-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, December 31, 2002 11:28 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: A gift to you from Stratfor.
Many of you have asked Stratfor to distribute more analysis via email that you can easily pass along to your friends. Therefore, each week we will be emailing you the Stratfor Weekly, written by our chairman and founder, Dr. George Friedman. This week's feature: The War of Time by Dr. George Friedman Summary The United States is perceived as being overly aggressive against Iraq and in the war on al Qaeda in general. However, a look at events of the past year shows that since major action in Afghanistan concluded, Washington has been relatively inactive. The illusion of aggressiveness covers a reality of caution. Though there was good reason for caution, Washington's extended focus on preparing for war in Iraq has created difficulties: Other crises such as North Korea and Venezuela, which would have been readily managed prior to Sept. 11, are increasingly unmanageable in this context. Therefore, Washington now feels pressure to bring the Iraq campaign to a rapid conclusion. Whatever the operational realities in Iraq, the global situation calls for a rapid onset of war and rapid victory. Analysis Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has played a long, deep game. Following the reflexive attack on Afghanistan -- and contrary to the claims of most of its critics -- the United States spent the next year biding its time. It built up its covert capabilities around the world, it collected intelligence and, on occasion, it acted. Washington decided that its next move would be to invade Iraq and, having decided that, it waited. The difference between the reality and the image of the United States since the Afghan campaign is striking. The image has been of an uncontrolled unilateralism; the reality has been a year-long process of coalition building and of cautious buildup for its next campaign. The roots of this paradox can be found in the origins of the war against al Qaeda. Pearl Harbor stunned the United States, and it took a year for a strategy and capability to emerge. During that time, the United States tried to compensate for weakness through an apparent bellicosity unsupported by power. Raids like the Doolittle raid, speeches by Gen. Douglas MacArthur and real if unintended battles like Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal laid the groundwork for a systematic offensive. In a similar sense, Sept. 11 took the United States by surprise. Washington had neither the strategy nor the force needed to wage the war. It substituted bellicosity for coherent action -- to keep the enemy off balance -- while fighting real, if not wholly intended or planned, engagements around the world. As in 1942, 2002 was consumed by debate about strategy. Following Afghanistan, the issue was: What next? Attention immediately focused on Iraq. There are three reasons to attack Iraq: 1. Saddam Hussein is unpredictable and potentially a powerful ally for al Qaeda. Whatever the relationship in the past, the threat of a relationship in the future requires the elimination of Iraq's regime. 2. All wars have a psychological component. There is a real perception within the Islamic world today that the United States is incapable of fighting a war to a definitive conclusion. The United States must demonstrate both its will and ability. Iraq serves the purpose well. 3. Iraq is an extraordinarily strategic country. It touches Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. An occupied Iraq would give U.S. forces the ability to wage covert and overt war throughout the region, setting the stage for the direct engagement and liquidation of al Qaeda, with or without the cooperation of regional governments. There was never a debate within the Bush administration about whether the next campaign would be in Iraq. There was a serious debate over how and when -- and while that debate raged and forces were prepared, the United States created a sense of inevitability of both war and victory that substituted for what Washington in reality was able to do at the time. The debate was between two factions. One, rooted in the Air Force, Joint Special Operation Command and Defense Department civilians, argued for an early war, using primarily air power and Special Operations troops along the Afghan model. The other faction, rooted in the regular army and State Department, argued for a more systematic buildup of heavier forces, which would be available should the opening gambit of USAF/JSOC prove insufficient. Secretary of State Colin Powell led the campaign for a conventional option. Since this option required coalition partners for basing and logistic support, he also argued for a period of systematic coalition building. In the end, Powell won the fight -- not against a war with Iraq, but for a more cautious and time-consuming strategy. That strategy has been unfolding since last summer; now the needed forces are nearly in place and the coalition is almost secure. The criticism of the rapid attack plan was that it was too risky -- there were no contingencies in the event of failure. The current plan includes a range of complex options. It is a war plan designed to raise the ante if Iraq's forces don't crumble. Forces will be moving toward the theater of operations even as the air war beings -- dramatically changing the Desert Storm model, in which almost all forces were in place before the air campaign began. This plan seems to call for a systematic increase in pressure designed to crack the Iraqis, with the expectation that the crack will happen early and a willingness to allow it to come later. It is in this sense that the buildup to war and the war itself can be called a long and deep game. It assumes that time is on Washington's side and that the war can be executed on multiple, complex levels simultaneously. And that is where this cautious war