Bush's crisis : Articulating a Strategy in Iraq ..

[lyot]

THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
15 April 2004

Bush's Crisis: Articulating a Strategy in Iraq and the Wider War

Summary

President George W. Bush's press conference on Tuesday evening
was fascinating in its generation of a new core justification for
the Iraq campaign: building a democratic Iraq. It is unclear why
Bush would find this a compelling justification for the invasion,
but it is more unclear why the administration continues to
generate unconvincing arguments for its Iraq policy, rather than
putting forward a crisp, strategic and -- above all -- real
justification.

Analysis

It is clear that the current crisis in Iraq was not expected by
the Bush administration. That in itself ought not to be a
problem. Even the most successful war is filled with unexpected
and unpleasant surprises. D-Day in Normandy was completely fouled
up; the German Ardennes offensive caught the Allies by surprise.
No war goes as expected. However, in order to recover from the
unexpected, it is necessary to have a clear strategic framework
from which you are operating. This means a clearly understood
concept of how the pieces of the war fit together -- a concept
that can be clearly articulated to both the military and the
public. Without a framework that defines where you are going, you
can never figure out where you are. It becomes impossible to
place the unexpected in an understandable context, and it becomes
impossible to build trust among the political leadership, the
military and the nation. This is why the 1968 Tet offensive in
Vietnam was unmanageable -- yet the Ardennes offensive of 1944-
1945 was readily managed.

In a piece entitled "Smoke and Mirrors: The United States, Iraq
and Deception" which Stratfor published Jan. 21, 2003, we
commented on the core of the coming Iraq campaign, which was that
the public justification for the war (weapons of mass
destruction) and the strategic purpose of the war (a step in
redefining regional geopolitics) were at odds. We argued that:
"In a war that will last for years, maintaining one's conceptual
footing is critical. If that footing cannot be maintained -- if
the requirements of the war and the requirements of strategic
clarity are incompatible -- there are more serious issues
involved than the future of Iraq."

During President George W. Bush's press conference this week,
that passage came to mind again. The press conference focused on
what has become the new justification for the war -- bringing
Western-style democracy to Iraq. A subsidiary theme was that Iraq
had been a potential threat to the United States because it
"coddled" terrorists. Mounting a multidivisional assault on a
fairly large nation for these reasons might be superficially
convincing, but they could not be the main reasons for invasion -
- and they weren't. We will not repeat what we regard as the main
line of reasoning (War Plan: Consequences http://www.stratfor.com/story.neo)
behind the invasion, because our readers are fully familiar with our
read of the situation. We will merely reassert that the real reason --
the capture of the most strategic country in the region in order to
exert pressure on regimes that were in some way enablers of al Qaeda -- was
more plausible, persuasive and defensible than the various public
explanations, from links to al Qaeda to WMD to bringing democracy
to the Iraqi masses. Such logic might work when it comes to
sending a few Marines on a temporary mission to Haiti, but not
for sending more than 130,000 troops to Iraq for an open-ended
commitment.

Answers and Platitudes

Bush's inability and/or unwillingness to articulate a coherent
strategic justification for the Iraq campaign -- one that
integrates the campaign with the general war on Islamists that
began Sept. 11 -- is at the root of his political crisis right
now. If the primary purpose of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was to
bring democracy to Iraq, then enduring the pain of the current
crisis will make little sense to the American public. Taken in
isolation, bringing democracy to Iraq may be a worthy goal, but
not one taking moral precedence over bringing democracy to
several dozen other countries -- and certainly not a project
worth the sacrifices now being made necessary.

If, on the other hand, the invasion was an integral part of the
war that began Sept. 11, then Bush will generate public support
for it. The problem that Bush has -- and it showed itself vividly
in his press conference -- is that he and the rest of his
administration are simply unable to embed Iraq in the general
strategy of the broader war. Bush asserts that it is part of that
war, but then uses the specific justification of bringing
democracy to Iraq as his rationale. Unless you want to argue that
democratizing Iraq -- assuming that is possible -- has strategic
implications more significant than democratizing other countries,
the explanation doesn't work. The explanation that does work --
that the invasion of Iraq was a stepping-stone toward changes in
behavior in other countries of the region -- is never given.

We therefore wind up with an explanation that is only
superficially plausible, and a price that appears to be
excessive, given the stated goal. The president and his
administration do not seem willing to provide a coherent
explanation of the strategy behind the Iraq campaign. What was
the United States hoping to achieve when it invaded Iraq, and
what is it defending now? There are good answers to these
questions, but Bush stays with platitudes.

