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| The Edge of the Razor |
| 2004-05-14 |
| Stratfor Weekly Summary The strategy of the United States in its war with radical Islam is in a state of crisis. The global strategic framework is in much better shape than the tactical situation in the Iraq theater of operations -- but this is of only limited comfort to Washington because massive tactical failure in Iraq could lead to strategic collapse. The situation is balanced on the razor’s edge. The United States could recover from its tactical failures, or suffer a massive defeat if it fails to do so. One thing is certain: The United States cannot remain balanced on the razor’s edge indefinitely. Analysis Most wars reach a moment of crisis, when the outcome hangs in the balance and in which weakness and errors, military or political, can shape victory or put it permanently out of reach. Sometimes these moments of crisis come suddenly and are purely military, such as the Battle of Midway. Sometimes they are a long time brewing and are primarily political in nature, like the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. These are moments when planning, judgment and luck can decide victors -- and when bad planning, lack of judgment and bad luck can undermine the best and brightest. It is the moment when history balances on the razor’s edge. The U.S.-Islamist war is now, it seems to us, balanced on that edge. There are some who argue that it is not reasonable to speak of the confrontation between the United States and al Qaeda as a war. It certainly does not, in any way, resemble World War II. It is nevertheless very much a war. It consists of two sides that are each making plans, using violence and attempting to shape the political future of a major region of the globe -- the Muslim world. One side masses large forces, the other side disperses much smaller forces throughout the globe. But the goals are the goals of any war: to shape the political future. And the means are the same as in any war: to kill sufficient numbers of the enemy in order to break his will to fight and resist. It might not look like wars the United States has fought in the past, but it is most certainly a war -- and it is a war whose outcome is in doubt. On a strategic level, the United States has been the victor since the Sept.11 attacks. Yet strategic victories can be undermined by massive tactical failures, and this is what the United States is facing now. Iraq is a single campaign in a much broader war. However, as frequently occurs in wars, unintended consequences dominate the battlefield. The United States intended to occupy Iraq and move on to other campaigns -- but failures in planning, underestimation of the enemy and command failures have turned strategic victory into a tactical nightmare. That tactical nightmare is now threatening to undermine not only the Iraqi theater of operations, but also the entire American war effort. It is threatening to reverse a series of al Qaeda defeats. If the current trend continues, the tactical situation will undermine U.S. strategy in Iraq, and the collapse of U.S. strategy in Iraq could unravel the entire U.S. strategy against al Qaeda and the Islamists. The question is whether the United States has the honesty to face the fact that it is a crisis, the imagination to craft a solution to the problems in Iraq and the luck that the enemy will give it the time it needs to regroup. That is what war looks like on the razor’s edge. The Strategic Situation In the midst of the noise over Iraq, it is essential to grasp the strategic balance and to understand that on that level, the United States has done relatively well. To be more precise, al Qaeda has done quite poorly. It is one of the paradoxes of American war-fighting that, having failed to articulate coherent goals, the Bush administration is incapable of pointing to its real successes. But this is an excruciatingly great failure on the part of the administration. It was Napoleon who said, "The moral is to the physical as 3-1," by which he meant that how a nation or army views its successes is more important than what its capabilities are. The failure to tend to the morale of the nation, to articulate a strategy and demonstrate progress, is not a marginal failure. It is the greatest possible failure of political leadership in wartime. Nevertheless al Qaeda has failed in its most fundamental goal. There has been no mass rising in the Islamic world, nor has a single Muslim government fallen. Nor, for that matter, has a single Islamic government shifted its position in support of al Qaeda. To the contrary, a series of Muslim governments -- the most important of which is Saudi Arabia -- have shifted their positions toward active and effective opposition to al Qaeda. The current attacks by al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia are a reflection of the shift in Saudi policy that has occurred since just before the invasion of Iraq. Saudi Arabia is far from the only country to have shifted its strategy. Iran -- for all of its bombast -- has, through complex back-channel negotiations with the United States as well as a complex re-evaluation of its strategic position, changed its behavior since January 2002. Syria, while still not fully in control, has certainly become more circumspect in its behavior. Prior to the Iraq war, these governments ranged from hostile to uncooperative; they since have shifted to a spectrum ranging from minimally cooperative