Saturday, March 24, 2012

Iraq

I recently posted on Counterinsurgency (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/03/counterinsurgency.html).  In that post I promised to have more to say on Iraq and Afghanistan.  This is the Iraq post.  I actually wrote an Iraq oriented document on counterinsurgency a few years ago but did not publish it.  The counterinsurgency post was based on that document.  I removed most of the Iraq specific content of that document while editing it to make the counterinsurgency post.  This document is an expanded version of the Iraq content I removed.

Iraq is not an old country.  It was created in the post World War I era.  Its construction was based on the British perspective on how the area should be organized with little consideration for and no input from the locals.  As a result the population of Iraq consists of three discordant segments:  The Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds.  For most of Iraq's history no one much cared that these groups did not actually get along that well.  During Iraq's recent history Iraq was governed by Saddam Hussein.  Saddam ruled through the Baath party and was a Sunni.  He was able to suppress the political aspirations of the Kurds and the Shia.  He governed by using standard Secret Police tactics.  He was effective enough at governing to prosecute a long and painful war against Iran, a much larger and more powerful neighboring country.  He used the standard tactic of ginning up fear of an external enemy to maintain his power.  For a long time the external enemy was Iran but in his later years he shifted to using the West in general and the U.S. in particular as the bogeyman.

In 1990 in a miscalculation Saddam invaded Kuwait, a small weak country with a lot of oil.  This precipitated the first Gulf War.  Actual combat operations lasted 100 hours.  The U.S. led coalition had little trouble dealing with the extensive Iraqi military, which was organized along traditional lines.  The war, and particularly the "softening up" process that preceded actual combat operations severely damaged both Iraqi military and industrial capability.  Various post war strategies could have been employed.  But the one selected left Saddam enough maneuvering room to retain power.  The first component was to let Iraqi forces retreat from Kuwait as long as they abandoned all heavy equipment.  This left the Iraqi military intact from a personnel point of view but left it under equipped.  The second component was a "no fly" zone.  All fixed wing military craft were to stay on the ground.  Limited use of rotary (helicopter) craft was allowed.  The third component was to abandon indigenous opposition (Shia in the South, Kurds in the North) to their fate, even though these factions had been encouraged to revolt in the run up to combat operations.  Saddam was able to marshall enough military power to put down both of these revolts.  This allowed Saddam to retain the support of the military.  This was combined with long standing Secret Police activities that were unaffected by any of the wars (e.g. Iran, Kuwait).  The Secret Police had successfully weakened opposition enough to render them ineffective without large scale support from outside.  With this support lacking Saddam continued in power.

But Saddam was greatly weakened.  The economy was in poor shape.  The two wars had drained resources from the economy.  His military capacity was much reduced.  In short, his ability to actually do anything was modest.  But Saddam had maintained a reputation for fearsomeness for a long time.  He decided to continue this strategy.  But where in the past this reputation was backed with actual capability that was no longer possible.  But he gambled that he could run a giant bluff.  He would talk like could still deliver.  So he claimed that his military was resuscitated.  He claimed that he had revitalized nuclear and chemical capabilities he had once had.  He gambled that outside powers would not be able to gather enough reliable intelligence to contradict him.  His Secret Police operation was still as formidable as always.  They were generally successful in combating HUMINT (spies on the ground).  For whatever reason SIGINT (spy satellites, photo reconnaissance, etc.) were either unable to detect his lies or weren't believed.  One contributing factor was certainly that the George W. Bush administration really wanted to invade Iraq.

So based on "WMD" that didn't exist, a nuclear program that didn't exist, chemical/biological programs that didn't exist, HUMINT provided by Ahmed Chalabi's organization that turned out to be a pack of lies, and links to al-Qaeda that did not exist, the U.S. initiated a second Gulf War.  Again the Iraqi military was dispatched with little trouble.  This time the country was completely occupied.

So where are we with respect to the thesis advanced in my counterinsurgency piece?  First, the history of Iraq gives ample reason for the indigenous population to view the central government as illegitimate.  But for many years there was no counterinsurgency.  Why?  Because Saddam deployed the first counterinsurgency strategy.  He created an extensive Secret Police operation.  And it was successful.  There were no successful insurgencies mounted from within Iraq.  From time to time the Kurds became a serious problem.  There he bolstered his Secret Police tactics with military tactics.  He bombed the Kurds with poison gas killing large numbers of them.  This cooled things down enough so that he could go back to standard Secret Police tactics.



