The strategy is this: if nothing else, create total disorder and thereby prevent enemies from projecting force.
This strategy is only appropriate in a "total war" situation when you don't know or care what the political situation in the destroyed country will be. It's enough that they are destroyed because the military threat of an organized enemy is so much greater than the threat from political chaos. Indeed, the concern of disrupting and dispersing the enemy overrides all other concerns in such a scenario. No negotiation or settlement is on the horizon. There is no possiblity of engagement competing with the necessity of destroying the enemy's capacity to hurt you severely.
Obviously this wasn't true of the United States but I think so many neocons had their strategic thinking influenced by Israel that they adopted, in effect, an aggressive ISRAELI foreign policy for Iraq.
But Isreal is also a very small nation that anticipates always having vastly more than enough stable, peaceful trading partners. The U.S. is an empire which must pacify and organize smaller trading partners. So the Iraq strategy was always a nightmare and a mistake because it put the United States in the role of a weak "citadel" surrounded by permanently hostile enemies, rather than as the leader of an empire.
The Kurdish guerilla groups are the best stewards of government in Iraq, currently. Now I like the Kurds and I am sympathetic with them, but that is a nightmare scenario. The Peshmerga are not exactly the Swedish parliament and it's incredible to think about the savages that are coming to dominate the rest of Iraq. As we've seen in Africa and Afghanistan, intense disorder seems to lead to a devolving of society into neo-feudal warlordism.
Under feudalism, people had to spend so much time hoeing raking and plowing just to eat that the land sort of dictated a basic social order. Also, the technology of weapons was so bad that no small group could make themselves ungovernable. Eventually, they were going to have to work the land to eat and eventually an organized force could dominate them.
These days, the Kalshnikov, RPG, explosives and simple electronics give small bands of people the capacity to be almost ungovernable at very low cost. If all you want is to do damage and plunder what you can from chaos, you can do that for a long while. It takes deliberate social organization at the grassroots level to deal with that kind of technology.
And that's why in the medium to long term the strategy of chaos is inevitably a failure for modern capitalist states. They need peace and stability to make money. Capitalism, like all parasites, requires a healthy host. And there is nowhere new for global capitalism to go. The only option is to increase the size of the peaceful population from which you can draw a profit.
To some people on this list, that seems to mean that any resistance is good resistance. Atheists and socialists have somehow been drawn into almost praising groups like the Shiite "Army of God" for their efforts at ungovernability. That is really worse than nihilism. Would you really pick the most useless, reactionary, superstitious barbarians simply because they aren't Citibank?
When these groups come to dominate a society it is because the ruling order has failed and left people to the whims of savages. When second-rate, stupid, violent, capitalist puppet dictators would be a step UP for a country, the system has failed and failed badly.
The lesson of Iraq SHOULD BE that capitalism can no longer engage in the strategy of chaos because capitalism is a dependent, parasitic social structure which feeds on the mostly good, usually peaceful, and basically socialist-minded host it has unwittingly created in modern civil society and orderly world trade. That capitalism itself cannot afford to smash things like a child is an important, sobering lesson. Bush won't learn it, but there are those who are taking it to heart.
David Brooks said of the Republicans "they have no theory of governance" and blamed their domestic - and implicity their foreign - policy failures on that fact. The fantasy that a combination of anarcho-capitalism, religion and violence (in that order) can run society is ending. Milton Friedman is dead.
But I'd take Friedman over the Islamist maniacs any day. People like Friedman and Brooks may be foolishly naive in their hope that religion on ethics can be a taming force on capitalism that will imbue it with sympathy and empathy. That's a large but innocent mistake compared to hacking off someone's head with a knife while shouting "God Is Great! God Is Great! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!". I'd rather have capitalism than medieval-style religious violence.
boddi