Juan Cole’s analysis of the ongoing wave of violence in Iraq is pretty interesting. I originally missed this item from last Sunday, but came across a mention of it today: 2-Day bombing total of 100 dead, hundreds wounded; Zarqawi threatens to hit American homeland. Especially noteworthy to me was this paragraph:

Few commentators, when they mention such news, point out the obvious. The United States military does not control Baghdad. It doesn’t control the major roads leading out of the capital. It does not control the downtown area except possibly the heavily barricaded “green zone.” It does not control the capital. The guerrillas strike at will, even at Iraqi notables who can afford American security guards (many of them e.g. ex-Navy Seals). If the US military does not control the capital of a country it conquered, then it controls nothing of importance. Ipso facto, Iraq is a failed state.

This recalls Richard Clarke’s analysis in Against All Enemies, on how the newly arrived Bush administration threw out all that counterterrorism doctrine that had been developed during the Clinton years, in which it was recognized that an important emerging threat to our security came not from hostile states, but from transnational terrorists operating from bases in so-called “failed states” like Somalia and Afghanistan. The Bushies wanted to go back to working the same problems they’d been working during the Reagan and Bush I years: nuclear missile defense and the toppling of rogue regimes.

So, congratulations, Bushies: You got what you wanted. Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat. Unfortunately, what you’ve replaced him with looks increasingly like a bad bargain from a national security standpoint.

(Thanks to Jerome Doolittle at Bad Attitudes for the link.)

This entry was posted by jbc on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 12:17 pm and is filed under george_w_bush, war. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.