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In the book I'm finishing, I try and place America's conflict with Iraq in a broader strategic perspective. Here's an excerpt from the chapter I just finished which deals with the decision to go to war with Iraq (but not with the insurgency--that's the next chapter). It's long, but I though it might provoke discussion or debate.
In the broadest sense the Bush administration's decision to remove Saddam Hussein by force and the way it went about it illustrated a number of ingrained characteristics, tensions, fissures, and potential problems with American strategy, at least is it was in the immediate aftermath of September 11. It showed, for instance, that U.S. strategy was often hamstrung by mutual incomprehension when operating across cultural divides. Neither George Bush nor Saddam Hussein fully understood their opponent. Bush interpreted Hussein's deception and bluster as evidence that he sought weapons of mass destruction for purposes of regional domination. As it turned out, the United States was—to borrow a phrase from Islamic militants—Iraq's "far enemy." His "near enemies" were internal opponents including the Kurds and Shiites, potential challengers within the Iraqi military, and Iran. Hussein felt that he had to make these enemies believe that he had weapons of mass destruction to deter them, all the more so as his conventional military power eroded during the era of sanctions. He assumed that the United States, with its massive intelligence capabilities, knew that he had few or no weapons of mass destruction and was simply trumpeting them as tool of propaganda. In psychological terms, both Bush and Hussein "mirror imaged" the other, assuming that the mind of the enemy worked much as their own did.
Bush and his top advisers also misunderstood the nature of the Iraqi psyche and political culture. They underestimated the extent to which three decades of Saddam Hussein's pathological rule had damaged and distorted that society. A whole generation of Iraqis knew nothing except the skills needed to survive in a brutal, totalitarian system. A willingness to compromise, toleration, trust, civic responsibility, and personal initiative—all of which could get an Iraqi killed or exiled under the dictatorship—were in scarce supply. To preserve his grip on power after his disastrous wars with Iran and 1991 coalition, Saddam Hussein had exacerbated sectarian hostility between Sunnis and Shiites, portraying Shiites as the puppets of Iran. Bush administration policymakers grossly underestimated the extent of this, sanguinely believing that the Sunnis, long accustomed to dominating Iraq, would accept minority status in a democratic country. Or, in an even more optimistic mode, Bush officials assumed that with Hussein gone, Iraqis would not approach politics through a sectarian lens. Phrased differently, the administration thought that Iraq was like Czechoslovakia or Poland where an essentially liberal society had a thin totalitarian veneer which could be stripped away.
Similarly, administration policymakers did not understand the central role which honor and justice play in Arab culture and the extent to which this was manifested as intolerance for outside intervention, particularly by Western, non-Islamic states. President Bush expected Americans to be seen as liberators and the leaders of the new Iraq to be publicly grateful for the removal of Hussein and his cronies. They were shocked when whatever gratitude existed quickly gave way to hostility. They failed to grasp the power that honorable resistance to perceived injustice had in the Arab world. This misunderstanding of Iraqi culture and values was exacerbated by the virtual exclusion of regional experts from policymaking in the Bush administration motivated, to some extent, out of concern that Arabists might have inadvertently developed sympathies for the people of the region which would flavor their policy positions. Somewhere between having "gone native" and knowing nothing about a region lies the "sweet spot" where strategy is informed and effective. The Bush policy toward Iraq did not attain it.
The Bush approach also illustrated that no strategy is stronger than its assumptions. Assumptions are composed of information which is vital to a strategy but which cannot be confirmed or disproven with existing information. Often they pertain to the future, or to the way that a leader, a nation, or a people will react to a particular event or action. Since assumptions reflect "unknowns," strategists believe that the fewer of them, the better. For the Bush strategy toward Iraq, the most important assumptions concerned Saddam Hussein's intentions, what he would do in the future if he remained in power, and how the Iraqi people, other Arabs, and the rest of the world would respond to American military intervention. This combined grimly pessimistic assumptions about the state of Iraq's WMD programs and Hussein's intentions with rosily optimistic assumptions about the ease with which Iraq could be rebuilt following intervention, the ease with which Iraq could form a stable democracy, the reaction to Iraq's political transformation in the rest of the Arab world, and the reaction of the world community to American intervention. When most of these assumptions proved incorrect, the Bush administration suffered a tremendous loss of deference and trust from both the American public and the world community. The price of unrealistic assumptions was a broader wounding of the administration.
