Plan with fundamental flaws

On the way towards transforming the Middle East into a region more to their liking, Bush administration postwar Iraq strategists ran afoul of the Law of the Six Ps that, for those who don't know it, is: "Proper Planning Prevents Pitifully Poor Performance."

That is not my conclusion.

I surmised as much from a Washington Times story regarding "Operation Iraqi Freedom Strategic Lessons Learned," a classified report prepared last month for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The report, the Times said, claimed that a rushed war planning process short-circuited the time needed to focus on postwar operations, including the all-important search for weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, that critical finding will be of little consequence to the Pentagon's senior policy hotshots, who remain the toast of the town in Washington's conservative circles.

True, US forces have been subjected to a dozen attacks a day since President George W. Bush declared major combat to be over on May 1. And, yes, more than 145 troops have been killed since then. That's not counting the more than 1100 US wounded since the March invasion.

But don't hold your breath waiting for senior Pentagon officials to be held accountable for the ineffective postwar game plan. If anyone is going to be forced to walk the plank, it probably will be some poor bird colonel or harried civil servant. Meanwhile, senior administration national security officials will continue to wax lyrical about America's moral mission to bring democracy to the region.

Notion is fine

The notion of a democratic Middle East is fine. After all, given a choice between a society that honours freedom and a tyrannical government in which political dissent is stifled, the economy is controlled and respect for human rights is nonexistent, who wouldn't choose democracy?

But as with the administration's now debunked rose-coloured postwar Iraq scenario, it's fair to ask whether what the Bush administration calls its Middle East Transformation vision is based on hard-nosed analysis or wishful thinking.

Oh, I get the part about the people of the Middle East sharing "the desire for freedom", as National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I'm sure they do.

And I'm with her when it comes to finding ways to lift the fortunes of 22 Middle Eastern countries that have a combined population of 300 million but a combined gross domestic product less than that of Spain. What's more, I take a back seat to no one in the Bush administration in singing the praises of freedom and wishing it on everyone.

But when Bush and Rice start talking about how democracy and prosperity will dissuade people of the Middle East from buying into ideologies of hate, I have to ask for more evidence to support their assertion.

Was it the absence of freedom and fat wallets that led those men from the Middle East to fly passenger jets into the twin towers and the Pentagon? Those hijackers weren't politically oppressed, uneducated Islamists from the Arab street.

As Youssef Ibrahim, a former Middle East and energy correspondent for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal observed in a March 23 Post article, Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 mastermind, was an architect; Osama bin Laden is an engineer, and his number two, Ayman Zawahiri, was a successful physician.

And likewise, the men and women who are blowing themselves up and taking innocent people with them are not homeless, psychotic, former child stone throwers; today's suicide bombers can be found in the ranks of the Arab educated middle class.

Democracy, prosperity and economic freedom have boundless virtues. But are they guarantees against intolerance and hatred, particularly of the radical Islamic fundamentalism variety that fuels anti-West hostility?

We need look no further than our own history for examples of hatred trumping prosperity and freedom.

Henry Ford was financially independent and well-positioned to enjoy the benefits of American democratic institutions and human freedom.

Yet he nourished and spewed a particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism that reached far beyond his offices and bedroom.

More? This country produced generations of freedom-loving, self-governing people who profited mightily from American democracy, living lives far removed from tyranny and torture. But for centuries, they did not believe that other Americans of a darker hue deserved the same freedom they enjoyed. And because they represented the majority, their prejudices and racist ideologies were enshrined into law, thanks to the prosperous and free lawmakers they sent to state legislatures.

Better nature

It took more than hope and appeals to the better nature of folks to turn things around. Lawsuits, demonstrations, plenty of broken heads and bodies, and a muscular federal intervention with troops, civil rights statutes, and law enforcement were needed to break the back of segregation.

So when Rice tells the American Legion that the Bush administration believes "the transformation of the Middle East is the only guarantee that it will no longer produce ideologies of hatred", I hunger to learn more about how she and her colleagues know that.

Does the administration really believe that ending hopelessness and institutional neglect in the Middle East will stop the breeding of terrorists and suicide bombers? What about the fundamentalists who want nothing to do with our secular world and everything to do with establishing and maintaining an Islamist order?

Does the Bush administration view the Middle East Transformation as a dollars-and-cents challenge with constitutions, elections and free enterprise thrown in for good measure?

Or is the administration's grand Middle East vision up against something else, more central to the enmity that causes well-fed and educated people to fly planes into buildings and strap bombs around their waists: fundamentalism?

Is transformation of Arab countries out of the question? No. But it's not a notion to flirt with, either. The administration had better know what it's taking on ... and by all means, know what it's doing.

Remember the Law of the Six P's.