May 2004

Winning Iraq: A Briefing on the Anniversary of the End of Major Combat Operations

May 1, 2003, marked the formal end of major combat operations in Iraq, yet the past year has presented the U.S. military with challenges every bit as daunting as the march to Baghdad.  At a May 4 AEI event, experts considered the following questions: How effectively has the U.S. military adapted from fighting a major theater war to a low-intensity counterinsurgency? What "lessons learned" should the Pentagon draw from its experience in both phases of the conflict? Is the U.S. Army big enough for the mission President Bush has assigned it in the global war on terror? Are enough troops deployed in Iraq?

Thomas Donnelly
AEI

The invasion of Iraq was an extraordinary military success--a lightning war that brushed aside Saddam Hussein's army and toppled his statues in Baghdad in record time. General Tommy Franks' forces moved as far in three weeks in 2003 as George Patton's did in three months in 1944. In the year since the end of major combat operations in Iraq, President Bush has emphasized that the victory in Iraq remains incomplete. The larger mission--trying to introduce a more decent and democratic political order throughout the greater Middle East--is far from accomplished. The question is whether the United States can sustain the level of effort needed to accomplish its admittedly ambitious goals.

Iraq was not a war of choice. Rather, it was a reaction to the disintegration of the old order in the Middle East, underway since at least 1979. It was in that critical year that the Shah fell in Iran, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Grand Mosque in Mecca was temporarily seized by Islamic extremists, and perhaps most significantly, Saddam Hussein openly came to power in Iraq. The American military presence in the region has steadily grown since then, beginning with the creation of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force-the forerunner of U.S. Central Command-under Jimmy Carter.

The growing footprint of the U.S. military in Middle East also reflects the failure of America's traditional diplomacy in the region-often described as "offshore balancing"--in which Washington worked with local autocrats to preserve stability and ensure access to energy resources. It is safe to say that this policy was a casualty of the September 11 attacks.

Of course, it is possible that a president other than George W. Bush might have been content, after the September 11 attacks, to invade Afghanistan and end the war there. But it is a delusion to think that America's enemies would have been any more content with the occupation of Kabul than they are with the occupation of Fallujah. And to have directed the Pentagon toward an ever more detailed and intricate manhunt for Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar would have relinquished the strategic initiative.

The scandal of Iraq is less what Bob Woodward describes in Plan of Attack-namely, that the United States began planning for the invasion of Iraq shortly after the war in Afghanistan-but, rather, that the resulting war plan was so at odds with the strategic goals set by the president. To oversimplify, the Pentagon planned to win the battle of Baghdad, not the longer war in Iraq or the Middle East.

The decision to limit the size and the capabilities of the invasion force had unintended but predictable consequences. The desire to fight a "just-in-time" war meant that even small surprises--the resistance of the Saddam fedayeen, for instance--sapped the strength of a force that was just large enough to conquer Baghdad but not to pacify the larger Sunni Triangle. President Bush asked for a plan for regime change; what he got was a plan for regime removal.

That said, it is easy to undervalue the invasion because it was so successful, so swift, and so relatively bloodless. There were many good reasons to fight the war as rapidly as possible, but the need for speed should have been balanced against the need for decisiveness, for a combat campaign that would set the right conditions for reconstruction.

Winning the war in the Sunni Triangle was the center of gravity for Operation Iraqi Freedom, but this was a goal that was not conceived in the war plan and was beyond the abilities of the invasion force as it found itself in early April. 

Regarding the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, the U.S. military has-by any historical standard-been remarkably successful. First, the insurgents in Iraq have had little luck in shaking American political resolve. Second, the insurgents have so far failed to provoke a civil war in Iraq. The insurgency has had one noticeable success, having fractured the international coalition that backs the United States in Iraq.

Even more disturbingly, however, there remains a dangerous gap between the strategic goals that the president has set and our military means. The U.S. military-its forces, plans, budgets, and weapons programs-remain fundamentally unchanged from the world of September 10, 2001, nor has there been any fundamental transformation even over the past year, as it has become devastatingly clear that our commitment in Iraq is going to be open-ended.

