Imperium's Graveyard: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Strange Death of the Western Way of War

At time of writing, US President Donald Trump has delivered his Afghan war strategy speech, having huddled and conferred with his senior military and foreign policy advisors to discuss what to do next in the Afghan War. The decision of the Trump WH is to increase the US presence in Afghanistan by 4,000 troops. There is as yet no allied commitment but, certainly, Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and other NATO allies can expect American requests for assistance in Afghanistan.

Weirdly, for a war that involved an array of US, allied and NATO HQ elements until the end of 2014, there seems to be no allied input into the Trump administration's discussions and, judging from press reporting, very little media interest, at all, whether in the US or overseas.

I have no special insight as to what the extra 4,000 troops is meant to achieve in Afghanistan (population c30m). First Bush, then Obama, now Trump, seem to want to stave off the inevitable collapse of Afghanistan into its natural state of civil war amid competing Pashtu and non-Pashtu elements, who are themselves proxies for Pakistan, India, Iran, Russia and, going forward, China.

The Afghan war, so far as the West is concerned, now enters its 16th year, and the view from national capitals is that it is best not seen, and even better unheard. But the war continues, "over there", with young troops, even those now in training and support roles, still exposed to death and wounding in what seems an interminable campaign. Moreover, Western nations have suffered enormous casualties, included many who were traumatically wounded and will need constant medical and specialist support for the rest of their lives.

Even Trump's worst and most "broken" critic would acknowledge that the Afghan War is, at best, a stalemate, a slog, a meandering if deadly struggle, with no clear end in sight. Others might say, "quagmire". And some others might say, more accurately, a searing indictment of Western military command and its inability to apply the Western way of war.

Indeed, it is hard to look back at the last 16 years of the Afghan War and not see every, or almost every, principle of war and Western military theory, violated. This infamous image of the ISAF/NATO operational concept is a symptom of a much bigger problem:

Somehow, the Western military effort would, apparently, succeed in Afghanistan when the Soviets, who at their peak strength had deployed 120,000 combat troops, with no restrictions on rules of engagement, and who also employed a massive civic aid program, failed to prevail there.

The Afghan War's conduct would have ashamed any great captain of the past or even the recent present. One did not have to be Sun Tzu to look at Afghanistan and conclude, also, that "there is no good protracted war for a conventional army". The cancer spread among the military caste by politicians that reward and promote the, frankly, pliant Generals, who were happy to uncomplainingly manage failure at a horrendous cost in allied lives and treasure, will threaten the security of the Western body politic for decades.

Yet the NATO forces in Afghanistan were not just at war. They have also spent well over a decade and enormous resources trying to train local Afghanis in democratic state building, which included training their military and security forces. The effort by the West to effect a wholesale reform of Afghan ways and religious sympathies - not just deter them from hosting Sunni jihadis such as Al Qaeda - has been Herculean in its ambitions and unrealistic in the extreme. While there may be a very politically incorrect if economically rewarding case for military colonialism, there is no logic or economic reward in an endless occupation of foreign lands, especially at the enormous cost of precious lives, lost or forever damaged by war.

The great British military historian Corelli Barnett wrote that War is the auditor of a nation’s resources, talents and failings. In the case of Afghanistan, war as auditor has exposed the West's military liabilities as well as the political insolvency of many nations' capacity to wage and sustain war to a successful conclusion. World War One was a global war that lasted barely four years. World War Two lasted just under six years. Korea went for three years and Vietnam’s major commitments went for seven years. The NATO forces have been deployed in Afghanistan for almost 16 years, with no end in sight.

It is time to learn some lessons from the endless Afghan War even if will not end for many years yet.

Lesson 1: Strategic clarity matters

Western governments should avoid strategic mushiness as to the purpose of military force, and when and why it is deployed in harm's way.

Armed forces should only be deployed if necessitated by a threat to the nation's or an allies' territorial security and/or a threat to well-defined and well-enunciated national security interests.

That is, only deploy military force to serve actual security interests, not vague ambitions to prevent societal unpleasantness, promote democracy or export the 'rule of law', the last of which means something entirely different in an Islamic culture.

The Afghan War suffered from objective confusion, whereby no one in 2017 can explain what real interests drove the NATO military commitment from 2002 on, after Operation Anaconda's conclusion. As former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates recently said, the proponent of any future large-scale deployment of land forces to Asia or the Middle East or Africa should “have his head examined” .

Lesson 2: the Mission matters

Second, the mission matters, or as the maxim goes, “in war, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing”. And when the mission as stated is over, then that should be "it". Unfortunately, the experience of both Iraq and Afghanistan is that missions do not end, anymore.

The war phase gives way, inevitably, to an occupation phase that post-cold war Western militaries find very difficult to sustain and their societies find even more difficult to stomach. In words attributed to Genghiz Khan, "occupations turn soldiers into jailers".

While it is true, that the “main thing” of the Iraq war did shift from destroying Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to defending the new Iraqi state, Iraq was and remains a country that actually matters, given its position, its massive oil reserves, its and its susceptibility to domination by neighbouring Iran, the natural hegemon of a region that spans from Kabul to Kobane. Iran's posture and its willingness to both support Sunni jihadis as well as use Greater Khorasan to provide strategic depth, is probably one of the most important and yet underreported stories of our time.

