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The Art of the Expendable
By U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Brian L. Wickliffe.
Tommy De Seno has written a magnificent post laying out the justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He says that invading Iraq was the right thing and that we would do it again today, and I agree with him — vehemently. This is because he insists upon setting the action in its proper historical context. I also feel that that experience lays out a firm case for never attempting a whole-enchilada approach like that again. Given the facts then in existence — this is stronger than “what we knew at the time” — it was objectively right, for the reasons identified. But that was then, and this is now, and we are being fundamentally transformed.
Millions of Iraqis voted in real elections, and with consequences. The dictator was gone, security wobbled and frittered, and then was restored to a reasonable standard. Things were never great, but that is an inappropriate bar to set. While some things were better and some things were worse, things in the aggregate were better than they had been in decades. Iraqis may not have enjoyed electricity and even physical security as they had, but they had hope, and they had friends. Even former bad guys were brought into the fold as they came to agree that the United States was not in fact the worst thing that either had happened or was happening at the time.
Consider Iraq an experiment under ideal conditions for motivating the American public to war, building and committing forces to theater, decapitating an identifiably strongman-led dictatorship, succeeding wildly, failing awfully, adjusting for changing conditions on the ground and poor performance in high places, and returning to a path of increasing security under largely new conditions. Dictator gone, American interests improved, Arab democracy underway in a large important country at a crucial strategic and logistical site.
We had enormous Saudi bases at our disposal with infinitely long runways and all the gas in the world in the basement. We had access from land, air, and by extension, sea, from multiple directions. We had a bipartisan series of presidents struggling with the dictator there, with bipartisan policy to encourage or effect regime change. We were already at war and were only restricted by an armistice whose conditions even the United Nations certified to have been violated many times over (seriously, read Tommy’s excellent piece).
We had been attacked by (Saudi!) Islamists and were in a fighting mood to not take any crap off of anybody. We were already at war with Iraq, and they were thumbing their noses at the world at large, the UN, the weapons inspectors, and our servicemen and women who were already enforcing no-fly zones to protect Iraqi people and inspecting shipping to enforce sanctions, both of which at risk to personnel and equipment (as the citation goes).
There was never a more accomplishable, set-piece, scripted experiment, war on rails, fill-in-the-blank, color-by-numbers technology demonstrator than this. Nor more of a come-as-you-are workbook example of a nation-building from a hostile WMD-mongering, communist religious dictatorship to fledgling and flawed democracy with people who need not wonder when the government will capture and torture their sons, and make expendable toys of their daughters.
The Iraq war and reconstruction were as good as it will ever get, but these things take time. Those who pointed out that fifty-plus years on, we were still in Germany, still in Japan, and still lined up for war in Korea somehow were not heard. Likewise those who called it “the Long War,” a polemically-charged intentional label to drive home the point that staying power was the one indispensable element. And we failed. We failed on purpose, we failed at the top, we failed as a people.
An incoming progressive administration whose very existence was predicated upon the Copperhead rantings of a defeat-at-any-cost Democrat party had prevailed — through Alinskyite tactics as effective as they are obvious — upon a majority of Americans to empower it to do its very worst. Discrediting the Iraq War was among the top priorities of an administration hell-bent upon taking this country down a peg. America must be made to suffer, made to fall in the eyes of friend and foe alike, must be seen as perfidious, weak, a hazard to “friends” and no hazard to “enemies” at all, if those words can even be relied upon in the post-Constitutional nation of racial vengeance.
The next time the Good Idea Fairy visits the hearts of the very very concerned, let the military point to the State Department and tell them to staff the positions. That is as good as it gets.
Published in Foreign Policy
I followed you right up to this point. Can you elaborate a bit on ‘we failed at the top’?
‘failed as a people’ I might challenge. I supported the war as did a lot of us. I can say the whole WMD thing broke our heart. All I wanted was an announcement the they found the chemical stuff and were still looking for more. It never came and the people defending the war were left with no support. I sent my daughter in law and raised my 2 year old grandson, others sent their kids and I sure did not want to fail as a people. We loyal folks back home did not ask for much, just a little air coverage from the White House. Sustaining domestic support was not any priority by the genius political hacks.
Will edit to clarify.
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Have edited from that paragraph.
Thanks BDB.
You might be right. You might be wrong. But it really doesn’t make any difference. Policing the world is wrong, whether you are right or wrong.
