Problems in Iraq have origins dating back long before occupation began
A Western Herald Editorial
October 14, 2004

When it comes to complaining about the way the war in Iraq has been conducted, the arguments usually end up being pro-Administration versus anti-Administration. It should not come as a surprise that because of this dichotomy, much of the debates between Sen. Kerry and President Bush have centered on the Iraq situation. There is a problem with Iraq and Afghanistan, but unfortunately, the focus of the problem has been lacking, and thus, may be the reason that the problem continues to get worse. To understand the real problem, we must move further back than the current Bush Administration to the late 1980s and the early 1990s.

At the end of the Cold War, there was a move in the United States military to switch from a “one big war” strategy to a “two small war” strategy. Instead of focusing on fighting a big war as our strategic goal, our strategic goal was split into two separate tactical objectives. Rather than plan for long-term, effective campaigns, the two-war strategy focused on ending battles quickly so that military planners could focus on both wars at the same time. In the mid-1990s, we realized that this two-war strategy was not going to work as planned because we were still feeding a military-industrial complex that refused to budge from the big-war-strategy mentality. Instead of funding and implementing rapid deployment forces, we continued to focus on a military designed to fight an enemy that no longer existed.

Shockingly, the solution to the problem was actually at the head of discussion in early 2001, and it is quite possible that the Bush Administration might have been moving in the right direction. But then 9/11 came, and all attempts to fix what was broken were lost in the rush to go to war against Afghanistan. It is very difficult to change military policy while in preparation for war, especially when that policy has been stagnant for decades.

When the United States went to war, it was under the remnants of the two-war philosophy of fighting big wars. We performed as should have been expected by winning the wars very fast, but as our process was now tactical rather than strategic, we now find ourselves in a circumstance where we are still trying to operate on a tactical level in order to achieve strategic results. This rarely works. To make matters worse, the Duelfer results indicate that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was preparing strategically where we were preparing tactically. On the evening of our invasion, he issued the order to his generals to hold our troops for a week, then he would take it from there, indicating that an insurgency would result from a failed attempt to respond to the U.S. military. It is not hard to read into the intention from a strategic mindset, that as long as the Iraqi insurgency can hold out, then victory against U.S. forces is believed to be possible.

Military philosophy indicates that the only way to successfully defeat a strategic level of planning is with similar national, strategic-level planning, or to respond tactically but in such a way that all strategic infrastructure of the enemy is completely obliterated. Unfortunately, we cannot do this without completely destroying both Iraq and Afghanistan. So this means that in order to successfully combat the insurgency in Iraq, we must do so strategically rather than tactically, and this requires changing the very nature of how our military operates today. It requires a full understanding, also, by the American people, because when strategy competes against strategy, the victor is the one who doesn’t blink first.

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