Posted on Mar 22, 2023
How do you reflect on the Iraq War, 20 years after it began?
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I deployed to Afghanistan in '09 with the 5-158, 12th CAB. I can't speak to Iraq. I think I stopped there once on a puddle jumper, but that was it. Over my years in, I have plenty of friends who told me their stories. The Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) has been over for a few years now, how do you reflect?
A small majority of our guys went to Iraq at the time I was downrange, and even then only a few actually stayed longer than a couple of week to serve in minor support roles. This was the height of the war under Obama and I recall a huge emphasis being placed on Afghanistan at the time. The fighting there seemed to be getting the most coverage, I specifically remember the Korangal valley.
Words shared by Dr. Albert Mohler, President of SBTS, struck a few chords with me and while hearing from others on this topic, I also want to share his thoughts for further reflection. You can listen to him on the first few minutes of his podcast here (https://albertmohler.com/2023/03/20/briefing-3-20-23) or read his transcript below. This is a lengthy post for RP, but sometimes a topic deserves it.
HIGHLIGHTS:
“William Inboden, in an article that appears at world opinion this morning, says that there were 8,200 American soldiers and contractors killed, tens of thousands more wounded or maimed and over 200,000 dead Iraqi civilians. He went on to say that the results of the war included the spending of trillions of dollars and emboldened Iran, acrimonious divisions in our body politic and severe damage to America's international credibility.”
“Dr. Inboden writes, “While the enormous costs and errors of the war are well known, the cost of inaction should not be ignored. Had Saddam Hussein been left in power, he had every intention of restarting his weapons of mass destruction program and continuing to diminish the region as well as the United States. He would also have continued to brutalize his own people and potentially resume his genocide against the Kurds. No one," He reminds us, "Should lament his loss."
“The next sentence is just incredibly important and Dr. Inboden was a member of President Bush's national security council staff at the time, “This is not to say that the war was worth the terrible price, but rather to remind us of the tragic dimension of statecraft. In our fallen world, with imperfect information, few policy choices are clear or cost free.””
“George Will said something like this, he said Iraq has everything necessary to build a functioning democratic culture except Washington, Adams, Madison, Hamilton. In other words, there is no democratic tradition.”
“The United States of America may be the new order of the ages, but it did not come out of a laboratory, just add water and stir.”
“You can say you know what's going on in someplace like Iraq and you can also say you know what will happen if certain war plans are approved, but at the end of the day, as many military strategists and practitioners have pointed out, a war plan rarely survives contact with the enemy. The fact is that we have to take actions in a fallen world with very fallible and limited information, but nonetheless, we're accountable for how we act based upon that information and even how we analyze and judge that information.”
“Patriotism and the service to one's country for righteousness and justice sake is inherently moral, and for that, we should thank every American in uniform and everyone who's involved in defending this nation. And at the same time, they are likely, if they have any experience in war at all, to be the very first to tell us that war is a very, very deadly and morally messy enterprise.”
“The reality is that there was no transformation of Iraq into a modern, western nation in terms of laws and culture and all the rest, and eventually, the culture wins over the politics. That's a very important conservative understanding. Eventually the culture trumps the politics.”
"Finally, when it comes to the lessons of history, we're always learning the lessons of history and Christians remind ourselves that we believe the history matters. We also understand that history is continuously an argument. We also understand that how that argument is understood really does matter, not just in our understanding of the past, but in our understanding of our own responsibility in the present and then we project that responsibility into the future. Nobody told us it was going to be easy."
TRANSCRIPT (Part 1):
It is very hard to take the historical measure of something, even something that's a fairly recent history. As a matter of fact, there are many ongoing historical debates that simply refuse to be concluded. Robert Kagan, in his new book entitled The Ghost at the Feast, Looking at American Foreign Policy between the years 1900 and 1941, points out that if you look to the Spanish American War fought just over a matter of weeks in the year 1898. There is still virtually no historical consensus about that war, was it or was it not a war of colonialization? He says, "No, at least not in the classic European sense." Was it or was it not intentional in terms of, for instance, the American involvement in the Philippines directly and for so long. Again, controversial questions well over a hundred years ago, the controversial questions continue.
Just consider the fact that today marks the 20th anniversary of the beginning of what we call the Iraq War. 20 years ago today, American and Allied forces entered Iraqi territory with the goal of removing Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, from power and establishing a democratic order in order of freedom in Iraq 20 years ago. Now in American history, you could just mention several wars that remain controversial. The Korean War, which, actually, legally wasn't a war and, legally, isn't even over. Or you take the Vietnam War, which again, at least by the lack of a declaration of war, wasn't officially a war, but it certainly was a war. It really can't be discussed in moral terms as anything other than a war, and a great controversial war in American history at that. Then the Iraq War 20 years ago today.
Now, it was of a different status legislatively, which is actually a part of the interesting history to this war, but there are ongoing historical questions, massive historical questions, massive moral questions. Was this a righteous war? Was it fought for a righteous cause or not? What was the result of the Iraq war?
