War forces us, or should force us, to ask hard questions of ourselves. As a military historian, a commentator on current events and the father of a young Army officer, these are mine.
You supported the Iraq war when it was launched in 2003. If you had known then what you know now, would you still have been in favor of it?
As I watched President Bush speak at Fort Bragg recently to rally support for the war, I contemplated this question from a different vantage than my usual professorial perch. Before long, my oldest son will fight in the war that I advocated, and that the president was defending.
So it is not an academic matter when I say that what I took to be the basic rationale for the war still strikes me as sound. Iraq was a policy problem that we could evade in words but not escape in reality. But what I did not know then that I do know now is just how incompetent we would be at carrying out that task. And that’s what prevents me from answering this question with an unhesitating yes.
The Bush administration did itself a disservice by resting much of its case for war on Iraq’s actual possession of weapons of mass destruction. The true arguments for war reached deeper than that. Long before 2003, weapons inspections in Iraq had broken down, and sanctions, thanks to countries like Russia, China and France, were failing. The regime’s character and ambitions, including its desire to resume suspended weapons programs, had not changed. Meanwhile, the policy of isolation had brought suffering to the Iraqi people and had not stabilized the Gulf. Read Osama bin Laden’s fatwas in the late 1990s and see how the massive American presence in Saudi Arabia – to keep Saddam Hussein in his cage – fed the outrage of the jihadis with whom we are in a war that will last a generation or more.
More than this: Decades of American policy had hoped to achieve stability in the Middle East by relying on accommodating thugs and kleptocrats to maintain order. That policy, too, had failed: It was the well-educated children of our client regimes who leveled the Twin Towers.
The administration is right in thinking that Saddam’s overthrow could change the pattern of Middle Eastern politics in ways that, by favoring the cause of decent government and basic freedoms, would favor our interests as well. Iraq will not become a progressive social democracy for generations, if ever. But it can become a state that has reasonably open and free politics, and that could inspire other changes in the Arab Middle East. The administration believed the invasion would jolt and transform a region bewitched by the malignant dreams that my colleague Fouad Ajami has described so well: the dark fantasies of Baathists, ultra-nationalists and religious fanatics. Indeed, cracks have begun to show in Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, and even in Syria and Saudi Arabia.
But a pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian and military high command would treat “Phase IV” – the post-combat period that has killed far more Americans than the “real” war – as of secondary importance to the planning of Gen. Tommy Franks’ blitzkrieg. I never dreamed that Ambassador Paul Bremer and Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the two top civilian and military leaders early in the occupation of Iraq – brave, honorable and committed though they were – would be so unsuited for their tasks. I did not expect that we would begin the occupation with cockamamie schemes of creating an immobile Iraqi army to defend the country’s borders rather than maintain internal order, or that the under-planned, under-prepared and in some respects mis-manned Coalition Provisional Authority would seek to rebuild Iraq with big construction contracts awarded under federal acquisition regulations, rather than with small grants aimed at getting angry, bewildered young Iraqi men off the streets and into jobs.
I did not know, but I might have guessed.
You are a military historian; what does the history of war have to tell us about the future of Iraq?
History provides perspective and context, not lessons. The failures and squandered opportunities of that first year in Iraq do not look that different from some of the institutional stupidities we saw in Vietnam. What is different is how quickly the United States changed its course. It took five years before we became serious about training our Vietnamese allies to take our place. It has taken about a year to get serious about training Iraqis.
The political side of insurgency, which is the side that counts most, never really came to the fore in Vietnam, but it has in Iraq. For the presidents who got us into Vietnam, and for that matter out of it, the war was a distraction from other, more important priorities. For this president, the war is the defining decision of his tenure. Whatever his faults may be, a lack of determination is not one of them. And in war, persistence counts for a very great deal.
That’s particularly true here because counterinsurgency is inherently a long, long business. Most insurgencies do, however, fail. Moreover, most insurgencies consist of a collection of guerrilla microclimates in which local conditions – charismatic leaders (or their absence), ethnographic peculiarities, concrete grievances – determine the amount and effectiveness of the violence.
This is an unusually invertebrate insurgency, without a central organization or ideology, a coherent set of objectives or a common positive purpose. The FLN in Algeria or the Viet Cong were far more cohesive and directed. This makes the insurgency harder to figure out, but also less likely to succeed. And with all its errors, the United States remains an extraordinarily wealthy and formidable foe. That fact may invite hubris, but it also provides solace.
None of this predetermines the outcome, of course, or foretells the consequences of a muddled success or a blurred failure in Iraq. Historians have the comfort of knowing how past wars played out in the end. Unfortunately, that philosophical detachment is cold consolation in the here and now, as young men and women go off to war.
Your son is an infantry officer, shipping out soon for Iraq. How do you feel about that?
Pride, of course, and fear. And an occasional flare of anger at empty pieties and lame excuses, at flip answers and a lack of urgency, at a failure to hold those at the top to the standards of accountability that the military system rightly imposes on subalterns.
It is a flicker of rage that two years into an insurgency, we still expose our troops in Humvees to the blasts of roadside bombs – knowing that these armored vehicles simply aren’t designed for warfare along guerrilla-infested highways, while, at the same time, knowing that plenty of countries manufacture armored cars that are. It is disbelief at a system that ships soldiers off to war for a year or 15 months, giving them two weeks of leave at the end, while our British comrades, wiser in pacing themselves, ship troops out for half that time, and give them an extra month on top of their regular leave after an operational deployment. All this because after Sept. 11, when so many Americans asked for nothing but an opportunity to serve, we did not expand our Army and Marine Corps when we could, even though we knew we would need more troops.
A variety of emotions washes over me as I reflect on our Iraq war: Disbelief at the time it took to call an insurgency by its name. Alarm at our continuing failure to promote at wartime speed the colonels and generals who have a talent for fighting it while failing to sweep aside those who do not. Incredulity at seeing decorations pinned on the chests and promotions on the shoulders of senior leaders who had the helm when things went badly wrong. Disdain for the general who thinks Job One is simply whacking the bad guys and cannot admit that American soldiers have tortured prisoners or, in panic, killed innocent civilians. Contempt for the ghoulish glee of some who think they were right in opposing the war, and for the blithe disregard of the bungles by some who think they were right in favoring it. A desire to slap the highly educated fool who, having no soldier friends or family, once explained to me that mistakes happen in all wars, that the casualties are not really all that high and I really shouldn’t get exercised about them.
If we fail in Iraq – and I don’t think we will – it won’t be because the American people lack heart, but because leaders and institutions have failed. Rather than fretting about support at home, let them show themselves dedicated to waging and winning a strange kind of war and describing it as it is, candidly and in detail. Then the American people will give them all the support they need. The scholar in me is not surprised when our leaders blunder, although the pundit in me is dismayed when they do. What the father in me expects from our leaders is, simply, the truth: an end to happy talk and denials of error, and a seriousness equal to that of the men and women our country sends into the fight.
Eliot Cohen is Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
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