crossposted from MLW
Three years after Israel invaded Lebanon, Ha'aretz, Israel's "quality" newspaper, began its lead editorial:
The fraudulent acts of Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin dragged the country into the Lebanon War on the basis of a false claim. (Quoted in Harkabi, Israel's Fateful Hour (1986; English ed. 1988) at 107).)
We need not await similar words about Bush and Rumsfeld in New York Times and Washington Post editorials to realize that much can be learned about the failure of the Bush administration in Iraq by examining what Bush should have learned, but did not, from Israel's misadventure in Lebanon. In this essay, I also will consider briefly Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr.'s now famous Foreign Affairs article, "How to Win in Iraq," and Francis Fukuyama's op-ed article in today's New York Times, "Invasion of the Isolationists."
The importance of setting clear goals and means for achieving them.
In his treatise On War, Clausewitz teaches:
No one starts a war -- or, rather, no one in his senses ought to do so -- without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it. The former is its political purpose, and the latter its operational objective.
As Harkabi explains (id., at 94):
The idea here is simple: one must first articulate the political gains to be achieved by the war, that is, the intended outcome. These are the goals of the war. They are translated into military objectives within the war. (Original emphasis.)
Harkabi criticizes scathingly then Prime Minister Begin because of the "incompatibility between the war's political goals and the military objectives." Even though "the military objectives were not achieved,"
nothing would have been different even if they had been, because they were simply inapproprite to the political goals of the war, which were impossibly grandiose and detached from reality.(Id.
The inadmissibility of passing the buck to the military.
Nor, writes Harkabi (himself a former chief of Israeli military intelligence and major general), could Begin's folly be excused by his reliance upon military experts: "conducting a war on the political level requires no special military knowledge -- merely simple common-sense undertanding of the major problems of political significance that will arise." (Id., at 95.) In this connection, Harkabi recalls that, when in 1948 David Ben-Gurion accepted the defense portfolio in addition to the prime ministership, Ben-Gurion said he did so
"not because I am a general proficient in military science, but because decisions in military matters are made not by technical experts but by those whose eyes are wide open and who have common sense. These are attributes every normal person has, to one degree or another." (Id.)
Harkabi adds:
The problems to which the statesman must give his attention are of the sort that later figure in the criticism of the war by historians: failure in war (not in battle) is related to failure to pay attention to major factors -- historical circumstances, not small technical and tactical details. The statesman's task is to anticipate the historian's criticism and intervene to prevent it. (Id..)
Applying the lessons of the Lebanon War.
Applying the lessons of Clausewitz, Ben-Gurion, and Harkabi to our present predicament, we easily can cut through the fog that surrounds the Bush administration's efforts to justify its conduct in Iraq or to avoid having to recognize its failures.
What did President Bush intend to accomplish by invading Iraq? Put most charitably: removing Saddam from power and protecting the U.S. from his (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction. By themselves, however, those goals are grossly inadequate. Anyone planning on invading a country to overthrow its government also must have clear political goals for replacing that government.
Here's one important place where the Bush administration plainly failed. Bush treated the war as though it were a single event, begun with the invasion and ended with the overthrow of Saddam. In presenting the "end of major combat operations" as the denouement of his policy, Bush not only misled the American people, he also misled himself. Not having learned, as Harkabi tells us, "a war is not an event, but a process; a battle is an event" (id. at 93), Bush failed to look beyond the victory in battle. Apparently, the president's planning ended with the anticipated pelting of American troops with cheers and flowers. In other words, Bush had no strategy for dealing with Iraq, only a tactical plan for overthrowing Saddam.
Lacking clear political goals for dealing with Iraq, President Bush failed to identify subsidiary military objectives to achieve the goals. There were no plans to secure the Iraq army's stores of weapons and ammunition; no plans to secure important public buildings, neither basic infrastructure nor internationally important museums; no plans for governing Iraq and assuring, or at least maximizing the chances for, a smooth transfer of authority to the Iraqis themselves.
We can see the magnitude of Bush's failure by attending to Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr.'s now famous Foreign Affairs article, "How to Win in Iraq". Krepinevich's thesis is summarized as: "Because they lack a coherent strategy, U.S. forces in Iraq have failed to defeat the insurgency or improve security. Winning will require a new approach to counterinsurgency, one that focuses on providing security to Iraqis rather than hunting down insurgents. And it will take at least a decade." (Emphasis added.)
