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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/08/who_lost_iraq_1.html
August 23, 2007
Who Lost Iraq?
By James Dobbins
In the aftermath of national catastrophes, people have a natural
tendency to look for an explanation based on a single point of
failure. Such explanations are often unhelpful in devising subsequent
policy. Simplistic lessons drawn from World War I persuaded the United
States to embrace isolationism and Europe appeasement, both of which
contributed to World War II. The lesson many Americans drew from not
opposing Hitler sooner -- "no more Munichs" -- became a powerful
rationale for the United States' entanglement in Vietnam in the 1960s.
The subsequent national rejection of counterinsurgency missions -- "no
more Vietnams" -- greatly hampered U.S. military performance in Iraq.
If the current debate over the United States' failure in Iraq is to
yield constructive results, it will have to go beyond bumper-sticker
conclusions -- no more preemption, no more democracy promotion, no
more nation building.
Individuals have been the first target of criticism: President George
W. Bush, of course, but also Vice President Dick Cheney; Donald
Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense; General Tommy Franks, the
former commander of U.S. Central Command; Paul Wolfowitz, the former
deputy secretary of defense; Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary
of defense for policy; L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the
Coalition Provisional Authority; and George Tenet, the former CIA
director. All except two of these individuals have been out of office
for some time: the Bush administration is already on its second
defense secretary, third CIA director, third commanding general in
Iraq, and fourth top diplomat there -- and thus far, none of these
changes has reversed a worsening situation. This suggests that the
source of at least some of the United States' difficulties in Iraq
transcends particular personalities.
Meanwhile, the White House, Congress, the State Department, the
Defense Department, and the CIA have engaged in continuous blame
shifting over Iraq. President Bush and Congress have accused the
intelligence community of misleading them about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction. Tenet has responded that the administration's senior
policymakers never seriously debated the decision to go to war.
Rumsfeld says that the president never asked his advice on the matter.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell says that he provided the
president with his views on the wisdom of war unasked, but to no
effect. Former intelligence officers allege that the Defense
Department and the White House manipulated, exaggerated, and
manufactured intelligence appraisals to support a decision to go to
war. Bremer says that he learned after serving several months in Iraq
that the Pentagon was not sharing his reporting with the White House
or the State Department. Tenet insists that the CIA warned the
administration of the difficulties that would be encountered in the
occupation (and recent press reports quoting CIA memos substantiate
this).
During the Vietnam War, dissatisfaction with the conflict first became
evident at the bottom of the military pyramid, and criticism of the
U.S. military's performance was often leveled at its lowest ranks: the
conscript riflemen whose disaffection, alcohol consumption, and drug
usage increased as the war dragged on. Today, no one is complaining
about the performance of the United States' all-volunteer force. In
this war, dissent has emerged among very senior officers and been
directed at the top leadership. Last year, in what became known as
"the revolt of the generals," half a dozen recently retired U.S.
commanders, several of whom had just led major units in Iraq, came out
publicly against Rumsfeld's management of the war. In May of this
year, the Armed Forces Journal printed an article by Lieutenant
Colonel Paul Yingling entitled "A Failure in Generalship." Yingling,
who is a veteran of two tours in Iraq and who is still on active duty,
wrote of both Vietnam and Iraq, "These debacles are not attributable
to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire
institution: America's general officer corps. America's generals have
failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian
authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of
policy."
Similarly, the U.S. media have engaged in a good deal of self-
criticism over their coverage of the war. The New York Times
apologized for its prewar coverage of nonexistent Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction. Thomas Ricks, The Washington Post's defense
correspondent, lambasted his own paper's editorial page for its pro-
war boosterism in his book on the occupation. Bob Woodward, the Post's
most famous journalist, acknowledged that he was part of the "group
think" that helped sell the war. Bill Moyers devoted an entire PBS
broadcast to the role of journalists in marketing the war. Dan Rather,
of CBS, admitted that there was no excuse for his own performance in
this regard.
As the difficulties and setbacks in Iraq have mounted, the level of
partisan political recrimination has also increased. The Democrats
have blamed the difficulties in Iraq on the Republicans. The
Republicans have blamed the Iraqis. Now in control of Congress, the
Democrats have insisted on conditioning further U.S. assistance to
Iraq on Baghdad's meeting certain benchmarks. If the Iraqis fail to
meet these goals, as seems likely, Congress may cut back funding for
the war. This will allow the Republicans to blame the Democrats for
the impending defeat, while the Democrats will blame the Iraqis.
In truth, there is more than enough blame to go around. The United
States went into Iraq with a higher level of domestic support for war
than at almost anytime in its history. Congress authorized the
invasion by an overwhelming bipartisan majority -- something that had
not occurred for the Gulf War a decade earlier, nor for any of the
highly controversial military operations of the Clinton era, in
Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Precisely because responsibility
for this misguided enterprise is so widely shared, the temptation to
make the Iraqis the scapegoat for U.S. failure may ultimately prove
irresistible.
But to serve any useful purpose, the debate over who lost Iraq will
need to cut a good deal deeper than this. Reform comes in the wake of
disaster. Sadly, Iraq represents an opportunity in this regard, one
too good to be passed up. Whether one concludes that the war itself
was a mistake or merely that its execution was badly managed,
Americans need to consider wherein their leaders, institutions, and
policies have been at fault.
THE LEADERS
So far, there is little disinterested information available on
decisionmaking within the Bush administration. Nearly all of it has
come from self-serving sources, such as former officials writing in
their memoirs or current officials speaking anonymously to
journalists. From these first drafts of history, one thing already
seems clear: neither the president nor the secretary of defense relied
on structured debate and disciplined dissent to aid his decision-
making. Under their leadership, both the White House and the Pentagon
used management models that emphasized inspiration and guidance from
above and loyalty and compliance from below. In such an atmosphere,
individuals within the administration who doubted the wisdom of
invading Iraq or the adequacy of plans to occupy and rebuild the
country were not encouraged to articulate those concerns. By adopting
such a top-down approach to decision-making, the president and the
secretary of defense denied themselves the more carefully considered
proposals and better analysis that a dialectical process of structured
debate would have produced.