Actually, it's a very mixed picture. And this is where Christians need to understand that we should expect, in situations like this, a very mixed picture. As a matter of fact, Christians should understand that even when we are looking at something as morally clear, you might say, and we would immediately say, as World War II, and the necessity of defeating, just think about the European theater, the specter of Nazism. The reality is that even though the war was clearly necessary and victory in that war was clearly necessary, there are still huge moral questions over that war, and that's just in the European theater, even more complicated, perhaps, in the Pacific Theater. And then you have the questions of primary and secondary causes for these wars and primary and secondary effects of these wars.
There are huge questions that still can't be answered, but what is clear right now is that the Iraq war is very controversial in the United States. Just consider the headline in yesterday's edition of the New York Times, "Lost Hopes Haunt Iraqis Two Decades After Invasion." The subhead, I think, is actually quite clear and honest. "Society is far freer, but many feel unsafe and left out as corruption reigns."
Now, Christians have been trained to think about war in terms of what's called just war theory. That is, the Christian theory of when war becomes either absolutely necessary or at the very least, morally justified, and under what terms war is to be conducted if morally justified. That's a good reminder that the Christian worldview takes violence, in general, and war, in particular, with extreme significance. Just war theory is divided into those two parts; what does it take for the beginning of military action to be justified, and then once it is justified as begun, how is military action rightly and justly to be undertaken?
Lots of rules, including the facts that all wars must, essentially, be defensive rather than offensive, that wars must be legally justifiable by a just authority in declaring the war, that all wars must be limited in their ambitions to remediating a harm or removing a threat, not to advancing something like territorial ambitions. Those are questions on the front side of just war theory. On the backside of just war theory, as a just war is being prosecuted, there are other issues, of course, such as the discrimination principle, which means there must be no targeting of civilians. Civilians are never to be targeted as an act of war.
Clearly all kinds of issues arise here and as you're looking at Iraq, one of the most interesting things about the Iraq war is that, at the time, in the United States, there was an amazing, if often now well forgotten or denied, consensus about the righteousness of removing Saddam Hussein, the dictator there in Iraq, who was repressing his own people and also threatening other nations. Most recently, of course, sending his armed forces to invade Kuwait.
It was a destabilizing regime that was blood thirsty and had blood on its hands. The authorization to begin military action along with allies in Iraq was undertaken with a broad political consensus in the United States, but that consensus didn't last. If you go back, for instance, to the 2008 race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama won, at least in part, because he had not voted for the resolution authorizing the military action in Iraq, and in the Democratic Party by 2008, that was important. It had a great deal to do with the fact that his main opponent, at that time, for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had voted as a senator for the war resolution, so did a lot of other Democrats including the current Democrat in the Oval Office.
It's not likely that you're going to hear much from the White House, much less the Oval Office, on the issue of the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war, but at least we need to take some moral reckoning of what took place and what it means. There was a great cost in human lies. William Inboden, in an article that appears at world opinion this morning, says that there were 8,200 American soldiers and contractors killed, tens of thousands more wounded or maimed and over 200,000 dead Iraqi civilians. He went on to say that the results of the war included the spending of trillions of dollars and emboldened Iran, acrimonious divisions in our body politic and severe damage to America's international credibility.
One of the big issues, from a Christian worldview, is the fact that we have to take moral responsibility both for action and for decided inaction. If we decide not to act. That, in itself, is a morally culpable or at least morally suspect decision. Someone can contest it, we might have to defend it.
Dr. Inboden writes, "While the enormous costs and errors of the war are well known, the cost of inaction should not be ignored. Had Saddam Hussein been left in power, he had every intention of restarting his weapons of mass destruction program and continuing to diminish the region as well as the United States. He would also have continued to brutalize his own people and potentially resume his genocide against the Kurds. No one," He reminds us, "Should lament his loss."
The next sentence is just incredibly important and Dr. Inboden was a member of President Bush's national security council staff at the time, "This is not to say that the war was worth the terrible price, but rather to remind us of the tragic dimension of statecraft. In our fallen world, with imperfect information, few policy choices are clear or cost free." That's a very important Christian realization and it's based in a Christian principle of realism.
And this realism, by the way, isn't just realism, say, in looking at facts, it's realism about the fact that we, as human beings, are trapped, both, in a finite situation in terms of our own knowledge, and we are often confronted with an inability to have an absolutely clear view of the consequences of our actions.
And that's particularly important and let's just say the stakes are particularly high when it comes to the most catastrophic of human endeavors, which is war. It is also really interesting to look at Iraq today and recognize that, undeniably, it is a lot freer than it was in the past, under the dictator Saddam Hussein. And that acknowledgement in the New York Times, even in the form of a headline, is really important. "Society is far freer, but many feel unsafe and left out as corruption reigns." And corruption is reigning.
And here's where we're looking at another fact that demands a certain form of Christian realism. By the way, the New York Times article says this, "Most troubling for young and old alike is the increasingly entrenched government corruption, which is rooted in a system of sectarian and ethnic distribution of power that the United States pressed Iraq to put into place after Mr. Hussein, that is Saddam Hussein, fell. Transparency international ranks Iraq 157th among 180 countries in its corruption index." Well, just to state the obvious, that's very, very bad and it's a very tragic result of what was undertaken as a major American military effort, and here's the next point, that was combined with a moral and political effort.
