I don't worry about America failing to learn lessons from the Iraq War as much as I worry we'll learn complete BS that masquerades as lessons. Behold the lesson that we should have reshaped Iraq's tribal- and kin-based society.
God help us but somebody else wants us to learn a lesson from the Iraq War:
The campaign pacified the insurgents, but the U.S. military paid too little heed to Iraq’s many sectarian divisions as it tried to suppress violence. It made no durable attempt to work or reshape the country’s system of tribes and kin-based relationships beyond making transactions with them. As a result, it was easy for violence to flare back up once the United States withdrew.
Is that all we needed to do before leaving? Reshape Iraq's system of tribes and kin-based relationships?
After that morning task we could fix the religious and ethnic divisions in the afternoon, eh?
Corruption could be dealt with over a working lunch, I assume.
Face it, we won the war. Some people expect too much from America for counting it as a win. Reshape Iraqi society, indeed.
Mind you, I think leaving Iraq in 2011 was a mistake no matter how much the administration wanted to hang the "Mission Accomplished" banner and walk away. We had more to do to hold the lid on the place. And deal with Iranian intrigue.
Maybe some sheer nonsense* in the article leads me to overlook that we agree on the major point of the need to defend the win by remaining in Iraq.
The military is a blunt instrument. Saying it failed because it couldn't cut up and stitch together a better Iraq is ridiculous. The West took centuries to make that kind of progres. All we could do was hold the line and assist Iraqis in making something better than Saddam's abattoir of lives and hope. The future might see the kind of progress that we should all want Iraq to make.
Sigh. The nonsense just never stops, does it?
[*Seriously, the author says "hundreds of thousands of armed men began protesting across the country"? If America faced that many armed Iraqis resisting us that early, the author could never have even written his "The campaign pacified the insurgents" preamble to his major complaint.
But don't get me started on the "Washington disbanded the Iraqi military" nonsense. So letting the pro-Iran Iraqi militias that helped stop ISIL in 2014 remain intact rather than disbanding them after defeating ISIL in Iraq has been a source of stability rather than a mistake? Letting the bad guys remain armed is a bad idea.
No nonsense would be complete without repeating this oracle: "When asked by Congress before the invasion what it would take to defeat and occupy Iraq, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General
Eric Shinseki said that the armed forces would need several hundred
thousand soldiers, more than the 130,000 they were given." We never had 300,000 American troops in Iraq. Not even during the surge. Yet as the author admits, we "pacified the insurgents." Fancy that.
Further, I reject the charge we had no post-war plans. Heck, the New York Times said we did. But plans never survive contact with the enemy. Our post-war plans had assumptions that didn't pan out in large measure because rather than having a post-war situation we had a different-war situation as Iran and its western satrapy, Syria, invaded Iraq.
And the American military is supposed to predict the long-term costs of a war as a warning to civilian leaders? When two decades later it couldn't predict four days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine?
I almost digressed. A huge footnote avoids that, right?]
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
