I’m no great fan of George W. Bush. I admire his resolve but his tactical prosecution of the War on Terror has been a disaster. How to deal with Islamic fundamentalism is THE strategic challenge that our country faces in the early decades of this century. So far, George W. Bush is failing to meet this challenge.

The administration has bungled the war effort by:

1. Trying to fight a war on the cheap.
2. Poor planning.
3. Going it alone.
4. Failing to articulate a vision.

It was a mistake to try to fight this war on the cheap.

Unlike Desert Storm, where we pushed for limited objectives with a broad coalition of 540,000 troops, this time we tried to take over the whole country with 200,000 mostly American troops.

From the get go, Donald Rumsfeld wanted to test his leaner, meaner or more nimble military. Colin Powell and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki wanted enough troops to do the job. Rumsfeld prevailed, Powell was marginalized and Shinseki was retired.

The result was that we couldn’t secure the streets and the looting and vandalism that followed slowed reconstruction significantly [My Year in Iraq]. Worse, our failure gave the insurgency time to organize itself.

Following the end of major combat, this stingy attitude continued resulting in decreased effectiveness. The primary goal of the Defense Department from day one was to minimize casualties and start rotating the troops home. This left a power vacuum that the insurgents such as al-Zarqawi and al-Sadr an eagerly filled.

Unfortunately, minimizing casualties took a back seat to minimizing the budgetary impact. The fact that the process of adding armor to the vehicles deployed in Iraq only sped up after Rumsfeld was called out in public by an Army officer should be a public scandal.

It was a mistake to fail to plan for what would happen after the war-fighting ended and peace-keeping began.

Donald Rumsfeld’s experiment was a success. It proved that the modern, network-centric, hi-tech U.S. military is without peer by taking down Saddam’s regime in three weeks. Unfortunately, Donald Rumsfeld had no plans beyond winning the war and the White House grossly underestimated the challenge of nation building.

The administration believed that we would see a repeat of Desert Storm with happy citizens dancing in the street and kissing the soldiers as they pushed into Baghdad. And we did - for a few days. Then the looting spiraled out of control.

Nation building is hard and Don Rumsfeld has shown little interest in it. Once the DoD wrested control of post war Iraq from the State Department, they made only the most Pollyanna-ish plans for what to do after they “won”. Thus, we were blindsided when the Iraqi Army and Police demobilized themselves and scattered leaving no one to enforce civil order.

However, I have to lay the blame here at Bush’s feet for not forcing Rumsfeld to do a better job of planning and for allowing him to ignore existing plans developed by the State Department.

It was a mistake to go it alone.

In a world is full of natural allies, Bush has managed to alienate most of them.

Our strategic interests in the Middle East remain what they’ve always been – make sure that the oil continues to flow into the world wide oil market so that the global economy can thrive. The demand curve for this oil in India and China is almost straight up. Yet these countries stand by while we do the heavy lifting to secure their energy supplies.

Last summer, France was ripped asunder by Muslim gangs. Germany has long been a hotbed of Islamic militancy and host to a backlash against Muslim residents. Russia has been fighting jihadists in Chechnya for years. Yet these three countries bitterly opposed military action in Iraq.

In fairness, this opposition was not based in principle. All three countries had their hands deep in the cookie jar that Bush threatened to shatter. Also, the governments in France and Germany had defined themselves for domestic consumption as anti-U.S. Nevertheless, we should have taken the time to woo them to our side, bribing them if need be with reconstruction contracts.

When the French and Germans expressed interest in post war reconstruction, Bush slapped them down. He should have let them in because this would have led to foreign workers, foreign casualties and then foreign peace keeping troops. It would have been far cheaper to guarantee or even pay the eight billion dollars Iraq owed to Russia than to prosecute this war on our own.

Bush has failed to articulate a vision for the War on Terror.

Resolve is one of George W. Bush’s strengths but in the absence of a clearly articulated vision, “staying the course” comes across as nothing more than stubbornness.

There are many good reasons for the United States to pursue an activist foreign policy in the Middle East [Why We Must Prevail in Iraq].

In all fairness, the left will not listen to anything Bush has to say. The insanity of the “shrub haters” is impervious to reason.

Nevertheless, Bush has declined to even try to educate the American people about the rationale behind any aspect of the War on Terror. The single exception is George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address. Even there, we’ve heard too much about the stick and not nearly enough about the carrot in our prosecution of this “war.”

The nature of this war requires that much of it must be kept secret but Bush owes it the citizens of the United States to educate us about the future world that his government is trying to create.

Where do we go from here?

Read Bush’s second inaugural address (and if it helps, hear it in JFK’s voice). It’s inspiring in its call to lift the world’s poorest and most backward regions (from whence the roots of terror spring) out of poverty.

But he’s a fool if he thinks that we can do it alone.

I want to separate George Bush’s execution of the war from domestic politics and position it within the geo-political context of our time.

I believe that the broad strategic outline of the developed world’s confrontation with Islamic fundamentalism is critical to our future.

Unfortunately, White House tactics are doing considerable damage to our future ability to face this challenge by eroding public support.

The Bush White House has bungled the war in Iraq by:

1. Trying to fight a war on the cheap.
2. Failing to plan for post combat nation building.
3. And in a world filled with natural allies, defiantly going it alone.

The American people are pretty well polarized regarding the war in Iraq.

Many admire George Bush’s resolve following 9/11; many despise him and everything he stands for; most are dissatisfied with the way he has pursued his foreign policy.

In this environment, truth is the first casualty of partisan warfare. But the preeminent issues of the day aren’t about domestic politics.

From the beginning of our nation, the American people have always had a significant isolationist streak preferring to hide behind our oceans and stay out of foreign wars. There were huge anti-war protests before WW I & II. Luminaries such as Charles Lindberg and Joseph Kennedy nearly kept us out of WW II. Imagine what the world might look like had they succeeded.

According to the ancient Chinese curse, we live in interesting times. As the world gets smaller, we will find ourselves pressed up against a culture that, at least in its most radical form, has no tolerance for our way of life and the values that we hold dear.

We must have clarity about where we stand in the face of this threat if western democracy and free market economies are to prevail in the 21^st century.

I stand with the 20 million Iraqis who proudly display their blue thumbs.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 5:09 am and is filed under 3_Right. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.