Four Years On:
Who is Winning the War, and How Can Anyone Tell?

'By George Friedman

Four years have passed since al Qaeda
attacked the United States. It is difficult to remember a war of which the
status has been more difficult to assess. Indeed, there are reasonable
people who argue that the conflict between the United States and al Qaeda is
not a war at all, and that thinking of it in those terms obscures reality.
Other reasonable people argue that it is only in thinking in terms of war
that the conflict makes sense -- and these people then divide into groups:
those who believe the United States is winning and those who believe it is
losing the war. Into this confusion we must add the question of whether the
Iraq war is part of what U.S. President George W. Bush refers to as the "war
on terrorism" and what others might call the war against al Qaeda. Even the
issues are not clear. It is a war in which no one can agree even on the
criteria for success or failure, or at times, who is on what
side.

Part of this dilemma is simply the result of partisan politics.
It is a myth that Americans unite in times of war: Anyone who believes they
do must read the history of, for example, the Mexican War. Americans are a
fractious people and, while they were united during World War II, the
political recriminations were only delayed -- not suspended. The issue here
is not partisanship, however, but rather that there is no clear framework
against which to judge the current war.

Let us begin with what we all
-- save for those who believe that the Sept. 11 attacks were a plot hatched
by the U.S. government to justify the Patriot Act -- can agree on:

1.
Al Qaeda attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, by hijacking aircraft
and crashing or trying to crash them into well-known buildings.
2. Since
Sept. 11, there have been al Qaeda attacks in Europe and several Muslim
countries, but not in the United States.
3. The United States invaded
Afghanistan a month after the strikes against the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon -- forcing the Taliban government out of the major cities, but not
defeating them. The United States has failed to capture Osama bin Laden,
although it captured other key al Qaeda operatives. The Taliban has
regrouped and is now conducting an insurgency in Afghanistan.
4. The
United States invaded Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration claimed that
this was part of the war against al Qaeda; critics have claimed it had
nothing to do with the war.
5. The United States failed to win the war
rapidly, as it had expected to do. Instead, U.S. forces encountered a
difficult guerrilla war that, while confined generally to the Sunni regions,
nevertheless posed serious military and political challenges.
6. Al Qaeda
has failed to achieve its primary political goal -- that is, to trigger an
uprising in at least one major Muslim country and create a jihadist regime.
There has been no general rising in the Muslim world, and most governments
are now cooperating with the United States.
7. There have been no
follow-on attacks in the United States since Sept. 11. Whether this is
because al Qaeda had no plans for a second attack or because subsequent
attacks were disrupted by U.S. intelligence is not clear.

This is not
intended to be an exhaustive list, but rather to provide what we would regard
as a non-controversial base from which to proceed with an
assessment.

From the beginning, then, it has been unclear whether the
United States saw itself as fighting a war against al Qaeda or as carrying
out a criminal investigation. The two are, of course, enormously different.
This is a critical problem.

The administration's use of the term
"war on terrorism" began the confusion. Terrorism is a mode of warfare. Save
for those instances when lunatics like Timothy McVeigh use it as an end in
itself, terrorism is a method of intimidating the civilian population in
order to drive a wedge between the public and their government. Al Qaeda,
then, had a political purpose in using terrorism, as did the British in
their nighttime bombing of Germany or the Germans in their air raids against
London. The problem in the Bush administration's use of this term is that you
do not wage a war against a method of warfare. A war is waged against an
enemy force.

Now, there are those who argue that war is something
that takes place between nation-states and that al Qaeda, not being a
nation-state, is not waging war. We tend to disagree with this view. Al
Qaeda is not a nation-state, but it is (or has been) a coherent, disciplined
force using violence for political ends. The United States, by focusing on
the "war on terror," confused the issue endlessly. But the critics of the
war, who insisted that wartime measures were unnecessary because this was
not a war, compounded the confusion. By the time we were done, the "war on
terror" had extended itself to include campaigns against animal rights
groups, and attempts to prevent terror attacks were seen as violations of
human rights by the ACLU.

