This is the fifth in a series. The bulleted points below are culled from many sources. They are compiled to show how much information on an issue is available to those who are seeking it.
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To solve the mystery of the Iraq War you have to explain how a brilliantly executed invasion turned into a messy counterinsurgency struggle. Part of the explanation, at least, is a lack of troops, a fault for which the Defense Department has been responsible. The former policy had its roots in the desire of Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, to wean the Army away from its decades of indulgence, when it routinely planned to win conflicts by confronting enemies with mass–masses of soldiers, masses of equipment (particularly tanks and armored vehicles) and masses of ground-attack aircraft.
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America rarely has the good fortune of fighting wars that go as planned and finish quickly. Most of our wars have been terrible and bloody. They’ve also been riddled with mistakes made by both military and civilian leaders.
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Many people think there was no plan for dealing with Iraq after the over-throw of Saddam Hussein. The fact is the Bush Administration had a plan to stabilize the country afterwards. It assumed a decisive defeat and elimination of enemy forces, not a three-week war in which the majority of Baathists and their terrorist allies fled into the shadows to await a more opportune time to reemerge, under quite different rules of engagement.
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Of course, the critics looked right because America hardly seemed to be winning the war in Iraq. But even here the critics are too smug. We have not won the war in Iraq because of something completely unforeseeable: widespread massacres of Iraqi civilians by other Iraqis and Muslims. We have never seen mass murder of fellow citizens in order to remove an outside occupier. No Japanese blew up Japanese temples in order to rid Japan of the American occupier. No Germans mass murdered German schoolchildren and teachers to rid Germany of the American, British, French and Soviet occupiers.
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The level of cruelty and evil exhibited by the enemy America is fighting in Iraq is new. Had Iraq followed any precedent in all the annals of resistance to occupation, America would likely have been victorious in Iraq. If one is morally bound not to kill large numbers of civilians, it may not be possible to fight those who target their own civilians and hide among them.
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The most common cliché about the war in Iraq is now this: We didn’t have a plan, and now everything is in chaos; we didn’t have a plan, and now we can’t win. This is entirely wrong. We did have a plan – the problem is that the plan didn’t work. And of course we can win – we just have to choose to do so.
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We thought a political process inside Iraq would make a military push toward victory unnecessary against a tripartite foe – Saddamist remnants, foreign terrorists and anti-American Shiites.
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Yes, we’d stay in Iraq and fight the bad guys when we had to, which seemed mostly to be when they decided to attack us first. Our resolve was intended to give the Iraqi people the sense that they were being given control of their future, and to give Iraqi politicians the sense that they had a chance to forge a new kind of country in which everybody could prosper.
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For this reason, we relented on several occasions when we had a chance to score a major victory over the bad guys. Because politics was more important than military victory, because playing the game was more important than killing the enemy, we chose to lose.
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After the beheading of Americans in Fallujah, we had the city surrounded – but, because it seemed an attack on Fallujah would be problematic for Iraqi politics, we pulled back. We had the Shiite monster Moqtada al-Sadr in our sights as well, but let him go as well for fear Iraq’s leading Shiite cleric would turn on us.
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Each of these decisions seemed prudent at the time. In retrospect, they seem disastrous. Our failure to take Fallujah after the deaths of Americans gave the enemy the sense that we were weak. Our failure to kill Sadr has led to a situation in which he has excessive power over the elected government.
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Still, the theory of how to prevail in Iraq made sense as a theory. What, after all, were the Saddamists and the terrorists fighting for? Clearly there would be no restoration of Saddam’s cruel reign, and they couldn’t score a battlefield victory against us. That’s why Dick Cheney and others referred to them as “dead-enders” – because they were and are dead-enders. They had no achievable goal for securing power in Iraq.
- Rumsfeld believed that in a counterinsurgency (cf. Vietnam 1965-71) –
- massive deployments only ensure complacency,
- breed dependency,
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and create resentment.
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In contrast, training indigenous forces, ensuring political autonomy, and providing air and commando support (e.g., Vietnam circa 1972-4) is the only answer.
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That is a long process, though, that can work only if political support at home allows the military to finish the job (cf. the turn-of-the-century Philippines, and the British in Malaysia).
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Iraq was a province of an Ottoman empire steeped in backwardness and ignorance. A half a century later, the British began an occupation of Iraq and drew the borders of contemporary Iraq as we know them today. Independence brought no relief to the people of Iraq.
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Under the Baath tyranny, Iraqis were to endure a brutal regime the likes of which they had never known before. Countless people were put to death on the smallest measure of suspicion.
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Wars were waged by that regime and the Iraqi national treasure was squandered without the consent of a population that was herded into costly and brutal military campaigns.
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Mr. Rumsfeld disliked the concept of mass because it carried huge financial costs but also because it locked the Army into a style of war-making that sought victory through firepower rather than through speedy maneuver. He had supporters in the civilian side of the Pentagon, notably his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and a man the rank below, Douglas Feith. Both also wanted to slim the Army down.
