Wartime
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lessons_learned.pdf
Lessons Learned The Iraq Invasion
Andrew J. Bacevich Jackson Diehl
Michael V. Hayden Walter Laqueur
Meghan L. O’Sullivan Richard Perle David Rieff
Paul D. Wolfowitz
Lessons LearnedLessons Learned The Iraq Invasion
Andrew J. Bacevich Jackson Diehl
Michael V. Hayden Walter Laqueur
Meghan L. O’Sullivan Richard Perle David Rieff
Paul D. Wolfowitz
Lessons Learned The Iraq Invasion
Andrew J. Bacevich Jackson Diehl
Michael V. Hayden Walter Laqueur
Meghan L. O’Sullivan Richard Perle David Rieff
Paul D. Wolfowitz
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LESSONS LEARNED
The US war in Iraq began on March 19, 2003. To mark the tenth anniversary of this momentous event, one whose ripples will continue to lap on the shores of American history for decades to come, World Affairs asked a number of leading foreign policy thinkers to address the “lessons” of this war. Their widely differing, but uniformly interesting responses to this assignment show that this war is likely to be as contentious a subject in future assessments as it was when it began, and that William Faulkner was right when he famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
— The Editors
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Jackson Diehl is the deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Post.
Jackson Diehl
So far as official Washington is concerned, the lessons of the Iraq War were established and absorbed long ago. Since the 2008 presidential cam- paign almost no one has disputed Barack Obama’s contention that Iraq was “a dumb war,” or the corrective principles he and his national security team have adopted.
These might be summed up as follows: (a) the United States should never again commit its troops to a conflict in the Middle East, (b) US- sponsored “nation building” doesn’t work and is better done at home, and (c) any US intervention in a foreign country should be carried out indirectly or remotely—through allies, local forces, or drones.
Obama’s “light footprint” doctrine has drawn grumbles from neocon- servatives and a few former congressional champions of the Iraq surge, such as Senator John McCain. Liberals have challenged the drone cam- paign on legal and human rights grounds. But virtually no one in Washing- ton now disputes the bottom-line lesson that has congealed into conven- tional wisdom. Obama’s first secretary of defense, Robert Gates, summed it up most pungently in a 2011 speech: “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.”
So Washington thinks it already knows the lessons of Iraq. But are those conclusions right? In a political context, probably so: Any proposal in 2013 to deploy American ground troops in harm’s way would almost certainly be greeted by a bipartisan buzz saw—a reality that the rulers of Iran, Syria, and North Korea, among others, seem to have factored into their behavior.
Still, the lessons of Iraq, as pursued by Obama, have already begun to produce their own problematic results, and demand their own hard con- clusions. The time has come to begin debating what might be called the lessons of Iraq’s lessons—which, while not necessarily vindicating George W. Bush’s post-9/11 interventionism, cast plenty of doubt on whether the post-Iraq US strategy for combating Islamic terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction is any better.
One clear test of Obama’s no-more-Iraqs doctrine has come in North Africa, where successive and related civil wars in Libya and Mali have forced decisions about whether and how to respond. In 2011, Obama very
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reluctantly agreed to join an intervention in Libya led by France and Brit- ain to help overthrow the regime of Muammar Qaddafi, but he withdrew US planes after the opening days of the fight. Similarly, in January the White House agreed to back a French intervention in Mali with transport and refueling aircraft, but only after a public show of foot-dragging.
Arguably the first results of Obama’s approach were promising: The Qaddafi regime in Libya was ousted by NATO, and al-Qaeda in the Islam- ic Magreb (AQIM) was driven out of Mali’s principal cities by French troops. But the drawbacks of the “light footprint” have become increas- ingly evident in Libya in recent months. Following the end of the war, requests by Libya’s new pro-Western authorities for US or NATO help with security and training were deflected, and funding requested by the Obama administration was held up by Congress. Meanwhile, the State Department rejected appeals by the US Embassy in Tripoli for increased security, and the Defense Department did not plan or prepare for the possibility of a crisis in a country where al-Qaeda–linked jihadists were known to be operating.
The catastrophic result was the September 11, 2012, sacking of the US mission in Benghazi and the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. This was a direct by-product of the post-Iraq mind-set and the withholding of resources it led to. Moreover, the trouble continues: Thanks to the Libyan government’s incapacity and its own lack of assets, the Obama administration not only has been unable to fulfill the president’s pledge to bring the Benghazi attackers to justice, but watched as the jihadist militia that carried out the attack redeployed in the city early in 2013 with impunity. Nor was Washington able to prevent or respond to a major terrorist attack in Algeria in January in which thirty-nine foreign hostages, including three Americans, were killed.
In other parts of the world, Obama’s standoffish approach is pro- ducing substantial political and diplomatic costs, from the growing anti- Americanism in Pakistan engendered by drone attacks to the incipient crumbling of an Afghan government that can no longer look to the Unit- ed States for help in extending its political and economic reach. Not just regional partners such as the Persian Gulf states but major allies such as France and Israel are questioning whether they can count on the United States to act in the event of a crisis with Iran.
The most troubling results of the post-Iraq policy, however, are appear- ing in Syria, a country that in many respects resembles its neighbor. Like
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Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Syria until 2011 was locked down under a brutal dictator who stockpiled weapons of mass destruction and sought a nuclear capacity; as in Iraq, the regime was controlled by a sectarian minority in a country where Shiites and Sunnis, Kurds and Christians live uneasily together.
In Iraq, the US destruction of the dictatorship and mishandling of the postwar order opened the way to a sectarian war and the growth of an al-Qaeda branch that for a time controlled several cities. Iran armed and trained Shiite forces while Gulf states financed the Sunnis. Tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered. Now much of the same scenario is unfolding in Syria—with the difference that the United States has done nothing either to start or to stanch the carnage.
