What is America's goal? (political blog entry)

I was reading this awesome (but long) article in the New Yorker and got a little scared about Americas “War on Terror”. On that horrible day years ago 9/11/2001 I was living in Russia and I saw the attacks and thought that it was a tasteless movie. When I realized what had happened I thought three things; “people are angry and we’re going to do the wrong thing,” “Bush is a horrible leader and will do the wrong thing,” and “I am more patriotic that I thought I was.” In the few months between 9/11 and when I left Russia I saw a pile of flowers outside the embassy so high you could barely see the wall, had Russians buy me drinks and toast America; and when I left there were people curing America and throwing eggs at the embassy. That was even before Iraq. I had also read a great article about 9/11 (still the best I have ever read) entitled “Be cool America.”

That article convinced me to write a letter to President Bush with a few insights about what was going to happen and how to go about it. I got an automated response. I am not naive enough to think that it would ever be read, I believe all e-mails go right to the deleted bin. I tried though.

So here is what I said. There are three things that are needed to win a war (or battle). These are not really printed anywhere but are really common sense things that people forget about. First, have objectives. Second, know your opponent’s objectives. Third, achieve your objectives while denying your opponents theirs. Yes, this sounds simple but we have not done that.

First, we have the goal of eliminating the group that attacked us, Al Qaeda. We started off good with the Afghanistan invasion etc. Then we started to stumble, we let the Bin Laden flee to Pakistan, we did not stabilize Afghanistan immediately, we did not immediately get to work on showing the people there that basic infrastructure is nice, democracy is nice, and free markets are nice. President Bush was too excited patting himself on the back and planning the most catastrophic move.

Second, Al Qaeda and Islamic Fundamentalism in general is a movement that uses terrorism as a tool. They also use poverty, disillusionment, and chaos as a tool to recruit members. Like all movements there is a single overwhelming fact about it, it is based on an idea that can not survive if there are no people that ascribe to that idea. After Afghanistan the group was broken. It had lost a lot of members (though we let the leadership go), it had been discredited to the world, and they allowed us to rebuild Afghanistan and show the Islamic world that we can heal as well as kill.

Third, we pretty much ignore Afghanistan and attack Iraq. Then we make the same mistakes by dismantling all the institutions and George Bush and his friends pat themselves on the back while the country is in chaos. There is widespread looting, destruction, and the US troops looked the other way when the people who had been oppressed for so long took their anger out on the former rulers. Most harmful of all, we forgot Al Qaeda, and the Taliban.

The result was poverty, disillusionment, hatred for the United States, and chaos. All which allowed more people join the Islamic Fundamentalists. America had a chance to prove in Afghanistan that our philosophy is better (not correct…) and rebuild a failed state. Create a shining beacon of democracy in the Islamic World. Yes, it does sound familiar; Bush said this about Iraq after there were no WMD found, after it was proved there were no Al Qaeda ties, and months after the chaos had destroyed Iraq. Of course Iraq is more fractured, larger, and more of a challenge than Afghanistan. Meanwhile in Afghanistan our half hearted institutions are failing (read Karzai’s interview in Time), there is no economy to help Afghans get on their feet (so they grow poppy), the institutions we built turned out to be corrupt (the Taliban was totalitarian but wasn’t corrupt), and now the Taliban is back.

So to sum up: we forgot our goal, energized our enemies, and are only helping them achieve their goals. Read the New Yorker article because we are doing exactly what they want us to do, and events are happening according to their timeline. We have not lost yet, because I don’t think that the Fundamentalists goals can be achieved and we can change our strategy though we have made it much more difficult for us to do this. Meanwhile Cheney says that he would not do anything different, though to be honest he can’t say anything else the problem is that I believe him. None of the people making mistakes are fired or even disciplined. Bush is still in power and according to his ABC interview he will remain on the attack. They need to sit back and look at their strategy, think about the three things to do to in a war. Achieving goals while denying your enemy is not easy, but it can not be done if the concept can not be understood.

Bush as a leader is a failure because he made bad decisions. I believed that he believed in those decisions, or someone in his administration did, and that he believes in them today. People support him because he “stays the course” which is not a bad idea if there is an objective but as it stands now there is no objective. It wasn’t to destroy Al Qaeda because we had the chance to do that, it wasn’t capturing Bin Laden because we had the chance to do that, it is not a creating a stable democracy in the Arab world because we could of tried to do that in Afghanistan instead of invading Iraq. Making America or the world a safer place is obviously not the goal because the administration had ignored that aspect… except around election time. It becomes simple, without a goal we simply can not have victory.