Stratfor’s Analysis of the Iraq War

Stratfor has an analysis of the Iraq war that a liberal will never understand. Concepts such as strategic positioning  and sending a message to friends and enemies alike will never be appreciated by the defeat at all cost left in this nation.

Stratfor rightly comes to the conclusion that the administration’s public justification for war, Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, was just a public face on a much more complicated plan.

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.

In other words, we intended to scare Pakistan and Saudi Arabia into being more cooperative in the fight against al-Qaeda. After, they might be next on the American hit list.

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.

It is  much easier to sell the war based on “weapons of mass destruction” than it is to explain to the American people the machiavellian details.

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 Washington’s perception of Iraq and what we thought was actually going on.

The Defense Department got caught flat-footed when the resistance continued and it took way to long to adjust its policies.

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.

Finally, Bush changed generals and tactics. It was an all-out military and political offensive that co-opted the Sunnis, forced the Shiites to compromise and threw Iran a curve ball.

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 surprised the Democrats to. But if you look at the Civil War, how many generals and changes of strategies did Lincoln go through before he found a winning one? That’s the nature of war. It just surprises me that so many Americans were so ready to throw in the towel.

Our presence in Iraq has attracted the jihadis there. The global jihad has been fixated on Iraq. What does that ultimately mean? It means that the battle against al-Qaeda was fought “over there” instead of “over here.”

Related posts:

Update on Offensive in Iraq

President Bush’s Iraq Speech

Photo of the Month: B-1 Destroys Al-Qaeda Hide Out

Terrorizing Iraq’s Women and Children: Part 3

Tags: Iraq