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Subject:
Stratfor's Five Year Summary
timon_phocas
3/19/2008 9:07:35 AM
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This is an interesting summary of the Iraq War by Stratfor. The article states their own (fiver year old) positions accurately. I believe they were correct in their formulation of the public versus private justifications of the war. It's not "Bush lied, blah blah, blah..." and it's not "democracy triumphalism."
So what do you all think?
Strategic Forecasting, Inc.
---------------------------
STRATFOR'S WAR: FIVE YEARS LATER
By George Friedman
Five years have now passed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Vice
President Dick Cheney, in Iraq with Sen. John McCain -- the presumptive
Republican nominee for president -- summarized the five years by saying, "If
you reflect back on those five years, it's been a difficult,
challenging, but nonetheless successful endeavor. We've come a long way in five
years, and it's been well worth the effort." Democratic presidential
aspirant Sen. Hillary Clinton called the war a failure.
It is the role of political leaders to make such declarations, not
ours. Nevertheless, after five years, it is a moment to reflect less on
where we are and more on where we are going. As we have argued in the
past, the actual distinctions between McCainâ??s position at one end
(reduce forces in Iraq only as conditions permit) and Barack Obamaâ??s
position (reduce them over 16 months unless al Qaeda is shown to be in Iraq)
are in practice much less distinct than either believes. Rhetoric aside
-- and this is a political season -- there is in fact a general, but
hardly universal, belief that goes as follows: The invasion of Iraq
probably was a mistake, and certainly its execution was disastrous. But a
unilateral and precipitous withdrawal by the United States at this point
would not be in anyoneâ??s interest. The debate is over whether the
invasion was a mistake in the first place, while the divisions over
ongoing policy are much less real than apparent.
Stratfor tries not to get involved in this sort of debate. Our role is
to try to predict what nations and leaders will do, and to explain
their reasoning and the forces that impel them to behave as they do. Many
times, this analysis gets confused with advocacy. But our goal actually
is to try to understand what is happening, why it is happening and what
will happen next. We note the consensus. We neither approve nor
disapprove of it as a company. As individuals, we all have opinions. Opinions
are cheap and everyone gets to have one for free. But we ask that our
staff check them -- along with their personal ideologies -- at the
door. Our opinions focus not on what ought to happen, but rather on what we
think will happen -- and here we are passionate.
Public Justifications and Private Motivations
We have lived with the Iraq war for more than five years. It was our
view in early 2002 that a U.S. invasion of Iraq was inevitable. We did
not believe the invasion had anything to do with weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) -- which with others we believed were under development in
Iraq. The motivation for the war, as we wrote, had to do with forcing
Saudi Arabia to become more cooperative in the fight against al Qaeda by
demonstrating that the United States actually was prepared to go to
extreme measures. The United States invaded to change the psychology of the
region, which had a low regard for American power. It also invaded to
occupy the most strategic country in the Middle East, one that bordered
seven other key countries.
Our view was that the Bush administration would go to war in Iraq not
because it saw it as a great idea, but because its options were to go on
the defensive against al Qaeda and wait for the next attack or take
the best of a bad lot of offensive actions. The second option consisted
of trying to create what we called the "coalition of the coerced,"
Islamic countries prepared to cooperate in the covert war against al Qaeda.
Fighting in Afghanistan was merely a holding action that alone would
solve nothing. So lacking good options, the administration chose the best
of a bad lot.
The administration certainly lied about its reasons for going into
Iraq. But then FDR certainly lied about planning for involvement in World
War II, John Kennedy lied about whether he had traded missiles in Turkey
for missiles in Cuba and so on. Leaders cannot conduct foreign policy
without deception, and frequently the people they deceive are their own
publics. This is simply the way things are.
We believed at the time of the invasion that it might prove to be much
more difficult and dangerous than proponents expected. Our concern was
not about a guerrilla war. Instead, it was about how Saddam Hussein
would make a stand in Baghdad, a city of 5 million, forcing the United
States into a Stalingrad-style urban meat grinder. That didnâ??t happen.
We underestimated Iraqi thinking. Knowing they could not fight a
conventional war against the Americans, they opted instead to decline
conventional combat and move to guerrilla warfare instead. We did not expect
that.
A Bigger Challenge Than Expected
That this was planned is obvious to us. On April 13, 2003, we noted
what appeared to be an organized resistance group carrying out bombings.
Organizing such attacks so quickly indicated to us that the operations
were planned. Explosives and weapons had been hidden, command and
control established, attacks and publicity coordinated. These things donâ??t
just happen. Soon after the war, we recognized that the Sunnis in fact
had planned a protracted war -- just not a conventional one.
Our focus then turned to Washington. Washington had come into the war
with a clear expectation that the destruction of the Iraqi army would
give the United States a clean slate on which to redraw Iraqi society.
Before the war was fought, comparisons were being drawn with the
occupation of Japan. The beginnings of the guerrilla operation did not fit into
these expectations, so U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
dismissed the guerrillas as merely the remnants of the Iraqi army -- criminals
and "dead-enders" -- in their last throes. We noted the gap between
Washingtonâ??s perception of Iraq and what we thought was actually going
on.
A perfect storm arose in this gulf. First, no WMD were found. We were
as surprised by this as anybody. But for us, this was an intellectual
exercise; for the administration, it meant the justification for the war
-- albeit not the real motive -- was very publicly negated. Then,
resistance in Iraq to the United States increased after the U.S. president
declared final victory. And finally, attempts at redrawing Iraqi society
as a symbol of American power in the Islamic world came apart, a
combination of the guerrilla war and lack of preparation plus purging the
Baathists. In sum, reshaping a society proved more daunting than expected
just as the administration's credibility cracked over the WMD issue.
