RIGHT STRATEGY--WRONG WAR

RIGHT STRATEGY---WRONG WAR


I watched with admiration as President Bush used a press conference in the East Room of the White House today (October 25, 2006) for a campaign-stop style political news conference.

Iraq was the topic, and the President was impressive: forceful, confident, and a true-believer in his war, which he says is the calling of this generation. Mr. Bush was shrewd, showed a depth of thought, and a connection with reality in Iraq that I have not seen during this Presidency of arrogant incompetence.

The President’s goal is to remain in Iraq until the Iraqi government is a sustainable democracy able to stand on its own against threats internal and from its neighbors. The President is setting “benchmarks” (goals) to measure the Iraqi government’s progress. Under the circumstances, the President’s strategy makes sense and he has clearly put more thought to it than ever before; however, two fatal flaws undermine his strategy.

First, there are not enough troops on the ground in Iraq to control the nation’s borders, disarm the country, and provide safety and services to Iraqi citizens. Absent security for citizens to live a basic life, political progress in Iraq is doomed to failure.

Second, the vision of a unified Iraq asks the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds (and tribes, clans, and families within those groups) to put aside their religious, geographic, and cultural identities and to embrace, fight, and die for an Iraqi national identity.

We know from the study of groups that people are the masters of their personal identities. We call this freedom. Only I can choose to change who I am. If you try to change who I am, I will fight you directly, or I will comply and fight you in passive/aggressive ways.

We can train a proud Marine in thirteen weeks and they fight heroically. We spend years training Iraqi soldiers and police and they run away or refuse to fight. We cannot understand why. They are not cowards. They just care more about their sect, tribe, clan, and family than they do about Iraq. They have chosen their identities. That is their human right.

This leads to the deeper, underlying failure of the Bush administration in Iraq: the failure to see reality as it is and the failure of imagination. Iraq is the wrong war. The right strategy in the wrong war is doomed to failure. The right war against terrorism is the war for energy independence.

The nation(s) that makes the quantum leap from a petroleum based life to energy sources that will rescue our planet from global warming, will lead the world to a renaissance of relationships with our natural world, with people in other nations, and with our own lives and aspirations. A national vision of renewal and energy independence would engage our citizens in the several Manhattan Projects needed to deal with the overwhelming number of issues that face our nation.

With energy independence, we can eliminate the biospheric threat of global warming and the strategic probability of wars over diminishing oil supplies. We can abandon our dependence on the Middle East and let people there choose the lives they want for themselves. Without the United States to blame for their problems, they will be more likely to see their leaders as the source of their problems and outrage. And we can renew our country in the process.

Energy independence is the right war for our planet and against terrorism and is the calling for our generation—not the war in Iraq as President Bush asserts.