Had President Bush fostered debate, the State Department would have
made the case for continuing to contain Saddam Hussein. Had the
administration investigated the likely costs of occupying and
reconstructing Iraq, the arguments for continued containment would
have gained additional weight. Had Rumsfeld sought military or
civilian expert advice regarding the manpower requirements for
stabilizing Iraq, he might have sought to increase rather than
decrease the already low estimates he was getting from his field
commander, General Franks. Had the White House sought to integrate
lessons learned during the various nation-building efforts of the
1990s, many early missteps in Iraq could have been avoided.
To be sure, a candid appraisal of the likely costs and risks of
invading Iraq would probably have leaked, gravely complicating the
administration's ability to secure congressional and public support
for the war. Such fears probably explain why the administration
silenced Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki and Assistant to the
President for Economic Affairs Lawrence Lindsay after they publicly
aired uncomfortably high estimates of the military manpower and
economic resources necessary to occupy Iraq.
President Bush is by no means the first U.S. leader to understate the
likely costs of an intervention. In 1995, President Bill Clinton
promised to have U.S. troops out of Bosnia in a year; they remained a
full decade. Yet it is equally true that Clinton was extremely
reluctant to commit forces in this and other instances and that his
decisions to do so were taken only after the most exhaustive internal
debates, in which almost every conceivable alternative was explored,
all relevant agencies listened to, and all the downsides considered.
There are undoubtedly costs to dependence on structured debate and
disciplined dissent as aids to presidential decision-making. The
process is time-consuming, the proceedings cannot be kept entirely
confidential, and the ensuing public debate will be anything but
disciplined. Yet a decision to go to war should be difficult, not
easy. The Founding Fathers intended that these issues should be
decided in open congressional deliberations. But current practice has
departed so far from this model that the decision to go to war in Iraq
was not even fully debated within the executive branch.
THE FOLLOWERS
Given the lack of receptivity to alternative views at the top, how
much blame should be shouldered by people lower down who knew better
and failed to speak up or who spoke up but failed to resign when their
objections were brushed aside? Should the generals who revolted be
condemned for awaiting retirement to lodge their protests? Should the
nation foster a more critical climate within its military services,
one in which officers are encouraged to challenge not only illegal
orders but unwise ones as well?
Probably not. The military demands a higher degree of subordination,
obedience, and discipline than other professions. Furthermore,
civilian control of the military is an inviolable principle, which
means that civilians should bear the chief responsibility when the
military is misdirected.
If it is not the military's role to challenge lawful orders, still
less is it the role of the press to manufacture controversy where none
exists. In a democracy, the primary responsibility for opposing or at
least critically examining the case for war falls on the opposition
party. If the opposition chooses to duck that responsibility, as the
Democrats largely did when the issue was put to them in late 2002, it
is hard to fault the press for not stepping in to fill the void.
Much criticism has been leveled at the Bush administration's reliance
on young, inexperienced ideologues to staff junior positions within
the Coalition Provisional Authority. But this is hardly the primary
example of political patronage undermining professional expertise.
Bremer filled nearly all the senior jobs in Iraq with seasoned
professionals and only turned to the White House patronage machine
when the administration proved unable to staff the more junior posts
with career professionals. In Washington, it is not the junior but the
most senior and influential positions that are filled by individuals
chosen primarily for their ideological convictions and personal
loyalty.
The U.S. system of political patronage (unique in its scope among the
world's democratic governments) ensures a high level of inexperience
in the opening years of any presidency, promotes strong barriers to
continuity of policy from one administration to the next, and results
in diminished competence in a civil service whose members are
permanently denied access to positions of greater responsibility. The
system effectively insulates political leaders at the top from
professional advice from the bottom, imposing several layers of
ideological buffer between the two. Some administrations are worse
than others in this regard, but all are bad. Neoconservative excess
may have led to the current mess in Iraq, but well-meaning liberals
are capable of the same sort of folly, as the late David Halberstam
documented in The Best and the Brightest, his classic study of Vietnam
War-era policymaking.
The U.S. military, police, and intelligence services are already
largely fenced off from politicization on the grounds that national
security is too important to entrust to amateurs. The nation should
seek the same standard of professionalism for the senior civilian
officials who staff the Defense Department and other national security
agencies, including the National Security Council. Legislation that
sets aside a certain proportion of subcabinet and White House staff
positions for career professionals would go far toward encouraging
continuity of policy and strengthening the competence of incoming
administrations. So would a requirement that aspirants for top jobs in
the national security field serve some time in another agency or a
joint position, just as military officers now must serve at least one
tour of duty outside their own branch of service to reach the most
senior ranks.
THE INSTITUTIONS
Congress and the White House have already taken corrective action to
address the intelligence failure that provided the war's main public
rationale, demoting the director of central intelligence and creating
a new post of director of national intelligence. Congress has only
begun, however, to examine the uses, misuses, and abuses of
intelligence by policymakers in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
Corrective action here may be much more difficult. Some would like to
further insulate the intelligence community from policymakers,
effectively turning it into a fourth branch of government, independent
of the executive and unreservedly free to criticize its intentions and
undermine its policies. This would be a mistake.
The intelligence community proved overly pessimistic in its assessment
of the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. It was equally
pessimistic -- if more accurate -- about the problems likely to be
encountered by a U.S. occupation of Iraq. Policymakers seized on one
assessment and ignored the other. The problem was less one of flawed
intelligence than of flawed use of intelligence by policymakers.
Intelligence analysts will almost always emphasize the downside of any
risk and can never be one hundred percent certain in their judgments.
Congress and the public should thus recognize and accept the inherent
limitations of secret intelligence instead of trying to
institutionalize yet another check on executive power.
