I'm really going (sort of) this time.......

[AngelaM]

I finally got my books in the mail for my latest educational venture. For those not familiar with the military, we have what is referred to as Professional Military Education to complete to advance to higher ranks. If you are active duty, the preference is to attend in residence and each course varies in length and/or location. However, not everyone can attend in residence even if they are active duty (very competitive for many schools) or if people are in the reserve like me and don't want to leave their family and/or primary job for a long period, then the course is taken via correspondence alone or in a seminar group. I chose the correspondence route, studying alone (I've always hated group projects where education is concerned).

In my case, the study material is for 3 major areas: Leadership & Command, National Security Studies, and Expeditionary Air & Space Power (I'm sure the third one varies more so in terms of which branch you work in). If I attended in residence, I would be going to school full time for 10 months. Since I'm not doing it in residence, I get 1.5 years to complete a series of 6 tests and 3 exercises. Believe me, it gets real easy to use that entire time to study as its easy to find other things more interesting to do…especially when you get into reading the 15th recommended method of being an effective leader. As I mentioned before, my participation here will now be limited as my time is short these days and adding studies like this will certainly cut into my "surfing" time. But, since you guys like to debate about the Iraq war, I thought you might be interested in seeing some of the excerpts from my studies on this topic. I dug a portion out just for you.

My participation here will now be hit or miss. Not that anyone is holding their breath to see if I'm here much but I had recently said I would be taken some time away and that is the case.

Anyway, here is a small snipit on Iraq. Thought you might want to see just a small glimpse into what we naive and ignorant military folk are learning. Enjoy!
Of course, I kind of laughed as I read through it yesterday evening.....I seem to be ahead of my studies.

