Weinberger preached that a war plan had to be "wholehearted": Preparation often precludes the need to fight. So in Iraq, where was the overwhelming force needed to subdue a country of 25 million? Where was the training for counterinsurgency? The adequate armor? The effective anti-improvised explosive device technology?
In fact, there was a disgraceful lack of military preparation for Iraq, and the war hasn't been handled well since, either.
Complaining that we don't use the Cold War-era Weinberger Doctrine in the Iraq War fails to consider that these are different eras. Consider that in the Cold War, we had the Soviet Union to consider and any distraction with a smaller war could be fatal if we then had to confront the Soviet Union while we were engaged with another small war. So winning any conflict quickly to minimize the amount of time the Soviets had to take advantage of our distraction was a key consideration. In essence we were focused on the Soviet Union in the 1980s and no other threat was considered important enough to draw away our power. Not being a dreaded "neo-con," I guess I am free to defend that approach and not complain about failing to confront jihadis in 1980s Lebanon. That was a future threat not a threat greater than communist Russia. But we are in different times now.
And comparing the Lebanon civil war with modern-day Iraq is an error. There is no civil war right now in Iraq. There is a Shia- and Kurd-dominated government fighting Sunni insurgents and terrorists for the most part. Lebanon saw various factions controlling their own chunks of territory. Only by broadening the definition of civil war to be meaningless can Iraq be brought under the definition in order to create a cudgel to batter our current strategy.
But what I really want to address is was it actually "whole-hearted" to gear up so much firepower in 1990-1991 to win a limited objective war as we did in Desert Storm under the guidance of the overwhelming force doctrine? Or was smashing the Saddam regime completely in about three weeks in 2003 "whole-hearted?" I think the latter is an example of whole-hearted grand strategy and the fact that we did smash the regime in three weeks shows that we did indeed have overwhelming force to do the job operationally, too. Desert Storm was a demonstration of whole-hearted operational art only. Big difference.
The rest of the complaints are farcical. It is absurd to say we prepared inadequately for the war. Critics may not like it, but you do go to war with the army you have and not the army you wish to have. So did our enemy. And we smashed them. Setting a land-speed record in the Middle East in the process, I might add.
And since the toppling of the regime, we've adapted to the insurgency very rapidly and are beating it down. And doing it increasingly with Iraqi troops. Since counter-insurgencies are a matter of persistence and not overwhelming force, we are succeeding without the massive numbers some insist would have somehow prevented the insurgency/terror campaign from starting.
All wars have mistakes and we've committed some. But we've committed no fatal errors and have adapted to the mistakes we've made. What is disgraceful is failing to see how superbly equipped our military entered the battle, how well we have fought, and how much we've achieved.
We're winning, people. And it is ok if President Bush gets the credit for the win. Really. Much like opponents of the Cold War, Desert Storm, and the Afghan campaign became supporters after these struggles were won, all you opposing the war in Iraq today can in five years insist you were for this war all along, too.
