Let's start, shall we?
There was a time not so long ago when the Vietnam War was widely viewed as the biggest misstep in American military history. Not only was the conflict poorly executed by America and its local allies, but domestic support for the war effort collapsed, leading to a stark defeat of American strategy.
So, we were succeeding in defeating the North Vietnamese-supported insurgency in South Vietnam until we engineered the overthrow of the Diem government. And after pouring in hundreds of thousands of troops, we managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and rebuild the decimated South Vietnamese armed forces, defeat the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong, and then left with South Vietnam mostly pacified and needing only continued American support to endure as an independent state. It was a tough fight requiring us to both spread out forces to pacify the population and to concentrate forces to fight large organized enemy forces.
Domestic support may have collapsed, but not before we left with an independent South Vietnam still in place. South Vietnam fell to a conventional mechanized invasion. We cut off the support that would have allowed the South Vietnamese to hold their ground.
And what did we achieve? Our strategy bought time for a stretch of Asia from India to Indonesia to Japan to build up their domestic cohesion to resist communist inroads. By the time the 1960s began, communism seemed to be on the march. In the end, only South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fell to the communists. Not too bad. And in Europe, we demonstrated to shaky Western European NATO allies with large domestic communist parties that we would resist the Soviet Union's efforts to spread communism. And we showed the Soviets that we'd suffer large casualties in an out-of-the-way Southeast Asia, leaving smaller doubts that we'd do what it took to defend our NATO allies. In the end, the war was part of a Cold War that we ultimately won. Was it expensive? Yes it was. We lost a lot of troops.
But a "stark defeat" of American strategy that was widely viewed as our biggest misstep in our military history? Rubbish. I won't say it isn't widely viewed as a misstep. But that is a problem of perception and not reality.
So having established his expertise in military matters and strategy, the author moves on to Iraq:
The outcome in Iraq is not so clear-cut, but characterizing it as a victory is the triumph of hope over hard-won lessons. In fact, the Iraq war and subsequent occupation may ultimately come to be regarded as a bigger mistake than Vietnam was.
Oh, enlighten me, please.
Well, Iraq shouldn't be a state at all since it is divided into three main ethnically based areas, the author says. That Iraq functioned as a state even before Saddam misruled it despite this problem and despite the fact that many countries have ethnic divisions that are geographically based is proof that Iraq must fail as a unified state. I see.
And this is a problem:
Vietnam may have been divided between North and South, but it encompassed an ancient culture with common language and traditions. Our reasons for defending it were grounded in a national strategy called containment that was embraced by both political parties as a necessary response to communist aggression. Iraq, in contrast, is a country of warring ethnic and sectarian communities, and our military involvement there resulted from an ad hoc response to faulty intelligence in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks.
Huh, so the strategy of Vietnam was good? I could have sworn--never mind. Iraq does have some unifying aspects. They are not Persians. Which is a unifier. 75% are Arab and 90% are Sunni. And there is that Arabic language thing they have in common. Hmm. Well anyone can have a bad day at the keyboard.
As for the ad hoc response to faulty intelligence. Our Congress enacted and President Clinton signed legislation making regime change in Iraq our official policy. I'll hold off on the faulty intelligence part for now.
Next!
The first lesson we learned after toppling Saddam Hussein was that our main reason for invading the country — Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program — didn’t exist. We soon determined that another big reason for going, the supposed presence of Al Qaeda elements, was largely imaginary.
No, the nuclear path was dormant. But Iraq had an obligation to prove that they had ended that and other WMD programs. Clearly, Saddam would have restarted all of them when he could. And al Qaeda related elements were inside Iraq along with many other terrorists.
They may not have been the slam dunks that war opponents insisted we have, but I have no doubt that we prevented Saddam from getting WMD and we prevented Saddam from hosting al Qaeda after we forced them to flee Afghanistan.
Also, we had many reasons to destroy the Saddam regime even though President Bush emphasized the WMD angle since our CIA assured him it was a slam dunk certainty they had such programs. Shoot, maybe we taught thugs not to lie to us. One can hope.
But the really big and enduring lesson was that the Iraqis were not by nature a peaceful people — they had longstanding scores to settle, not only with each other but also with us, and they proved remarkably persistent in pursuing that purpose. If anything, our presence helped spur recruiting by sectarian militias and local supporters of Al Qaeda.