Ineffectual performance in Iraq accompanied by constant blame shifting
among Washington's agencies has led some to conclude that the entire
interagency structure is defective. While still secretary of defense,
Rumsfeld characterized the interagency system as broken, claiming
that, as reported in Bob Woodward's State of Denial, "in the 21st
Century we're still functioning with an interagency process and
governmental structure that is in the industrial age of the last
century." In his confirmation hearings to replace Rumsfeld, Robert
Gates stated that the lack of interagency collaboration during the war
in Iraq highlights the need to compel cooperation in the way the
Goldwater-Nichols Act helped the military services work together in
the 1980s.
The current system for integrating defense and foreign policy has
actually functioned quite well for most of the past 60 years: it
helped win the Cold War, unite Europe, cope with the collapse of the
Soviet Union, deal with the early challenges of the post-Cold War era,
and initially respond to the attacks of 9/11. Arrangements that seemed
to be working adequately only six years ago are probably not
irremediably broken today. Fixing them does not require a new
department of national security or a further expansion of the White
House staff, as some have suggested. What would help is legislation
establishing a durable division of labor among the State Department,
the Defense Department, and other national security agencies that are
involved in postconflict nation building.
For the past 15 years, critical functions such as overseeing military
and police training, providing humanitarian and reconstruction aid,
and promoting democratic development have been repeatedly transferred
from the State Department to the Defense Department and back again,
leaving each agency uncertain what its long-term responsibilities are
and consequently disinclined to invest in improving its performance.
An executive order defining such roles, as Gates has proposed, would
probably not outlast the administration that issued it. The national
security establishment thus needs a legislated reorganization so that
it can better conduct postwar stabilization and reconstruction
missions, just as the Goldwater-Nichols Act over 20 years ago
reorganized the military establishment to more effectively wage war.
THE STRATEGY AND FORCE STRUCTURE
Many of those calling for a reduced U.S. military presence in Iraq are
simultaneously urging an increase in the size of the army. Underlying
this apparent anomaly is widespread confusion regarding the
appropriate role of military force in combating violent extremism.
Where the United States puts the bulk of its national security effort
is heavily influenced by how Americans conceptualize the struggle
against violent extremist movements in the Muslim world. If al Qaeda
and its ilk are regarded primarily as criminal conspirators, then the
United States needs a counterterrorism strategy that emphasizes
police, intelligence, and diplomatic efforts. If the threat is deemed
to have metastasized to the point where it is regarded as a global
insurgency, then a greater reliance on military force may be
justified.
Many experts believe that the threat of Islamist terrorism has indeed
grown to the point where its purveyors have the capacity to overturn
existing governments and seize control of substantial territory.
Others continue to regard al Qaeda and its imitators more as
opportunistic parasites that seek to attach themselves to what are
essentially nationalist conflicts (much as al Qaeda has attached
itself to a Sunni resistance movement in Iraq).
In the case of parasitic relationships, supporting rather than
opposing the insurgency can, on occasion, be the best way to
marginalize the extremists. This is the approach the United States
followed in Afghanistan in the 1980s and in the Balkans in the 1990s,
where it supported Muslim insurgencies against Soviet and Serbian
domination, respectively. Staying aloof, as the United States did with
respect to the Algerian insurgency in the 1990s, is another option. In
cases where U.S. national interests dictate some level of involvement
against the insurgents, limiting the U.S. role to training, equipping,
and advising the counterinsurgents is normally preferable to direct
military intervention. In rare circumstances, such as in Afghanistan,
that option may not be immediately available, and the burden may fall
to U.S. soldiers.
With the unexpected early retirement of John Abizaid as head of U.S.
Central Command and the replacement of General George Casey by General
David Petraeus as the top commander in Iraq, one of these approaches
to counterinsurgency has given way to another. Abizaid and Casey,
feeling that the large U.S. military presence in Iraq provoked more
resistance than it suppressed, advocated turning combat operations
over to Iraqi forces as quickly as possible. They thus concentrated on
training and equipping the Iraqi security forces. Petraeus, for his
part, believes that U.S. forces employing classic counterinsurgency
tactics still have an opportunity to gain the cooperation of the
population and give Iraqi politicians the time and space they need to
reconcile their differences. The Pentagon's top brass reportedly
backed Abizaid and Casey's preference but were overruled by President
Bush.
Iraq is, after all, a comparatively small country, yet countering the
insurgency there has engaged most of the U.S. Army and the Marine
Corps. If future terrorist-linked insurgencies are to be similarly
confronted by U.S. forces, then very large numbers will be needed.
Alternatively, if the United States chooses in the future to combat
insurgencies via local proxies, as it did throughout the Cold War
(Vietnam being the sole exception), then a renewed emphasis on
training, equipping, and advising foreign forces is in order. In that
case, the need is less for a larger army than for one reorganized to
better handle these new tasks.
It would be a mistake to employ Iraq as the yardstick by which to
gauge the future necessary size and shape of the U.S. military, given
that the war was probably unnecessary and the occupation mishandled
from the outset. Afghanistan offers a better and somewhat less
demanding guide to future requirements. The U.S. effort there has
broad (if diminishing) local support, full international legitimacy,
and substantial multinational participation. Yet Afghanistan, for all
these advantages, is a test the United States is not currently
passing. Improvements in the United States' capacity for nation
building and counterinsurgency are thus in order.
The Bush administration's rhetoric since 9/11 has accentuated the
warlike character of the terrorist threat and the martial nature of
the required response. Yet most of the tangible successes in the "war
on terror" have come as a result of police, intelligence, and
diplomatic activity. Not until U.S. leaders rebalance their rhetoric
will it be possible to redirect the government's funding priorities
toward the nonmilitary instruments on which the suppression of violent
extremist movements is most likely to depend.
THE POLICIES
Preemption, democracy promotion, and nation building have all been
sullied by association with the war in Iraq. All three policies
deserve reexamination, but none should be jettisoned entirely.
