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The Strategic Architectures of the Iraqi Wars

Like the Vietnam War, the Iraqi Wars encompassed new and old aspects of warfare. Wars I–III bore the familiar characteristics of combatant states and armies engaged in conventional battles. The transition from War III into War IV brought back memories of the frustrations the United States had experienced in Southeast Asia. War V shows that the defeat of ISIS is now a mission for the Trump administration or a future administration.

The first Bush administration’s decision to liberate Kuwait in War I was a straightforward and initially high-risk response where there was a clear casus belli, Saddam’s invasion of one major oil-producing state and his threat to another, Saudi Arabia. Twenty-five years ago, the team of President Bush, Secretary Baker, Secretary Cheney, and Generals Schwarzkopf and Powell produced a winning result, despite post–War I commentary about the lost opportunity for regime change. President Bush in 1990–1991 understood the importance of Arab, European, and international participation in War I to liberate Kuwait. He and Secretary Baker implemented a global full-court press to bring a total of thirty-five states to contribute forces and matériel to Desert Storm. President Bush understood the limits of what he could effectively accomplish, listened to his staff and generals, and accepted the outcome.

Neither Bush nor Schwarzkopf could predict that War I would turn into a cakewalk; sixteen thousand body bags had been warehoused in the theater in anticipation of high casualties. With those kinds of casualty projections, no one was thinking beyond the liberation of Kuwait, certainly not of regime change. To have proposed such a goal would have undermined the international coalition Bush and Baker had so carefully assembled. And their strategic architecture did not include the kind of postwar planning that would have been required had regime change been the goal. Historians may eventually realize the wisdom of Bush’s restraint once Saddam was defeated. In fundamental geopolitical terms, President Bush protected much of the world’s petroleum energy supplies from a brute-force takeover by a tyrant.

General Schwarzkopf’s military triumph achieved its stated aim of the liberation of Kuwait in War I, but President Bush failed to provide Schwarzkopf and CENTCOM with specific policy guidance at the Safwan armistice. In a PBS Frontline broadcast transcript in February 1997, former prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Bush’s national security advisor, General Scowcroft, retrospectively said the following years later:

PBS Narrator. The Iraqi generals got exactly what Saddam wanted, to the astonishment of some of the civilian architects of the war.

Thatcher. They should have surrendered their equipment, the lot. When you’re dealing with a dictator, he has got not only to be defeated well and truly, but he’s got to be seen to be defeated by his own people so that they identify the privations they’ve had to go through with his actions. And we didn’t do that.

Scowcroft. I think what we should have insisted upon is Saddam Hussein come to Safwan. That was our mistake because that allowed him to blame his generals for the defeat and not he himself.1

War II evolved out of the unresolved issues of War I’s flawed termination at Safwan, which left Saddam as a surviving dictator of a major Middle East oil-producing state and a potential future hegemon who could covertly develop WMDs. The Clinton administration that succeeded Bush entered office with much more modest ambitions and assumptions about the application of military power.

War III was born out of the failure of international efforts to compel Saddam’s satisfactory compliance with UN resolutions throughout the 1990s decade. When UN WMD inspection policy crumbled, President George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq because of the perceived menace of Saddam possessing WMDs after the events of 9/11 had elevated international awareness of terrorist threats. Yet invasion was not the worst decision; it was the insistence that it was not necessary to plan and prepare to occupy, secure, and rebuild Iraq. The administration’s willful denial that such a massive undertaking might be necessary led to War IV.

The decision to invade Iraq a second time to overthrow Saddam and his Ba’athist government committed the error of relying on front-to-back military planning where the assumptions about the geopolitical outcome turned out to be wrong. President George W. Bush launched Operation Iraqi Freedom based on a military plan for regime change with optimistic postwar assumptions. Had the president insisted on a fully defined postwar end state beforehand, he could have ensured better and more immediately executable postwar planning after Saddam’s defeat. It very well might have influenced the size and composition of the CENTCOM force that Secretary Rumsfeld and General Franks sent into Iraq in March 2003.

Secretary Rumsfeld by War III believed that the inclusion of allies did not weigh decisively in the military scales because the Americans and their principal ally, Britain, possessed ample conventional combat manpower, weapons platforms, and matériel. He was convinced that participation by European allies had become unnecessary to achieving military success because of the revolution in military affairs (RMA). Rumsfeld believed in the superiority of American advanced technology. Specifically, a faster, lighter, more agile force with a smaller footprint, deployed with network-centric and RMA technologies, rendered a European military contribution irrelevant.2 It took President George W. Bush nearly three years before he realized that his decision to invade Iraq required a major change of course. The Bush War III strategic architecture failed to develop a realistic postwar plan with the necessary resources.

President Bush was honest and wise enough to eventually recognize that War IV required a new approach. It was fortuitous that there were enough senior officers in the US Army who had prepared themselves for the daunting mission they undertook in 2007. Petraeus and his colleagues recommended and then executed the surge. As Colonel Mansoor, Petraeus’s executive officer, observed, “the most important surge was the surge of ideas, not the surge in forces. . . . The most important of the ‘big ideas’ was that the U.S. and Iraqi forces had to focus on securing the people.”3 It was also a surge in effective leaders.

