Years in Iraq change U.S. military’s understanding of war
by Greg Jaffe, Washington Post
COL Gian Gentile,
I hope we are going to start asking some of the hard questions now. What have the last eight years really gotten us? What has military force really accomplished in Iraq?
COL (ret.) Douglias Oliviant,
The fundamental truth of the Iraqi settlement is that the sectarian civil war ended — and the Sunni lost,” he wrote recently in a paper for the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank. “Upon realizing this defeat, the Sunni went into damage control mode to reach a settlement.
Comments
The political leadership of this nation appears unwilling to learn from history that the costs to our military is never worth an effort to intercede in a land for the de facto purposes of nation building--when we have absolutely no national strategic interest in that country.
The military, as we did after Vietnam, will once again learn that wasting our manpower and physical resources in costly and eventually futile attempts at nation building, now called counter-insurgency, will have degraded our armed forces capability and lead to budget cuts further degrading our armed forces.
This country has only two strategic interests in the middle east. The first is to secure the supply or flow of needed oil into the west in the amounts needed and when needed and the containment of terrorist group members in that area as much as possible. I suppose one could add to the later the limiting of base areas from which they can operate. Massive bombing from the unannounced appearance of B-52's, or their modern equivalent, can solve that problem when coupled with the employment of special operations groups and use of Naval forces for sea borne searches.
Whether the people of that (Islamic) part of the world like or dislike the West is meaningless to our economic well being. Let them riot and burn down their countries to their hearts content. It will have no material effect on our physical / economic well being what so ever. The royal families of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will continue to sell us oil to obtain the funds they need to continue their life style. Our conventional Naval and military presence in the area can secure that understanding without much more than sunk costs.
Conventional military capability can secure both those objectives in a far more cost effective manner and allow this nation's armed forces to fight battles (when needed) on our terms and not on the enemy's terms--as forced on our military by the unnecessary adoption of the rifle to rifle counter insurgency tactics. We need to relearn the lesson of General Sheridan's very effective campaign against the Plains Indians. As he noted, they were the finest light cavalry in the world and he was not going to play the fool and use his cavalry to chase Indian cavalry all over the West. Instead, he fought the war on his terms, employed US Army strengths effectively, and went against the Indian's weaknesses. He succeeded despite the misleading content of movies.
Iraq will fall apart in relatively short order after we leave as will Afghanistan, where Kharzi will someday find himself on the Taliban gallows once we leave, and good riddance to him. He is as effective and honest as was Thieu.
As in Vietnam, if one party needs foreign military main line units to intercede on their behalf and the other does not, the other side will eventually prevail once the foreign main line units withdraw. That is a political lesson this country is doomed to experience over and over again.
Lets hope the US military once again returns to the understanding that when a war is to be fought, we fight it on our terms to maximize employment of our strengths, and that our only interest in hearts and minds of the enemy, or their supporters, is to put bullets and the like in those places on enough of their bodies to convince them to give up the fight and bury their dead followers.
We are repeating the costly lessons of Vietnam for those who wish to admit it.
Certainly this is but one small chapter in a long and evolving history, but there's nothing wrong with looking at our part in that chapter and trying to learn from it. If nothing else, I hope we've figured out that democracy is not an accessory that can be installed at will, and that any plan including the assumption that we can install a democracy - or a functioning government - is pretty seriously flawed, no matter what country it deals with.
Bumperplate, the bottomline is that evolution takes time. We are inherently an impatient people who are quick to forget the unique petrie dish that the American colonies were and the 2+ centuries of social political evolution that took place in that petrie dish before Thomas Paine penned a single word, or George Washington stepped forward to lead a revolution, or Sam Adams stepped forward to fire up support for change.
We think we can storm into town in tanks and declare "democracy" and expect that it will immediately stick. Not likely. This is a foreign concept to those who have not also had time to evolve in splendid isolation. But others are evolving as well. As I say, Arab Spring did not begin this year, but rather over a century ago. We have, in the West, been as much an obstacle as an accelerent, to this process.
Take a long view and assume the role of facilitator and protector, and we will do well. Attempt to control and shape, and we will draw fire.
I totally agree about historical context as mentioned in the prior comments. What I cannot reconcile, probably due to my own ignorance, is Iran's role in the recent years.
I speak to people that have lived in Iran and they talk of their current political leadership as some sort of aberration. It seems that way to me as well. Ahmadinejad is Arab but he's somehow ruling a Persian country, which seems a bit odd to me. Many times we see/read/hear that the current problems in the ME were set in motion by the concluding acts of WWI and WWII - but does that explain Ahmadinejad? Could the tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran be foreseen?
I guess what I'm really asking is this: what else should the historical context be telling us? Are we headed back to that region again in the near future? What can we anticipate in the tug of war between Saudia Arabia and Iran, pulling Iraq in different directions, and what's to result from the internal struggles Iraq is going to face?
From my time in Iraq I always got the impression that many Iraqis attempted to look at things in a positive way (perhaps just for show), but behind their expressions seemed to be a sense that peace is not around the corner.
Sir, can we expect a second edition with some reflection on how Iraq has asserted its sovereignty in forcing US forces out and how the country has progressed after our departure? Obviously it would have to come in a few years, but I think it might be an interesting addition. It might also generate some new publicity. I have to admit that I haven't read the book, but I plan on checking it out of the Library when I get back to USNA next semester. This is the first I've heard of it.
While my perspective was not as broad as RCJ suggests it needs to be, my book Iraq in Transition was an attempt to look at the Iraqi side of transition through a broader lens that considered their history, politics, etc, while only touching on American tactics and policies as they intersected with Iraqi issues. It came out in 2009 and was lost in the noise, so I think maybe ten people read it. Even so, reviewers including Michael Rubin and Adeed Dawisha (quite different outlooks) had good words for it. Join an elite club! http://www.amazon.com/Iraq-Transition-Dictatorship-Prospects-Democracy/…
Iraq may be winding down for the US, but for the people and government of Iraq this has been but another foreign-manipulated crossroad /interlude in the long and difficult journey that lies both behind and before them.
This is not a journey that began with the US invasion in 2003, and this is not about us. That invasion did, however, "defrost" a process that began over 100 years about with revolutions in the Ottoman Empire and Persia (from which modern Iraq was carved) that set those populace on the path toward evolution of governance.
Western efforts to intervene in the region for Western interests (Britain's quest for oil and wealth in Iran; the post-WWI scramble to divide and colonize the residue of the Ottoman empire into new states "mentored" by one paternal European country or another in a mockery of the self-determination being promoted at Versailles by President Wilson; Post-WWII Cold War competition, containment, and oil-driven policies) have served to disrupt the natural progression of these people in ways we will never fully appreciate.
For those who look at Iraq solely through the lens of the US intervention there the lessons learned will inevitably be self-centered, biased, and flawed. We need to pull back and take at least a 100 year look at this region to have any clarity at all, and even that must be contexted by a 1000 year look. Agonizing over the lessons learned from a 10 year snapshot and colored in the context of military tactics and warfare far too narrow of a perspective are far too short of a time span to have any validity whatsoever.