Iraq: What went wrong?

I have had this post in rough draft form for some time now and I have decided to just post it. I could spend days editing this post as there is a lot in it and I have a lot to say about the subject. So in the interest of just getting this post off my chest, I am going to post it as is. So I am sorry if parts are a little jumbled or oddly worded. Anyways, here goes:

Welcome back to the Sensible Logic analysis of the war in Iraq. I hope you have sufficiently digested the first blog post and are ready for more.

I concluded the last post essentially saying I could not fault President Bush on getting us into Iraq. However, I do find many faults on how this war was conducted. It is worth admitting that I am not an expert on military strategy or counter terrorism, but after listening to hours of analyses and reading page after page about this subject, I have many opinions on the subject.

I will start off by giving my main thesis as to what went wrong. I believe that, coupled with the complete lack of cooperation of the Iraqi people and government, we were under prepared, under staffed, and over confident to handle what came after the fall of Saddam.

To start to dissect my thesis, we need to start at the beginning. The start of the war showcased the best of the American military. No military in the entire world is as advanced, well trained and proficient as ours and the ease to which we took Bagdad proves that. If the war ended then, no one would be second guessing the reasons for going into Iraq, President Bush would be a hero, and the Democrats would not be in charge of congress. Sadly this is not the case, the war did not end there and people have every right to expect better from their elected leaders, especially of the President. He failed to have a “what next” plan for after the fall of Bagdad. This has lead to a series of catastrophic mistakes that has caused us to be in this war 4 years later.

The evolution of the U.S. military is where I think our problem begins. Being the most dominant military force, there has evolved this sense of not wanting to be “too tough” on the enemy as it will certainly make us look like bullies. Imagine if you will the Boston Red Sox playing a baseball games against my 8-year old nephew’s little league team. Do you expect the Sox to bring their “A-game” and play at a major league level? What would you say if Curt Schilling threw a brush back pitch because an 8-year old was crowding the plate? Why I assume you would be little disturbed. With respect to war, since we know we could easily crush a much weaker Iraqi army, what would be the world perception if we just went in there and mowed them all down? There would be outrage, even though I think being super aggressive in the beginning would have significantly reduced future causalities. Unfortunately we will never know if this is true.

Since, in my opinion, Vietnam, this trend of not wanting to be too “mean” has only gotten worse. In the first gulf war, we only fought just enough to force Iraq out of Kuwait. Had we pressed Saddam further, perhaps we would not be in this mess at all. It is the Sensible Logic position that if you make the decision to go to war, you go with the full resources you possesses and use whatever amount of force it takes to guarantee a complete victory. It is important for me to also say, that what force we do take comply with the rules of warfare set by the Geneva Convention and punish those within our ranks that break these rules.

This first mistake leads to the second mistake of being under prepared. Since the United States felt this would be a swift victory we did not bring enough troops and supplies to secure the country or be able to endure a prolonged war such as it has become. This coupled with our absurd desire to be “politically correct” in conducting this war has created the mess we are in.

Because modern warfare has become more of a gorilla type style of fighting, our attitudes need to change as well. This is where the cold hand of reason and logic needs to brush aside the warm feelings of peace and love. Remember we are not the ones who decided to fight street by street in downtown Bagdad. We are not the ones hiding behind innocent civilians. We would have been more than happy to meet in the middle of the desert, but the bad guys are much smarter than that. They know of our reluctance to use brut force when innocent lives may be lost and they exploit this to their advantage. It is a sad reality of modern warfare that civilian causalities are to be expected. If we were to only accept this in the beginning and use the full force of the American military and deal with the fallout of world opinion after, I honestly believe that fewer civilians would have been killed and displaced in the long run. Again, there is simply no way to know this, but I believe it to be true. If you go back to my December 5th post, I tell how Iraqis actually see our reluctance to risk the lives of civilians as a weakness, and these are the Iraqis on our side. You can imagine how the bad one feels.

The third mistake was the complete disbanding of the Baath Party. The Baath party was the ruling party under Saddam and consisted of several levels with Saddam being the highest level member. It is also known that not all levels were equally as evil. It would have been beneficial to remove the upper level members such as Saddam and his family and advisors and work to reform the lower level members. However, we removed all the members, and got rid of all the people who knew how to govern and all that was left was chaos.

When you remove a dictator from power it is inevitable that there is going to be a power vacuum that someone is going to full. We were not prepared to fill it so chaos instrued. As we saw with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Muslim extremist poured into Iraq to fight the “occupiers”. Once this happened, Iraq did become the central front of the war on terror. This is what I mean when I say that President Bush “accidentally” got this right. So while we wait for Iraq to form a completely new governing body, we have people pouring in from all across the region to blow us up.

Our fourth mistake was our ill placed faith in the people of Iraq to embrace democracy and welcome us into Iraq as heroes. We were fooled. We actually thought that the Iraqis wanted to be free, to live together in peace. But we forgot one key aspect to Iraqi culture, which is the thousands of years of distrust between rival sects, not to mention the whole Sunnis exterminating the Shia under Saddam. We weren’t expecting them to forget about that were we? I guess we did. The now Shia majority in the government do not trust the Sunnis and thus have been unwilling to bring them fully into the decision making process. This has led to resentment by the Sunnis which have fueled sectarian attacks. It is a vicious cycle. The suicide attacks on Iraqi civilians by Muslim extremist only serve to fuel the sectarian rift and keep the cycle of violence going. Until the people of Iraq end this cycle, nothing we can do will have any positive effect. You can lead horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. As I said in an earlier post, you can lead people to democracy, but it is up to them to decide if they want to take a sip.

I will blog soon as to how I think we can get out with a victory. But the way it is looking, I am no longer sure there is anything we can do. The Iraqi people just do not want to stop killing each other.