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On September 11, 2001, the fanatical operatives of Osama bin Laden flew jetliners into three symbols of American power: the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A fourth jet, targeted for either the White House or the Capitol, crashed in Pennsylvania as passengers struggled heroically to take back control of the aircraft. At this point, the game changed. For the first time since the War of 1812, the citizens and symbols of the United States of America had come under sustained attack on American territory. There was little to link the Iraqis to these events, while much connected the Taliban in Afghanistan to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network, not least of all the fact that its leadership was harbored there.
September 11 forced Americans to reevaluate their understanding of the external world. History had not ended with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. A “clash of civilizations” between portions of the Islamic world and the West now seemed very real. That clash had little to do with poverty; the suicide pilots had come from the Arab middle classes and had enjoyed many material privileges. Nor was the Islamic world reacting to the aggressions of the crusader West, as former president Clinton suggested in October 2002. During thirteen centuries of relations between Christianity and Islam, most of the time Islam has been the aggressor. The central problem lay in the fact that history was asking the Islamic world to adjust to modernity in barely eighty years—a condition that the West had taken well over five centuries to create.
Without the events of September 11, George W. Bush, like his predecessors, would not have garnered the will to conduct a war against Iraq. And the American electorate would not have supported it. It is even less conceivable that Tony Blair would have been willing to participate in such an endeavor. The road from September 11, 2001, to March 19, 2003, will emerge in greater detail in the memoirs of those who participated in the debates and in the documentary evidence that eventually will be released into the public domain. But the skeleton of what happened is already available in outline.
The pressing problem confronting the United States in the aftermath of September 11 was what actions to take to combat terrorism around the world. Firing off cruise missiles against uncertain targets, such as terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, would hardly address the threats raised by Al Qaeda’s murderous attack. The problem of tailoring a response was particularly difficult because the terrorists responsible represented neither a government nor a state. Rather, they owed their allegiance to an individual and his extremist beliefs. Granted, bin Laden and many of his chief lieutenants were harbored by the failed state of Afghanistan, whose Taliban rulers had hardly any friends in the world. But it was a difficult place to reach, and the fact that its warriors had fought the Soviet Union to a standstill in the 1980s gave the administration pause.
Not surprisingly, many in the West despaired. The attacks by Islamist fanatics were all America’s fault, they said, and military intervention in Afghanistan would lead to another Vietnam quagmire. At the other extreme, some argued that the United States should respond immediately with an all-out invasion of Afghanistan. More prudent counsel in the Bush administration took a middle course. Using a skillful combination of diplomacy, special operations forces, and precision capabilities to attack the Taliban’s supporters, together with a liberal use of cash and weapons to buy the cooperation of Afghan tribesmen, the United States overthrew the Taliban regime in short order. The Al Qaeda network was severely damaged, though the operation failed to catch or kill bin Laden. Still, the performance of U.S. forces in Operation Enduring Freedom, as the Afghanistan conflict was called, underlined the military capabilities the United States could project when it had the will to do so. What was not so clear was whether American leaders were prepared to follow through and establish a more equitable government in Afghanistan from the wreckage of twenty-five years of war.
In summer 2002, the Bush administration began to assemble a coalition to deal with Saddam Hussein once and for all. For American leaders and those states willing to participate, the most compelling argument for the use of force against Iraq was the potential threat of weapons of mass destruction. Before the Gulf War in 1991, the international community had possessed incontrovertible evidence that Iraq had embarked on massive programs aimed at developing biological and chemical weapons. After the end of that war, UNSCOM inspections uncovered solid evidence that Iraq was close to possessing a nuclear device when it invaded Kuwait. The Gulf War’s air campaign and the inspections that followed set Iraq’s nuclear program back substantially—that much was known—but no one, including intelligence agencies, could be sure how far. The extent of Saddam’s biological and chemical weapons program was also unknown. Weighing heavily on the Bush administration was the fact that Saddam had already shown a willingness to use chemical and biological weapons against his internal and external enemies: Kurdish citizens and Iranian soldiers. Moreover, Saddam had stated in innumerable speeches that he would not hesitate to use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against Israel, if the opportunity arose. Most threatening, perhaps, was the prospect that, as a rogue state, Iraq seemed capable of passing nuclear or biological devices to terrorists to use against the United States.
The intelligence regarding Saddam’s WMD program in the period immediately before the launching of military operations was ambiguous—as intelligence always is in an uncertain and unpredictable world. Intelligence analysts were likely misled by a predisposition to interpret the bits and pieces of information that filtered out from Iraq in accordance with Iraq’s past behavior, and in a way that would obscure their own previous failures. After all, prior to the Gulf War, Iraq had one of the most ambitious programs in the world to develop nuclear weapons, and yet the American intelligence community had failed to discover it. In late 2002, Saddam’s penchant for secrecy did his regime an enormous disservice. By providing such grudging and inadequate support for Hans Blix’s U.N. weapons inspectors, Saddam signaled that he had something dangerous to hide. This behavior cleared the road for Bush and Blair to launch a preemptive invasion, ostensibly to prevent the use of those presumed weapons, even without U.N. support.
The intelligence community was not the only group predisposed to believe that a WMD program was under way in Iraq. The military was persuaded as well. The stringent protection measures that the Coalition enforced on their troops is strong evidence that military leaders themselves expected chemical or biological attack.
A major factor for the Bush administration in the summer of 2002 was the disarray of international sanctions against Iraq. Clearly, the United Nations was not going to abide the continuation of sanctions for much longer, and a number of opportunistic nations were already drumming up business for their products, which Iraq would have the money to buy from its enormous petroleum sales. Saddam had already signed a huge contract at unfavorable terms with French construction firms to revamp his antiquated oil infrastructure. The long-range prospect of rearmament must have worried policy makers in Washington even more than fears that the Iraqis actually possessed and would use weapons of mass destruction in the near term. As MacGregor Knox, Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, pointed out in June 2003: ‘“Regime change’ in Iraq seemed imperative not because Saddam necessarily still had weapons of mass destruction—although the Coalition, judging by the rubber suits the troops initially wore, genuinely feared that he did—but because his continuance in power and his oil wealth guaranteed that he would have them again if he survived.”8
Moreover, there was also an undertow of feeling in Washington that the foreign policy of the Clinton administration had projected an image of the United States as a paper tiger, unwilling to use force even when its citizens and their vital interests were at stake. To many detractors and enemies around the globe, the United States appeared incapable of risking the lives of its troops to defeat a rogue state like Iraq. In the post-September 11 world, as the Bush administration understood, an international reputation for weakness could prove to be extremely dangerous. The destruction of Saddam’s regime in a short, swift military campaign offered the chance to warn others that the United States’ interests could be threatened only at terrible cost to the aggressors.
Policy makers in the Bush administration probably hoped to establish as strong a coalition as the one the president’s father had put together in 1991. That desire contributed to the decision to go through the difficult processes of diplomacy in the United Nations. The result was a serious deterioration in U.S. relations with Germany and France. The German antiwar reaction should not have surprised American observers. The deeply ingrained pacifism of German society today represents the success of U.S. efforts after World War II to alter the mindset that had made the Reich such a disaster for Europe and the world in the first half of the twentieth century.
French attitudes were also consistent with that nation’s past performance in doing business with Saddam. It was the French who justified their decision in the early 1980s to supply Iraq with technology to build a nuclear weapon by arguing that the Israelis already possessed one. With the lifting of sanctions, huge profits would be made in Iraq, should Saddam survive to reward his friends, and French businesses were already in the queue. Ironically, the obduracy of Chirac’s position in early 2003 that no evidence, no matter how compelling, could convince France to support a war against Iraq played a major role in swinging British public opinion behind the Blair government in its support of the Americans.
Britain’s decision to align itself with the United States reflected a number of concerns. One was the worry that Iraq would use WMD on its neighbors and enemies, and, more important, that it would return seriously to the business of producing these weapons once it was free from trade restrictions. But a more subtle motive underlay Blair’s strong support of the United States. For the past six decades British governments had performed a delicate balancing act between deeper participation in the affairs of the Continent and maintenance of the special relationship with the United States. As a senior British general suggested to the authors, a failure to support the American initiative in Iraq would inevitably have upset that balance, and Britain would have fallen into just the sort of entanglement with Europe that it had been careful to avoid.
By early January 2003 the date for war had been pinned to the wall. American and British military power was flowing with increasing speed to the Gulf. The United States aimed to make an example out of Saddam’s regime, for better or worse. Ironically, only Saddam and his followers appeared to miss the warning signs of the gathering storm. They might have wriggled out at the last moment by wholehearted cooperation with the weapons inspectors. They did not. Consequently, the United States was able to serve up Saddam’s regime as a salient warning to those who would dare to attack America’s vital interests anywhere on the globe. But in Iraq, as history has repeatedly shown, victory always seems to entail more than just military success.

[Julester]

Interesting reading Angela--THANKS!

But I can guarantee you that some of our friends on the "left" would almost say that it was hogwash and a great big conspiracy theory!

Julie

[robine]

Great read...I am sorry to see your time limited, but thrilled at this opportunity to advance..

[BC-Tracik]

You will be missed here... pop in when you can and let us know how you are doing.

Have fun with your studying, ok I know easier said then done, But learning is always a good thing.

[Maddy00]

Hey Angela,

I feel for you dear! Andy started the same course while in Korea. He finished shortly after coming back home and boy is he GLAD that's behind him! Hang in there...I know some of the tests are easier than others. Good luck and hope to see you more than you think!

[Natalie Rose]

Angela, you will be missed. Promise you'll check in with us?

P.S. I enjoyed reading your article.

[BC-Maura]

I'll miss you too! Have fun with the books!

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Maura