Has the Bush Doctrine failed?

[Hippikos]

Analysts say conflicts in the Middle East have halted aggressive US policy, and may hint at end of West's military superiority.

"The United States may find it hard, if not impossible, the analysts say, to again try in the near future to topple a hostile regime. Its military is stretched, its moral standing diminished. Even democracy itself is tarnished, often equated now with car bombs and chaos, rather than peace and prosperity.

The kind of thing people in the administration prided themselves in understanding, namely the use of power, was actually the very thing they proved not to be able to use effectively," said David Holloway of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, which conducts research and training on issues of international security."

"Despite a massive American and Israeli technological edge, including nuclear arsenals, mounting evidence suggests that the age of Western military ascendancy is coming to an end. Muslim radicals have evolved an Islamist way of war that is as complex as it is cunning. As a consequence, in and around the Persian Gulf the military balance is shifting. The failures suffered by the United States in Iraq and by Israel in southern Lebanon may well signify a turning point in modern military history, comparable in significance to the development of blitzkrieg in the 1930s or of the atomic bomb a decade later. Although the full implications of this shift are not clear, they promise to be huge, calling into question basic strategic assumptions that have held sway in the United States and Israel."

"Resistance is a strategy not of conquest but of denial. Wars undertaken with the expectation that they will be short and conclusive -- on the model of the Six Day War or Operation Desert Storm -- instead become open-ended and inchoate. Politically, the Islamist way of war is demonstrating that the West can no longer impose its will on the Middle East. The inhabitants of that region now have options other than submission or collaboration. Both the United States and Israel must grapple with the implications of this fact. Predictably, the initial reaction of both is to look for ways of tipping the military balance back in the other direction."


Of course ueber-neocon Podhoretz disagrees...

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[Aliantha]

I don't know if it's 'the Bush doctrine' that's failed. I believe it's got more to do with the fact that a young nation can't simply walk into an ancient crisis and expect to fix it overnight. Maybe it's just not fixable. Ahhh...the innocence of youth...

[Spexxvet]

If most Americans believe a conflict is just and warranted, we can, will, and do take care of business. It's when a conflict is perceived as unjust and unwarranted that we are not overwhelmingly successful.

[Undertoad]

I still think that's the most appropriate Vietnam analogy with Iraq: don't fight a war without overwhelming public support.

We tire, is what Americans do. In 1980 I was in grade school and took a (rare) course in International Relations. This was right after the Iranian hostage crisis. The class was packed. The teacher pointed out that, the previous year, almost nobody took the class. It was his theory that Americans have an attention span of about four years for international matters.

This sentence: may find it hard, if not impossible, the analysts say, to again try in the near future to topple a hostile regime

This is a poorly-written sentence because 95% of people will misinterpret it. The American military force is stronger now than it ever has been in history - partly because it's now been used, and is battlefield-hardened with commanders having all sorts of different kinds of experience. There is no question about the ability of the force to topple a hostile regime. It can topple just about anyone, with the use of its little pinky finger. That part of the Iraqi misadventure was the "Mission Accomplished" section.

The US will find it impossible to topple a hostile regime because of political pressures. The world and the American people are against it. Which is what makes the Iraqi misadventure a bigger and bigger mistake. It turns N Korea and even Iran into Somebody Else's Problem.

Up until the next attack on US soil that is.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

The American military force is stronger now than it ever has been in history - partly because it's now been used, and is battlefield-hardened with commanders having all sorts of different kinds of experience.

The military is now so overwhelmed that it cannot even exercise the invasion of Iran. But again, we go right back to the lessons of Vietnam. Same claim was made by those same Curtis LeMay types. As a result, the US was so pathetic militarily that is the USS Pueblo had no airworthy aircraft to come to its rescue off of N Korea. That was the state of the US military all over the world - even in Europe.

And to maintain massive military operations (in Vietnam as in Iraq), the US economy was starved of necessary infrastructure, education, new product development, etc. The US even sold off the world's third largest industrial base - US owned foreign businesses - to pay for war. And as a result of that war, US military suffered for almost 10 years later.


Meanwhile, troops are not being trained for flexible military missions. They are spending time learning how to fight a war that has no hope of victory - that cannot end. Training for an internationally effective military? Of course not. Even standards for military recruits reduced just to meet recruiting quotas.

Degradation of military hardware. Helicopters now requiring something in excess of eight hours maintenance for one hour of flight. Air transports in degraded condition AND assembly lines for new transports closed. This is not what a healthy military looks like.

It is the lesson from Vietnam and the same symptoms apparently in today's overstretched US military. All signs of a military that is becoming increasingly threadbare each year. Deja vue Vietnam.

$400 billion annual budget to the DoD. Then another $100 billion quietly added later just for Iraq - just like during Vietnam. Money must grow on trees - when stagflation then resulted. Its not just the military that is being degraded.

Nope, the rich are richer, the poor are poorer, the Gov't is bigger, the sick are sicker, the war machine is 500% larger, the environment is fucked and none of his strings are tangled.