plan is most risky -- not necessarily in relation to Iraq, but in terms of global strategy as a whole. The war plan has the United States focusing heavily on Iraq, with parallel attention on covert operations against al Qaeda. It also has opened the door -- during this period and particularly at this moment, when troops are committed but not yet in action -- for other actors to take advantage of the situation or for other events to spiral out of control. There are two major crises on the table now, both of which involve fundamental U.S. interests and neither of which the United States is in a position to manage effectively because of its long Iraqi game. 1. North Korea clearly has watched the U.S. fascination with Iraq and has calculated that a crisis now could extract for it maximum advantage from Washington. Pyongyang has gone out of its way to cause Washington to perceive a nuclear threat, with the perception quite possibly greater than the reality. North Korean officials know the United States can't afford a two-front war, regardless of what its doctrine says. They expect Washington to make political and economic concessions, calculating that it cannot engage in confrontation. Pyongyang's calculation is proving correct. This would not be the case if the Iraq matter were settled. 2. Venezuela is a major supplier of oil to the United States. With the Iraq war brewing and oil prices rising, a disruption of Venezuelan oil is the last thing the United States needs. Yet, because of a crisis between President Hugo Chavez and a large and diverse opposition, Venezuela has ground to a virtual halt, actually importing oil to keep itself going. Normally, the United States would act aggressively to bring the crisis under control; now the Bush administration feels that it can't. If Chavez were overthrown in a coup that could be attributed to the United States, then Europe would hurl charges of overthrowing a democratically elected government in Latin America -- redolent of the Allende assassination in Chile -- and use it as a justification for staying out of the coalition against Iraq. Maintaining the anti-Iraq coalition compels the United States to refrain from action, even as Venezuela collapses along with its oil exports. Two major crises now confront the United States. Neither emanates from the Islamic world or from al Qaeda. Neither can be managed effectively by the United States because of Iraq. The situation becomes even more difficult when we consider that the concentration of forces for Iraq has created opportunities elsewhere within the Islamic theater of operations. In Afghanistan, for example, there is a perceptible increase in the tempo of operations of Islamist forces, which continually are probing U.S. and allied fortifications with apparently growing effectiveness. Moreover, in the coming months, al Qaeda will find opportunities to strike at targets within and without the Islamic world -- as the recent attack on American doctors in Yemen demonstrated. Therefore, the United States cannot put off an attack on Iraq much longer. The peculiarity is not that the United States has been so eager to attack, but that it has held off for so long that its flanks are exposed. That exposure cannot end until the United States defeats Iraq and occupies it. This means not only that war cannot be put off much longer but also that the war cannot be allowed to last very long. Therefore, a tension is building in the U.S. warfighting strategy that will define events in the coming weeks and months. The war plan in place allows for a quick air/Special Ops attack that hopefully will shatter the Iraqi army, force a collapse in the government and permit a rapid occupation. The war plan seeks the best but allows for the worst. If there is not a rapid Iraqi collapse, it allows for a systematic occupation of Iraq from multiple axes of attack. It is a plan designed to minimize risk and maximize the likelihood of success. The price embedded in this plan is time: It trades risk for time under the assumption that time is one commodity of which the United States has a surplus. Time is the one thing that is not conserved under the Powell strategy. The assumption about time remains true to some extent, but no longer to the extent it was during the summer or fall, when the plans were being devised. The U.S. focus on Iraq has generated problems outside the Islamic world that are not as critical as those arising within the Islamic world, but which normally would be of paramount importance to Washington. There is now a pressing need to conclude the Iraq military campaign and to move to follow-on operations, while also bringing order to other areas outside the primary theater of operations. U.S. power is enormous, but it is not infinite. Therefore, the United States has the ability to play a long and deep game. It does not have to shoot from the hip, because enormous power buys a great deal of time. But because power is not infinite, time is also inherently finite. The war will begin sometime in the next four to six weeks and must conclude quickly; otherwise, things could get out of control on a global scale. This is something that Hussein certainly understands. His entire strategy has been a delaying strategy: First, he delayed diplomatically; then he delayed on weapons inspections. Inevitably, his war-fighting strategy, if he chooses war over exile, will be to delay the United States, to impose time penalties at every point -- to trade lives for time in the hope that the United States runs out of time before he runs out of lives. For him, it all comes down to Baghdad and the ability to force a drawn-out war of attrition. For the United States, it comes down to smashing Iraq's ability to resist before U.S. troops even reach Baghdad. Now, Hussein thinks that time is his friend, and Washington knows it must deny Hussein time. Don't forget to forward this email to a friend. 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