Bush's Major Mistakes in the First Terrorist War
It can be safely said that the First Terrorist War was concluded a few years ago (exactly when is a matter for debate), and that it was a draw. We took out Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar's Afghani regime, and both Saddam Hussein and his regime Iraq, but we have not yet toppled the Ayatollah of Iran. We withdrew too quickly, leaving a power vacuum into which ISIS is flowing, and hence setting up the war which we have now (half-heartedly) begun to prosecute against them.
Here I pause to point out that it was a draw rather than a "defeat." We killed hundreds of thousands of Terrorist troops, none of which spring to life with cries of Allahu'akbar! simply because we failed to completely defeat their organizations and all of their regimes. Those men are dead, they are not easily replaced, and the sheer overwhelming firepower we used means that in many cases few survived unmaimed to become veteran NCO's in their forces. This means that the enemy has been attritioned rather than blooded; the forces we face in the Second Terrorist War will mostly be green and hence easily defeated on the battlefield.
We lost only around ten thousand Americans doing this (counting the civilians murdered on 9-11), achieving kill ratios of tens to one despite operating under fairly restrictive Rules of Enagement. When some future atrocity leads to those RoE being modified to more effective and rational ones, we may be able to increase that kill ratio even more. Pessimists point out that there are over a billion Muslims worldwide; they forget that most of them will not fight, and that if even 10% of them did fight against us (a historically-gigantic percentage), kill ratios of 20:1 or more imply that they could all be slain with the loss of "only" 5 million or so Civilized forces (and remember that we might have allies in the fight, particularly India).
Realistically, no nation or nations ever fight that hard; usually 10-50 percent casualties (not even killed) is enough to force an army to retreat or surrender. So the total losses to the Civilized forces might be more on the order of a few hundred thousand to a couple million -- assuming that we had to fight every single Muslim nation (which is also unlikely). More on the order of a World War than Armageddon, in short. We've done this sort of thing (relative to our population) four times before in our history -- the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the World Wars. We survived. In all but the first-named fight, our foes didn't.
Having said that, we wouldn't be in this situation if George W. Bush hadn't made some pretty serious mistakes. (Obama's made worse ones, but Bush was a serious leader and educated man; Obama is a pair of well-creased pants that has learned to parrot leftist slogans attractively in front of a camera, one expected more of Bush than one does of Obama).
So what were these mistakes?
His first mistake was backpedaling on his original stark formulation of "you're with us or you're against us." Had he stuck with this idea, and acted upon it, neutrals would have been much more scrupulous about making sure that their own citizens did not flock to the battlefield on the Terrorist side, and unfriendly "neutrals" such as Iran might have been deterred from intervention.
His second mistake was refusing to formally declare war. This has been our mistake in every war fought since the end of World War II. The original rationale for this, in the Korean War, was to avoid an open-ended commitment that could lead to nuclear war. There was no obvious reason to avoid declared wars from the Panama War on, yet we have continued to refuse a formal war declaration. This has become a piece of "common wisdom" which in fact severe folly.
His third mistake was not fully mobilizing for war. Without large ground forces, on the scale with which we fought World War II, we could not occupy and pacify conquered areas and still have enough force left to keep an offensive momentum going. That was why once we conquered Iraq, we could do nothing but defend it, instead of continuing on to smash Syria and Iran.
His fourth mistake was that he made no attempt to make war "pay for itself" by permanently seizing the oil wells and their revenues and using them first to fund his campaigns, and then to fund government benefits to American citizens. The first would have reduced the net cost of the war, the second made it politically-unpopular to ever return the assets to their former owners. Together, they would have deterred oil-rich enemies from using their oil wealth to attack America, because defeat could mean that they would lose this wealth permanently.
His fifth mistake was that, when hostile foreign Powers (such as Libya, Syria and Iran) did intervene in the war, he didn't treat their actions as acts of war and respond appropriately. Even had he lacked the manpower to invade, conquer and reconstruct those countries, he might have launched punitive air raids on a scale such as to completely wreck the infrastructure of those Terrorist States, and then not go in to repair the damage. The spectacle of nations of tens of millions thrown into poverty and suffering for years to decades would have been a strong deterrent to future aggression against America and her allies.
His sixth mistake was failing to establish that the Terrorists lacked protection under the Laws of War since they were non-uniformed combatants, not obeying the Laws of War themselves, and not fighting for any recognized Powers. Failing to assert at the beginning that we had the right under international law to execute or otherwise harm captured Terrorists at our discretion created a huge scandal about torture which could have been ended with the blunt statement: "Yes. We have the right to torture them. We have tortured them. We are torturing them. We will keep on torturing them. And we also have the right to execute them, which will be the ultimate fate of those of them who do not cooperate fully with us." It also should have been emphasized that the Terrorists broke the Laws of War quite decisively on 9-11, and hence were specifically not entitled to their protection.
Basically, George W. Bush's errors all amounted to this:
He was too civilized and too nice to fight and win a war in the Mideast.