[Hippikos]

Not only the US Army is stressed to its limits and on the border of enlistment, also the British Army according their new top soldier.

"The new head of the British army has told the Guardian that his soldiers are fighting at the limit of their capacity and can only just cope with the demands placed on them by the government. Sir Richard Dannatt, who took over from Sir Mike Jackson last week, called for a national debate about what resources the armed forces should be given, and what value society should place on them.

In his first interview since taking up his post as chief of the general staff, General Dannatt warned: "We are running hot, certainly running hot." He added: "Can we cope? I pause. I say 'just'."

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[Spexxvet]

In hind sight, would it have been better to have evacuated Iraq when W landed on the aircraft carrier, and let the "Iraqis" rebuild and sort things out themselves? We could "shock and awe" them over and over, if we needed to, and we wouldn't be in the middle of this civil war where everybody wants us out anyway.

[headsplice]

Which Bush doctrine are you referring to?
If you mean pre-emptive aggression to topple a regime, then the Bush doctrine worked perfectly. That's exactly what happened.
Unfortunately, the Bush folks forgot that when they break other people's toys, they're responsible for fixing them , since we're (the US) is supposed to have the moral high ground (shining beacon on the hill and what not). Sticking the American military's head in the secular/religious buzzsaw that is the Middle East was incredibly stupid, particularly because there was such strong resistance to invasion back here. The only way to win in the Middle East is to do what foreign invaders have always done, invade, conquer, and enforce their rule, no matter what the consequences to the local population. Imperialism being out of favor puts a damper on our ability to do that.

[Flint]

We could have at least gotten their ramshackle infrastructure back up and running, instead of trying to over-ambitiously upgrade it.

[Hippikos]

I still think that's the most appropriate Vietnam analogy with Iraq: don't fight a war without overwhelming public support.

Public support goes with the events. The more body bags return, the less support, as Vietnam showed. With the current stream of internet information Guvmint lies and manipulations will be revealed much sooner than 30 years ago. The Tonkin hoax would have been known weeks after it had been used as an excuse.

This is a poorly-written sentence because 95% of people will misinterpret it. The American military force is stronger now than it ever has been in history - partly because it's now been used, and is battlefield-hardened with commanders having all sorts of different kinds of experience. There is no question about the ability of the force to topple a hostile regime. It can topple just about anyone, with the use of its little pinky finger. That part of the Iraqi misadventure was the "Mission Accomplished" section.

As the analysts show, the US and Israel army are not suited to the current asymetric warfare and therefore are losing the battle no matter how much technology has been pumped into the army. In fact that's the weak spot, human intelligence has been completely ignored that last decades in favor of War Games. The head of the Arab section of the CIA didn't even speak the Arabic language...

The US will find it impossible to topple a hostile regime because of political pressures. The world and the American people are against it. Which is what makes the Iraqi misadventure a bigger and bigger mistake. It turns N Korea and even Iran into Somebody Else's Problem.

Von Clausewitz already teached us that you can never separate War with Politik in his tripartite conception of war. "These three tendencies," he wrote, "are like three different codes of law, deeply rooted in their subject and yet variable in their relationship to one another."

[Undertoad]

Public support goes with the events. The more body bags return, the less support, as Vietnam showed.

In that case Iraq should have much greater legs, since there are about 2,800 coalition body bags so far as compared to over 60,000 in Vietnam.

US public support trailed with the public perception that it was going poorly. The public would still be majority in favor, if the deaths led to the sort of productive changes that were hoped for. In fact it seems like the insurgency has been largely addressed at this point but simply leading everything into sectarian violence is also considered an unacceptable outcome.

[Hippikos]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

In that case Iraq should have much greater legs, since there are about 2,800 coalition body bags so far as compared to over 60,000 in Vietnam.

US public support trailed with the public perception that it was going poorly. The public would still be majority in favor, if the deaths led to the sort of productive changes that were hoped for. In fact it seems like the insurgency has been largely addressed at this point but simply leading everything into sectarian violence is also considered an unacceptable outcome.

World has changed. Vietnams are not possible anymore today. JDAM´s instead of napalm, cluster instead of carpet bombing, asymatric army instead of peoples army. World opinion doesn´t accept high casualties both civillian and military.

Must say that the rate of civillian death in iraq is rapidly approaching the old norms.

[Elspode]

Au contraire...the Bush Doctrine is overwhelmingly successful. Oil company and military supplier profits are at historical highs. Bush campaign supporters enjoy unparalleled access to the highest levels of government, and the Sheeple are following their Shepherd to the shearing with relatively little bleating.

How much more successful could his Doctrine be? Or were you talking about what we laughingly call "foreign relations"?

[headsplice]

Originally Posted by Elspode

Au contraire...the Bush Doctrine is overwhelmingly successful. Oil company and military supplier profits are at historical highs. Bush campaign supporters enjoy unparalleled access to the highest levels of government, and the Sheeple are following their Shepherd to the shearing with relatively little bleating.

How much more successful could his Doctrine be? Or were you talking about what we laughingly call "foreign relations"?

Ding! You win a pony!