When President George W. Bush, members of his administration and American Allies spoke of the goal in what became known as the Iraq War, it had centered in replacing Saddam Hussein with a functioning, legitimate democratic form of government in that troubled part of the world, and Iraqi is still, in all likelihood, almost by any judgment, the freest and most democratic of all the nations in that region.
But at the same time, it is not a stable democratic experiment and political corruption is absolutely rife. Sectarianism, political corruption, organized graft, all very much a part of Iraq today. It reminds me of something that was said by the columnist George Will, of the Washington Post, now, well, I guess almost two decades ago, about the prospect of nation building and building democracy in Iraq and it's really important from a worldview perspective. George Will said something like this, he said Iraq has everything necessary to build a functioning democratic culture except Washington, Adams, Madison, Hamilton. In other words, there is no democratic tradition.
There is no system of constitutional understanding. There is no commitment to the kind of moral and constitutional order that marks the United States of America. The United States of America, by the way, might declare itself a new order of the ages, and in one sense it is, but on the other hand, the United States, its constitution, its government, its separation of powers, its understanding of human liberty, is entirely dependent upon the inheritance of a long tradition of legal argument and development that, in the English speaking tradition, actually unites rather than divides Great Britain and the United States of America. The United States of America may be the new order of the ages, but it did not come out of a laboratory, just add water and stir.
So on this 20th anniversary, what do we mostly need to think about as we contemplate the legacy and the moral dimensions of the Iraq war? We need to think about this. Number one, human intelligence is incredibly limited. You can say you know what's going on in someplace like Iraq and you can also say you know what will happen if certain war plans are approved, but at the end of the day, as many military strategists and practitioners have pointed out, a war plan rarely survives contact with the enemy. The fact is that we have to take actions in a fallen world with very fallible and limited information, but nonetheless, we're accountable for how we act based upon that information and even how we analyze and judge that information.
Something else to understand is that in a fallen world, an enterprise as deadly and catastrophic as war can never be carried out with absolutely clean hands. That's a very, very sad but very, very accurate assessment. That is not to say that soldiers and officers in the army are not and cannot be noble. No, indeed they are. Defending liberty is inherently noble. Patriotism and the service to one's country for righteousness and justice sake is inherently moral, and for that, we should thank every American in uniform and everyone who's involved in defending this nation at the same time, they are likely, if they have any experience in war at all, to be the very first to tell us that war is a very, very deadly and morally messy enterprise.
It's also important for us to recognize that when you are undertaking war, your goals sometimes simply have to change. The reality is that there was no transformation of Iraq into a modern, western nation in terms of laws and culture and all the rest, and eventually, the culture wins over the politics. That's a very important conservative understanding. Eventually the culture trumps the politics.
Finally, when it comes to the lessons of history, we're always learning the lessons of history and Christians remind ourselves that we believe the history matters. We also understand that history is continuously an argument. We also understand that how that argument is understood really does matter, not just in our understanding of the past, but in our understanding of our own responsibility in the present and then we project that responsibility into the future. Nobody told us it was going to be easy. Just consider that on the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq.”
- Dr. Albert Mohler, President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
A small majority of our guys went to Iraq at the time I was downrange, and even then only a few actually stayed longer than a couple of week to serve in minor support roles. This was the height of the war under Obama and I recall a huge emphasis being placed on Afghanistan at the time. The fighting there seemed to be getting the most coverage, I specifically remember the Korangal valley.
Words shared by Dr. Albert Mohler, President of SBTS, struck a few chords with me and while hearing from others on this topic, I also want to share his thoughts for further reflection. You can listen to him on the first few minutes of his podcast here (https://albertmohler.com/2023/03/20/briefing-3-20-23) or read his transcript below. This is a lengthy post for RP, but sometimes a topic deserves it.
HIGHLIGHTS:
“William Inboden, in an article that appears at world opinion this morning, says that there were 8,200 American soldiers and contractors killed, tens of thousands more wounded or maimed and over 200,000 dead Iraqi civilians. He went on to say that the results of the war included the spending of trillions of dollars and emboldened Iran, acrimonious divisions in our body politic and severe damage to America's international credibility.”
“Dr. Inboden writes, “While the enormous costs and errors of the war are well known, the cost of inaction should not be ignored. Had Saddam Hussein been left in power, he had every intention of restarting his weapons of mass destruction program and continuing to diminish the region as well as the United States. He would also have continued to brutalize his own people and potentially resume his genocide against the Kurds. No one," He reminds us, "Should lament his loss."
“The next sentence is just incredibly important and Dr. Inboden was a member of President Bush's national security council staff at the time, “This is not to say that the war was worth the terrible price, but rather to remind us of the tragic dimension of statecraft. In our fallen world, with imperfect information, few policy choices are clear or cost free.””
“George Will said something like this, he said Iraq has everything necessary to build a functioning democratic culture except Washington, Adams, Madison, Hamilton. In other words, there is no democratic tradition.”