Over more than two centuries, the United States has conducted dozens
of military campaigns, only two of which were in response to attacks
on U.S. soil. This record should leave few in doubt that the United
States will employ force to protect itself, its friends, and its
interests without necessarily waiting to be struck first. To enshrine
this principle in publicly proclaimed national doctrine, however, only
makes any subsequent resort to force more controversial and hinders
the process of attracting allies and securing international sanction
for such actions; other nations will never be prepared to exempt the
United States from the internationally recognized restraints on the
unprovoked use of force. This international resistance to declared
U.S. policy was clearly on display when the decision was made to
attack Iraq soon after the Bush administration formally adopted
preemption as the cornerstone of its new national security strategy.
Washington therefore needs to drop "preemption" from the lexicon of
its declared national security policy (as the Bush administration has
already begun to do) while leaving an appropriate degree of
uncertainty in the minds of any potential foes about how the United
States might respond to a mounting threat.
Like preemption, democracy promotion has been a component of U.S.
foreign policy almost since the country's birth. Beginning in the
eighteenth century, most other nations in the Western Hemisphere have
adopted political systems modeled, however imperfectly, on the United
States' system. After World War II, the United States established
strong democracies in Japan and Germany and supported democratization
throughout Western Europe, employing a combination of military power,
economic assistance, strategic communications (that is, propaganda),
and direct, if surreptitious, support to democratic parties. In more
recent decades, all of central and most of eastern Europe, nearly all
of Latin America, much of East Asia, and some of Africa have become
democratic with active U.S. encouragement.
But democratization is no panacea for terrorism and no shortcut to a
more pro-U.S. (or pro-Israel) Middle East. Established democracies may
not make war on one another, but studies have shown that democratizing
nations are highly prone to both internal and external conflicts.
Furthermore, democratic governments in Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia
would be more hostile to Israel and less aligned with the United
States than the authoritarian regimes they replaced, since public
opinion in those countries is more opposed to Israeli and U.S. policy
than are their current leaders.
It may well have been a mistake to exempt the Middle East from over 60
years of largely successful U.S. efforts to promote democracy, but it
is unrealistic to expect this deficiency to be remedied within a few
years. Recent efforts to accelerate political reform in the region
have already backfired. Elections are polarizing events, particularly
in societies already marked by sectarian conflict, as has been
demonstrated recently in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian
territories. Rather than seeking dramatic electoral breakthroughs, let
alone imposing reforms, U.S. efforts to advance democracy in the
Middle East should focus on building its foundations, including the
rule of law, civil society, larger middle classes, and more effective
and less corrupt governments.
Nation building also deserves to survive its failure in Iraq. The Bush
administration, like the U.S. public, now recognizes that the
occupation of that country was mismanaged. As a result, it has
embraced the nation-building mission in all but name with the fervor
of a new convert. Unfortunately, although the Bush administration's
reaction to setbacks in Iraq has been a determination to do better
next time, Americans seem more inclined to avoid any such future
enterprises.
In fact, both conclusions are valid. The United States should
certainly avoid invading large hostile countries on the basis of
faulty intelligence and with the support of narrow, unrepresentative
coalitions. But not all conflicts are avoidable. Iraq may have been a
war of choice, but Afghanistan was not. Both conflicts left the United
States with a heavy burden of nation building. Through the 1990s, the
Clinton administration slowly learned how costly and time-consuming
such missions could be. In Somalia, the United States turned tail at
the first sign of opposition. In Haiti, it set an early departure
deadline, thereby ensuring that any improvements it introduced would
be short-lived. In Bosnia, Clinton set an even shorter timeline,
promising to have all U.S. troops out of the country within 12 months.
But if Clinton had not learned to avoid setting deadlines, he had at
least learned to avoid keeping them. Only late in his second term did
he finally acknowledge the open-ended nature of U.S. commitments in
both Bosnia and Kosovo.
It has taken the Bush administration a similar amount of time to learn
that nation building cannot be done on the cheap. The "surge" of
troops into Baghdad is a belated acknowledgment that rebuilding a
failed state takes an enormous commitment of manpower, money, and
time. This realization may have come too late to rescue the U.S.
venture in Iraq. It should, nevertheless, serve as a cautionary guide
to such endeavors in the future.
THE FAULT IS NOT IN OUR STARS
By January 2009, nearly everyone responsible for launching and
directing the war in Iraq will have left office. Sorting out who did
what will then become a job for historians. In choosing successors,
however, Americans should insist on leaders who will foster debate and
welcome disciplined dissent. These leaders should be surrounded by
advisers chosen primarily for their relevant experience and
demonstrated competence, not their ideological purity and partisan
loyalty.
Leaders of this caliber, supported by more competent and professional
staffs, will make better use of existing structures for policy
formulation and implementation. These structures can be strengthened
by the establishment of an enduring division of labor for postconflict
stabilization and reconstruction among the national security agencies
and by the building of a cadre of senior career officials with
experience across the national security establishment.
The "war on terror" should be reconceived and renamed to place greater
emphasis on its police, intelligence, and diplomatic components. The
U.S. Army should continue to improve its counterinsurgency skills,
with a particular emphasis on training, equipping, and advising others
to conduct such campaigns. The United States should avoid allowing al
Qaeda and its ilk to dictate its alignment in any particular dispute,
should take sides when necessary based on an objective calculation of
national interests, and should directly engage U.S. troops in local
civil wars only in the rarest of circumstances. "Preemption" should be
retired from the lexicon of declared policy, democratization should be
pursued everywhere as a long-term objective in full recognition of its
short-term costs and risks, and nation building should be embarked on
only where the United States and its partners are ready for a long,
hard, and expensive effort. Above all, Americans should accept that
the entire nation has, to one degree or another, failed in Iraq.
Facing up to this fact and drawing the necessary lessons is the only
way to ensure that it does not similarly fail again.
James Dobbins directs the International Security and Defense Policy
Center at the RAND Corporation and served as Assistant Secretary of
State under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He was the
Clinton administration's special envoy to Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, and
Somalia and the Bush administration's first envoy to Afghanistan.
