Maybe the best "lesons of the Iraq war" article I have ever read. Food for thought for sure. Thankyou Professor Walt.

Ask that question prior to starting any war. Be sure to understand what it is you're going to want out of a war before you start, and make sure you have a plan to get there.

Since the fiasco (thanks Tom!) in Iraq, we have continued the no-win war in Afghanistan, our Army now starting to show the same kinds of cracks we saw after Vietnam. We helped descend Libya and Yemen into semi-chaos and militarized the horn of Africa and beyond. It appears the US can't wait to figure out some way to intervene in Syria, and of course Iran. Pakistan has devolved in the interim, and any good that might have come from the Arab spring has dissipated, water into the sand. Our economy is a mess, oil is priced high and ready to rise on the hint of another conflict.

We didn't learn anything in Iraq.

Peter Van Buren
www.wemeantwell.com

And 5 Israelis were there to tape it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUbTe50UUgM

Ehud Barak was preaching for a war on terror from hour zero, Professor.

From the Congressional Record - Senate, May 20, 2004, pages S5921-S5925,

Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings said we invaded Iraq to secure Israel.

Yes or no?

x

Isn't it true the "We" who benefitted are the true leaders of our country? Are they the 25 neoconservatives Tom Friedman talked about? If so, they obviously have a lot of friends below the radar. Who are they? What is their connection to each other?

Those of us who agree the 10 lessons are right on target need to find out more about those who have benefitted, how they feel Iraq was, and continues to be, a successful endeavor, and how they managed to control the "marketplace of ideas", and what needs to be done to extricate ourselves from their control.

Are they the same leaders who are now blocking peace in Palestine, ruining the physical, social and governmental infrastructure (admittedly already in pretty bad shape) of other vulnerable nations in the Mideast ? Paving the way for an Iranian debacle?

Where there is smoke, there's fire. How deep does the Israel connection go? Is our "special relationship" with Israel simply a massive example of what Machiavelli referred to in #5? Where Steve, in talking specifically about Iraq, and self-interested foreigners, listed in two words: Ahmed Chalabi. When it comes to
determining who is benefitting by our over-all Mideast policy, can that self-interested foreign entity not by listed in one word: Israel?

We lost? Iraq is no longer a threat to its neighbors or the larger world. Iraqis have the makings of a democracy they've yearned for and they have some form of representation. Their oil resources are no longer solely in the hands of a madman who was working with N. Korea and others to develop nukes. Thanks to the invasion, Qaddafi halted his nuclear program. Certainly we all thought Saddam had WMD. We knew he had possessed various weapons of this kind before, and used them, and the intelligence strongly indicated he was escalating. Given the unfolding post-9/11 situation it made all the sense in the world to react to another demonstrated threat, especially given U.N. Security Counsel resolutions, and the provisions of the Gulf War cease fire that made the 2003 invasion more a matter of resumption of hostilities than preemption. Of course we should have had more troops and locked the country down immediately. Certainly it was a huge mistake disbanding the Iraqi army and police, leaving defeated and humiliated me fully armed with nothing to do but fight us, hence the insurgency. But never forget, establishing the battlefield there, and drawing in the jihadists resulted in the killing or capture of most of the leadership in Al Qaeda, sending terrorists everywhere a message: attack America, and you pay the price. Radical Islam understands only one message: fear. Unless they fear us, the do not respect us, and without fear and respect, there is no basis for peace. Thirteen hundred years of history should have taught us that much. Tragically, we left too soon, and we'll pay for sending a message of weakness, as we are doing now in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

...and for much of this article one could simply replace "Iraq" with "Afghanistan" and the point would still stand.

This article could become a classic. It should.

I've never been convinced of the whole "neocon" angle, none the less, I think the validity of the decision to invade is still quite debatable. Given the context around that time, its a very interesting question. I personally think the nuclear wmd pretext given was created as a result of the UN being a blocking mechanism for radical muslim countries. The UN otherwise wouldn't have acted. I think it is quite easy to say that the decision to remove saddam was moral. Just because the UN is amoral, it does not then follow that good nations have to be similarly amoral. Of course the french and many other countries at the time used this as an opportunity to paint the US as the "amoral aggressive imperialist" one for their own domestic political considerations. It does not make it true however. The iraqi people wanted the US to remove saddam and welcomed the americans as liberators. There is no question that debaathification was poorly executed. But was the initial invasion successful and moral? I would have to say yes.