“The United States of America may be the new order of the ages, but it did not come out of a laboratory, just add water and stir.”
“You can say you know what's going on in someplace like Iraq and you can also say you know what will happen if certain war plans are approved, but at the end of the day, as many military strategists and practitioners have pointed out, a war plan rarely survives contact with the enemy. The fact is that we have to take actions in a fallen world with very fallible and limited information, but nonetheless, we're accountable for how we act based upon that information and even how we analyze and judge that information.”
“Patriotism and the service to one's country for righteousness and justice sake is inherently moral, and for that, we should thank every American in uniform and everyone who's involved in defending this nation. And at the same time, they are likely, if they have any experience in war at all, to be the very first to tell us that war is a very, very deadly and morally messy enterprise.”
“The reality is that there was no transformation of Iraq into a modern, western nation in terms of laws and culture and all the rest, and eventually, the culture wins over the politics. That's a very important conservative understanding. Eventually the culture trumps the politics.”
"Finally, when it comes to the lessons of history, we're always learning the lessons of history and Christians remind ourselves that we believe the history matters. We also understand that history is continuously an argument. We also understand that how that argument is understood really does matter, not just in our understanding of the past, but in our understanding of our own responsibility in the present and then we project that responsibility into the future. Nobody told us it was going to be easy."
TRANSCRIPT (Part 1):
It is very hard to take the historical measure of something, even something that's a fairly recent history. As a matter of fact, there are many ongoing historical debates that simply refuse to be concluded. Robert Kagan, in his new book entitled The Ghost at the Feast, Looking at American Foreign Policy between the years 1900 and 1941, points out that if you look to the Spanish American War fought just over a matter of weeks in the year 1898. There is still virtually no historical consensus about that war, was it or was it not a war of colonialization? He says, "No, at least not in the classic European sense." Was it or was it not intentional in terms of, for instance, the American involvement in the Philippines directly and for so long. Again, controversial questions well over a hundred years ago, the controversial questions continue.
Just consider the fact that today marks the 20th anniversary of the beginning of what we call the Iraq War. 20 years ago today, American and Allied forces entered Iraqi territory with the goal of removing Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, from power and establishing a democratic order in order of freedom in Iraq 20 years ago. Now in American history, you could just mention several wars that remain controversial. The Korean War, which, actually, legally wasn't a war and, legally, isn't even over. Or you take the Vietnam War, which again, at least by the lack of a declaration of war, wasn't officially a war, but it certainly was a war. It really can't be discussed in moral terms as anything other than a war, and a great controversial war in American history at that. Then the Iraq War 20 years ago today.
Now, it was of a different status legislatively, which is actually a part of the interesting history to this war, but there are ongoing historical questions, massive historical questions, massive moral questions. Was this a righteous war? Was it fought for a righteous cause or not? What was the result of the Iraq war?
Actually, it's a very mixed picture. And this is where Christians need to understand that we should expect, in situations like this, a very mixed picture. As a matter of fact, Christians should understand that even when we are looking at something as morally clear, you might say, and we would immediately say, as World War II, and the necessity of defeating, just think about the European theater, the specter of Nazism. The reality is that even though the war was clearly necessary and victory in that war was clearly necessary, there are still huge moral questions over that war, and that's just in the European theater, even more complicated, perhaps, in the Pacific Theater. And then you have the questions of primary and secondary causes for these wars and primary and secondary effects of these wars.
There are huge questions that still can't be answered, but what is clear right now is that the Iraq war is very controversial in the United States. Just consider the headline in yesterday's edition of the New York Times, "Lost Hopes Haunt Iraqis Two Decades After Invasion." The subhead, I think, is actually quite clear and honest. "Society is far freer, but many feel unsafe and left out as corruption reigns."
Now, Christians have been trained to think about war in terms of what's called just war theory. That is, the Christian theory of when war becomes either absolutely necessary or at the very least, morally justified, and under what terms war is to be conducted if morally justified. That's a good reminder that the Christian worldview takes violence, in general, and war, in particular, with extreme significance. Just war theory is divided into those two parts; what does it take for the beginning of military action to be justified, and then once it is justified as begun, how is military action rightly and justly to be undertaken?
Lots of rules, including the facts that all wars must, essentially, be defensive rather than offensive, that wars must be legally justifiable by a just authority in declaring the war, that all wars must be limited in their ambitions to remediating a harm or removing a threat, not to advancing something like territorial ambitions. Those are questions on the front side of just war theory. On the backside of just war theory, as a just war is being prosecuted, there are other issues, of course, such as the discrimination principle, which means there must be no targeting of civilians. Civilians are never to be targeted as an act of war.
Clearly all kinds of issues arise here and as you're looking at Iraq, one of the most interesting things about the Iraq war is that, at the time, in the United States, there was an amazing, if often now well forgotten or denied, consensus about the righteousness of removing Saddam Hussein, the dictator there in Iraq, who was repressing his own people and also threatening other nations. Most recently, of course, sending his armed forces to invade Kuwait.
