Iraq war will haunt west - Emma Sky

[Steve the Planner]

Mike:

The brutality of Iraq for the twenty years before 2003 was unprecedented, systematic, institutionalized, long before we came along...

The idea that we missed in our Light Brigade mission was that there was a deep inherent problem---we told our military to go and kick that particular Hornet's Nest but without prep, resourcing or accurate PROBLEM DEFINITION, that just let all the demons fly, and created many of our own.

Back to my original premise: Planning for War has to begin with Planning for Peace (the rough and tumble end state), and then to create a credible path to that.

Dumbass civilian planner that I am, I know that had we, in transition, have become a real partner with Iraq's existing ministries (for better or worse with Baathists or not) for things like Water, Infrastructure, Food, etc....we would still be welcome and much needed partners, have all the eyes on Iraq we we ever needed, and the opportunity for a less inflammatory occupation period, existed.

What military or intel group has ever modeled those kinds of alternatives? (A quick and nasty take-out-the -baddest-guys and tinker within existing remnants.)

Now, as she says. We are out, and where do we go from here?

[Dayuhan]

A couple of comments stood out for me. One was this:

there is a danger that we won't learn the right lessons, particularly related to the limitations of our power.

That danger seems very real to me, and in that sense it might be a good thing if the specters of Iraq and Afghanistan haunt us for a good while. If the haunting reminds us that while force can remove a government, it cannot make a new one or build a nation, it will at least serve some purpose.

I also noted this:

"We think it is about us, and it is about our security. But in the end, it is about their politics … success in Iraq was always going to be defined by politics. We needed a political solution, a pact, a peace."

and I couldn't help noting the "we". Yes, we needed a peace. Arguably the Iraqis needed or need the same. You could say the same about the Afghans. That doesn't mean a pact or a peace will come any time soon, or that we can make one happen. IMO, of course... but realistically, when external force removes a government, there's a power vacuum. That vacuum is filled by the removing power, or local powers will fight to fill it themselves. The ideal solution, for us or for the people, might be a peaceful agreement between all of those parties. Whether or not we can bring that ideal solution to pass is another question altogether, one that must be realistically assessed before we decide to create the vacuum in the first place.

[TheCurmudgeon]

I am not saying we didn't hose this up. No one could defend that position.

Sky admits the CPA simply could not meet these expectations and no amount of hard work from many experienced British and American volunteers could make up for the lack of planning before the invasion. It left the CPA – which was assembled in haste and from scratch – attempting to restore public services, disband the security forces and build new ones, as well as introduce a free market and democracy.

'No organisation would have been able to implement such an agenda, particularly without the consent of the population'.

But she came in with a specific expectation and agenda and discovered that things were not what they seemed.

I had arrived ready to apologise to every Iraqi for the war. Instead I had listened to a litany of suffering and pain under Saddam for which I was quite unprepared. The mass graves, the details of torture, the bureaucratisation of abuse. The pure banality of evil...

She makes a number of valid points that I can agree with, and I give her credit for going out and doing something rather than sitting at home and complaining about it, but I think she is looking at things through the lens of her own "private boarding school" upbringing. She assumes that we could talk this all out. As others have pointed out, even internally initiated nation building and transitions are messy things. If the Iraqi people had done this on their own does she really believe that the Sunnis would have been treated better?

Retribution is the new law of the land in Libya. Summary executions, arbitrary arrests, torture and indefinite detention have emerged while the judicial system remains in a state of paralysis.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...,4794359.story

Guess I find it all a bit self righteous.

[Steve the Planner]

Curmudgeon:

The immortal and heartfelt words of Jack Nicholas in Mars Attacks: "Can't we all just----get along?"

As Dahyan says: Who is the WE?

Steve

[Dayuhan]

Guess I find it all a bit self righteous.

Post-mortem introspection often is, and I can forgive that.

The one thing myself and other keep coming to is: How to engage the actual people that are the focus of all of this.

What I keep coming to is the need to accept that engaging actual people becomes extraordinarily difficult when the engagement begins with you invading and conquering their country. It makes an already difficult process infinitely more difficult.

I don't doubt that poor planning for the aftermath of invasion was a major cause of the disarray and the generally unsatisfactory results. The danger in focusing on that, of course, ist that we might easily reach the conclusion that if we just plan a bit better, we could pull off regime change without a disorderly aftermath. I'm not convinced that we can do that, or that we should be trying.

[Steve the Planner]

Dahuyan:

Agree with the BIG insight: Planning better was not the problem, nor the route to the "if only we would have...." solution.

First, planning better should have materially changed the task/mission.

Second, as you say, the occupying power can not be the occupied, nor create the legitimacy to or of them. No matter how many cups of tea or soup eaten with knives.