If the second Gulf War had actually been over when President Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" then I would not be writing this piece.  But within months of the end of the standard military component of what is now in the U.S. called the Iraq War an insurgency began operating.  They mostly used the standard "blend in with the general population" strategy to make themselves hard to find.  The U.S. did make two significant contributions to making them effective, particularly in the early phases.  The U.S. disbanded the Iraqi army.  This created a large group of young males with no job prospects (the economy was in shambles) and military training.  We also did not secure the many Iraqi military ammo dumps.  The insurgents were able to carry off large amounts of small arms, explosives, and other equipment that could be very effectively used against us.

There has been a lot of debate as to what the Bush plan for the post war period was.  Nothing was published before the end of the war and whatever the plan was it was so badly implemented that it is hard to discern what was intended but bungled versus what happened that was unintended.   The only thing we know for sure is that the transition to an Iraqi run government we liked was supposed to be short.  Plans called for a total withdrawal for all U.S. troupes within a few months.  Also, the number of U.S. troupes used initially was enough to defeat the Iraqi military but not to occupy and run the country for an extended post war period.  My theory is that the U.S. government believed that Chalabi, who was close to the Bush Administration, would be warmly received by the Iraqi general public.  This would allow him to quickly form a government that was broadly supported by the Iraqi public and move on to governing with a minimum of fuss.  This, in turn, would allow the U.S. to make a quick exit.

This did not happen.  When Chalabi, an Iraqi expatriate who had been living abroad for many years, returned to Iraq the initial reaction by Iraqis was "who is this person?"  This was quickly followed by "whoever he is, we don't like him and we don't trust him".  Chalabi has never garnered substantial support within Iraq.  If I am right that that was "plan A" then the problem was that there was no "plan B" to fall back on once it became apparent that "plan A" was not working.  Not only was there no one to quickly hand over control of the government to, there was now an insurgency.

This caused the Bush people to make it up as they went.  They also consistently underestimated the difficulty and cost, both in terms of money and in terms of the number of troupes.  Iraq was consistently under resourced.  There was also another problem.  The Bush Administration strongly believed in outsourcing.  So large contracts were written to firms with close ties to the administration for key components of what strategy there was.  These companies' first priority was to make a lot of money, which they did.  The Bush people performed almost no oversight so there was lots of waste, fraud, and inefficiency.  What little there was of a strategy was poorly implemented and thus got poor results.

The early stages of the Iraq post war period was when I developed my "willing and able" test.  It proved itself, unfortunately.  In the early days I am convinced that there were many Iraqis who did see us as liberators who had released the country from the oppression of the Saddam regime.  So these people were more than willing to "drop a dime on" (e.g. rat out) the insurgents.  The problem they had was there was no one on the other end.  All of the power resided with the U.S., usually our military.  But the phones weren't working.  And if they worked there was no one on the other end who spoke the local language.  So it was literally impossible to drop a dime.  Later Iraqis became discouraged as the security situation deteriorated and became unwilling to drop a dime.  Whatever trust the Iraqis had that the U.S. would do the right thing, that they could tell the good guys from the bad guys, evaporated.  We now had both a "willing" and an "able" problem.  It is no surprise that things got worse.

After the U.S. 2004 election a general review was undertaken by several groups.  The general conclusion of pretty much all of them was that there was no reason to put good money in after bad.  Instead we should wind things up and leave.  This did not sound like "victory" to George W. Bush.  So he searched far and wide for someone who put forth a strategy that led to something that could be called "victory".  This led him to General Petraeus.  Petraeus had become an expert in counterinsurgency.  He literally wrote the book on the subject for the U.S. military.  His "Counterinsurgency Field Manual" is available on line.  It is Army publication "FM 3-24" and USMC publication "MCWP 3-33.5".  I found it recently on the web at http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/coin/repository/FM_3-24.pdf.  It is an excellent document.  Its only weakness is that it is written from the perspective of and for the use of military personnel.  As such, it assumes that there is a large civilian oriented nation building effort going on into which the military will be slotted.  So it focuses on military issues in that context and does not take the broader view of everything that needs to be done.  But if you read between the lines you can get a good idea of what the overall process needs to accomplish.