Nonetheless, nothing similar can be said about Afghanistan itself, or about much of the war that has raged there since late 2001. The reality is that Afghanistan was only ever important because it hosted bases for Al Qaeda that had to be destroyed, not because the Taliban ran a brutal regime. The original 2001-2002 “main thing” was the destruction of Al Qaeda and all of its support networks, not the civilising of Pashtu culture. The original mission involved Special Forces, backed by airpower and, significantly, was supported by those non-Pashtu Afghans who were most interested in removing the Taliban and their foreign Al Qaeda allies. By the end of 2002, with Al Qaeda’s personnel and camps in Afghanistan bombed, raided, killed and destroyed to the maximum extent possible by military means, and Al Qaeda spreading to the four corners, the US-led coalition should have declared victory and gone home, having negotiated a realistic future that accommodated competing Russian, Iranian, Indian and, yes, Pakistani, interests. Afghanistan, in the absence of the decade-plus NATO mission, would then have reverted to its traditional role as a problem and battleground for these competing Russian, Iranian, Indian and Pakistani interests, all of which can occur without any need for Western troops to be exposed to the deadly consequences of these rivalries.

For reasons that defy any strategic logic, the Western coalition - first under Bush, then Obama - determined that Afghanistan should become some sort of civilised place, as if somehow a validation of the West's mission there, rather than leaving an historically brutal Afghan society to its warring tribes and factions. Quite inexplicably, conservatives, as well as liberals, in the last decade-plus have supported nation-building missions in the Islamic world, and mistakenly embraced foreign movements professing ‘freedom’ and which are led by, “those who wax eloquent about democracy and moderation, hold advanced degrees and speak English” , and are entirely unrepresentative of the people they purport to speak for. Trump, for what it is worth, has specifically disavowed nation-building in favour of "killing terrorists" but it is hard to make this distinction in form if, in substance, there is still a substantial Western presence, whose objective is to make Afghanistan something different from it has been, historically.

The confusion over the Afghan War's real mission meant, over time, that the mission became one directed against its most distasteful but dominant Sunni fundamentalism, which manifests itself in various forms of Taliban and other militias and movements. To the degree that Afghani Islam and the Taliban’s return to power is an internal matter, then Afghanistan’s future, however lamentable it may be to us in the West, is a matter for the Afghans to fight for and cannot alone justify a Western presence. (Albeit the strategic value of holding onto the Bagram airfield complex, north of Kabul, and perhaps the Kandahar airbase, would serve a s a significant justification for a residual NATO military presence in the vicinity of the Iranian and Chinese frontiers, not to mention the Pakistan that supports the Taliban and gave sanctuary to Usama bin Laden for years. The realpolitik case for Bagram as NATO's ongoing imperial stronghold to help guard a pacified Afghanistan, with obvious capabilities for future missions related to China, Russia, and Iran, etal, strangely, has never been made by any senior US or NATO military or civil leader.).

In future, Western forces should not seek to protect or secure a country that its own people have shown little or no interest in protecting or securing. Much worse, these needless, quasi-colonial occupations (without securing the extractive benefits of empire) have cost us dearly in blood and treasure. Never again!

Lesson 3: Public support matters

Third, public support matters. Strategic confusion and mission creep corrode Western population's trust in their Governments and the public support on which the armed forces rely, not just in current conflicts but for longer term recruitment and rearmament programs.

The peoples of Western nations should understand, in clear and unmistakable language, what the military mission is and how it relates, in clear terms, to the national interest.

They should also know what the end-state will be and how, roughly, it will be achieved.

Additionally, public support requires a level of transparency and regular dissemination of information, in which the Government treats democratic polities seriously and takes the people, whose sons and daughters are in harm's way, into their confidence. Citizens are not stupid and understand, indeed they expect, that their armed forces will target and destroy the enemies of the nation. For conservatives, the reality is that while security interests in 2017 mean that one cannot indulge in isolationism, the nature of the West's strategic position means we can also never indulge in do-gooderism.

Western governments should expect that their people will earnestly support armed forces and just military actions that require the targeting, destruction, killing and capturing of those who may threaten. However, no one has yet explained why the West's young troops and scarce national wealth should be expended for objectives far remote from national security, such as ensuring the success of infant and fragile democracies or propping up corrupt foreign regimes.

Lesson 4: Making war matters

Fourth and lastly, and most importantly, even despite the last 16 years’ experience, Western governments suffer from a regrettable and widespread naivete about war, which needs to be expressly anathematised. If nothing else, the making of modern war is a subject on which reality must be allowed to intrude and, in a sense, imposed.

Western political leaders and media can be relied on to decry the use of excessive force, ensure restrictive rules of engagement, and urge the winning of hearts and minds, not create a massive “body count”. They cannot be relied on to discuss war in any way that is honest, or which grapples with the true nature of conflict. This elite naivety refuses to face the central reality of war in the Western tradition: that successful war requires the swift application of massive resources in the guise of overwhelming force. If the war cannot be won by these means, it is pointless trying to fight it. The pliant Western Generals, who seemed to have told governments what they want to hear, are not innocents here, either.

It is no accident that the last wars unmistakably won by Western democracies were the Second World War and the Gulf War of 1991, where national leaders accepted that victory required defined objectives and the use of overwhelming force and speed to achieve them. These were also both inter-state wars, where nation-states battled nation-states, rather than some muddled through conflict occurring in broken and hopelessly tribalised states, such as Afghanistan and Iraq. The Second World War also featured a senior Allied military caste that was unafraid of speaking truth to power and demanding political support for decisive military victories. The Second World War also featured a political leadership that would listen to and work with its Admirals and Generals, even at times if fraught, and would listen to and rely on their professional military advice.