Seen through the prism of Syria, the war in Iraq already looks differ- ent. The sectarian bloodletting and appearance of al-Qaeda seem less like the avoidable result of US bungling and more like the inevitable product of the breakdown of a 1960s-vintage Arab dictatorship. If Iraq had, like Syria, exploded on its own during the first months of the Arab Spring—as surely it would have, had Saddam still been in power—the results likely would have been similar.
The difference is the presence of US troops, and their role both in quickly eliminating the old regime and, eventually, putting an end to the sectarian war. In Iraq that effort imposed an undeniably high price on the United States: more than forty-four hundred US lives lost, some thirty-two thousand wounded, and hundred of billions spent. Yet Iraq today, despite continuing violence, is an island of calm compared to Syria, and no threat to its neighbors.
In Syria, the costs to the US are mounting fast. An al-Qaeda affiliate is rapidly gaining strength; key American allies, including Turkey, Jordan, and Israel, are in danger of being drawn into the fighting; hundreds of thousands of refugees are pouring across borders; and chemical weapons stocks are increasingly insecure.
Already it’s worth speculating about which will ultimately be seen as the worse US decision in the post–Cold War Middle East: the choice to invade Iraq, or the refusal to intervene in Syria. If the answer seems obvi- ous to many in Washington now, that could be because the lessons of the lessons of Iraq have yet to be learned.
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Andrew J. Bacevich
The Iraq War teaches many things, but near the top of the list of lessons that Americans ought to learn (or relearn) is this: It’s not a black- and-white world. Statecraft is not a contest pitting innocence against evil. It never has been and it never will be. Any nation choosing to ignore this fundamental reality courts disappointment at the very least and may well invite full-fledged disaster.
From time to time decisionmakers in Washington have chosen to believe otherwise (or have made a pretense of doing so). When he announced in 1917 that war against the German Reich had become an imperative, Woodrow Wilson not only abandoned the policy of neutrality that he had steadfastly pursued over the previous two and a half years, he also invested the Allied cause with vast (and largely undeserved) moral significance. Germany was not just the enemy; it represented a threat to civilization itself. Presented with Wilson’s eloquent appeal to wage a war that would end all wars, Americans swooned. Yet although the nation’s doughboys—“crusaders,” Wilson called them—pitched in to defeat the Hun, the results fell well short of those that the president had envisioned.
Twenty-five years later, with the onset of a second world war, the good- versus-evil paradigm came roaring back. To judge from the line coming out of Washington by 1942, the Axis powers represented all that was evil, while the Allied cause embodied all that was good—freedom and democ- racy, respect for human dignity, and adherence to the rule of law. The problem with this formulation lay less with the first half than with the second. Sustaining it obliged the administration of Franklin Roosevelt to soft-pedal the totalitarian and imperialistic tendencies of our chief allies, while sweeping American racism under the carpet altogether. Crimes against humanity committed by the other side received appropriate condemnation. Crimes against humanity committed by our side? Not so much. Given the urgency of the situation, the tendency to permit a double standard was all but irresistible.
Once again, the white hats prevailed. Yet here too the expected happy outcome failed to materialize. Indeed, with the passing of World War II, Washington wasted no time in replenishing the ranks of evildoers, moving
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. An updated edition of his book The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War will be published this spring.
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the Soviet Union from the column headed “allies” to the column headed “adversaries.” In short order, China followed, along with a motley crew of lesser nations, all said to take marching orders from the Kremlin. By the time the Korean War erupted, US policymakers—helped along by anoth- er Red Scare at home—had once more cast the world in unambiguously black-and-white terms.
However useful as a device for mobilizing the American people, this Manichaeism also underwrote a penchant for mischief by US policymak- ers that exacted heavy costs. Persuaded that the freedom of the Free World was at stake in Vietnam, the United States committed itself to a cat- astrophically unnecessary and ultimately unsuccessful war. Persuaded that anyone opposed to communism must necessarily possess some redeem- ing qualities, Washington threw in with a long list of unsavory autocrats from Somoza and Batista to Marcos and Chiang. Persuaded that commie sympathizers posed a threat to vital US interests in places like Iran and Guatemala, Washington toppled governments not to its liking—and then professed surprise at the unanticipated adverse consequences.
Again, the urgency of the postwar situation—European weakness combined with Stalin’s demands for accommodation as a prerequisite for “peace”—may have provided a partial justification for depicting the situa- tion in terms that were “clearer than truth,” as Dean Acheson once put it. Yet implicit in Acheson’s remark was this assumption: Ordinary Americans lack the capacity to deal with nuance and complexity; hence, the need to address the public in dumbed-down, oversimplified terms.
Has there ever existed a more useful bogeyman than “monolithic communism,” the figment of fevered imaginations employed to enforce the Cold War foreign policy consensus? Well, yes, actually. That would be “global terrorism,” the product of equally fevered imaginations employed to similar effect in the wake of 9/11.
Immediately after the September 11th attacks, whether acting from instinct or out of calculation, George W. Bush framed the problem at hand as something both frighteningly novel and yet reassuringly familiar. The nineteen hijackers had initiated a new round of an old fight, he told Americans. Once again, the forces of light stood toe-to-toe with the forc- es of darkness. The enemy represented and drew inspiration from val- ues that threatened freedom’s very survival. That enemy—not al-Qaeda alone, but the much larger enterprise of which al-Qaeda represented the radical vanguard—intended to impose those values on the entire world.
A n d r e w J . B a c e v i c h
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So once again, it was us against them in what was going to be—could not be other than—a fight to the finish.
“We have seen their kind before,” the president declared. “They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions—by abandoning every value except the will to power—they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”
Ipso facto, it followed that targeting the organization actually respon- sible for the 9/11 attacks would not suffice as a war aim. Much, much more was needed. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s immediate response, a cryptic note written on September 11th itself, captures the administration’s mood. “[G]o massive—sweep it all up, things related and not.” Two days later Rumsfeld’s deputy Paul Wolfowitz identified “ending states” involved in sponsoring terrorism as a primary US policy objective. As for President Bush, he was intent on eliminating tyranny and, indeed, evil itself, while inter alia removing any last remaining constraints on the exercise of American power.
