MEMBERS’ FORUM: Wayne’s World Sitrep

This week we introduce a new feature to To The Point: The Members’ Forum, selected articles submitted by TTPers themselves. We launch this feature with TTPer Wayne Daniels. Publication of such submissions does not imply To The Point’s full agreement with them. —JW

The dominate world event is expected to be our November Presidential election. I say this not out of nationalistic arrogance, but because the beliefs and governing philosophies of the leader of the world’s only superpower actually do matter. His beliefs about the uses and limitations of military power matter. The US economy is the world’s largest and when it sneezes, the rest of the world tends to catch a cold or worse.

Our election is having a major impact on the conduct of the War on Terror (which I prefer to call WW4) and the war’s progress, or lack there of, will impact the election. Causality seems to run both ways.

June 30, 2004 marked the “Official” end of the Iraqi occupation. Yes, we will have troops on the ground there for years. Remember it is 59 years and counting that we have had troops stationed in Germany and Japan; 50 years and counting in Korea, etc.

I will argue that the only US strategic interests in Iraq are (1) that the Iraqi government not fund or otherwise support terrorist groups; (2) we need military bases on the borders of three of the primary state sponsors of terrorist groups – Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia; and (3) that enough oil reaches the world markets to keep the price of crude in the $25 to $40 range. As long as these interest are satisfied, we really don’t care who controls the streets or the government. The idea that we could or should set up a democratic government in Baghdad was a dangerous bit of mission creep that occurred after the fall of Saddam.

The political hot button issue will be casualties. It was politically unacceptable to have our troops be the ducks in a shooting gallery called Baghdad or Fallujah. I expect that over the next few weeks, our troops will quietly withdraw from all urban areas and will settle into camps on the borders to rest until after the election. This strategy will also allow troops to be rotated on some reasonable schedule, allow retiring soldiers to actually retire, etc.

Removing our troops from the urban areas will create a power vacuum that official police units can only partially fill. Every group with a few guns will try to grab as much turf as possible. It will be a bloody mess for a month or two until who controls what gets sorted out. CNN and the mainstream media will provide weeks of ‘live from Baghdad’ coverage of this ‘American policy failure’ while Bush will use the ‘Bully Pulpit’ to tell us this is “Iraqi’s solving Iraqi problems and we have to stand back and let them.” When it is over, I suspect the American voters will be very glad it was not our soldiers taking the causalities.

Perhaps a quarter of our troops will camp on the Syrian border. Their job will be to intimidate the regime of Assad Jr. While I have no way to know how this will play out, a reasonable expectation is Assad will dramatically scale back his support for terror groups in the hope we will not invade Syria. If he scales back his terrorist support by 75% or so we will probably let him keep his job for a few more years.

Perhaps a third of the troops will camp near the Iranian border in NE Iraq. These troops will have 2 jobs. The first will be to keep the Kurds separated from the Turks and the Sunnis. The 2nd will be to intimidate the Iranians. The Iranians are playing several games at once. They have their nuclear card — a nuclear program, not a weapon — that they feel will earn them significant concessions on the issue that they truly care about: securing a neutral or pro-Iranian Iraq. They also want respect or at least be considered to be a player. Thus they kidnap a few British Sailors so we do not forget that they are still there.

What Tehran has yet to realize is (1) that the Bush administration no longer trusts its intelligence agencies to reliably know what stage the Iranian nuclear program is in, and (2) that the Bush administration is in no mood to play games with any government in the Islamic world. For the Iranians, this is a chess game. For the Americans, this is part of a war. In any case, the Iranians are 2nd or 3rd on the hit list.

Just under half the troops will be moved to the Saudi Arabian border. For the Bush administration, the war against al Qaeda is an all-important priority against which all other concerns are secondary, except getting re-elected. The only reason the Bush administration is not moving on this more aggressively is because the U.S. electorate would prefer not to have another front in the war opened right now. Once that constraint is removed, the Bush administration will hit Saudi Arabia with everything it has.

One of two developments will remove that restraint: Either George W. Bush will be re-elected, or he won’t. This is an administration that sees everything through one lens: al Qaeda. Everything is on the table; this is an administration that is quite willing to act decisively, even as a lame duck, on that worldview. After the U.S. elections, no matter which way they go, the gloves will come off.

Since the Iraq war ended, the real conflict with al Qaeda has shifted to Saudi Arabia. Before Riyadh had a multidivisional American force parked on its northern border, the House of Saud simply deflected U.S. demands that they crack down on al Qaeda supporters, recruiters and financiers operating within the kingdom.

With those American troops just to the north (you didn’t think that the U.S. Army thought that heavy armor units were really the best possible configuration of forces to patrol narrow Baghdad streets, did you?), Riyadh has changed its policies somewhat and actually begun to root al Qaeda out.

Riyadh is afraid that going against the true powers beyond al Qaeda in the kingdom would trigger a backlash that the regime might not weather well. In my opinion, about the only way the House of Saud can survive would be to compile a list of all Saudi al Qaeda members and sympathizers, including members of the royal family, and then arrest all of them or hand the list to the US and then stand back and let us arrest them.

US voters have a long history of voting their pocket books. When the economy is doing well, the incumbent is re-elected. About the only exception was LBJ and the extreme unhappiness with the Vietnam war. Thus, I expect a very quiet next four months in Iraq.

This election has a new wildcard — al Qaeda may choose to vote in our election much as they did in the recent Spanish election. I guess it depends on how al Qaeda thinks the US voters would react to a new domestic attack. Our choice would be to surrender or fight. Based on the way America reacted to 9/11/01, we would choose to fight this time as well.

Since it is hard to envision a scenario in which Kerry is perceived to be more hawkish than Bush, Bush becomes the leader to rally the nation against a real enemy that has attacked us again. The big swing vote would be married women. Married women supported Bush from 9/11 until after the Taliban were defeated. As they again felt safe, many went back to being liberal democrats.

The most likely scenario involving an Al Qaeda attack has to be Greece. Greek security continues to suck, and the Olympics are a horrendously tempting target. A lower probably event would be the kidnaping of someone attending either the Demo or Republican convention. All al Qaeda has to do is abduct some poor schmuck in either town to completely drown out the conventions themselves.

The excesses of al Qaeda operatives is starting to work in favor of the interim regime. A lot of Shi’a mosques and Sufi holy places have been blown up by these guys– there’s a real possibility that the Shi’a will see these terror squads as THEIR enemy, not the Americans. If so, public sentiment could turn around rapidly, at least in the Shi’a segment of the country. Even some Sunni clerics are speaking out against the foreign jihaddists.

As the situation in Iraq drops off our TV screens, it will likely be replaced by vidio from the southern Sudan. BBC has been pushing this story for several months and it is now being picked up by the mainstream media. Moslem militias have killed close to a million non-Arab Christians and animists and over 2 million more are at risk of mass extermination by starvation. The US has done nothing, and because of Iraq may not be in a position to do anything. How will both the bleading heart liberals and the religious right react if the Bush administration lets these people all die? Expect the posturing about it to begin before September. Maybe some sort of UN program?