And the U.S. took a military-centric approach to the problem with a much smaller civilian component.  Without admitting that we were now in the business of nation building we started trying to nation build in Iraq.  Most of the effort was undertaken by the military.  It should have failed dramatically but it did not.  The reason was that Petraeus's timing turned out to be perfect.  Concurrent with the shift in policy by the U.S. was a shift in thinking by the Sunni Iraqis.  We had the "Sunni Awakening".  A large group of important Sunnis decided they were better off working with the U.S. rather than opposing us.  As the Sunnis formed the backbone of the insurgency this immediately reduced it in size and effectiveness.  The shift to the Petraeus approach was critical because it positioned the U.S. to be a willing partner when these Iraqis approached us.  After than things started going much better for the U.S.

Then another good thing happened.  Nouri al-Maliki turned out to be more competent that most people, including myself, expected.  In March 2008 he started "the battle of Basra", an all-Iraqi effort.  Although not a complete victory it convinced everyone that the al-Maliki government was for real.  Al-Maliki continued to gain more control and separate himself from the U.S.  At the end of 2008 he was able to negotiate a timeline for the removal of all U.S. forces.  The deadline in that plan (the end of 2011) was ultimately met.  So Iraq gradually transitioned from a country effectively run by the U.S. to an independent country run more or less effectively by the Iraqis.  In short, the transition to a legitimate government in Iraq was successfully completed.

In my opinion the most critical reason for this transition was the Sunni Awakening.  This took most of the steam out of the insurgency as local support dried up to a great extent.  But the shift to the Petraeus strategy and al-Maliki becoming an effective leader of an Iraqi based government were also critical.

So critical elements of my analysis are vindicated.  The key factor in defeating an insurgency is to create a functioning government that can deliver services, particularly security services to the populace.  The al-Maliki government's ability to fill that role, successfully in the eyes of Iraqis, was critical.  That government also successfully repositioned itself as a "local" government, not a puppet of the U.S.

Is the insurgency in Iraq completely dead?  No!  And many see rough sailing for Iraq.  The tension between the Sunnis, the Shia, and the Kurds continues.  Sectarian violence continues.  But I see most of the violence in Iraq stemming from Sunni/Shiite/Kurd tension.  I think Iraqis see it the same way.  So the violence stems primarily from sectarian tensions and not from an insurgency.  So I see this violence as manageable.  I am optimistic about the future of Iraq.  Will it be a peaceful and stable country like your typical European country?  Not any time soon.  But I think the Iraqis will manage to muddle their way to an accommodation somehow.

This will be helped by oil.  Iraq has vast reserves and terrible infrastructure.  There is a lot of money to be made, particularly at current oil prices of over $100/barrel, if Iraq's oil fields can be properly developed.  It is important to reach a revenue sharing deal among the factions.  I think that is possible.  Once that is done then it is a simple matter of investing in improved infrastructure.  This can easily be funded out of oil revenue so cost is not an impediment.  And if a deal can be done then there will be a lot of money to share around.  I think that money can be used effectively to smooth out the rough spots between the factions.  It will not be pretty but it will work.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Counterinsurgency

We have just ended our direct military involvement in Iraq.  We have a plan to wind down our involvement in Afghanistan.  Neither has gone well.  To understand why it is necessary to understand how insurgencies work.

My introduction to the subject came with the war in Vietnam.  At that point insurgencies were called Guerrilla wars and everyone, professional and amateur alike were confused.  This was understandable at the time.  In 1832 Carl Von Clausewitz wrote the greatest single book on military tactics called "On War".  He had little or nothing to say about how to fight and win a Guerrilla War.  If the acknowledged master was clueless then what chance did the rest of us stand?

Unfortunately, Vietnam turned out to be the first in a long string of Guerrilla wars.  In the intervening period I have come to understand how Guerrilla Wars work and, more importantly, how to win them.  This did not seem that great an achievement to me.  But judging from the rhetoric that surrounds Iraq/Afghanistan (and Vietnam) to this day the subject is still a mystery to most.  Fortunately, only a few easily understandable key ideas are necessary to understand the subject.