War, Carl von Clausewitz said, does not consist of a single short blow. The basic strategy that the president has set out is correct: that of liberating Iraq and liberalizing the political order in the region.  It places our greatest strategic strengths against our enemy's greatest weaknesses.  But it simply is not possible to achieve our goals without a sustained restructuring and expansion of our military forces toward this end. If we do not prepare ourselves for the war, instead of simply preparing for battle, there will not be a victory.

Andrew Krepinevich
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

The major combat operations phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom illustrates a number of important points about contemporary defense and security policy. First, it reveals the extent to which the first Gulf War was an anomaly insofar as the global community was genuinely unified in its perception of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the need to take decisive action against Iraq.

Second, it is clear that the United States is now in the regime-change business--a polite euphemism for overthrowing governments. From Panama to Haiti and Serbia to Afghanistan, the United States removes a hostile regime on the order of once every three years.

Third, the United States and its allies are diverging in terms of military capabilities. The allies are not catching up with the American military. There is an irony to this, insofar as just at a time when Washington needs allies more than ever, its allies are less capable and less reliable. 

Fourth, precision warfare, which made its debut in the first Gulf War, came of age during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Operation Iraqi Freedom also witnessed significant advances in the ability of the United States military to field distributed, networked forces operating on a nonlinear battlefield.

Fifth, certain legacy forces have become victims of their own success. For example, the Army used only one heavy division in major combat operations, whereas the war plans called for several more. The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps used only 40 percent of the strike aircraft that they did in the first Gulf War-a consequence of the proliferation of aircraft that use precision weapons.

Regarding the insurgency phase of the conflict, the Bush administration has set out a very ambitious objective in establishing democracy in Iraq. That certainly very differs from what the British and Roman approaches to managing or policing their empires. 

Unfortunately, the U.S. military has been built for sprints, not marathons. The Pentagon likes short wars, as reflected in the Powell Doctrine's emphasis on overwhelming force. The military essentially abandoned counterinsurgency after Vietnam.

It is obvious that the U.S. military is not optimized for the kind of conflict it faces in postwar Iraq. For instance, establishing a rotation base that will allow the U.S. military to sustain a certain level of force in places like Korea, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Iraq for a protracted period of time is proving extremely difficult. 

It is clear that more troops are needed in Iraq, but any increase in the number of troops will require a tradeoff later on. The notion that somehow NATO or the United Nations will ride to the rescue and solve these manpower problems is wishful thinking.  Even if the French government were to revamp its position, the fact of the matter is that the French military has very few troops left to deploy: they are in Haiti, the Ivory Coast, Afghanistan, and the Balkans. Where are the great powers that are going to solve the manpower problem?  They simply do not exist.

Consequently, it is important to ask not only whether the means are sufficient to accomplish the objective, but also whether the objective is realistic at all.

In the Iraqi counterinsurgency campaign, the center of gravity is the American population and the Iraqi population. It is not the insurgents. If the mission has the support of the American and the Iraqi peoples, there is no way to lose this war.

Despite all the talk about Tet offensives, there was no national uprising in April. The Iraqi people did not take to the streets en masse. Rather, it was fairly localized. 

At the same time, during last month's limited uprising, 10 percent of the Iraqi security forces turned against us, 40 percent quit, and the other 50 percent proved only marginally effective.  This, in turn, calls into question any strategy that relies on a quick turnover of security to indigenous Iraqi forces.

Insurgents win by not losing. They win by assuming, correctly, that time is on their side.  As long as they hold to that assumption, there is always the opportunity to erode popular support among both the American and Iraqi peoples.

In terms of major combat operations, the U.S. military got close to an A+ in Iraq.  Unfortunately, the enemy of that war is unlikely to be seen again soon. In terms of the insurgency, the early returns are discouraging, but not surprising given the extent to which the U.S. military is not designed to wage this kind of war. As one Army general recently remarked, the Pentagon is trying to change out of a track uniform into a tuxedo while running the high hurdles. 

Steven Metz
U.S. Army War College

Effective strategy is predicated on a clear understanding of a conflict, whether a conventional war or an insurgency. In Iraq, this necessitates that American strategists think about the conflict as an Iraqi would.