It is odd to raise these points at the
beginning of an analysis of a war, but no war can be fought when there isn't
even clarity about what it is you are doing, let alone who you are fighting.
Yet that is precisely how this war evolved, and then degenerated into
conceptual chaos. The whole issue also got bound up with internal
name-calling, to the point that any assertion that Bush had some idea of
what he was doing was seen as outrageous partisanship, and the assertion
that Bush was failing in what he was doing was viewed the same way. Where
there is no clarity, there can be no criteria for success or failure. That
is the crisis today. No one agrees as to what is happening; therefore, no
one can explain who is winning or losing.

Out of this situation came
the deeper confusion: Iraq. From the beginning, it was not clear why the
United States invaded Iraq. The Bush administration offered three
explanations: First, that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq;
second, that Iraq was complicit with al Qaeda; and finally, that a
democratic Iraq -- and creation of a democratic Muslim world -- would help
to stop terrorism (or more precisely, al Qaeda).

The three
explanations were untenable on their face. Contrary to myth, the Bush
administration did not rush to go to war in Iraq. The administration had
been talking about it for nearly a year before the invasion began. That
would not have been the case if there truly was a fear that the Iraqis might
be capable of building atomic bombs, since they might hurry up and build
them. You don't give a heads-up in that situation. The United States did.
Hence, it wasn't about WMD. Second, it wasn't about Iraq's terrorist ties.
Saddam Hussein had no problem with the concept of terrorism, but he was an
ideological enemy of everything bin Laden stood for. Hussein was a secular
militarist; bin Laden, a religious ideologue. Cooperation between them
wasn't likely, and pointing to obscure meetings that Mohammed Atta may or
may not have had with an Iraqi in Prague didn't make the case. Finally, the
democracy explanation came late in the game. Bush had campaigned against
nation-building in places like Kosovo -- and if he now believed in
nation-building as a justification for war, it meant he stood with Bill
Clinton. He dodged that criticism, though, because the media couldn't
remember Kosovo or spell it any more by the time Iraq rolled
around.

Bush's enemies argued that he invaded Iraq in order to (a)
avenge the fact that Hussein had tried to kill his father; (b) as part of a
long-term strategy planned years before to dominate the Middle East; (c) to
dominate all of the oil in Iraq; (d) because he was a bad man or (e) just
because. The fact was that his critics had no idea why he did it and
generated fantastic theories because they couldn't figure it out any more
than Bush could explain it.

Stratfor readers know our view was that
the invasion of Iraq was intended to serve three purposes:

1. To
bring pressure on the Saudi government, which was allowing Saudis to funnel
money to al Qaeda, to halt this enablement and to cooperate with U.S.
intelligence. The presence of U.S. troops to the north of Saudi Arabia was
intended to drive home the seriousness of the situation.
2. To take
control of the most strategic country in the Middle East -- Iraq borders
seven critical countries -- and to use it as a base of operations against
other countries that were cooperating with al Qaeda.
3. To demonstrate in
the Muslim world that the American reputation for weakness and indecisiveness
-- well-earned in the two decades prior to the Sept. 11 attacks -- was no
longer valid. The United States was aware that the invasion of Iraq would
enrage the Muslim world, but banked on it also frightening
them.

Let's put it this way: The key to understanding the situation
was that Bush wanted to blackmail the Saudis, use Iraq as a military base
and terrify Muslims. He wanted to do this, but he did not want to admit this
was what he was doing. He therefore provided implausible justifications,
operating under the theory that a rapid victory brushes aside troubling
questions. Clinton had gotten out of Kosovo without explaining why signs of
genocide were never found, because the war was over quickly and everyone was
sick of it. Bush figured he would do the same thing in Iraq.

It was
precisely at this point that the situation got out of control. The biggest
intelligence failure of the United States was not 9-11 -- only Monday
morning quarterbacks can claim that they would have spotted al Qaeda's plot
and been able to block it. Nor was the failure to find WMD in Iraq. Not only
was that not the point, but actually, everyone was certain that Hussein at
least had chemical weapons. Even the French believed he did. The biggest
mistake was the intelligence that said that the Iraqis wouldnÕt fight, that
U.S. forces would be welcomed or at least not greeted hostilely by the Iraqi
public, and that the end of the conventional combat would end the
war.

