Expensive strategic stalemate
Tuesday, January 29, 2008 at 2:18AM OP-ED: We’re Fighting the Wrong War, By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, Jan 28, 2008
Really solid diagnostic piece by Fareed, reminding me why I wrote what I did over the first half of 2007.
We approach the rotational crunch created by Bush's choice to eschew the diplomatic surge in conjunction with the troop surge and Petraeus' COIN strategy.
We're there on the Balkans-done-backward, as Biddle astutely observes, which, as I've long argued, forces a dial-down of the U.S presence into a Vietnam-done-backwards (direct action to advising) unless you somehow surmount the rotational limits that currently threaten to break our ground forces. Even if you blow off the troop issue, you've got Fallon demanding and getting more Marines for Afghanistan and some kinetic/nonkinetic response brewing on the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas (of Pakistan)].
All of this means the lack of a diplomatic surge keeps us tied down in Iraq with a very fragile non-war that somebody's got to babysit for years--Biden's soft partition continues with the continuing danger of a Lebanon-style civil war erupting for years into the future.
And all that means is that Bush has effectively passed off Iraq-the-postwar to the next administration with nothing in the way of a lasting settlement, either internal (Iraq is still broken outside of the Kurdish region) or regional (Iran and Saudi Arabia still pose more competition questions than cooperation answers) or even extra-regional (with all due respect to Fareed, South Africa and Poland wouldn't exactly constitute my idea of a Core quorum).
Thus the next admin is confronted by the untenability of this situation: either break the Army or risk the return of civil war or pretend the UN can take over for us. Any Democratic administration that picks from this undesirable lot will be lambasted by the Right, which may be Rove and Cheney's hand-tying strategy all along.
But the reality is that the SysAdmin New Core function arrives in bits and pieces--witness the reconstruction contracts that the Chinese and Russians pick up along the way, along with the Iranians. Thus we effectively cut on the reconstruction and stay on the peacekeeping. Not the worst world, if we were a bit more self aware on thus subject and stopped babbling about "winning" or "losing" this "war," but there you have it.
Bush effectively abdicated the intervention to Petraeus last September, and the general has done a great job of taking what the situation gave him (the Anbar awakening) and turning it into a lasting advantage on tamping down sectarian strife (the ethnic cleansing, largely completed, does not reach the level of violence many observers predicted), meaning he effectively turned the occupational clock back to the initial postwar dynamics, except this time we're not disbanding the extant forces but co-opting them. But again, that still leaves the reconstruction, outside of the Kurdish region, largely stillborn--almost five years in.
And again, that's not sustainable.
We've quieted the civil war by agreeing to let the Shiia and Sunni run their own security regimes (as we did all along with the Kurdish peshmerga), but that stability can dissolve and will inevitably dissolve under the long term pressure of a continuing great depression among those two populations.
So in the end, as one of my recent columns argues, Bush has reset the clock without locating a way ahead. Instead, we're left with the same basic packages in place on Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and a contiuing Al Qaeda center of gravity along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
That has been a ton of blood and treasure spent to achieve this strategic stalemate.
(Thanks: jarrod myrick)
Reader Comments (8)
We changed tactics with palpable success. Now it seems that the insurgents have changed tactics as well, aiming to undo all that Petraeus has done.
Zakaria does not emphasize the fragility of the Sunni change of heart. If our forces/advisors cannot ensure their safety, they will turn on us (again) - and then we're back to the lack-of-security dynamics that made the insurgency so attractive to ordinary Iraqis in the first place.
Form should follow function. We all know wars entail lots of less than good choices, so it's not unusual that the glass looks half empty in the rear view mirror perspective. Unfortunately that's where journalists reside. Your PNM, etc., is valuable becuase of the forward view perspective.
Need to keep that positive value perspective in place when analysing war where there are few if any good choices. Given what he had to work with, President Bush has done well.
We've got the countries that enabled al Queda to shift aliances to our side, and placed ourselves at the table for virturally all decisions in the Middle East now. Our mass media folks seem to regard the events there in terms of shortly arriving at a solution of happiness for all. That's not going to happen. Tom's SYS ADMIN concept is obviously appropriate - but transitioning from a mostly military process to that is the challenge.
You've often emphasized how the economic realty will drive the political reality. Not the inverse.
Maybe the complete set of systemic=diplomatic surges, each as much, of a kind, and at a level, as was thought/seen to be available and appropriate at the time, were what have (maybe?) turned things around in the fighting in Iraq. Maybe what has been realized that has made the difference is that Iraqis have had good reason not to trust the good will, honesty, and competence of themselves and their fellow Iraqis when it comes to security justice and progress and that they (the Iraqis) can be persuaded that we as system administrators and developers are, after all, competent and willing to help them work through what is likely to be the work of a number of years to begin to reach suitable and sustainable working cultures of trust between and among Iraqi individuals, identity groups, and institutions (and their global connections). This may turn out be how SysAdmin will always work out, not only in Iraq and its region, but in other parts of the Gap. SysAdmin is certainly not passive and not suited to mere babysitting. If a workable and sustainable soft partitioning is what the people of a failed Gap regime or country can handle now and for a time in the future then that’s probably what they will have with the able help of Old Core countries and New Core countries.