10 Lessons Learned the Hard Way in Iraq Posted by Suzanne Nossel

The Best Available Intelligence Can be Dead Wrong Or, Even Worse, Manipulated for Political Purposes – When the war was first launched, the prospect that evidence of Saddam’s weapons program might never be found was an cringe-worthy nightmare scenario. It was impossible to imagine that Colin Powell’s UN powerpoint was a work of fiction. We all know what happened next, and our trust in the intelligence establishment and the White House’s use thereof has been irreparably shattered

When the World isn’t Behind Us, That Doesn’t Necessarily Mean They’re Wrong – It’s become an article of faith that the UN failed the test posed by Iraq four years ago. But how so It doesn't take a UN-hugger to acknowledge that in refusing to ratify the war, the Security Council avoided the very same mistake Members of Congress are now admitting to one by one One can argue that no matter what Saddam did, Russia, Moscow and even Paris would have given him a pass, but that wasn't put to the test.

The US Military Has Limits - Four years ago it was tough to imagine a scenario in which the mighty US military was, by all accounts, stretched to its limit When we used to hear about the requirement of preparedness to fight two regional wars simultaneously, the prospect always seemed very far-fetched Some may be heartened that, the wisdom of such a potential option aside, launching a military confrontation right now with Iran is all but impossible.  But we would rest easier if the military option were off the table only by choice, rather than by necessity as well.

Military Power Can't Accomplish Everything - Iraq has illustrated powerfully the limits of military power and the corresponding importance of diplomatic, economic, nationalistic and religious forces, as well as more abstract phenomena like international legitimacy.  The problem we face now is fundamentally that our military presence has virtually no role to play in solving Iraq's political impasse.  We have yet to work through the implications of this revelation for the conduct of US foreign policy, but doing so may change a lot about how the Defense and State Departments do business.

The Power of Our Ideals is Not Self-Evident - There's nothing wrong with having faith in American notions of freedom and democracy, but Iraq demonstrates that the triumph of these ideas in places geographically and culturally far-flung is anything but automatic.  The Iraq experience further cautions that when clouded by the overlay of military intervention and occupation, the appeal of these concepts may become deeply obscured.

Going it Alone Isn't Always a Viable Option - One of the great things about superpowerdom is being able to take refuge in the idea that even if no one agrees with you, your resources make it possible to act alone and get things done.  While that may often be the case, it isn't always.  Had the Iraq occupation been truly multilateral from the start, the insurgency may not have built its terrifying momentum.

The Sophistication of a Military Confrontation Can be Dictated by the Lowest Common Denominator - For all our high-tech weaponry and sophisticated logistics and communications systems, we still find ourselves locked in a low-tech conflict where the weapons of choice are car bombs and IEDs.  Our counter-insurgency tactics, likewise, are old-fashioned efforts to find and flush out terrorists, street by street and house by house.

Post-Conflict can be Tougher than Conflict, and Even More Important - Even before so-called nation-building was explicitly renounced by Condi Rice during the 2000 campaign, the US was ambivalent about its role in post-conflict stabilization missions.  The result was that every time the US got involved, it had to reinvent the wheel, mustering resources and personnel anew.  Hopefully the combination of Afghanistan and Iraq will be enough to convince skeptics that the US needs to take these operations, and related capabilities, seriously.

Cronyism has its Costs - There's something un-American about nepotism and no-bid contracts, but the incompetence, waste and cost overruns in Iraq illustrate that these practices have enormous tangible costs as well.

Not to Silence Dissent in the Name of Supporting the Troops - For the sake of American troops present and future, I hope we've learned this.

Comments

[Cal]

The Power of Our Ideals is Not Self-Evident - There's nothing wrong with having faith in American notions of freedom and democracy, but Iraq demonstrates that the triumph of these ideas in places geographically and culturally far-flung is anything but automatic.

A good list, especially the above point. I just hope we don't have to re-learn it every 40 years.