And Krepinevich's final paragraph is particularly telling. After outlining his proposed new approach, basically withdrawing to secure enclaves and focusing on their economic development and gradual expansion, Krepinevich concludes (emphasis added):
Even if successful, this strategy will require at least a decade of commitment and hundreds of billions of dollars and will result in longer U.S. casualty rolls. But this is the price that the United States must pay if it is to achieve its worthy goals in Iraq. Are the American people and American soldiers willing to pay that price? Only by presenting them with a clear strategy for victory and a full understanding of the sacrifices required can the administration find out. And if Americans are not up to the task, Washington should accept that it must settle for a much more modest goal: leveraging its waning influence to outmaneuver the Iranians and the Syrians in creating an ally out of Iraq's next despot.
The wages of deception.
"The Lebanon War," Harkabi observes, "was accompanied by lies and deceit at the highest political levels. Defense Minister Sharon has been repeatedly accused of having misled Begin and the cabinet. . . . To provide a justification for the war the Likud government also lied to the public by grossly exaggerating the terrorist acts conducted from Lebanon." (Israel's Fateful Hour at 99.)
So, too, the Iraq War. The Bush administration lied about Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction and lied about Saddam's connection to Al Qaida.. By making these lies the center-piece of its popular campaign for domestic political support, the Bush administration not only delegitimized the falsely-based Congressional endorsement it procured. When combined by the strategic failure of Rumsfeld's planning for the aftermath of "victory," the Bush administration also sowed the seeds for its present predicament.
Francis Fukuyama addresses this last point in his op-ed article in today's New York Times, "Invasion of the Isolationists":
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Americans would have allowed President Bush to lead them in any of several directions, and the nation was prepared to accept substantial risks and sacrifices. The Bush administration asked for no sacrifices from the average American, but after the quick fall of the Taliban it rolled the dice in a big way by moving to solve a longstanding problem only tangentially related to the threat from Al Qaeda - Iraq. In the process, it squandered the overwhelming public mandate it had received after Sept. 11. At the same time, it alienated most of its close allies, many of whom have since engaged in "soft balancing" against American influence, and stirred up anti-Americanism in the Middle East.
Recognizing, at least implicitly, that rather than being manipulated by neoconservatives Bush used them to provide him with intellectual cover for his independently held desire to topple Saddam, Fukuyama observes that the discrediting of Bush's war rationale, combined with lack of success on the ground, threatens to split his base of support:
Within the Republican Party, the Bush administration got support for the Iraq war from the neoconservatives (who lack a political base of their own but who provide considerable intellectual firepower) and from what Walter Russell Mead calls "Jacksonian America" - American nationalists whose instincts lead them toward a pugnacious isolationism.
Happenstance then magnified this unlikely alliance. Failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the inability to prove relevant connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda left the president, by the time of his second inaugural address, justifying the war exclusively in neoconservative terms: that is, as part of an idealistic policy of political transformation of the broader Middle East. The president's Jacksonian base, which provides the bulk of the troops serving and dying in Iraq, has no natural affinity for such a policy but would not abandon the commander in chief in the middle of a war, particularly if there is clear hope of success.
This war coalition is fragile, however, and vulnerable to mishap. If Jacksonians begin to perceive the war as unwinnable or a failure, there will be little future support for an expansive foreign policy that focuses on promoting democracy. That in turn could drive the 2008 Republican presidential primaries in ways likely to affect the future of American foreign policy as a whole.
Israel did not have either the resources or an international environment to permit it to establish a new political order in Lebanon to its own liking. Israel's misadventure ended only eighteen years later when Prime Minister Ehud Barak unilaterally withdrew Israel's remaining forces from southern Lebanon. If we are willing to sacrifice, the U.S. has the resources and - as the world's hegemonic power - the permissive international environment to try to work its will in Iraq. I believe, however, that the majority of the American people have given up on President Bush: he is not believed; he does not have the political capital or trust to ask for the sacrifices that Krepinevich's strategy - itself not guaranteed to succeed - would require. Bush might create a political opening by firing the national security team, beginning with Secretary Rumsfeld, responsible for the Iraq disaster, but such a bold step seems unlikely.
Interim Conclusion
Iraq is not Lebanon, however; and America is not Israel. Israel's too-long delayed departure helped initiate a process that seems to be culminating in the termination of Syrian (indirect) rule over the country as though Lebanon were a Syrian province, much as China now rules Hong Kong. America's departure from Iraq well may intensify the conflict among the country's contending factions.
What responsibility, if any, do we have to the peoples will be leaving behind? At a minimum, I would argue, we ought not once again betray the Kurds. At a maximum, and if at the time of withdrawal an Iraqi government exists with a modicum of democratic legitimacy, we ought to provide it with some continuing support.
But above all, we as a people need to draw the appropriate conclusions from Bush's misadventure in Iraq. We must demand honesty of our elected leaders, a clear statement of political goals for any armed intervention, and a clear statement of a realistic strategy, and its costs, for achieving those goals. Finally, those who led us into this folly need to be given a considerable period of time in private life to reflect on their errors.