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09/20/2007
Lessons From Iraq
James Dobbins directs the International Security and Defense
Policy Center at the RAND Corporation and is a former
Assistant Secretary of State under Presidents Bill Clinton and
George W. Bush. He recently wrote an essay titled “Who Lost
Iraq? Lessons from the Debacle” for the September/October
edition of Foreign Affairs. Following are a few of his insights.
[Whether or not we can still pull it out is not necessarily part of
this discussion.]
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“(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. (L. Paul) 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).”
Dobbins focuses on the military and the conflicts between the
generals and the senior officer corps. As opposed to Vietnam,
which saw major problems at the lower end of the pyramid: “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.”
You’ve seen the “revolt of the generals,” when six recently
retired U.S. commanders openly questioned Rumsfeld’s
management of the war. Then this past May, Lieutenant Colonel
Paul Yingling, a veteran of two tours in Iraq 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.”
Dobbins notes, “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 overwhelmingly
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.”
But in light of the many failures, what exactly broke down?
Dobbins says one thing has become 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 these
concerns.”
What it boils down to is that if the president had sought the
advice of the State Department, they would have argued for
continued containment of Saddam Hussein. If Donald Rumsfeld
had sought the advice of the Pentagon and civilian experts
regarding manpower requirements, “he might have sought to
increase rather than decrease the already low estimates he was
getting from his field commander, General Franks.”
Dobbins says you can’t blame officers below the top level for not
voicing their alternative views more vociferously, outside of the
six who stated their case. “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.”
Interestingly, Dobbins blames the Democrats. “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.”
On a different topic, staffing, Dobbins says that just as the
military and intelligence services “are already largely fenced off
from politicization on the grounds that national security is too
important to entrust to amateurs (we) should seek the same
standard of professionalism for the senior civilian officials who
staff the Defense Department and other national security
agencies.” Our current system of political patronage guarantees
a high level of inexperience at the start of every presidential
term.
Dobbins also has some interesting thoughts on democracy
promotion.
“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.”
Our efforts to accelerate reform have been backfiring. “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.”
Dobbins concludes that “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.”
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Hott Spotts will return Oct. 4.
Brian Trumbore
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