Here's an article by a former State Department official that touches on many of the same points you make. But it was written in 1968.

How Could Vietnam Happen?

"There is a final result of Vietnam policy I would cite that holds potential danger for the future of American foreign policy: the rise of a new breed of American ideologues who see Vietnam as the ultimate test of their doctrine. I have in mind those men in Washington who have given a new life to the missionary impulse in American foreign relations: who believe that this nation, in this era, has received a threefold endowment that can transform the world. As they see it, that endowment is composed of, first, our unsurpassed military might; second, our clear technological supremacy; and third, our allegedly invincible benevolence (our "altruism," our affluence, our lack of territorial aspirations). Together, it is argued, this threefold endowment provides us with the opportunity and the obligation to ease the nations of the earth toward modernization and stability: toward a fullfledged Pax Americana Technocratica... In a sense, these men are our counterpart to the visionaries of Communism's radical left: they are technocracy's own Maoists. They do not govern Washington today. But their doctrine rides high."

-- James Thomson Jr

[Dan Kervick]

When the war was first launched, the prospect that evidence of Saddam’s weapons program might never be found was an cringe-worthy nightmare scenario.

Well now that's an extraordinarily odd thing to say. I imagine most people were relieved to learn that there were fewer weapons of mass destruction in the world than previously believed.

And honestly, is there a single item on this list that you really didn't believe before the war? Perhaps the truth of these points has been reemphasized for us all, but surely even before the war you already knew that "going it alone is not always a viable option."

A lot of Truman types seem to be obsessing these days about the "lessons" they learned or should learn from the Iraq War. But I'm not seeing a lot of important change in their outlook. There is a certain amount of ritualistic donning of ashcloth and eating of crow. But at bottom, they just think they miscalculated and need to be a bit more careful and skeptical next time. But the agenda is still the same: neoliberal global domination constructed with a deceptively pretty toolkit of squishy "soft power" tools, and enabled by an exceptionalist world view and a fanatical ideological will to power.

The Power of Our Ideals is Not Self-Evident - There's nothing wrong with having faith in American notions of freedom and democracy, but Iraq demonstrates that the triumph of these ideas in places geographically and culturally far-flung is anything but automatic.

Are you still going on about your precious ideals? The power of our ideals!? How about the power of our pocketbooks? We live in a world in which the majority of people now live in huge cities, flooded with refugees from dispossession, and a large proportion of these urban populations live in squalid and destitute slums, while a fortuante few profit from the Washington-headquartered racket of gobal extortion and dispossession. Truman Dems constantly try to pose the primary global affairs debate in terms of "idealism" vs. "realism" and now mope around in a self-pitying and petulant pose of chastened idealism. They seek to portray their opponents as cynical "realists", because doing so flatters their own moral vanity. But none of you guys seem to be willing to consider the possibility that you have the wrong ideals; or that the ideals you have are weirdly prioritized. There is a whole global movement out there of committed idealists about whom Truman Dems are either ignorant, resentful or disdainful.

You and your cohort are little different from the missionaries of old who thought it was more important to save the heathens' souls, than to feed them, and who looked the other way on all manner of imperialist depravity and depradation, so long as there was some space carved out of the schedule of plundering to allow for conversion time. Just like your ingenuous forbears, you are willing to attach yourselves to an imperial war machine and ravenous economic leviathan because you get to tag along with the empire to impress your favored political ideals on the natives. Why don't you and Peter Beinart join "the good fight" against imperialism, military violence and foreign domination, and against the rationalized banditry, piracy and explotation that constitutes neoliberal globalization? How about those "ideals"?

[Zathras]

Just to play devil's advocate, wouldn't Donald Rumsfeld have agreed whole-heartedly that "military power can't accomplish everything"? The whole idea behind his "revolution in military affairs" was that peacekeeping, nation-building and other activities requiring large numbers of soldiers were not central to American interests and not worth using the military to do. Now that the military has been asked to do something it did not train or equip itelf for, it is failing to attain its objective. Never mind that the objective -- a stable democracy in an Arab country -- may not have been attainable by any means, isn't failure exactly what Rumsfeld would have predicted four years ago at this time? Left to himself, he'd have wanted the American invasion force to leave Iraq no later than December of 2003, when Saddam was dug out of his spider hole.