That the Bush administration devoted so much of its attention to Iraq and gambled so much of the trust and deference which it had accumulated after September 11 showed that focus is both a blessing and a curse for American strategy. Concentrating on a single enemy, threat, or issue makes it easier to mobilize and sustain support from the always-fickle public and Congress. It makes the strategy more coherent and convincing. An unfocused strategy complicates the task of mobilizing and sustaining support. The price of a focused strategy, though, is that other problems and issues may receive less effort than they should. The Bush administration's concentration on Iraq provided a textbook illustration of this. Little was done to stop the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs until they were well underway. Afghanistan and Pakistan received less attention and resources than they would have. Emerging problems in key petroleum producers like Nigeria and Venezuela were largely ignored. Little progress was made on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The American public, Congress, and foreign partners came to believe that not only was the Bush administration overly focused on a single problem, but it was focused on the wrong problem. Bush had convinced the public that terrorism and proliferation of WMD were the most pressing security threats to the United States, but then it concentrated on a nation that was a marginal supporter of transnational terrorism and, as it turned out, far from developing an effective WMD capability. Again, the trust and deference which are so vital to leadership proved to be the casualties of administration's obsession with Iraq.
The Bush strategy toward Iraq represented the end of the global security system which had taken shape following World War II. In overthrowing Saddam Hussein over protests from key allies, the Bush administration abandoned the notion that a concert of great powers should maintain global stability. Franklin Roosevelt's dream had been mortally wounded by September 11 then died somewhere in southern Iraq. Attempts to portray the Iraq intervention as the effort of a broad coalition could not salvage this and were never taken seriously. The invasion was the action of the United States and a retinue. By far the most significant aspect of this was the wedge driven between the United States and its traditional European partners. The Atlantic community had formed the foundation of American strategy since the 1940s. It had always been inequitable though, reflecting America's economic and military preponderance. But while the Soviet Union existed, differences such as the disagreements over the British and French intervention in Suez in 1956 and the deployment of intermediate range ballistic missiles to Europe in the 1980s could be overcome. For the Europeans, even a heavy-handed America was a lesser evil than the Soviet Union.
By the beginning of the 21st century, though, Europe had matched the United States economically and, with no Soviet threat looming, lost much of its deference. After a decade of American frustration over the unwillingness of Europe to develop military capabilities concomitant with its economic power and desire for influence, Bush concluded that the brake that Europe put on American power outweighed the benefits. Europe was angered by the extent that the Bush administration ignored it, but this was an irrelevance partly of its own creation. By inclination President Bush had little need (or want) for approval from other states. A nation as powerful as the United States, he and the conservative idealists who helped shape his ideas believed, should be unconcerned with the perceptions and wishes of lesser powers. Europeans saw it differently. What Bush considered bold leadership they viewed as hubris.
Bush's style amplified the problem. What worked in America's "red" states did not in Europe. Neither did Donald Rumsfeld's aggressive, often bullying methods. The best efforts of Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice could not overcome this. But it was more than that. Clinton had gone to great lengths to find agreement with the Europeans even if it meant sacrificing something that the United States wanted. The Bush approach was simply to take the course he desired and assume that once it worked, the Europeans (and the rest of the world) would follow. But if they did not, so be it. As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld phrased it, if "old" Europe refused to go along "new" Europe—the former communist states reliant on American support and thus more compliant—would. More broadly, "old" Europe was dominated by what John Keegan calls the "olympian" worldview which is based on "a distaste for and hostility toward the use of military action for state purpose." So at the very time that conservative idealism was increasing reliance on military force in American strategy, America's European allies were moving in the opposite direction. Iraq was simply the issue that changed this festering problem into a gaping wound. Rather than building strategy on permanent partnerships, the United States would, according to President Bush's vision, operate with ad hoc, issue-specific coalitions. For the Bush administration, Iraq was to be the case that validated the new approach. For the Europeans, Iraq had become an opportunity to punish American arrogance.
