Really, what's the point of that article?
Invading Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein a decade ago was one of the biggest strategic errors in modern American history.
That's pretty big talk, strategery-wise, isn't it? No "we made mistakes" or no "the price was too high" or "it was an error"? None of those more pedestrian claims? He goes right for "one of the biggest strategic errors" in modern American history? Pray tell, why?
One, he claims we didn't have enough power to impose a settlement on Iraq, so the war was a failure:
America’s military power, awesome as it was, turned out to be insufficient to impose a settlement in Iraq; and in a grinding war of occupation, all our might could not turn on the electricity in Baghdad or frighten Sunnis and Shiites into cooperating with each other. Rome was also weak at home, politically: The United States didn’t have the stomach for a protracted war that President George W. Bush couldn’t explain and the public didn’t understand.
Excuse me? We did have enough power to win the war, impose a settlement that got the Sunni Arabs to largely abandon violence; convinced the Kurds to remain within Iraq; and got the Shias to adopt democracy--as shaky as it is (but is that a problem of the war or our failure to stay after the war?)--rather than just become the new brutal dictator to sit in the palace.
As for not having the stomach to fight a protracted war, we did fight through a number of stages in the war from spring 2003 to spring 2008 that broke the backs of many forces trying to defeat us. If that isn't stomach for the fight, what is?
Yet while this justification for his claim is just obviously wrong, his next one is so mystifying that I fear I simply lack the nuance to appreciate what he is getting at:
My [Syrian] friend took me aside after the fighting had been raging for several months. I am still haunted by what he said: “I am sorry for America. You are stuck. You have become a country of the Middle East. America will never change Iraq, but Iraq will change America.”
What does that even mean? My brain may not strain the seams of my cap, but I think I'm a pretty smart guy. But Iraq changed America in such a way that Ignatius is "haunted" by it? Dude. Seriously? Give me a scrap to work with! Nothing? No clue what you mean? Just a grimace, a thoughtful shake of the head, and then you move on?
But there is no explanation for his claim. Just that haunting worry. This isn't analysis. This isn't even penance. It's in therapy territory.
Then he says a reason for his claim is that a vacuum of power was created by crushing Saddam's regime. Well, duh. Is that really a reason to keep dictator's in power? Do you really want to stake that claim?
Of course not. So Ignatius trots out the notion that we could have prevented the vacuum and prevented sectarian interests from arising to replace the firm hand of Saddam:
[When] we disbanded the nonsectarian army and most of the secular government, Iraqis had nowhere to turn but their most basic ethnic and tribal identities as Sunnis or Shiites, Kurds or Arabs.
Many in the CIA understood the need to keep the Iraqi army and civil service together.
While an interesting notion, I think it is dead wrong. One, the Iraqi army was not "nonsectarian." It was a tool of the Sunni Arab Baathists. Two, arguing we failed to keep the army together by "disbanding" it is rot. The Iraqi army dissolved in the major combat operations. I was simply gone by April 2003. Indeed, that was our intent because we did not want our spearheads slowed down by the need under international law to take care of a flood of captured enemy POWs.
The "secular" government claim ignores that Saddam increasingly relied on Sunni Islam to justify his rule. Remember that "Saddam's Fedayeen" were not local chapters of the League of Women Voters. They were imported jihadis under the control of the Baath Party. And Sunni Arabs hated Shia Arabs and Kurds (gassing the Kurds infamously in 1988). Shias were second-class citizens--on a good day.
I'm open to the question of whether de-Baathification went too deep. But given the suspicion that the majority Shias had of us after we encouraged them to revolt in 1991 and then refused to help them when they did revolt against Saddam, a decision to keep Sunni Arab-dominated army units and civil servants in power would have been a huge strategic error by giving the Shias the idea that the new boss was the same as the old boss. The twin Sadrist and al Qaeda/Baathist offensives in spring 2004 could have been a disaster of Sepoy Mutiny dimensions if we had followed the advice that Ignatius now says justifies his claim of massive strategic error.