This is not only odd, but also it has substantial political
implications for Bush and the United States. First, by providing
no coherent answer, he leaves himself open to critics who are
ascribing motives to his policy -- everything from controlling
the world's oil supply, to the familial passion to destroy Saddam
Hussein, to a Jewish world conspiracy. The Bush administration,
having created an intellectual vacuum, can't complain when
others, trying to understand what the administration is doing,
gin up these theories. The administration has asked for it.

There is an even more important dimension to this. The single
most important thing that happened during the recent offensive in
Iraq was that the United States entered into negotiations for the
first time with the Sunni guerrillas in Al Fallujah. The United
States has now traveled a path that began with Donald Rumsfeld's
dismissing the guerrillas as a disorganized band of dead-enders
and led to the belief (shared by us) that they had been fairly
defeated in December 2003 -- and now to negotiations that were
initiated by the United States. The negotiations began with a
simple, limited cease-fire and have extended to a longer, more
open-ended truce.

The United States is facing the fact that the Sunni guerrillas
have not only not been defeated, but that they are sufficiently
well organized and supported by the broader Sunni population that
negotiations are possible with them. There is an organized Sunni
command authority that planned and executed this operation and is
now weighing U.S. offers on a truce. That is a huge change in the
U.S. perception of the Sunni guerrillas. Negotiations are also
something that the administration would never have contemplated
two weeks ago, regardless of how limited the topic might be. The
idea that the United States needed to negotiate anything was
unthinkable.

This is not the only negotiation going on at the moment. There
are negotiations with the Muqtada al-Sadr group. Negotiations
with the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani group. Discussions with the
Iranians. Iraq is swirling with negotiations, offers, bluffs,
double crosses and lies. It is quite a circus at the moment, with
at least three major players (the Sunnis, the Shia, the United
States) who are in turn fragmented in all sorts of fascinating
ways -- and this doesn't even begin to include the Kurds and
other minorities.

Making Alliances

The United States is going to have to make alliances. Its core
alliance with the majority Shia has to be redefined in the wake
of al-Sadr's uprising. Even if al-Sadr is destroyed with his
militia, the United States and the Shia will have much to talk
about. Far more important, the United States is now talking to
the Sunni guerrillas. That might or might not lead anywhere, but
it is vitally important to all sides, no matter what comes of it.
The United States has recognized that the Sunni enemy is a
competent authority in some sense -- and that changes everything.

The United States will combine military action with political
maneuvering. That is logical and inevitable in this sort of war.
But as deals are cut with a variety of players, how will Bush's
argument that the United States is building democracy in Iraq
fly? The United States will be building coalitions. Whether it is
a democracy is another matter. Indeed, it was al-Sistani
demanding elections (which he knew the Shia would win) and the
president putting off elections -- declaring at the press
conference that he would not bend to Shiite demands on a
timetable.

The problem that Bush has created is that there is no conceptual
framework in which to understand these maneuvers. Building
democracy in Iraq is not really compatible with the deals that
are going to have to be cut. It is not that cutting deals is a
bad idea. It is not that the current crisis cannot be overcome
with a combination of political and military action. The problem
is that no one will know how the United States is doing, because
it has not defined a conceptual framework for what it is trying
to accomplish in Iraq -- or how Iraq fits into the war on the
jihadists.

Bush Political Crisis

This is creating a massive political crisis for Bush
domestically. The public knows there is a crisis in Iraq, but
there is little understanding of how to judge whether the crisis
is being managed. If the only criterion is the creation of
democracy, that is not only a distant goal, but also one that
will be undermined by necessary U.S. deal-making. Democracy -- by
any definition that the American public can recognize -- is not
coming to Iraq anytime soon. If that is the mark of success,
Bush's only hope is that he won't be kept to a tight timetable.
What is worse for Bush is that, in his news conference, he framed
the coming presidential election as basically a referendum on his
policy in Iraq. The less that policy is understood, and the more
Iraq appears uncontrollable, the more vulnerable Bush will be to
charges that the Iraq war was unjustified, and that it is a
distraction from the wider war -- which the American electorate
better understands and widely supports.