For me, the real tradgedy from the iraq war, besides of course the soldiers losses and injuries, is the fact that it might now have a rubber band effect on US policy towards Iran, i.e. ironically swaying policy towards doing the wrong thing now in attempt to somehow right iraq'sperceived wrongs. I think many people are falling prey to this line of thinking. While it sounds great and has some "intellectual" trappings, its really a flawed way of looking at what is taking place right now with iran. I am not sure Mr. Walt is giving you the straight dope. Why would he do that? He's ideological and has his biases, like any of us do.

Professor Walt notes that one of the mistakes of policy-makers was to believe that because of Iraq's large middle class "democratization" would be easy.

While it's true that Iraq can be classified as a "middle-income" country -- divide the GDP by the population and Iraq ranks fairly high in the world even now -- that does not mean it has a middle class in the American sense. Policy makers missed this because they didn't want to see it in the rush to war, of course. But they also missed it because of the US' unusual history, and because they did not know much of that history. The key assumption was that as a country becomes rich its people want, and automatically know how to get, idealized American democracy. If only the bad institutions are removed, then "those people" will act just like "us."

American policy has repeatedly made this mistake of assuming that economics determine politics at least three times since 1914 -- at Versailles, when the USSR collapsed, and in Iraq. In each case, the costs of rectifying the mistake have been very high for the US and the world.

For me, an oil-cursed citizen, Venezuela, the most important lesson, a tragic lesson, is that the USA missed out on the mother of all opportunities to advance real democracy, by failing to help install an oil-revenue sharing mechanism whereby all Iraqi got their oil dividend a la Alaska.

As is you will now just have to sit and wait for the next Saddam Hussein, who, from what we see, could have immensely larger resources available than what Saddam Hussein ever had.

Please listen to the unheeded plea that, as an oiled cursed citizen, I made to America some years ago http://bit.ly/wJFlqU

I believe the greatest failure was the failure of the US press to really scrutinize what was being said and the claims being made. It was like jingoism on speed, a total and utter shameful failure to question our "leaders". Some of the foreign press was much more questioning and analytical. If we could encourage our citizens to read more foreign analysis in times of crisis maybe we would have better outcomes. But that will never happen.

I question whether any country fully understands another, even those culturally similar.

The US is incredibly secure but it's citizens, and maybe it's leading politicians, seem to suffer from great insecurity - a paradox.

The original purpose of the war was to remove Saddam Hussein from power-all of the original operational level military orders and presentations from 2002-2003 make this clear. We did. We conquered Babylon faster than anyone in the history of the world and removed the Baathists from power. Saddam was the strategic and operational center of gravity and there has been a struggle for new centers ever since.
Walt's "alleged purpose" of WMD is important to him to try to set the standard for victory and from his own standartd then be able to declare a loss. This allowis him to use the negative perspective only for the rest of the paper . He is wrong on this baseline point and that casts doubt on his subsequent points. WMD was the foreign policy noise but not the real purpose, for without Saddam, was WMD relevant? I suspect that his first point is more political in character than academically honest. Or as a minimum, so narrowly focused that it ignores the significance of removing Saddam from power.

This is an extremely informative list of lessons for the empire-builders among us, Professor Walt. Don’t you just wish our opinionated politicians would take these lessons to heart?

The best of the list is the last, because it focuses not on the sorry history of Iraq that everyone insists on forgetting, denying, and ignoring, but on U.S. foreign policy going forward. You correctly point out that the U.S. is not very good at running other societies, but the mindset that gets us into all these problems is even more fundamentally flawed. The simple truth is that the U.S. does not need empire, although empire may be infinitely profitable for certain individuals. The other half of that coin is that no Hitler is even remotely on the horizon. The U.S. can afford to deal, and there is no state on the globe with which the U.S. cannot legitimately deal.

Individuals may merit being blacklisted, and political factions may merit being blacklisted, but I doubt that a single state exists today with which the U.S. cannot find a win-win path to doing morally justifiable business. We can trade food for nuclear restraint with North Korea, after all! We could work with liberal Pakistani factions to strengthen democracy and economic security as a viable long-term replacement for the current U.S. focus on attacking militants. We could replace our Afghan war policy with a backseat role of encouraging an international Muslim coalition to promote non-violent social reforms. We could cut any number of useful deals with Iran, from stemming the export of Afghan drugs to defining a regional nuclear security regime. We could even cooperate in a manner that would benefit our long-term security with a variety of Israeli factions (though probably not with factions that advocate the violent establishment of a Greater Israel or wars of aggression).

But all that would require a much more flexible and informed approach to dealing with the world than the U.S. has had for quite a few years, and it would require recognition that building a military empire is an out-dated grand strategy.

