destroyed by mistake or by maliciously misleading tipoffs. Regardless, the military shows up, destroys some property, perhaps takes some Iraqis away in handcuffs, and then they leave and things go back to being the way they were. The soldiers don't speak the language and are more worried about being killed than they are worried about social niceties or apologizing for any possible error. In the streets, they drive by with a minimum of contact.
So the Iraqis don't like the occupying troops much. Understandably so - and yet, the occupying troops are behaving in the best fashion they can given their training, equipment, and goals. They're trying to keep the peace and trying not to get killed. They're an army, and their top job is to defeat other armies. Which they did in Iraq almost flawlessly. But using them to maintain order in the country is like using a shovel to guide a horse. It can be done, but it's awkward and it pisses off the horse.
You know a word I haven't heard in a number of years? "Globocop". It was all the rage in the early nineties, after the Soviet Union disintegrated and suddenly there was one superpower in the world. In the early years of the Clinton administration it was "globocop" this and "globocop" that, largely in conjunction with how American was not responsible for getting mixed up in every little hellhole (according to the conservatives) or how America didn't have the right to get mixed up in every little hellhole (according to the liberals). And, as usual, America simply picked-and-chose its hellholes (Bosnia yes, eventually, Rwanda no, I don't think so) and muddled along.
But now the Worst President Ever has pretty much single-handedly plunked us down squarely into one of the larger hellholes out there. And regardless of the merits of doing so, now we're there and if we're to have any hope of making the whole effort result in anything other than a fiasco, we're going to have to stay there for a while.
Yet we have basically one tool at our disposal, and although it did a fantastic job at what it was designed for, it's doing a pretty darn poor job at keeping the peace.
What we need in Iraq now aren't soldiers. What we need are cops. Globocops.
And taking a step back, that's what we will need more of in the twenty-first century anyway. Is America likely to get in a major shooting war? It's always possible - with China, over Taiwan, or with North Korea over nothing much at all - but not only is it unlikely, our military is patently up to the task.
But then ask yourself if America is likely to get involved in international brush fires - civil wars, little countries having coups, humanitarian interventions - you're looking at military action of that sort almost every year. Sometimes lasting for years.
Take Haiti. (Please.) The country has no military, no economy, has been run solely by corrupt thugs whenever the locals were in charge, and has required or attracted U.S. intervention dozens of times over the last two centuries. Now we're there again, only ten years after we set up the very government that was just ousted.
And who did we send in? The Marines. Now, if you want to take enemy-held territory, or to guard places you already hold, the Marines are your armed service. But there's no army in Haiti. No one wants the place. What Haiti needs is not Marines, it's cops. Uncorrupt, keep-the-peace type cops, who will protect the Haitians' life and property and that Haitians could and would turn to if they needed police help. So that, free from the fear of violence, Haiti and the international community can possibly turn the country around.
Those are exactly the same sort of people that are needed in Iraq. Cops. People that the Iraqis would see as being on their side - and would thus be effective because they would be community-informed. People who knock on doors in daylight, rather than in midnight raids. People who speak the language. Iraqis, actually.
Of course, this is already being done - Iraqi cops are being trained by the tens of thousands. But those are Iraqi cops, with their own power structure, and their own interests. Better would be an occupying police organization, with locals (in this case Iraqis) as the men on the street but having them reporting to and being guided by a highly trained (as compared to a few weeks) and locally unbiased leadership structure, an organization dropped into place immediately after the end of hostilities to recruit locals by the tens of thousands and to set up policing that works because it has been tested.
Once it has been running for a sufficient amount of time, withdrawal becomes a matter of slowly having the foreign officers replaced by local leadership as such men are found to be competent and to have absorbed the values of the service.
I think, given the new realities of twenty-first century conflict, we need a sixth branch of the armed services.
Globocops.
An armed service whose responsibility is occupation. Who will have institutional knowledge of how to occupy a country with the least amount of violence and resentment. Who, when one mentions "hearts and minds", has that as a top priority, rather than a "while you're at it". Who have specialists with local country knowledge and generalists with advanced degrees in sociology; who aren't focused on winning the war but are focused on winning the peace. Tens of thousands of police sergeants, to take charge and create overnight a policing force that doesn't just drive by in cars. A service whose job is what happens when the tanks stop rolling.
Because we Americans always seem to make our occupations up afterward. With the exception of the second world war, where the occupied countries were utterly prostrate and almost without men of military age, very few American occupations have gone well. From the Phillipine insurrection to Iraq, we win the war, get the land, and then have to decide what to do about it. The people the job inevitably gets handed to are the military, whose training is how to defeat foreigners, not how to live with them.
It is of course possible to argue, as was argued a decade ago, that we should not be occupying foreign countries anyway, and the establishment of such a service is therefore a bad thing. I.e., we should not buy a gun, because we'd be tempted to use it.
But we're already using it, and we are going to use it again. Sure, ideally, America should never have to occupy any foreign country. But then, in an ideal world, we wouldn't need a military at all. Hope for the best, plan for the worst, the saying goes. And it's time that we spent a little time planning for the aftermath of war, instead of just the war itself.
- Sun Ra