Quote:
In deciding to invade Iraq, the Bush administration abandoned that logic. It used a legal rather than a strategic form of thinking, concluding that the establishment of guilt was sufficient. Once guilt was established, punishment proportionate to the guilt was applied. I contend that make sense for a domestic legal system, but not for strategy.
Feith, being a lawyer, fully adopted this position. He spends dozens of pages establishing that Saddam Hussein was a threat, and a few sentences on the costs and risks of addressing that threat by invasion and social re-engineering.
I believe--and I hammer this theme in my book--that this abandonment or distortion of the logic of strategy was made possible by the unusual post-September 11 psychological climate.
I think you are exactly right in pointing out the lack of solid strategic thinking on the part of the administration in the run-up to Iraq. My reasoning for that is that they did not really understand the nature of military power and what it can and cannot do, and hence they asked of it something alien to its nature, to loosely paraphrase Clausewitz. And, broadly speaking, the ideological belief in the power of freedom to solve all the problems of the Iraqi society definitely did not help whatever cost/benefit analysis it may have taken place.