The Bush approach to Iraq also illustrated the persistence of deep dissonances within American strategy. One was between the new strategy which President Bush had developed and the U.S. national security organization. The new strategy did not simply seek to defeat an aggressor's military force and restore the status quo ante bellum, but to alter the causes of aggression. Yet the U.S. the military, so superb at defeating enemy armed forces, was less adept at stabilizing and rebuilding a defeated state. Unfortunately, neither was any other government agency. There was a yawning mismatch between America's strategic ends and its strategic means. The inept and hasty creation of ORHA and exclusion of the State Department showed had badly configured the government was for the new strategic tasks it had been given. It was like a relay team with no one to anchor the last leg.
Operation Iraqi Freedom demonstrated that the transformation of the American military had, if anything, increased the gap between objectives and capabilities. The military appeared able to defeat conventional enemies more quickly and with a smaller force than in the past. But rapid battlefield victory with a lean force did not guarantee that a defeated enemy would change in the way that Americans wanted. As any military drill sergeant knows, the will and confidence of a new recruit must first be broken before he or she can be rebuilt in the desired way. The same holds for nations. Changing aggressive nations into peaceful ones requires that the population feel defeat and have their will broken so that they will accept the new order. As this is taking place, the sheer presence of troops matters greatly. Josef Stalin was wrong about many things but if he actually said, "Quantity has a quality all its own" he was, for once, right. Transformation had thus made the U.S. military the perfect tool for the old American strategy but less than optimal for the new one.
President Bush believed that a world of proliferation and terrorism required bold action. But the American political system and strategic culture mitigated against bold action. With its checks and balances, division of power, and influential role for the public, this system was specifically designed to check boldness. It stressed consensus building and deliberate action. To overcome these constraints, the Bush administration had to rely on a risky technique—building support on assumptions. This freed it for bold action but it also set the stage for later failure.
Two of the institutions which might have braked the Bush administration's boldness and questioned its strategic assumptions failed to do so. While there are reports of dissatisfaction within the uniformed military, no one in a senior position openly opposed the invasion of Iraq. This is particularly true of the two officers who were best positioned to do so—Tommy Franks and Richard Myers. The easy explanation for this is to attribute it to the power of Donald Rumsfeld's personality and his skill at using the immense power that he had as Secretary of Defense. But the problem is deeper and more systemic than that. American civil military relations are based on military deference to civilian control, and civilian deference to uniformed leader on matters that are strictly military. That is the theory, but reality is much more confusing. By definition, strategy intermixes politics and military issues. But it is never perfectly clear where the right and obligation of military officers to render advice ends. By selecting officers for senior positions who were not inclined to comment on policy (as Colin Powell had been when chairman of the Joint Chiefs) and by implying that questioning the President while the nation was "at war" was disloyal, perhaps even treasonous, the administration quelled any inclination that senior military leaders might have had to speak out against the invasion of Iraq. General Shinseki's comment about the size of the occupation force was the frankest expression of misgivings, and it was met with ferocity by the Pentagon's senior civilians. That message was clearly received by the rest of the uniformed leadership.
Congress—the other institution which might have altered or constrained the Bush strategy—also abdicated this role. During war, Americans knew, patriots deferred to the commander in chief. This paralyzed all but a few mavericks like Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV). Byrd was frank and untiring in probing the assumptions of the Bush strategy toward Iraq. But was also isolated and irrelevant. "There were many failures in the American system that led to the war," Thomas Ricks later wrote, "but the failures in Congress were at once perhaps the most important and the least noticed." Overall, though, the timing of the war with Saddam Hussein was an act of brilliance on the part of the Bush administration. It was close enough to September 11 that it was relatively easy to mobilize public fear and pacify Congress and to propagate the notion that opposition was inappropriate during wartime. But it was also close enough to the 2004 election that no ambitious politician—which included most of Congress—wanted to be seen as "soft" on national defense. It was the perfect time for boldness.