In Afghanistan, no General or NATO official could ever explain how a protracted intervention by an international Coalition can succeed in Afghanistan when local fighters and their Pashtu fathers, brothers and uncles have been fighting a jihad of one form or another since (at least) Russia’s invasion in 1979. No General or NATO official could, either, explain how 21st century Westerners, lacking any sort of relevant language and cultural knowledge, are temperamentally suited to occupying other countries and attempting to force our way of life on the locals. The fate of the US General Eric Shinseki, whose career ended under the Bush Administration, for saying, "beware the 12-division strategy for a 10-division Army". Shinseki's fate serves as a warning to those in senior command whose advice was all too real.

Future military deployments should only be made in a way that accords with our own strengths and own distinctive way of war, which applies overwhelming force, speed, firepower and decisive manoeuvre to achieve an identifiable result, as opposed to the continual drain of counter-insurgency warfare, seeking hopelessly to win the hearts-and-minds of people whose attitudes to Westerners vary from merely hating us to fighting a jihad against us.


The Strategic Costs of Dumb Wars

As a wise man once said, predictions are hard, especially about the future. No sensible person would predict whether there will still be an Afghan War raging on 11 September 2021, but, on the evidence of the drift and intellectual stagnation of the past 16 years, it is more than likely the war will still continue. The Roman imperial and British Raj aesthetic of sons relieving fathers on the front lines of empire looms large in any discussion of where this endless mission goes on – without end. In an era of volunteer militaries, it is unlikely that anyone will care beyond those immediately tasked with fighting wars and their anxious families.

One critical aspect of these wars adverse effects on Western security, missed by most analysts, and which has been raised by recent naval disasters and air safety issues, is that the enormous diversion of scarce defence monies into protracted land wars.

Across the Western world, fleets have contracted and squadron numbers have declined, as the urgent need to fund the Iraq, Afghanistan and other campaigns took priority, a priority that has persisted for almost 20 years.

Given the enormous contribution of Allied seapower to ensuring the security and safety of the sea as a global commons, which delivers commodities and prosperity to the world, it cannot be healthy for Allied fleets to have shrunk, especially as Chinese and Russian navies grow and start to operate in what were formerly 'allied lakes', particularly the greater South China Sea and the Persian Gulf, as access to regional ports grows. The West has not, since the 1970s, had a period when Allied naval supremacy was ever challenged and, even then, severe doubts plagued the Soviet ability to project and sustain sea power. However, the advent of Chinese seapower, and the leverage this will provide Beijing, should concern all observers.

Similarly, the NATO appetite to maintain forces to maintain a viable deterrence of Russian ambitions has waned to a dangerous degree. While European pusillanimity was a problem before Sept 11, the degradation of European defences has only grown more concerning in the last few years. Even in the US, the enormous cost and priority imposed by Iraq and Afghanistan has seen the US Army focused more on low intensity warfare, at the cost of the heavy army that would be needed to meet any challenge by the Russians to central Europe.

Truly, it seems that the only strategic effects of these dumb wars has been not to cause any decline in jihadist attacks, but to waste precious lives and increase Western indebtedness, and to provide the Chinese and Russians with opportunities to fortify their positions and expand their influence. It is difficult to understand how it was that Admirals and Air Marshals looked on as precious defence funds were absorbed by fruitless wars, as their own sea and airpower contracted and atrophied, dangerously. The diminished navies and air forces of the post-Vietnam era stand as a warning of what happens when land wars roll on, and on, with no sense of urgency and no identifiable objectives.

It is likely that Western strategic drift will get worse, before it gets better. In another age, composed of more serious people, the Western policymaker would be presumed familiar with history, maps, geopolitics and the iron demands of reality. She or he may not be Churchill, de Gaulle, Adenauer or FDR, but those that came after at least knew they should aspire to be like them, they should read and educate themselves, and they should be cautious of seeing politics as an end in itself, and not merely a means to conducting statecraft.

Unfortunately, in 2017, we have the political classes that we do and, in every Western jurisdiction from the Baltic States to the Atlantic, from Ottawa to Canberra, there is no relief in sight from the tyranny of the combined machinations of the political hack, the former lobbyist, the PR whiz, the "human rights lawyer", and those, frankly, who would be unemployable in government in any other age.

The Proconsuls, Legates, Tribunes & Centurions Must Speak

This is where the West's professional military cohorts need to, urgently, assert themselves more and pre-emptively capitulate less.

It is absurd that so few military officers speak loudly and clearly, even when in comfortable retirement, about proposed and continuing wars which serve no or at best dubious strategic interests. The bonds of camaraderie and duty of loyalty between leadership and led have evaporated in a political climate dominated by spin, lies, sound bites and the need to be seen to be 'doing something', however vain and ineffectual.

Perhaps this is the long hangover in Western Generalship since the notorious relief of General Douglas MacArthur by President Truman in April 1951? MacArthur had presented Truman with an honest military appreciation of the Korean War – and, after some impolitic remarks, MacArthur was fired. MacArthur did, nonetheless, continue to counsel and advise, including warning President Kennedy to not escalate the Vietnam War but, regardless, the cost to be paid for being the stentorian patrician in the MacArthur mold was more than clear to all who came after him. One suspects that, given the rise of China and the threat from North Korea, that a harsher and more critical view of Truman's relief of MacArthur will be taken in future, than has been taken in the past. MacArthur's military and historical grasp was vast, and he could see, as the provincial Truman could not, how precarious both Asian and Western security would be should the communist Chinese state be allowed to aggress and establish proxy regimes on their periphery. Moreover, good leaders know how to handle their difficult geniuses. President Roosevelt managed, in addition to the Second World War, not just MacArthur, but Admiral Ernest King, General George Patton, General Curtis LeMay, and a host of other war-winning military leaders who would be the nightmare of contemporary human resources' departments. Winston Churchill had not just Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery but the brilliant if tempestuous General Charles de Gaulle as well. Churchill famously said of de Gaulle, "He thinks he's Joan of Arc, but I can't get my bloody bishops to burn him". Good leaders keep their wild horses in harness.

