Friday, 08 August 2003

War and Peace, Part 3-D: Ever start a project, get about halfway through it, and then your enthusiasm flags and it starts to become a chore? Here's the third part of my version of Steven Den Beste's strategic overview of the War on Terror thus far; read Part 1 and Part 2 first.

5. Stage 1: Afghanistan
1. Afghanistan was a failed state without a functioning sovereign.
1. Nominally governed by the Taliban, an ultraconservative Islamic sect.
2. In practice mostly an anarchy of opium growers and private armies.
3. Used as a safe haven and training camp by Al Qaeda.
2. The Taliban couldn't have detained or extradited Osama Bin Laden even if they had chosen to.
1. Al Qaeda's terrorist army was comparable in size to the forces the Taliban could raise in their own defense.
2. Some evidence hints the more pragmatic Taliban members were perfectly willing to trundle up Osama and drop him off at the nearest consulate, but the option simply wasn't available to them.
3. Our goals:
1. To capture Osama, dead or alive.
1. The Bush Administration has stopped talking about this goal, due to their lack of success—but we're still very interested in achieving it.
2. To deny Al Qaeda the use of Afghanistan as a safe haven.
3. To reduce or destroy Al Qaeda's abilities to mount terrorist attacks.
4. If we happened to make life better for Afghans in the process, great.
5. If we happened to strike fear into the hearts of other nations that were harboring or cooperating with terrorists, even better.
4. Effects of the war in Afghanistan.
1. Reduced Al Qaeda's membership by the most direct available means.
2. Reduced or eliminated Al Qaeda's ability to recruit new members.
3. Greatly reduced Al Qaeda's stature in the Islamic world.
4. Diminished Al Qaeda's ability to mount offensive operations.
5. Toppled the Taliban and replaced it with (fragile) democracy.
1. It isn't Sweden yet, but it's the best Afghanistan has had in decades.
6. Newfound respect for American military prowess.
1. Increased intel sharing from other nations in region.
2. Start of a decline in overt state-sponsored terrorism.
5. Net result: Successful operation in all aspects but one (capturing Osama).
6. Stage 2: Iraq
1. Iraq was a perennial thorn in America's side.
1. 1991 Gulf War ended prematurely.
1. At the end of the war we left the Kurds and Shiites to mop up Saddam, failing to realize that a "people power" revolt would get slaughtered. Iraq is not the Phillippines.
2. "No-fly zones" established to prevent further massacres.
2. Saddam's chief exports: Terrorism, regional instability, exiles.
1. Offered rewards to families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
2. Attempted to assasinate a former U.S. President.
3. Attacked Iran and Kuwait; threatened Saudi Arabia.
4. Four million Iraqis living in exile (vs. 24.6 million living in Iraq).
3. "Smart sanctions" policy utterly ineffective.
1. Saddam controlled the entire distribution chain; used it to feed his friends, starve his enemies.
2. Instead of using baby formula to feed children, Saddam went abroad and sold it for cash.
3. Saddam's propaganda mill had a field day with sanctions, with fake reports of dying children that damaged U.S.'s reputation abroad.
4. Net effect of sanctions: To increase the dependency of the Iraqi people upon their government, further tightening Saddam's hold on power.
2. Iraq war plans were drawn up before September 11th.
1. Senior members of Bush cabinet lobbied Clinton to invade Iraq.
2. Presenting Iraq plans as a response to 9/11 was a question of packaging what was already on the table.
3. There is a strong chance that even if 9/11 had not occurred, Bush would still have led the U.S. to war in Iraq. We can only speculate on what might have been, but certainly Perle, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld (if not Cheney) would have been pushing in that direction regardless.
3. Our goals:
1. To remove Saddam Hussein from power, and (preferably) capture or kill him.
2. To remove a source of instability and terrorism in the Middle East.
3. To remove an obstacle to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
4. To secure the blessings of liberty for the Iraqi people.
1. The U.S. is founded on the premise that the Iraqi people are responsible for securing their own liberty—that it's their duty to so do, in the words of the Declaration of Independence—but history has repeatedly shown that American interests coincide with helping other nations to secure these rights.
5. To right past wrongs between America and the Iraqi people.
1. We engineered the coup that put Saddam in power in the first place.
2. We have repeatedly betrayed the Kurds and Shiites in their past bids to remove Saddam from power, promising them support that we never delivered.
6. To eliminate an ongoing threat to a vital American strategic interest.
1. It's not all about oil, but we're not blind either. The U.S. has a legitimate interest in securing its own economy from attack.
7. (Unconfirmed) "Flypaper" strategy: Put American soliders in vulnerable situations and give terrorists from all over the Mideast an opportunity to shoot them.
1. Wait a minute—our strategy is to use American soldiers as bait?
2. What chowderhead came up with this strategy? "In this part of our brilliant plan, American troops will be picked off and killed in small numbers in order to lure terrorists out of the woodwork." Can you name one person who dared to claim this as their strategy before the troops started dying?