And without the Shias mostly on our side because the Shias could see the alternative to fighting with us was a return of the Sunni Arabs to power, we truly would have faced a national resistance to our presence. Even if the Shias didn't side with the Sunni Arabs, they might have remained neutral and we would have flailed away alone (the Kurds would have withdrawn to the relative safety of their mountains) without a population to protect. We would have lost that war.
And since we did impose an American occupation government (and I use that as a legal term rather than as a moral condemnation) to try to impose order, it is funny that some today say that we should have thrown together an Iraqi government faster despite the lack of experience or credibility of any Iraqis not tainted by Saddam.
As for the dignity issue. To Hell with that. For all our talk of democracy, we actually left Iraqis a democracy, no? And it isn't that we harmed their sense of honor and independence as much as it is we fought and bled by their side until they could do it on their own. If Saddam's strutting evil stroked Arab ego, that's a problem for them and not our fault. It is surely no excuse to have left Saddam in power.
Ignatius' final evidence for strategic error has a point, but misses the target:
A final lesson is the benefit of persistence. Bush made a disastrous mistake invading Iraq in 2003. But having busted up the country, he tried his best to clean up the mess. By checking the spiraling sectarian killing, the surge of U.S. troops led by Bush and Gen. David Petraeus saved thousands of Iraqi lives. It’s one thing Americans did right in this painful story.
One, we busted up Saddam's regime--not Iraq. Aside from Saddam himself during his reign of terror and war, Iran, Syria, and al Qaeda did the real busting up from summer 2003 to spring 2008 (and continue to do so at much reduced levels).
More importantly, if the desire of Ignatius for persistence is sincere, do remember that President Bush did persist over the protests of many here until victory--as Ignatius concedes Bush did. But what about President Obama? Where is his persistence to spend the relatively small effort to defend what we achieved in Iraq by deciding to destroy the Saddam regime (as our Clinton-era policy codified our objective for Iraq)?
If Ignatius wants to seriously talk about modern American strategic error, he needs to ask the White House today why they set Iraq adrift in a sea of hostility. Iraq may turn out well even without us, but we are taking a greater risk of failure in the power vacuum that President Obama accepted in Iraq at the end of 2011.
UPDATE: Mark Steyn is less sure of what we achieved in Iraq, but he still thinks it was worth it. But he absolutely doesn't like the way those who supported the war have melted away over the last ten years:
The war dead of America and its few real allies died in an honorable cause. But armies don’t wage wars, nations do. And, back on the home front, a vast percentage of fair-weather hawks who decided that it was all too complicated, or a bit of a downer, or Bush lied, or where’s the remote, revealed America as profoundly unserious. A senator who votes for war and then decides he’d rather it had never started is also engaging in “alternative history” — albeit of the kind in which Pam Ewing steps into the shower at Southfork and writes off the previous season of Dallas as a bad dream. In non-alternative history, in the only reality there is, once you’ve started a war, you have two choices: to win it or to lose it. Withdrawing one’s “support” for a war you’re already in advertises nothing more than a kind of geopolitical ADHD.
Back in 2005, I was disgusted by the sight of war supporters melting away:
Our leaders have been keen on getting the support of the American people for war. The military especially has been gun shy after Vietnam unless the American people clearly support the decision to wage war. The resulting Abrams Doctrine of relying on our reserves to ensure public debate prior to going to war surely worked for the Iraq War. There was mobilization, debate, and a Congressional authorization for war that reflected public polling in support of war. Pretty much the Gold standard, wouldn't you say?
But now elements of our population and political parties are abandoning their earlier pledge of support while the war is not yet won. We are winning but the war is not yet won.
So the question is, when giving consent to wage war, don't those who give that consent have an obligation to maintain that consent until victory? Was there a clause in the Congressional declaration that said it sunsets in 2006 or is there a subsection that allows for a reversal at the 2,000th casualty? And the American people whose support for winning is dropping, the same criticism holds. If our enemies ever believe our people have a particular threshold where we retreat, we guarantee resistance to reach that threshold.
But we did stay long enough to win. Public support held and we achieved battlefield victory. Yet still we might blow it because people who hate George W. Bush were charged with defending what he allowed our troops to win.
