Section II: The Lamppost Problem — Fighting Where You Can, Not Where You Should
- john raymond
- Jul 3
- 3 min read
There’s an old parable about a drunkard who loses his keys at night and chooses to look for them beneath a streetlamp—not because that’s where they were lost, but because that’s where the light is better.
The metaphor is simple, but devastating: we search not where we should, but where we can see.
In this section, we use this parable to understand how the United States, in the aftermath of 9/11, initiated a war in Iraq not because Iraq had attacked us, but because it was easier to find, to bomb, and to show on television.
Al-Qaeda vs. Iraq: The Light and the Darkness
Al-Qaeda was the real enemy—an amorphous, decentralized network, embedded in failing states, hidden in safe houses, speaking in code and striking through proxies. Targeting them required patience, subtlety, and an evolved understanding of modern warfare. It required fighting in the dark.
But Iraq was lit up. It had borders, a dictator, parade routes, bunkers, palaces, and oil. It had a past history of conflict. It had a capital we could bomb and a regime we could topple on prime time. So America, manipulated by the Bush administration, shifted its focus from asymmetric threat to conventional target. We fought where we could, not where we should.
Fighting Meaningless Symbols, Not Threats
The Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq was not simply a strategic miscalculation. It was a deliberate act of asymmetric propaganda. They chose Iraq because they needed a visible villain.
They framed the war as a righteous response to 9/11, though Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the attacks. They constructed an "Axis of Evil" because the American mind had been trained to see war through the lens of sides and meaningless symbols.
And in doing so, they taught Americans a dangerous lesson: that simplicity equals truth, that visibility equals value, and that hitting something—anything—is better than being confused.
A Victory of Optics Over Outcomes
From a military standpoint, Iraq was a showpiece. The tanks rolled in. The statue fell. Mission accomplished.
But from a strategic standpoint, Iraq was a sinkhole. Al-Qaeda metastasized. ISIS was born in the chaos. American credibility collapsed globally. And the asymmetric threat that had actually attacked us grew stronger, more diffuse, and better funded.
Worse, we trained the American public to misread war. To equate explosions with progress. To mistake the glow of the streetlamp for illumination. To cheer for wins that made us strategically weaker.
Weaponizing Simplicity
Simplicity was the Bush regime’s most effective asymmetric weapon. It didn’t matter that the intelligence was bad, or that the WMDs weren’t real.
What mattered was that the narrative could be understood in five seconds and shouted from a podium. And like any good asymmetric actor, the administration used its own people as the audience for a disinformation campaign. It weaponized patriotism and fear. It reduced a planetary emergency to a slogan: "You’re either with us or against us."
The Damaging Legacy
This legacy of fighting where we can instead of where we must has crippled our capacity for strategic thinking. It lives on in how we fund defense. In how we discuss Ukraine. In how we imagine "enemies." And it set the stage for actors like Putin and Trump, who understand that perception, not truth, governs the battlefield of modern politics.
Putin, watching the Iraq war unfold, learned that lies could be more powerful than bombs. Trump, inheriting this broken strategic culture, simply turned it further inward—deploying the same asymmetric techniques against democracy itself.
So we must ask: What other enemies are we failing to see, simply because the streetlamp isn't shining on them?
And more urgently: Are we still letting useless "light" dictate our aim?
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