Nonetheless, Generals since MacArthur, throughout the Western world, learned their lesson, that command honesty to the political authority would be rewarded with dismissal, not any sort of strategic dialogue of the kind that Churchill and Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, or FDR and General George Marshall, had enjoyed. The successful post-war commanders that survived political meddling, such as Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer and General Alexander Haig, were by the ends of their career seen by political insiders as oddities, notwithstanding their long-demonstrated military competence.

Sadly, the model for the modern General is David Petraeus. Despite Petraeus having championed Counter Insurgency (aka COIN) - the most insanely costly and self-defeating form of warfare for wealthy first world nations to pursue - as well as incurred a criminal conviction for sharing classified material with his mistress, and advocated the US arm Al Qaeda to fight Iran, Petraeus' record of catastrophically bad judgements has not impacted his reputation among the American elite. In any other age, Petraeus' record would have seen him retire to the back shed with his service revolver. In 2017, with a strategic culture mired in permanent idiocy, Petraeus is sought out, including by US Presidents.

While Prime Minister Churchill may have described a Field Marshal Montgomery as, "in defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable", Monty, and his like, were very familiar with history, with what was possible and what was not, and with the tragic results for the nation and its people of commanders engaging in wishful thinking in matters of war and peace. Like MacArthur, Monty had seen considerable action in the Great War, he had been badly wounded, and he had seen the carnage caused by unreliable allies on other fronts and bad planning and inadequate intelligence preparation on one's own front. It may be worth all of our whiles to have more Generals who are unbeatable and victorious and, to borrow from Lincoln, we should risk the "unbearable". If not MacArthurs or Montgomerys, at least we can aspire to have more General Shinsekis? It is too much to hope for fewer of the Petraeus ilk as the lesson of MacArthur's firing and after has been that truthtellers are relieved and pliant politicos are rewarded and, even if they fail, only fail upward.

In any event, either the military classes recover their belief in their own vocations, relearn and reapply the principles of war, and assert the profession of arms' role in the conduct of war, or they will see themselves and, more importantly, their troops, devolve more into the role of the doomed legionaries of the insane ambitions of the West's 'forever bubbled' political classes.

For the West to survive as a political and military entity, it has never been more crucial than now for its military leaders to provide to the West's peoples the honest and frank discussion of war and its ends that its political classes will not. As General George Patton wrote, not long before his most untimely death:

There is a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and much less prevalent. One of the most frequently noted characteristics of great men who have remained great is loyalty to their subordinates.

The only greater loyalty is to the Truth.

"Lest I Forget"

For Australians, the 11th of November is the date to recall our war dead and wounded, especially of the catastrophic Great War (1914-1919). It is difficult to overstate the enormity of Australia's losses in that war. From a young nation of almost 5 million people, approximately 420,000 enlisted, representing just approximately 40% of the male population aged 18 to 44.

Of those who enlisted for the war, over 60,000 were killed in action and 155,133 were wounded (a figure that includes gassing and what was then called “shell shock”). Another 4,000 Australians were taken as prisoners of war, while over 430,000 Australians suffered from sickness or injuries unrelated to combat. It is unknown how many Australia veterans of the Great War would die in the 1920s as a result of their wounds, or, given the horror of that war, at their own hands.

Wherever one goes in Australia, whether in city or country, suburb, town or village, one finds local memorials to those who served in the wars and, at the least, the names listed of those who made the ultimate sacrifice. These memorials, especially those built originally for the Boer and Great Wars, are, more often than not, straightforward, rather than plain, sometimes with a celebration of Edwardian heroism, often with a Biblical verse deposing to no greater loves, perhaps representations, also, of an ancient representation, perhaps a classical torch to symbolise ancient virtues being passed by the generation lost in the war to those coming after and benefiting from the heroic sacrifice. Australians of the war generations were a stoic, laconic people, not given to agonising self-reflection, and the memorials were a practical gesture to assure those who had lost loved ones far from home that, at home, their sacrifice would never be forgotten.

Like most Australians, my family, too, was touched by wars. And, not unlike most Australians, much of my immigrant family is recently arrived here. My late mother's family included many war veterans, Boer War cavalrymen and Kittyhawk pilots from World War II. My paternal grandparents, who emigrated from the United Kingdom to Australia in 1949, were products of the Great War. Sadly, both of them passed away years before I was born.

My grandfather served as a 19 year old reinforcement subaltern in the British Army at the very final stages of the Great War and then Armistice. He was not a career soldier, but was, rather a product of a Catholic public (ie private) school and the officer cadet training units that by 1918 were producing Second Lieutenants in a matter of weeks, whose war service offered a similar life expectancy once in the front lines.

But for the collapse of the German Army in late 1918, I have often wondered whether his life expectancy would have been that of the short duration of others of his generation. While proud to have done his very small part in late 1918, my grandfather was reluctant to ever share very much with my late father of the details of 'his war', with our only knowledge passed on through some photographs and some stories. My late father only ever very reluctantly raised the war with my grandfather, because of the pain it caused him. One of my great regrets is my grandfather's death so many years before my birth.

My grandfather, though a very young survivor, nonetheless lost his world in the Great War, as did so many of that "lost generation". The Great War destroyed the Edwardian age that my grandfather had been raised in, a loss which, if anything, afflicted British Catholics, with their determinedly medieval sense of right and wrong, more than most. Similarly, all of that golden age for the empire "on which the sun never set" was destroyed by the Great War. As a result of the enormous loss of young men, it meant that many of grandfather's school friends had died or were grievously wounded, many of their sisters would be doomed to spinsterhood as their great loves or future beaus perished on the Somme, while for grief-stricken parents, the war would mean the sale of homes and estates that dead sons could never inherit.