Guerrilla wars are not primarily military problems.  They are political problems with a substantial military component.

Guerrilla armies are not strong.  They are weak.  If you placed a conventional army and a guerrilla army of roughly the same size in a dessert and let them fight it out, the conventional army would win easily.  The problem for a conventional army is not how to beat the guerrillas.  It is to find the Guerrillas.  Guerrillas are adept at hiding themselves.  If they weren’t then they would be wiped out quickly.  So the problem is not to come up with some military strategy to defeat the guerrillas.  The problem is to come up with a strategy to find them.  If conventional military strategies or technology worked for finding guerrillas we would have been done long ago.  But they don’t.

We only have a Guerrilla problem where we have a government that has a legitimacy problem

Where do Guerrillas hide?  There are only two types of places.  They can hide in extremely rugged terrain like mountains (Afghanistan) or jungles (Vietnam).  Essentially what we have is land that is not really controlled by the government the land is nominally a part of.  By going into the wilderness the Guerrillas are safe from the government because the government, for whatever reason, is not capable of controlling all of its territory.  If you can not control all of your own territory are you truly the legitimate government of all your territory?

More commonly guerrillas hide among the populace of the country.  In Vietnam there was a lot of talk about black pajamas.  In Afghanistan the costume is different but the problem is the same.  If you look at a bunch of Afghanis, you can’t tell the Guerrillas from the regular citizens.  Now this is not a problem in countries with a legitimate government.  This is because the general populace knows who the insurgents are.  The problem is that they don’t pass the information on to the government.  Why?  Because they do not trust the government?  I call this distrust of the government by its own citizens a legitimacy issue.  A significant part of the population sees its own government as being illegitimate, as not deserving of the citizen’s support and trust.

The key to fighting Guerrillas is street level intelligence

As indicated above, guerrilla armies are weak, not strong.  They are also typically divided up into many small cells.  This is critical to their survival where they are opposing a much larger more powerful enemy.  Cells are isolated so that if one is captured only a tiny part of the guerrilla resource is lost.  And there is little or no path from the small unit to other and larger units.  This is the Guerrilla’s strength.  But it is also his weakness.

A single cell has an insignificant amount of military power at its disposal.  If you can find it you can easily take it out.  This is not a military problem.  It is a police problem.  And the key to success is finding the cell.  How do you find the cell?  The answer is street level intelligence.  You can’t find a particular cell by examining satellite photos or by flying reconnaissance sorties.  Tapping overseas phone calls using the NSA is not going to work.  You need someone on the ground who knows the players in a specific small neighborhood.  They will know who the good guys and the bad guys are, if the bad guys come from that neighborhood.  They will know who the strangers are if the bad guy comes from somewhere else.  Identifying the bad guys, who they are and where they are is the whole game.  The rest is easy.

Winning a Guerrilla war – the first way

There are actually two ways to win a Guerrilla war.  First I will discuss the Saddam way.  It could also be called the Stalin way or it could be named after a number of others.  It has been used successfully over and over.  So it’s known to be a proven winner.

As indicated above the secret of success is street level intelligence.  One way to get this street level intelligence is to install a large, pervasive Secret Police organization.  With the Secret Police everywhere, there is a local operative for each neighborhood.    Once he has identified a bad guy, he calls in the goons, the bad guys are picked up and taken care of.  Do this enough times in enough neighborhoods and eventually there are no more bad guys left and your Guerrilla problem is solved.

Of course you also need to make sure you actually control all of your territory.  If your secret police are not up to the task then you may need to supplement them with police, paramilitary and regular military.  But what needs to be done and how to do it is not a secret.  It is just a matter of having the will and having the resources.

Winning a Guerrilla War – the second way

This way is much harder to pull off.  The British pulled it off in Malaysia in the late ‘50s.  There are other successes but there are also many failures.  The U.S. effort in Vietnam is an obvious example of a failure.  Many other examples of failure come easily to mind.  The second way is to fix the government, to turn it from illegitimate to legitimate in the eyes of its population.  This is hard to do.  Boiled down to its essentials this business of changing an illegitimate government into a legitimate one is what counterinsurgency entails.

