I haven’t talked about Sun Tzu here in quite a while, but he came to mind when I saw this story the other day (hat tip, Kevin):

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON – U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned the White
House beginning more than two years ago that the insurgency in Iraq had
deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war,
according to former senior intelligence officials who helped craft the
reports.

Among the warnings, Knight Ridder has learned, was a major
study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, completed in October
2003 that concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions
– not foreign terrorists- and drew strength from deep grievances,
including the presence of U.S. troops.

The existence of the top-secret document, which was the
subject of a bitter three-month debate among U.S. intelligence
agencies, has not been previously disclosed to a wide public audience.

     And the Sun Tzu line that jumped into my head was this, rather famous, one (he says it twice):

Therefore I say: "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. (3.31 ff;10.26)

     It seems fairly certain that Bush and Rumsfeld and company, when contemplating the possibilities for insurgency following the initial invasion, did not want to know the enemy.  They were wrapped in a neocon ideology that kept them from absorbing information that suggested a much harder fight than they wanted.  But war is not about the fight we might want to undertake, it is about the fight we actually face.

    The other question Sun Tzu raises here is: did Bush et al., really know "themselves;" that is, did they fully understand what popular US opinion might support in the way of war.  Here, I think, they erred again.  As Robert Kaplan, pessimist extraordinaire, suggests in today’s Washington Post, we cannot expect democracy as an outcome in Iraq.  Order and security will be hard enough to attain.  His take on Sadddam Hussein would have had him branded a traitor just a year or so ago:

The portrait of Iraq that has emerged since his fall reveals him as the
Hobbesian nemesis who may have kept in check an even greater anarchy
than the kind that obtained under his rule.

   But the carnage of the past several years is making this into  conventional wisdom. 

    Bush and his war planners were in a position to appreciate this possibility.  But they sold the war as a part of a grand effort to democratize the region.  They knew that the American people would not accept a war rationale like this: we have to fight and topple a dictator even if it will likely create a worse security situation in Iraq and will certainly not have democratizing effects in the region.  They knew "themselves" and that such an argument would fall flat with the American public.  So, they made up a nicer story, one that they know Americans wanted to hear: we are fighting for democracy in Iraq and the region.  Nice and clear; black and white morality.  Too bad it was fundamentally false.

    So, maybe they did know "themselves," the American public.  And they knew it so well that they had to create a made-for-TV narrative, all warm and fuzzy, that had little to do with reality.

    This sad and violent experience may suggest a revision to Sun Tzu: it is not enough to simply know the enemy and yourself, you have to anchor your actions to that knowledge.  Hope is not a strategy.