The occupier has to find its legitimate role and stay within that. Huge pressure, huge influence is OK, but the outcomes of that can not become the local solution---just the occupier's quick hit.

Sustainable solutions have to emerge from and be rooted in them, not us.

Finding a different path AFTER you went down a road is very very tricky.

Like most on this site, we were not involved in the big decision---just what followed---and doing the best with what was in front of us.

Maybe, with Ken's wisdom, it has and always will be that way, but the question that Emma Sky leaves behind: What next? is still unanswered.

Personally, as ugly as it may look: Iraq is doing what I expected---finding its sea legs in a very tough circumstance---but with some good fortune (a short boom in oil prices).

Afghanistan, on the other hand: Boy, I hope some decent transition planning starts soon.

[Ken White]

Howsomeever, this ol' dumb Ken has always contended that it'd be the halfway point -- 2018 -- before any real degree of stability was shown and the the full 30 years to 2033 before Iraq was a functioning semi-rule of law State in accordance with world -- not Western; definitely not Western, not ever -- norms. That to be true only if there was no major disruption in the ME in the interim. I said that in 2003 and little I've seen or heard since has caused me to change my mind. Nor do I at this time see any major flaps in the ME, just a slew of minor ones...

They're nervous over there -- and they should be; they have to fix that. We cannot.

FWIW I disagree with Professor Sky. Iraq will not "haunt" us; the world will move on and lurch to another crisis. 'It' -- the lurching factor -- has indeed always been this way and always will. The Perfesser is a smart Lady but she's young and reading about doesn't give all the subtleties that living with a spasmodically improving world does. Nor does it show well the resilience of humans...

[Steve the Planner]

Ken:

Used to hear folks talking about the books they were gonna write about Iraq when it was over. Always wondered who they were going to sell these books to. Iraqis---the real target audience---would have no interest in them.

Dumb american ideas about their country.

The 30 year horizon. Lifetimes, generation spanning. Real life. Open-ended. Self-defining and re-defining. Who knows where its is headed, or how it will get there.

Just doesn't fit in to our operational efforts.

Like dwelling on Huntington's CORDs critique (which has a lot of substance and reference), but gets in the way of "Don't Just Stand There, Do Something."

[Dayuhan]

FWIW I disagree with Professor Sky. Iraq will not "haunt" us; the world will move on and lurch to another crisis. 'It' -- the lurching factor -- has indeed always been this way and always will. The Perfesser is a smart Lady but she's young and reading about doesn't give all the subtleties that living with a spasmodically improving world does. Nor does it show well the resilience of humans...

I think she's correct in the sense that the Iraq war and the memories of it (memories that may or may not be accurate, on all sides) will have an influence on our relations with the Middle East and the Muslim world for a long time to come, just as our Cold War legacy of installing and/or propping up dictators we perceived to be anti-Communist still complicates our relationships with much of the developing world. Whether or not we will recognize the influence or its antecedents is of course another question.

Used to hear folks talking about the books they were gonna write about Iraq when it was over. Always wondered who they were going to sell these books to.

Other Americans, of course.

That is exactly what the Air Force believes or at they used to. I have a copy of a letter to the editor of our local paper from just after the overthrow of Sadam where Colonel Warden tried to warn whoever would listen what would happen if we disbanded the Iraqi military and implemented some kind of de-bathistazation(spelling?) program. Pretty much fell on deaf ears.

Were those ears deaf, or were they also considering what could happen if we didn't disband the army or get rid of the Baath? It's easy to look back and say that was a mistake, but we don't know that the road not taken would have led anyplace better. How do you think the Shi'a and the Kurds might have reacted if we'd proposed to keep the army intact and the Baath in power? I'd guess they'd have been pissed, to put it mildly.

[TheCurmudgeon]

What I keep coming to is the need to accept that engaging actual people becomes extraordinarily difficult when the engagement begins with you invading and conquering their country. It makes an already difficult process infinitely more difficult.

As a general rule I would agree. In the case of Iraq I disagree. By using the term "their country" you assume the population has an interest in seeing the current regime continue. That they are vested in it. That they find it legitimate. I don't believe that was the case prior to the invasion in Iraq. I believe that the majority of the population wanted Saddam and his sons out of the picture. I believe that manifest itself in the relative good will we have in the three to four months after the invasion.

We hosed it up, but not because of the decision to invade. It was the decisions on how to handle it afterwords that screwed us. In my opinion to walk away from this believing that the right lesson to learn from Iraq is that it is better to just sit on the sidelines and do nothing would be misreading the autopsy.

[Bob's World]

Come on, just because the people don't have a say in their governance, it does not mean it is not "their country." That is a dangerous bit of rationalization.

"We had to destroy the country to safe the country" Right? This is an easy trap to fall into, and we are better served by admitting that we did than we are by rationalizing away our most important lessons that we should be learning from this.