This describes the context in which the administration devised and promulgated the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. Bush and his lieuten- ants quickly identified Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as an ideal locale for giving that doctrine a trial run. Yet Operation Iraqi Freedom turned out to be a costly bust, with the reputations of Bush, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz among the lesser casualties.
How did they get away with perpetrating such a preposterously stupid war? Through means not dissimilar to those that Lyndon Johnson, Rob- ert McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy once employed to perpetrate an unnecessary and ill-advised war in Vietnam. Simply put, they snookered us. They employed demagoguery to frighten and seduce. To scare the American people, they portrayed Saddam Hussein—uninvolved in the 9/11 plot and himself on Osama bin Laden’s enemies list—as the equiv- alent of Adolf Hitler. To seduce their fellow citizens, they painted Amer- ica’s intentions toward Iraq as selfless and benign—part of the nation’s providential mission to liberate the oppressed and spread the blessings of democracy. They either ignored or were themselves oblivious to vast historical, religious, sectarian, ethnic, and national complexities that soon enough made a mockery of Washington’s portrayal of dragon-slayers pit- ted against dragons.
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For Americans, one big lesson of the Iraq War should be this one: When policymakers and pundits purport to explain what the United States “needs to do” by resorting to hoary old comparisons drawn from some mythic past, don’t believe them. Their aim is to manipulate and deceive. Whatever problem you’re talking about—did someone say Iran?—it’s not simple. And the nation’s purposes, whether measured by past actions or future aspirations, do not qualify as altruistic.
Alas, Americans are unlikely to learn this lesson for one simple reason. Rather than subjecting the Iraq War to the critical scrutiny it deserves, Americans are keen to forget this latest painful episode in their history. For that very reason, they can count on being snookered yet again.
Paul D. Wolfowitz
During the 2000 presidential campaign, candidate George W. Bush criticized the Clinton-Gore administration for what he called efforts at “nation building” in Somalia and Haiti: “I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war . . . to help overthrow a dictator when it’s in our best interests. But in this case, it was a nation-building exercise.” Twelve years later, many are saying that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would have been shorter and less costly if we had anticipated the requirements of “nation building.” But it could equally be argued that the idea of “nation building” is too ambitious and may have helped lead us into mis- takes of overreaching.
Not counting Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has intervened with its own military forces some ten times in the last thirty years to wrest control of a part or all of a foreign country from those in power, twice unilaterally (Grenada and Panama) and eight times in some sort of a coalition (Kuwait, Northern Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, and Libya). In the first four and last two of those ten cases, the US made no attempt to stay for a long period or to dictate the subsequent form of governance. The local populations managed their political affairs relative- ly successfully on their own, albeit in the case of Liberia with the help of a very large UN peacekeeping force. Bosnia, and to a lesser degree Kosovo,
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Paul D. Wolfowitz served as deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005.
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are at best mixed successes despite the substantial and extended presence of international peacekeeping forces, led by the US. The notable failures were Haiti—where the US left quickly but where the country has struggled for years despite the assistance of a succession of UN peacekeeping mis- sions—and Somalia, where the US, having succeeded at averting famine, which had been our original purpose, decided to stay in order to build democracy. It was the failure particularly of the latter effort, with the US beating a hasty retreat in the face of unexpected combat casualties, that gave nation building a bad name in the 1990s.
The experiences with Germany and Japan after World War II are often cited as demonstrations of American success at “nation building.” True, these countries were governed for many years under a military occupa- tion, through which their political systems were completely restructured. (In Japan, General MacArthur virtually dictated the terms of the new con- stitution.) But that was possible because those countries had surrendered unconditionally and the previous regimes were completely discredited. Those circumstances are unlikely to be repeated again and they were not the circumstances of either Afghanistan or Iraq.
In a prescient memo to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in August of 2002, the late Peter Rodman, then assistant secretary of defense, cautioned that planning for Iraq should not look to Germany or Japan as examples but rather to postwar France, where the Allies fortunately aban- doned plans for a military occupation. Rodman observed that if the Allies had gone ahead with the plan for an occupation government, “the Com- munists would have . . . taken over the countryside” while the occupation “would have neutered the Gaullists.” Instead, de Gaulle was able to build up his own movement as a counterweight. While “Iraq has no de Gaulle,” he observed, “an occupation government will only delay the process of unifying the moderate forces.”
This line of reasoning led to a recommendation that we should move as quickly as possible—perhaps even in advance of the war—to recognize a provisional Iraqi government that would take charge from the outset. The alternative viewpoint was that Iraq needed to be governed for a multi- year period, perhaps under UN auspices, by a transitional civil authority, to allow for the emergence of new leadership from inside Iraq, thus avoiding the imposition of a government composed largely of what were labeled “externals,” i.e., Iraqis who had spent the preceding years in exile or in liberated Northern Iraq.
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The initial decision was to create something called the Iraqi Interim Authority, which would be more like a provisional government but which would not gain control of key ministries, particularly those controlling finances and security, until it had demonstrated in less critical ministries its ability to manage competently and honestly. However, that notion was abandoned after the Coalition Provisional Authority took upon itself the role of long-term occupier, a role codified on May 22, 2003, in UN Reso- lution 1483. Much debate within the US government was required before the decision was made to end the occupation earlier than the CPA had planned and transfer sovereign power to an interim Iraqi government by the end of June 2004.
We paid a serious price in the eyes of the world for that prolonged occupation, particularly in the Arab world, and most importantly in the eyes of Iraqis. Moreover, the search for capable and widely supported “internal” leaders has to be judged a failure, since the initial Iraqi govern- ment was led almost entirely by externals, a situation that continues today, even after ten years and a series of national and provincial elections and referenda. The most notable “internal” to have emerged is Moktada al-Sa- dr, an example that hardly commends the idea.
