.re: "Planning a war without regard to the enemy"
"TigerHawk takes one of the most legitimate criticisms of pre-invasion planning for the Iraq campaign and points it in a different direction.
Money quote(s):
"The biggest credible indictment of the Bush administration's planning and execution of the invasion and occupation of Iraq is that it failed to imagine the many ways in which the enemy would adjust to each American initiative, whether on the battlefield or in the political reconstruction of the country. It was as if we were planning to fight the war as we imagined or hoped it would be, rather than as it was.""
Consul at Arms
posted by madtom at 9:48 PM
2 Comments:
Thanks for the linkage. I've linked back to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2007/03/re-re-planning-war-without-regard-to.html
I think the Bush Administration was faced with an unmovable set of axioms:
1) Toppling the Taliban in Iraq was insufficient to change the environment of the ME that had produced the 9-11 terrorists. If the environment didn't change, even the Afghanistan venture would fail eventually.
2) It was impossible to move against any tyranny in the ME if Iraq wasn't dealt with first. How could we justify toppling the Iranian theocracy or the Syrian Ba'athists and leave Saddam in place.
3) There were so many ways for the Iraq venture to fail it makes one's head hurt.
Faced with the requirement of going to Iraq and bewildering array of potential counterattacks, the Administration chose to put all its chips on the Iraqi people themselves.
Most educated Iraqis considered Iraq the most educated, modern, and westernized nation in the Middle East. The *hope* (and it turns out that that was all it was) was that given the opportunity for liberty, the Iraqis would put aside all else and seize Liberty and Modernity.
Unfortunately, no only did that not happen but the demographic that would typically most want to have that happen were educated Sunni Arabs who the most tied to the ideals of Saddam's regime and ended up working toward the failure of the enterprise.
I don't think that even with perfect foresight, most of the last 4 years could have been avoided. But since we can't afford for Iraq to fail, we must out wait the multiple dimensions of enemies there until Iraq becomes stable and liberal in spite of its neighborhood and the worldview of so many Iraqis.
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