So I'm a loser eh, Walt my boy? I bet you wouldn't say that to my face; that would actually involve you descending from your ivory tower to take in the realities on the ground. Can you, or any of the so-called experts in the comments even name a single Iraqi tribe without resorting to wikipedia? Your analysis is shallow and full of the talking points I have come to expect from your ilk. 28 months in-country, Walt, with all the scars and tattoos to prove it: those are my qualifications to speak on the subject, what are yours?
So we lost? Just the fact that you would talk about something this massive in scope in terms of a sports metaphor like win/loss (btw Harvard teams suck the big one) should disqualify you from public debate. It's clear to me that your intent is to masturbate the liberal psyche while antagonizing anyone trying to honestly come to grips with the duality inherent in nation building.
We built schools, hospitals, a government not actively raping and killing its people,gave suffrage to women, RECONCILED two sects that were tearing Iraq apart and this is a loss? I would do it again in a heartbeat. Out.

I don't understand why we can't go back to the Monroe doctrine until we get our own house back in order. The "New World" of America has enough resources to keep us well-off. With a growing Brazil, we have a potentially large trading partner.

While I disagree with them it's interesting to me seeing the very smart comments here saying that yes, we "won" the Iraq war in the way they define "winning."

Interesting especially given that from all I've seen—not to mention the results of the last Presidential election—the country at least clearly wanted out of Iraq.

Doesn't mean we didn't "win," but certainly doesn't mean nothing.

But, anyway, maybe another way to phrase the question to ourselves is asking whether, if we could go back in time, knowing exactly what we know now and not being able to change anything, we would support doing again what we did in Iraq?

I have a hard time believing anyone would say yes to this, but them's just my 'druthers as they used to say.

Any "yeses" out there then?

Bad form. It is your question- you answer it. I did but you didn't like my responses My point as to why your question is not "simple," but is a good one and a better lesson 1. Another answer for you: it is still to be determined so today the answer is that it is not yet decided. It is the definitive framing attempt by you to a question that is not known or simply answered at this time that I dismiss.
This is my framing point answer restated for you: the character and nature of the war evolved and are still doing so. The U.S. has simply left. So here's another attempt to satisfy you: from the original purpose of removing Saddam from power:victory/ worth it. From the long term impact: unknown. I will let each family and person that actually served in Iraqi Freedom answer for themselves your question as to whether it was worth it or not to them "today". For me, those are the only ones with any standing to answer. Honestly and personally, I'm still deciding that one myself but I do not think it is simple and I detest attempts to frame the question to suit political motivations and a pre-selected answer.

The majority of people in the US wanted to remain British citizens. Wellesley (Later Duke Wellington) had a next to impossible task convincing nations to form a coalition against Napoleon- who used to let his soldiers have more than their fair share of "fun" when occupying a hostile city. Fighting the nazis was so politically unpopular here that even after we learned what was happening in concentration camps we refused to bomb them. I know politics is solely a popularity contest now but sometimes standing up to your own people is the right thing to do.
To me OIF/OEF isnt about winning or losing, it's about America realizing that the actions of our govt and corporations have had tragic and lasting consequences around the world. It's creating a social contract with the common men and women of other countries instead of just naively worrying about our own. I've had to weigh the cost of intervention more closely than most and I do believe, must believe, that the US Army is a force for universal human rights unlike any before in history. God help me if I am wrong.

Good exercise: compare the professor's analysis with the Oct. 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c107:5:./temp/~c107ghdVSR::

I think the anti-Bush anti-Iraq war crowd is trying to save face for being so wrong for so long: revisionist reconstruction of egos.

Good exercise: compare the professor's analysis with the Oct. 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c107:5:./temp/~c107ghdVSR::

I think the anti-Bush anti-Iraq war crowd is trying to save face for being so wrong for so long: revisionist reconstruction of egos.

The United States won the war. it took a few weeks and cost few casualties. The nation lost the occupation, and did so because the administration of the day simply couldn't assemble a sensible group of Americans and American friends who knew much about Iraq. Instead, it assembled a group that thought Iraq was failing each time it wasn't like the US -- and should be compelled to remedy that "deficiency". This nonsense now seems to be named as American exceptionalism.

A better Lesson #2 would be: it's always a mistake to vote a military shirker to be president of the United States.

Mr Ricks and sundry other reporters reported close to a decade ago that Mr Bush was widely known to the troops as "the shirker" because of his unconventional termination of military service in the Texas Air National Guard. odd how that soundly-based wisdom seems to have blown away as though it never existed.