It was a destabilizing regime that was blood thirsty and had blood on its hands. The authorization to begin military action along with allies in Iraq was undertaken with a broad political consensus in the United States, but that consensus didn't last. If you go back, for instance, to the 2008 race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama won, at least in part, because he had not voted for the resolution authorizing the military action in Iraq, and in the Democratic Party by 2008, that was important. It had a great deal to do with the fact that his main opponent, at that time, for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had voted as a senator for the war resolution, so did a lot of other Democrats including the current Democrat in the Oval Office.
It's not likely that you're going to hear much from the White House, much less the Oval Office, on the issue of the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war, but at least we need to take some moral reckoning of what took place and what it means. There was a great cost in human lies. William Inboden, in an article that appears at world opinion this morning, says that there were 8,200 American soldiers and contractors killed, tens of thousands more wounded or maimed and over 200,000 dead Iraqi civilians. He went on to say that the results of the war included the spending of trillions of dollars and emboldened Iran, acrimonious divisions in our body politic and severe damage to America's international credibility.
One of the big issues, from a Christian worldview, is the fact that we have to take moral responsibility both for action and for decided inaction. If we decide not to act. That, in itself, is a morally culpable or at least morally suspect decision. Someone can contest it, we might have to defend it.
Dr. Inboden writes, "While the enormous costs and errors of the war are well known, the cost of inaction should not be ignored. Had Saddam Hussein been left in power, he had every intention of restarting his weapons of mass destruction program and continuing to diminish the region as well as the United States. He would also have continued to brutalize his own people and potentially resume his genocide against the Kurds. No one," He reminds us, "Should lament his loss."
The next sentence is just incredibly important and Dr. Inboden was a member of President Bush's national security council staff at the time, "This is not to say that the war was worth the terrible price, but rather to remind us of the tragic dimension of statecraft. In our fallen world, with imperfect information, few policy choices are clear or cost free." That's a very important Christian realization and it's based in a Christian principle of realism.
And this realism, by the way, isn't just realism, say, in looking at facts, it's realism about the fact that we, as human beings, are trapped, both, in a finite situation in terms of our own knowledge, and we are often confronted with an inability to have an absolutely clear view of the consequences of our actions.
And that's particularly important and let's just say the stakes are particularly high when it comes to the most catastrophic of human endeavors, which is war. It is also really interesting to look at Iraq today and recognize that, undeniably, it is a lot freer than it was in the past, under the dictator Saddam Hussein. And that acknowledgement in the New York Times, even in the form of a headline, is really important. "Society is far freer, but many feel unsafe and left out as corruption reigns." And corruption is reigning.
And here's where we're looking at another fact that demands a certain form of Christian realism. By the way, the New York Times article says this, "Most troubling for young and old alike is the increasingly entrenched government corruption, which is rooted in a system of sectarian and ethnic distribution of power that the United States pressed Iraq to put into place after Mr. Hussein, that is Saddam Hussein, fell. Transparency international ranks Iraq 157th among 180 countries in its corruption index." Well, just to state the obvious, that's very, very bad and it's a very tragic result of what was undertaken as a major American military effort, and here's the next point, that was combined with a moral and political effort.
When President George W. Bush, members of his administration and American Allies spoke of the goal in what became known as the Iraq War, it had centered in replacing Saddam Hussein with a functioning, legitimate democratic form of government in that troubled part of the world, and Iraqi is still, in all likelihood, almost by any judgment, the freest and most democratic of all the nations in that region.
But at the same time, it is not a stable democratic experiment and political corruption is absolutely rife. Sectarianism, political corruption, organized graft, all very much a part of Iraq today. It reminds me of something that was said by the columnist George Will, of the Washington Post, now, well, I guess almost two decades ago, about the prospect of nation building and building democracy in Iraq and it's really important from a worldview perspective. George Will said something like this, he said Iraq has everything necessary to build a functioning democratic culture except Washington, Adams, Madison, Hamilton. In other words, there is no democratic tradition.
There is no system of constitutional understanding. There is no commitment to the kind of moral and constitutional order that marks the United States of America. The United States of America, by the way, might declare itself a new order of the ages, and in one sense it is, but on the other hand, the United States, its constitution, its government, its separation of powers, its understanding of human liberty, is entirely dependent upon the inheritance of a long tradition of legal argument and development that, in the English speaking tradition, actually unites rather than divides Great Britain and the United States of America. The United States of America may be the new order of the ages, but it did not come out of a laboratory, just add water and stir.
So on this 20th anniversary, what do we mostly need to think about as we contemplate the legacy and the moral dimensions of the Iraq war? We need to think about this. Number one, human intelligence is incredibly limited. You can say you know what's going on in someplace like Iraq and you can also say you know what will happen if certain war plans are approved, but at the end of the day, as many military strategists and practitioners have pointed out, a war plan rarely survives contact with the enemy. The fact is that we have to take actions in a fallen world with very fallible and limited information, but nonetheless, we're accountable for how we act based upon that information and even how we analyze and judge that information.
