A Time For Humility

February 2005 Eliot A. Cohen

Eliot A. Cohen, who kindly contributed this article, is a consultant to Interinvest. He is Robert E. Osgood Professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, at Johns Hopkins University.

A milestone does not inform us whether the trail ahead is smooth or rocky, well marked or obscure, but it provides a place to pause and reflect. So, too, with the Iraqi election. It may weaken the insurgency by endowing the Iraqi government with a legitimacy and authority it now lacks, or by reinforcing Sunni resentment, strengthen it. But the election indubitably demonstrates the power of freedom, and the courage that love of it can elicit even in a terrorized population. Surely, even those so-called realists who disparage the project of building civil society in Iraq share Lincoln’s wish, expressed about another group, also believed incapable of self-rule, “that all men every where could be free.”

This is a victory, no doubt about it. Iraq’s journey may take many turnings, but it will not return to a past in which a totalitarian regime brutalized 85% of the population. It may, in the future, have its Salazar or Pinochet, it may writhe in anarchy or civil war, but Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party are gone. That is an achievement which, however perilous their condition now, most Iraqis do not wish to reverse. The menace of an Iraqi regime that intended to rebuild and extend its most dangerous capabilities has been removed, and possibly forever. Most of the Arab world may hate America, but a disjointed yet palpable movement for reform has gathered strength. This movement has broken through in a few countries; it has sympathizers in the rest, who note the irony of free elections as a byproduct of American occupation.

The war has achieved important results, wrongly minimized or dismissed by the administration’s critics. But this is not, alas, the whole story. For us, too, the Iraq elections provide an opportunity, more proper than arbitrary anniversaries, to reckon with our failures as well as our achievements. If the war has had its great successes, it has also had more than its share of bungles, evident in the chaos and suffering in Iraq, heavy loss of American life, and a battered reputation for the U.S. abroad. Bloody mistakes occur in all wars, as some point out — an easy wisdom that flows most easily from those who have no loved ones in harm’s way. Even such philosophers, however, should honor the 8,000 families of dead and wounded American soldiers by facing the unpleasant truths, because even if blunders characterize all wars, blunders they remain.

The argument about the merits of going to war will continue for many years. The overthrow of Saddam’s regime represented the least unpalatable choice in the face of a regime that was about to slip as completely out of a leaky and corrupt U.N. sanctions regime as it had a U.N. inspections regime. It embodied a decision based on bad intelligence, but the best available. It reflected suppositions about linkages to the 9/11 plotters that were, at least, plausible. But war emerged, most of all, from the view that by removing Saddam’s regime and replacing it with something reasonable — not Sweden, but say, Romania circa 1993 — the broader political dynamics of the Arab world could be altered, profoundly and perhaps decisively. We do not know, and will not know for years whether that strategy will work, but it had much to be said for it.

Before the war reasonable people disagreed about these arguments for war; they still do. But good idea or bad, the handling of the war has made an admittedly risky strategy far more precarious and costly than it need have been. Some of those failures persist, and others could recur all too easily. They fall into two classes:

The first consists of waging war with the mentality and practices of peace. Because we choose to cut taxes in wartime, we have a ballooning deficit; because we have a ballooning deficit we cannot expand the active-duty military on a permanent basis; because we cannot expand the active-duty military, we call up hundreds of thousands of reservists to fight an optional war half a world away, sending part-time soldiers — some ready for this mission, others not — off for a year of combating guerrillas in a limited war, a concept at odds with all previous notions of what citizen-soldiers do. Because we cannot substantially increase the defense budget we may fail to replace equipment worn down by months of active service in a harsh climate, and we have even begun to drain our military-school system of leaders. Signs of strain appear in retention rates; but it becomes most clear, if you talk to soldiers, in the disgust and anger of the Army’s best mid-level leaders, and in the institutional leukemia that has begun to sap the vitality of a military educational system that was once, deservedly, the pride of our armed forces.

In past conflicts, civilian and military leaders ruthlessly pruned the ranks of generals who though competent in peace, could not adapt to the novel conditions of war. They promoted rapidly the lieutenant colonels and colonels who could. George Marshall did this in World War II, and pillars of the old Army like 62-year-old Hugh Drum gave way to hard 36-year-olds like James Gavin. A few happy but nonetheless regular promotions aside, this has not happened here. Nor is the issue military leadership alone: Ambassador Paul Bremer, an intelligent and self-sacrificing man, accepted the call to go to Iraq, with neither the time nor the authority to build a staff and a plan. Still, the Coalition Provisional Authority he ran was a disaster, a micromanaged American enterprise too often out of touch with Iraqi realities. The U.S. government that had not provided the structure needed to administer postwar Iraq would not admit his deficiencies and replace him. Instead, he, like George Tenet and Gen. Tommy Franks — equally able and patriotic men, who also failed in key aspects of the Iraq war — received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military philosopher, declared that statesmen and commanders must establish “the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor turning it into, something that is alien to its nature.” Here came the second class of failures. For a very long time, the U.S. government would not even use the word insurgency. Until recently it insisted that we faced only 5,000 “former regime loyalists, jihadis, and released criminals.” We have killed or captured more than three times as many, and yet the insurgency rages. In a war where, as one successful commander has put it, “dollars are bullets,” bureaucrats spent months ponderously awarding giant contracts to multinational corporations that would hire expatriates from around the world, rather than Iraqis who could get angry young men off the street. In guerrilla war nothing matters more than raising and training indigenous forces; we passed that job off to Vinnell Corporation, and only belatedly realized that we needed our best general, supported by American soldiers and Marines, to do the job.

The failure to accept this war’s nature as an insurgency rests with civilians and soldiers, individuals and institutions. It has many causes, including memories of Vietnam, that have prevented Americans from thinking straight in peacetime about the challenges of guerrilla warfare. Nor is it certain that the lessons will stay with us: Having built and celebrated a military designed to win battles but less adroit at winning wars, it is entirely possible that the Pentagon will revert to a military obsessed with stupendous deeds of fire and movement, rather than winning the wars we face.

In part because it corrected belatedly many, though not all of these mistakes, the U.S. may still achieve a tolerable outcome in Iraq, albeit at the cost of far too much American and Iraqi blood, far too much treasure, far too much political capital. We remain big, rich and determined; above all, we have tapped a yearning for freedom in Iraq. But as we celebrate this historic poll, honoring the courage of the millions of Iraqis who risked their lives to vote, and the bravery and skill of our soldiers and public servants who helped them do so, we should, in all humility, look at our failures as well as our successes, call them by that name, and learn from them.