Anyone interested in this topic should read the excellent piece by Harvard Prof. Linda Bilmes, co-author of the Trillion Dollar War book with Joseph Stiglitz. Writing in the Boston Globe, Bilmes does not disagree with Walt but she lists a number of other lessons which are very compelling.

http://articles.boston.com/2011-12-07/bostonglobe/30497004_1_iraq-war-cost-war-spending-train-iraqi-forces

The lesson I draw from this is that Americans will always listen to those who have always, always been wrong; and sadly, being right does not get you a hearing the next time.

A necessary analysis, bravely written. Andrew Bacevich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and countless others including Machiavelli (as you point out), back at least through Thucydides have made most of these points and with about the same effect on future operations as yours will have. The utter cluelessness of some commenters here is most sobering.

Totally Spot on! Best postmortem I've read on the Iraq War to date. Lesson 1 is the ugly truth, which is why Lesson 10 is also my mantra - except he's more blunt than I was in my December HuffPost piece (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-holshek/iraq-war-end_b_1161456.html).

As some who has been there and done that (see Tom Rick's Fiasco), I'm intimately familiar with especially Lessons 6 and 8, and Lesson 9 explodes the common myth that we had no post-war plan.

Required reading, folks, considering we're on the edge of screwing up again in the case of Iran and perhaps Syria.

Lesson learned by US policy analyst, US military and administrations.

Lying over and over again works. The all volunteer army works because Americans do not have to think about who these unnecessary wars lives destroy. The MSM is easy to manipulate and continues to be. Not counting the dead, injured, displaced in Iraq, Afghanistan etc works. And generally Americans do not care. .

Lying works, control and embed the media, don't count the dead and injured and don't show the public pictures of what has and is really going on. And no one will be held accountable for the false intelligence or crimes against humanity. Lessons learned

Forcing regime change in countries that start to sell their oil in currencies other than US dollars does not always work.

The US doesn't actually HAVE a grand strategy. I'm not sure we even have the type of people in high positions of authority who would know how to go about crafting one - or maybe even know what a grand strategy IS. This, to say the least, is a big part of our problem. A grand strategy establishes a set of clear priorities. When a great power does not have a grand strategy, then it has no clear priorities, which means that EVERYTHING ends up looking like a priority. That pretty accurately describes US foreign policy over the past few decades.

In the first Comment on Professor Walt's "Top 10 Lessons of the Iraq War," HURRICANEWARNING says:

"Maybe the best "lesons of the Iraq war" article I have ever read. Food for thought for sure. Thankyou Professor Walt."

Perhaps the more correct term would be "lesions" of that war — which, like the first "Gulf War," continues after we have "declared victory" and left.

Instead of taking sides on the various comments made to date, I'd like to add a few "cards to the deck" — particularly as, although presented in a neat and cohesive form by a credentialed scholar, it is not really scholarly. Too much has been left out of the Letterman-like pop-listing of the "Top Ten Lessons," to wit:

#1: "We lost." Too simplistic. Per others' comments, Saddam was deposed in short order, the fruit of his own defiance of 16 UN resolutions (remember them?) demanding he end his WMD program. "War of choice"? Not really; had the U.S. (and the UK and other Coalition partners) failed to act, the UN would have been confirmed as toothless. Moreover, Saddam had been killing thousands of his own people every year (remember?), and yes, our forces were indeed hailed as liberators … until a combination of missteps and growing insurgencies turned us into foreign occupiers. Our costs and casualties are indeed losses — borne mostly by our killed and wounded and their families, and by the economic activities forgone by immediate war expenses (as additions to our national debt, itself exacerbated by our Great Recession), but most of our troops are proud to have served and believed in the good they accomplished while there.

As for the war critics' seizure on "no WMDs" as the U.S.'s primary objective, and thus trumpeting our inspectors' failure to find any as a "loss," it was certainly embarrassing (though the "Bush Lied" accusers should be ashamed of themselves). However, the full story may be different. Certainly Saddam had a nuclear weapon development program for a number of years . . . so where did it go? Here I'd recommend a review of *Saddam's Secrets," written by Iraqi Maj General Georges Sada, head of his air force (although a staunch Christian); the book was published in 2006, and covers events through 2005 (i.e., before our "failure" to find Saddam's WMDs became a cause celebre). For starters, he wrote (in p. 248):

"America made the right decision to come in and liberate Iraq, and despite some mistakes, I have to say they've done a great job. They broke Saddam's regime and eventually captured the dictator in his spider hole—that was a tremendous victory, and no one in Iraq or America should miss the symbolism of the way it was done. But the peace is still not won, and the future is uncertain. . . ."

