With us sinking deeper and deeper into The Quagmire that is Iraq, it is becoming increasingly obvious that this exercise, far from demonstrating our strength and fearsomeness to the rest of the world, has instead demonstrate the limits of American power. How has this happened and what are the implications?
To the first question, most people by now know the sordid story:
- A poorly equipped military that cannot sustain an occupation
- Civilian strategists overruling military leaders and implementing strategies based on fantasy
- An unwillingness to put the necessary "boots on the ground", leading to a situation where we cannot even secure the highway between Baghdad and the airport
- A "hollowing out" of the Army and Marines as troops do not re-enlist (especially the mid-level officer corps) and new enlistments are plummeting
All these things have revealed the limits of American military power--indeed, these things have shown it to be a Paper Tiger in many respects. We can destroy something with air power, but after that we are largely impotent.
What are the implications of this?
Leave aside for the moment the recent CIA revelations that Iraq is now a better recruiting and training ground for terrorists than Afghanistan was. What lessons could say, China, or North Korea, draw from our debacle?
If I were in Beijing, I would be starting to look for ways to put the screws to Taiwan, because the US is too bogged down to do anything but protest. Sure we could threaten with air power, but all it would take would be for one aircraft carrier to be blown up by a surfact-to-surface missile and the feeling of defeat people are starting to get about Iraq would deepen into dispair.
If I were in North Korea, I would be starting to look south at all that food and technology and thinking that perhaps it was time to do a little real estate procurement.
If I was in Iran, I would be thinking this would be a great time to develop nuclear weapons and prepare for regional hegemony with the first acolyte being a Shia-dominated Iraq.
And finally, if I were a terrorist earning my spurs in Iraq, I would be thinking of taking my newly found skills in urban warfare (unlike the rural warfare learned in Afghanistan) into the cities of apostate Arab countries and even into the US.
In other words, the overreaching by the Neocons in their grasping at Empire may have in fact undermined and even (ultimately) destroyed our nation as a dominant political and military power, and made the world less safe for us all as a consequence.