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January 13, 2006
Democracy, Republic, and Insurgency
Callimachus has an excellent post at Winds of Change about the difficulties democracies have in winning guerilla wars, insurgencies and against terrorist campaigns. There are four tracks that need to be explored in detail, and as I don't have the time at present, I'll sketch them out.
The first track is whether or not the historical evidence is on Callimachus' side. From what I know without looking up a lot of minor wars and conflicts, I would think it is. But there are a lot of minor wars and conflicts that might make his thesis weaker and would need to be addressed.
The second is whether it is only democracies that have this problem. In other words, would a republic have the same difficulty? The campaigns against the Indian tribes in America, when we were still constituted a republic, rather than a representative democracy, and against the Barbary Pirates indicate that there might be a difference worth looking into.
The third track that needs detailed consideration is whether the US strategy in Iraq is not, in light of Callimachus' observations, the best strategy we could have adopted. After all, the US never, apparently, intended to fight and win against the insurgency in Iraq. Once the insurgency and terrorist campaigns really got going, towards the end of 2003, the US switched from trying to stand up a conventional Iraqi army to trying to stand up Iraqi police and light infantry to fight the insurgency, while the US focused on buying the Iraqis time until they could successfully fight those battles. If that is indeed the best strategy, what are the implications for American warfighting doctrine, and for that matter for Barnett's grand strategic vision of having separate forces for conventional and insurgent wars?
The fourth track to be thought through is whether alternate governmental arrangements could overcome such a problem. For example, if we required an unambiguous declaration of war from Congress before committing troops to offensive actions overseas, and gave Congress an unambiguous power to similarly declare peace without the consent of the executive, but in exchange gave the President nearly unlimited authority to pursue war aims within the confines of geometry and time and funds set by the Congress — to the extent of abolishing Presidential elections until such time as the war was over, or the President died, resigned or was impeached for his conduct of the war — would give a democratic country (obviously, I based this on the current US model, but other models could be similarly reconstituted) the ability to win a bloody, ugly and protracted war. The other possibility here, too, is to have two separate executives, one for foreign policy and warmaking and one for domestic matters. The domestic executive would be more of a Prime Minister, answerable to Congress, while the President would be head of state rather than government, and would be far less constrained, but unable to act within the United States absent specific and limited Congressional action. Whether or not this is a good idea, and how to improve it, has to be part of that discussion.
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Comments
Thanks for the thoughtful extension. Probably the media proliferation and evolution has more weight than the form of government between "now" and any "then" we could pick. Before, the media were limited, and subsumed into political and nationalistic structures. Now they have vaulted above them and the latter must appease or avoid the media to survive.
Great blog.
Posted by: Callimachus at January 14, 2006 1:54 AM