What I didn't expect in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam's regime was the extent of the Syrian and Iranian joint involvement in trying to provoke a civil war--Syria supporting the Baathists and Sunni al Qaeda on one side and Iran supporting the Shia death squads on the other. Former British Prime Minister Blair didn't expect that either and marks it as a significant failure:
Blair says he did not plan for two things: first the absence of a civil service infrastructure; and, second, the role of Iran and al-Qaida.
He suggests that, if the lack of a civil service was the only problem, the coalition would have been able to copy.
It was the introduction of AQ and Iran that very nearly caused this mission to fail.
Blair says there is a "huge lesson" in that because those forces are still at work in the region.
That was the biggest problem. It wasn't a failure to plan for a proper Phase IV, it was a failure to anticipate a whole new war where Syria and Iran effectively invaded Iraq beginning in spring 2004. Until then, we had ground down the Baathist dead-enders, capturing Saddam in December 2003 and watched our combat casualties drop through the fall to extremely low levels by February 2004.
Even all the money the Baathists had at their disposal from oil-for-food (which I also didn't expect) and all the ammunition they had buried in Iraq (which I didn't anticipate) hadn't been enough to build an insurgency. Then all Hell broke loose in April 2004 when the Syrian- and Iranian-supported forces launched an offensive.
But even the anti-war side didn't predict this foreign invasion. Indeed, many of these anti-war people charged that Iraq was just the first target of Bush, and that Syria or maybe Iran was next in line to be invaded. In retrospect, all I can say is I wish that was what we planned. Maybe then Syria and Iran would have been too afraid to take us on inside Iraq.
I don't know what we could have done to keep Iran and Syria from starting a whole new war that took us 3-1/2 more difficult years to win. But nobody over here predicted that we'd face that type of enemy inside Iraq after defeating Saddam.
Yet despite that surpsise (and nobody can plan for no surprises in a war), we held in the face of the 2004 crises, adapted, and eventually beat the Baathists, the Sunni tribes, al Qaeda in Iraq, and Iran's Sadrist puppets.
It's nice to see Blair arguing for what I've long considered a key development in turning a fairly easy war into a close call as our politicians back here started itching to run away when the going got rough.
And as Tony Blair remarked, those two elements that caused us so much grief are still active in fighting us.
I'll add one more thing: we never made Syria or Iran pay a price for all the American and British soldiers who died fighting their invasions, or for all the Iraqi civilians who died in the near-civil war that engulfed Iraq because of their joint actions. But no, Blair is the one called to testify to justify what happened rather than the Syrian or Iranian governments being held accountable.
More things could yet go wrong for us because of that failure.
