Defeat plus 9 more lessons US ought to draw from Iraq: Analyst

Had the US public been notified of the cost of US war on Iraq, they would never have supported the invasion in the first place, an analyst says.





Upon the ninth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, a decorated American professor and author has documented a list of Top 10 Lessons that Washington should draw from its misadventure there.


“Regardless of your views on the wisdom of that decision (US invasion of Iraq), it's fair to say that the results were not what most Americans expected,” Stephen M. Walt wrote on the Foreign Policy website on Tuesday. 

Acknowledging that “many lessons” will have to be learned from the experience, Walt proceeds to catalogue his “Top 10 Lessons”: 

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 pl`ns 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. 

HMV/IS