Letters to the Editor
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Iraq and political weaknesses
Nothing about Iraq makes sense. We are fighting a war that is making our enemies stronger, more brazen and more numerous each day. Iraq is a war of attrition that the US cannot win unless we are prepared to abandon our values and adopt a strategy of "total war" which borders on genocide. Since that is not politically or legally possible under our rules of engagement, the worst thing we could have done in Iraq is to engage the enemy on their turf and according to their rules and become a testing ground for more lethal and effective guerrilla tactics. Iraq has provided insurgent groups around the world a front row seat on how to defeat a major military power by using cell phones, AK-47's and RPG launchers. Israel got a taste of this in Lebanon, which Iran has duly noted. Afghanistan could be the next theater that "goes south" in a hurry for all the same reasons.
The issue is that political weaknesses in every corner of the world caused this debacle to unfold the way it did. This is the untold story of the GWOT in that key world leaders fell into the trap set very deliberately by al Qaeda after 9/11. Al Qaeda knew that Bush would react just the way he did and even got a bonus when the US went into Iraq. By political weakness, I mean that Bush could not withstand the pressure to execute militarily and instead use the enormous political and diplomatic resources of the US to hunt down al Qaeda and destroy them. All of this could have been done in the shadows but Bush's political weaknesses prevailed and the rest is history. Bush was not prepared to risk 2004 based on vague notions of containment or counterinsurgency actions in faraway places even though that policy has served American presidents well since Truman. Bush wanted action and this is what we got:
o a depleted military stretched too thinly around the world
o a vastly divided country that causes more even more political weaknesses
o a younger generation that believes the US is more threatening than North Korea
o an emboldened enemy that believes that the decadent West is no match for virulent islamo-fascism.
o a false sense of security by believing that the worst is behind us
o a disdain for non-military tactics that promote ideas and values instead