Francis Fukuyama’s Iraq recantation has received keen attention on both sides of the Atlantic. Like many US conservatives, he now distances himself from what has been done in the neocons’ name by the Bush administration. Of course, we welcome every sinner that repenteth, but the people who seem most deserving of respect are those clever Americans who got it right in the first place. Most of my US military acquaintances opposed the invasion. They did not doubt the coalition’s ability to defeat Saddam’s army swiftly and topple his regime. It was uncertainty about what would follow that rang warning bells. They identified from the outset precisely the difficulties that Messrs Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contemptuously dismissed.
In October 2002, when it became evident that Bush was determined to invade Iraq, the US Army War College’s strategic studies institute undertook a study of a prospective occupation. Some bright soldiers and diplomats got together with two military academics, Dr. Conrad Crane and Dr. Andrew Terrill. The fruits of their labors were published in February 2003.
Re-reading the study today, it seems stunningly prescient. First, it highlighted previous failures to address the problems of occupation, notably after the 1991 Gulf War.
In 2003, the study predicted, after a brief initial honeymoon “suspicion of US motives will increase ... A force initially viewed as liberators can rapidly be relegated to the status of invaders ... Regionally, the occupation will be viewed with great skepticism, which may only be overcome by the population’s rapid progress toward a secure and prosperous way of life ... The establishment of democracy or even some sort of rough pluralism in Iraq ... will be a staggering challenge”. It warned that exile groups, the focus of Pentagon hopes, did not possess the domestic support to form a credible Iraqi interim administration.
Crane and Terrill forecast the alienation of Sunnis dispossessed of power, and the difficulties of reconciling a society riven by religious and tribal divides. They anticipated an insurgency, and highlighted the importance of training US soldiers in the specialized skills of low-intensity combat against guerrillas in the midst of a civilian population.
They identified suicide-bombing as the insurgents’ likely tactic of choice, noting that Israel had been able to stem this threat only by building its security wall, not an option in Iraq: “All Arabs ... are now learning stunning lessons about the effectiveness of suicide bombers.”
They cautioned against disbanding the Iraqi Army after winning the war: “To tear apart the army ... could lead to the destruction of one of the only forces for unity within the society ... [It] also raises the possibility that demobilized soldiers could affiliate with ethnic or tribal militias.” There is today much criticism of American and British intelligence about Iraq before the invasion. We know that both the CIA and the Secret Intelligence Service got it wrong about weapons of mass destruction. Yet allied commanders had access to a mass of shrewd analysis, of which the Crane-Terrill study, from a respected US army institution, is only the most striking example. All such material was tossed aside, of course, because it did not fit the administration’s agenda.
Intelligence and predictive analysis can never be more useful than the political and service chiefs to whom they are submitted. In Afghanistan today, almost all the smart diplomats, soldiers, journalists and intelligence-gatherers agree that NATO plans to deploy a few thousand troops to support reconstruction amount to gesture strategy of the worst sort. The policy survives only because it represents the highest common factor of NATO nations’ willingness to act, a pitiful political figleaf rather than a coherent military operation.
Perhaps the most important lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan is that senior soldiers on both sides of the Atlantic should be braver about saying no. Armed forces are the servants of democratic governments. But their commanders should recognize a constitutional duty to dig in their heels when invited by politicians to undertake operations they perceive as militarily unsound. This the 2003 Iraq invasion emphatically was, because of the US government’s refusal meaningfully to address “phase IV” occupation planning.
Cobra II, the new book by Michael Gordon and Gen. Bernard Trainor makes plain that much of America’s military leadership was uncomfortable with the operation, and thought the terms set by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld quite unrealistic. Yet the doubters stifled their feelings, and the dissenters were sidelined. There was enough ambitious, heedless top brass in the mould of Gen. Tommy Franks to do the business.
Britain’s service chiefs would have endorsed every word of the Crane-Terrill pamphlet about the requirements for occupation strategy, and were in no doubt that their American partners had done little or nothing toward fulfilling them. British commanders went ahead with doing their part anyway. They perceived this as their duty, just as they are now presiding over the token British deployment in Afghanistan, though almost no one in uniform thinks its objectives attainable with the forces available.
The Blair government ruthlessly stifles expressions of dissent within the Ministry of Defense. Yet the only way to avoid more foreign fiascos is to have an informed, ongoing public debate about what our armed forces are or are not doing.
Iraq has demonstrated what happens when governments are allowed to defy informed opinion and pursue ideologically driven adventures.