Something else to understand is that in a fallen world, an enterprise as deadly and catastrophic as war can never be carried out with absolutely clean hands. That's a very, very sad but very, very accurate assessment. That is not to say that soldiers and officers in the army are not and cannot be noble. No, indeed they are. Defending liberty is inherently noble. Patriotism and the service to one's country for righteousness and justice sake is inherently moral, and for that, we should thank every American in uniform and everyone who's involved in defending this nation at the same time, they are likely, if they have any experience in war at all, to be the very first to tell us that war is a very, very deadly and morally messy enterprise.
It's also important for us to recognize that when you are undertaking war, your goals sometimes simply have to change. The reality is that there was no transformation of Iraq into a modern, western nation in terms of laws and culture and all the rest, and eventually, the culture wins over the politics. That's a very important conservative understanding. Eventually the culture trumps the politics.
Finally, when it comes to the lessons of history, we're always learning the lessons of history and Christians remind ourselves that we believe the history matters. We also understand that history is continuously an argument. We also understand that how that argument is understood really does matter, not just in our understanding of the past, but in our understanding of our own responsibility in the present and then we project that responsibility into the future. Nobody told us it was going to be easy. Just consider that on the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq.”
- Dr. Albert Mohler, President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Iraq
Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF)
GWOT
Peace
International Affairs
Edited 1 y ago
Posted 1 y ago
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The Real lessons should be about how to lose the peace. By the numbers. (1) it was obvious by the time Baghdad fell that the "Government" in exile had no real support. We should have kicked them to the curb and started dealing with the Clan heads and co-opted them as much as possible. (2) The State Department push to disband the Iraqi Army, and by default, a lot of the Police, was a disaster. Instead of being able to use them to control the crime, looting and killing, we sent thousands of soldiers into unemployment and directly into the arms of Al Queda. The non-Republican Guard soldiers were well thought of in Iraq and their loss cost us the Country. (3) There should have been no pretense about letting the Iraqis rule themselves immediately and the country should be been set up with a military governor like we did in Japan, where MacArthur approved or disapproved all legislation. I will point out that the Occupation of Japan lasted 10 years. (4) The State Department should not have had a guiding hand until all the hostile parties had either been brought in the fold or eliminated (5) Our response to the initial to the insurgency should have been to stomp it flat. The decision not to eliminate insurgents during the places like the First Battle of Fallujah just encourage the opposition.
We generally suck at Nation Building and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
We generally suck at Nation Building and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
(6)
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LTC Carlene Salazar
I see I'm not the only one who believes we lost the peace. We did the same thing in Afghanistan. Especially in Afghanistan. When we went into Afghanistan, we were looked at as liberators. Had we followed through, there would be a mostly stable democratic government there right now. When President Bush declared we had won the war, he was sadly and tragically mistaken. Wars aren't won unless you win the peace. We had told the Afghan people we were going to follow through. We DID NOT! CPT Cable states it very well. We should have done the same things we did in Japan and Germany, ruling until the people believed in what we represented. I am sad to say, we as a nation, have failed several times by NOT following through with what we stated we would do. Here's just one more example of our breaking agreements we made recently. We promised the Kurds that we would support them. We again DID NOT. We left them "high and dry". I believe 100% that we have given ourselves a black eye. I am surprised that we have any allies any more. How can any other country believe we will come to help them in their hour of need, when we can't see to finishing what we start. I believe we are capable of doing so still. We just need the leadership (the white house and congress) to ensure we do it right.
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CPT Lawrence Cable
LTC Carlene Salazar - A couple of points about Afghanistan. Most of the non-Pashtun tribal groups saw us as liberators, that didn't seem to be true among the Pashtun in either Afghanistan or Pakistan. But then again, we would probably have had better results if we had began the war by bombing Islamabad, then addressing Al Queda in Afghanistan. Pakistan isn't worth crap as an ally.
I don't believe that a stable democracy is a realistic goal at the level of cultural ans social development in Afghanistan, or Iraq, for that matter. Western Europe, especially Britain, has a democratic history going back 1215 and still has problems making it work. There isn't a democratic history in any of the Islamic cultures that I can find.
I have about as much sympathy for the Kurds as any group in the Middle East, but the Kurds have had the reputation of switching sides when it suited them. The big issue is that trying to support the Kurds tends to alienate some of the big dogs in the area, the biggest being Turkey. Historically, Turkey has been a pretty decent ally and given the choice of who to piss off, I would have to vote to piss off the Kurds.
My bigger point is that we should quit being World Cop and mind our own business. If we don't have the consensus to go Curtis Lemay on the Enemy, maybe we should just leave them alone.
I don't believe that a stable democracy is a realistic goal at the level of cultural ans social development in Afghanistan, or Iraq, for that matter. Western Europe, especially Britain, has a democratic history going back 1215 and still has problems making it work. There isn't a democratic history in any of the Islamic cultures that I can find.
I have about as much sympathy for the Kurds as any group in the Middle East, but the Kurds have had the reputation of switching sides when it suited them. The big issue is that trying to support the Kurds tends to alienate some of the big dogs in the area, the biggest being Turkey. Historically, Turkey has been a pretty decent ally and given the choice of who to piss off, I would have to vote to piss off the Kurds.
My bigger point is that we should quit being World Cop and mind our own business. If we don't have the consensus to go Curtis Lemay on the Enemy, maybe we should just leave them alone.
