Petraeus said he and new U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker have developed a draft matrix for the September benchmarks that he provided this week to Congress in closed sessions and to Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Petraeus said he and Crocker will “probably focus” on four areas: security, economics, politics, governance and rule of law.
Army Times, 4/27/07
June 3, 2007
Dear Friends,
Last week, TMR opined about a changing conventional wisdom in American politics, using economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s definition of what causes these shifts – i.e., events not ideas.”
This week we turn to two other towering figures of the 20th century, both experts in the physics of motion, whose ideas offer differing perspectives about the ‘surge” and the future in Iraq -- German physicist, Werner Heisenberg, whose uncertainty principle upended classical, Newtonian physics; and Canadian athlete, Wayne Gretzky, whose feats of physical magic on the ice set new records for the sport of hockey.
First, Heisenberg and the uncertainty principle.
As polymath and Aspen Institute president, Walter Isaacson, writes in his brilliant new biography, Einstein:
“It is impossible to know, Heisenberg declared, the precise position of a particle, such as a moving electron, and its precise momentum at the same instant. The more precisely the position of the particle is measured, the less precisely it is possible to measure its momentum.
“The very act of observing something . . . affects the observation.
“The uncertainty principle, so simple and yet so startling, was a stake in the heart of classical physics. It asserts that there is no objective reality . . . outside of our observations.”
Second, Gretzky the Great, who offers a different perspective about position and momentum:
“I don’t skate to where the puck is, I skate to where it’s headed.”
Take your choice: Gretzky or Heisenberg – the former whose 40 regular-season records, 15 playoff records, 6 All-Star records, four Stanley Cups, 9 MVP awards,10 scoring titles, and 200 points in each of four seasons, suggests that “knowing where the puck is headed” is a knowable proposition; and the latter, founder of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, who seems less sanguine about such matters -- i.e., there is no objective reality . . . outside of our observations.”
And that’s the central conundrum about Iraq -- before, during, and after the surge. At best, we have known where the puck is, but never where it was headed.
Of course, there has been no shortage of puckish presumptions:
For example, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman believes that it takes about six months to know where the puck is headed:
"The next six months in Iraq—which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there—are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time." (The New York Times, November 30, 2003)
"I think we're in a six-month window here." (NBC's Meet the Press, September 25, 2005)
"Well, I think that we're going to find out, Chris, in the next year to six months—probably sooner—whether a decent outcome is possible there." (MSNBC's Hardball, May 11, 2006)
A team of experts assembled by the American Enterprise Institute produced the Kagan-Keane Report, which suggests that it is possible to predict where the puck is headed in Iraq by measuring where it is at a certain point in the surge process: that if by September it has achieved x, then y can be accomplished by December. Or that if 20,000 additional troops can achieve x, then 40,000 troops can achieve 2x. It’s a fair perspective based on deductive reasoning, but it may be just what H. L. Mencken had in mind when he observed, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
For those who prefer the lessons of history, there is “Things Fall Apart: Containing the Spillover from an Iraqi Civil War,” by Kenneth Pollack and Daniel Byman, leading scholars at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, who conducted an exhaustive examination of a dozen recent civil wars and the resulting patterns of fallout – spillover – that portend ominously for what could follow in Iraq.
No matter which perspective you find most relevant, you’re essentially endorsing the Gretzky school of physics -- i.e., It is possible to know where the puck is headed. And given his accomplishments, you have powerful evidence on your side.
Much as I am drawn to the uncomplicated perspective of the Canadian practitioner whose career seems to settle the question of whether one can really know where the puck is headed, I’ve concluded that as it relates to Iraq and the surge, it is the German theoretician who probably has it right.
And that leads me to the postulation of TMR’s “theory of the surge:”
“When September rolls around (although now we’re hearing pleas for a delay until December), we may know where the puck is, but we won’t know where it’s headed.”
And to its corollary:
“And we ain’t ever gonna know.”
Let’s use a current for-instance from the violent Al-Anbar province, where Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents hold forth, and where the surge is beginning to make a seeming difference in the level of hostilities and the alliances between and among Sunnis, Al Qaeda, and U.S. troops.