For example, there is widespread bafflement today why the United States is not receiving more overt, enthusiastic support from the Iraqi street. The future that America is offering--of democracy, of integration into the global economy--is clearly better than any future the insurgents can offer them. Yet this is not how the Iraqis are probably looking at the situation. They are not asking themselves what they would like the future of Iraq to resemble. Rather, they are asking themselves who is more likely to be here five years from now? Is it going to be the insurgents, or is it going to be the Americans and their allies?

Another question the Iraqis are likely asking themselves is who is more likely to be able to bring a modicum of stability to Iraq--the Americans and their allies or the insurgents?  In the past months, the insurgents have demonstrated that they can determine whether there is instability while the Americans cannot.

It is notable that there has not been a popular uprising in Iraq, but in the history of insurgencies there have been many successful uprisings, including the American Revolution, in which popular support never materialized. History suggests that insurgents only need the active support of a small percentage of the population and the rest of the public either to be so afraid of them or to dislike the government so much that they are passive.

Many paint the future of Iraq in black-and-white terms: victory or defeat. But the outcome might be something much more ambiguous: For instance, there might be a pro-U.S. government that only controls part of the country. There might be a "government of national unity" that brings insurgents into it. In fact, there is a vast array of outcomes that lie somewhere between pro-American, liberal democracy and insurgent victory.

In formulating its strategy for Iraq and the Middle East, the Bush administration has made several assumptions that deserve greater scrutiny. First, the current strategy assumes an outside force-the United States-can play a decisive role in removing the obstacles to democracy in the region.  However, in the great regional waves of democratization that swept Latin America and Eastern Europe over the last thirty years, outsiders like the United States played an important role, but not a decisive one.

The second assumption of our current strategy is that the ultimate strategic benefits gained by creating democracy in the Middle East will be worth the cost. Implicit in this is another assumption: that democracy will undercut sacred terrorism. Also, that these democracies will be pro-American. However, it is equally possible that new, fragile democracies would define their legitimacy by being anti-American.

The third and final assumption is that a democratic Iraq will serve as a catalyst for a wider democratic revolution in the region. This, too, may be true, but there has not been enough critical thinking or analysis about how exactly this would happen.

Under Secretary Douglas Feith
Department of Defense

In May of last year, major combat operations in Iraq ended.  Iraq has changed greatly over the past twelve months, largely for the better, though the intensity of the fighting in recent days tends to overshadow the progress. First and foremost, Saddam's regime is gone. The threats that he posed to the United States and to the region have been eliminated. Twenty-five million Iraqis have been liberated.

Given its oil resources and the education of its people, Iraq should be a wealthy country. Under Saddam, however, its infrastructure became pathetically dilapidated. Coalition forces managed to spare most of the existing infrastructure during the war, and over the last year the coalition has worked to repair and upgrade it. Electricity generation has surpassed pre-war levels and is more evenly distributed. Iraqi schools have been repaired in large numbers. Health care spending in the country is thirty times greater than its pre-war levels. 

At the national level, the major achievement has been the unanimous approval by Iraq's Governing Council of the transitional administrative law (TAL), which is going to serve as an interim constitution until an elected assembly drafts a permanent constitution to be ratified by the Iraqi people.  The TAL is the most liberal basic governance document in the Arab world.

The TAL's text is important, but the process by which this interim constitution came into being may be even more so.  Non-democratic regimes often have high-minded constitutions decreed by the dictator that are belied by the actual practice of officials, who are above the law. By contrast, the TAL emerged from vigorous bargaining among diverse Iraqis--men and women, secularists and Islamists, Sunnis and Shia, Arabs and Kurds. There have been welcome political developments at the local level too: over 90 percent of Iraqi towns and provinces now have local councils.

This progress has been made possible in part through the bravery, resourcefulness, high-mindedness, and devotion to duty of America's military. It is especially important to remember this now, as the horrific stories about the abuse of some Iraqi prisoners come to light.  The Defense Department leadership will ensure that the ongoing investigations are completed properly and remedial action is taken. Individual accountability is crucial.