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I did 3 rotations in Iraq of 15, 14, and 13 months, including the very beginning (OIF 1) and the nominal end (transition from OIF to OND). Below is my personal view based on what I saw while there, as well as what I read when not there.
Bush made a major messaging mistake by hanging his hat on WMD. Iraq had many weapons, not just WMD, that the UN had said "get rid of these or else". Yes, all of the publicity and speeches - to include some that likely swayed the UN vote - focused on WMD. But the actual UN mandate to go in to Iraq covered all of those other weapons - like long range missiles - too.
And we found plenty of those. Oh, yeah, we also found WMD too - kind of. We found some mustard gas here and some yellow cake there. No stockpiles, as had been advertised, but not none, either.
In hindsight, more reserved messaging, focusing on "banned weapons" instead of the grandiose WMD claims may have saved a lot of criticism down the road. Of course, it may have not garnered the green light or the broad coalition we initially had, either, so there's that.
As far as the actual war, our military won the war. Our politicians and diplomats lost the peace.
There were two critical failures in Iraq: one of understanding, and one of tool selection.
The hope of installing a Western Democracy was doomed to failure from the very beginning. As mentioned in OP, the culture simply doesn't support this. You can't change culture in a month, a year, or even a generation. You need MULTIPLE generations to shift culture that radically. And no one was discussing being there for multiple generations.
The second problem was tool selection. Once the military won the war, they should have been radically downsized and de-emphasized. The military should have been little more than security forces for a MASSIVE state department presence. But instead, you had people who specialize in killing people now all of a sudden trying to figure out how to help farmers, and sheepherders get back on their feet. You had people who specialize in blowing things up trying to figure out how to fix things. And you had a decision (de-Ba'athification) that removed 99% of all competent local nationals from consideration for putting things back together - including governance. The overwhelming majority of the proper tools for the job (US State Department and local experts) were left on the shelf.
So the military had to make do. The same military that had just toppled the government was now being told to try to build support for a new government. Despite being trained and focused on death and destruction, we were told to gain the hearts, minds, and trust of the people whose nation we had invaded and were now occupying. This, too, was doomed to failure. "Win hearts and minds" is almost the exact opposite of "close with and destroy the enemy."
With those two critical failures - and both happened early - everything that followed was going to be a mixed success, at best.
I am no statesman. And I am sure there are all kinds of reasons why my proposed battle plan would have been radically worse. But IMHO the US military should have been gone from Iraq by around August, 2003. Once the previous regime, to include (but not limited to) Sadam, Uday, and Qusay, has been well and truly removed and disabled, peace out. Let the Iraqis figure it out, because ultimately they are the ones who are going to have to live with the results.
Did we need to go in to Iraq? Yes.
Did we execute the war properly? Yes.
Did we execute the peace properly? No.
Overall, did we do more good than harm? I really don't know.
Bush made a major messaging mistake by hanging his hat on WMD. Iraq had many weapons, not just WMD, that the UN had said "get rid of these or else". Yes, all of the publicity and speeches - to include some that likely swayed the UN vote - focused on WMD. But the actual UN mandate to go in to Iraq covered all of those other weapons - like long range missiles - too.
And we found plenty of those. Oh, yeah, we also found WMD too - kind of. We found some mustard gas here and some yellow cake there. No stockpiles, as had been advertised, but not none, either.
In hindsight, more reserved messaging, focusing on "banned weapons" instead of the grandiose WMD claims may have saved a lot of criticism down the road. Of course, it may have not garnered the green light or the broad coalition we initially had, either, so there's that.
As far as the actual war, our military won the war. Our politicians and diplomats lost the peace.
There were two critical failures in Iraq: one of understanding, and one of tool selection.
The hope of installing a Western Democracy was doomed to failure from the very beginning. As mentioned in OP, the culture simply doesn't support this. You can't change culture in a month, a year, or even a generation. You need MULTIPLE generations to shift culture that radically. And no one was discussing being there for multiple generations.
The second problem was tool selection. Once the military won the war, they should have been radically downsized and de-emphasized. The military should have been little more than security forces for a MASSIVE state department presence. But instead, you had people who specialize in killing people now all of a sudden trying to figure out how to help farmers, and sheepherders get back on their feet. You had people who specialize in blowing things up trying to figure out how to fix things. And you had a decision (de-Ba'athification) that removed 99% of all competent local nationals from consideration for putting things back together - including governance. The overwhelming majority of the proper tools for the job (US State Department and local experts) were left on the shelf.
So the military had to make do. The same military that had just toppled the government was now being told to try to build support for a new government. Despite being trained and focused on death and destruction, we were told to gain the hearts, minds, and trust of the people whose nation we had invaded and were now occupying. This, too, was doomed to failure. "Win hearts and minds" is almost the exact opposite of "close with and destroy the enemy."
With those two critical failures - and both happened early - everything that followed was going to be a mixed success, at best.
