Thoughts On Iraq – 5 Years Later

by Jack Lee

We’re into the war over 5 years now and prior to the invasion, many of us, myself included, had realistic concerns about a protracted involvement where we wear out our welcome and we turn from an army of liberation into an army of occupation.

(Please…don’t jump to any conclusions now until you have read the whole thing!)

I can’t deny that Saddam’s regime had done a number of provoke us and it almost seemed like he was trying to start something. Anyone could make a pretty good case for a war, look at the treaty violations and all those aggressive actions taken with UN inspectors. Several times our military recon flights over Iraq had been fired at and thats a serious provocation. These things were all violation of the UN brokered peace agreement and there was enough UN resolutions calling on Saddam’s better cooperation for UN inspections that you could have filled a garage can. UN sanctions to gain Saddam’s cooperation obviously didn’t work, but they were working to starve some of his people and that was a mistake, the sanctions were hurting the people we wanted to help.

These issues and more (like a multitude of human rights abuses by Saddam) were ALL serious issues that called for a strong, affirmative response, but not necessarily war and then a perpetual occupation.

A full scale, regime toppling, war is fraught with unintended consequences and therefore this should be the option of last resort, one that deserves our full consideration before we commit to it, because once we do, we could be stuck…for years and it could cost of thousands of lives and billions of dollars. Are we prepared to do that?

Another concern I had back in 2003 was the lack of international cooperation like we had 1991. The President told us he had a coalition, but these were token forces, save for the British. Many people, both liberal and conservative, wondered if a delay and a search for an alternative to war might be the better direction or at least a delay until the UN inspections had been completed or totally ended by Saddam Hussein. This could have meant delaying the war for up to a year, however, in hindsight that delay might have been just what we needed to fully assess the situation before we got in too deep.

However, we were told by President Bush, who had full access to information we did not have, that there was an urgency to act. This was affirmed by an informed Congress and even our trusted allies, all of whom knew more about the situation than us citizens.
Everyone in government leadership was dead certain that Saddam Hussein had begun rebuilding his WMD arsenal and worse, that he was now plotting with Al Qaeda.

Despite some good circumstantial evidence to support these alarming claims, much was still left to us to take it on trust…but, we didn’t know how much the government was trusting in their sources and that those sources were of questionable reliability. If we had only known that we might have never allowed our soldiers to go to war.

We had too fill in the missing dots and trust because we knew our President and the good men and women advising him knew far more than we ever would or could. Our President assured the nation we DID have the evidence and the WMD’s were there. Our national security was at stake and the next 9-11 style attack could be in L.A., San Francisco or even closer to home,. The absurd security precautions at Chico Airport underscored the idea that an attack could happen anywhere and anytime and that just was plain old BS.

We were told that and we believed it because it appeared there was an imminent threat due to the nature of WMDs like Sarin gas or weapon’s grade anthrax. This all played on our fears, reinforced by visions of 9-11 still fresh in our mind. We were building momentum…for war!

Sure, we had a lot to consider before invading Iraq, but we had to weigh that against the urgency to prevent an attack by Iraqi agents or by Al Qaeda terrorists using a WMD in a major city or two here. But, if we did invade Iraq there was this risk that we might appear to world as a conquering force for oil and occupiers a country.

There was also the high cost of rebuilding an Iraq ruined by decades of Husein’s corrupt leadership. Do we really have the time and resources to do that? War was a gamble, but nobody in the Bush administration believed it would take too long or cost too many American lives than we could somehow justify by this dire WMD threat. Most of the Bush administration seemed to think we would be welcomed with open arms by Iraqi’s tired of being brutalized by Saddam Hussein. We also thought that a democratic government would be quickly formed and we could quickly leave with the eternal gratitude of the Iraqi people for their liberation.

The war planners greatly under-estimated the job of fixing Iraq after Saddam.