The scale of the enormity of the losses throughout the British Empire cannot be overstated. And in our family's part of western London, where a new repatriation hospital was nearby, the sight of the wounded and the maimed was ever present long after 1918 and the guns falling silent. Seeing the 'living dead' of the Great War, recognisable instantly by their government-issue blue suits, was a feature of my own father's childhood in the London of the Second World War. The Armistice may have taken effect at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, but for that generation, the war had no end. Its effects were felt on every birthday of the fallen, every anniversary of their death, at every family Easter and every Christmas, at every event at which the chairs once occupied by fallen loved ones would be, henceforth, forever empty and their distinct voices unheard.

My grandfather worked in the Connolly family business, well, if not brilliantly. He married well and was a very good father. The war had not shaken his devoutly Catholic faith. By all accounts, he was grateful to have survived albeit he had been exhausted. The war had robbed him of his youth, as it had robbed so many of their lives, their bodies and their sanity. My grandfather was a gentle man, a kind man, and a man of formality, who even in the Australia of the 1960s, would always, I was told growing up, be dressed properly, acquit himself in the day's work, manfully, answer correspondence promptly and would, on any given Sunday morning, be with my grandmother in their pew for what they called "Maaaas". Yet, in the ghastly chaos of the world destroyed by the Great War, those surviving and continuing institutions, such as the Crown and the Papacy, had never been more important to him.

In the years since my parents' passing, amid the grief that envelops one at this time, it has been something for me to go through my mother's and father's belongings and find there some momento of the grandparents that I never knew, like their commemorations of Royal events and old Bibles and Missals, and to see that, where "Johnny Foreigner" had destroyed his country in the wake of the Great War, the innate good sense of provincial Britons like my grandparents saw them instead hold fast to the Crown, to their traditions, and to the faith, whatever it was.

Unfortunately the Luftwaffe’s bombing of London in 1940-1941 meant that the official military history of my grandfather’s Great War service is unavailable and all that is left are his records, some photographs, some stories, and some cryptic notes on the back of photographs. My grandfather did think very highly of “the Australians”, as he apparently called them even when living among them, as well as their imperial cousins, who rallied to the imperial cause. Indeed, the story of how my late father and his parents came to Australia is intimately connected with the War.

My grandfather’s older cousins had all served in the Royal Artillery in the Great War from 1914 onwards and some had served in the Boer War as part of the “Hooray Henry” yeomanry units formed in the City of London.

Finally, my great uncle was a merchant mariner and then a Sub-Lieutenant, RNR, in the Royal Navy in the Great War. Family lore has it that, after the scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow in June 1919, he applied for demobilisation and was then back at sea, quickly thereafter. The rest of my father's extended family include numerous soldiers, including two sound uncles who are retired Majors, one of which Major lives in Gloucestershire and has been known to write letters to the editor expressing his dismay at the decline of everything.

The Connollys and others past, such as they are, loom large, always, in my mind, especially at these times of national remembrance.

As for me, I used to spend every Anzac Day and Armistice Day with my parents. My father grew up during the Korean War and national service and, choosing the Royal Australian Navy, was one of the few of his intake selected for officer training. Fortunately for the Navy, if not for my father, the "Midshipman Connolly" life of the regular Navy was not for my father and he completed his national service, as did his friends, with a spirit of "doing their part", as did every Australian of his generation. Despite being too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, my father and his friends also served their country, for as Milton said, "They also serve who only stand and wait". My late mother, too, was also a stalwart, as well as the most wonderful mother that one could have been blessed with. It is hard for me to do justice to the enormous support given by my late mother when I was deployed overseas. The "care packages from Mrs Connolly" arrived regularly and sustained morale wherever I was, with more than enough tea, chocolates, biscuits, cookies and the like to share among the ship or unit that I served in for the duration. I still, with the distance of almost a decade, feel responsible for putting my late mother through all the worry and turmoil that I learned, after her passing, that she had gone through, and I have often worried, myself, had I had been a source of unnecessary concern for her? But my late mother was of a proud Portuguese and Scottish ancestry, a lifelong doer of her duty and, I was assured by the extended family, she wanted me to fulfil what I felt was my duty "over there".

Sadly, my parents' passing means that my ANZAC Days and Armistice Days are now spent without them and their irreplaceable presence. Nothing can ever prepare you for the loss of your parents. However, as my devoutly Catholic parents passed in the friendship of Christ, I know that they, too, still muster and march with me, hopefully as proudly each year as ever before.

"Lest I Forget"

Syria: There Is No Substitute For Realism

The Trump administration is not yet 3 months old and it has already engaged in its first overt military actions. On 06 April 2017, on President Trump's orders, the US Navy launched strikes on Syria's Shayrat airbase after a chemical weapons attack by Syria's Assad regime. As yet, President Trump has said that he is not intervening in Syria. There are conflicting reports about the various options being proposed to President Trump. As always, there remains the concern that, from confusion and a sentiment that "something must be done", a new Western war in Syria may yet result.

Accordingly, and given the range of security challenges already facing the US-led Western alliance, this is a good time to examine, coldly and realistically, today's already grave threats and explain why adding a new war in Syria to them would be a most unwise diversion of scarce military and intelligence resources.

