I’ve made up my mind

So I’m voting for Kerry. In my two threads on the subject (here and here), I’ve been amused to read suggestions by fellow Republicans that I’m overanalyzing things and should just trust my gut. If I had done that, I would have known I was voting for Kerry sometime this summer because of Iraq. To put it crudely, my anger at Bush for the number of Mongolian cluster-f**ks this administration was discovered to have made in the planning process in the run-up to Iraq was compounded by the even greater number of cluster-f**ks the administration made in the six months after the invasion, topped off by George W. Bush’s decision not to fire the clusterf**ks in the civilian DoD leadershop that insisted over the past two years that not a lot of troops were needed in the Iraqi theater of operations. No, if I was voting based on gut instincts, I would have planned on voting for Kerry and punching a wall afterwards. Reading the New York Times recap of the postwar planning by Michael Gordon just brought all of this back to the surface. The failure by Rumsfeld and his subordinates to comprehend that occupation and statebuilding requires different resources, strategies and tactics than warfighting boggles my mind:

Military aides on the National Security Council prepared a confidential briefing for Ms. Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, that examined what previous nation-building efforts had required. The review, called “Force Security in Seven Recent Stability Operations,” noted that no single rule of thumb applied in every case. But it underscored a basic principle well known to military planners: However many forces might be required to defeat the foe, maintaining security afterward was determined by an entirely different set of calculations, including the population, the scope of the terrain and the necessary tasks. If the United States and its allies wanted to maintain the same ratio of peacekeepers to population as it had in Kosovo, the briefing said, they would have to station 480,000 troops in Iraq. If Bosnia was used as benchmark, 364,000 troops would be needed. If Afghanistan served as the model, only 13,900 would be needed in Iraq. The higher numbers were consistent with projections later provided to Congress by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in Iraq. But Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed that estimate as off the mark. More forces generally are required to control countries with large urban populations. The briefing pointed out that three-quarters of Iraq’s population lived in urban areas. In Bosnia and Kosovo, city dwellers made up half of the population. In Afghanistan, it was only 18 percent. Neither the Defense Department nor the White House, however, saw the Balkans as a model to be emulated. In a Feb. 14, 2003, speech titled “Beyond Nation Building,” which Mr. Rumsfeld delivered in New York, he said the large number of foreign peacekeepers in Kosovo had led to a “culture of dependence” that discouraged local inhabitants from taking responsibility for themselves. The defense secretary said he thought that there was much to be learned from Afghanistan, where the United States did not install a nationwide security force but relied instead on a new Afghan Army and troops from other countries to help keep the peace. James F. Dobbins, who was the administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and had also served as the ambassador at large for Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti, thought that the administration was focusing on the wrong model. The former Yugoslavia – with its ethnic divisions, hobbled economy and history of totalitarian rule – had more parallels with Iraq than administration officials appeared willing to accept, Mr. Dobbins believed. It was Afghanistan that was the anomaly. “They preferred to find a model for successful nation building that was not associated with the previous administration,” Mr. Dobbins said in an interview. “And Afghanistan offered a much more congenial answer in terms of what would be required in terms of inputs, including troops.”

Maybe, maybe someone could give administration officials a pass in making that assumption. But once they realized that the Afghanistan analogy wasn’t working, they never questioned their assumptions:

General Franks’s talk of being prepared to take risks alarmed General Garner, the civil administrator. Fearing that an early troop reduction threatened the mission of building a new Iraq, General Garner took his concerns to Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the chief allied land commander. “There was no doubt we would win the war,” General Garner recalled telling General McKiernan, “but there can be doubt we will win the peace.” Soon after, the Pentagon began turning off the spigot of troops flowing to Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld had started to question whether the military still needed the Army’s First Cavalry Division, a 17,500-member force that was slated to follow the lead invasion force into Iraq. He and General Franks discussed the issue repeatedly. “Rumsfeld just ground Franks down,” said Mr. White, the former Army secretary who was fired after policy disputes with Mr. Rumsfeld. “If you grind away at the military guys long enough, they will finally say, ‘Screw it, I’ll do the best I can with what I have.’ The nature of Rumsfeld is that you just get tired of arguing with him.” General Franks insisted that he had not faced pressure on the First Cavalry issue. “It was Rumsfeld’s idea,” he said, referring to the cancellation of the deployment. “Rumsfeld did not beat me into submission. Initially, I did not want to truncate the force flow, but as it looked like we were likely to get greater international participation, I concluded that it was O.K. to stop the flow.” General Franks also said he accepted the suggestion only after his field commanders agreed that the division was not needed. But a former staff officer to General McKiernan said the land war commander had wanted the unit to be deployed and was disappointed that he had to do without the additional division. The deployment of the division was canceled on April 21…. According to United States officials, Mr. Bremer raised the troop issue in a June 18 video conference with Mr. Bush. Mr. Bremer said the United States needed to be careful not to go too far in taking out troops. The president said the plan was now to rotate forces, not withdraw them, and agreed that Washington needed to maintain adequate force levels. Still the American forces shrank, from a high of about 150,000 in July 2003 to some 108,000 in February 2004, before going up again when violence sharply increased early this year. Some of the troop declines were offset by the arrival of the Polish-led division in August 2003. (emphasis added)

One other thing — reading the Gordon article, what’s stunning is that the administration never solved this dilemma:

Rumsfeld, and the rest of the Bush administration’s foreign policy team, face a clear choice. It can outsource peacekeeping functions to the United Nations or close allies, at the cost of some constraints on foreign policy implementation. It can minimize the U.N. role and develop/train its own peacekeeping force. Or it can do neither and run into trouble down the road.

No, it’s back to thinking. In my original post on this topic, I said that, “I prefer a leader who has a good decision-making process, even if his foreign policy instincts are skewed in a direction I don’t like, over a leader who has a bad decision-making process, even if his foreign policy instincts are skewed in a direction I do like.” I meant two things by this:

1) John Kerry is more likely to recognize during the decision-making process that his instincts might be wrong — and therefore change tacks before making a catastrophic mistake; 2) Whatever Kerry’s policy, the decision-making process and the implementation of those decisions would lead to a greater probability of success.

Some commenters have argued that a second Bush term would be different. However, ironically enough, the failure of Bush to reshuffle his team requires me to take this assertion…. on faith. And I can’t do that. I still have doubts about Kerry. Massive, Herculean doubts. His plan to internationalize the Iraq conflict is a pipe dream. However, here’s the one thing I am confident about — a Kerry administration is likely to recognize, once the multilateral diplomacy fails, that it will actually have to come up with a viable alternative. UPDATE: Kevin Drum has some persuasive points on this topic. Like Laura McKenna, I’m not at all happy about my choice (And if the Kerry campaign is stupid enough to let Theresa continue to speak to the press, there’s an off-chance that in a fit of pique I’ll vote to deny her the opportunity to be First Lady.) But in the end, I can’t vote for a president who doesn’t believe that what he believes might, just might, be wrong. To quote David Adesnik, “As a professional researcher, I think I simply find it almost impossible to trust someone whose thought process is apparently so different from my own.”