Emma Sky and the American Military

Interesting profile today in the NY Times of Emma Sky. Sky is a British foreign service officer who has become the right hand of Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top American in Iraq. She is from a left-wing background and opposed the war -- reporter Thomas Ricks called her a "tree hugger" -- but she speaks Arabic, has logged more time on the ground in Iraq than any American soldier, and has put her expertise to work helping to maintain order in Iraq and get the Americans and British out. It is uplifting to see a person who is actually working to end evils she hates, even if it means working side-by-side with people she totally disagrees with.

Sky has been from the beginning a critic of our habit of trying to defeat insurgents from the air, with attendant "collateral damage."

During the troop buildup in 2007 known as the surge, she said that attacks on insurgents that also resulted in civilian casualties were tantamount to “mass murder.”

“When you drop a bomb from the air and it lands on a village and kills all those people and you turn around and say, ‘Oh we didn’t mean to kill the civilians,’ well, who did you think was living in the village?” she said.

When the Americans realized that killing Iraqis would never solve anything and switched to their counter-insurgency strategy, they began to pay a lot more attention to people like Sky. Odierno:

Emma was able to give me a completely different perspective: it was from an Iraqi viewpoint. We didn’t have a lot of experience in doing these things, so someone with her background and knowledge was able to assist us as to how we could best help civilians.

It's quite a story, and one comes away from it feeling better about a species that includes people like Emma Sky.

Another impression one gets from these stories is what a serious institution the US military is. Sky herself told Thomas Ricks that "America doesn't deserve its military." What she means, I think, is that while American politicians and pundits like to bluster about toughness, and most American civilians don't care a fig about the rest of the world, American generals are focused on solving problems, and American soldiers are genuinely willing to die defending abstractions like freedom. When the invasion of Iraq began, Bush, Rumsfeld and company were blithely dismissive of the future; it was Gen. Petraeus who famously turned to a reporter and said, "Tell me how this ends." It was Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our current commander in Afghanistan, who ordered an end to airstrikes and all other attacks on populated areas that might kill civilians. It is our military officers who have shown a real ability to learn from their mistakes, and who see the limits of what force can accomplish.

That doesn't mean the generals are right about everything. I think at the moment they are far too optimistic about Afghanistan, although I certainly understand why; who wants to send soldiers to die in a war he thinks he can't win? They are focused on the mission, so when somebody tells them to defeat the Taliban, they devote all their energies to defeating the Taliban, not to wondering whether a bunch of tribesmen with AK-47s are worth the thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars that would really take. But it is clear to me that the trillions of dollars we spend on our military have bought a very impressive and powerful thing, one that can do amazing things. But it still remains to us to decide what those things should be.