It is much easier to envision what a success looks like after it has been achieved.  Here the populace trusts the government and the government is competent and capable.  If there are bad guys in a neighborhood then the people in the neighborhood know who they are.  If there are strangers, again the local people know who they are.  So a member of the neighborhood contacts the local police.  The police investigate and conclude the complaint is legitimate.  They pick up the bad guys and the criminal justice system takes care of them.

A competent and capable government will have the will and resources to take control and keep control of all of its territory.  So the bad guys will have nowhere to hide.

Politics, Politics, Politics

We have seen that by itself, the military can’t win a Guerrilla war.  But they can lose one.  If the military resources available to the government are weak enough or incompetent enough it may be possible for the Guerrillas to win a military victory.  If the Guerrillas can sow enough chaos and discord for long enough the populace will give up completely on the government.  The military can help hold things together for long enough to give one of the winning strategies time to be implemented.  But the winning strategies are essentially political and not military.  So the military’s role is important but not paramount.

Politics, however, is paramount.  Even someone like Saddam must at some point gather enough political power to be able to implement his Secret Police solution.  It is possible at least in some cases for some period of time to impose a Saddam type solution from the outside.  But as the Soviet experience in Eastern Europe showed, Saddam type solutions imposed from outside have a way of not lasting as long as people think they will.

And there is the competence issue.  Even a Saddam type solution requires a certain amount of skill.  And it’s political skill.  The government must be able to impose some combination of fear and acquiescence on the populace to remain in power.  This is actually harder than it looks from outside.  The Shah of Iran was eventually overthrown, in spite of his large and effective Secret Police organization.  In those later years he failed to display sufficient skill at garnering enough fear or acquiescence.

And the second solution is vastly more difficult to pull off.  I know of no example where it has been pulled off solely from the outside.  You must have competent insiders in charge.  Certainly outside assistance can be helpful.  But highly competent insiders with little or no help from the outside stand a much higher chance of success than incompetent insiders with tremendous help from the outside.

The second solution – it’s all in the details

To see why let’s take a harder look at what must be done.  The reason there is an insurgency in the first place is because the government is not doing its job.  It needs to field a police force.  If there is no local cop there is no local cop to “rat on a rat” to.  The populace has to have faith that the police are fair and competent.  If you think they are all crooks or that they are in the pocket of someone else are you going to take the risk of dealing with them?  They might just decide that you are the problem, not the bad guy.

The police must be backed up with a trustworthy court system.  You want to be confident that when the cop you trust turns over the bad guy over to the court system then the court system can be trusted to do the right thing.  You don’t want to bad guy to be able to buy his way out of trouble whether with money or influence.  You also want to have some confidence that if you get involved with the court system you will not just arbitrarily be tossed into a hole and forgotten about even if you are manifestly innocent.  Finally, the courts need to be backed up with a trustworthy prison system.

These specific questions must be asked in the environment of the general question of how competent and effective the government as a whole is.  If the government as a whole is rife with corruption and incompetence then people are far less likely to trust the justice system.  Also an ineffective government will often lack resources because the local economy is in poor shape.  So it may not be capable of controlling all of its territory.  An incompetent government may also fail to deliver needed services like power, water, sewage, streets, etc., engendering more distrust.

To implement the second solution we must fix what’s wrong and there is usually a lot wrong.  People must be put in charge of the government who are both competent and honest.  They must be competent in the machinery of government, in the delivering of services.  They must also be competent in a purely political sense.  They are going to tell the people “Trust me.  Things are bad now but we are going to fix them.  You won’t see progress for a while but later they will get better”.  This is a lot to ask.  So you need people with the communications skills and the charisma to pull this off.

I can’t prove that the new people need to be honest.  But what they are trying to pull off is extremely difficult.  My belief is that if people see their leaders lining their pockets or handing out favors to their friends they will quickly lose faith in their leaders.  And I believe faith in the new leaders is critical to success.