to fully cooperative. Since the United States could not hunt down al Qaeda, cell by cell and individual by individual, it devised an alternative strategy that is less effective in the short run but more effective in the long run -- and the only strategy available. Washington sought to change the behavior of enabling countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, by making the potential threat from the United States greater than the potential threat from al Qaeda. By occupying Iraq and surrounding Saudi Arabia with military forces, the United States compelled a reluctant and truculent Riyadh to comply with American wishes. In the long run, changes in the behavior of these governments -- and of other Muslim governments, from Islamabad to Tripoli -- represent the only way to defeat al Qaeda. To the simplistic American question of, "Are we safer today than we were a year ago?" the answer is, "Probably not." To the question of whether the United States is on a path that might make it safer in five years, the answer is "Probably yes," assuming the U.S. effort doesn’t collapse under the weight of its pyramiding mistakes in Iraq. We would argue that the political shifts in the Muslim world that have helped the United States were aided significantly by the invasion of Iraq. We would certainly agree that Islamic opposition to the United States solidified -- we doubt that there was much room for intensification -- but we would also argue that opinion is significant to the extent to which it turns into war-fighting capability. The Poles despised the Germans and the Japanese were not fond of the Americans, but neither could expel the occupier simply on the strength of public opinion. It is the shifts in government policy that contained radical Islamist tendencies that should be the focal point, and the invasion of Iraq served that purpose. Tactical Failures? It is at that point that things started to go wrong -- not with the grand strategy of the United States, but with the Iraq strategy itself. A string of intelligence failures, errors in judgment and command failures have conspired to undermine the U.S. position in Iraq and reverse the strategic benefits. These failures included: * A failure to detect that preparations were under way for a guerrilla war in the event that Baghdad fell.These are the particular failures. The general failures are a compendium of every imaginable military failing: * Failing to focus on the objective. Rather than remembering why U.S. forces were in Iraq and focusing on that, the Bush administration wandered off into irrelevancies and impossibilities, such as building democracy and eliminating Baath party members. The administration forgot its mission.Remember the objective; respect the enemy; be your own worst critic; exercise leadership at all levels -- these are fundamental principles of warfare. They have all been violated during the Iraq campaign. The strategic situation, as of March 2004, was rapidly improving for the United States. There was serious, reasonable discussion of a final push into Pakistan to liquidate al Qaeda’s leadership. Al Qaeda began a global counterattack -- as in Spain -- that was neither unexpected nor as effective as it might have been. However, the counterattack in Iraq was both unexpected and destabilizing -- causing military and political processes in Iraq to separate out, and forcing the United States into negotiations with the Sunni guerrillas while simultaneously trying to manage a crisis in the Shiite areas. At the same time that the United States was struggling to stabilize its position in Iraq, the prison abuse issue emerged. It was devastating not only in its own right, but also because of the timing. It generated a sense that U.S. operations in Iraq were out of control. From Al Fallujah to An Najaf to Abu Ghraib, the question was whether anyone had the slightest idea what they were trying to achieve in Iraq. Which brings us back to the razor’s edge. If the United States rapidly adjusts its Iraq operations to take realities in that country into account, rather than engaging on ongoing wishful thinking, the situation in Iraq can be saved and with it the gains made in the war on al Qaeda. On the other hand, if the United States continues its unbalanced and ineffective prosecution of the war against the guerrillas and continues to allow its relations with the Shia to deteriorate, the United States will find itself in an untenable position. If it is forced to withdraw from Iraq, or to so limit its operations there as to be effectively withdrawn, the entire dynamic that the United States has worked to create since the Sept. 11 attacks will reverse itself, and the U.S. position in the Muslim world -- which was fairly strong in January 2004 -- will deteriorate, and al Qaeda’s influence will increase dramatically. The Political Crisis It is not clear that the Bush administration understands the crisis it is facing. The prison abuse pictures are symptomatic -- not only of persistent command failure, but also of the administration’s loss of credibility with the public. Since no one really knows what the administration is doing, it is not unreasonable to fill in the blanks with the least generous assumptions. The issue is this: Iraq has not gone as planned by any stretch of the imagination. If the failures of Iraq are not rectified quickly, the entire U.S. strategic position could unravel. Speed is of the essence. There is no longer time left. The issue is one of