Let’s assume there is a right answer. And then let’s assume the right answer is knowable. Both of those assumptions are highly unlikely, but I’ll grant them for the sake of argument. Here’s the next problem. How are you going to elect a president time after time who is able to figure out the right answer. If you can’t do it every single time, then you shouldn’t be policing the world. And I doubt if electoral politics is designed to choose the right man more than one time out of ten.
There are many other things that make policing the world wrong, even when you are right. But the impossibility of always choosing the right person to be commander-in-chief is one critical problem, a deal breaker actually, that I’ve never seen addressed.
The first Gulf War is interestingly cited as the turning point that ended 4th generation war, we won, and laid the groundwork for 5th generation where we are not fairing as well.
I do not think your Korea/Japan/Germany examples are analogous to the swamp in Iraq.
We do have forces forward deployed in the three aforementioned nations to secure mutual interests we share with them. We do not interfere with their government or elections.
Our western democracy and republic isn’t consistent with the tribal savagery of Sunni/Shia Islam with a helping of Kurds that is Iraq. The only way to instill democracy and minority protecting Constitutional gov’t there is under our boot which kind of defeats the purpose.
Additionally, in the case of Germany and Japan we so crushed our foes that those remaining were broken and had no interest in returning to their wayward governments and objectives. In Iraq our foes changed shirts and attacked from across the street. We tried a peaceful transition without breaking our foes because we failed to identify the enemy and objective unlike Gulf War I.
I don’t think our country wishes to litigate the decision to go to war in 2003. There are many reasons to question why we didn’t identify the enemy and objective then prosecute those to their conclusion and now keep getting drug back into the mess.
This is why Syria can burn and Turkey too for all I care.
Thanks, BDB. I’ll be thinking about this for a long while.
Do you have any thoughts on why Americans had the patience to effectively colonize Germany and Japan after WWII? That would seem to be the anomaly in US history.
SoS, we (and our allies) left Germany in rubble with little wherewithal to feed/clothe themselves let alone fight. I don’t know if you’ve visited Japan. When I went to Nagasaki it was humbling and eye opening the destruction and suffering we unleashed on Japan’s mainland.
If we did not stay in those countries it is questionable they would exist today and the conquered understood that because of the might of the sword we laid on them.
We didn’t do that in Iraq. Iraqis had both the wherewithal and means to fight us in the name of their fanatical religious divisions and did so. We only killed a handful of our enemies and then tried to setup shop among the rest of them and here we are today.
Great post and great opening. I fear that the ability to render the ‘proper historical context’ for serious issues is becoming a lost art.
People increasingly find such thoughts boring and irrelevant, not to mention, hard.
Easier to just jump in the passing clown car and yuk it up.
An excellent piece, sir.
This always struck me as the strongest case for the war: in a post 9-11 world, Saddam’s game of footsie was no longer acceptable, either as a matter of risk or as an expenditure of resources.
The prosecution of the war was my main issue in 2007/8, which is why I supported McCain — with all his flaws — from quite earlier on. If anything, our experience since then has made it even clearer how consequential our decision to elect Obama was. It really has cemented our reputation for abandoning people.
Probably the greatest foreign policy problem we now face is that — whenever we next intervene — intelligent and good people are going to have every reason not to trust us. That’s seriously bad.
The problem is that we didn’t provide sufficiently tailored destruction towards the major social factor in Iraq, family and tribe (we didn’t because to do so would have been barbarous).
Japan and Germany were nation states in the truest sense and shattering the countries with the effectiveness we did – to the point that without direct aid millions would have starved to death – isn’t possible in the Middle East.
Unless you make the possible downside of attacking the United States greater than any possible upside at the tribal/familial level terrorism will continue – and we’re not about to drag people out in the street and execute them for something their brother/cousin/uncle/child did so the attacks will always continue.
We did fail, you’re right.
But please don’t forget that these are people.
Thanks for the cogent, thought-provoking piece. Historical context is sorely lacking in our discourse these days.
I would prefer that Syria and Turkey don’t burn. Like if you agree. Thank you!
Both this post and De Seno’s are missing the two words Sunni and Shia. We now know that thinking about Iraq without understanding that divide is like… uh thinking of the GOP primaries without understanding the angry working-class white vote.
