Achieving 'Total Victory' in an Unwinnable War

By Scott Ritter, AlterNet. Posted August 26, 2005.

"So long as I am President, we will stay, we will fight and we will win the war on terrorism," President Bush recently declared. "I made a decision. America will not wait to be attacked again," he added. "We will confront emerging threats before they fully materialize."

These comments, made to an audience of Idaho National Guardsmen, echoed rhetoric from a day earlier before a gathering of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in which Bush underscored the foundation of his strategy for Iraq: "We will accept nothing less than total victory over the terrorists and their hateful ideology."

These are noble words, uttered at a time of increasing difficulty for a President beleaguered at home, where a groundswell of anti-war sentiment has driven his popularity ratings to an all-time low, and in Iraq, where the process of Iraqi self-governance has proved incapable of producing a viable constitution. At the same time, an increase in the intensity of the ongoing insurgency in Iraq has taken a marked toll on Americans and Iraqis alike.

But the fact is, noble words void of a coherent strategy to achieve the stated goals accomplish nothing more than to continue to propel the United States, together with Iraq, down the path of collective chaos, devastation and ruin.

While one may argue (as I have vociferously over the past years) that the Iraq under Saddam Hussein had nothing whatsoever to do with the forces of Osama Bin Laden and the radical form of Islam embraced by his Al Qaeda movement (the group that actually perpetrated the attack against America on September 11, 2001), the reality is that this logic is moot today. As we speak, conditions are devolving inside Iraq. This is conducive to the emergence of a training ground and recruitment base for Al Qaeda that will make pre-September 2001 Afghanistan look like a child's playground.

If President Bush wants to add substance to his rhetoric, then he must first be willing to re-evaluate, in its totality, where the United States is going vis-à-vis Iraq and the entire Middle East. The politics of regional transformation, so boldly underscored with the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the subsequent removal from power of Saddam Hussein, have floundered catastrophically inside Iraq before they could be applied to other targeted regimes in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. As an antidote for the festering that produced the anti-American sentiment that Osama Bin Laden and others feed off of, the goal of imposing democracy on the region has backfired.

Today, the policies of the Bush administration have bred far more terrorists than have been eliminated, and the world, including the United States and its allies, is a much more dangerous place to live. The attacks in Madrid and London should leave no doubt in anyone's mind that there is a direct correlation between the American-led invasion of Iraq and the decision by Al Qaeda to strike those two European cities.

The failure of the U.S.-backed Iraqi government to ratify a constitution worthy of the name provides the Bush administration with a unique opportunity to shift gears in Iraq and the Middle East. It allows for the achievement of stability inside Iraq, and as a result, a meaningful reduction in the ability of anti-American terrorists to recruit and train followers to wage Jihad in Iraq and abroad.

Rather than continuing to reinforce failure by supporting a fatally flawed process, the Bush administration should allow the current government in power in Baghdad to collapse, walk away from the policy of direct meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq, and seek a more nuanced approach to achieving stability inside Iraq through a strategic shift in overall American policy in the Middle East as a whole.

The key reasoning behind the impetus for a radical departure from the current policy is the reality that the Bush administration has gotten it fundamentally wrong regarding Iraq from the very beginning, and as such lacks a foundation upon which to build any lasting achievements in that troubled nation. In its rush to achieve regime change in Iraq, the Bush administration disregarded years of expert opinion, which held that before one seeks to remove Saddam Hussein from power, one had better have a good idea about who or what will rule in his place.

Instead, policy formulators acted on ideologically-driven revisionism that held that an invading American military would be greeted by "song and flowers," and that Western-style democracy could flourish in Iraq, despite centuries of historical grievances among those who populate that country. This ideologically-motivated theory deviated so far from reality that the damage incurred by the Bush administration in trying to force an outcome is irreparable.

Scott Ritter was U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq from 1991-1998 and is author of 'Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of America's Intelligence Conspiracy,' to be published by I.B. Tauris (London) in the summer of 2005.

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