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The result of their efforts to do so led to the expeditionary force sent to Iraq in 2003 being considerably weaker than that which had fought the Gulf War of 1991. The initial outcome, though, was similar: the rapid collapse of Iraqi resistance at only slight cost in American lives, a result that seemed to justify Mr. Rumsfeld’s force policies and his belief that “speed kills.”
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For several months the second Iraq War seemed a triumph. Then the American army of occupation, whose continuing presence was dedicated to the political transformation of the country, began to come under low-grade attack by Iraqi guerrillas. American soldiers began to die, and attempts to create a successor regime, organized on democratic principles, failed to take root. Political instability was accompanied by rising military difficulty, until by 2005 a full-scale insurgency was in swing, with dozens of American soldiers dying every month and the numbers of insurgents growing proportionately.
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Those who blame America for the “civil war” that broke out in Iraq ignore both the demonstrated power of fanatical minorities and the ancient ethno-religious enmities that were constrained but not crushed during the decades Iraq was under Saddam Hussein’s jackboot.
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It would have been wonderful had Iraqis spontaneously organized their own defense. But is it so astonishing that they did not? Longtime observers of Iraq “completely miscalculated the impact of 30 years of violent, brutal repression on the Iraqi people and their willingness, in President Bush’s phrase, ‘to stand up’ for themselves, to take authority, to take risks.
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There is a small but extremely violent segment of the population determined to deny citizens any semblance of a normal life. It’s clear that the reason morale and support for their mission is high among American troops is that they see firsthand the human face of longing for a better life.
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If you stipulate that everything people allege was a mistake in Iraq, even if you stipulate that they all were actually mistakes rather than judgment calls about which reasonable men could differ and could have had worse consequences if they’d gone the other way–even if you stipulate that all the critics are right, these ‘mistakes’ are chump change compared to the mistakes that were made during World War II by great leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt, and the lives that were squandered, thousands and thousands of lives uselessly squandered.
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But even with these mistakes, this country was indispensable in defeating the two great totalitarian threats of the 20th century. It was this despised bourgeois civilization that turned out to be the one bulwark against those monstrous enemies of humanity. I feel the same way today about Islamofascism.
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Norman Podhoretz is not dismissive of the costs the U.S. has incurred. But better, he argues, to endure these convulsions than the previous arrangements. “We’ve paid an extraordinarily small price by any reasonable historical standard for a huge accomplishment,” he says. “It’s unseemly to be constantly whining.” “They’ve declared defeat, basically. What can I say? I think they’re wrong. I think Iraq has gone not badly but well, is not a disaster or a crime or a delusion, but what’s more is a noble, necessary effort.”
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Many politicians and pundits in Washington have ignored perhaps the most important point made by Gen. David Petraeus in his recent congressional testimony: The defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq requires a combination of conventional forces, special forces and local forces. This realization has profound implications not only for American strategy in Iraq, but also for the future of the war on terror.
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As General Petraeus made clear, the adoption of a true counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq in January 2007 has led to unprecedented progress in the struggle against al Qaeda in Iraq, by protecting Sunni Arabs who reject the terrorists among them from the vicious retribution of those terrorists. In his address to the United Nations General Assembly Wednesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki also touted the effectiveness of this strategy while at the same time warning of al Qaeda continued threat to his government in Iraq and indeed the entire region.
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Yet despite the undeniable successes the new strategy has achieved against al Qaeda in Iraq, many in Congress are still pushing to change the mission of U.S. forces back to a counterterrorism role relying on special forces and precision munitions to conduct targeted attacks on terrorist leaders. This change would bring us back to the traditional, consensus strategy for dealing with cellular terrorist groups like al Qaeda–a strategy that has consistently failed in Iraq.
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Precision-guided munitions and special forces have been touted as the ideal weapons against this sort of group, because they require a minimal presence on the ground and therefore do not create the image of American invasion or occupation of a Muslim country. This accepted strategy of fighting cellular terrorist organizations has failed in Iraq for four years–skilled U.S. special-forces teams killed a succession of al Qaeda leaders in Iraq, but the organization was able to replace them faster than we could kill them.
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A counterterrorism strategy that did not secure the population from terrorist attacks led to consistent increases in terrorist violence and exposed Sunni leaders disenchanted with the terrorists to brutal death whenever they tried to resist.
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It emerged that “winning the hearts and minds” of the local population is not enough when the terrorists are able to torture and kill anyone who tries to stand up against them.
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Despite an extremely aggressive counterterrorism campaign, by the end of 2006, al Qaeda in Iraq had heavily fortified strongholds equipped with media centers, torture chambers, weapons depots and training areas throughout Anbar province; in Baghdad; in Baqubah and other parts of Diyala province; in Arab Jabour and other villages south of Baghdad; and in various parts of Salah-ad-Din province north of the capital. Al Qaeda in Iraq was blending with the Sunni Arab insurgency in a relationship of mutual support.
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It was able to conduct scores of devastating, spectacular attacks against Shiite and other targets. Killing al Qaeda leaders in targeted raids had failed utterly either to prevent al Qaeda from establishing safe havens throughout Iraq or to control the terrorist violence.