I wouldn’t have taken out “failed at the top.” Bush 43 ran for re-elect as a war president. However, he pivoted immediately to just about everything but the war. Bush deferred concerns about the war’s conduct to the judgment of military “experts” again and again.
I can’t really give him much credit for the surge. As I recall, McCain did the heavy PR lifting for that.
Iraq was a Greek Tragedy. It was a mistake, but it was a mistake that we were morally obligated to make. The point was not just to get the WMD’s. The point was to establish a true democracy in a Muslim country of the Middle East. To show that it was possible. To create a 21st Century equivalent of what West Berlin was to communism – living proof that Western values were preferable to our opponents’ values.
For decades we had supported friendly dictators in the Middle East. If we withdrew that support (as with the Shah in Iran), we got unfriendly dictators. Bush believed (truly believed, in my opinion) that there was a third way, besides supporting dictators or letting them be replaced by worse dictators. Bush believed that the people of the Middle East longed for freedom. He tried to deliver it.
Bush was wrong. It didn’t work. There are too many people in this part of the world who don’t care about freedom. But I still believe that we were morally obligated to try. Now I think the best we can do is to go back to supporting friendly dictators.
The idea that all people think the same way is the source of much of the trouble of the last 150 years.
I agree that this is an excellent piece. I too have a difficulty with that one statement.
I don’t think we failed as a people. It took to the end of the Bush administration to reach stability. The Obama administration failed to carry it forward. If we had maintained the stability for a couple of more years, the whole endeavor would have been looked on as a success, albeit a costly one.
And I’m of the mind that we found enough WMDs and capability to reconstitute a WMD making facility that supports the claim. But as said in Tony De Seno’s post, WMDs were not the sole justification for going there.
Great comment. Perhaps we should stop trying to apply the tactics we employ against nation states against other actors.
Good post. This was not a war about oil, WMD’s or Code Pink, Donald Trump revisionism or whatever. It was about a very nasty regime, sanction violations, and the threat the regime posed long term. Iran was weaker back in 2001 and became more compliant after the invasion. Libya too. WMD’s drove the emotion and the urgency – and Saddam could get there and had done so. But if you read the Senate resolution to go to war, you get the full picture. Terroism and al Qaeda changed our level of tolerance for risk. That is all. BTW, the Clinton administration called for regime change in Iraq, not Bush.
Iraq was an opportunity to make things better – and we almost made it. Certainly, the status quo by 2008 was so much better until we started the political skeedaddle to prove the current President right. The best decision I ever saw was Bush’s decision to go with the surge. It was courage. Not battlefield courage – but it electrified those in the front. We were there to win and nothing makes it worth more – especially when you are sleep deprived and hopped up on caffeine to the point where you cannot sleep – to know you are there to get the job done.
I would say the conclusions of the OP go wrong – we can’t just tell the world to go to hell when things don’t work out as planned. People, especially the Arab people, have lived under wars and invaders for centuries. They just adapt. Loyalty is survival. We let them down. And, we have to keep our “left up.” The White House is too cautious now.
We were never abandoned at the top in the Bush administration – except Frank, Sanchez and Casey were all shaky and not thinking strategically. The military brass tends to do this – at least in public. They wanted in and out. Brenner was not the right guy and CPA was poorly crafted – the entire operation needed to be military, not civilian. We were too eager to assume that things would go well after the first three weeks.
Rumsfeld said it correctly – this might take 10 years or longer. And we should have heeded that, moved faster on the insurgency, and stayed the course.
PS: This was the first sensor war. This technology was first applied with pilotless planes and vibration monitors on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was cumbersome back then. But we got to the point where we could predict who was coming, with how much and when as the war in Vietnam wound down. We saw and measured Tet preparations coming, but too few believed in sensor warfare.
In Iraq we bio-scanned, eaves dropped, jammed, and droned. Today China and Russia are working to replicate this using deft devices incorporated into our iPhones and adapted to weapons.
I agree with this and had some additional points:
Not only were Germany and Japan crushed, they had no alternatives nor outside support, unlike our enemies in Iraq. If the Germans didn’t like us, who was going to arm them or send supporters – Switzerland? The Russians? Same with Japan – they certainly couldn’t look to the Koreans or Chinese for help. Both societies were isolated and alienated from all their neighbors.
