Iraq War: Iraq and the GWOT

The situation in Iraq may be moving rapidly into a dangerous new phase. In any case, it's safe to say that we're still closer to the beginning of the war begun last year than to the end.

I've quoted before from Bounding the Global War on Terrorism (Dec. 2003) by Jeffrey Record of the US Air Force's Air War College. Record also notes what a very serious distraction the Iraq War has been from the so-called global war on terrorism, to which he refers by the policy-jargon acronym GWOT.

In conflating Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, the administration unneecessarily expanded the GWOT by launching a preventive war against a state that was not at war with the United States and that posed no direct or imminent threat to the United States at the expense of continued attention and effort to protect the United States from a terrorist organization with which the United States was at war. ...

Strategically, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was not part of the GWOT; rather, it was a war-of-choice distraction from the war of necessity against al-Qaeda. Indeed, it will be much more than distraction if the United States fails to establish order and competent governance in post-Saddam Iraq. Terrorism expert Jessica Stern in August 2003 warned that the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad was "the latest evidence that America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one." How ironic it would be that a war initiated in the name of the GWOT ended up creating "precisely the situation the administration has described as a breeding ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders or provide for its citizens' rudimentary needs." Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director of counterrorism, Vincent Cannistraro, agrees: "There was not substantive intelligence information linking Saddam to international terrorism before the war. Now we've created the conditions that have made Iraq the place to come to attack Americans."

And the conventional wisdom among our sad  press corps is that the Republicans are stronger on national security issues. Go figure.

Tags: iraq war, gwot, global war on terror, jeffrey record, war on terror