It was not unreasonable for people to worry about whether Iraqis could be counted upon, in the early months after the fall of Saddam Hus- sein, to run the new government honestly or competently. But I believe that this fear exaggerated the ability of Americans to do better, partic- ularly where they lacked anything like a comparable knowledge of the country nor even spoke the language. Certainly Iraqis would have made mistakes, as they did when sovereignty was finally transferred after more than a year of occupation government. But they would have been Iraqi mistakes. American mistakes were more consequential, because they allowed Iraqis to turn their anger on the occupiers rather than accept responsibility for their own affairs.
Of course, one key characteristic of both Afghanistan and Iraq—one we did not have to confront in Japan, Germany, or any of the other exam- ples mentioned above—was the existence of a virulent insurgency deter- mined to restore the previous regime in some form. In the face of that threat, it was a critical mistake in 2003 to focus the effort of rebuilding Iraq’s own army solely on the mission of external defense.
That is a mistake that Iraqis themselves would not have made. When I met with Iraq’s soon-to-be Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi in Baghdad in June of 2004, to discuss plans for security forces after the transition to
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Iraqi sovereignty, he stressed the importance of devoting the Iraqi army primarily to internal security. I was delighted that I had the authority to tell him that the US agreed with this idea.
Unfortunately, by that time the insurgents had more than a year’s head start, a lead that was never really overcome until, with the surge, Gener- al David Petraeus brought additional resources to the task of training and organizing Iraqis. Fortunately, that task was entrusted to an unsung American hero, Lieutenant General James Dubik, who was able roughly to double the size of the Iraqi army over the course of 2007, while at the same time improving its quality.
In Afghanistan we avoided the mistake of establishing an occupation government at the outset. And, for all of the weaknesses of the Karzai gov- ernment, the effort there benefited from having an Afghan government as a partner, particularly in the early years. But, for a number of reasons, including the fact that the Taliban insurgency took some time to gather strength, we underestimated the need for Afghan security forces as well. As in Iraq, it was only with the additional resources available from the Afghan surge and with inspired leadership by another American lieutenant gen- eral, William Caldwell, that the US was finally able to build up the Afghan security forces to their present size of more than three hundred thousand, while also improving their quality.
The additional resources provided by the surges, first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan, were important for getting the training mission right. But more important than the relatively small increase in resources was the recognition of the importance of the mission. Although our military has developed substantial capability in the area of training indigenous military forces—the mission carries the acronym FID, for Foreign Inter- nal Defense—that is not a mission that normally captures the attention of the most promising and ambitious fighters. It is more satisfying, both personally and professionally, to train soldiers to the very high standards of the US military and to lead them in action than to deal with the frus- trations and compromises of what may dismissively be called “third-world militaries.” Yet those militaries are often the key to success and the key to minimizing our own losses. So, FID is a mission we must cultivate for the present and the future.
Already, I believe, the Obama administration seems so intent on avoid- ing anything that looks like what George W. Bush might have done that the US failed to do much to help a very moderate government in Libya
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to stand up the security forces that could stabilize the country (and which might have prevented the tragedy in Benghazi). And, by doing almost nothing to help the free Syrians strengthen their military capability, we have dangerously increased the risk of a post-Assad government falling into the hands of the most extreme armed groups.
Hopefully we will never again have to send American ground forces to assist a friendly government to resist the onslaught of a determined insur- gency. But with so many important countries in such a state of turmoil, there is no way to be certain. If we ever do face such a situation, we should remember the importance of political legitimacy for our local allies. We should think long and hard before imposing another occupation govern- ment. And we should not waste any time in establishing the most capable possible indigenous security forces.
Finally, if we must send American combat troops into such a situa- tion, they should be trained and equipped for counterinsurgency, not for peacekeeping. As we unavoidably draw down some of the marvelous counterinsurgency forces that we have developed over the past decade, it would be a mistake to abandon the capability completely. Despite our most heartfelt hopes, we may need it again some day.
David Rieff
Nearly ten years on from the Iraq invasion, what have we learned? The simple answer, I’m sorry to say, is not much. Lest it be forgotten, the Bush administration went to war to topple Saddam Hussein with broad bipartisan support from Congress, notably from the presumptive front-runner for the presidency in 2016, Hillary Clinton, who has sedu- lously refused ever since to concede that her support in favor of the Octo- ber 2002 Iraq War Resolution was mistaken. The war was also supported by a great many of the most important national media outlets, most nota- bly the New York Times, that on most other matters at the time tended to be critical of the Bush administration from a liberal-progressive perspec- tive. Unlike former Secretary of State Clinton, most of these journalistic institutions have since recanted.
What is not obvious is how much, if indeed anything at all, should be
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David Rieff is a journalist and author. He is finishing a book on the global food crisis.
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read into these second thoughts. Meanwhile, although many neoconser- vatives and so-called national-greatness conservatives, both within and outside the Republican Party, would concede with benefit of hindsight that the Bush administration bungled the occupation of Iraq, few have reconsidered their support for military interventions abroad, not only to further direct US interests, or preempt or prevent war, but also to topple dictatorships in the name of human rights and humanitarian necessity.
To be sure, the difficulty of such interventions is now broadly acknowl- edged. It is inconceivable, for example, that were the Obama administra- tion to decide to intervene militarily in Syria, a senior Pentagon official would adamantly insist before Congress that prosecuting such a war suc- cessfully, then securing a durable post-conflict settlement in its aftermath, would be comparatively easy and that the costs of both these enterprises would be negligible, in the way that Bush officials did repeatedly in tes- timony before both the House and the Senate in the run-up to the Iraq War. So perhaps one can say that American policymakers have learned that imposing democratic order at the point of a gun is more difficult than they assumed it was in 2003. But does this mean they have repudiated such projects altogether, let alone questioned whether it really is the business of the United States to go abroad and, to paraphrase John Quincy Adams’s celebrated formulations, use military force to champion and vindicate the liberty of others? The answer to that is an emphatic “No.”