In the broadest sense the Bush administration's decision to remove Saddam Hussein by force and the way it went about it illustrated a number of ingrained characteristics, tensions, fissures, and potential problems with American strategy, at least is it was in the immediate aftermath of September 11. It showed, for instance, that U.S. strategy was often hamstrung by mutual incomprehension when operating across cultural divides. Neither George Bush nor Saddam Hussein fully understood their opponent. Bush interpreted Hussein's deception and bluster as evidence that he sought weapons of mass destruction for purposes of regional domination. As it turned out, the United States was—to borrow a phrase from Islamic militants—Iraq's "far enemy." His "near enemies" were internal opponents including the Kurds and Shiites, potential challengers within the Iraqi military, and Iran. Hussein felt that he had to make these enemies believe that he had weapons of mass destruction to deter them, all the more so as his conventional military power eroded during the era of sanctions. He assumed that the United States, with its massive intelligence capabilities, knew that he had few or no weapons of mass destruction and was simply trumpeting them as tool of propaganda. In psychological terms, both Bush and Hussein "mirror imaged" the other, assuming that the mind of the enemy worked much as their own did.
Bush and his top advisers also misunderstood the nature of the Iraqi psyche and political culture. They underestimated the extent to which three decades of Saddam Hussein's pathological rule had damaged and distorted that society. A whole generation of Iraqis knew nothing except the skills needed to survive in a brutal, totalitarian system. A willingness to compromise, toleration, trust, civic responsibility, and personal initiative—all of which could get an Iraqi killed or exiled under the dictatorship—were in scarce supply. To preserve his grip on power after his disastrous wars with Iran and 1991 coalition, Saddam Hussein had exacerbated sectarian hostility between Sunnis and Shiites, portraying Shiites as the puppets of Iran. Bush administration policymakers grossly underestimated the extent of this, sanguinely believing that the Sunnis, long accustomed to dominating Iraq, would accept minority status in a democratic country. Or, in an even more optimistic mode, Bush officials assumed that with Hussein gone, Iraqis would not approach politics through a sectarian lens. Phrased differently, the administration thought that Iraq was like Czechoslovakia or Poland where an essentially liberal society had a thin totalitarian veneer which could be stripped away.
Similarly, administration policymakers did not understand the central role which honor and justice play in Arab culture and the extent to which this was manifested as intolerance for outside intervention, particularly by Western, non-Islamic states. President Bush expected Americans to be seen as liberators and the leaders of the new Iraq to be publicly grateful for the removal of Hussein and his cronies. They were shocked when whatever gratitude existed quickly gave way to hostility. They failed to grasp the power that honorable resistance to perceived injustice had in the Arab world. This misunderstanding of Iraqi culture and values was exacerbated by the virtual exclusion of regional experts from policymaking in the Bush administration motivated, to some extent, out of concern that Arabists might have inadvertently developed sympathies for the people of the region which would flavor their policy positions. Somewhere between having "gone native" and knowing nothing about a region lies the "sweet spot" where strategy is informed and effective. The Bush policy toward Iraq did not attain it.
The Bush approach also illustrated that no strategy is stronger than its assumptions. Assumptions are composed of information which is vital to a strategy but which cannot be confirmed or disproven with existing information. Often they pertain to the future, or to the way that a leader, a nation, or a people will react to a particular event or action. Since assumptions reflect "unknowns," strategists believe that the fewer of them, the better. For the Bush strategy toward Iraq, the most important assumptions concerned Saddam Hussein's intentions, what he would do in the future if he remained in power, and how the Iraqi people, other Arabs, and the rest of the world would respond to American military intervention. This combined grimly pessimistic assumptions about the state of Iraq's WMD programs and Hussein's intentions with rosily optimistic assumptions about the ease with which Iraq could be rebuilt following intervention, the ease with which Iraq could form a stable democracy, the reaction to Iraq's political transformation in the rest of the Arab world, and the reaction of the world community to American intervention. When most of these assumptions proved incorrect, the Bush administration suffered a tremendous loss of deference and trust from both the American public and the world community. The price of unrealistic assumptions was a broader wounding of the administration.
