I'm about halfway through TPM Barnett's "The Pentagon's New Map", and it has given me a way to think about 'the war in Iraq' in the context that I have been trying to triangulate for a long time. I use the scare quotes because one of the deepest assumptions that both sides make is that there is an exit strategy in the GWOT. There is none, just as there wasn't an exit strategy to the Cold War. One side has to win, one side has to lose. But the way the arguments are generally presented, we have Americans believing that America has to lose (in order to win?).
What hasn't been articulated by either party is the context to which Iraq is just a very large battle in a larger conflict. Nor has the battle for Iraq been appropriately contextualized with regard to regional affairs. That is why both sides are rather obsessed with reporting on the ground and trying to box the conflict into a nice standalone package (which is either a disaster or 'yet still winnable'). To talk about Iraq alone is the mistake because then you can devolve questions to the probity of GWBush's pre-emption. The problem is all of those metrics hang on whether or not we 'win' in Iraq. Both sides cannot agree on the terms of victory because both sides just want to be right about Iraq.
It's not about Iraq.
And now that is becoming clear, and the focus has changed somewhat to Iran, the anti-war contingent is suggesting that Bush's 'warmongering' pre-emption is now just casting about for a new target. Iranians believe precisely the same thing.
What is lost in most of this is the neoconservative geopolitical project, now almost casually dismissed as debunked, which situated the US into the position of nation-building bodyguard for the world in the first place. This debate has been cast aside and no lessons learned really applied to it other than 'Feith was an idiot' and 'Fukyama quit' and 'Bremer screwed up' and 'Where is Wolfowitz now?'. This failure to answer the fundamental question of what America is doing engaging the world in the first place, leaves all foreign policy decisions at the level of partisan blame. Partisan blame is enough when the long view isnt' discussed. That's where we are now - with four year old arguments about WMD.
It is right to consider what the American strategic vision is with regard to our shared interest in defeating terrorism. And until that is articulated clearly within America, the possibilities of establishing a global coalition are slim. I find that Democrats, would willingly undermine the Bush Administration in order to try to establish almost any diplomatic brownie points outside of the US. The Republicans will gloat over any battlefield victory (or downplay any defeat) in order to justify the Administration's moves, whether or not they work coherently at a high level. Each party claims to be the true Americans, but neither can agree on American interests. As soon as the argument devolves to body counts and Vietnam codewords, we may as well start talking about Nazis again. (Godwin's Law).
I like Barnett's strategic vision, and it is never too late to talk about strategic worldviews. But until we do that, we do little more than Shi'a and Sunni ourselves, and it ought to be obvious how we are thusly weakening our central government.
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