Incidentally, I'd think the disadvantages of putting people in the White House who have not thought very much about foreign and national security affairs and who have specialized throughout their public lives in the various aspects of the permanent campaign would be a very significant lesson not only of the Iraq war, but of the last fifteen years or so. The good news for Democrats is that they have some Presidential candidates who are probably aware of this lesson. The bad news is that none of the current front runners for the 2008 nomination are among them.

[Dan Kervick]

If one takes each of the items on Suzanne's list, and forms its negation, most of the results are items that not even the most dimwitted would accept. So it is hard to see that this is a serious attempt to identify "lessons". Nobody believed those negations to begin with. Consider a few examples of negations of the above:

Post-conflict can't ever be tougher than conflict, or can't ever be more important than conflict.

Croyism has no costs.

The US military has no limits.

Military power can accomplish everything.

When the world isn’t behind us, that necessarily means they’re wrong.

[SolderNoLongerInIraq]

I find much irony in Nossel's list. I know she's being intentional glib and unsophisticated with her Top 10, that's the nature of the genre. But it's ironic because so much of this was preordained not only by the former SecDef, but by the previous (Clinton) administration.

Why do we have a third fewer infantry forces now than during Desert Storm? The drawdown of George Herbert Walker Bush and William Jefferson Clinton that relied on dwindling troop levels (and gains in efficiencies from privatization, see KBR) to cut the budget deficit in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Rummie's RMA only intesified a dynamic fully in flux before he arrived. The problem, of course, happens when the sparse All Volunteer Force (AVF) is tasked out to two regional wars that rely heavily on ground units, plus all the usual treaty obligated troops for Japan, South Korea, Germany, Djibouti and other places that would look familiar to a Brit gazing at a map of global coaling stations available to Victoria's navy.

Of course the US military has our limits. You made it so. Of course the military and its culture can't solve the many generations of bottle up conflict in geographic fictions such as "Iraq" or "Afhganistan," just as military might alone couldn't contain the toxic cultural clash in Bosnia or Croatia or Kosovo, where a Chetnik frozen in 1945 and thawed out in 1995 would have seen a civil war not so different from the war-within-a-war between Chekniks and Partians and Bosnian Moslems and Bosnian Serbs and Kosovars (Albanians and Serbs) during WWII.

Sometimes there are no "politics" involved. Sometimes war is motivated by cultural forces deep before the realm of "politics," so deep that they're buried in the reptilian part of the soul we'd rather not gaze too directly upon, lest it enrages us.

The Suzanne Nossel I remember, however, would give us more than 10 talking points to chew on. No one within the military would debate anything on this list. So why write it?

Write more.

[J Thomas]

SNLII, I completely agree with everything you say. Normally I wouldn't write a me-too message, but we've disagreed enough before that I wanted to this time.

[Don Bacon]

Oh, please, let's not complicate it. We've invaded Iraq and Afghanistan for the control of, and access to, petroleum deposits, and in both places the locals are successfully resisting the US brutal occupations, which is nothing more or less than we would do if we were invaded and occupied by a foreign military force. I wouldn't hide under the bed if a foreign military had shot my uncle on the street, raped my sister and tortured my brother, would you? And then would you call yourself an insurgent or a patriot?