Success factors

The lesson to be learned from the second half of the twentieth century is the strength of nationalism.  Time after time someone who was less competent or less honest was able to defeat someone who was more honest and competent by saying “I’m one of us.  He’s one of them.”  People want desperately to be led by one of their own.  The British ran reasonably competent and effective governments in many countries all around the world.  In many cases these governments were replaced by less competent and less honest locals.  Even after the local populace had experienced the incompetence of the government run by locals there is no case where a populace wanted to go back to British rule.  An Afghan government with a U.S. face is a recipe for disaster.  And local perceptions are critical.  The reality is far less important.

Street level intelligence is critical.  If the U.S. military is handling security then it is critical that the local people trust and be able to communicate with the average U.S. soldier.  Yet U.S. soldiers have no language training and no cultural training.  And the military tends to move units in and out of the country or around within the country.  I make take months for a unit to develop a communications channel with the local people and build up some level of trust.  Just when this is starting to produce some results the unit is moved or withdrawn and the process must be started all over.  And how well are the Afghanis doing as we hand this function over to them?  They have the advantage of speaking the language and knowing the culture.

Government services are critical.  I think everyone knows how badly things are going with security.  But what about power, sewage, the mails, the justice system, any of the services traditionally provided by government?  Unfortunately, there is a coherent pattern that extends across all government services and the news is bad.  Finally, what is the state of the economy?  There is no functioning economy in Afghanistan.  If you are a good Afghani business man how would you rate your chances of starting or maintaining a successful business in Afghanistan?

The simple test

The U.S. has not gone with the Secret Police option in either Iraq nor Afghanistan.  In this "second way" environment all of the above can be boiled down to a simple test.  I call it the “willing and able” test.  As I have shown above, the key to defeating the Insurgency is getting locals to rat on a rat.  The effectiveness of our rat on a rat program can be broken down into two stages.  Once an Afghani has identified a rat how willing is he to rat him out?  If he fears for his safety or doesn’t trust the government to respond effectively he is likely to be unwilling.  Now let’s assume our Afghani is willing, how able is he to do so?  Someone must be within reach that he can communicate with to receive the information about the rat.  That’s it.

I will be making a separate post applying this perspective to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Game Change

"Game Change" is the title of a book.  It is also the title of a movie that aired recently on HBO.  The movie is based on sections of the book.  I have not read the book nor seen the movie.  So what expertise do I bring to the subject?  I lived through the events as they happened.  The book "Game Change" covers many subjects.  The movie restricts itself to Sara Palin, her selection and her activities associated with the 2008 Presidential campaign.  Most people consider the movie critical to Sara Palin.  I am not a fan of Ms. Palin.  But, from what I have heard, I believe much of the criticism of Ms. Palin the movie has resurrected is misguided.  Here is what I consider the principal and most appropriate criticism of Ms. Palin.

I think even Ms. Palin would agree that when she was initially selected she lacked some of the background and expertise that she should have.  I think that's true but it is not the key criticism I have of her.  To understand why, I would like to compare Ms. Palin to Harry S. Truman, our Thirty-Third President.  I and many others think Mr. Truman was a truly great President.  Yet his background and experience prior to assuming office were in many ways just as inadequate as Ms. Palin's.

Harry S. Truman was born in 1884 and became President in 1945 when President Roosevelt died in office.  Prior to becoming President Mr. Truman had no college education.  He was the product of the Missouri public school system.  He served in the U.S. Army during World War I for roughly a year as an Artillery Captain.  After that he had an undistinguished business carrier.  His political opponents characterized him as "a failed haberdasher", which was reasonably accurate.  He became a U.S. Senator in 1935 and continued to serve until he became Vice President in 1945.  He was generally considered a journeyman rather than a star as a Senator.  He was best known for investigating waste and corruption in government contracts.  He was not considered a heavyweight in domestic policies, economics, or foreign policy during this period.  Like Ms. Palin, this is not the resume we normally associate with a Vice President or President.

Compared to Mr. Truman, Ms. Palin's resume doesn't look too bad.  Unlike Truman, she is a college graduate.  She got a Bachelor of Sciences (4 year) degree from the University of Idaho.  Ms. Palin has not served in the military.  But she did become the Governor of the State of Alaska.  A case can be made that either person's credentials are superior to the other.  Ms. Palin, for instance, garnered "executive" experience as Governor.  By most standards neither was sufficiently qualified based on their formal credentials.  But based on the Truman example, coming into the job without the appropriate formal credentials is not, by itself, a sufficient reason to disqualify a person.  So I believe it is unfair to criticize Ms. Palin based solely on her thin resume.

