The news today of fourteen US soldiers killed in one engagement in Haditha, together with the story that a journalist, Steven Vincent, was murdered in Basra, reminds us of just how badly the American occupation of Iraq is going.  The US has failed to create a political outcome that would justify the war.  Increasingly, the American public is looking at the entire affair as a failure, and the Bush administration is looking for a way out before next year’s Congressional elections, when the domestic political consequences could come due.

     All of this might be condensed into a single, perhaps somewhat oversimplified lesson: war is not simply a matter of military might.  The German military theorist, Clausewitz, reminded us that:

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.

 The Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu takes an even broader view:

In war, numbers alone confer no advantage.  Do not advance relying on sheer military power alone… He who lacks foresight and underestimates his enemy will surely be captured by him. (122)

      From a Clausewitzian point of view, the American confusion about its political goal has now come back to haunt us.  The confusion has operated on several levels: were we fighting to disarm Iraq or for regime change?  If it was the latter, what kind of change were we looking for: a rotation of elites at the very top of the political system, centering on our man in Baghdad, Ahmed Chalabi?  A thorough-going de-Ba’athification?  The creation of a federal democracy?  An Islamic Republic of Iraq allied with Iran?

     Rumsfeld and company placed their faith in military power alone and believed that all the big political questions would somehow work themselves out.  Those big issues have not resolved, and, therefore, without a clear political goal accomplished, the war goes on.  At some point, the war will end for the US – Bush will declare some sort of victory and leave – but it seems fairly certain that war will rage in Iraq for a long time, and at a high level of human suffering, until some fundamental political resolution is reached.  The creation of a paper constitution, in and of itself, will not mark the kind of broad social-political resolution that is required.

     Sun Tzu’s approach to all of this points out the limitations of American power.  In calculating the prospects for victory, he relies upon a complex concept of "strategic advantage" (see Ames’s introduction, pp. 71-84).   It is not just a matter of "sheer military power."  One can underestimate an enemy’s will to fight, his strategy, the social and political context in which he operates.  Of course, war in Sun Tzu’s time was quite different than conflict in the 21st century.  But it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that, when thinking about the political aftermath of the Iraq war, and the requirements of national reconstruction, Sun Tzu would have advised American planners to assume a very broad definition of "strategic advantage" in order to calculate the prospects for American success.  And they did not.

     In hindsight (yes, 20/20 and all that), it is now apparent that the US was at a strategic disadvantage in attempting to manage the reconstruction on its own.  We had sufficient military power to overcome Saddam’s army in its conventional form, but we did not have sufficient political capacity, economic resources, cultural understanding or leadership skill to manage the difficult work of rebuilding a shattered Iraq.  There were clear hints ahead of time of the problems we would likely encounter: Colin Powell’s warning that if we break it, we own it; General Shinseki’s statement that many more troops would be needed on the ground; the  concerns of some specialists that the country could come apart at the seams.  All of these were ignored by the blind faith Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney placed in US military hardware.

     In the end, American leaders ignored Sun Tzu’s most basic idea:

Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.  When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal.  If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril. (84)

 It is unfortunately clear now that Bush neither understood the limits of American power when it came to the political goals of the war, nor knew the nature of the enemy he was taking on. 

      American troops and Iraqi citizens continue to die for his ignorance.