10 Lessons the US should learn from Iraq defeat

Stephen Walt
Foreign Policy


Lesson #1: The United States lost.

“The first and most important lesson of Iraq war is that we didn't win in any meaningful sense of that term.”

While the initial alleged purpose of the war was eliminating executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, no such weapons were ever found, Walt says, adding that, the rationale then shifted to creating a pro-American democracy, but Iraq today is “at best a quasi-democracy and far from pro-American.”

The costs of the destruction of Iraq (easily exceeding $1 trillion dollars) are “much larger than US leaders anticipated or promised” and Washington is now “much less popular around the world” as a result of the war.

Walt says this lesson is important because US war hawks are already “marketing a revisionist version,” according to which they claim the 2007 surge was a huge success (“It wasn't, because it failed to produce political reconciliation,” Walt notes.) and Iraq is now on the road to stable and prosperous democracy. And the costs weren't really that bad.

“The danger of this false narrative is obvious: If Americans come to see the war as a success - which it clearly wasn't - they may continue to listen to the advice of its advocates and be more inclined to repeat similar mistakes in the future.”

Lesson #2: It's not that hard to hijack the United States into a war.

“The Iraq war reminds us that if the executive branch is united around the idea of war, normal checks and balances -- including media scrutiny -- tend to break down.”

Walt says the remarkable thing about the Iraq war is “how few people it took to engineer”, adding that the main architects were in fact just “a group of well-connected neoconservatives.”

Lesson #3: Don't listen to ambitious exiles.

“The case for war was strengthened by misleading testimony from various Iraqi exiles, who had an obvious interest in persuading Washington to carry them to power.”

“Unfortunately, US leaders were unaware of [16th century Italian writer and philosopher Niccolo] Machiavelli's prescient warnings about the danger of trusting the testimony of self-interested foreigners,” Walt says.

Machiavelli writes in his Discourses, a work of political history and philosophy: "How vain the faith and promises of men who are exiles from their country. Such is their extreme desire to return to their homes that they naturally believe many things that are not true, and add many others on purpose, so that with what they really believe and what they say they believe, they will fill you with hopes to that degree that if you attempt to act upon them, you will incur a fruitless expense or engage in an undertaking that will involve you in ruin."

Lesson #4: The United States gets in big trouble when the "marketplace of ideas" breaks down and when the public and our leadership do not have an open debate about what to do.

“Given the stakes involved, it is remarkable how little serious debate there actually was about the decision to invade.”

Walt says the invasion was “a bipartisan failure”, as both conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats all tended to jump onboard the bandwagon to war. And mainstream media organizations became “cheerleaders rather than critics.”

Even within the halls of government, Walt notes, individuals who questioned the wisdom of the invasion or raised doubts about the specific plans “were soon marginalized.”

“As a result, not only did the United States make a bone-headed decision, but the [Former US President George] Bush administration went into Iraq unprepared for the subsequent occupation.”

Lesson #5: The secularism and middle-class character of Iraqi society was overrated.

“Of course, the people who said things like this apparently knew nothing about Iraq itself.”

This failure is especially striking insofar as “Iraq's turbulent pre-Saddam history was hardly a secret”. But a realistic view of Iraq clashed with the neocons' effort to sell the war, “so they sold a fairy tale version instead,” Walt noted.


Lesson #6: It's very hard to improvise an occupation.

“[Former US] Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Co. assumed that standing up a new Iraqi government would be quick work and that the light US force would head home almost immediately. But when conditions deteriorated, US leaders -- both civilian and military -- were extremely slow to realize that they faced a wholly different situation.”

Walt says while the US military is generally depicted as “a highly intelligent fighting force”, yet the Iraq war is a reminder that the defense establishment is “a big and unwieldy organization that doesn't improvise quickly.”

Lesson #7: Don't be surprised when adversaries act to defend their own interests, and in ways we won't like.

“The architects of the Iraq war seem to have blindly assumed that other interested parties would simply roll over and cooperate with us after a little bit of ‘shock and awe.’”

But the lesson was an obvious one as various actors did not simply sit back in the face of the invasion and “took steps to defend their own interests,” Walt says.

Lesson #8: Counterinsurgency warfare is ugly and inevitably leads to war crimes, atrocities, or other forms of abuse.

