Bush's Security Plan Now Rests On Nothing But Hope. PNAC & Incompetence [View All]

[KittyWampus]

Bush's security plan now rests on nothing but hope

America doesn't have the troops to deal with North Korea and Iran

Peter Galbraith
Monday October 11, 2004
The Guardian

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But the Bush doctrine is not just about forward defence. It also involves an American mission to spread freedom and
democracy, particularly in the Islamic world....

Paul Wolfowitz and the Pentagon neo-conservatives, who are the ideological authors of the Bush doctrine, saw Iraq as an opportunity to transform the Middle East. They hoped that, by overthrowing Saddam, the US could establish a democratic Iraq which would have the same ripple effect on the Islamic world... Since the American people would never buy such an ambitious (and implausible) agenda, WMD became the justification for the war, but not its reason. Wolfowitz admitted as much when he toldVanity Fair that the administration had settled on Iraqi WMD as the single rationale for war for "bureaucratic reasons".

The question is whether the Bush doctrine makes for sound national security strategy. Devising this strategy entails
assessing threats and looking for opportunities. Since no country can do everything, the most important task of a
strategist is to set priorities, taking into account available resources, costs and risks....

But Bush never prioritised. North Korea with nuclear weapons and Iran acquiring nuclear technology posed far greater threats in 2003 than an Iraq with some hidden chemical and biological weapons. The Clinton administration threatened war to get Pyongyang to freeze its nuclear programme in 1994. In 2002, the Bush administration noisily terminated the 1994 agreement because of North Korean cheating, and then did nothing when the country withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began reprocessing previously safeguarded plutonium into nuclear weapons. All this took place before the start of the Iraq war, but the Bush administration never shifted its focus. North Korea is the world's leading exporter of missile technology to rogue states, and there is every reason to fear its nuclear weapons will be for sale.

By not setting priorities, the Bush administration lost control of the costs and the risks of its strategy. The Pentagon neo-conservatives planning postwar Iraq had grand ideas for a long occupation (modelled on postwar Germany and Japan), but only sent a minimal number of troops (for domestic political reasons). Because of limited resources, they simply assumed abenign environment, eliminating from their planning the possibilities of resistance and lawlessness.

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By not distinguishing between serious immediate threats and distant potential ones, Bush ducked the hard choice at the core of all sound national security strategy - how to ration scarce military and diplomatic assets. As a result, the US invaded Iraq to eliminate a threat posed by non-existent weapons. As for North Korea and Iran, the US is reduced to hoping that others - China in the case of Pyongyang and the Europeans in the case of Tehran - can solve the problem. Hope is not a strategy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1324259,00.html