Mr. Truman was only Vice President for a short period of time.  And he served in the time before the modern Vice Presidential era.  The modern era is best characterized by Dick Cheney.  He was a very active member of the George W. Bush administration.  John Nance Garner, who held the office before Truman did, characterized the job of Vice President as "not worth a warm bucket of piss".  This was because at that time the Vice President did not play an active role in the administration.  He was not briefed on issues.  He did not attend important policy meetings.  He was given a small staff and generally ignored.  Every once in a while he would attend a funeral or give a speech but that was it.  So Mr. Truman did not get much on the job training during his stint as Vice President.  When Roosevelt died, Truman was so out of the loop he did not even know of the existence of the Manhattan Project, the effort to build an Atomic Bomb.

So how did Mr. Truman go from "failed haberdasher" to a respected and admired President of the United States?  As we have seen, it was not by any formal process like getting a degree at a prestigious university, becoming known as an expert on various areas of importance as a U.S. Senator, or even becoming a member of the inside circle of the Roosevelt Administration.  What Mr. Truman did was informal but effective nevertheless.  He proceeded to educate himself.  He was a voracious reader all his life.  He was a heavy consumer of biographies and other serious works on a variety of subjects.  While he was President and probably well before that, Truman made heavy use of the staff and resources of the Library of Congress.  He would identify a subject that he felt he need to know more about.  He would then contact the staff of the Library of Congress and ask them to send him some good books on the subject.  He would then carefully read them.  He also as President asked for and received extensive briefings on subjects of importance.  When he first became President he was keenly aware of how much he didn't know.  But he set out as quickly as he could to learn enough to make informed decisions on the many and critical issues that came before him.



Senator McCain was a more traditional candidate.  He had a degree from a military academy, several years of military experience, and many years experience as a high profile Senator.  Over the years he had built up a knowledge about most of the issues likely to come before a President.  In spite of how well prepared he was before he started running I'm sure he supplemented his knowledge with briefing books and tutorials before and during the campaign.

Ms. Palin had not seriously considered running for President or Vice President until at most a few weeks before she was picked.  So she had no reason to study up in advance on many of these issues.  So it was to be expected that at the time of her selection the depth of her knowledge on many important issues was inadequate.  So it is inappropriate to criticize Ms. Palin's depth of knowledge on these issues at the time she was picked.

It is also important to note that Ms. Palin brought important skills with her.  She was extremely charismatic and a great public speaker.  She also had strong retail politician skills.  She could quickly impress people at small events and in one on one situations where she came off as very warm and friendly.  So she had great star appeal.  And that's important to the success of a candidate.  But it is also important that candidates also be knowledgeable on the issues of the day.

The standard "briefing books" and tutorials were prepared for Ms. Palin.  Apparently the movie makes it very clear that fairly early in the process Ms. Palin rejected this approach.  It was reported in the media late in the campaign that this was so.  What I do know from personal experience is how Ms. Palin comported herself in public at that time and what level of expertise she demonstrated.  My observations are consistent with the idea that she did not feel it was important to become knowledgeable on the issues of the day.  The 2008 campaign is now more than three years in the past.  Ms. Palin she has to this day not remedied her knowledge deficit.  Apparently it's not her style.  And I think it is completely appropriate then and now to criticize her for her unwillingness to address her knowledge deficit.

It was bad but not a "show stopper" for her knowledge level to be deficient when she first joined the ticket.  But it was incumbent on her to remedy this deficit as quickly as possible.  And it was critically important for her to believe that remedying this knowledge deficit was necessary in order for her to become qualified to hold the office she aspired to.  If we compare President Truman to Governor Palin we see that Mr. Truman was acutely aware of the deficiencies in his knowledge.  He moved quickly and effectively to repair these deficiencies.  This gave him the foundation to make careful and thoughtful decisions concerning the issues of the day.  You can not make careful and thoughtful decisions based on ignorance.  So Ms. Palin utterly fails the "Truman test".

