http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20060831-033649-4306rWASHINGTON, Aug. 31 (UPI) -- As the U.S. president and defense secretary try to shore up support for the Iraq war with a series of tough speeches, a professor at a U.S. military graduate school argues the United States is politically, militarily and culturally ill suited to fight and win insurgent wars, beginning with Iraq, but extending to much of what America will face in the long war on terrorism.
Jeffrey Record is a professor in the Department of Strategy and International Security at the U.S. Air Force's Air War College in Montgomery, Ala., has written extensively on the U.S. military, and served as assistant province adviser in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War.
In a forthcoming paper for the libertarian Cato Institute, Record says the attributes that have made the U.S. military the premier conventional force are the same ones that prevent it from being effective against an insurgent enemy.
"Counter-insurgency and imperial policing operations demand forbearance, personnel continuity, foreign language skills, cultural understanding, historical knowledge, minimal employment of force, and robust interagency involvement and cooperation," he writes. "None of these are virtues of American statecraft and warmaking. Americans view war as a suspension of politics; they want to believe that the politics of war will somehow sort themselves out once military victory is achieved."
Post-war Iraq is an example of those very weaknesses, he said.
"I'm not sure we are in the mess we are in because faulty execution," he said. "It was doomed from the beginning, one can argue.
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