Newswise — As the one-year anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq approaches Friday, a scholar of blunders by U.S. presidents says the failure of intelligence to know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction was "real, but incidental to the strategic miscalculation" because the Bush administration wanted war with Iraq in any case.
The decision by America to go to war against Iraq "is the biggest strategic miscalculation by any presidential administration in my lifetime," says Dr. Samuel R. Williamson, president emeritus and professor of history at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. Dr. Williamson was author of "Miscalculation and International Crises," part of a Report to the President-Elect 2000 by the Center for the Study of the Presidency in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Williamson has identified five types of foreign policy gaffs made by U.S. administrations over the last half-century. He says most mistakes come early in a presidential administration, "while the new staff is still trying to find its way around." The types include:
1. Strategic: misreading of the international context; failure to anticipate some major structural change in the international environment.
2. Political: failure to calculate the international, domestic, bureaucratic, and organizational situations correctly, or even the rivalries among one's senior aides.
3. Organizational: failures to assess the details of implementation or to correct flaws when they emerge.
4. Ideological: failures in which preconceptions of reality lead to error.
5. Transitional: failures that come when a new government finds itself trapped by the plans or actions of its predecessor, or when the new bureaucracy and its leaders exploit the ignorance of a new Administration for their own needs.
The invasion of Iraq, he says, meets at least two of those criteria.
"It was a strategic mistake because it misplaced priorities away from more pressing military and foreign policy needs," he says. "It was an ideological miscalculation because of assumptions about other cultures and the transportability of democracy into a society with no experience in that form of government."
As a result, he says, the Bush administration now faces four choices.
"First, they must decide whether the July 1 deadline for turning over governance of Iraq to Iraqis is a good timeline. Will the US walk away and leave Iraq in good shape or a mess?
"Second, they must decide what resources to commit to Afghanistan--the military commitment there and the rebuilding of that nation.
"Next, they are faced with replacing the director of the CIA after investigating intelligence failures." He says that Republicans will blame intelligence failures on President Clinton but says that there is evidence that U.S. intelligence deteriorated under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, as well.
"Finally, they may have to extend the deadline for the 9-11 Commission to do its investigatory work into the seeds of the war against terrorism."
Dr. Williamson says the Bush administration "portrays itself as a band of hard-headed realists but acts like Woodrow Wilson," referring to the Democratic president who has been often characterized as a utopian dreamer. He believes the administration often makes mistakes in which its preconceptions of reality lead to error.
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