The West's Security Challenges

Long before Donald Trump sought the US Presidency, these were among the more prominent problems in Western security and they persist today:

(1) apart from the UK, France, Canada and Poland, there is no NATO ally of the US that can contribute combat forces to any 'out of area' mission, let alone a sustained mission, and, sometimes, even within the European theatre. Notwithstanding every post-cold war President since Bush 41 pleading with Europeans to pull their weight as security partners, the response, even despite a supposedly ominous Russian threat, has been pathetic;

(2) China is building an ever more powerful military and constituting new bases in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean, areas of direct military interest to not just the US but to Japan, India, Australia, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan. China has busily realised its "string of pearls" as the West's security position declined in the region, a consequence of maddening obsessions in fighting well intended but futile wars in the Islamic world. In fighting protracted war on land - a costly means of ruining oneself as Sun Tzu warned - West and especially the US has allowed the Chinese to focus on geopolitical realities and the opportunity to challenge both American seapower and the global economic order. The Chinese state is now directly challenging the decades-long hegemony of the United States as the world's greatest sea power. Additionally, China's former client state of North Korea, a nuclear-armed communist dictatorship, continued to issue bellicose statements and to test its increasingly capable missile arsenal. The greatest win for China has been the focus of the American political classes on Russian perfidies when China is consolidating its strategic position in Asia and potentially the South China Sea. It is hard to overstate the influence that China will have once its growing navy also has new Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea bases, in seas that were formerly the "American lake". The last three US administrations' focus on the insoluble problems of the Middle East and the post-Ottoman Islamic world have come at a tremendous cost to the security of the Asia-Pacific, based as it is on a US maritime hegemony;

(3) Iran remains a threat on any number of fronts. Most ominously, Iran continued to cooperate, to varying degrees, with North Korea on missile technology. Iran also continues to threaten to close the Persian Gulf and thereby deny the easy movement of oil from Saudi and Gulf suppliers. Iran also remains the principal state sponsor of terrorism, arming and financing Hezbollah in Lebanon, and supplying terrorists of not only Shia origin but, also, when in Iran's quasi-imperial interests, Sunni salafist groups like Al Qaeda. Iran also threatens to encircle (via its Shia crescent allies and proxies) the West's allies on the Arabian Peninsula. Finally, Iran has not renounced its intent to destroy Israel, albeit the military balance weighs still in Israel's favour and the Israeli arsenal should only be strengthened by the Trump administration;

(4) Russia has conquered (or in the Russian mind, "regained") Crimea, without much of a shot, while Russia still wages a hybrid war campaign to destabilise the new government of Ukraine and threatens the Baltic states. Russia's disinformation and electronic warfare campaigns have only intensified, often uncontradicted by any compelling Western narrative and counter-measures. Russia, also, continues to solicit new relationships in the Middle East, for the first time in 50 years, both as markets for its weaponry as well as its channels for Russian influence and destabilisation. To be fair, though, there is no US or Western policy that can stop Russia influencing its periphery or "near abroad". Russia is approximately 150m people, spanning 11 Eurasian timezones from NATO's fringes to Japan's maritime approaches. Russia is a real country, with a profound sense of itself as an Orthodox Christian, great power in perennial danger of encirclement and invasion, as has been its fate throughout its history. Russia, too, has a long term domestic jihadi problem, which it confronts with an admirable degree of kinetic zeal, and Moscow sees Western policy in Syria as both a threat to its long term Syrian ally and bases, as well as delusionary with regard to, if not tacitly supportive of, Sunni salafist extremism. The Russians can be countered in some areas and cooperated with in others of shared interests. Moreover, the West has more to fear from what former US President Nixon called a "Weimar Russia" than a Russia that asserts itself esp on its southern and eastern flanks. (Anyone familiar with basic Russian, especially Tsarist, military and foreign policies would be unsurprised by patterns of Russian assertiveness, but in this age of historical illiteracy, those so familiar are, sadly, small in number); and

(5) after almost 16 years of war, the Sunni salafist jihadi terrorist threat had not receded but, rather, was as dangerous and more widely distributed than before 11 September 2001. The past 18 months has seen deadly terrorist attacks in Europe and the US, as well as foiled plots in many major cities. As ISIL has become the more prominent jihadist group, now in Afghanistan as well as inspiring "lone wolf" attacks, Al Qaeda has been, for some time, expanding its operations and fundraising, into Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.

West's all too protracted wars

Given these five key challenges, it is important to note that Iraq and Afghanistan remain theatres of war for Western military forces, now in their 16th year of the post-9/11 wars. Iraq's west and north remain in a state of war, as the Iraqis (with substantial Western and Iranian help) seek to retake their country from ISIL. These Sunni-majority areas of Iraq were, not coincidentally, identical theatres of war, a decade earlier, as the US-led coalition in Iraq sought to eject Al-Qaeda from western Iraq.

In Afghanistan, the Western-backed government in Kabul controls less of the country than it did one year ago. Various efforts by Western forces to help raise, train and sustain the Afghan military and security forces have been failures. Afghan territory won at considerable cost by Western troops have been surrendered by the Kabul regime to the Taliban with nary a shot fired. The Russians, meanwhile, are reported to be increasingly engaged with the Taliban, less likely as a means of hurting the West than of Moscow now seeking influence with the party that looks, inevitably, to again the Afghan government. Whether Iran, which was a reliable supporter of the Northern Alliance's insurgency against the Taliban before 11 September 2001, would accept the Taliban's resumption of power is an open question. Whether Russia and Iran both see a Taliban-run Afghanistan as preferable to a potentially ISIL-aligned one is another matter.