A More Complex Game
By 2004, the United States had entered a new phase. Rather than simply
allowing the Shia to create a national government, the United States
began playing a complex and not always clear game of trying to bring the
Sunnis into the political process while simultaneously waging war
against them. The Iranians used their influence among the Shia to further
destabilize the U.S. position. Having encouraged the United States to
depose its enemy, Saddam Hussein, Tehran now wanted Washington to leave
and allow Iran to dominate Iraq.
The United States couldnâ??t leave Iraq but had no strategy for
staying. Stratforâ??s view from 2004 was that the military option in Iraq had
failed. The United States did not have the force to impose its will on
the various parties in Iraq. The only solution was a political
accommodation with Iran. We noted a range of conversations with Iran, but also
noted that the Iranians were not convinced that they had to deal with
the Americans. Given the military circumstance, the Americans would
leave anyway and Iran would inherit Iraq.
Stratfor became more and more pessimistic about the American position
in 2006, believing that no military solution was possible, and that a
political solution -- particularly following the Democratic victory in
2006 congressional elections -- would further convince the Iranians to be
intransigent. The deal that we had seen emerging over the summer of
2006 after the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in
Iraq, was collapsing.
The Surge
We were taken by surprise by U.S. President George W. Bush's response
to the elections. Rather than beginning a withdrawal, he initiated the
surge. While the number of troops committed to Iraq was relatively
small, and its military impact minimal, the psychological shock was
enormous. The Iranian assumption about the withdrawal of U.S. forces collapsed,
forcing Tehran to reconsider its position. An essential part of the
surge -- not fully visible at the beginning -- was that it was more a
political plan than a military one. While increased operations took place,
the Americans reached out to the Sunni leadership, splitting them off
from foreign jihadists and strengthening them against the Shia.
Coupled with increasingly bellicose threats against Iran, this created
a sense of increasing concern in Tehran. The Iranians responded by
taking Muqtada al-Sadr to Iran and fragmenting his army. This led to a
dramatic decline in the civil war between Shia and Sunni and in turn led to
the current decline in violence.
The war -- or at least Stratforâ??s view of it -- thus went through
four phases:
Winter 2002-March 2003: The period that began with the run-up to
invasion, in which the administration chose the best of a bad set of choices
and then became overly optimistic about the war's outcome.
April 2003-Summer 2003: The period in which the insurgency developed
and the administration failed to respond.
Fall 2003-late 2006: The period in which the United States fought a
multisided war with insufficient forces and a parallel political process
that didnâ??t match the reality on the ground.
Late 2006 to the present: The period known as the surge, in which
military operations and political processes were aligned, leading to a
working alliance with the Sunnis and the fragmentation of the Shia. This
period included the Iranians restraining their Shiite supporters and the
United States removing the threat of war against Iran through the
National Intelligence Estimate.
The key moment in the war occurred between May 2003 and July 2003. This
consisted of the U.S. failure to recognize that an insurgency in the
Sunni community had begun and its delay in developing a rapid and
effective response, creating the third phase -- namely, the long, grueling
period in which combat operations were launched, casualties were incurred
and imposed, but the ability to move toward a resolution was
completely absent. It is unclear whether a more prompt response by the Bush
administration during the second period could have avoided the third
period, but the second period certainly was the only point during which the
war could have been brought under control.
The operation carried out under Gen. David Petraeus, combining military
and political processes, has been a surprise, at least to us.
Meanwhile, the U.S. rapprochement with the Sunnis that began quietly in Anbar
province spiraled into something far more effective than we had
imagined. It has been much more successful than we had imagined in part because
we did not believe Washington was prepared for such a systematic and
complex operation that was primarily political in nature. It is also
unclear if the operation will succeed. Its future still depends on the
actions of the Iraqi Shia, and these actions in turn depend on Iran.
The Endgame
We have been focused on the U.S.-Iranian talks for quite awhile. We
continue to believe this is a critical piece in any endgame. The United
States is now providing an alternative scenario designed to be utterly
frightening to the Iranians. They are arming and training the Iranians'
mortal enemies: the Sunnis who led the war against Iran from 1980 to
1988. That rearming is getting very serious indeed. Sunni units outside
the aegis of the Iraqi military are now some of the most heavily armed
Iraqis in Anbar, thanks to the Sunni relationship with U.S. forces there.
It should be remembered that the Sunnis ruled Iraq because the Iraqi
Shia were fragmented, fighting among themselves and therefore weak. That
underlying reality remains true. A cohesive Sunni community armed and
backed by the Americans will be a formidable force. That threat is the
best way to bring the Iranians to the table.
The irony is that the war is now focused on empowering the very people
the war was fought against: the Iraqi Sunnis. In a sense, it is at
least a partial return to the status quo ante bellum. In that sense, one
could argue the war was a massive mistake. At the same time, we
constantly return to this question: We know what everyone would not have done in
2003; we are curious about what everyone would have done then.
Afghanistan was an illusory option. The real choices were to try to block al
Qaeda defensively or to coerce Islamic intelligence services to provide
the United States with needed intelligence. By appearing to be a
dangerous and uncontrolled power rampaging in the most strategic country in
the region, the United States reshaped the political decisions countries
like Saudi Arabia were making.
This all came at a price that few of us would have imagined five years
ago. Cheney is saying it was worth it. Clinton is saying it was not.
Stratforâ??s view is that what happened had to happen given the lack of
choices. But Rumsfeld's unwillingness to recognize that a guerrilla war
had broken out and provide more and appropriate forces to wage that war
did not have to happen. There alone we think history might have
changed. Perhaps.
Tell George what you think
Copyright 2008 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. |
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