For despite all the complaints from the right about the Obama admin- istration’s supposed retreat, the dominant view in Washington remains that version of the doctrine of American exceptionalism which holds, con- tra Adams, that if there are indeed monsters out there beyond the nation’s borders, then, within the bounds of feasibility, it is both the duty and the right of the United States to find and destroy them. To put it another way, the US intervention in Iraq soured policymakers and mainstream pundits on Iraq, not on intervention itself. To the contrary, between 2005 and 2013, the same powerful coalitions that were assembled to push for Sadd- am Hussein’s overthrow have reassembled unsuccessfully to press for mili- tary action in Darfur, successfully for a campaign to overthrow the Qaddafi regime in Libya (with the disastrous and entirely predictable blowback effects now unfolding in Mali and that will soon become evident elsewhere in the Sahel), and now in Syria, though there, despite pressure from both Republicans in Congress and liberal interventionists both inside and out- side his administration, President Obama seems, as of this writing at least,
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to have dug in his heels. To put it starkly, with respect to interventions on the Iraq model, there has been no “Never Again” moment, except in the sense that—mirabile dictu!—there is indeed a strong consensus in Wash- ington now that never again should an American army be sent to Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Perhaps none of this should be surprising. It took Britain and France a considerable time to get used to their reduced place in the world after the dissolution of their colonial empires (though the French have done this far more successfully than the British, whose elite—think of Tony Blair—continue to cling to the fantasy of the UK being Greece to Amer- ica’s Rome). After almost a century of hegemony, the political elite in the United States are not yet ready to come to terms with the nation’s comparative decline and with what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have actually revealed, which, former Vice President Cheney’s florid fantasies to the contrary notwithstanding, is not what we as a nation can do if we set our mind to it, but instead what we cannot do even if we have set our mind to it. Liberals and conservatives continue to want to speak as if it were the 1990s and the question is not whether we can intervene successfully, but only whether or not we will choose to do so. But instead, it is 2013, and the greatest nation in the history of the world, as American exceptionalists like to say, is certainly great in one respect: we are now the greatest debt- or nation in the history of the world. And political structures seem to be decaying as fast as our physical infrastructure.
What should happen? The United States should learn to live within its means, not just economically, but militarily, and in terms of its ideological self-conception. That would mean no more so-called wars of choice, no more fantasies of omnipotence whose greatest manifestation is a military budget so much greater than that required for national self-defense and for essential national interests such as the capacity to keep the sea lanes and the skies open for global trade—yes, by force if necessary—and no more mortgaging of the nation’s future in the name of empire, idealism, or, in the American case, of both. But will this happen? Almost certain- ly not. Like the old Soviet Union, we cling to our old ways and our old conceits, pretending to ourselves that the world is still what it was when our word was law. It will take more than a failed war in Iraq and a stu- pid and wasteful occupation of Afghanistan to change that. Dreams die hard, and American exceptionalism, that is to say, the American dream, dies hardest of all.
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Walter Laqueur
Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 20, 2003. Less than four months later, on July 9th, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reported to the congressional armed forces committee on the lessons of Iraq. Since then, there have been hundreds, probably thousands, of such reports, analyses, investigations, postmortems, and such.
During the early period, they were mostly of a military-technical nature, concerning the effects of weapons systems. By 2004–2005, the emphasis of the lessons had shifted to political issues. (Had the postwar planning been sufficiently thorough? Had it been wise to disband the Iraqi army and to engage in wholesale de-Baathification?) The debate became more and more politicized. Although the official aim of the campaign had been to destroy the weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal, no such weapons were found. Did this mean that the allegations had been a deliberate lie, a pretext by neoconservatives to produce a plausible case for going to war and to bring about regime change? Or had there been a genuine intelligence failure?
Eventually the debate over the lessons of Iraq focused on which were right and which were wrong. By 2009, articles began to appear in profession- al journals with titles like “Forget the Lessons of Iraq” (Armed Forces Journal).
There are, of course, lessons to be learned from Iraq—some of a mil- itary-technical character, such as whether certain new weapons systems work, whether they should be discarded or improved. There are questions of a more general character, but not all of them have clear answers. It is probably correct that the planning for the postwar period was not as good as the military preparations. But could there have been better political planning? How could it have been assured that Saddam Hussein’s regime would be replaced by a more democratic or at least less aggressive one, how to assure that the defeat of the Baathist regime would not bring about a strengthening of Iran, that is to say a regime equally repressive and aggressive—or even worse?
This question was bound to come up time and again in the Middle East—but not only there. Could a democratic regime be imposed from the outside on societies without democratic traditions and institutions, coun- tries deeply split internally on religious, ethnic, tribal lines? This problem
Walter Laqueur is the author, most recently, of After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent.
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appeared even in the case of preventing proliferation: Why prevent Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass destruction if there was no willingness (or possibility) to act with the same determination in the case of Iran?
American policy in the case of Iraq suffered from what some neurosci- entists call “optimism bias,” in this case the tacit assumption that following the deposition of the old undesirable rulers things would somehow fall in their place. In the case of Iraq, the optimism bias was initially strong, mainly among those of a right-wing persuasion. More recently it has been prevalent above all among the left—hoping (frequently against hope) that “engagement,” diplomatic approaches, and concessions would solve con- flicts, be they in the Far East or the Middle East or other parts of the globe.
In the case of the Arab Spring (to give but one example) it was argued, particularly in Europe, that the movement toward greater free- dom always took time and was accompanied by setbacks. This is perfectly true but it tends to omit from view that Europe is heir to a political tra- dition quite different from the Middle East’s and that even in Europe it took almost a century after the revolutions of 1848 until democracy and peace were firmly anchored.