Meanwhile, the various Western allies that participated and still continue in the Iraq, Afghan and now Syrian wars have incurred thousands of war dead, tens of thousands wounded and maimed (who suffer today from neglect and bureaucratic obfuscation), and war costs in the trillions, from these wars in the Islamic world. It is hard to find any parallel in post-Westphalian military history for wars of such long duration, horrific cost in blood and treasure, and so pronounced a lack of any kind of success, as the West's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If, as the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote, "There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited", one wonders what possible rationale there is for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to have been so fitfully and poorly prosecuted.

Notwithstanding these realities, in the West generally and in the United States in particular, there are new calls for a new Western war to be commenced in Syria, to combat, inter alia, Iran, Hezbollah, ISIL, Al Qaeda and...Russia. Thus it is time to calmly examine the Syria question and to, especially, repel the blitzkrieg of strategic stupidity presented by proponents of Western military intervention in Syria, especially that aimed at "regime change".

The case for masterly Western inactivity in Syria

For reasons that are difficult for any prudent observer to comprehend, Syria has now become the latest focus of apparent Western concern and renewed calls for intervention. To be sure, Syria has had a brutal civil war, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the outflow of refugees. Syria, also, has been a warzone between various odious armed groups, each of which pose security challenges to individual Western powers.

Given the Western security challenges identified above, however, and especially the two ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the gathering storms in North Asia and the South China Sea, Syria is not the place for increasingly scarce military and intelligence resources to be spent, at least not to any significant degree.

First, the West has, as James Baker said in 1992 of the factions fighting in the former Yugoslavia, "no dog in this fight" and, if anything, Western security, the reduction of refugee flows, and Syria's religious and ethnic minorities, need Assad to survive (to be followed by some form of reconciliation process). While anguished liberal media commentary - and what is left of the neoconservative rump that boarded the Hillary Titanic in 2016 - urges "something must be done", there is very little that can be practically done by the Western powers beyond continuing to augment the war already waged by Assad, Russian and Iranian forces against the salafist jihadist threat. While there is touting by the media of the "moderate Syrian rebels", these groups are allied with Islamists or have aims indistinguishable from jihadis. Meanwhile, Western kvetching over Russian bombing of various Syrian targets, especially Aleppo and Idlib, avoids the obvious reality that the Russians take a much broader – and, frankly, more realistic – view of what is a legitimate jihadi target. The refreshingly kinetic Russian way of war, as well as its decades of dealing with its own deadly internal jihadi threat, has inured Moscow to Western criticism. Russia remains the only (quasi) Western-ish country that has successfully defeated an insurgency, jihadist or otherwise – and the Russians do so using a ferocious mixture of firepower, speed and overwhelming force that every serious Western military leader of yesteryear would have understood, even if anathema to current (and hopeless) Western approaches based on "cultural awareness" and "counterinsurgency". It is no accident that the last wars that Western forces unmistakably won were the Second World War and the 1990-1991 Gulf War, where allied political and military leaders accepted that victory required clearly defined objectives, deliberate planning, proper resourcing, coalition building, and the speedy use of overwhelming force-and where Allied forces could avail themselves of seapower and had access to resupply by seaports. Instead, the West's various militaries have had 16 years of protracted wars of 'lions led by donkeys', planned and executed poorly, and of unmeritorious political and media concerns corrupting military operations. At a certain level, the West should be grateful that it is the Russian Bear and his brutal if effective mission focus that is driving the Syrian war's strategy - and not some sensitive, new age, David Petraeus-figure, eager for a 'pat on the head' from the media and whose command is doomed to almost certain defeat.

Secondly, there is no Western solution, of any kind, to Syria's problems. Syria is c.23m people, majority Sunni Muslim (most of the 'gin and tonic' kind) but also with powerful Alawite and Christian minorities. Syria is the reverse of Saddam's Iraq, which was majority Shia but run by a mostly Sunni regime. Syria is the last bastion of Baathism and its sort of pan-Arab, secularist, ideology that had once been a conventional wisdom across the Middle East, which manifested itself in secular and rather brutal regimes in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Such religiously diverse polities and their mismatch between demography and regime cannot ever be truly stable and yet also cannot ever be neatly reformed...certainly not during year 6 of a brutal civil and now sectarian civil war. Therefore, what precisely is the political outcome that any Western intervention would seek? Because once the West were to intervene in Syria to change the regime, it would 'own' whatever polity resulted from it, noting, also, that the anti-Assad forces are patronised by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, hardly known for their adherence to constitutionalism and the rule of non-Sharia law.

Thirdly, as a matter of simple realpolitik, the Russians and the Iranians have large stakes in the survival of Assad's Syria, for which Moscow and Tehran will fight against any Western intervention that seeks to topple or destabilise the regime. The Syrian regimes of Assad (senior and junior) have been reliable Russian and Iranian clients for over 40 years: Russia has substantial bases in Syria at Tartus and Latakia, and from the Iran-Iraq war onwards, Syria has been a loyal facilitator of Iran's regional ambitions, including its arming and training of Hezbollah in adjoining Lebanon. Neither Russia or Iran will want to be seen as fair-weather allies – quite the reverse. Russia and Iran are sending a message to current allies and potential allies that they are true friends and will defend with enormous violence a truly terrible regime like Assad, cf the West's abandonments during the Arab Spring.

Fourthly, any Western military intervention in Syria that is opposed by Russia and Iran (and thus Hezbollah) is guaranteed to incur substantial Western dead and wounded. The Russians, Iranians and their proxies have been operating in Syria for many years now and know this area of operations intimately. Further, in the case of Hezbollah, it has been fighting Israel for decades and, as well, provided lethal aid and support to militias and jihadis that fought Western troops in Iraq. It is difficult to overstate how much of an advantage the Assad forces and their Iranian and Russian patrons have in opposing any future Western military intervention in Syria.