Our intel was lacking on Iraq from day one, in part due to previous administrations that had gutted our CIA, but mostly because this was a closed society for Westerners, like Iran or North Korea where everything is a state secret.

Prior to the war, we had a lot to consider and we should have. We should have seen all the complexities from ethnic strife to terrorist zealots. If we did we didn’t seem to care enough to delay the invasion, we acted like the clock was ticking away and we had to act.

In any crisis there is always a sense of urgency to solve it. Adrenalin displaces introspection as we rush to prepare for war and then we leap from one event to the next as the momentum builds. If we had not let momentum sweep us along so quickly maybe we would have seen through Saddam’s little charade? Maybe we could have seen that if we go into Iraq, we could be there for a long and bloody period of time? That latter reason should have compelled us to build a real coalition if we absolutely had to invade Iraq. Even if that meant playing along with the frivolous UN requests to see what that additional cooperation with them might buy us.

This is not to say we should ever trust OUR national security to the UN, no not at all. However, to go to war more or less alone, against the popular opinion of the free world, and to go in too quickly without a really good plan for peace keeping, well all needed sorting out first. It was important to consider everything and all options and we didn’t. This could turn out badly for Iraq and for us in the long run.

While few would deny now that we’ve made too many major mistakes in this war, fewer will admit it was due to a rush to invade.

I think it’s healthy for us to come to terms with that, because I’m sure we let that “momentum” compromise our judgement. There were too many poor decisions made and too many things overlooked that should’nt have happened. It all goes back that time when a delay to invade in 2003 would have given us the opportunty to improve the outcome of many future events.

For instance, we wanted to open a northern front using Turkey. 60,000 soldiers from USAREUR headed from Germany, but in the final hours they were denied to land. Access through Turkey was denied. As it turned out, we didn’t need them to defeat Saddam’s Army, but we did need them to help keep the peace. That large force could have been used to control the borders and limit the insurgency and that would have helped us speed up the reconstruction dramatically. This brings up another major mistake by our war planners. From the beginning we had too few forces on the ground to adquately control the population. Nobody in the military wanted to admit, they were tasked to the job and that was as far as it went. At home our leaders were overly concerned about keeping a low numbers for appearances that they consistently underestimated the numbers needed to control the situation. The idea of the “SURGE” arrived about 4 years late.

This war has also involved more media and more lawyers than any other war in history. How this came to be ought to be reconsidered, because if this is to be a trend, then we might as well run up a white flag right now and be done with it! I can’t believe the number of our soldiers that have been put on trial for fighting a war basically the same way soldiers in contact with a deadly enemy have always fought! It was not just wrong to do this, it was stupid.

Our leadership grossly underestimated the enemy and greatly overestimated the contributions by the Iraqi people. We employed too many rules of engagement and tried to be too politically correct in order to gain Iraq cooperation and it got just the opposite. It made us look weak and indecisive and Iraqi’s who wanted to help were restrained because they couldn’t trust us to deal with their enemies effectively as Husseins regime had once done. We began to look more like occupiers of their land and this began to errode our moral authority as months turned into years.

Winning hearts and minds is often just as important as winning battles, sometimes more so and what we didn’t know about the various cultures represented in Iraq was stunning.

Now consider that one of the corner stones for invading Iraq quickly was the reported imminent threat presented by Hussein’s new WMD program. When can argue about what people believed, but the fact remains that Hussein was scamming us and we didn’t figure it out and we should have. Saddam was gambling with a big bluff about WMD’s to keep his enemies in check and status among his peers. Further, the allegations of an Iraq- Al Qaeda connection were far more distant and less threatening than originally believed. That may have come out if we had the time to investigate this properly, but we will never know, because we didn’t wait to find out.

Iraq has a complex social structure that is easily inflamed via old tribal feuds, competing religious sects and ancient ethnic differences. A number of stories have come out since those early days that analysts in the CIA recognized this was a serious problem and could threaten to destabilize any peacekeeping efforts, but as this information worked its way up the chain of command, it was dismissed or minimized because of this “urgency” to act.

