Exactly 10 years ago the American invasion of Iraq commenced, launching one of military history's most egregious strategic non sequiturs. Not since Napoleon Bonaparte's ill-fated expedition to Egypt and Syria (1798-1801) -- from which he ultimately fled, losing an army and a fleet -- has the world seen a great power so humbled in the pursuit of illusory goals. Napoleon's dream was to use his incomparable army to spread French revolutionary and democratic ideals across a key portion of the Muslim world. But, as historian Lynn Montross once noted, "The masses were too fatalistic to be stirred by promises of a liberty they neither understood nor trusted."
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The grand American goal in the Middle East, pursued some two centuries after Napoleon but with nearly the same idea in mind that had motivated him, foundered for similar reasons. The military occupation of Iraq, predictably, sparked a general uprising. But whereas Lord Nelson's great victory at Aboukir Bay forced an end to the French campaign, no such dramatic intervention drove American forces out. So they stayed, at a cost of over a trillion dollars, tens of thousands of soldiers' lives lost or shattered, and with the mounting Iraqi death toll rising well above 100,000. A debacle.
In some ways, the misadventure in Iraq can be seen as worse than Napoleon's blunder, in terms of the flawed logic that underpinned it. In addition to the idealistic American "democracy project," this was a war started to defang Saddam Hussein's budding nuclear arsenal. But U.N. inspectors had made clear beforehand that there simply were no such weapons in Iraq; invading forces overran the whole country and found none. Not anywhere in the country.
The other threat-based rationale for the war was the notion that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Again, this was a terrible logical fallacy; Saddam was one of the "apostates" targeted for overthrow by al Qaeda. Sadly, the prolonged American presence in Iraq actually brought the terrorist network's jihadis there, as it was much easier for them to fight their "far enemy" in this more easily reachable theater of operations. Today, the American military is gone, while al Qaeda, after suffering sharp reverses, is back and making mischief once more.
Even the leading explanation for the tactical defeat suffered by al Qaeda in Iraq is subject to some fuzzy reasoning. The faith many have put in "the surge" having turned the tide needs to be questioned. The relatively small number of additional American trigger-pullers sent -- some 20,000 -- mattered far less than the change in operational concept. It was the outreach to indigenous Iraqis, who made up the majority of the insurgents, and their willingness to turn against the foreign fighters al Qaeda had sent, that made the true difference. What the U.S. military calls "influence operations" haven't yet received their proper due in this campaign.
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