Mr. Truman had more than his share of troubles with the press.  So he would have been sympathetic to a candidate dealing with a "gotcha question", a question like "have you stopped beating your wife".  Ms. Palin was famously involved in a "gotcha question" (as characterized by Ms. Palin) event during this period.  Katie Couric asked her what periodicals she regularly read.  I want to explore whether this actually was a "gotcha question".

Let's start with what presumably would be the politically correct answer:  "The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Economist".  These would be politically correct because they represent some of the most respected media in the world, particularly with respect to political issues.  I don't know whether Ms. Palin considered making this answer.  Certainly if she had it might not have ranked as highly credible.  And I doubt she actually regularly read these publications so follow up questions might have been problematic.  But was it really important for her to make the politically correct answer?  I think not.

As a good conservative, she could have said "The National Journal, The Washington Times, and The Anchorage Daily News (her local paper)".  This would have been a completely appropriate answer.  Except, again I don't know if she actually read those publications either.  If she didn't then again follow up questions might have been problematic.  But there's more.  Let's say she picked a list of the most politically inappropriate publications, say "Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Guns & Ammo".  I think had she listed these publications, and assuming she actually read them, this answer would have worked for her.  In the same way that men "read Playboy for the articles" I think women can claim to "read Cosmo for the articles".  If nothing else it would have supported her "down home" persona.

The problem for Ms. Palin is that I suspect she actually does not read anything routinely.  So she really was stuck for an answer.  Because not reading anything is truly more politically incorrect than my "reading Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Gus & Ammo" list.  And I think Ms. Palin knew that.  And that's my point.  There are many political epithets out there.  One four letter word that I particularly dislike as an epithet is "wonk".  What is a wonk?  A wonk is someone who knows what they are talking about.  And for a large segment of the public, our media, and our political class, "wonk" is an epithet because knowing what you are talking about is a bad thing.  I think Ms. Palin worked hard at not being a wonk and making sure her supporters knew she was not a wonk.

A core belief of mine is that ignorance leads to bad decisions and that knowledge leads to better decisions.  I suppose it is possible to make a good decision out of ignorance but I believe it is far more likely that ignorance leads to bad decisions.  In my universe being a wonk is a good thing even if I disagree with the wonk.  So ultimately Katie Couric's question was a gotcha question.  But not because Katie intended it to be a gotcha question.  I think she intended it to be a softball question.  But it turned out to shed light on Ms. Palin as a person and so it "got" her.

Finally, I want to come to something that Steve Schmidt, the staffer most responsible for going with Palin has highlighted several times.  Picking their running mate is perhaps the most important public decision a candidate does during the campaign.  So it can be very illuminating.  And it turned out to be very illuminating that John McCain picked Sara Palin.  McCain was a fighter pilot in Vietnam.  Fighter Pilots are not known for their deep thinking.  Instead they are known for their ability to make decisions quickly and under pressure.  They are also risk takers.  These attributes are important to a successful "fighter jock".  It's just you and, if you are in a pickle, the best thing to do might be to make a risky decision, a "game changer".

But if a fighter pilot screws up he is risking only himself and his plane.  Presidents play for much higher stakes.  And the consequences of getting it wrong are much higher:  thousands of lives, the state of the economy, trillions of dollars, even war and peace can be on the line.  A president is confronted with very few snap decisions.  What is usually required is a thoughtful approach that takes into account multiple conflicting interests.  Slow and careful are usually the best approach.  And if a snap decision is required it is either in the context of events that have been playing out for a long time and have finally reached a predictable climax or it is the result of a major mistake abruptly coming home to roost.

John McCain demonstrated in his Sara Palin decision that he still has a "fighter jock" mind set.  He was willing to risk everything because he had gotten in a pickle.  It looked like if he didn't make a "game changer" decision he would lose the election.  So he did what a fighter jock would do.  He went with his gut based on a 5 day vetting process that produced a person that in her current state was manifestly unqualified to be Vice President.  He bet, wrongly, that she could be whipped into Vice President ready condition before the inauguration.  This would have been a chancy bet if Ms. Palin had been willing to go along with the program.  It turned out the bet stood no chance at all because Ms. Palin refused to go along.  And what this shows is that not only was Sara Palin unqualified to be Vice President but that John McCain was unqualified to be President.  He was not thoughtful enough and too willing to go "all in" to be acceptable as a President.