As an insider he shows why disbanding the entire Iraqi army (vice retiring just its high-ranking officers) was a mistake and thereby helped populate the anti-American insurgency that followed. Then from p. 249 to 261, he describes Saddam's long-running (!) WMD program (comprising chemical weapons that he used, and nuclear weapons under development). In short, during 2002 - 2003 Saddam ordered his scientists and researchers to memorize their documents, had their WMD facilities destroyed, and smuggled their assets via commercial aircraft (under guise of humanitarian relief supplies) to Syria, which had suffered a river flood.

— Rumor? Unbelievable? A conspiracy theory? Perhaps, . . . but ask yourselves: What was that 2007 bombing of a Syrian facility all about? And why did the Syrians (as well as the Israelis and U.S. government) say nothing about it? Perhaps, as with our Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a number of years must pass before the real truth comes out. But, IF Sada's account is validated, whether the UN or our inspectors found the main caches or not — in fact, whether such weapons actually existed or not — the outcome can be claimed as a "win": neither Saddam nor Syria got to use them, and Saddam brought about his own and his Baathist party's demise by his own intransigence. (The downside, however, is that Iran is trading on our embarrassment and current caution to pursue its own nuclear ambitions. . . .)

Also unmentioned in Professor Walt's trendy piece are the terrorist acts of al Qaeda affiliates (which had flocked to Iraq) — and the fact that their leader, al-Zarqawi, along with many of his fellow-"militants," paid with their lives while al Qaeda itself lost favor with much of the Islamic world as a result of its indiscriminate brutality. I'd claim this as a net "win" also.

As for the 2007-8 surge, it certainly dampened the sectarian violence (its primary objective), and thus on balance is indeed another "win," whether Iraq's still-evolving "democracy" is to our liking or not. As for "the Bush administration negotiat[ing] the 2008 Status of Forces agreement that set the timetable for U.S. withdrawal," then-Candidate Obama had undermined the U.S. position by advocating an early withdrawal, thus strengthening Iraqi Prime Minister Malaki's position — which resulted in now-President Obama's difficulty in assuring a meaningful presence in Iraq after our troops have withdrawn . . . in accordance with his campaign promise.

If we extend these circumstances to Afghanistan (arguably an even more complicated situation), then President Obama may well wind up losing his war there as well as Bush's war in Iraq — especially if Professor Walt's criteria are applied.

Well, I'd like to address several other of the article's Lessons (and some of the Comments thereon), but I've run out of time. One of the most useful lessons, I've found, is to learn what the enemy was thinking and doing in any particular conflict — vice focusing primarily or solely on our own interests and viewpoints. (You may be sure that our friends and enemies are studying us and ours.)

Unfortunately, as a people we seem to have difficulty taking this approach, even after the fracas is over and secrets revealed. Accordingly, I suggest that our professor's judgments, even while offering much "Food for thought," remain wanting.

JM
(Sada's book should be available on Amazon.com and other on-line bookstores. Check it out; it's a gripping record of first-person experiences that shed fresh light on that war.)

Smartly and obviously enough lots of the discussion here has shown that how you define "winning" depends on your answer to whether we won or lost.

It seems to me however that there are indeed more important senses of the term and less important senses.

Thus, two days back, being a "we lost" guy and thus obviously addressing the "we won" folks here I asked what seemed to me a simple question:

Whether, If we could go back in time, knowing exactly what we know now and not being able to change anything, would you support doing again what we did in Iraq?"

And then asked:

"Any 'yeses' out there ...?"

And so far at least there have been no such unambiguous "yes" answers that I've seen.

To me at least then the results appear to indicate that nobody is willing to unambiguously say that yes, the Iraq thing was indeed worth it.

And I have a hard time not seeing why indeed that *isn't* the most important way to define "winning."

If not, after all, then what possible definition does one put to the term "losing"?

the Vizzini Rule, but that might have been a bit too flippant given the circumstances.

unnecessary if we were to simply reject the basic premise upon which they rely: the doctrine of American interventionism. This is the one lesson the American people ought to have learned from September 11th and from the intervening years of war--that intervention, while it may hold utility for some in the short run, is a severe detriment to both US security and indigenous democracy movements in the long (and often times short) run. And the problem isn't just interventions like the Iraq war, which required a substantial amount of boots on the ground, but also ones like Libya, which is suspected to have resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians and which all the evidence points to being yet another politico-economically motivated coup. And the most tragic thing of all is that it is not independently-minded foreign dictators and rogue regimes but US interventionism, practiced over decades, that has caused things to fall as they have and, thus, seemingly justify more US interventionism!

So you are quite correct, Prof. Walt, that we must revise the US grand strategy, but not just to avoid wars like Iraq. Non-Americans must be treated as ends in themselves, not means in an American world order. They must also be allowed the ability to determine their own destinies, and not have their futures shoved upon them by Americans who claim to know what is best for them.

