Since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United States was so suspicious of Saddam Hussein that regime change in Iraq eventually became official US policy with the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and after years of unsuccessful negotiations with Saddam Hussein over Iraq’s suspected weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, the United States ended talks and, on March 20, launched Operation Iraqi Freedom.1 The Hussein regime fell on April 9, and the United States established a transitional government called the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
Failing to prepare adequately for the occupation, the US military and civilian authorities faced an increasingly chaotic situation as the Iraqi military collapse turned into an insurgency.2 Policies such as de-Ba’athification (which removed and banned members of Hussein’s Ba’ath Party from the public sector) and disbanding the Iraqi Army, combined with heavy-handed military operations in the Sunni Triangle, stoked Sunni Arab fears of marginalization and repression by dominant Shi’a parties.3 Senior Iraqi leaders often manipulated unwitting American forces to advance personal and sectarian agendas.4 Sunni-Shi’a violence spiraled with the February 2006 bombing of the Shi’a mosque in Samarra.5 Senior US officials focused on drawing down the US presence and handing over security responsibilities to the fledgling and sectarian Iraqi security forces.6 They rebuffed recommendations by junior American officials to reach out to Sunni leaders.7
This intervention was to replace an existing regime with one more amicable to US interests. Failure to adequately consider war termination resulted in a strategy that fixated on the use of military force, wished away post-Saddam risks, and underappreciated the requirements for a favorable and durable outcome. The critical factors model outlined in chapter 2 suggests that success hinged upon, first, the establishment of a government that earned legitimacy across the political, ethnic, and sectarian spectra, and second, preventing armed resistance from becoming a sustainable insurgency. Decisive victory could have been possible had those two conditions been achieved. However, by 2006 the United States was backing a predatory sectarian Iraqi government that was fighting against a sustainable Sunni Arab insurgency, and Iran-supported Sadrist militias battled coalition forces while participating in the burgeoning civil war.
The existing scholarship is broadly in agreement about why the Iraq War spiraled quickly from an overwhelming military success into a grinding civil war. The Bush administration failed to deploy enough troops to secure the country after the fall of the regime.8 Compounding this error was the Department of Defense’s failure to plan for the so-called Phase IV: post-war reconstruction.9 The administration then stubbornly refused to deploy more troops as the situation grew worse. The US military, meanwhile, had deliberately unlearned counterinsurgency after Vietnam and employed counterproductive tactics that exacerbated rather than diminished the insurgency.10 Within this broader explanation, some view Coalition Provisional Authority chief L. Paul Bremer’s decisions on de-Ba’athification and the disbanding of the Iraqi Army to have made a lousy situation unrecoverable.11 A RAND study notes, however, that de-Ba’athification affected far fewer Iraqis than did de-Nazification for Germans after World War II, and that the Iraqi Army had already disbanded itself.12 These decisions, moreover, were briefed to the Bush administration and approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Ambassador James Dobbins, perhaps the most prominent American scholar and practitioner on post-war reconstruction, largely exonerates the CPA from responsibility for the descent into civil war. After all, he notes, the CPA’s progress ranks quite high in comparison to more than 20 other post-conflict missions.13 The CPA succeeded in areas in which it had the lead. It was not, however, responsible for security.14 Dobbins lays principal blame with the Department of Defense for mismanagement. “Experience in these and many other cases,” Dobbins argues, “has dictated a prioritization of post-war tasks: beginning with security, then restoring basic public services, stabilizing the economy, and finally reforming the political system.”15 Secondarily, he criticizes the White House for giving the post-conflict mission to Defense and failing to supervise the planning and execution adequately. “By doing so, the President took himself and his staff out of the daily decision loop.”16 Had Defense done the appropriate planning, anticipated the scale of effort, and allocated enough forces for security after Saddam’s fall, these arguments suggest, they might have prevented an insurgency or quickly defeated it.
The argument assumes that better planning, additional resources, and more efficient execution would have prevented disaster. The war termination framework developed in chapter 1 and the critical factors in chapter 2 provide ways to build upon the existing scholarship. The Bush administration assumed decisive military victory but failed to develop a strategy to gain the most favorable and durable outcome possible at the least cost in blood, treasure, and time. A consequence of this assumption was the failure to evaluate the risks of inadequate government legitimacy and a sustainable insurgency. As Part VI will show, having better plans and more American “boots on the ground” was not sufficient for success. The Bush administration’s decisions and US actions in-country amplified rather than reduced the risks in at least three interrelated ways. First, US officials in Washington, D.C., and Baghdad lacked the strategic empathy to understand and manage the intense and often violent scrimmage for political power. Instead, senior American civilian and military officials super-empowered favored Iraqi elites, who used such backing for narrow personal and political advantage.
In many cases, they managed to dupe US officials into enriching their cronies and targeting their rivals. This problem damaged the foundations of legitimacy and gave Sunni Arabs a cause to fight. Second, US officials envisioned post-war security and reconstruction as an engineering task: break the problems down into components, arrange them into linear milestones over fixed timelines, and apply the necessary resources to achieve them. American officials did not appreciate how Iraqi elites could manipulate these milestones in ways damaging to government legitimacy. Third, civilian and military efforts worked in silos that were ably exploited by the adaptive Iraqi networks on both pro- and anti-government sides. As the United States focused on the efficient execution of its plans and congratulated itself on achieving bureaucratic milestones, the government was losing legitimacy and the insurgency was becoming sustainable. The Bush administration and its officials in Baghdad had plenty of detailed plans but no strategy adequate to address the dynamic complexity of the emerging conflict.