There is a peculiar form of insanity in which a veneer of rationality distracts attention from the madness lurking just beneath the surface. When Alice dove down her rabbit hole to enter a place where smirking cats offered directions, ill-mannered caterpillars dispensed advice, and Mock Turtles constituted the principal ingredient in Mock Turtle soup, she experienced something of the sort.
Yet, as the old adage goes, truth can be even stranger than fiction. For a real-life illustration of this phenomenon, one need look no further than Washington and its approach to national security policy. Viewed up close, it all seems to hang together. Peer out of the rabbit hole and the sheer lunacy quickly becomes apparent.
Consider this recent headline: "U.S. to Ship 2,000 Anti-Tank Missiles To Iraq To Help Fight ISIS." The accompanying article describes a Pentagon initiative to reinforce Iraq's battered army with a rush order of AT-4s. A souped-up version of the old bazooka, the AT-4 is designed to punch holes through armored vehicles.
Taken on its own terms, the decision makes considerable sense. Iraqi forces need something to counter a fearsome new tactic of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS): suicide bombers mounted in heavily armored wheeled vehicles. Improved antitank capabilities certainly could help Iraqi troops take out such bombers before they reach their intended targets. The logic is airtight. The sooner these weapons get into the hands of Iraqi personnel, the better for them -- and so the better for us.
As it turns out, however, the vehicle of choice for ISIS suicide bombers these days is the up-armored Humvee. In June 2014, when the Iraqi Army abandoned the country's second largest city, Mosul, ISIS acquired 2,300 made-in-the-U.S.A. Humvees. Since then, it's captured even more of them.
As U.S. forces were themselves withdrawing from Iraq in 2011, they bequeathed a huge fleet of Humvees to the "new" Iraqi army it had built to the tune of $25 billion. Again, the logic of doing so was impeccable: Iraqi troops needed equipment; shipping used Humvees back to the U.S. was going to cost more than they were worth. Better to give them to those who could put them to good use. Who could quarrel with that?
Before they handed over the used equipment, U.S. troops had spent years trying to pacify Iraq, where order had pretty much collapsed after the invasion of 2003. American troops in Iraq had plenty of tanks and other heavy equipment, but once the country fell into insurgency and civil war, patrolling Iraqi cities required something akin to a hopped-up cop car. The readily available Humvee filled the bill. When it turned out that troops driving around in what was essentially an oversized jeep were vulnerable to sniper fire and roadside bombs, "hardening" those vehicles to protect the occupants became a no-brainer -- as even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld eventually recognized.
At each step along the way, the decisions made possessed a certain obvious logic. It's only when you get to the end -- giving Iraqis American-made weapons to destroy specially hardened American-made military vehicles previously provided to those same Iraqis -- that the strangely circular and seriously cuckoo Alice-in-Wonderland nature of the entire enterprise becomes apparent.
AT-4s blowing up those Humvees -- with fingers crossed that the anti-tank weapons don't also fall into the hands of ISIS militants -- illustrates in microcosm the larger madness of Washington's policies concealed by the superficial logic of each immediate situation.
The Promotion of Policies That Have Manifestly Failed
Let me provide a firsthand illustration. A week ago, I appeared on a network television news program to discuss American policy in Iraq and in particular the challenges posed by ISIS. The other guests were former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leon Panetta, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and current CEO of a Washington think tank Michelle Flournoy, and retired four-star general Anthony Zinni who had once headed up United States Central Command.