At present the main lesson to be learned from Iraq is probably a neg- ative one—that “parataxic distortion” should be avoided. This is a fancy term coined by one school of American psychoanalysis. Translated into plain English, its lesson is to avoid the example of the cat that, having burned itself as the result of sitting down on a very hot stove, will avoid all future stoves even if they are very cold. Strategists (and political scientists) are forever searching for common denominators, laws, and lessons to be learned. Historians know from bitter experience that each historical situ- ation is sui generis, differing in essential aspects from previous ones. Weap- ons systems are the same whether used in Asia, Africa, or the Antarctic (perfectionists may dissent even from this proposition), but the political, social, geographical situation is different in each case. What was true with regard to Afghanistan does not apply to Mali—the former is ideal guerrilla country whereas the Sahara desert is not. There are no jungles, no forests, no megacities, few mountains to hide—and few targets to attack.
There are some universally valid lessons to draw from Iraq but they are so obvious that one hesitates even to repeat them: That countries should get involved in armed conflicts only when immediate national interests are at stake, that if involvement does take place it should be carried out with overwhelming force (and may have to be repeated), that there should be
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no illusions concerning nation building and the imposition of democratic regimes from the outside. That in each case the risks of action should be weighed—but also the risks of inaction. And so on.
Some of these self-evident truths have been ignored in the past and as a result the present strong trend is toward withdrawal and inaction. This could have been foreseen. The question then arises—what are the vital national interests, how far should a withdrawal go? The present writer is not among the leading admirers of Oswald Spengler, but Spengler was not always wrong. He was right, for instance, when he wrote that trying to opt out of world politics does not necessarily offer protection against suffering from the effects of world politics.
Richard Perle
Not only has the most important “lesson” to arise from the invasion of Iraq a decade ago not been learned, it has gone largely unnoticed. The lesson is this: Without a political strategy to deal with our adversaries, any last resort to force, when it comes, will cost more, achieve less, and dimin- ish or even destroy the prospects for victory.
From Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to the 9/11 attack in 2001, what passed for an American Iraq policy was a misplaced belief that an increas- ingly shaky sanctions regime could “contain” Iraq and render Saddam Hussein harmless. Successive American administrations had shown no interest in working with Hussein’s opponents inside or outside Iraq and when, despite administration opposition, Congress passed the Iraq Liber- ation Act in 1998, President Clinton gave lip service to its call for regime change while doing nothing substantial to bring it about.
When George W. Bush took office, top officials recognized that the Iraq sanctions were losing international support, and that the risks of maintaining “no flight zones” over Iraq were increasing (Hussein’s forces were firing daily at the US and British aircraft patrolling the zones and it seemed a matter of time before they would score a lucky hit). This com- pelled a review of Iraq policy. Some officials wanted to reaffirm the policy
Richard Perle is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He served as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy from 1981 to 1987 and afterward as a member of the Defense Policy Board, including three years as chairman.
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inherited from the Bush senior and Clinton administrations: no interest in bringing down the regime, no alliance with Hussein’s opponents. Secre- tary of State Colin Powell, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1991 had preferred leaving Hussein in power to removing him by continu- ing the Desert Storm offensive, proposed no alternative to the status quo containment policy. If he had his way, the United States would make no real effort to work with the regime’s opponents. He hoped that Hussein would be contained, notwithstanding the well-known Pentagon maxim that hope is not a strategy.
Having failed to anticipate any attack on the scale of 9/11, however, we were suddenly faced with the danger of the next attack, perhaps with weapons of mass destruction. So the administration did the obvious thing. It made up a list of all the terrorist organizations and terrorist-supporting states who had both motive and means to inflict a devastating attack on the US, and searched for policies that could protect us against them.
Iraq was high on the list. Saddam Hussein had vigorously applaud- ed the 9/11 attack. He had actually used weapons of mass destruction already, killing thousands in an infamous chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988. He had extensive relationships with ter- rorists—Abu Nidal, for example, was living and working in Baghdad. All Western intelligence organizations believed that Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear weapons program, and his government made reliable international inspections difficult or impossible. Could he—would he—make WMD available to terrorists for use against the United States? The question had become urgent. The Iraqi expatriate and Kurdish opposition that we had failed to assist or organize was not sufficiently coordinated or capable to counter the threat for us. It was too late to deal with Iraq by political means. After months of addition- al fruitless diplomacy (building on nearly a dozen years of less-than-effec- tive “containment” efforts by the UN Security Council), President Bush concluded that only the military option remained.
Unwilling to leave Hussein in place and simply hope for the best, the administration decided to remove Saddam and his sons from power, using a multinational coalition that eventually numbered forty-nine coun- tries but did not include a significant Iraqi opposition force alongside the US and coalition forces.
We will never know whether a political strategy of regime change could have succeeded in the years before 9/11. We never tried. But we do
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know that we were hopelessly ill prepared for the costly occupation that followed the war. Having failed to develop a working relationship with Hussein’s opponents before the invasion, and knowing little about Iraqi culture, society, and politics, we made one mistake after another as several thousand well-intentioned Americans, some of whom had never traveled outside the United States, descended on and remained isolated in the protected “Green Zone” in Baghdad, sent there to govern a country of which we knew little.
For many of us who believed the risk of leaving Hussein in place after 9/11 was unacceptable, the American occupation of Iraq was excruciating. The insurgency mobilized against it took the lives of thousands of brave Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The insurgency might never have gotten off the ground (for five months after Baghdad fell, there was no insurgency) if we had turned governmental authority over to the Iraqis soon after grateful Iraqis pulled down Hussein’s statues and monuments. But we hardly knew the Iraqis, and the State Department and CIA officials who had long opposed working with them distrusted them with far more passion than reason. An Iraqi government would surely have made mistakes, but I doubt it would have proved as inept as the ineffectual occupation leadership sequestered in the Green Zone.
For years before 9/11 made invasion our only option in Iraq, we failed to develop a political strategy for dealing with Hussein. And for years after Baghdad fell, we compounded that failure as occupiers.
