I should not badmouth Stratfor. Granted, their star has dimmed a tad in the last few years, but they email me news articles every day or two gratis so who am I to quibble.
I especially love the cozy, your one of us, insider tone of the articles. It may be ridiculous, but who cares? It’s fun for the space of a few hundred words to pretend you’re a select recipient of special intelligence.
So when I received George Friedman’s The United States Has Unfinished Business in Ukraine and Iraq I read it, because who does not want to know what it is we need to finish so we can be done. Mr. Friedman is Stratfor’s founder, so if anybody there would know, it should be him. Unfortunately, his missive was a disappointment.
The title is not accurate. Mr. Friedman is not suggesting we finish up a few tasks and move on. Rather, he is saying we should do less, but do it smarter, forever. A departure from the usual neocon ethos of do more and do it stupider. Unfortunately, doing anything is doing too much, but then again, we’re all Bourbons now in what we learn and forget.
So, do we have a precedent for losing a war the "smart" way? We sure do. It’s called Viet Nam. We put the word "smart" in quotes because nobody ever planned to lose our ten-year South East Asian field-training exercise and genius would have been to have never fought it in the first place.