"Our counter-insurgency tactics, likewise, are old-fashioned efforts to find and flush out terrorists, street by street and house by house." Check your dictionary. To have an insurgency you've got to have a government to "insurge" against, and there is no viable government in Iraq or Afghanistan. There are military occupations of these two countries and ineffectual puppet governments (ever-changing in Iraq as in Vietnam). Thus what we have is not an insurgency but an occupation resistance. And exactly how do you "flush out a terrorist" when sixty percent of the populace support armed attacks on the occupying force? Oh, there have been efforts. What they consist of is, at night, placing a block of C-4 explosive outside a residential door, blowing the door in, throwing the military-age males to the floor and zip-tying their hands behind their backs, harassing the females, ransacking the house, destroying personal effects, furniture and bedding, then throwing said males in the back of a truck to be taken to a detention center where they are tortured and sometimes killed. This is properly called: Recruiting the resistance, which may in fact be a conscious effort to prolong the war, such is the mindset of the War Party that now rules the United States.

"Four years ago it was tough to imagine a scenario in which the mighty US military was, by all accounts, stretched to its limit"?? I guess that I'm showing my age but I do remember a little dust-up in far off Vietnam (now a preferred US trading partner) where the "mighty US military" got defeated rather soundly, so many of these lessons are being RE-learned using the blood and guts of innocents.

As Dan Kervick suggests, the concern about our loss of military potency is a false issue. The real issue is: Why do many insist on exporting a way of life that just isn't working very well? The US has the highest poverty rate among industrialized nations, also: infant mortality, maternal mortality, income divide, incarceration, suicide, homicide and execution, where the idea of democracy is becoming a joke because the president is selected by the Supreme Court, voting districts are gerrymandered to eliminate competition, third parties are virtually outlawed and as a result, because nobody represents their interests, half the citizens don't vote--and we want to export this?

You can't expect a military force to do the impossible. Get a new agenda. Kervick: Why don't you and Peter Beinart join "the good fight" against imperialism, military violence and foreign domination, and against the rationalized banditry, piracy and explotation that constitutes neoliberal globalization? How about those "ideals"?

Ron Paul is now running for president. Recently he wrote: "I believe our founding fathers had it right when they argued for peace and commerce between nations, and against entangling political and military alliances. In other words, noninterventionism. Noninterventionism is not isolationism. Nonintervention simply means America does not interfere militarily, financially, or covertly in the internal affairs of other nations. It does not mean that we isolate ourselves; on the contrary, our founders advocated open trade, travel, communication, and diplomacy with other nations."

Thanks for raising the issue!

[Don Bacon]

Terrorist of Freedom Fighter?
from Jacob Hornberger, fff.org

On Sunday, the New York Times carried a very interesting obituary of a woman named Lucie Aubrac, who, along with her husband Raymond, were French resistance fighters during World War II.

Lucie Aubrac’s courage in resisting the Nazi occupation of France was audacious. After the capture of her husband, for example, she personally met with Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo officer known as the Butcher of Lyon, told him she was a pregnant and unmarried woman (actually they were married) whose boyfriend had been arrested by mistake, and requested his release so that they could get married.

Barbie’s response was striking. He called Aubrac’s husband a “terrorist.”

Now, why would Barbie call Raymond Aubrac a terrorist? Because Aubrac was an insurgent who was resisting the foreign occupation of his country. In Barbie’s mind, all Frenchmen had a moral duty to accept the inevitable and cooperate with their occupier, as many of the French did. Aubrac’s refusal to do that and his violent resistance of the occupation of his country rendered him, in Barbie’s mind, a “terrorist.”

As the old adage goes, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

[Cal]

If one takes each of the items on Suzanne's list, and forms its negation most of the results are items that not even the most dimwitted would accept. So it is hard to see that this is a serious attempt to identify "lessons". Nobody believed those negations to begin with.

I don't know Dan. Most of the commenters here have been unsuccessfully trying to impress on Suzanne many of these obvious truths -- especially the point that the peoples of the world won't bow down before the "power of our ideals" (which apparently take form in the person of Chalabi). I think its good to see that some progress has been made.

Baby steps.

.

[R Hatt]

Don Bacon: Raped your sister? I love when intelligent people make inflammatory comments to raise emotions of readers to blur the simple truths.

Please don't make our entire military sinister to support your deep seated desire to be read.

It's not worth it.

I appreciate most other comments from other authors, however.