Foreign Affairs
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/08/who_lost_iraq_1.html
at August 26, 2007 - 08:10:52 AM CDT
August 23, 2007
Who Lost Iraq?
By James Dobbins
In the aftermath of national catastrophes, people have a natural
tendency to look for an explanation based on a single point of
failure. Such explanations are often unhelpful in devising subsequent
policy. Simplistic lessons drawn from World War I persuaded the United
States to embrace isolationism and Europe appeasement, both of which
contributed to World War II. The lesson many Americans drew from not
opposing Hitler sooner -- "no more Munichs" -- became a powerful
rationale for the United States' entanglement in Vietnam in the 1960s.
The subsequent national rejection of counterinsurgency missions -- "no
more Vietnams" -- greatly hampered U.S. military performance in Iraq.
If the current debate over the United States' failure in Iraq is to
yield constructive results, it will have to go beyond bumper-sticker
conclusions -- no more preemption, no more democracy promotion, no
more nation building.
Individuals have been the first target of criticism: President George
W. Bush, of course, but also Vice President Dick Cheney; Donald
Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense; General Tommy Franks, the
former commander of U.S. Central Command; Paul Wolfowitz, the former
deputy secretary of defense; Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary
of defense for policy; L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the
Coalition Provisional Authority; and George Tenet, the former CIA
director. All except two of these individuals have been out of office
for some time: the Bush administration is already on its second
defense secretary, third CIA director, third commanding general in
Iraq, and fourth top diplomat there -- and thus far, none of these
changes has reversed a worsening situation. This suggests that the
source of at least some of the United States' difficulties in Iraq
transcends particular personalities.
Meanwhile, the White House, Congress, the State Department, the
Defense Department, and the CIA have engaged in continuous blame
shifting over Iraq. President Bush and Congress have accused the
intelligence community of misleading them about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction. Tenet has responded that the administration's senior
policymakers never seriously debated the decision to go to war.
Rumsfeld says that the president never asked his advice on the matter.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell says that he provided the
president with his views on the wisdom of war unasked, but to no
effect. Former intelligence officers allege that the Defense
Department and the White House manipulated, exaggerated, and
manufactured intelligence appraisals to support a decision to go to
war. Bremer says that he learned after serving several months in Iraq
that the Pentagon was not sharing his reporting with the White House
or the State Department. Tenet insists that the CIA warned the
administration of the difficulties that would be encountered in the
occupation (and recent press reports quoting CIA memos substantiate
this).
During the Vietnam War, dissatisfaction with the conflict first became
evident at the bottom of the military pyramid, and criticism of the
U.S. military's performance was often leveled at its lowest ranks: the
conscript riflemen whose disaffection, alcohol consumption, and drug
usage increased as the war dragged on. Today, no one is complaining
about the performance of the United States' all-volunteer force. In
this war, dissent has emerged among very senior officers and been
directed at the top leadership. Last year, in what became known as
"the revolt of the generals," half a dozen recently retired U.S.
commanders, several of whom had just led major units in Iraq, came out
publicly against Rumsfeld's management of the war. In May of this
year, the Armed Forces Journal printed an article by Lieutenant
Colonel Paul Yingling entitled "A Failure in Generalship." Yingling,
who is a veteran of two tours in Iraq and who is still on active duty,
wrote of both Vietnam and Iraq, "These debacles are not attributable
to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire
institution: America's general officer corps. America's generals have
failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian
authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of
policy."
Similarly, the U.S. media have engaged in a good deal of self-
criticism over their coverage of the war. The New York Times
apologized for its prewar coverage of nonexistent Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction. Thomas Ricks, The Washington Post's defense
correspondent, lambasted his own paper's editorial page for its pro-
war boosterism in his book on the occupation. Bob Woodward, the Post's
most famous journalist, acknowledged that he was part of the "group
think" that helped sell the war. Bill Moyers devoted an entire PBS
broadcast to the role of journalists in marketing the war. Dan Rather,
of CBS, admitted that there was no excuse for his own performance in
this regard.
As the difficulties and setbacks in Iraq have mounted, the level of
partisan political recrimination has also increased. The Democrats
have blamed the difficulties in Iraq on the Republicans. The
Republicans have blamed the Iraqis. Now in control of Congress, the
Democrats have insisted on conditioning further U.S. assistance to
Iraq on Baghdad's meeting certain benchmarks. If the Iraqis fail to
meet these goals, as seems likely, Congress may cut back funding for
the war. This will allow the Republicans to blame the Democrats for
the impending defeat, while the Democrats will blame the Iraqis.
In truth, there is more than enough blame to go around. The United
States went into Iraq with a higher level of domestic support for war
than at almost anytime in its history. Congress authorized the
invasion by an overwhelming bipartisan majority -- something that had
not occurred for the Gulf War a decade earlier, nor for any of the
highly controversial military operations of the Clinton era, in
Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Precisely because responsibility
for this misguided enterprise is so widely shared, the temptation to
make the Iraqis the scapegoat for U.S. failure may ultimately prove
irresistible.
But to serve any useful purpose, the debate over who lost Iraq will
need to cut a good deal deeper than this. Reform comes in the wake of
disaster. Sadly, Iraq represents an opportunity in this regard, one
too good to be passed up. Whether one concludes that the war itself
was a mistake or merely that its execution was badly managed,
Americans need to consider wherein their leaders, institutions, and
policies have been at fault.
THE LEADERS
So far, there is little disinterested information available on
decisionmaking within the Bush administration. Nearly all of it has
come from self-serving sources, such as former officials writing in
their memoirs or current officials speaking anonymously to
journalists. From these first drafts of history, one thing already
seems clear: neither the president nor the secretary of defense relied
on structured debate and disciplined dissent to aid his decision-
making. Under their leadership, both the White House and the Pentagon
used management models that emphasized inspiration and guidance from
above and loyalty and compliance from below. In such an atmosphere,
individuals within the administration who doubted the wisdom of
invading Iraq or the adequacy of plans to occupy and rebuild the
country were not encouraged to articulate those concerns. By adopting
such a top-down approach to decision-making, the president and the
secretary of defense denied themselves the more carefully considered
proposals and better analysis that a dialectical process of structured
debate would have produced.
