What I would Have Done After Afghanistan And Instead Of Invading Iraq, Part 1

It's a question I get asked a lot from people who are upset with me when I criticize this president for his massive and multiple failures leading up to and in the execution of the American-Iraqi War.

"What would you have done differently," they ask, knowing that I cannot possibly have an answer to the question. It's also a legitimate question to ask. It is one thing to stand opposed, and another to offer a different path.

In December of 2002 I did exactly that. I posted in three parts (I, II, and III) what I would have done differently after Afghanistan. After the jump you will the first entry reposted without any changes, better able to ask if my ideas had merit or were simply mediocre. Tomorrow I will post the second and third posts followed by a post-mortem of sorts. I encourage your participation in this endeavor.

Bad Assumptions

One of the my chief complaints with the the Left in general and the Democratic Party in particular is that rather than enunciating a positive vision for America and the world they simply oppose whatever Bush does. This policy, as we have witnessed, does not win elections. Nor should it.

I spend a lot of time carping about the Bush Administration's foreign policy. I also vote. I also spend a lot of time studying foreign affairs, international relations and history. I feel not only justified in my opinions as a voter, but qualified in my criticisms as well, due to my capacity as a serious student of international relations theory and diplomatic history.

I have spent considerable effort and thought trying to formulate a personal philosophy of what America's role in the world should be. This is no easy task. America's foreign policy can be infuriatingly contradictory, whether a Republican is in power or a Democrat. There are parts of me, like America's foreign policy, that truly and deeply resemble that same foreign policy.

For example, I believe that most international problems have solutions. I believe in the idea of the perfectability of mankind. I believe in American "exceptionalism." I believe in peace, until we are threatened. I believe government should be as limited as possible, but that is has a role to play in making American society better. That is the crux of my "Americanism": I believe society can be made, not perfect, but better.

I have also traveled a great deal. I have seen shades of the world the vast majority of Americans will NEVER see, nor do they want to see it. Chinese peasants sleeping on mud floors, barefoot and dirty children harvesting bananas for our consumption in Belize, Turkish girls wearing veils and miniskirts (go figure) and nasty anti-American Europeans come to mind first. But I've also seen the rotting machines of death littered all across the landscape of the former Soviet Union, and the glittering new American machines of war in Tawainese and Korean airports. Finally and tragically, I've seen countries ravaged by civil wars and ethnic cleansing.

The world is not a pretty place outside the confines of Western Europe and North America.

Most Americans, as I said, will never see these sights, nor do they want to, nor should they, really. Prefering to live in their sheltered, gated communities, driving their large anti-social SUVs, and remaining ignorant of the world at large, they are us.

This is the immutable fact of American politics: we are a solipsistic people. Our lack of historical interest or perspective is a double-edged sword that sometimes leads us into places and situations we'd be advised to avoid. At other times, however, it animates those "better angels" of ours, the belief that we really can change the world. Sometimes, to the chagrin of cynical Old-World onlookers we succeed in doing just that. And this too, is us.

I, in my thoughts, am a microcosm of this reality, so completely American in my contradictions.

Assumptions and Theory

The entire post-Afghanistan phase of the "War on Terror" rests on the realities mentioned above. It also relies on two basic Bush Administration assumptions: the state as actor in international relations and RMA (the revolution in military affairs). Both are faulty, and the potential consequences grave.

The neoconservative theory that Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld represent is a modern mutation of old-school realism. "Realism's" central tenet is that the state is the only actor of import in international affairs, that all actions in the international system are instigated and resolved by the state. Thus, neocons downplay and dismiss the role of non-state actors such as NGOs and international organizations like the WTO. They are also dismissive of globalization in all of its manifestations, promoting, often blindly, the role of "hard power", over that of our immense "soft-power", snidely dismissing it as "irrelevant".

The President's national security strategy is the finest, most pure and distilled pronouncement of neocon thought on record. All of its multi-lateral lip-service aside, its true essence is this: We will play by your rules until we do not want to.

But the one glaring problem with this blind, unreflective adherence to neocon theory is that we were not attacked by a STATE on September 11, 2001. We were attacked by a cruel, vicious, super-empowered NON-STATE actor.

Bad assumption number one: we wage war against state actors, while we were attacked by non-state actors. Not only is this a bad assumption, it is bad strategy.

Now, here is where the second faulty assumption comes in---that there has been an RMA (revolution in military affairs). There hasn't. Military affairs are at their very core about strategy and strategy, no matter all the blather about cyber-and-space-based war, is still the same: winning political, lasting, victories.

Dr. Colin S. Gray is the closest thing we have to a modern day Clausewitz. In his book, Modern Strategy he says:

"In the post-Cold War period, the radical changes in political context--no superpower, which is to say peer, competitor--and the apparent promise of what may amount to a revolution in military affairs keyed to the exploitation of information technologies, combine to make conventional warfare the flavour of the era for the United States.

Whether or not the US armed forces can demonstrate a unique competence in information-led conventional combat will be affected by the willingness of America's opponents (emphasis added) to wage a style of war that allows the United States to obtain most from its comparative advantages in high technology, organization, and training."

We assume that we are still fighting against "conventional" enemies, all the "new kind of war" rhetoric notwithstanding. We also assume that our enemies will oblige us. And thus, as I quoted earlier:

"We had difficulty uprooting al Qaeda's cells globally, as erstwhile allies hesitated or set terms for their cooperation against it. . . . And so, for lack of clear targets and reliable allies, Washington decided to outflank the al Qaeda dilemma and go with U.S. strengths. In attacking a familiar, conventional, state target -- the second after Afghanistan -- it would redefine the terms of the U.S. war on al Qaeda. . . . Basically, the Bush Administration gambled the future of the War on Terrorism, on a war with Iraq."

In other words, the Bush Administration, because of its cavalier treatment of our allies pre-9/11, had little multilateral credibility with which to fight this "new kind of war" and were forced into choosing from several poor choices. This is the result of overreliance on neoconservative thought--forced to fight a new kind of war, in an old kind of way.

Finally, the Bush Administration's reliance on our conventional superiority and military victories leads it to ignore the central reality of the "War on Terror": The only victory worth having is a political victory--one that will end this conflict. This, sadly, is a legacy straight out of Vietnam. We never lost a battle, but we lost the war--because we ignored the political realities.

So here is bad assumption number two: substituting military victories for political ones, in the hopes that military exhaustion will end the conflict.

To be continued . . .