One Comment

  • john Carey

    August 29, 2006 at 2:54 pm

    Flap: I never commented on a cartoon before! I might make Mike’s gathering storm the entire region from Iran to Syria….

    We need a new national strategy from Iran to Lebanon.

    What the pentagon calls the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is real. Iran’s president continues to issue frightening verbiage uncommon in the diplomatic community. The war in Iraq is dragging on. And Hezbollah may have struggled one of the finer military forces in the world, the IDF, to a standstill.

    It may be time for a reassessment of our entire US strategy and policy in the Middle East. Democrats have their own notions, from Congressman Murtha, a former Marine who, with others, favors a nearly immediate pull out.

    That would be folly.

    But Tuesday General Wesley Clark, also a Democrat, is calling for a regional strategy to encompass Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and other hot spots. Nobody is spearheading any effort of the sort and everyone is politically posturing.

    Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, issued strongly worded defenses of the current policy; underscored with what some in the media have called rebukes for Democrats.

    We are at war; men are dying in the field. And there is no more important time for clear thinking and bipartisanship.

    The GWOT is more than a military confrontation. It is also a spy game, a media battle for “hearts and minds,” a war of financial sleuthing and intrigue, a war on the internet and a lot more.

    Consider a new definition of war as: “getting what you want at the end in a struggle between forces.”

    Using this definition, the war on terror is equally Hezbollah rockets into Israel and Hezbollah using counterfeit US currency to fund the recovery in Lebanon. It is “Shock and Awe” to defeat Saddam in 2003 and a reconstruction and peacekeeping “Shock and Awe” with equal verve.

    Certainly when describing the war on terror and the war in Iraq, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and many others have stressed the need for an articulated, comprehensive approach to include intelligence, diplomacy, the media and all other national and international assets.

    But yet here at home in the United States we are politically divided and that seriously erodes our will to win and our national determination. Our enemies certainly know this. To our enemies it might not be crystal clear that we are indivisible in our determination, with a national plan to succeed.

    With troops fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, if at all possible we need to strive for bipartisanship and wisdom.

    We seem bound by our political divisions, mired in strict rules of procedure and crippled by some of our own policies, like random airline searches to include 90 year old grandmothers. The enemy has no such restrictions. The enemy plays to win and this means playing dirty. Doctored photographs in the media are just the tip of the iceberg.

    If war is truly “getting what you want,” did Israel do well in the war with Hezbollah? And is the United States achieving success in Iraq?

    Israel did not achieve any of its top three objectives: the return of the captive soldiers, the elimination of Hezbollah and the destruction of Hezbollah’s rockets.

    Moreover, Israel now faces an even more enraged group of Arabs (and Persians) due to the destruction of much of southern Lebanon; a media machine even more emboldened by Nasrallah due to his adroit use of Al-Minar, al-Jazeera, and other outlets; some loss of trust and respect for the IDF by the Israeli people; and arguably, a political and military leadership shake-up for Israel in the offing.

    And it is uncertain that Israel, with the help of the UN, has, as yet, ended support for Hezbollah from Iran and Syria. It is also not certain that the international community that cannot seem to field a peacekeeping force, can stop arms shipments to Hezbollah.

    The U.S. war strategy of “Shock and Awe” in 2003 worked remarkably well but two years later, with a steady loss of blood and life, mostly due to Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), it might be productive for all Americans to come together to help determine the best course of action here on out.

    For Iraq, we might discuss a bipartisan and national effort to win; or a bipartisan national decision to withdraw. The discussion might forge a new recommended “way ahead.” More troops or fewer troops are just two options below a potentially new and larger framework.

    One potentially helpful discussion could come from renewed hearings on the progress of the war in Congressional committees. These would have to be not political grandstanding committee meetings meant to score points by skewering Secretary Rumsfeld, but genuine, bipartisan and adult discussions on how to proceed as a nation to achieve what we want in the war. This will require statesmanship not showmanship.

    Because before too long we have to either open the tool kit of our thinking and win; or put our hammer away and go home. The alternative is that the President’s current methodology will continue.

    Vice President Cheney echoed some of the president’s recent statements on Iraq at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Reno on August 28, saying, “A precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would be … a ruinous blow to the future security of the United States.”

    What we need in Iraq is to get what we want.

    What we do not want, if it can be avoided and there are better alternatives, is a decades long conflict called GWOT and a continuing and festering divide between the United States and the entire Islamic world.

    To get what we want we may need more bipartisan thinking; and some bipartisan agreement and leadership on our nation’s strategy to win – or we may need to reverse course.

    John E. Carey is former president of International Defense Consultants, Inc. and a retired U.S. military officer.