Had President Bush fostered debate, the State Department would have
made the case for continuing to contain Saddam Hussein. Had the
administration investigated the likely costs of occupying and
reconstructing Iraq, the arguments for continued containment would
have gained additional weight. Had Rumsfeld sought military or
civilian expert advice regarding the manpower requirements for
stabilizing Iraq, he might have sought to increase rather than
decrease the already low estimates he was getting from his field
commander, General Franks. Had the White House sought to integrate
lessons learned during the various nation-building efforts of the
1990s, many early missteps in Iraq could have been avoided.
To be sure, a candid appraisal of the likely costs and risks of
invading Iraq would probably have leaked, gravely complicating the
administration's ability to secure congressional and public support
for the war. Such fears probably explain why the administration
silenced Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki and Assistant to the
President for Economic Affairs Lawrence Lindsay after they publicly
aired uncomfortably high estimates of the military manpower and
economic resources necessary to occupy Iraq.
President Bush is by no means the first U.S. leader to understate the
likely costs of an intervention. In 1995, President Bill Clinton
promised to have U.S. troops out of Bosnia in a year; they remained a
full decade. Yet it is equally true that Clinton was extremely
reluctant to commit forces in this and other instances and that his
decisions to do so were taken only after the most exhaustive internal
debates, in which almost every conceivable alternative was explored,
all relevant agencies listened to, and all the downsides considered.
There are undoubtedly costs to dependence on structured debate and
disciplined dissent as aids to presidential decision-making. The
process is time-consuming, the proceedings cannot be kept entirely
confidential, and the ensuing public debate will be anything but
disciplined. Yet a decision to go to war should be difficult, not
easy. The Founding Fathers intended that these issues should be
decided in open congressional deliberations. But current practice has
departed so far from this model that the decision to go to war in Iraq
was not even fully debated within the executive branch.
THE FOLLOWERS
Given the lack of receptivity to alternative views at the top, how
much blame should be shouldered by people lower down who knew better
and failed to speak up or who spoke up but failed to resign when their
objections were brushed aside? Should the generals who revolted be
condemned for awaiting retirement to lodge their protests? Should the
nation foster a more critical climate within its military services,
one in which officers are encouraged to challenge not only illegal
orders but unwise ones as well?
Probably not. The military demands a higher degree of subordination,
obedience, and discipline than other professions. Furthermore,
civilian control of the military is an inviolable principle, which
means that civilians should bear the chief responsibility when the
military is misdirected.
If it is not the military's role to challenge lawful orders, still
less is it the role of the press to manufacture controversy where none
exists. In a democracy, the primary responsibility for opposing or at
least critically examining the case for war falls on the opposition
party. If the opposition chooses to duck that responsibility, as the
Democrats largely did when the issue was put to them in late 2002, it
is hard to fault the press for not stepping in to fill the void.
Much criticism has been leveled at the Bush administration's reliance
on young, inexperienced ideologues to staff junior positions within
the Coalition Provisional Authority. But this is hardly the primary
example of political patronage undermining professional expertise.
Bremer filled nearly all the senior jobs in Iraq with seasoned
professionals and only turned to the White House patronage machine
when the administration proved unable to staff the more junior posts
with career professionals. In Washington, it is not the junior but the
most senior and influential positions that are filled by individuals
chosen primarily for their ideological convictions and personal
loyalty.
The U.S. system of political patronage (unique in its scope among the
world's democratic governments) ensures a high level of inexperience
in the opening years of any presidency, promotes strong barriers to
continuity of policy from one administration to the next, and results
in diminished competence in a civil service whose members are
permanently denied access to positions of greater responsibility. The
system effectively insulates political leaders at the top from
professional advice from the bottom, imposing several layers of
ideological buffer between the two. Some administrations are worse
than others in this regard, but all are bad. Neoconservative excess
may have led to the current mess in Iraq, but well-meaning liberals
are capable of the same sort of folly, as the late David Halberstam
documented in The Best and the Brightest, his classic study of Vietnam
War-era policymaking.
The U.S. military, police, and intelligence services are already
largely fenced off from politicization on the grounds that national
security is too important to entrust to amateurs. The nation should
seek the same standard of professionalism for the senior civilian
officials who staff the Defense Department and other national security
agencies, including the National Security Council. Legislation that
sets aside a certain proportion of subcabinet and White House staff
positions for career professionals would go far toward encouraging
continuity of policy and strengthening the competence of incoming
administrations. So would a requirement that aspirants for top jobs in
the national security field serve some time in another agency or a
joint position, just as military officers now must serve at least one
tour of duty outside their own branch of service to reach the most
senior ranks.
THE INSTITUTIONS
Congress and the White House have already taken corrective action to
address the intelligence failure that provided the war's main public
rationale, demoting the director of central intelligence and creating
a new post of director of national intelligence. Congress has only
begun, however, to examine the uses, misuses, and abuses of
intelligence by policymakers in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
Corrective action here may be much more difficult. Some would like to
further insulate the intelligence community from policymakers,
effectively turning it into a fourth branch of government, independent
of the executive and unreservedly free to criticize its intentions and
undermine its policies. This would be a mistake.
The intelligence community proved overly pessimistic in its assessment
of the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. It was equally
pessimistic -- if more accurate -- about the problems likely to be
encountered by a U.S. occupation of Iraq. Policymakers seized on one
assessment and ignored the other. The problem was less one of flawed
intelligence than of flawed use of intelligence by policymakers.
Intelligence analysts will almost always emphasize the downside of any
risk and can never be one hundred percent certain in their judgments.
Congress and the public should thus recognize and accept the inherent
limitations of secret intelligence instead of trying to
institutionalize yet another check on executive power.