“Another lesson from Iraq (and Afghanistan) is that local identities remain quite powerful and foreign occupations almost always trigger resistance.”

Walt notes that counterinsurgency campaigns are “extremely hard to control”, because decisive victories will be elusive, progress is usually slow and the occupation force will have difficulty distinguishing friend from foe within the local population.

And that means that sometimes our forces will “go over the line, as they did in Haditha or Abu Ghraib,” he added.

“So when you order up an invasion or decide to occupy another country, be aware that you are opening Pandora's Box,” Walt warned.

Lesson #9: Better "planning" may not be the answer.

There is little question that the invasion of Iraq was “abysmally planned, and the post-war occupation was badly bungled,” it does not necessarily follow, Walt argues, that better pre-war planning would have produced a better result.

For starters, he says, though there were extensive pre-war plans for occupying and rebuilding Iraq, the problem was that “key decision-makers (e.g., Rumsfeld) simply ignored them.”

Furthermore, “had Americans been told about the real price tag of the invasion -- i.e., that we would have to send a lot more troops and stay there longer -- they would never have supported the invasion in the first place.”

Lesson #10: Rethink US grand strategy, not just tactics or methods.

“Because it is not clear if any US approach would have succeeded at an acceptable cost, the real lesson of Iraq is not to do stupid things like this again.”

Walt says while the US military might have some virtues, one thing is certain, namely, “it is not good at running other countries.”

Furthermore, he adds, it is impossible to sustain public support for long and grinding wars of occupation.

“Once it becomes clear that we face a lengthy and messy struggle, the American people quite properly begin to ask why we are pouring billions of dollars and thousands of lives into some strategic backwater. And they are right.”

“So my last lesson is that we shouldn't spend too much time trying to figure out how to do this sort of thing better, because we're never going to do it well and it will rarely be vital to our overall security,” Walt concludes.

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/

Maybe this guy should run for president.
The White House surely needs someone that can add 2+2 and not get 7

 

Next , rewrite , redacting Iraq and inserting Afganistan
Next , rewrite , redacting Afghanistan and inserting Libya
Next , rewrite and redact Libya and leave blank , just in case Russia forces them to rethink before adding Syria .

If Stephen Waite gets to be president , then I want the number two job , as I preached his hymn sheet , except for point 5 , which I don't fully understand .

 

You forgot to put "defeat" in quotes.

 

Some of that makes sense, but I don't know if we lost. I suppose it depends on what one thinks the goal was in the first place and whether the cost in achieving that goal negating achieving the goal in the first place.

We hopefully did learn some lessons. Or maybe not. We are slow to learn.

 

“The case for war was strengthened by misleading testimony from various Iraqi exiles, who had an obvious interest in persuading Washington to carry them to power.”

The misleading testimony was purchased from the Iraqis by the neocons. It was the worst case of an anti-democratic assault on the U.S. government I've witnessed to date. A lot of neocons should be in prison for a long, long time.

 

Have we won ANYTHING? If not, then we have been defeated?

 

We wanted Saddam out of power. Saddam is no longer in power.

We wanted a democracy in his place. There is now a democracy in his place.

If we got what we wanted, I do not see how that can be viewed as a "defeat". You could argue that it wasnt as easy as it could or should have been, but it was hardly a defeat. I seriously doubt Saddam went to his death believing he had "won" LOL.

 

If you achieve your goal I guess you can say you won. But that leaves the question open as to what the goal even was and whether the goal itself was even worthy. Then, in the event you did achieve whatever goal it is you think we were seeking, you need to ask if "winning" was really worth it. Is it really "success" if you finally got your 1978 Monte Carlo running, but it cost you $17,000 to do it? Perspective, I guess. You may beat your chest in victory while everyone else laughs.

 

You wanted to get rid of the weapons of mass destruction, which didn't exist, and to destroy Al Qaida, which didn't have any existence in Iraq. Mainly, though, you wanted to steal the oil, and the deliberate ink-clouds make it difficult to discover whether that came off.

 

I think the goals were quite clear actually. The first goal was to defeat Saddam's military. The second goal was to remove his government. The third goal was to establish a democracy in it's place. I am not sure why people are confused about our goals.

We accomplished all of those items.

Oil was never a stated goal. That is a projection on the part of various liberals, based only on their personal opinions, who didn't like the war. The war was about Defense.