He is facing John Kerry, who has shrewdly chosen to call neither
for a withdrawal from Iraq nor for an end to the war on the
Islamist world. Kerry's enormous advantage is that he can
articulate a strategy without having to take responsibility for
anything in the past. He can therefore argue that Bush's impulses
were correct, but that he lacked a systematic strategy. Stratfor
said in its annual forecast that the election was Bush's to lose.
We now have to say that he is making an outstanding attempt to
lose it.
Obviously, the administration has a strategy in Iraq and the
Islamic world. It is a strategy that is discussed inside the
administration and is clearly visible outside. Obviously, there
will be military and political reversals. The strategy and the
reversals are far more understandable than the decisions the Bush
administration has made in presenting them. It has adopted a two-
tier policy: a complex and nearly hidden strategic plan and a
superficial public presentation.

It could be argued that in a democratic society like the United
States, it is impossible to lay bare the cold-blooded reasoning
behind a war, and that the war needs to be presented in a
palatable fashion. This might be true -- and there are examples
of both approaches in American history -- but we tend to think
that in the face of Sept. 11, only a cold-blooded plan, whose
outlines are publicly presented and accepted, can work. We could
be wrong, but on this we have no doubt. Even if the
administration is correct in its assumption that there must be a
two-tier approach to the public presentation of the war, it has
done a terrible job in articulating its public justification.

The administration has held only three press conferences. Some
explain this by saying that the president is too inarticulate to
withstand public grilling. We don't buy that. He is not the
greatest orator by any means, but he doesn't do that badly. His
problem is that he will not engage on the core strategic
question. Franklin Roosevelt, our best wartime president bar none
-- who should be the model for any wartime president -- spoke on
and off the record with reporters, continually and with shocking
frankness when we look back on it. He did not hesitate to discuss
strategy -- from Germany First to relations with Joseph Stalin.
He filled the public space with detail and managed public
expectations brilliantly, even during the terrible first six
months of the war.

We are convinced that the Bush administration has a defensible
strategy. It is not a simple one and not one that can be made
completely public, but it is a defensible strategy. If President
Bush decides not to articulate it, it will be interesting to see
whether President Kerry does, because we are convinced that if
Bush keeps going in the direction he is going, he will lose the
election. The president's public presentation of the war is
designed to exploit success, not to withstand reversals and
hardships. What is fascinating is that political operatives like
Karl Rove, the president's political adviser, can't seem to get
their arms around this simple fact: The current communications
strategy is not working. They seem frozen in place, seemingly
hoping that something will turn up. We doubt strongly that
building democracy in Iraq is the cry that will rally the
American nation.

(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.stratfor.com

================================================== ===============

STRATFOR SERVICES NOW AVAILABLE:

Join decision-makers around the world who read Stratfor for daily
intelligence briefs, in-depth analyses and forecasts on a wide
range of international security, political and economic affairs.

Stratfor Premium is our flagship product providing comprehensive
global intelligence including daily analyses, special reports,
intelligence alerts, premium analyses, situation reports, country
and regional net assessments as well as Stratfor's sought after
Annual and Quarterly Forecasts. Corporate or multi-user volume
discount packages available. Visit this web page for details:
http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corpora...?s=SUB&c=c

Stratfor Basic offers daily analysis, situation reports and
ongoing coverage of global events. Also available with this
package is a pay per view service for many of our premium reports.
Visit this web page for details:
http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corpora...?s=SUB&c=d
.................................................. ...............

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Product inquiries, partnership, and sales: [email protected]
Subscription and customer service issues: [email protected]
Comments and/or information for analysis: [email protected]
Media services and trade show requests: [email protected]
.................................................. ...............

[parcifal]

http://www.zog.org/blog/bushjoke.mov

triestig.

[Kaal]

Mogen wij ook weten wat jullie ervan denken? Ik kom op politics.be om over politiek te klappen, niet om persberichten te lezen.

[lyot]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Kaal

Mogen wij ook weten wat jullie ervan denken? Ik kom op politics.be om over politiek te klappen, niet om persberichten te lezen.

ah, tuurlijk.. het is niet bepaald een 'persbericht' ,maar kom.. Ik sta volledig achter het belangrijkste standpunt van deze analyse, met name dat de Amerikaanse regering o.l.v George Bush een credibility probleem heeft veroorzaakt door telkens opnieuw af te komen met andere motivaties voor de oorlog, zonder daarbij open kaart te spelen en - zoals het artikel vermeldt- te stellen dat de VS in Irak is binnengevallen om het regionale evenwicht te beinvloeden in haar voordeel.. Mijn grootste probleem met deze oorlog is dan ook dat de VS nooit heeft willen zeggen waar het op staat