That the Bush administration devoted so much of its attention to Iraq and gambled so much of the trust and deference which it had accumulated after September 11 showed that focus is both a blessing and a curse for American strategy. Concentrating on a single enemy, threat, or issue makes it easier to mobilize and sustain support from the always-fickle public and Congress. It makes the strategy more coherent and convincing. An unfocused strategy complicates the task of mobilizing and sustaining support. The price of a focused strategy, though, is that other problems and issues may receive less effort than they should. The Bush administration's concentration on Iraq provided a textbook illustration of this. Little was done to stop the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs until they were well underway. Afghanistan and Pakistan received less attention and resources than they would have. Emerging problems in key petroleum producers like Nigeria and Venezuela were largely ignored. Little progress was made on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The American public, Congress, and foreign partners came to believe that not only was the Bush administration overly focused on a single problem, but it was focused on the wrong problem. Bush had convinced the public that terrorism and proliferation of WMD were the most pressing security threats to the United States, but then it concentrated on a nation that was a marginal supporter of transnational terrorism and, as it turned out, far from developing an effective WMD capability. Again, the trust and deference which are so vital to leadership proved to be the casualties of administration's obsession with Iraq.
The Bush strategy toward Iraq represented the end of the global security system which had taken shape following World War II. In overthrowing Saddam Hussein over protests from key allies, the Bush administration abandoned the notion that a concert of great powers should maintain global stability. Franklin Roosevelt's dream had been mortally wounded by September 11 then died somewhere in southern Iraq. Attempts to portray the Iraq intervention as the effort of a broad coalition could not salvage this and were never taken seriously. The invasion was the action of the United States and a retinue. By far the most significant aspect of this was the wedge driven between the United States and its traditional European partners. The Atlantic community had formed the foundation of American strategy since the 1940s. It had always been inequitable though, reflecting America's economic and military preponderance. But while the Soviet Union existed, differences such as the disagreements over the British and French intervention in Suez in 1956 and the deployment of intermediate range ballistic missiles to Europe in the 1980s could be overcome. For the Europeans, even a heavy-handed America was a lesser evil than the Soviet Union.
By the beginning of the 21st century, though, Europe had matched the United States economically and, with no Soviet threat looming, lost much of its deference. After a decade of American frustration over the unwillingness of Europe to develop military capabilities concomitant with its economic power and desire for influence, Bush concluded that the brake that Europe put on American power outweighed the benefits. Europe was angered by the extent that the Bush administration ignored it, but this was an irrelevance partly of its own creation. By inclination President Bush had little need (or want) for approval from other states. A nation as powerful as the United States, he and the conservative idealists who helped shape his ideas believed, should be unconcerned with the perceptions and wishes of lesser powers. Europeans saw it differently. What Bush considered bold leadership they viewed as hubris.
Bush's style amplified the problem. What worked in America's "red" states did not in Europe. Neither did Donald Rumsfeld's aggressive, often bullying methods. The best efforts of Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice could not overcome this. But it was more than that. Clinton had gone to great lengths to find agreement with the Europeans even if it meant sacrificing something that the United States wanted. The Bush approach was simply to take the course he desired and assume that once it worked, the Europeans (and the rest of the world) would follow. But if they did not, so be it. As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld phrased it, if "old" Europe refused to go along "new" Europe—the former communist states reliant on American support and thus more compliant—would. More broadly, "old" Europe was dominated by what John Keegan calls the "olympian" worldview which is based on "a distaste for and hostility toward the use of military action for state purpose." So at the very time that conservative idealism was increasing reliance on military force in American strategy, America's European allies were moving in the opposite direction. Iraq was simply the issue that changed this festering problem into a gaping wound. Rather than building strategy on permanent partnerships, the United States would, according to President Bush's vision, operate with ad hoc, issue-specific coalitions. For the Bush administration, Iraq was to be the case that validated the new approach. For the Europeans, Iraq had become an opportunity to punish American arrogance.