On last Friday’s News Hour, former Marine Captain Bing West had this to say to senior correspondent, Ray Suarez:
RAY SUAREZ: Well, you sounded pretty cautious, Bing West. Even if this kind of thing works, and it does get exported to the rest of Iraq, it sounds like you're anticipating United States forces being there for a long time?
BING WEST: Against al-Qaida, yes. I'm also a little bit careful about seeing how far we really go with this model, because this really is a way whereby the Sunnis, who out in Anbar are really tough guys, basically said, "We're going to throw in," but they didn't say they were throwing in with the Baghdad government. This is the dilemma. They said, "We see that the Marines are the strongest tribe out here, so we align with the Marines."
Now, the question is how you move from the alignment between American Marines and Sunnis to an alignment between the Shiite government in Baghdad and the Sunnis. So there's another step, Ray that still has to be taken here.
Ergo: We know where the puck is in Al-Anbar today -- things are looking better, the Sunnis are cooperating with U.S. troops against Al Qaeda. So, if you’re in the Gretzky School, you’d argue that if we keep at it, and export the surge model around the country, we can achieve the goal of a (relatively) peaceful and democratic Iraq.
But if you’re in the Heisenberg Schule, you’d observe that the conclusion, though compelling, may be sophisticated sophistry -- as Marine West suggests, once the U.S. troops move on, the larger question is whether the Sunnis will lie down with the Shia-led government or whether trouble will rise up in another form.
So, is the surge a Gretzky quantum leap or Exhibit A of Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics theory . . . the uncertainty principle?
It is both.
The American character is all about the quantum leap.
That’s what Manifest Destiny was all about.
It was the essence of John F. Kennedy’s, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth."
And it was where “Let’s Roll” on United Airlines Flight 93 came from.
It’s a mindset that eschews uncertainty. It sees the world in binary terms -- yes-no, good-evil, victory-defeat. It subscribes to a “stay the course” mentality, which seems to find its voice in Winston Churchill’s 1941 exhortation to the boys at Harrow:
"Never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.''
And to most observers, this points at Gretzky’s quantum leap except, perhaps, where Churchill says that “convictions of . . . good sense” are the exception to staying the course.
And that’s where Dr. Heisenberg’s counsel answers the question.
Every once in a while, America’s quantum leaps lead the country into a deep abyss, which forces the nation to accept the unconventional wisdom of the uncertainty principle, and to realize that after years of believing that we can know where the puck is headed, and discovering every six months or so, that we were wrong, then it’s probably a good time to hang up the skates and get off the ice.
Nice similes, but you could have been more decisive. I have a lot of respect for Patreus, and the other soldiers who figured out years ago that we need a counter-insurgency strategy to have any chance at all(bucking the position of their then boss, D. Rumsfeld). Still, the idea that a six-month surge will turn things around runs counter to history and common sense alike.
We know where this puck is going, AND we know it has a lot of momentum, AND its trajectory is not favorable to the Bush Administration's goals. Indeed, those goals are simply not achievable in any of our lifetimes.
One of the realities on the ground that Perle and Wolfie and Bolton and Feith were blind to is that the presence of a foreign conqueror is a deep and abiding humiliation to the Iraqi people. Any faction we support will ipso facto lose support among the locals. Call it Arab pigheadedness, misplaced pride, irrational resistance to policies that are in their own best interest, but there it is. We are not going to change that cultural orientation in six months or six years or twenty-six years.
What would it take, and how long would it take, for the Bush Administration to win the love and loyalty of the citizenry of New York City? What would it take, and how long would it take, for Hillary Clinton to win a majority of the white vote in Mississippi? Impossible you say? Believe me, it would be far easier to achieve either of those objectives than to establish a stable, benevolent government in a peaceful Iraq.
The real question is why we assume that a politically absurd objective in the U.S. is somehow within our grasp if we try something equally absurd in a foreign country. Its fatuousness boggles the mind.
Posted by: robertjhard | June 21, 2007 at 10:30 AM