Ineffectual performance in Iraq accompanied by constant blame shifting
among Washington's agencies has led some to conclude that the entire
interagency structure is defective. While still secretary of defense,
Rumsfeld characterized the interagency system as broken, claiming
that, as reported in Bob Woodward's State of Denial, "in the 21st
Century we're still functioning with an interagency process and
governmental structure that is in the industrial age of the last
century." In his confirmation hearings to replace Rumsfeld, Robert
Gates stated that the lack of interagency collaboration during the war
in Iraq highlights the need to compel cooperation in the way the
Goldwater-Nichols Act helped the military services work together in
the 1980s.
The current system for integrating defense and foreign policy has
actually functioned quite well for most of the past 60 years: it
helped win the Cold War, unite Europe, cope with the collapse of the
Soviet Union, deal with the early challenges of the post-Cold War era,
and initially respond to the attacks of 9/11. Arrangements that seemed
to be working adequately only six years ago are probably not
irremediably broken today. Fixing them does not require a new
department of national security or a further expansion of the White
House staff, as some have suggested. What would help is legislation
establishing a durable division of labor among the State Department,
the Defense Department, and other national security agencies that are
involved in postconflict nation building.
For the past 15 years, critical functions such as overseeing military
and police training, providing humanitarian and reconstruction aid,
and promoting democratic development have been repeatedly transferred
from the State Department to the Defense Department and back again,
leaving each agency uncertain what its long-term responsibilities are
and consequently disinclined to invest in improving its performance.
An executive order defining such roles, as Gates has proposed, would
probably not outlast the administration that issued it. The national
security establishment thus needs a legislated reorganization so that
it can better conduct postwar stabilization and reconstruction
missions, just as the Goldwater-Nichols Act over 20 years ago
reorganized the military establishment to more effectively wage war.
THE STRATEGY AND FORCE STRUCTURE
Many of those calling for a reduced U.S. military presence in Iraq are
simultaneously urging an increase in the size of the army. Underlying
this apparent anomaly is widespread confusion regarding the
appropriate role of military force in combating violent extremism.
Where the United States puts the bulk of its national security effort
is heavily influenced by how Americans conceptualize the struggle
against violent extremist movements in the Muslim world. If al Qaeda
and its ilk are regarded primarily as criminal conspirators, then the
United States needs a counterterrorism strategy that emphasizes
police, intelligence, and diplomatic efforts. If the threat is deemed
to have metastasized to the point where it is regarded as a global
insurgency, then a greater reliance on military force may be
justified.
Many experts believe that the threat of Islamist terrorism has indeed
grown to the point where its purveyors have the capacity to overturn
existing governments and seize control of substantial territory.
Others continue to regard al Qaeda and its imitators more as
opportunistic parasites that seek to attach themselves to what are
essentially nationalist conflicts (much as al Qaeda has attached
itself to a Sunni resistance movement in Iraq).
In the case of parasitic relationships, supporting rather than
opposing the insurgency can, on occasion, be the best way to
marginalize the extremists. This is the approach the United States
followed in Afghanistan in the 1980s and in the Balkans in the 1990s,
where it supported Muslim insurgencies against Soviet and Serbian
domination, respectively. Staying aloof, as the United States did with
respect to the Algerian insurgency in the 1990s, is another option. In
cases where U.S. national interests dictate some level of involvement
against the insurgents, limiting the U.S. role to training, equipping,
and advising the counterinsurgents is normally preferable to direct
military intervention. In rare circumstances, such as in Afghanistan,
that option may not be immediately available, and the burden may fall
to U.S. soldiers.
With the unexpected early retirement of John Abizaid as head of U.S.
Central Command and the replacement of General George Casey by General
David Petraeus as the top commander in Iraq, one of these approaches
to counterinsurgency has given way to another. Abizaid and Casey,
feeling that the large U.S. military presence in Iraq provoked more
resistance than it suppressed, advocated turning combat operations
over to Iraqi forces as quickly as possible. They thus concentrated on
training and equipping the Iraqi security forces. Petraeus, for his
part, believes that U.S. forces employing classic counterinsurgency
tactics still have an opportunity to gain the cooperation of the
population and give Iraqi politicians the time and space they need to
reconcile their differences. The Pentagon's top brass reportedly
backed Abizaid and Casey's preference but were overruled by President
Bush.
Iraq is, after all, a comparatively small country, yet countering the
insurgency there has engaged most of the U.S. Army and the Marine
Corps. If future terrorist-linked insurgencies are to be similarly
confronted by U.S. forces, then very large numbers will be needed.
Alternatively, if the United States chooses in the future to combat
insurgencies via local proxies, as it did throughout the Cold War
(Vietnam being the sole exception), then a renewed emphasis on
training, equipping, and advising foreign forces is in order. In that
case, the need is less for a larger army than for one reorganized to
better handle these new tasks.
It would be a mistake to employ Iraq as the yardstick by which to
gauge the future necessary size and shape of the U.S. military, given
that the war was probably unnecessary and the occupation mishandled
from the outset. Afghanistan offers a better and somewhat less
demanding guide to future requirements. The U.S. effort there has
broad (if diminishing) local support, full international legitimacy,
and substantial multinational participation. Yet Afghanistan, for all
these advantages, is a test the United States is not currently
passing. Improvements in the United States' capacity for nation
building and counterinsurgency are thus in order.
The Bush administration's rhetoric since 9/11 has accentuated the
warlike character of the terrorist threat and the martial nature of
the required response. Yet most of the tangible successes in the "war
on terror" have come as a result of police, intelligence, and
diplomatic activity. Not until U.S. leaders rebalance their rhetoric
will it be possible to redirect the government's funding priorities
toward the nonmilitary instruments on which the suppression of violent
extremist movements is most likely to depend.
THE POLICIES
Preemption, democracy promotion, and nation building have all been
sullied by association with the war in Iraq. All three policies
deserve reexamination, but none should be jettisoned entirely.