Far from learning from that bitter experience, however, we repeat it with alarming frequency, especially now, after uprisings have remade the Arab world. In Libya we were not even thinking about a political strategy when the anti-Qaddafi uprising drew us (albeit leading from behind) into yet another Middle Eastern military operation. We dithered until the situation was desperate, then jumped in without connections to Libyan allies that we knew and could trust. Administration officials explained our delayed response, which made the outcome more costly and the eventual consequences less predictable, by saying that we didn’t know who among the rebels we should back. Of course we didn’t—just as we had not known who to work with in Iraq.
And now Iran. We have an obvious interest in preventing an Iranian nuclear weapons capability and ending Iran’s support for international terrorism. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime is intensely unpopular. Yet, astonishingly, our government has no political strategy for Iran. President
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Obama’s response to the massive (and potentially regime-changing) pro- tests in June 2009 was one of studied indifference. Eventually the sheer size of the protests and the regime’s bloody response elicited a reluctant statement criticizing the government’s brutality. But we should have begun to work with the Iranian opposition years ago, just as we should have worked with the oppositions in Libya and Iraq.
As in the case of Iraq a decade ago, we are again facing dangers for which we lack a sensible political strategy, leaving us either to accept the unacceptable, a nuclear-armed Iran, or turn to a costly “last resort,” to mil- itary operations. Lessons learned may be painful, but lessons unlearned are inexcusable.
Michael V. Hayden
Few geo-strategic and geo-political judgments on lessons learned from the Iraq War are likely to top, at least in sheer starkness, Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s valedictory statement that “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.”
I’m not even going to try to top that one. Besides, I’m the intel guy, not a policy wonk, and ten years may not be enough time for the really big lessons of Iraq or anywhere else to have ripened. So, instead, I’m going to look at “lessons learned” though an intelligence rather than a policy lens.
First of all, there is the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on weapons of mass destruction. Just to be clear, I was in the room when it was approved. I voted yes. I had earlier told Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, that the National Security Agency (where I was director at the time) had mountains of evidence on Saddam Hussein’s WMD pro- gram. The problem was that it was all circumstantial rather than definitive.
Recent accounts claim that Michael Morell, deputy director of the CIA, has commented that evidence that Osama bin Laden was living in Abbottabad was equally circumstantial. In fact, we may have had stronger evidence on Iraqi WMD that we had on bin Laden’s location.
What is most striking about the 2002 estimate is not that it was wrong
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Michael V. Hayden was director of the CIA from 2006 to 2009.
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(which it certainly was), but that the language of the estimate was so unambiguous. We had our footnotes from State Department and Energy dissenting on “aluminum tubes” and the nuclear weapons program, but in retrospect the language is clearly over-confident and the unsuspecting policymaker leaning on this intelligence is given a false sense of certainty. Lesson learned: Share your doubts.
A second lesson: When America enters a fight, the distinctions between tactical and strategic (or national) become meaningless. As I said, I was director of the National Security Agency at the time of the invasion of Iraq and doctrinally I was charged with supporting the national leadership and Department of Defense echelons down to about the corps level.
Doctrine didn’t work. My chief of research came back from a week- plus visit to Iraq with a troubling report card. They loved us at MNFI (the multinational force headquarters), tolerated us at division, and below that barely knew who we were.
Shortly thereafter, we imbedded NSA teams down to the regimental (in the Marine Corps) and brigade (in the Army) levels, and became integral to those units’ organic intelligence assets. Low-echelon GIs were tweaking and pointing the most precious national assets for their imme- diate tactical needs. Lesson learned: doctrine be damned; do whatever it takes. In signals intelligence as in policy, the formerly tactical had become strategic and vice versa.
A third lesson: An outgrowth of this kind of integration was the inev- itable blending of intelligence and operations, of what are known as US Code Title 10 authorities (traditional military activities) and Title 50 authorities (traditional intelligence activities, including covert action).
In 2006, within a few days of US special operations forces killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the notorious leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, I (then director of the CIA) received a hand-written personal note from Stanley McChrystal, then head of Joint Special Operations Command. It was a simple “thank you.”
As CIA director, I visited various intelligence centers in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were all impressive. As I was about to exit a facility, I generally would pause, look over my shoulder, and ask, “Hey, who here works for me?” In other words, the previous two hours of the visit had not given me any indicator of who was who. It was just one team. That was a measure of our integration.
Much has been made of this, and some members of Congress have
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complained that similar if not identical activities have been arbitrarily booked under Defense Department or intelligence authorities and hence fall under the oversight of either the intelligence or armed services com- mittees—but not both.
Lesson learned: Get beyond this. Operationally successful arrange- ments should not be put at risk to protect congressional prerogatives. Oversight is essential but its structure should reflect operational impera- tives, not the other way around.
Lesson four: Intelligence support for a preemption strategy is really hard. The Bush administration famously described it as a duty to “antic- ipate and counter threats, using all elements of national power, before the threats can do grave damage” (emphasis added). For me, in the simplest terms, that raised the question of how good American intelligence would have to be to identify such threats and to identify them at a confidence level that would justify America shooting first.
Intelligence is always designed to inform policymakers, but it usually does so in the face of continuing doubt. It enables action even in the face of ambiguity. This looked different; this looked like intelligence as evidence.
And before anyone is tempted to dismiss this as a peculiar Bush admin- istration or Iraq War phenomenon, consider the present administration’s policy toward Iran and its nuclear program. President Obama has rejected containment and has promised not to allow Iran to acquire a weapon—all of which will require intelligence to be able to “anticipate and counter” this threat before it materializes. For the intel guy, that challenge has the feel of Iraq WMD redux.
One final lesson, or perhaps an “un-lesson.” With the country at war for eleven years, much of American intelligence has been shaped to sup- port brave young Americans in harm’s way. Much of what now passes for analysis is really targeting. I told David Petraeus shortly before his con- firmation hearings that the CIA never looked more like its World War II predecessor, the OSS, than it did today.