We await a more realistic and sanguinary President to finish the job.
And he will come. The Terrorist States will be but borders on outdated maps when America is still going strong, and rising to the stars.
Such is our Manifest Destiny.
Here I pause to point out that it was a draw rather than a "defeat." We killed hundreds of thousands of Terrorist troops, none of which spring to life with cries of Allahu'akbar! simply because we failed to completely defeat their organizations and all of their regimes. Those men are dead, they are not easily replaced, and the sheer overwhelming firepower we used means that in many cases few survived unmaimed to become veteran NCO's in their forces. This means that the enemy has been attritioned rather than blooded; the forces we face in the Second Terrorist War will mostly be green and hence easily defeated on the battlefield.
We lost only around ten thousand Americans doing this (counting the civilians murdered on 9-11), achieving kill ratios of tens to one despite operating under fairly restrictive Rules of Enagement. When some future atrocity leads to those RoE being modified to more effective and rational ones, we may be able to increase that kill ratio even more. Pessimists point out that there are over a billion Muslims worldwide; they forget that most of them will not fight, and that if even 10% of them did fight against us (a historically-gigantic percentage), kill ratios of 20:1 or more imply that they could all be slain with the loss of "only" 5 million or so Civilized forces (and remember that we might have allies in the fight, particularly India).
Realistically, no nation or nations ever fight that hard; usually 10-50 percent casualties (not even killed) is enough to force an army to retreat or surrender. So the total losses to the Civilized forces might be more on the order of a few hundred thousand to a couple million -- assuming that we had to fight every single Muslim nation (which is also unlikely). More on the order of a World War than Armageddon, in short. We've done this sort of thing (relative to our population) four times before in our history -- the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the World Wars. We survived. In all but the first-named fight, our foes didn't.
Having said that, we wouldn't be in this situation if George W. Bush hadn't made some pretty serious mistakes. (Obama's made worse ones, but Bush was a serious leader and educated man; Obama is a pair of well-creased pants that has learned to parrot leftist slogans attractively in front of a camera, one expected more of Bush than one does of Obama).
So what were these mistakes?
His first mistake was backpedaling on his original stark formulation of "you're with us or you're against us." Had he stuck with this idea, and acted upon it, neutrals would have been much more scrupulous about making sure that their own citizens did not flock to the battlefield on the Terrorist side, and unfriendly "neutrals" such as Iran might have been deterred from intervention.
His second mistake was refusing to formally declare war. This has been our mistake in every war fought since the end of World War II. The original rationale for this, in the Korean War, was to avoid an open-ended commitment that could lead to nuclear war. There was no obvious reason to avoid declared wars from the Panama War on, yet we have continued to refuse a formal war declaration. This has become a piece of "common wisdom" which in fact severe folly.
His third mistake was not fully mobilizing for war. Without large ground forces, on the scale with which we fought World War II, we could not occupy and pacify conquered areas and still have enough force left to keep an offensive momentum going. That was why once we conquered Iraq, we could do nothing but defend it, instead of continuing on to smash Syria and Iran.
His fourth mistake was that he made no attempt to make war "pay for itself" by permanently seizing the oil wells and their revenues and using them first to fund his campaigns, and then to fund government benefits to American citizens. The first would have reduced the net cost of the war, the second made it politically-unpopular to ever return the assets to their former owners. Together, they would have deterred oil-rich enemies from using their oil wealth to attack America, because defeat could mean that they would lose this wealth permanently.
His fifth mistake was that, when hostile foreign Powers (such as Libya, Syria and Iran) did intervene in the war, he didn't treat their actions as acts of war and respond appropriately. Even had he lacked the manpower to invade, conquer and reconstruct those countries, he might have launched punitive air raids on a scale such as to completely wreck the infrastructure of those Terrorist States, and then not go in to repair the damage. The spectacle of nations of tens of millions thrown into poverty and suffering for years to decades would have been a strong deterrent to future aggression against America and her allies.
His sixth mistake was failing to establish that the Terrorists lacked protection under the Laws of War since they were non-uniformed combatants, not obeying the Laws of War themselves, and not fighting for any recognized Powers. Failing to assert at the beginning that we had the right under international law to execute or otherwise harm captured Terrorists at our discretion created a huge scandal about torture which could have been ended with the blunt statement: "Yes. We have the right to torture them. We have tortured them. We are torturing them. We will keep on torturing them. And we also have the right to execute them, which will be the ultimate fate of those of them who do not cooperate fully with us." It also should have been emphasized that the Terrorists broke the Laws of War quite decisively on 9-11, and hence were specifically not entitled to their protection.
Basically, George W. Bush's errors all amounted to this:
He was too civilized and too nice to fight and win a war in the Mideast.
We await a more realistic and sanguinary President to finish the job.
And he will come. The Terrorist States will be but borders on outdated maps when America is still going strong, and rising to the stars.
Such is our Manifest Destiny.