Over more than two centuries, the United States has conducted dozens
of military campaigns, only two of which were in response to attacks
on U.S. soil. This record should leave few in doubt that the United
States will employ force to protect itself, its friends, and its
interests without necessarily waiting to be struck first. To enshrine
this principle in publicly proclaimed national doctrine, however, only
makes any subsequent resort to force more controversial and hinders
the process of attracting allies and securing international sanction
for such actions; other nations will never be prepared to exempt the
United States from the internationally recognized restraints on the
unprovoked use of force. This international resistance to declared
U.S. policy was clearly on display when the decision was made to
attack Iraq soon after the Bush administration formally adopted
preemption as the cornerstone of its new national security strategy.
Washington therefore needs to drop "preemption" from the lexicon of
its declared national security policy (as the Bush administration has
already begun to do) while leaving an appropriate degree of
uncertainty in the minds of any potential foes about how the United
States might respond to a mounting threat.
Like preemption, democracy promotion has been a component of U.S.
foreign policy almost since the country's birth. Beginning in the
eighteenth century, most other nations in the Western Hemisphere have
adopted political systems modeled, however imperfectly, on the United
States' system. After World War II, the United States established
strong democracies in Japan and Germany and supported democratization
throughout Western Europe, employing a combination of military power,
economic assistance, strategic communications (that is, propaganda),
and direct, if surreptitious, support to democratic parties. In more
recent decades, all of central and most of eastern Europe, nearly all
of Latin America, much of East Asia, and some of Africa have become
democratic with active U.S. encouragement.
But democratization is no panacea for terrorism and no shortcut to a
more pro-U.S. (or pro-Israel) Middle East. Established democracies may
not make war on one another, but studies have shown that democratizing
nations are highly prone to both internal and external conflicts.
Furthermore, democratic governments in Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia
would be more hostile to Israel and less aligned with the United
States than the authoritarian regimes they replaced, since public
opinion in those countries is more opposed to Israeli and U.S. policy
than are their current leaders.
It may well have been a mistake to exempt the Middle East from over 60
years of largely successful U.S. efforts to promote democracy, but it
is unrealistic to expect this deficiency to be remedied within a few
years. Recent efforts to accelerate political reform in the region
have already backfired. Elections are polarizing events, particularly
in societies already marked by sectarian conflict, as has been
demonstrated recently in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian
territories. Rather than seeking dramatic electoral breakthroughs, let
alone imposing reforms, U.S. efforts to advance democracy in the
Middle East should focus on building its foundations, including the
rule of law, civil society, larger middle classes, and more effective
and less corrupt governments.
Nation building also deserves to survive its failure in Iraq. The Bush
administration, like the U.S. public, now recognizes that the
occupation of that country was mismanaged. As a result, it has
embraced the nation-building mission in all but name with the fervor
of a new convert. Unfortunately, although the Bush administration's
reaction to setbacks in Iraq has been a determination to do better
next time, Americans seem more inclined to avoid any such future
enterprises.
In fact, both conclusions are valid. The United States should
certainly avoid invading large hostile countries on the basis of
faulty intelligence and with the support of narrow, unrepresentative
coalitions. But not all conflicts are avoidable. Iraq may have been a
war of choice, but Afghanistan was not. Both conflicts left the United
States with a heavy burden of nation building. Through the 1990s, the
Clinton administration slowly learned how costly and time-consuming
such missions could be. In Somalia, the United States turned tail at
the first sign of opposition. In Haiti, it set an early departure
deadline, thereby ensuring that any improvements it introduced would
be short-lived. In Bosnia, Clinton set an even shorter timeline,
promising to have all U.S. troops out of the country within 12 months.
But if Clinton had not learned to avoid setting deadlines, he had at
least learned to avoid keeping them. Only late in his second term did
he finally acknowledge the open-ended nature of U.S. commitments in
both Bosnia and Kosovo.
It has taken the Bush administration a similar amount of time to learn
that nation building cannot be done on the cheap. The "surge" of
troops into Baghdad is a belated acknowledgment that rebuilding a
failed state takes an enormous commitment of manpower, money, and
time. This realization may have come too late to rescue the U.S.
venture in Iraq. It should, nevertheless, serve as a cautionary guide
to such endeavors in the future.
THE FAULT IS NOT IN OUR STARS
By January 2009, nearly everyone responsible for launching and
directing the war in Iraq will have left office. Sorting out who did
what will then become a job for historians. In choosing successors,
however, Americans should insist on leaders who will foster debate and
welcome disciplined dissent. These leaders should be surrounded by
advisers chosen primarily for their relevant experience and
demonstrated competence, not their ideological purity and partisan
loyalty.
Leaders of this caliber, supported by more competent and professional
staffs, will make better use of existing structures for policy
formulation and implementation. These structures can be strengthened
by the establishment of an enduring division of labor for postconflict
stabilization and reconstruction among the national security agencies
and by the building of a cadre of senior career officials with
experience across the national security establishment.
The "war on terror" should be reconceived and renamed to place greater
emphasis on its police, intelligence, and diplomatic components. The
U.S. Army should continue to improve its counterinsurgency skills,
with a particular emphasis on training, equipping, and advising others
to conduct such campaigns. The United States should avoid allowing al
Qaeda and its ilk to dictate its alignment in any particular dispute,
should take sides when necessary based on an objective calculation of
national interests, and should directly engage U.S. troops in local
civil wars only in the rarest of circumstances. "Preemption" should be
retired from the lexicon of declared policy, democratization should be
pursued everywhere as a long-term objective in full recognition of its
short-term costs and risks, and nation building should be embarked on
only where the United States and its partners are ready for a long,
hard, and expensive effort. Above all, Americans should accept that
the entire nation has, to one degree or another, failed in Iraq.
Facing up to this fact and drawing the necessary lessons is the only
way to ensure that it does not similarly fail again.
James Dobbins directs the International Security and Defense Policy
Center at the RAND Corporation and served as Assistant Secretary of
State under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He was the
Clinton administration's special envoy to Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, and
Somalia and the Bush administration's first envoy to Afghanistan.
Foreign Affairs
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