The Bush way of war

The degradation of United States forces in Iraq is a direct consequence of the derangement of George W Bush's leadership in Washington, writes Sidney Blumenthal.

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14 - 6 - 2006 -- The doctrinal fetish of counter-terrorism substitutes for and frustrates counter-insurgency efforts. The killing on 7 June in a US air raid of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of a Salafist gang that called itself al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, and whose singular significance as terrorist kingpin had been inflated since before the invasion of Iraq, underscores rather than relieves the urgency of a political resolution.

Conventional fighting takes two primary forms: chasing and killing foreign fighters as if they constituted the heart of the Sunni insurgency and seeking battles like Fallujah as if any would be decisive. Where battles don't exist, assaults on civilian populations, often provoked by insurgents, are misconceived as battles. While this is not a version of some video game, it is still an illusion.

Many of the troops are on their third or fourth tour of duty, and 40% of them are reservists whose training and discipline are not up to the standards of their full-time counterparts. Trained for combat and gaining and holding territory, equipped with superior firepower and technology, they are unprepared for the disorienting and endless rigors of irregular warfare.

As Bush's approach has stamped failure on the military, he insists ever more intensely on the inevitability of victory if only he stays the course. Ambiguity and flexibility, essential elements of any strategy for counterinsurgency, are his weak points. Bush may imagine a scene in which the insurgency is conclusively defeated, perhaps even a signing ceremony, as on the USS Missouri, or at least an acknowledgment, a scrap of paper, or perhaps the silence of the dead, all of them. But his infatuation with a purely military solution blinds him to how he thwarts his own intentions.

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