These are good things. But it is also good to remember that the CIA is not the OSS; it’s the nation’s global espionage and analytic service. And if it and the rest of the intelligence community do not remember and tend to these broader roles, the nation will be the worse for it. That’s another lesson worth heeding.
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Meghan L. O’Sullivan
A decade after the removal of Saddam Hussein, we still appear reluc- tant to embrace one of the central lessons of Iraq: that regime change necessitates nation building. This lesson—and the many subsidiary lessons that flow from it—is of real relevance to what is happening in the Arab world today. In Libya, the international community sought to distance itself from this reality and the consequences of doing so are becoming apparent. In Syria, the almost obsessive focus on Assad suggests that few policymakers are prepared to talk about the huge effort—by Syrians and the international community—that will need to follow Assad’s fall, instead preferring to focus on the comparatively limited goal of removing him.
The Bush administration went into both Iraq and Afghanistan large- ly on the grounds of protecting and advancing other national security interests, with little expectation these efforts would involve a decade- plus of nation building. While the intention was to replace Saddam Hussein and the Taliban with more representative and even democratic regimes, in neither case was this the primary reason for going to war, nor did the US government anticipate spending large amounts of time or resources to this end.
In Iraq, initial assumptions focused on the well-developed bureaucra- cies of the Iraqi state and the expectation that Iraq’s institutions would largely stay intact, ready for use by a more friendly, benevolent set of new rulers. While fewer institutions seemed to exist in Afghanistan, policymak- ers counted on the loya jirga (assembly) to legitimate the assumption of power by a new government.
Although not anticipated by those planning to remove Hussein, the intense focus on nation building following the removal of a longstand- ing dictator is, in retrospect, not surprising. As the Iraq experience has made so clear, the institutions of a repressive regime are unlikely to stay in place and function semi-normally once the regime is decapitated. The institutions of dictatorial states are not the same as those of modern nation-states; they may well not survive their patrons. In Iraq, Hussein had spent nearly thirty years hollowing out the institutions of the Iraqi state and refashioning them for the sole purpose of protecting and
Meghan L. O’Sullivan is the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School and was deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. She spent two years in Iraq between 2003 and 2008.
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perpetuating his rule. When he fled Baghdad, these institutions quickly collapsed. Iraqis took to the streets and to their workplaces looking to pillage state buildings, over which they felt no ownership; because no law was believed to be larger than Hussein’s regime, with his departure, the country lapsed into lawlessness almost overnight.
Moreover, even in other situations where institutions outlive the down- fall of a brutal regime, their survival may not be welcome or necessarily constructive. Very few peoples who endure a repressive regime are going to be content to adopt the security and other structures of the old state, even after the strongman has been deposed. For instance, the most vocal advocates for the “disbanding” of the Iraqi army were the Kurds, who had suffered genocidal acts at its hands. Expecting them to accept Hussein’s old army as the army of a new Iraq was a fantasy. And so, for similar rea- sons, is the hope of some outside powers that Syrians will retain the army and other institutions custom-built by the Assad dynasty after decades of oppression and an especially vicious rear-guard civil war over the last two years. In the rare instance, Egypt, where security institutions outlived the ruler, their strength and dominance led many Egyptians to lament that their revolution turned into a coup.
The real lessons from Iraq are not about how the institutions of the old regime should be maintained, but pertain to how and how not to take such institutions apart. Perhaps the most important lesson is that the old institutions, particularly in the security domain, should not be dismantled without anything to take their place. The greatest problem surrounding the disbanding of the Iraqi army was not simply alienating tens of thou- sands of highly trained Sunnis, many of whom later became sympathetic to the insurgency. Rather, it was upending the security order without offering any other workable arrangements in its place. Plans to build a new Iraqi army were slow and, at least initially, ill conceived. And yet the US-led coalition was at first unwilling to provide the security needed in the interim while a new Iraqi force grew in capability. In part, it was this vac- uum that invited sectarianism and its militarization—and led to a vicious sectarian war in 2006.
If some dismantling of the state—either as part of the regime-change process or its aftermath—is inevitable, then nation building must neces- sarily follow. True, there is nothing that automatically requires that new institutions are democratic. But Iraq’s experience demonstrates the very strong pressures that will exist in that direction, even if one sets aside
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normative preferences for democracy. First, after decades of repression, people will desire accountability in their next government, perhaps above all else. Second, in all likelihood, these new societies will need to cope with significant societal divisions—either evident or newly “discovered” after years of such differences being suppressed. There is, in fact, no bet- ter form of governance for both promoting accountability and balancing power in highly divided societies than democracy. Finally, as in the exam- ple of Iraq, people will press for early elections, not out of ideology or even necessarily a love of democracy, but out of a need to determine who has the credibility to lead the country through a transitional process.
Another clear lesson from Iraq is that security is the basis on which all other forms of progress—political, economic, diplomatic—rest. Part of the reason for the failed US strategy from 2003 to 2006 was that the Bush administration pursued a strategy predicated on the idea that political achievements would drive security gains. While this may be true at certain levels of development, in situations of dramatic physical insecurity, violence reinforces the power of sect, ethnic group, and tribe over the broader ideas of nation and state, which otherwise might motivate the founders of any new or reborn country. The Bush administration’s revision of its core stra- tegic assumptions to focus on security as a precursor to effective politics, rather than vice versa, underpinned the adoption of the “surge” strategy— which contributed to dramatic improvements in Iraq beginning in 2007.
In sum, one of the clearest overall lessons coming out of Iraq is that one should never think that regime change is a discrete task—that declar- ing victory can follow the simple removal of a horrific leader. By whatever means that leader goes, the hard work of both dealing with the institutions of the old regime and remaking the institutions of the new state must fol- low. The challenge, as Iraq has made abundantly clear, is that while some institutions must be dismantled, the new ones that take their place cannot be created overnight. This transition creates a period of extreme vulner- ability, when spoilers can exploit vacuums. Some countries will be able to weather this period on their own, but others will require extensive exter- nal help to bridge the gap from regime change to peace and prosperity.
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