Ok. But that is a completely different issue. We did win, regardless of whether or not you personally think it was worth the effort.

If your life or the life of someone you care about depends on the Monte Carlo running, then yes, it was a success even if it cost you your life savings.

 

Getting rid of Saddam accomplished the same thing. Now the chances of him creating WMDs is zero.

We were correct not to take his word for it.

The purpose of the Iraq war was not to destroy Al Qaida. You are incorrect.

This is another example of liberal projection...you make assumptions about our "real" motives and then project them as if we stated them as our motives. Your opinions are not objective fact.

Source?

Please post your evidence that oil was a stated goal of our invasion of Iraq.

 

Saddam was our counterweight to Iran. So we eliminated the counterweight and installed a pro-Iran dictator. Real good thinking and now we got a pantload full of problems. That ain't a win.

And your proof of democracy in Iraq is some purple thumbs from 5 years ago? This ain't Reps vs Dems in Iraq, it is Sunni vs Shia. Their idea of democracy is to kill each others potential voters and then to jettison voting entirely. That ain't a win, either, so it must be defeat.

 

So what? How does that change anything I just said?

My proof of democracy is actual elections taking place and the people actually elected actually taking power. And then the process repeating itself next election.

Have you not been paying attention over the last decade?

According to who?

 

Then I guess we won. It still leaves open the question of why, but OK. We won. Granted, it was accomplishing very little at a hugely outsized cost, but I'll admit we "won".

Defense from what? Not that I am saying it was about oil. I've never said that. I have no idea what it was about. I'll say that we often do have goals we do not state because it will not go over well, so not stating it has little bearing on whether it's true. But I do not think oil was the goal.

Then people are clearly free to ask you how it's possible you did not know other cars existed that would accomplish the same goal for far less cost. That is where the incompetence issue comes in.

 

I disagree that it leaves open the question of "why". I think the "why" is obvious.

I do not agree that deposing Saddam's entrenched government and replacing it a working democracy was a "very little" accomplishment. In fact, I do not think any other nation could have accomplished it except us.

It could be argued that the cost was too high for what we got out of it (not by me of course), but this was obviously not a trivial accomplishment.

Saddam manufacturing and distributing WMDs to be used against us. I thought that was obvious.

I agree. But many critics of the war are saying that. Iolo just said it like a few posts ago.

Who is "we". The war could not have taken place without the consent of the American People. The American People obviously authorized the war for the officially stated reasons if nothing else.

Maybe I do not agree with them that other cars existed that would accomplish the same goal for far less cost. Have you considered that possibility? It is my life at stake, right?

What makes them right and me wrong by default?

 

It means that the people who wanted to remove Saddam had no clue what they were doing. In itself, that is a defeat.

The blood bath has already started. Another defeat for the US. Democracy ain't going to happen in Iraq. But you knew that going in, right?

 

You left out the fact that AQ suffered a humiliating defeat on what they declared the central battleground of their little Global Jihad. Not only were thousands of their holy warriors dispatched to Allah's celestial whorehouse, they managed to completely alienate their fellow Muslims by massacring Shiites and abusing their fellow Sunnis...

 

Your criteria for defining "defeat" is retarded.

Yeah, because that certainly never happened during OUR democracies formative years, right? LOL

...based your your retarded criteria.

Yes, it is all a big conspiracy. You have exposed us! Curses, foiled again!

 

#1. After you've won, elect a Democrat.

 

I'm afraid you live not only on a different planet but in a different, not-very-parallel universe: go home and shut up. Since you had no reason to commit a war-crime but to steal, and since oil was what Iraq had, what other explanation is there for your insane crime? And, by the way, I am no more a liberal than you are informed. Pack in these crappy insults!

 

The problem with the oil argument is the same as the problem for any other argument. It lacks logical sense. Iraq oil was on the market before the war. It all but stopped during the war. We never stole any to send over here. And now we buying it again via the world market. I can see how the argument got started. There was no logical reason we were there, so it must be something and they had oil, etc. But we have no more Iraqi oil now than we had before.

 

It seems to me that your masters control it, but, as I say, the ink-clouds are very thick.

 

Request denied.

Yeah, it isnt like you could be wrong or anything. That would just be absurd, right?

LOL!

 

I need to know who my master's are before I can really respond.

 

Oh Stekim...why can't you read between the lines?