I am no statesman. And I am sure there are all kinds of reasons why my proposed battle plan would have been radically worse. But IMHO the US military should have been gone from Iraq by around August, 2003. Once the previous regime, to include (but not limited to) Sadam, Uday, and Qusay, has been well and truly removed and disabled, peace out. Let the Iraqis figure it out, because ultimately they are the ones who are going to have to live with the results.
Did we need to go in to Iraq? Yes.
Did we execute the war properly? Yes.
Did we execute the peace properly? No.
Overall, did we do more good than harm? I really don't know.
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CPT Lawrence Cable
SFC Casey O'Mally - I guess I have a bit different perspective as an Engineer. We worked a lot of Civil Action Projects in Central and South America before and after Desert Storm. Africa too, as well as anti minefield work in the Balkans. Had the Army mobilized Civil Affairs and Engineering units, I think we would have done a much better job at rebuilding the infrastructure, or building it in many cases, than what really happened. It may be that we are just better at mission focus.
I still recommend "The Strongest Tribe". It isn't always easy to read since Bing has the habit of writing like the reader has the same extensive background and access as he does, but it's very good about laying out what screwed up and why.
I still recommend "The Strongest Tribe". It isn't always easy to read since Bing has the habit of writing like the reader has the same extensive background and access as he does, but it's very good about laying out what screwed up and why.
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1LT (Join to see)
SFC Casey O'Mally Yes. Instead of bolstering the DoD's budget and forces to enact the hearts and minds initiatives, pour into the state department the same resources and work up statecraft on the ground with those were trained and eager to do just that.
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CPT Lawrence Cable
1LT (Join to see) - If you read SGM Dawson's comments on Bremer/Foreign Service actions after replacing the Military, it wasn't lack of resources, it was the fact that Bremer made a series of stupid decisions that changed the face of the conflict and managed to piss everyone off. I am of the same opinion. The anti-baathist policies and the insistence on a new Constitution when the country was still in chaos are at the top of my list, along with sending the Iraqi Army home.
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SFC Casey O'Mally
CPT Lawrence Cable Bremer undoubtedly screwed things up irreparably. I was not there for the invasion, but my unit was one of the very first crop of occupiers in April 2003. By the time we left in June 2004, "Bremer" was a curse word.
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I don't know how many classify chemical artillery shells, which were found and this was covered up by the Pentagon. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2793452/u-s-troops-did-chemical-weapons-iraq-pentagon-kept-secret-discovery-5-000-warheads-shells-saddam-hussein-s-abandoned-weapons-program-hushed-soldiers-injured.html And we will not talk about the soldiers who were exposed. I personally know of 1 squad leader who was exposed and yet when he returned nothing was in his records.
https://www.businessinsider.com/american-troops-were-exposed-to-chemical-weapons-in-iraq-2014-11?r=US&IR=T
This being said, I went, did my job and would do it again. The biggest problem came when V Corps ended and was changed to CJTF-7 and Bremer took over. He refused to allow any Iraqis who were members of the Baathist party to take part in any of the government. Many were Baathists only by name, if they didn't belong they would have been dead. When I entered Iraq at the beginning, the people welcomed us with open arms. I entered Balad, Baghdad ina soft top Hummer, after Bremer, it all changed. Upon trying to instill a western style of government, things went wrong. If Bremer had went to the "clan" leaders, former Baathists for help in setting up their government, police, administration, things would have been different. Once the "in fighting" started it was open season and every terrorist came to the play ground. There was no real Phase III of the war plan for Iraq, i.e. after invasion. With this void, what happened, happened. It was FUBAR. I could continue with this line, but all of you have the internet and can read for yourselves.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/iraq-without-a-plan/
https://www.businessinsider.com/american-troops-were-exposed-to-chemical-weapons-in-iraq-2014-11?r=US&IR=T
This being said, I went, did my job and would do it again. The biggest problem came when V Corps ended and was changed to CJTF-7 and Bremer took over. He refused to allow any Iraqis who were members of the Baathist party to take part in any of the government. Many were Baathists only by name, if they didn't belong they would have been dead. When I entered Iraq at the beginning, the people welcomed us with open arms. I entered Balad, Baghdad ina soft top Hummer, after Bremer, it all changed. Upon trying to instill a western style of government, things went wrong. If Bremer had went to the "clan" leaders, former Baathists for help in setting up their government, police, administration, things would have been different. Once the "in fighting" started it was open season and every terrorist came to the play ground. There was no real Phase III of the war plan for Iraq, i.e. after invasion. With this void, what happened, happened. It was FUBAR. I could continue with this line, but all of you have the internet and can read for yourselves.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/iraq-without-a-plan/
U.S. troops found a hidden cache of 5,000 chemical weapons in Iraq
A New York Times investigation has revealed U.S. forces happened upon underground stashes of the deadly weapons between 2004 and 2011, but kept the findings secret.
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SGM Mikel Dawson
Uncovering secret chemical weapon victims of the Iraq war
During the Iraq war, American soldiers were unknowingly exposed to old chemical weapons long abandoned by Saddam Hussein’s regime. The story of the troops who were injured trying dismantle the contaminated weapons has been kept secret until now. Judy Woodruff learns more from C.J. Chivers of The New York Times about his investigation.
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