In addition to underestimating the culture differences, it could be said that in general the Iraqi people are acclimated to a strong central government control, to the point they are almost unable to function without one. The sudden transition to a democratic form was a lot to expect on nothing more than faith and hope.

Iraq has a porous border that is difficult to control and we did not plan well to control it. Iraq has enormous wealth in oil that encourages many plots from within and from without and we seemed naive about what this could lead to. There were all part of what you might say was our “due diligence” to consider BEFORE going in and without doing so, it adds up to a huge problem for a new Iraq government and for us as the occupying force.

It’s not a leap of faith to think that without the Iraq invasion Al Qaeda would most likely have gravitated toward Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a far better battleground for our forces to fight the Al Qaeda. It’s a difficult place for the enemy for many reasons, its a remote, underdeveloped region with mountains on its borders, the rural valleys are lightly populated and overall it is simply far less hospitable place for a foreign enemy like Al Qaeda to operate effectively. We did not give enough weight to an Al Qaeda strategy being played out better in Afghanistan, than Iraq….wouldda, shouldda, couldda…perhaps, but these are all relevant points we seeming glossed over in the rush to invade Iraq.

The last 5 years in Iraq has cost us of hundreds of billions (and not money all that well spent either) and over 4000 American lives. The civilian gains we have made for society building are probably no more permanent than a house of cards. Almost everyone agrees that a sudden withdrawal of US forces now could easily undue everything we’ve accomplished and hope to accomplish and would lead to a slaughter of civilians of Biblical proportions. In the end and after this bloody chaos, Iranian and Iraqi Shia Muslims could wind up controlling the worlds riches oil field, a nightmarish possibility.

The Iraqi government is unprepared to go it alone. After 5 years of sacrificing to get them up to speed, we still can’t leave. Our benchmarks for demonstrating their autonomy are just that….our bench marks. The Iraqi’s seem to have their own schedule and goals keep getting pushed further and further out. We should have seen this one coming too, because the corruption in Iraq is among the worst in the world.

Contrary to what President Bush said, we will not be there for ‘however long it takes”. We don’t have the money, time or will to be there “however long it takes”. This “limited time” factor is a big problem and the solution is unclear, but there is still reason for SOME hope and by no means am I saying Iraq is a lost cause. However, the question before us now is, what price are the American people willing to pay to see a good outcome in Iraq? We’ve been very patient so far, but 5 years of sacrifice is nothing when contrasted the thousands of years of social problems within that culture. I think all good things have their limits and our limit in Iraq is fast approaching.

Digressing back to post war 2003, there is a quote that was very relevant then and now, “A good plan, violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.” Gen. Geo. S. Patton. Well, we didn’t do either and that sums up our Iraq policy.

President Bush went to war too fast and he may have done it for reasons best known only to himself, but I suspect those reasons may not have centered entirely on our national security. Again, that’s just my opinion, but I suspect it and I don’t say this lightly.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Hussein is gone! We did the world a favor when we took him out and put an end to the mass graves for political opponents. Without the war we could be facing another 40 years under Hussein’s crazy sons too. The invasion of Iraq might have been inevitable, however, I would have hoped by that time we would have done it under far better conditions, with better planning and in a declared war, declared for all the right reasons! A declared war gives a lot more leverage to minimize the very things that have been dragging out this war in Iraq. A declared war gives us the authority to deal effectively with the kind of anti-war rhetoric that is killing our soldiers and undermining our will and our morale! In the future we should either fight a [declared] war to [win]…or we don’t go!

The prosecution of the war in Iraq has been so poor that it has hurt our image and our future national security, but only time will tell how much. I hope I’m wrong, but it’s looking more and more like history will say we acted in haste, without sufficient cause or evidence. .

The bottom line: We can’t learn from our mistakes (or correct them) unless we first acknowledge them.