History always casts the deciding vote

Since well before the fall of Constantinople, what is now the greater Middle East was traumatised over centuries by conquerors and invaders, by the clash of Christian and Islamic worlds, and by the desire to control silk roads and seaways. In particular, the long brutalisation of the region by the Ottomans and, also, by great power conflicts among the Ottomans, the Iranians, various Western powers and by Russian intrigue and "The Great Game", cannot be overstated. Only in the post-everything West is history considered optional and the brutal realities of a war something to be put to one side.

Unfortunately the history of these most bloody of the world's crossroads means one struggles to comprehend what, precisely, is the Western interest in seeing the Syrian status quo – the Assad regime – replaced by what would inevitably become a Sunni Islamist regime. An Assad supported by Russia and Iran, which has been the status quo for more than forty years, would be succeeded by, to borrow from Usama bin Laden, the "strong horse" of an Islamic state, if not a jihadistan. Why is this, in any way, desirable?

Moreover, most of the pundits and advocates for "something must be done" in Syria were proposing similarly grandiose solutions to Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, and Libya, and these latter day 'Lawrences of Amnesia' were completely discredited by events - and by a repeated unwillingness to recognise the unique problems that emerge in this region.

Given that what was Saddam's Iraq now resembles - thanks to Shia chauvinism, ISIS' insurgency and Kurdish assertiveness - something between the former Ottoman vilayets and a Mad Max world, some humility to proffering to know how any Western intervention in Syria would end is eminently desirable. Given the catastrophic results of the Western interventions of the past 16 years, the maxim "first, do no harm" should be engraved on the walls of every Western chancery.

Similarly, it is alarming to see how much of Western commentary on Syria is focused not on ISIL and Al Qaeda - but on Iran. To be sure, Iran is a hegemonic power, its population (c75m) dwarfs its Saudi (c27m) rival, and Iran's capacity to efficiently and decisively project power to its east and west, either directly or using its military proxies such as the IRGC and Hezbollah, into areas of Western security interest, is of great concern. However, Iran was a challenge when an ally under the Shah and has long been a challenge under the hostile regime of the Mullahs. There has been no appreciable change in the Iranian security challenge because of its participation in the Syrian war.

Moreover, Iran's size and strategic position make Western attempts to isolate and punish Iran little more than futile. Iran has been an historically important power since Biblical times, and, despite its innate ethnic and religious pluralism, Iran has a national cohesion, self-confidence and consistent grand strategy that its local adversaries, with the exception of Israel, do not. Expecting that any Western policy towards Iran - especially one of direct military confrontation in Syria - will result in Iran eschewing its pursuit of the regional hegemony, that the iron laws of geopolitics have historically granted it, is a foolish proposition. Iran fought Iraq for eight years to a bloody stalemate in circumstances where Iraq was armed by the Soviets and bankrolled by the Sunni Arab world, while Iran had only sub rosa support from North Korea, Syria, and, at times, Israel. The idea that Iran would be deterred by a Western military intervention in Syria – which would see Western forces operating in Tehran's preferred killing ground – is nothing short of insane.

Further, given that Shia Iran has, historically, been a Western ally and tolerant of Jewish and Christian faiths, it would be wiser for the West to seek to engage Iran's burgeoning civil society, as we once did those of the former Soviet empire, to seek to make the Iranian people our ally, and to appreciate the scholarly and artistic qualities of Shi'ism that differentiate Iran from the primitive salafism that afflicts our supposed Sunni 'allies'. What Churchill said of the Soviets applies to Iran's regime: they fear our friendship more than our enmity.

What would MacArthur and Patton do?

In a world of numerous concurrent, serious and draining security challenges, the case for masterly Western inactivity in Syria is overwhelming.

The current Western military effort, focused on combating ISIL and Al Qaeda should certainly be maintained and, where necessary, varied to achieved the desired end of destroying these two jihadi groups' capacities to operate in the Middle East and further afield. Similarly, there is a strong case for the enforcement of international legal norms by military strikes against those using weapons of mass destruction, something I have argued should have been done by President Obama when the Assad regime previously crossed the "red line".

However, the scope of the West's military effort in Syria should not be broadened to include that of seeking regime change or, indeed, some wider war in the Iraq and Syria areas of operations with Iran, Russia or their proxies. The West already has sufficient unfinished wars as it is without adding new fronts fighting protracted wars with the well-armed and combat-experienced forces of major military powers.

President Trump is known to be a disciple of two of America's greatest soldiers, General Douglas MacArthur and General George Patton. Both men were commanders known for achieving victories based on inspired leadership, meticulous planning, a keen appraisal of opposing forces, the relentless use of mass firepower, speed, and the remorseless concentration of forces on the weakest points of the enemy's positions. MacArthur himself has gone into history for the phrase, "In war there is no substitute for victory", uttered after MacArthur's relief as the allied commander during Truman's poorly prosecuted war in Korea.

However, less well known is that General MacArthur, in retirement, counselled presidents, prime ministers and various 'wise men' that wars that cannot be won must never be fought. MacArthur, in particular, advised his former Pacific war subordinate, President John F. Kennedy, to avoid land wars in Asia and, in particular, escalating the Vietnam war, which MacArthur judged as likely only to result in the US and its allies being bogged down in a costly quagmire that placed them at the mercy of their foes.

In the loneliness of the presidency, with all its burdens and responsibilities, and surveying the world on fire that has been bequeathed to him, President Trump could surely do worse than ask what his heroes MacArthur and Patton would make of the prospect of yet another long and unwinnable war in the Middle East? One suspects their advice would be, in every sense, laconic.