Second, the Germans and Japanese were nationalists. In the Middle East we face religion, a much more difficult and wider challenge. We simply cannot maintain ourselves in a long-term occupation in these societies. Some factions might temporarily welcome us to help smite their enemies but, in the longer term, we are merely irritants for everyone there.
-Notice the Dems who were for the war, were against it once Saddam was caught and no longer a threat.
-We did find great quantities of WMD. The NYT documented what Saddam had when Clinton was President and again when it wanted to get back on the truth side of history a year or two ago.
-You only have “the seen” to go by. Just like in economics, the “unseen” is not considered in the discussion. However, the unseen is important….where we would be today had we not gone in.
-There are several reasons why the truth about WMD is not known. First, Bush was naive and nice. He refused to bring it up to defend his actions because it would be divisive. He was wrong because it wasn’t just about him. However, [2nd] Bush needed support from countries who abetted Saddam’s WMD program so he didn’t want to offend them.
Third, WMD was not stored in obvious locations, clearly labeled “WMD” for our benefit. Also, many were in precursor form like the many drums of “pesticide” that hadn’t been weaponized but were stored in military weapons storage bunkers. Therefore, troops didn’t know what they stumbled on and were injured by the chemicals, as documented by the NYT.
Fourth, troops were fighting a war and their lives were in danger as their rapidly moving front engulf territory. The warfighters had neither the knowledge nor the manpower to recognize and secure WMD in military facilities.
Fifth, since the WMD was not secured, it was dangerous to announce where and when it was found. It would be Sams Club for terrorists.
Sixth, with the administration seemingly acting as if WMD was not a critical find, military leaders were not likely to fall on their sword admitting they left WMD unguarded as they pushed forward. Their priority, rightly, was pushing forward and overrunning the enemy before the enemy could rebound or destroy things. There probably still is a cache of stuff hidden or buried in Iraq. The Iraq generals didn’t even have a good handle on their stuff.
Finally, not all WMD comes in bulk. Many dangerous biological agents could be hidden in a small container or briefcase, in amounts too difficult to find.
Its not that people think the same, as thought patterns are generally impressed upon by one’s environment. Its the fact that they have the capacity to think the same way. When an Iraqi is born out of the womb it has no more a predisposition to tyranny than an American.
“Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.” – Vladimir Lenin
If you mean, Barack Obama purposely wanted America to leave Iraq, then yes. However, it was not that Iraq fell into civil war. ISIS came out of Syria. Point in case being that if the Syrian Civil War had not happened we do not know what would have happened to Iraq. On the issue of a status of forces agreement, if we had held a corps of troops (40-50,000 troops) in Iraq then Iraq would still be whole this day. ISIS would have been outnumbered. We currently keep 30,000 troops in Germany and 40,000 in Japan (why?).
A failure of execution does not equal a failure in the principle.
I agree with you on people in general; if I had been snatched at birth by a time-traveling citizen of the Roman Republic I’d probably be a good Roman, not an American in Rome. However we’re unwilling to do what is necessary for the transformation desired to take place and therefore it won’t.
My conclusion is (and has been) that our lack of will, commendable in many ways as it is, renders the terrorism issue insoluble.
What is or was necessary in your opinion?
The only way you stop certain behavior is to make the punishment greater than any possible upside. To do this in the Middle East is barbarism, and I don’t condone it. But that doesn’t change my analysis of the only real solution.
Since Arab culture is largely rooted to family and tribe you have to punish the family and tribe for terrorist actions of their members. In other words you have to punish the innocent for the actions of the guilty.
Who sends their children to Wahhabist mosques when their third son’s strapping on a bomb vest means the death of every male in the family over 8? What village harbors missile launching sites or terrorist fighters when the result is you burning the village down and leaving the people of that village with only the clothes on their backs, to walk for help and beg for charity? How does a place like Sadr City exist if you place it under siege, let no one and nothing out, until the people not allied with the true believers kill the terrorist rather than starve to death with their families?
These actions are evil. We shouldn’t pursue them. And because we are unwilling to do so, thank God, terrorism will always be with us.
Thanks for this. Add my name to the list of people who never understood the degree of outrage over the war. Seems like some of it was fake, and the rest was the result of bipolar disease. The American people wanted some kind of response and our involvement in the cesspool of Afghanistan was never going to satisfy that want.
I disagree with you then on the solution. That degree of violence is not necessary.