The #1 lesson is that we lost? Iraq was an asymmetrical conflict. I think most historians will agree on that. Can the author define an alternative to losing? Would finding WMDs in Iraq have effected Iran's current position in the Persian Gulf? What about Afghanistan? Now that we've left Iraq, are we righting the ship there? How do you fix Afghanistan? Is it possible? Should we commit trillions more to that cause?

I've read this article so many times before. Get a new routine.

That this article would be framed so neo"con"classically as "we lost" is intellectually pedestrian at best. Come on professor, you can muster a more robust cerebral claim than that. This is grade school level reasoning for issues far more complex, and you insult your readers with your diatribe. Time would be better spent covering monster truck games at the local arena, with beer swigging misfits and car crushing antics. We Win! Oh please, spare us the self loathing...

Prof. Walt's basic points are very good, but he overlooks how academia helped sanction our unjustified and therefore war crime Iraq invasion and occupation.

His Lesson No. 3 about ensuring open and thorough debate grimly amused me. On H-Diplo on 14May99, I helped blow the whistle on Appendix B of the Rambouillet Treaty with which NATO demanded the unconditional occupation/surrender of ALL Yugoslavia including Serbia, which as Blair&Clinton well knew would make the treaty unacceptable to the Serbs and (with the media's collaboration in not reporting App. B) seemingly justify our bombing war against them. (See Grunfeld's 8Jun99 H-Diplo confirmation of this.)

A few years later, after - in response to a list-wide invitation to discuss ethnic groups' influence over American foreign policy - I submitted an objective, referenced posting describing institutions of our Jewish American community (like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum with its 31Mar99 Comm. on Conscience press release) endorsing our illegal attack on Yugoslavia, I was permanently blocked/banned from posting/debating on H-Diplo. (A 26Jul06 posting slipped by a new editor, but a subsequent submission of mine was mockingly rejected.)

So much for "academic/intellectual freedom" in diplomatic history in American academia.

Lesson 8, that occupations are inherently vicious and produce atrocities and war crimes, was a given before we invaded but is good to be driven home.

But his Lesson 10. - that we should rethink our foreign policy - brings up academia's own responsibility/guilt for what happened.

Right here on Foreign Policy on 1Nov02, diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis authored "A Grand Strategy of Transformation" which endorses pre-emptive war and "reforming" authoritarian regimes - regime change - supposedly being justified by the "new circumstances" evidenced by 9/11 (which many Americans suspected even then of being at least in part a false flag operation).

John is pre-eminent in his field, and his endorsement of aggressive interventionism - which in Iraq's case has proven to have been fraudulently motivated aggression - can presume to have been influential if not decisive in muting any academic questioning/debate at the time. Nothing at all was mentioned about this historic departure from previous American foreign policy on H-Diplo from Oct02 to Apr03, and Gaddis was a member of its editorial board and staff.

Had I not been blocked from posting, there certainly would have been lively discussion well before we attacked Iraq. Indeed, I would welcome having my H-Diplo ban being lifted, so that I might initiate and lead a discussion of the consequences and liability of Dr. Gaddis's article, just as I raised the Rambouillet App. B question in 1999.

Lou Coatney, www.coatneyhistory.com

Iraq has lost the war. Iraq must pay because the winner of the war takes all.
Get all of their oils for replenishment of war cost and casualties lossess.
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The consequence of this war was not what we intended, but it was known to us long before this war was even contemplated.The real winner in this drama is Iran and the Shia population of the Middle East. We knew this day was coming because we started to groom Iran for it's grand entrance into middle eastern affairs, during the days of the Shah of Iran. Unfortunately we stumbled in the process and ended with and Iranian enemy instead of a friend. The Shia population of the min-east has been oppressed for a long time and they will have a say in this region whether we like it or not. The tragedy for Iran is that it has entwined it fortune with the Palestinian debacle and this could result in a Pyrrhic Victory for them, but a victory non the less. The destruction of the Sunni core of the Islamic world could only result in the expansion of the eastern provinces. Quite similar to the expansion of the Slavic Nations once Germany was defeated

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Iraq will become the new Palestine/Israel. As little kids say, when it comes to the world, "we are not the boss of them" and this growing chant by republicans that we should now invade Iran or use covert operations or whatever is "deja vu all over again." We need to learn from our past mistakes, including Viet Nam when France tried to warn us and Afghanistan when Russia tried to warn us what we were getting ourselves into, and stop posturing like an oversexed rooster. Get real life doing better job - SEO Apps or Lelaki Kacak.

No.
No, it wasn't.

