The Cause of the War in Iraq

The war in Iraq continues and President Bush and the Pentagon are nonplussed as to the degree, intensity and size of the opposition. What they don't understand is that a war of low intensity conflict - as this war is (LIC - Low-Intensity Conflict is where at least one side has no regular standing army but instead uses irregular forces drawn from the population or other sources to conduct limited but deadly strikes against their enemy), has no relation to military power. Rather, a war of this type is dependent upon ideology.

Although every war is based to some degree on ideology, a LIC form of war is primarily based on ideology. In the case of the war in Iraq, this ideology is religious in nature.

To quell the opposition in Iraq and prevent American troops and Iraqi citizens from dying, the American military and political leadership must understand the cause of this war. Ideology is the driving force, not military force, not size of the opposition, not the number of Muslims ready to die for their cause.

When 1 Muslim dies in a suicide bombing, this only encourages others to take his or her place. If a combatant Muslim is killed or captured before they have the chance to commit suicide, others will rise up to complete the mission left uncompleted.

This war cannot be won by number of dead. It cannot be won by capturing a region and then releasing that region back to the local populace. It cannot be won by generals or presidents throwing arms, equipment or someone's sons or daughters into the meatgrinder. It can be won by defusing the situation through understanding of the motive for war.

This war is based on a religious ideology. The enemy leadership feels threatened by the American presence, by Western values and a shift of power into the hands of the people and out of the hands of the religious leadership.

To win this war requires convincing the combatant Muslim leadership that continued hostile action on their part will be detrimental to their organization and create a disservice to their religion.

If we do not achieve these objectives, there is a possibility the war will grow, spreading around the world, with new strikes in Europe, the US and nations the enemy believes are providing the US with assistance. This could mean strikes in Japan or Australia which are Western in philosophy but have little or none in terms of military support in Iraq. They support the US by nature of their culture and it is this culture the enemy fears.

The enemy believes that the West has attacked their traditional values and so they are just defending in the only way they believe they can.

We must convince the enemy that their traditional values, their religion and their religious values and their culture will be preserved by the West. We do not seek to "Westernize" them, but rather to accept them into the world community as equals.

We must convince the enemy that their continued attacks do not serve them but rather only provoke us to greater action and greater incursion into their values. We must convince them that the more the enemy strikes out at the West, the more the West will harden its resolve to win this conflict at any cost. As the US sought "total victory" and "unconditional surrender" by the enemy after Pearl Harbor so also will we seek totality in this conflict, even if such a position is not true. We must only convince the enemy that it is what we believe. To win this conflict, the US must find a place that the combatant leadership can aspire to without conflict and this will take greater intelligence anaylsis on the part of the US and the western powers than has thus far been experienced.

We may seek to win on the battlefield, but that cannot occur until and unless we have killed or captured every individual who would make war against the US, (which could be millions), or forcing the entire population into camps or preserves where the whereabouts and activity of every individual is known and closely monitored or displacing every individual to a location where they can pose no threat to the West.

These are unlikely options and serve to highlight the obvious; this war probably cannot be won by conventional means - force against force, because force is merely an outbreak of a deeper condition. We must address that deeper condition to end this war, without doing so, the most likely probability is that this war will just go on and on.