There is a WIDE range of options between "sit on the sidelines and do nothing" and "Invade and occupy."

One such option was the UW concept put on the table early to simply go in and leverage the Kurdish separatist movement. No one wanted one more SF-centric quick success though. We (DOD) were looking for a big gunfight that everyone could play in; and the Whitehouse was looking for an option that took out Saddam once and for all - and that is what we got. Now, what did we learn from that?

All the lessons learned I am seeing being captured are about how to do the wrong thing better. It is time we start putting a bit more wattage into thinking about how we could have done better things.

[Steve the Planner]

Bob:

Right across the Board.

Options: Take out Saddam and his main deck of cards, and you are actually left with a mixed army including Kurds.

Kurds, however, were only one possible leverage point. Shia opposition? Internal Sunni dissent? Pressure through those that influence various parties in Iraq?

I, for one, believe that the attacks on Kurds and Shia were so virulent that absent us "Doing Something" Iran (and other neighbors) would have been drawn into that fight, and that a regional conflict was an important unrecognized consideration. The flip side of that is that these regional players were also leverage points.

I know, how stupid. Back Saddam to attack Iran, than spur Iran to attack Iraq.

Back to Dayuhan's point about what exactlyis our legacy in the ME. Divide and conquer? Play all sides against the middle? Whatever.

Lots of options, all of which evaporated once we went in.

[TheCurmudgeon]

Come on, just because the people don't have a say in their governance, it does not mean it is not "their country." That is a dangerous bit of rationalization.

You are misreading what I wrote. I was responding to Dayuhun's assertion that engaging the people becomes extraordinarily difficult when the engagement begins with you invading and conquering their country. I would argue that how difficult engaging the people is situation dependent. We had no problems working with the French after Normandy. Each case has to be looked at as a unique situation.

"We had to destroy the country to safe the country" Right? This is an easy trap to fall into, and we are better served by admitting that we did than we are by rationalizing away our most important lessons that we should be learning from this.

No, not saying that.

There is a WIDE range of options between "sit on the sidelines and do nothing" and "Invade and occupy."

This is EXACTLY what I am saying (although, apparently very ineptly). There is a continuum between the two extremes and each situation has to be examined to determine what, if anything can be done. Then once those options are fleshed out determine what, if anything should be done, based on our interests.

All the lessons learned I am seeing being captured are about how to do the wrong thing better. It is time we start putting a bit more wattage into thinking about how we could have done better things.

Agree, but we will never go there if our answer is "We should never do this again". That is the kind of cookie cutter solution I take issue with. That was the point of my comment.

I am not saying that "invade and occupy" was the right solution. But I will not concede that "invade and occupy" is the primary reason we are where we are in Iraq today. We did not need to apologize to every Iraqi for invading. We did need to have had a better plan for how we were going to occupy and how the transition was going to occur. It needed to take into account the various religious, ethnic, and economic variations and historical animosities. We could have split the country up into three separate nations rather than try to compound a mistake made when the lines were drawn by the British. We could have not engaged in DeBathification. Who knows if any of these would have worked better. But I do believe that we can learn from mistakes made after the invasion rather than see the invasion as the primary error and therefore dismiss everything that occured after as the natural cascade of events that occur as the result of that mistake.

[slapout9]

What military or intel group has ever modeled those kinds of alternatives? (A quick and nasty take-out-the -baddest-guys and tinker within existing remnants.)

Believe it or not the Air Force has and they have proposed that concept since the 1950's starting with "Project Control" but because it was an AF idea people don't pay much attention to it.

[Steve the Planner]

Slap:

Right. The pathways are there but they never meet in the operational plan.

The one thing myself and other keep coming to is: How to engage the actual people that are the focus of all of this.

As a civilian planner, the first thing you learn in a well-implemented community engagement process is that planners define the issues and rough-out options and CHOICES.

Then you go to the intended audience who invariably adds either nuances you missed or wholesale changes (different problem definitions, different solutions), after which, you start again.

This nasty business of community engagement---confounded in blood conflict (instead of just general community conflicts)---is just DAMNED hard, yet will never stick from some ferner telling locals what to do.

We cannot be both the occupier and fill the shoes of the occupied. If they have problems, they must find solutions to them.

Rule 101 in disaster relief---help where you can, then engage the community to rebuild itself. It can not work any other way.

Steve

[slapout9]

We cannot be both the occupier and fill the shoes of the occupied. If they have problems, they must find solutions to them.

That is exactly what the Air Force believes or at they used to. I have a copy of a letter to the editor of our local paper from just after the overthrow of Sadam where Colonel Warden tried to warn whoever would listen what would happen if we disbanded the Iraqi military and implemented some kind of de-bathistazation(spelling?) program. Pretty much fell on deaf ears.