" ..both conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats all tended to jump onboard the bandwagon to war. "

The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 passed the House 297 - 133 with 60% of Democrats & liberals accounting for 127 of the 133 Nays, it passed the Senate 77 - 23 with 44% of the Democrats and liberals accounting for 22 of the 23 Nay votes.
There were anti war demonstrations. On Feb 15, 2003 10 million marched world wide. 500,000 in NYC alone marched.

There was NOTHING 'bipartisan' about this.

1. Regarding Prof. Walt’s lesson #2 about the striking ease of taking America to war, what are we to do about it? One approach would be to focus on the benefits to the U.S. of stronger engagement in multilateral institutions -- exercising leadership through them, just as we did in the early Cold War. Most of the post-war international regimes (UN, NATO, WTO, etc.) were essentially created by the U.S. with rules that give us certain advantages (veto power, basing rights, $ supremacy, etc.) while also promoting international legitimacy and fairness. Sticking to these regimes encourages others to do the same, locking in the advantages that accrue to us and lowering the cost to us of having to enforce those rules. Moreover, if the domestic constraints on rash executive branch decision making are no longer sufficient to hold back the unrestrained use of military power, these international institutions provide another check on our soundness. We bristle at the idea of being constrained by an IO, but giving credence to the international regime essentially amounts to following the rules that we ourselves created. Just as it is wise to honor the Constitution and our laws, it is wise to honor the treaty agreements we sign up to. Doing so would help keep us out of trouble.

2. The U.S. is correct to promote the capabilities and capacity of its allies. One of the reasons the U.S. didn't care to accept the aid of NATO after 9/11 and didn't care to cultivate the active support of serious allies in the campaign was because we made a material calculation -- probably correct -- that the costs of dealing with a multinational campaign as in Kosovo weren't worth the additional tactical capabilities on offer. Increasing the capabilities of our allies makes them more attractive partners, and gives the U.S. additional incentives to work through the regimes including those allies.

3. The end of the unipolar moment might actually be a good thing. Ten years of 'full spectrum dominance' have couldn’t prevent strategic debacle. A good chunk of realist IR theory actually predicts this -- that hubris leads to the overestimation of one's capabilities and dismissiveness about costs. All this talk today about the 'rise' of China, India, and other countries really amounts to a rebalancing of power towards more historically normal patterns. And if nothing else, the existence of 'peer competitors' to the U.S. could promote more disciplined strategic thinking and more effective political consultation with U.S. allies.

4. Reducing the defense budget might be a good thing. Especially if done properly, we can excise the ungainly influence and growth of the defense industries and further limit our capacity for strategic error without diminishing our security. As Walt says, we're basically incredibly secure as is now. Navies and Air Forces take decades to develop, so cuts to those services could be more modest to provide a hedge against future threats. High-investment Army platforms and skillsets like Special Forces and professional Non-Commissioned Officers should also be maintained with discretion. Cuts have the potential to be good not only for the country but would also give the military a chance to reduce bureaucracy and improve quality. Moreover, cuts to the U.S. defense budget might do more to encourage U.S. allies to shoulder more of the burden for collective security, via initiatives such as NATO’s ‘Smart Defence’ or others.

5. Prof. Walt's injunction simply to have better strategy and not make these mistakes in the future is fine. But how to do that? The military doesn’t choose the wars, so what is it to do? It seems to me the only reasonable alternatives for the military are either to prepare/plan for all contingencies (including COIN) as best we can, or to excise those capabilities in the hopes that lack of capacity will make political decision-makers less likely to embark on those kinds of operations. The same challenge existed after Vietnam. In the early days of 21st century COIN, we often derided our own forgetfulness of the lessons of COIN from Vietnam (e.g. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife). But the Army essentially and deliberately chose to pursue an organizational course of action post-Vietnam that made COIN less likely by deliberately minimizing COIN capabilities. This conventional approach was pretty successful through the Gulf War. I predict that we'll end up doing the same thing again - forgetting about COIN and hoping for a twenty year lease on not having to do it again. All bets off after that.

** Written as part of the Atlantic Council's Young Atlanticist Working Group

Did The United Nations Fail At Keeping US From Entering The Iraq War? Is The UN Dominated By US?
http://bit.ly/usun12

If anybody's still reading this, I'd like to add a few points:

1. As nobody has challenged anything I wrote earlier, I'd like to infer that my historical inputs and corrections are accepted. ;-)

2. One more point might explain how the UN could pass 16 resolutions against Saddam's nuclear program (yes, it did exist) without approving an official UN operation: It was only after our Coalition's invasion that the extent of Saddam's "oil bribery" of key UN countries and their buyers became a scandal; presumably, his goal had been to undermine the international community (and UN itself) and assure that they would not unite against him with force. Upon discovery, a wide investigation was promised, and may even have occurred. However, no results or punishment of the guilty seem to have occurred. Can anybody shed any light on this? Was there a "lesson" in this that Professor Walt could have included?

