Philip H. Gordon, writing in Foreign Affairs:

It can, but only if US officials start to think clearly about what success in the war on terror would actually look like. Victory will come only when Washington succeeds in discrediting the terrorists' ideology and undermining their support. These achievements, in turn, will require accepting that the terrorist threat can never be eradicated completely and that acting as though it can will only make it worse.

Can the War on Terror Be Won?

Security screeners at two of the nation's busiest airports failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers in more than 60% of tests last year.

Most fake bombs missed by screeners

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Today marks five years since the authorization of military force in Iraq, setting Operation Iraqi Freedom in motion. Five years on, the Iraq war is as undermanned and under-resourced as it was from the start. And, five years on, Iraq is in shambles.

As Army captains who served in Baghdad and beyond, we've seen the corruption and the sectarian division. We understand what it's like to be stretched too thin. And we know when it's time to get out.

Compare with Rory Stewart's latest comments. Contrast the captains' experiences with the recent RAND report on The Civil-Military Gap:

What is the potential for a divergence in views among civilian and military elites (sometimes referred to as the civil-military gap) to undermine military effectiveness?

RAND concludes:

Overall, concerns about a civil-military gap and possible erosion of the principle of civilian control of the military appear to be overstated.

However, the captains report that:

Even with "the surge," we simply do not have enough soldiers and marines to meet the professed goals of clearing areas from insurgent control, holding them securely and building sustainable institutions. Though temporary reinforcing operations in places like Fallujah, An Najaf, Tal Afar, and now Baghdad may brief well on PowerPoint presentations, in practice they just push insurgents to another spot on the map and often strengthen the insurgents' cause by harassing locals to a point of swayed allegiances. Millions of Iraqis correctly recognize these actions for what they are and vote with their feet -- moving within Iraq or leaving the country entirely. Still, our colonels and generals keep holding on to flawed concepts.

...

This is Operation Iraqi Freedom and the reality we experienced. This is what we tried to communicate up the chain of command. This is either what did not get passed on to our civilian leadership or what our civilian leaders chose to ignore. While our generals pursue a strategy dependent on peace breaking out, the Iraqis prepare for their war -- and our servicemen and women, and their families, continue to suffer.

Have you seen In the Valley of Elah?

The Real Iraq We Knew

Ashley Gilbertson photographs the war in Iraq for the New York Times. He talks about the invasion of Iraq, the battle for Falluja, the Marines he worked with, post-traumatic stress disorder, Iraqi civilians, and the future of photojournalism. His work is available in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War published by the University of Chicago Press.

Praise for the book:

“This is the kind of reporting we so desperately need: free of false bravura, free of agenda, free of inflated urgency. Gilbertson … shows us personally and incontrovertibly what it has been like for him coming of age in Iraq during the last five years.

“For this reason, the book belongs less with other histories of the war than on the same shelf with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This is not trumped-up news coming live from Iraq but the straight story with harrowing snapshots of the American soul. When future generations look back and wonder where we went wrong, where we failed ourselves and them, it will not be hours of television and radio broadcasts that they pore over. It will be a select few texts, and Gilbertson’s book deserves to be one of them.”

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

A few years ago, with little fanfare, the United States opened a base in the horn of Africa to kill or capture Al Qaeda fighters. By 2012, the Pentagon will have two dozen such forts. The story of Africa Command, the American military's new frontier outpost.

The Americans Have Landed

When news of The Al Qaeda Reader leaked to the press in 2005, some on the left questioned whether the book would be a pseudoscholarly attempt to demonize Muslims. Others on the right worried that unfiltered exposure to the radical beliefs and propaganda of bin Laden and his cohorts might unintentionally lead to more converts or sympathizers.

My reply is simply this: Whatever one's position in regard to the "war on terror," understanding the ideas of our enemy is both a practical necessity in wartime and a fundamental liberal value. It is my hope that both sides in this bitter debate will profit from a deeper acquaintance with these works. In any case, it simply will not do to dismiss Al Qaeda as an irrational movement without ideas.

The Two Faces of Al Qaeda

TSA also plans to train screeners in the art of observing slight facial movements that indicate a person is lying.

Although civil libertarians and top Democrats in Congress say the techniques raise serious questions about privacy rights and racial and ethnic profiling, TSA officials say the behavior-detection officers may play a more important role in thwarting terrorist attacks than traditional screening techniques.

Kip Hawley: "A behavior-detection officer will detect somebody no matter what the weapon is."

To become a behavior-detection officer, screeners undergo four days of classroom training and three days of supervised on-the-job work.

Let me get this straight: in four days, you, too, can outperform an X-ray?

Searching Passengers' Faces For Subtle Cues to Terror

The Los Angeles Times unspins it for you:

The "very substantial withdrawal" Petraeus outlined Monday would keep the buildup in place for as long as possible without extending the tours of soldiers beyond the current limit of 15 months. Taking into account those tour limits, which were increased to their current level earlier this year, those additional troops would have had to come home anyway by the end of August. In essence, Petraeus was arguing Monday for a continuation of the buildup until virtually no more Army and Marine units were available.

More like gradual exhaustion, perhaps.

Petraeus calls for 'gradual drawdown'

Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result.

They call it a "dollar auction."

The rules are simple. The professor offers a dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one wrinkle: the second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well. Several students almost always get sucked in. The first bids a penny, looking to make 99 cents. The second bids 2 cents, the third 3 cents, and so on, each feeling they have a chance at something good on the cheap. The early stages are fun, and the bidders wonder what possessed the professor to be willing to lose some money.

The problem surfaces when the bidders get up close to a dollar. After 99 cents the last vestige of profitability disappears, but the bidding continues between the two highest players. They now realize that they stand to lose no matter what, but that they can still buffer their losses by winning the dollar. They just have to outlast the other player. Following this strategy, the two hapless students usually run the bid up several dollars, turning the apparent shot at easy money into a ghastly battle of spiraling disaster.

Theoretically, there is no stable outcome once the dynamic gets going. The only clear limit is the exhaustion of one of the player's total funds. In the classroom, the auction generally ends with the grudging decision of one player to "irrationally" accept the larger loss and get out of the terrible spiral.

Economists call the dollar auction pattern an irrational escalation of commitment.

We might also call it the war in Iraq.

Lessons on the surge from economics 101

In this video letter to the editor, Charles Ferguson, director of the acclaimed documentary No End in Sight, responds to Paul Bremer's September 6 op-ed, How I Didn’t Dismantle Iraq’s Army.

If you haven't seen No End in Sight, I recommend it. Here's a sampler of review blurbs:

...a sober, revelatory and absolutely vital film.

...the best and saddest film of the year so far...

Someone in the film notes that there were 500 ways to mess things up in Iraq and that the U.S. seems intent on going through them all. After watching No End in Sight, the inescapable conclusion is that that prediction is depressingly, but exactly right.

Masterfully edited and cumulatively walloping, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight turns the well-known details of our monstrously bungled Iraq war into an enraging, apocalyptic litany of fuckups.

Charles Ferguson, On the Dismantling of the Iraqi Army