That was the really significant intelligence failure. Hussein,
or at least some of his key commanders, had prepared for a protracted
guerrilla war. They knew perfectly well that the United States would crush
their conventional forces, so they created the material and financial basis
for a protracted guerrilla war. U.S. intelligence did not see this coming,
and thus had not prepared the U.S. force for fighting the guerrilla war.
Indeed, if they had known this was coming, Bush might well have calculated
differently on invading Iraq -- since he wasnÕt going to get the decisive
victory he needed.

The intelligence failure was compounded by a
command failure. By mid-April 2003, it was evident to Stratfor that a
guerrilla
war was starting. Donald Rumsfeld continued vigorously to deny that any such war was
going on. It was not until July, when Gen. Tommy Franks was relieved by John
Abizaid as Central Command chief, that the United States admitted the
obvious. Those were the 45-60 critical days. Intelligence failures worse
than this one happen in every war, but the delay in recognizing what was
happening -- the extended denial in the Pentagon -- eliminated any chance of
nipping it in the bud. By the summer of 2003, the war was raging, and foreign
jihadists had begun joining in. Obviously this increased anti-American
sentiment, but not necessarily effective anti-American sentiment. Hating the
United States is not the same as being able to run secure covert operations
in the United States.

The war did not and does not cover most of
Iraq's territory. Only a relatively small portion is involved -- the Sunni
regions. At this point, the administration has done a fairly good job in
creating a political process and bringing the Sunni elders to the table, if
not to an agreement that will end the insurgency. But the problem is that
American expectations about the war have been so strangely set that whatever
esoteric satisfaction experts might take in the evolution, it is clear that
this war is not what the Bush administration expected, that it is not what
the administration was prepared to fight, and that the administration is now
in a position where it has to make compromises rather than impose its
will.

We believe that a war started on Sept. 11, 2001. We believe
that from a strictly operational point of view, al Qaeda has gotten by far
the worst of it. Having struck the first blow, al Qaeda has been crippled,
with each succeeding attack weaker and weaker. We also think that the U.S.
invasion of Iraq achieved at least one of Washington's goals: Saudi Arabia
has behaved much differently since February 2003. But the ongoing war has
undermined the ability of the United States to use Iraq as a base of
operations in the region, and the psychological outcome Washington was
hoping for obviously didn't materialize.

What progress there has been
is invisible, for two reasons. First, the Bush administration had crafted an
explanation for the entire war that was based on two premises -- first, that
the American public would remain united on all measures necessary after Sept.
11, and second, that the United States would achieve a quick victory in Iraq,
sparing the administration the need to explain itself. As a result, Bush has
never articulated a coherent strategic position. Furthermore, as the second
premise proved untrue, the failure to enunciate a coherent strategic vision
began to undermine the first premise -- national unity. At this point, Bush
is beginning to face criticism in his own party. Sen. Chuck Hagel's
statement, that the promise to stay the course does not constitute a
strategy, is indicative of Bush's major problem.

The president's
dilemma, now, is this. He had a strategy. He failed to explain what it was
because doing so would have carried a cost, and the president assumed it was
unnecessary. It turned out to be necessary, but he still didn't enunciate a
strategy because it would at that point have appeared contrived. Moreover,
as time went on, the strategy had to evolve. It is hard to evolve an
unarticulated strategy. Bush rigidified publicly even as his strategy in
Iraq became more nimble.

Figuring out how the war is going four years
after 9-11, then, is like a nightmare fighting ghosts. The preposterous
defense of U.S. strategy meets the preposterous attack on U.S. strategy:
Claims that the United States invaded Iraq to bring democracy to the people
competes with the idea that it invaded in order to give contracts to
Halliburton. Nothing is too preposterous to claim.

But even as U.S.
politics seize up in one of these periodic spasms, these facts are still
clear:

1. The United States has not been attacked in four
years.
2. No Muslim government has fallen to supporters of al
Qaeda.
3. The United States won in neither Iraq or Afghanistan.
4. Bin
Laden is still free and ready to go extra rounds.

So far, neither side
has won -- but on the whole, weÕd say the United States has the edge. The war
is being fought outside the United States. And that is not a trivial point.
But it is not yet a solution to the president's problems.