3. I mostly agree with Allan Erickson's points, with one caveat: Yes, the disbanding of the entire Iraqi army was a mistake — in retrospect. However, our main prior example had been the extensive denazification of post-WWII Germany. If we had kept the mostly Baathist officials in authority (for continuity of government), we may well have given rein to an internal (Sunni) insurgency, exacerbated by the Shi'ite majority, from the start. . . . Sometimes 20-20 hindsight can be overrun by the Law of Unintended Consequences (which was presumably written by "Murphy").

4. Another mistake had been to let the Iraqis handle the 2004 Fallujah uprising themselves. This failure was corrected a couple of years later by our U.S. Marines, but with more devastation than would have occurred had they been allowed to proceed in the first place. Moreover, the chance to neutralize the “fiery cleric” Moqtada al-Sadr and his “Mahdi army” might have saved many U.S. as well as Iraqi lives.

5. My hat’s off to IRAQVET and SGTD13FOX for their first-hand facts and observations. Whether agreeable or not to the academic and policy wonks in this forum, they offer insiders’ expertise and considerations that should inform the rest of us.

6. Finally, in response to SJ_ATLANTICIST, above:

a. “[S]tronger engagement in multilateral institutions” is certainly desirable — provided our leadership and/or their participation can be achieved in sufficient and timely fashion. However, even our friends can decline or even veto our initiatives, such as France’s last-minute refusal to support President Bush’s proposed UN-sponsored operation against Saddam’s Iraq, and Russian and Chinese UN Security Council vetoes of most U.S. motions. It is because we no longer live in a bipolar world that the U.S. cannot be assured of support by its traditional allies.

b. While the U.S. may have declined NATO aid in offensive operations after 9/11, it was glad to accept seven NATO AEW&C (AWACS) aircraft to give relief to our national E-3A AWACS fleet for a few months — perhaps the only time that NATO assets deployed to the Western Hemisphere to date.

c. Professor Walt may have stated that the U.S. is “basically incredibly secure”today, but so was the view for the ten years preceding 9/11 — a decade of continuing decreases in military forces to the point where, when we needed them in 2003 and following, we had neither enough people nor enough of the right equipment to meet the demands of both Iraq and Afghanistan . . . a two-theater situation we could have managed satisfactorily during much of the Cold War.

d. The contrarian view that we could avoid future entanglements by deliberately reducing forces or specific capabilities (“saving money” thereby), is likely to prove foolish and costly over the long run — as the multiple combat tours, crash programs and casualties have shown during the past decade. Moreover, our future threats may well involve new risks, as North Korean and Iranian intransigence over their nuclear capabilities is telling us. As for suggesting that “cuts to the U.S. defense budget might … encourage U.S. allies to shoulder more of the burden for collective security,”that is pure foolishness. First of all, our and their views of “collective security” may well differ today. Secondly, when the U.S. drew down its NATO forces to meet expanding needs during the Southeast Asia War (aka “Vietnam”), our NATO allies, far from increasing their forces to meet our shortfall, also decreased their forces to maintain their same percentages of commitment to NATO — despite the continuing level of threat from the Warsaw Pact, mere hundreds of miles away or less.

e. Indeed our “military doesn’t choose the wars,” but, as it is by definition responsible for fighting them, it cannot limit its forces or capabilities except as directed by civilian and legal authority or by (un)availability of funds. We may still be “the world’s sole surviving superpower,” but we never have been living in a “unipolar world”; instead, we went from a bipolar to a multipolar world as fast as centrifugal forces loosened international ties and enabled nations to pursue their own interests. Thus, adapting former-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s words, we must plan (at least to some degree) for not only the “known” and “known-unknown” threats, but also for the “unknown unknowns,” because (as he also said): “One goes to war with the forces on has.” Accordingly, we must make and keep them as capable and ready as “the law [and money] allow.”

By definition, Surprises are Unexpected, and Accidents are not Planned.

I know that, Five of the first six contract awards announced Tuesday were for parachutes costing nearly $1 billion. All five contracts were for “low-cost, low velocity parachutes.” Alas, as is becoming increasingly common, the contract announcements don’t specify how many are being bought, so it’s difficult to assess the “low cost” claim. We trust the competition keeps prices down. The Army’s Medical Department just published a journal devoted to the use of dogs in Army medicine. I wanted to highlight the publication here on Time’s Battleland. Both dog- and soldier-lovers can read it for free.