Blindsided by military victory

[Shrek]

IT’S ONE THING to be wrong. It’s another to be incapable of imagining yourself wrong. Much of what has gone wrong in the Bush administration’s postwar Iraq policy can be attributed to a failure of imagination. But there was no excuse for this particular failure. In the previous dozen years, U.S. armed forces had taken part in five major post-conflict nation-building exercises, four of them in predominantly Muslim nations. There is a record of what works and what doesn’t. Had Wolfowitz studied the record, or talked with those who had, he wouldn’t have made such a wrongheaded remark.

Link to complete article on MSNBC.

[LoneStarLiberal]

1. It's Not A Failure of Imagination...

...It's A Failure of Fundamental Thinking.

These neocons come from a school of IR (international relations) that does not recognize anything but power and the exercise of power when a country has hegemony both regionally and in the global system. Their schooling does not allow for "little things" like peacekeeping, nation-building, or international law. Power solves everything and is an all-justifying end for neocons.

[bemildred]

3. Correct.

Not merely bad execution, dumb all the way through.

A dumb goal pursued with a dumber plan based on fundamental
ignorance of history and the relevant current circumstances.

Politically stuck in the seventeenth century. Militarily with
their head completely up their own ass smelling the heady odor of
their own vaporous delusions of military grandeur.

[teryang]

2. No after "victory" policy will obtain

...the alleged desired political effect of the war. The war was meant to subjugate Iraq indefinitely and to obtain control of its resources and military bases. This is 19th Century colonialism which cannot be resurrected. Goals focused on disarmament, reconstruction and building a "democratic" government were and are pure deception. This is the neocon stock in trade. American corporate dominion over Iraqi resources is "democratic."

War is inseparable from its underlying policy objectives. When you haven't achieved your political goals for which you went to war you have not obtained victory. If the "war" is flawed in its conception, because its stated goals were illegitimate, non existent and unobtainable, (western domination over the Islamic world) then there can be no victory, only further conflict.

Contrast this with the Iraqi strategy, evolving under the pressure of necessity:

<"When you induce opponents to come to you, then their force is always empty; as long as you do not go to them, your force is always full. Attacking emptiness with fullness is like throwing stones on eggs- the eggs are sure to break.">

<Therefore those skilled at the unorthodox are infinite as heaven and earth, inexhaustable as the great rivers. When they come to an end, they begin again, like the days and the months; they die and are reborn, like the four seasons.>

Commentary and subsequent verse in the Art of War. Sun Tzu/Thomas Cleary

Reconstruction in Iraq is the attempt to manufacture legitimacy that flies in the face of history.