US War College: Iraq "strategic error"

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Registered: 03-31-2003
US War College: Iraq "strategic error"
1
Mon, 01-12-2004 - 11:49pm
I heard about this on MSNBC tonight and found the text on Salon.com. The site says it's a "December 2003 report by Jeffrey Record, a Vietnam veteran, author and professor in the Department of Strategy and International Security at the U.S. Air Force's Air War College in Montgomery, Ala." He argues that the Global War on Terror is unfocused, unsustainable, "dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/01/13/war_report/

You don't have to subscribe to the site, but you do have to watch an advertisement to get a day pass. Here's part of the article:

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"Jan. 13, 2004  |  In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida terrorist attacks on the United States, the U.S. government declared a global war on terrorism (GWOT). The nature and parameters of that war, however, remain frustratingly unclear. The administration has postulated a multiplicity of enemies, including rogue states; weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators; terrorist organizations of global, regional and national scope; and terrorism itself. It also seems to have conflated them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and nonstate entities that pose no serious threat to the United States.

Of particular concern has been the conflation of al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat. This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaida. The war against Iraq was not integral to the GWOT, but rather a detour from it.



Additionally, most of the GWOT's declared objectives, which include the destruction of al-Qaida and other transnational terrorist organizations, the transformation of Iraq into a prosperous, stable democracy, the democratization of the rest of the autocratic Middle East, the eradication of terrorism as a means of irregular warfare, and the (forcible, if necessary) termination of WMD proliferation to real and potential enemies worldwide, are unrealistic and condemn the United States to a hopeless quest for absolute security. As such, the GWOT's goals are also politically, fiscally and militarily unsustainable."

...

"Perhaps inadvertently, the contemporary language on terrorism has become, as Conor Gearty puts it, "the rhetorical servant of the established order, whatever and however heinous its own activities are." Because the administration has cast terrorism and terrorists as always the evilest of evils, what the terrorist does "is always wrong what the counter-terrorist has to do to defeat them is therefore invariably, necessarily right. The nature of the regime, the kind of action that is possible against it, the moral situation in which violence occurs -- none of these complicating elements matters a jot against the contemporary power of the terrorist label"...

Stapling together rogue states and terrorist organizations with different agendas and threat levels to the United States as an undifferentiated threat obscures critical differences among rogues states, among terrorist organizations, and between rogue states and terrorist groups. One is reminded of the postulation of an international communist monolith in the 1950s, which blinded American policymakers to the influence and uniqueness of local circumstances and to key national, historical, and cultural differences and antagonisms within the "bloc." Communism was held to be a centrally directed international conspiracy; a Communist anywhere was a Communist everywhere, and all posed an equal threat to America's security. A result of this inability to discriminate was disastrous U.S. military intervention in Vietnam against an enemy perceived to be little more than an extension of Kremlin designs in Southeast Asia and thus by definition completely lacking an historically comprehensible political agenda of its own...

...

Strategically, Operation Iraqi Freedom was not part of the GWOT; rather, it was a war-of-choice distraction from the war of necessity against al-Qaida. Indeed, it will be much more than a distraction if the United States fails to establish order and competent governance in post-Saddam Iraq...

...

The central conclusion of this study is that the global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly that its parameters should be readjusted to conform to concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American power.


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Registered: 03-18-2000
Tue, 01-13-2004 - 10:14am

I had this

 


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