Did America screw up the post-war Iraq mission? Maybe. But we recovered and won. And then screwed up and recovered again. What comes next is up in the air.
I'm not really comfortable with this assessment of the Iraq War:
The fall of Baghdad ended major combat operations in Iraq, but martial law was not declared or established. US commanders believed their mission was complete when the Iraqi army collapsed. They ignored their legal and moral obligations to restore order and impose interim military governance over occupied territory. Despite the futile efforts of leaders like Gen. Eric Shinseki who knew better, the poorly planned and executed consolidation and stabilization effort resulted in an eight-year insurgency ending in a unilateral US withdrawal, not a peace treaty or a stable and enduring political outcome.
Shinseki's counsel for several hundred thousand troops--which is the focus of the linked article in the above quote--to pacify Iraq was actually pretty standard fare for troops required. But Shinseki was in error--or people interpreting him err--when you consider that we actually did win the Iraq War insurgency campaigns without anywhere near 300,000 American troops in Iraq even during the Surge:
During the Iraq War counter-insurgency phase, many on the left argued that we failed to put several hundred thousand troops into Iraq as US Army General Shinseki once asserted we'd need to win, and as past counter-insurgency fights indicated could be necessary.Here's a post counting more than American security forces.
It was a dishonest critique by Democrats because they would never have supported an effort on that scale, but they made it nonetheless.
Yet except for specific periods when enemy initiatives threatened our war effort (I'm thinking of spring-summer 2004 and summer-fall 2006), I judged that we were winning the counter-insurgency war in Iraq despite the constant media cries of imminent defeat.
I wrote many blog posts calculating the troop-to-population ratio for our effort and continually judged we had enough to win.
The basis for my judgment was that the left was oddly only counting American troops when it was appropriate to consider all ground security forces and take into account the threat level in different areas.
And again, we won with the troops we committed. Both Obama and Biden recognized and boasted of the achievement.
We did screw up by not clamping down quickly after major combat operations. But we wrongly assumed civilian police would stay on their jobs and hold down the looting. The police deserted, too.
And it would be rewriting history to think Democrats would have applauded a hard American-led reaction to post-major combat operations violence.
But to argue that failure provoked the insurgencies by Iraqi Sunni Arabs supported by Syria and by Iraqi Shias supported and directed by Iran is ridiculous. Who really believes that only absence of law and order in the several months after destroying the Saddam regime convinced Sunni Arabs and pro-Iran Shias to wage insurgencies and support terror?
But just stop the BS claims that we had too few troops to win the war in Iraq or that we caused resistance to our victory. Let's focus on defending our win--again.
UPDATE: As for defending the gain, it is good to see that the Saudis are finally competing with the Iranians for Iraqi friendship:
Saudi Arabia and Iran are competing to win the most popular support possible in Iraq. The Saudis are offering billions of dollars’ worth of economic investments, much of it aimed at improving the Shia south and the city of Basra. This is the heartland of the Iraqi Shia, who comprise about 60 percent of the population. Iraqi Shia live throughout the country but most are down south where they are very much the majority. Most Iraqi Shia are dissatisfied with Iraq’s Shia dominated parliament and government. Lots of government investment has gone to the south and much of it got stolen or paid for sub-standard work. The Saudis point out that they also have a corruption problem but have learned how to control it and are reducing the corrosive impact of corruption on their economy.
It frustrated me that the largely Sunni Arab world that had once backed Sunni Arab Saddam as a shield of the Arab world against Persian and Shia Iran didn't work early after we overthrew Saddam to compete for Iraqi support based on pan-Arab solidarity in contrast to Persian Iran's appeal to pan-Shia solidarity.
And we'll see if Trump's plan to reduce our troop contingent in Iraq to 2,500 is a prudent move to defend our gains. Perhaps the additional Saudi support is part of the withdrawal consideration. But I'm wary of the reduction.
