Five years later, Iraq is still a mess

Attempting to restore democracy
As with all logical arguments, once you accept the assumptions, you are doomed to accept the conclusions. If democracy is the enemy of fundamentalism and terrorism, and if everyone loves democracy, then the mere replacement of a despotic regime with a democratic one ought to be enough. By getting rid of Saddam and replacing the Ba’athists with a democratically elected government, you quickly inoculate the region with democracy, and demands for free elections will spread. Except that it doesn’t work like that in the real world, especially in a region where groups loathe each other.

Furthermore, the administration had a naïve understanding of how military operations are conducted. With good evidence, there are some who argue that the White House and the Pentagon had no idea what they were doing.

Despite the clear-headed prognosis of the Army Chief of Staff at the time, Eric Shinseki, that it would take more then several hundred thousand troops to secure Iraq, the Secretary of Defense and the majority of his Joint Chiefs succumbed to the tantalizing prospect that technology alone would substitute for inadequate numbers and would reduce the number of American casualties.

It took four years of misguided strategy, which begat foolish tactics, before the mission acquired some adult supervision, but it may be too late even for the enlightened David Petraeus to affect the outcome of the mess in Iraq. Petraeus and Secretary Gates can be credited for some of the success we see in Iraq, but they have been ably assisted by a timely cease-fire agreement between the Iraqi government and Moqtada al-Sadr. The agreement will lapse soon, and a resumption of aggression by al-Sadr’s militia may erase the security gains of the past year.

Price of war will affect us for years
We have paid an awful price for our generals’ passively agreeing to employ an inadequate force for the period after the initial combat phase; for our leaders’ refusal or inability to distinguish between conventional and unconventional war; for their simple-minded assumption that the military instrument of power can be used alone; for Paul Bremer’s astonishingly idiotic policies of dissolving the Iraqi army and permitting the militias to keep their weapons; and for the puerile world view that was the genesis of the whole adventure.

And the unpleasant legacies of poor judgment in Iraq are many as well. They include the loss of an enormous amount of money and equipment; the cavalier and intemperate weakening of our military machine; the diversion of forces from the important campaign in Afghanistan; and a world, including Iran, that is convinced that America is a paper tiger.

The American electorate is ambivalent in the extreme, rocking uncomfortably between hope and fear. We hope that the exit from Iraq will be painless but fear it will not be, hope that our misadventure hasn’t set the stage for a dangerous regional war but fear it has. And we admire the selflessness of the young Americans who answered the call to defend the Republic, but we mourn their heroic loss.

In an absolute sense, any loss is a disaster. But one of the mistakes made by the Pentagon was the assumption that losses are to be avoided at all costs. When casualty avoidance is more important that accomplishing the mission, one often gets the worst of both worlds: failure of the mission and plenty of casualties anyway. Muddling around in Iraq has produced far fewer American deaths than in World War II, about 4,000 versus more than 400,000, but we knew what we were doing in World War II.

And we won.

Jack Jacobs is a military analyst and a retired U.S. Army colonel. He earned the Medal of Honor for exceptional heroism on the battlefields of Vietnam and also has three Bronze Stars and two Silver Stars.

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