3. Taking people who had insufficient motive, means or opportunity to kill Americans, and putting a parade of targets right in front of them, is not a "strategy" for attracting and eliminating terrorists; Osama will not be drawn out of hiding by the siren call of vulnerable Americans haggling in the Baghdad market-place. This "strategy" is pure spin.
4. Preparation for the war in Iraq.
1. America's "soft power" had been eroded by unilateralism, shoddy diplomacy, and the poor communication skills of our Chief Executive; we were unable to gather international support for our Iraq plans.
1. Blunt handling of Kyoto, ICC, ABM treaty, land mines, et al. left us with no favors to call in and few foreign leaders willing to sacrifice on our behalf. Germany's Schröder, Russia's Putin among the burned.
2. Ease of American victory in Afghanistan, and the fact that we declined offers of military help, dispelled the useful diplomatic fiction that America was a really big lamb with sharp teeth and a mane.
3. Blunt announcement of "pre-emptive strike" policy; nations with an interest in not being pre-emptively struck (i.e., all of them) found common cause for alarm.
4. Bush's iron-tongued phrasing in "with us or with the terrorists" speech came across as "you will do as we say or else" overseas.
5. Tony Blair, alone among European leaders, had the political capital and foresight to lead his people into war—but even he couldn't do it under a unilateral American banner. He needed diplomatic cover in the form of U.N. resolutions.
6. Battle plans required a six-month buildup of forces in the Gulf anyway, so we had nothing to lose by trying our luck at the U.N. for a while.
2. Building support for a pre-emptive war is challenging under the best of circumstances.
1. Must make the case that delay is only postponing the inevitable, and that the enemy will be stronger in the future.
2. Easier to make the humanitarian case for war: That intervention now will stop the killings. This approach is less appealing to strategic-interest purists, though, raising questions of selection (why not Liberia, then?) and motive (why the sudden interest now when Saddam's been genocidal for decades?).
3. Also, Republicans have an "only Nixon can go to China" problem with making the humanitarian case: Only a Democrat can sell the idea that America is dropping bombs out of pure-at-heart liberal goodness. When the Republicans try that line, everyone looks for the real motive.
4. United Nations is very protective of sovereignty and prefers to avoid war at virtually all costs. We designed it that way back in 1947 for what seemed like very good reasons at the time.
5. U.N. resolutions against Iraq have narrowly focused on the WMD issue, in part because acknowledging Saddam's other crimes could implicate Chinese leaders et al.
3. Domestically, little to no debate on the merits of pre-emptive war.
1. Congressional Democrats rolled over, hoping to change the subject; Congressional Republicans pulled out the rubber stamp.
2. Since 1994 Congress itself has become less a forum for debate and more an all-out partisan trench battle. Newt Gingrich's legacy lives on.
3. Politically, abstract arguments about the problems with pre-emptive war, the value of respecting national sovereignty, the merits of establishing a rule of law in international relations, etc., were harder to sell than the concrete, compelling arguments against Saddam Hussein.
4. Nonetheless, the debate deserved to be held. Many on the left felt cheated and abandoned, and stayed home on Election Day 2002.
4. And so America marched off to the U.N., PowerPoint slides in hand…
1. Absent a smoking gun, no nation would be stirred to war by evidence that Iraqi missiles flew ten kilometers further than they should have, or that Iraq's aluminum tubes were just a little too polished. This was never a compelling casus belli, and presenting it as such hurt our credibility.
2. On top of that, the evidence we presented to UNSC was, in fact, flimsy and inadequate. The fact that we're still speculating on whether Saddam even had WMDs in theater, four months after the war's end, speaks volumes about the intel we had before the war; to date we've unearthed no evidence that Saddam posed an imminent threat to anyone (except his fellow Iraqis).
3. For other nations, then, the "Iraq debate" became more of a referendum on the United States' foreign policy, and especially of whether to endorse a policy of pre-emptive warfare on the basis of weak evidence, than a debate about Iraq.
4. U.N. endorsement of such a policy would set a precedent that might come back to haunt us. We would almost certainly argue the other side of this debate if, say, India came to the U.N. with "evidence" that Pakistan was preparing a nuclear strike, and sought a vote asking U.N. member nations to pre-emptively invade Pakistan.
5. It remained possible that the Bush Administration could make the case for invading Iraq, on the basis that Saddam's regime was exceptionally brutal and flagrant in its disregard for U.N. resolutions. Bush's speech in support of UNSC Resolution 1441 made this argument compellingly, and got the Security Council to pass its most assertive resolution in decades.
6. Bush Administration then stumbled and made the second UNSC vote a litmus test of loyalty, instead of repeating its earlier performance. France helped make it possible with an actual betrayal of SecState Powell, by most reports; apparently a chance at toppling Tony Blair was worth more to them.
7. Jacksonian "face culture" wing of American politics preferred retaliation against France at the expense of any serious effort at post-war reconciliation.

(Concluded in Part 4…)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:12 pm. comments.