Pakettiratkaisu

Tässä edellä mainitsemani SSI:n selvityksen laatijan
yhteenveto:

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorist attacks
on the United States, the U.S. Government declared a global war on
terrorism (GWOT). The nature and parameters of that war, however,
remain frustratingly unclear. The administration has postulated a
multiplicity of enemies, including rogue states; weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) proliferators; terrorist organizations of global,
regional, and national scope; and terrorism itself. It also seems to
have conflated them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has
subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in
foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of
open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and nonstate entities
that pose no serious threat to the United States.

Of particular concern has been the conflation of al-Qaeda and
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat.
This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored
critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and
susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has
been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred
Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic
terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing
the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable
al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the GWOT, but
rather a detour from it.

Additionally, most of the GWOT’s declared objectives, which
include the destruction of al-Qaeda and other transnational terrorist
organizations, the transformation of Iraq into a prosperous, stable
democracy, the democratization of the rest of the autocratic Middle
East, the eradication of terrorism as a means of irregular warfare,
and the (forcible, if necessary) termination of WMD proliferation to
real and potential enemies worldwide, are unrealistic and condemn
the United States to a hopeless quest for absolute security. As
such, the GWOT’s goals are also politically, fiscally, and militarily
unsustainable.

Accordingly, the GWOT must be recalibrated to conform to
concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American power.
The specific measures required include deconflation of the threat;
substitution of credible deterrence for preventive war as the primary
vehicle for dealing with rogue states seeking WMD; refocus of the
GWOT first and foremost on al-Qaeda, its allies, and homeland
security; preparation to settle in Iraq for stability over democracy (if
the choice is forced upon us) and for international rather than U.S.
responsibility for Iraq’s future; and finally, a reassessment of U.S.
military force levels, especially ground force levels.

The GWOT as it has so far been defined and conducted is
strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver,
and threatens to dissipate scarce U.S. military and other means over
too many ends. It violates the fundamental strategic principles of
discrimination and concentration.