General Petraeus and the men and women that he and Ambassador Crocker recruited were not conventional military or diplomatic careerists. They were students who had spent decades studying, writing, and learning from America’s mistakes. Americans continued to believe that prevailing in Wars I through III required the application of their firepower, airpower, technology, and mobility. As War IV developed, General Petraeus implemented a balanced combination of COIN doctrinal concepts and kinetic operations to break the violence of the insurgency. The application of force had to be traded between earning the confidence of the local populations in Baghdad’s districts and in the belts around the city and the risks of collateral damage from excessive use of firepower and airpower.

On the military and diplomatic levels, the Petraeus-Crocker team demonstrated what a group of focused, determined, and informed soldiers and civilian experts could accomplish: reverse a very bad situation and create more time to enable Iraq’s sectarian factions to reconcile themselves to a plausible future where Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds could govern themselves, resolve disputes without violence, and rebuild a shattered economy. That was the vision. They reversed what many had already written off as a hopeless expeditionary war. Their watch, however, did not end the violence of War IV. An effective endgame required a political, whole-of-government strategic architecture.

The Obama administration’s decision to bring War IV to a “soft landing” by withdrawing all US military forces by the end of 2011 was not an effective end of the American military mission in Iraq. In the fall and winter of 2011–2012, the Kagans reinforced their view that the withdrawal decision was a “defeat.”4 In a series of articles starting in late 2011 to the present, they began by viewing the breakdown of the status-of-forces negotiations as a diplomatic failure of the Obama administration.5

The Obama administration had its own difficulties in constructing effective strategic architectures, the good war versus the bad war. At various times, between 2002 and 2009, Obama characterized Afghanistan as the “good war”6 and the “war of necessity”7 and Iraq as “the dumb war . . . the rash war.”8 Once in office, President Obama discovered that he too was unwilling to sustain a protracted war in Afghanistan with its long-haul implications for de facto nation building, even as the “war of necessity.” He wanted to be done with both wars because he believed the American people remain unconvinced and sharply divided over the strategic merits for expeditionary war in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Polling data about how well the war was going in Iraq ranged from 90 percent agreeing with “very or fairly well” in March 2003 to only 30 percent by February 2007.9 Polling data in late 2011 indicated that the American public was evenly divided between 50 percent believing that the United States had achieved its goals in Iraq and 47 percent saying the United States had not achieved its goals.10 With the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, and pressures mounting on federal fiscal policy, the Obama administration was more interested in fulfilling its campaign promises of withdrawal from Iraq than maintaining a long-term, military commitment to help build a new Iraq in the heart of Mesopotamia.

The Bush administration, before it left office in early 2009, had already agreed to a timetable for the withdrawal of military forces from Iraq by 2011 because it could not conclude a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) with adequate jurisdictional provisions regarding legal exposure of American personnel to Iraqi rather than US law. President Obama then readily implemented this timetable based on the failure of either Bush or his own administration to achieve a SOFA with Iraq so that US military forces could continue to provide security after 2011.11

Neither the Bush nor the Obama administration was prepared to plan and implement a long-haul, whole-of-government approach to defining a nation-building strategic architecture.12 Had either administration been serious about a sustained whole-of-government intervention in Iraq, negotiating a workable SOFA or finessing its jurisdictional sticking points with a diplomatic instrument would have been an incidental detail to an overarching strategy with an extended, preferably indefinite, schedule for the presence of US combat forces.13

Whatever one’s geopolitical judgment about whether Wars III–V should have been fought, or whether they were follies similar to what had happened in Vietnam, Iraq involved much higher stakes. Iraq contains the fifth-largest oil reserves in the world and ranks as the sixth-largest exporter of petroleum liquids, with daily production at 2.9 million bbl per day and potentially much higher volumes.14

On the tenth anniversary of Wars III and IV in 2013, the nation’s two premier newspapers ran front-page stories and op-ed pieces about the continuing sectarian violence in Iraq (a barrage of car bombs killing dozens and wounding 177 people in Baghdad). The New York Times opined,

The Iraq war was unnecessary, costly and damaging on every level. It was based on faulty intelligence manipulated for ideological reasons. The terrible human and economic costs over the past ten years show why that must never happen again.

The Wall Street Journal made this observation about the future:

As long as the United States remains a great power, it will eventually have to fight such a war again. When that day comes, let’s hope our political and military leaders will have learned the right lessons from this bitter but necessary war.15

Five years later, the fight against ISIS continues and the search for the “right lessons” persists.

Years earlier, Ambassador Crocker had offered this prescient criterion: “In the end, what we leave behind and how we leave will be more important than how we came.”16

In January 2015, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in testimony before the US Senate Armed Services Committee, characterized the consequences of the US military withdrawal from Iraq. He defined the emerging threat of ISIS as a new competitor for power in the region. ISIS should be viewed as an organization “explicitly designed to undermine all of the existing weapons of legitimacy” on which the post-1945 international system depends. If ISIS were to succeed as a governing authority within the Middle East, it could directly challenge “the current international order—based on respect for sovereignty, rejection of territorial conquest, open trade, and encouragement of human rights—primarily a creation of the West,” for a world order based on “universal theocracy.”17

This view of ISIS as a threat changed over the next two years. ISIS may no longer be viewed as an expanding governing force. However, the price for this result is Iran’s deep penetration into Mesopotamia, as Arango’s New York Times reporting in the summer of 2017, cited in chapter 28, made all too clear to a world paying little attention to Iraq or Syria.