.The ones who started Iraq also lost it
ATLANTA — The pithiest analysis I've seen of our occupation of Iraq — its epitaph, really — comes from the Web site of John Robb, a former Air Force intelligence officer now working as a security and anti-terror consultant.
"The problem," Robb writes at globalguerrillas.typepad.com, "has become bigger than our will to fix it."
That about sums it up. In fact, as public disenchantment grows —and revelations of apparent U.S. atrocities aren't going to help — and as the Iraqi government proves itself incapable of ruling, the gap between the size of our problem and our will to fix it will grow larger still, just as it did in Vietnam.
And just as with Vietnam, those who pushed hardest for this war will blame its failure on their usual set of villains — a traitorous media, critical politicians, etc. — who supposedly undercut the national will we needed to fight and win it.
And it will all be nonsense.
The truth is, the gap between the problem and our will to fix it has existed from the moment this invasion was conceived. It was the fundamental flaw in the Bush policy, the single thing that doomed it to failure.
If we were going to invade and occupy Iraq, we should have done so with hundreds of thousands of troops, after months of intensive planning. We should have committed ourselves to spending as much money as it took, as much time as it took, as many lives as it took to ensure Iraq's security.
But that level of national will did not exist, and the Bush administration knew it. Even in the wake of Sept. 11, they knew that the American people would never buy an optional war that large and expensive. They also knew that without a draft, they lacked the manpower that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki and others told them they needed.
Yet they wanted this war so badly — they yearned in their bones to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein and establish American military power in the heart of the Middle East — that they went ahead and did it anyway.
Since the American people wouldn't buy a big war, we got sold a tidy war, a war in which "mission accomplished" could be declared quickly and Iraq could fund its own reconstruction. It was a fake war, an illusion of war, a war deceptively downsized to fit political will and not reality.
No wise leader does that. No wise leader commits his nation to a war he suspects it is not prepared to win, and we will pay a heavy price for that miscalculation.
Much as we might like to withdraw, we cannot, not for years, not without greatly compounding what is already the single biggest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.
Here's what will probably happen: As political will wanes, U.S. forces will try to cut casualties by withdrawing to major bases, away from population centers, leaving the Iraqi military, police, militias and tribes to settle through brute force what they have proved incapable of settling through politics.
That bloodletting will be ugly and brutal, and we will bear a large moral responsibility for it. And even though we will be helpless to stop it, the U.S. military will have to remain to perform two essential tasks.
First, it will try to prevent Iraq from becoming the safe haven for jihadist groups that Afghanistan once provided. It has long been clear that terrorism festers in failed and failing states, just as we've created in Iraq. But until now, we also believed that we had the power and ability to fix those states.
That illusion evaporated in the heat of the Iraqi sun. In a recent analysis, the Army's Combating Terrorism Center acknowledges that as powerful as we may be, even the United States lacks the ability to come in and fix failed states.
"That takes immense resources, as the largely unsuccessful effort to end the security vacuum in Iraq shows," the CTC concluded.
A more feasible approach, according to the CTC, is to accept failed states as reality while maintaining the military power to act against terrorists who try to seize advantage of the situation. Applied to Iraq, that means withdrawing our troops to their bases but deploying them when necessary to prevent jihadist groups from seizing power.
The other major reason our forces have to remain in Iraq is to discourage outsiders from joining the violence, particularly if it becomes an all-out civil war between Sunni and Shiite. Once that kind of violence begins to spread beyond Iraq's borders to the rest of the Middle East, there's no telling where it would end. Preventing that catastrophe would amount to success, which says a lot about how our goals have changed.
Rutland Herald
"The problem," Robb writes at globalguerrillas.typepad.com, "has become bigger than our will to fix it."
That about sums it up. In fact, as public disenchantment grows —and revelations of apparent U.S. atrocities aren't going to help — and as the Iraqi government proves itself incapable of ruling, the gap between the size of our problem and our will to fix it will grow larger still, just as it did in Vietnam.
And just as with Vietnam, those who pushed hardest for this war will blame its failure on their usual set of villains — a traitorous media, critical politicians, etc. — who supposedly undercut the national will we needed to fight and win it.
And it will all be nonsense.
The truth is, the gap between the problem and our will to fix it has existed from the moment this invasion was conceived. It was the fundamental flaw in the Bush policy, the single thing that doomed it to failure.
If we were going to invade and occupy Iraq, we should have done so with hundreds of thousands of troops, after months of intensive planning. We should have committed ourselves to spending as much money as it took, as much time as it took, as many lives as it took to ensure Iraq's security.
But that level of national will did not exist, and the Bush administration knew it. Even in the wake of Sept. 11, they knew that the American people would never buy an optional war that large and expensive. They also knew that without a draft, they lacked the manpower that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki and others told them they needed.
Yet they wanted this war so badly — they yearned in their bones to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein and establish American military power in the heart of the Middle East — that they went ahead and did it anyway.
Since the American people wouldn't buy a big war, we got sold a tidy war, a war in which "mission accomplished" could be declared quickly and Iraq could fund its own reconstruction. It was a fake war, an illusion of war, a war deceptively downsized to fit political will and not reality.
No wise leader does that. No wise leader commits his nation to a war he suspects it is not prepared to win, and we will pay a heavy price for that miscalculation.
Much as we might like to withdraw, we cannot, not for years, not without greatly compounding what is already the single biggest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.
Here's what will probably happen: As political will wanes, U.S. forces will try to cut casualties by withdrawing to major bases, away from population centers, leaving the Iraqi military, police, militias and tribes to settle through brute force what they have proved incapable of settling through politics.
That bloodletting will be ugly and brutal, and we will bear a large moral responsibility for it. And even though we will be helpless to stop it, the U.S. military will have to remain to perform two essential tasks.
First, it will try to prevent Iraq from becoming the safe haven for jihadist groups that Afghanistan once provided. It has long been clear that terrorism festers in failed and failing states, just as we've created in Iraq. But until now, we also believed that we had the power and ability to fix those states.
That illusion evaporated in the heat of the Iraqi sun. In a recent analysis, the Army's Combating Terrorism Center acknowledges that as powerful as we may be, even the United States lacks the ability to come in and fix failed states.
"That takes immense resources, as the largely unsuccessful effort to end the security vacuum in Iraq shows," the CTC concluded.
A more feasible approach, according to the CTC, is to accept failed states as reality while maintaining the military power to act against terrorists who try to seize advantage of the situation. Applied to Iraq, that means withdrawing our troops to their bases but deploying them when necessary to prevent jihadist groups from seizing power.
The other major reason our forces have to remain in Iraq is to discourage outsiders from joining the violence, particularly if it becomes an all-out civil war between Sunni and Shiite. Once that kind of violence begins to spread beyond Iraq's borders to the rest of the Middle East, there's no telling where it would end. Preventing that catastrophe would amount to success, which says a lot about how our goals have changed.
Rutland Herald
posted by madtom at 10:17 AM
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