| 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.
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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 McCain’s position at one end
(reduce forces in Iraq only as conditions permit) and Barack Obama’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 anyone’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 didn’t happen.
We underestimated Iraqi thinking. Knowing they could not fight |