responsibility. Who is responsible for the failures in Iraq? The president appears to have assumed that if anyone were fired, it would be admitting that something went wrong. At this point, there is no one who doesn’t know that many things have gone wrong. If the president insists on retaining all of his senior staff, Cabinet members and field commanders, no one is going to draw the conclusion that everything is under control; rather they will conclude that it is the president himself who is responsible for the failures, and they will act accordingly. The issue facing Bush is not merely the prison pictures. It is the series of failures in the Iraq campaign that have revealed serious errors of judgment and temperament among senior Cabinet-level officials. We suspect that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is finished, and with him Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Vice President Dick Cheney said over the weekend that everyone should get off of Rumsfeld’s case. What Cheney doesn’t seem to grasp is that there is a war on and that at this moment, it isn’t going very well. If the secretary of defense doesn’t bear the burden of failures and misjudgments, who does? Or does the vice president suggest a no-fault policy when it comes to war? Or does he think that things are going well? This is not asked polemically. It is our job to identify emerging trends, and we have, frequently, been accused of everything from being owned by the Republicans to being Iraq campaign apologists. In fact, we are making a non-partisan point: The administration is painting itself into a corner that will cost Bush the presidency if it does not deal with the fact that there is no one who doesn’t know that Iraq has been mismanaged. The administration’s only option for survival is to start managing it effectively, if that can be done at this point. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #9 Has Stratfor gotten anything right since, oh, say, 9/10/01 Hey, I read StratFor during the *Kosovo* crisis, and they sucked then, too. So, they have consistency going for them... |
| Posted by: Carl in NH 2004-05-14 8:45:10 PM |
| #8 I can think of about 240,000 reasons that dull this "razor's edge". I bet SF won't take this debate face to face with those 240,000 reasons. But if SF doesn't think the world is a safer place today when folks from the US are in Libya dismantling WMDs then they wouldn't believe a pissed off private stomping a greasy spot in their butt debating their "failures". |
| Posted by: TopMac 2004-05-14 12:20:13 PM |
| #7 its good to read SF, but read Belmont Club, the Weekly Standard, etc as an antidote. |
| Posted by: Liberalhawk 2004-05-14 10:16:03 AM |
| #6 SF is interesting and intelligent, but clearly has an agenda here. Note points 1. They imply (without quite stating so) that Chalabi is working with Iran, and is unreliable, despite the fact that the insinuations linking him to Iran have been largely debunked 2. They say that building democracy is "an irrelevancy and an impossibility" 3. They talk about the importance of working with Baathists, and ignore how that would hurt the US position with the Shiites. 4. While pessimistic on Iraq, they are virtually pollyanish on the turnaround in Saudi, which many of us see as still quite complex, much more precarious than SF says. They also minimize the threat from Syria and Iran - and simply ignore all the evidence that Zarqawi is being financed and supported from those countries - NOT from AQ cells in Pakistan or Afghanistan. 5. As long as the muslim dictatorships are in place, who cares about the muslim street, sayeth SF. Given the above, is it any wonder that SF comes out strongly against Rummy and Wolfie? At least theyre being ideologically consistent - IE pro-Saudi, pro-Iraqi Sunni Arab, pro-Ex Baathist, pro "realist" emphasis on geopolitics of power, anti Iraqi Shia, anti Iraqi democrats, anti democracy promotion, pro arab dictatorships, and therefore anti neocon. |
| Posted by: Liberalhawk 2004-05-14 10:14:07 AM |
| #5 Fred, LOL! You always manage to sum things up best in one snarky little sentence. |
| Posted by: B 2004-05-14 10:10:43 AM |
| #4 Obviously you are not platinum members. I'll give you a hint about platinum level info... can't give ya all it just a gist.... sol, red giant, relatively soon as these things go. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-05-14 9:59:44 AM |
| #3 Has Stratfor gotten anything right since, oh, say, 9/10/01? |
| Posted by: Mike 2004-05-14 9:15:57 AM |
| #2 My hands get really sore when I wring them like that... |
| Posted by: Fred 2004-05-14 8:56:57 AM |
| #1 Do these Stratfor guys get paid by taxpayers? Because they suck. Their analysis is juvenile and little more than whiney staff-puke self-masturbation. That said, I did think that they did a good job of summing themselves up with their final line, We have provided you with some facts to show you that we have studied this. But all we have to offer you is blame. It makes us feel important to assign blame. Since blame is an opinion, no one can then accuse us of making mistakes in our analysis. Like movie critics that can't act, we have no real talent of our own, but we believe that if we criticize those who have leading roles, then we can delude others (and ourselves) that we are more important than those whom we observe." Yawn.. you could get better work from high school students assigned a late night term paper. |
| Posted by: B 2004-05-14 8:54:13 AM |