In this piece Andrew J. Bacevich answers that question with a rather strong negative.
It is thoughtful, biting, even brilliant piece, which begins
Judgments rendered by history tend to be tentative, incomplete and reversible. More than occasionally, they arrive seasoned with irony. This is especially true when it comes to war, where battlefield outcomes thought to be conclusive often prove anything but.
There are two key thrusts to Bacevich's argument.
First, we wound up in Iraq as a direct result of World War I.
Second, if we want a parallel for what the surge did or did not accomplish we might consider the Battle of New Orleans.
Along the way he describes the Korean War as perhaps America's most successful conflict, once Truman gave up on expelling the Communists from the Korean Peninsula and reverting to the policy of containment that the President had applied in what Bacevich calls the Greater MIddle East through the Truman Doctrine - after all, there has been no further war (yet) in Northeast Asia, even 6 decades later.
If I have already persuaded you to read the piece, then feel free to stop reading. Otherwise, you really should continue beneath the fold where I will make a further attempt to persuade you.
Bacevich notes that one result of "victory" in the Great War aka World War I was the British had a pretext for carving up the Ottoman Empire. Try this paragraph, which serves to explain why Bacevich calls the British decision "a fateful move" -
What London wanted from this new Middle East that it nonchalantly cut and pasted was profit and submission; what it got was resentment and resistance, yielding a host of intractable problems that in due time it bequeathed to Washington. In effect, victory in 1918 expanded Britain’s imperial domain only to accelerate its demise, with the United States naively assuming the mantle of imperial responsibility (euphemistically termed “leadership”). Thank you, Perfidious Albion.
Bacevich notes that what may seem like "a storied triumph" often contains the seeds of its own destruction:
-- the Six Day War saddled Israel with a disgruntled minority population that bedevils it still
-- pushing the Soviets out Afghanistan led to the rise of the Taliban
-- our first endeavor in Iraq meant we had troops in Saudi Arabia, from which a straight-line can be drawn to the events of 9-11.
Whereupon Bacevich tartly notes:
Think you’ve won? Wait until all the returns are in.
In this piece Bacevich demonstrates a real gift for language. Noting of the final rationale of the Bush administration for its Iraqi (mis)adventure - the Freedom Agenda to transform the Middle East, Bacevich remarks
When it came to advancing the cause of liberty, the Bush administration set out to build a cathedral. In the end, the Obama administration declared itself content with a shaky two-car garage.
Those of my generation remember a song in the late 1950's by one Johnny Horton, titled "the Battle of New Orleans." Bacevich finds occasion to apply it. After comparing the Surge so beloved by McCain and some of his compadres to Nixon's invasion of Cambodia - given the troops some occasion to fist bump but being insufficient to change the final outcome of the conflict (which in Iraq still continues even absent the presence of American combat troops), he then offers this paragraph:
The importance attributed to the surge by devotees such as McCain distracts attention from matters of far greater significance. It’s the equivalent of using the Battle of New Orleans as a basis for evaluating the War of 1812. Of course, in contrast to Petraeus, Gen. Andrew Jacksondefeated his adversary. When the shooting stopped, it was the surviving Redcoats — not the surviving Americans — who packed up and left. Still, take your cues from Johnny Horton, and you might conclude that Jackson single-handedly redeemed an entire war. Take your cues from McCain, and you might conclude that, two centuries later, Petraeus did likewise.
For some a history lesson is in order. There is no doubt that Jackson won a substantial victory. It was irrelevant because officially the War of 1812 was over, having been settled two weeks earlier by the Treaty of Ghent. Bacevich writes that the most important impact of New Orleans was that it distracted from the failure of Madison's war. He then writes
So, too, for a time Petraeus’s victory (if that’s what it was) might do the same for George W. Bush’s War, likewise marred by glaring errors committed at the top. It’s the oldest technique in the campaigner’s playbook: Inflate a glimmer of good news to divert attention from all the bad.
After some more pungent observations, Bacevich - while noting he will not like McCain offer a definite judgment - speculates that
in its historical importance, the Iraq war will end up somewhere on a par with the War of 1812 (though without a comparable musical legacy). If not forgotten, it will be subsumed into a much larger story, remembered not as a big, important war but as a small, insignificant skirmish.
The real issue is that
the inhabitants of the Islamic world are asserting the prerogative of determining their own destinies.
They do not want outsiders deciding their destinies. Bacevich views our endeavors in both theaters of the past decade plus as an extension by the US of the British notion of an entitlement to meddle.
Remember, that entitlement, at least in West Asia, comes from the opportunities the British saw in seizing control of much of the Ottoman Empire.
Exhausted after World War II, they turned that over to us, first in Greece and Turkey (hence the Truman Doctrine of containment of the spread of communism), then further through the Baghdad Pact (and greater US involvement in the oil to be found in many Islamic nations of the region).
There is more analysis, including that Muslim self-determination will continue with or without US approval.
And then there is this conclusion:
The United States finds itself today pretty much where the British were back in the 1920s and 1930s. We’ve bitten off more than we can chew. The only problem is that there’s no readily available sucker to whom we can hand off the mess we’ve managed to create.
I read those words and could not help but think of the endeavor set up during the waning years of the Clinton administration by a groups of hawks that notably include both Rumseld and Cheney, arrogantly named "
The Project for a New American Century." Those Hawks got their "regime change" in Iraq. They did not get their real intent - long-term control of oil riches of the region. And in the process what they have done to this nation is what imperialism did to the British, albeit in their case because of the exhaustion of having to defend their empire in a real global conflict - they drained the US dry, exhausted the American people, and cost too many lives killed and maimed (including psychologically) in an endeavor that was ultimately futile.
Read the Bacevich.
All of it.