War and Peace
Strategic Forecasting has a story that's crystallized my thinking about this Administration's grand strategic vision (or apparent lack thereof) in the war on terror. Key quote: “Lurking in the shadows is the not fully articulated perception that the Iraq war not only began in deception but that planning for the Iraq war was incompetent -- a perception driven by the realization that the United States is engaged in a long-term occupation and guerrilla war in Iraq, and the belief that the United States neither expected nor was prepared for this.”. The deception, by itself, isn't fatal - the real problem, according to the article, is that “what bothers the American public is the idea that the lying is not designed to hide the strategy, but to hide the fact that there is no strategy.”.

And that's what one of things that's bothered me all along. I have not heard any believable or even coherent formulation of "this is how we win". Because I think the real key here is not winning the battles - that's been ridiculously easy - but winning the peace. Winning the peace is the province of grand strategy. And we don't seem to have one.

The consequences of not having an overarching and achievable grand strategy are pretty severe. Here's what B.H. Liddell Hart says in his seminal book, Strategy: “They did not look beyond the immediate strategic aim of "winning the war" and were content to assume that military victory would assure peace - an assumption contrary to the general experience of history. The outcome has been the latest of many lessons that pure military strategy needs to be guided by the longer and wider view from the higher plane of "grand strategy"”

Liddell Hart was talking about the outcome of World War II, which led directly to the Cold War. He could have just as easily been talking about the outcome of World War I. The Treaty of Versailles led directly to WWII as well as to many of the other ills of this century. Among those was the somewhat arbitrary redrawing of the map of the Middle East, which has had a wide variety of direct and indirect consequences - one of them being the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in 1991. We won that war and then failed to win the peace, which ultimately led to our invasion of Iraq early this year. And so here we are.

I think we need the notion of Hart's “Indirect Approach” to strategy now more than ever. The neo-cons, unfortunately, are the direct heirs of Kissingerian RealPolitik and so suffer from the same ills of short-sightedness and ethically challenged expediency. Put another way, they're content to try to fix problems with sledgehammers and then immediately walk away. You can criticize their approach on all kinds of grounds, but the very worst thing you can say about it is that it's unlikely to decisively win this conflict. And we need to win; the alternative is that the Middle East and Africa succumb to a post-industrial Dark Age and drag the rest of the world down with them.

Now, I'm only an amateur student of history and politics. But it seems to me any approach at the level of grand strategy should deal with root causes and not just our immediate circumstances. Since this is a war on terror the grand strategic goal should be to remove the underlying causes of terrorism. Have we really asked ourselves what those underlying causes are? And if we identified them, how would that shape our grand strategy? What is the longer and wider view?

I have my own answers to those questions, but I'll save them for another post.