Watch it. We're getting dangerously close to racist stereotyping here. And might not the bloody path have something to do with Iran and Syria essentially invading Iraq by funneling in money, expertise, and weapons to their own Shia and Sunni Arab factions? While the Kurdish region remained peaceful despite being Iraqis who are not--he says--peaceful people? Sure, al Qaeda was able to recruit there, but that is a natural part of war. I'm sure the Hitler Youth got a lot more recruits when Allied armies reached the Rhine River. And the "solution" to the problem would leave us in the strange position of abandoning Iraq just to deprive al Qaeda of the recruiting tool of our presence? Really? You don't think al Qaeda could recruit on the basis of our defeat? Or anything else we do or don't do?
And this is the funny part:
When the immediate rationales for invading Iraq were revealed as misguided, the Bush Administration then defaulted to the argument that a brutal dictator was being deposed to make way for the first real democracy in the Arab world. That certainly was a laudable objective, but it begged the question of how Saddam had managed to remain in power for decades.
Remember that Clinton era law I mentioned? Here's one part:
It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.
And I hate to bring up the obvious, but the invasion was called Operation Iraqi Freedom.
That's subtle, I know. So let's go to the New York Times of January 5, 2003:
President Bush's national security team is assembling final plans for administering and democratizing Iraq after the expected ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Huh.
Anyway. So how did Saddam survive for decades?
One, since when is simply dealing with a dictator immunize that dictator from ever having to face American power in anger? Is that really the implication? Because we didn't kill him on day one we forfeit the right to ever kill him? Seriously, dude?
But back to Saddam's endurance. At first Iraq was a formal ally of the Soviet Union. And when the mullahs of Iran waged war on Iraq (yes, I know Iraq invaded Iran), we naturally preferred the lesser of two evils from 1980 to 1988. In 1991, the sainted international community didn't want us to overthrow Saddam and we then spent the 1990s trying to get anybody inside Iraq to kill the man. In 2003 we sent him packing and pulled him out of a spider hole. So there were reasons we didn't nail him before 2003. Okay?
Then we get to the real heart of his view. He thinks we are handing Iraq to Iran:
The one local government run by Shiites that Maliki can turn to for help when the Americans are gone is that of Iran, which is essentially a Shiite theocracy. In other words, what looks like a fledgling democracy in Iraq to some U.S. policymakers looks to the governments in surrounding states more like a huge opportunity for radical leaders in Teheran to expand their influence. I won’t get into how resentful many Sunni Arabs are about the role America played in giving Shiites — a distinct minority in the Arab world — political power in Iraq, but that is likely to be a potent factor in future regional relations.
What rot. Iran is surely trying to use local allies to undermine Iraq. But Iraqis don't welcome Iranian control. The author bizarrely speaks of the majority Sunnis resenting our putting Shias in charge, but inside Iraq the majority is Shia. Why should it be an issue that the former privileged minority resents their dethroning? And why should we go by the fact that the world's Sunnis don't like the idea of the grubby Shias running their own country?
I'll wrap up with this:
In the process, though, much of the military’s agenda for modernizing Cold War weapons has been derailed, and U.S. forces have lost the mystique they once enjoyed for being invincible. Although they have fought bravely and in the end successfully, it will be a long time before overseas aggressors again view them with the awe exhibited after Operation Desert Storm and the Balkan air war.
Does he really think we'd have hundreds of Raptors and lots of other new ships and weapons without the war? The war led to some amazing new stuff and modernization. And our troops are combat veterans.
And I can hardly believe my eyes to read that our enemies aren't in awe of our ability to adapt our conventional army to fight a well-funded and extremely vicious insurgency and pound their sorry butts into the ground. Nor can I believe that the Balkan air war (of 1999 or 1995) is viewed by our jihadi enemies as anything other than proving that we are too afraid to tangle with our enemies man-to-man on the ground. Our enemies used to mock us as unwilling to do anything but fling cruise missiles at them. You don't hear that too much anymore.
What rubbish. I've gone on long enough and can't bear to even address the issue of paying for wounded veterans who apparently didn't have the decency to just die in percentages our troops have in the past and spare us the cost.
The author says he writes about national security, especially its business dimensions.
Because when you want to understand war and strategy, you naturally want the business dimension.
I can't believe I lost the chunk of my life reading and writing about that rubbish masquerading as national security analysis.
We won the Iraq War. Let's not throw it away by talking ourselves into the stupid notion that we didn't win anything at all.
UPDATE: Strategypage addresses Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and counter-insurgency. In case you want the historical dimenstion of military and defense analysis.