No country in the world upholds the Geneva Conventions more steadfastly than the United States. This is true not only because Americans recognize a moral obligation to be humane and because Americans are a law-abiding people. It is true also because no country in the world has a greater practical interest than the United States in respect for the laws of war.

There has been speculation regarding whether the fighting in Fallujah represents a widespread insurgency. It does not. Coalition forces, Iraqi authorities, and the Coalition Provisional Authority are working with Sunni tribal leaders to try to ensure that the violence does not spread. In the Shia community, Muqtada al-Sadr's power grab has not succeeded. Support for him continues to decrease as the major Shia religious figures influence their community against him.

Neither Sadr nor the Fallujah fighters represent a broad movement of insurgency in Iraq. Unlike in other historical guerilla campaigns, hardly any bombings in Iraq have been accompanied by a claim of responsibility. The Baathists and terrorists behind the bombings know they have no philosophical or political basis on which to appeal to the Iraqi people. Their only hope is that we will lose heart and depart.

The controversy concerning our failure to find stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq has obscured the strategic rationale for the war. The public debate has focused on questions relating to the intelligence failure, which is a serious matter in the damage it inflicts on U.S. credibility. However, the strategic rationale for the war did not hinge on classified information concerning chemical and biological stockpiles. Rather, it depended on assessments about the nature of the Saddam Hussein regime and its activities. 

Saddam had ties of various types with various terrorist groups. He had launched aggressive attacks against countries in his region. He was outspokenly hostile to the United States and defiant of numerous attempts by the U.N. Security Council, over a dozen years or so, to constrain him and compel him to account for and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The 9/11 attack compelled U.S. policymakers to reevaluate the dangers posed by the Saddam Hussein regime. It was clear that the terrorists responsible for 9/11 would have gladly killed a hundred or a thousand times the number of victims if they had had the means. The principal strategic danger to the United States in the war on terrorism is the possibility that terrorists could acquire chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

Given Iraq's record of hostility, aggression, WMDs, and ties to terrorists, and given Saddam's frustration of a dozen years' worth of efforts to contain him, President Bush concluded that it was necessary to remove Saddam Hussein by force.

President Bush told the American people and the world that the removal of Saddam's regime would also open the way for the development of democratic institutions in Iraq that could inspire the growth of freedom throughout the Middle East. A democratic Iraq could help us in the crucial task of countering ideological support for terrorism. The terrorists of al Qaeda understand how devastating this would be for their interests, which is why they are doing what they can to fight the coalition in Iraq.

U.S. strategy is to encourage and enable Iraqis to assume responsibility for their own affairs in all fields-economic, political, and security. That is why the upcoming restoration of sovereign authority is so important to achieving our objectives in Iraq. Those who say that the current security problems will or should lead to a delay in the transfer of sovereign authority to the Iraqis have the analysis backwards. A sovereign Iraqi government will be better able to marginalize its extremist opponents politically while coalition forces defeat them militarily.

This coalition has the benefit of leadership and strategic thinking, but it has also shown that it can be flexible, as necessary. Examples of flexibility include requesting a large amount of supplemental funds when it became clear that Iraqi reconstruction was going too slowly; creating a new type of indigenous force, the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, to fill the gap left by the Iraqi police service; responding to Iraqi demands for an earlier resumption of sovereignty by developing the idea of a transitional government that could take power before a permanent constitution is ratified; dropping the caucus plan for selecting the transitional government when it turned out to be unpopular with Iraqis and substituting a two-step process involving an interim government that can take power before legislative elections; revising the mechanisms for implementing the de-Baathification policy to address complaints that the appeals process was not working as intended and to respond to the Sunni minority's fears of marginalization.

As the target date for the handover of sovereign authority to the Iraqis draws close, enemies of a free Iraq will become even more violent. They know that the establishment of a sovereign, credible, representative Iraqi government--one that builds democratic institutions in Iraq--would be a major defeat for them, and they are determined not to let it happen. Nonetheless, the coalition has the will, the forces, the resources, and the strategy to succeed. 

AEI research assistant Vance Serchuk prepared this summary.