The Bush approach to Iraq also illustrated the persistence of deep dissonances within American strategy. One was between the new strategy which President Bush had developed and the U.S. national security organization. The new strategy did not simply seek to defeat an aggressor's military force and restore the status quo ante bellum, but to alter the causes of aggression. Yet the U.S. the military, so superb at defeating enemy armed forces, was less adept at stabilizing and rebuilding a defeated state. Unfortunately, neither was any other government agency. There was a yawning mismatch between America's strategic ends and its strategic means. The inept and hasty creation of ORHA and exclusion of the State Department showed had badly configured the government was for the new strategic tasks it had been given. It was like a relay team with no one to anchor the last leg.
Operation Iraqi Freedom demonstrated that the transformation of the American military had, if anything, increased the gap between objectives and capabilities. The military appeared able to defeat conventional enemies more quickly and with a smaller force than in the past. But rapid battlefield victory with a lean force did not guarantee that a defeated enemy would change in the way that Americans wanted. As any military drill sergeant knows, the will and confidence of a new recruit must first be broken before he or she can be rebuilt in the desired way. The same holds for nations. Changing aggressive nations into peaceful ones requires that the population feel defeat and have their will broken so that they will accept the new order. As this is taking place, the sheer presence of troops matters greatly. Josef Stalin was wrong about many things but if he actually said, "Quantity has a quality all its own" he was, for once, right. Transformation had thus made the U.S. military the perfect tool for the old American strategy but less than optimal for the new one.
President Bush believed that a world of proliferation and terrorism required bold action. But the American political system and strategic culture mitigated against bold action. With its checks and balances, division of power, and influential role for the public, this system was specifically designed to check boldness. It stressed consensus building and deliberate action. To overcome these constraints, the Bush administration had to rely on a risky technique—building support on assumptions. This freed it for bold action but it also set the stage for later failure.
Two of the institutions which might have braked the Bush administration's boldness and questioned its strategic assumptions failed to do so. While there are reports of dissatisfaction within the uniformed military, no one in a senior position openly opposed the invasion of Iraq. This is particularly true of the two officers who were best positioned to do so—Tommy Franks and Richard Myers. The easy explanation for this is to attribute it to the power of Donald Rumsfeld's personality and his skill at using the immense power that he had as Secretary of Defense. But the problem is deeper and more systemic than that. American civil military relations are based on military deference to civilian control, and civilian deference to uniformed leader on matters that are strictly military. That is the theory, but reality is much more confusing. By definition, strategy intermixes politics and military issues. But it is never perfectly clear where the right and obligation of military officers to render advice ends. By selecting officers for senior positions who were not inclined to comment on policy (as Colin Powell had been when chairman of the Joint Chiefs) and by implying that questioning the President while the nation was "at war" was disloyal, perhaps even treasonous, the administration quelled any inclination that senior military leaders might have had to speak out against the invasion of Iraq. General Shinseki's comment about the size of the occupation force was the frankest expression of misgivings, and it was met with ferocity by the Pentagon's senior civilians. That message was clearly received by the rest of the uniformed leadership.
Congress—the other institution which might have altered or constrained the Bush strategy—also abdicated this role. During war, Americans knew, patriots deferred to the commander in chief. This paralyzed all but a few mavericks like Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV). Byrd was frank and untiring in probing the assumptions of the Bush strategy toward Iraq. But was also isolated and irrelevant. "There were many failures in the American system that led to the war," Thomas Ricks later wrote, "but the failures in Congress were at once perhaps the most important and the least noticed." Overall, though, the timing of the war with Saddam Hussein was an act of brilliance on the part of the Bush administration. It was close enough to September 11 that it was relatively easy to mobilize public fear and pacify Congress and to propagate the notion that opposition was inappropriate during wartime. But it was also close enough to the 2004 election that no ambitious politician—which included most of Congress—wanted to be seen as "soft" on national defense. It was the perfect time for boldness.
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