Was it wrong to sidetrack the War on Terror and turn Iraq into a training ground for al-Qaida?
Much of what follows is paraphrased from Thomas Barnett's book, "Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating", which is the follow on to his "The Pentagon's New Map". Barnett's two books are very popular, not only in the Pentagon but in military circles worldwide. If you want a look at what senior decision-makers are reading, then these are required reading.
With apologies for the length of the post, here goes...
Iraq is a war within the global war on terrorism. What radical Islamic fundamentalists such as OBL seek is not merely a ‘disconnect’ from globalization’s creeping embrace of the Middle East's more traditional societies, but a reconnect to an idealized past they believe offers a better alternative-an Islamic definition of globalization that contrasts itself with the Western one. Barnett quotes terrorism expert Marc Sageman:
"The global Salafi jihad is a worldwide religious revivalist movement with the goal of reestablishing past Muslim glory in a great Islamist state stretching from Morocco to the Phillipines, eliminating present national boundaries. It preaches salafiyyah (from salaf, the Arabic word for “ancient one,” referring to the Prophet Mohammed), the restoration of authentic Islam, and advocates a strategy of violent jihad, resulting in an explosion of terror to wipe out what it regards as local political heresy. The global version of this movement advocates the defeat of the Western powers that prevent the establishment of a true Islamist state. Al-Qaeda is the vanguard of this movement, which includes many other terrorist groups that collaborate in their operations and share a large support base."
Ultimately, what OBL and the movement offer is civilizational apartheid.
To attack transnational terrorism and other forms of mass violence is naturally to increase their overall frequency in the short run. Sound counterintuitive? Not really. If you want to disarm the bad guys, you're asking them to give up that which makes them powerful, or what they believe gets them to their future caliphate.
So, it should have been no surprise that when the US took up the challenge of a global war on terrorism that terrorism would go up in frequency. To expect anything else is simply not logical.
In many ways, our efforts to shrink the Arab-Muslim terrorists world involve us in a number of implied races with the terrorist networks that plague so many societies there. We seek to create a bandwagon effect across the global economy, enlisting the support of our logical allies in this struggle. Conversely, our enemies seek to create bystanders by targeting our weakest links, or those industrialized states most vulnerable to their terrorist acts. We target rogue regimes that support transnational terrorism, while they target pre-globalized states (typically failed regimes) for sanctuary, thus triggering our interventions and subsequent nation-building efforts. We push toward a victory defined as eliminating all their secure havens, while the terrorists fight essentially a defensive war designed to motivate our retreat from their world and the establishment of civilizational apartheid. Our sense of progress comes in isolating and disabling their network nodes, and theirs come in expanding the reach of their operations and the robustness of the their networks.
They wage a calculated war of attrition designed to wear us down and sap our sense of purpose and moral cause. Because our enemy's success need not require their discrediting of globalization as a historical process, just the US. Because once the world's sole military superpower is convinced to abandon its military efforts to defeat the forces of terrorism, then the rest of the world's major powers will simply conlcude their separate peace arrangements as required with the various dictators who will continue to flourish in the Arab-Muslim terrorist world. The EU, China, India, and Japan will have no choice but to bargain for their continued access to key resources - especially energy. Over time, more of the terrorist-targeted Arab-Muslim world would succumb to instability and mass violence absent America's military presence, forcing great powers to increase their own military spending to secure-in a zero sum fashion-their desired level of connectivity and access to key sources of raw materials.
Thus, if the US fails in its current attempts to enlist the support of other great powers in a shrink the transnational terrorist Arab-Muslim strategy, we'll probably see those states try to carve out their own 'spheres of influence' there in much the same way that the US and the Soviet Union competed for allies in the Third World during the Cold War.
There is much, much more at stake here than just Iraq.