Dimensions: 6'' x 9'' 141 pages AEI Press  (Washington) Publication Date: July 2004 Paperback ISBN: 0-8447-4195-7 Price: $ 20.00 Add to Cart   Examination Copies

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July 2004
Operation Iraqi Freedom: A Strategic Assessment
By Thomas Donnelly

Why did the United States go to war in Iraq--and what does it seek to accomplish there? This is the question that veteran defense analyst and AEI resident fellow Thomas Donnelly seeks to answer in this study. Looking past the prewar debate in the UN Security Council and postwar recriminations over weapons of mass destruction, Donnelly argues that the George W. Bush administration charted the correct strategy in Iraq, but has failed to match its military means to its strategic ends.

Thomas Donnelly is a resident fellow in defense and national security studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also the author of Operation Just Cause: The Storming of Panama (1991) and Clash of Chariots: The Great Tank Battles (1996).

More than a year after President George W. Bush declared "mission accomplished" in the invasion of Iraq, a fuller victory remains elusive. This is, in large part, because a fuller understanding of the war itself remains elusive.

After examining the conventional invasion of Iraq, the resulting counterinsurgency campaign, and their broader significance for the global war on terrorism--through firsthand research conducted across postwar Iraq and interviews with U.S. military planners and soldiers--four key observations emerge:

• Regardless of the exact nature of Saddam Hussein's relationship with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, the Iraq war is today the central front of the global war on terrorism. It is impossible to understand American decisions about Saddam Hussein--to support him in power after the Islamist revolution in Iran, to leave him in power after the Gulf War, to remove him from power after the September 11 attacks, and, most crucially, to replace him in power with an experiment in Arab democracy--without understanding American policy toward the greater Middle East. Although militant Islam has been at war with the United States for twenty-five years, it was not until after al Qaeda struck the American homeland that Washington awoke to the clear and present danger posed by the political and economic failures afflicting the Arab-Muslim world. The war in Iraq thus seeks to address the problem of Islamist terrorism at its roots, fostering a beachhead of freedom that will, in turn, promote more decent, democratic, and pluralistic political order throughout the region.
  
• Military planning for the invasion did not fully reflect President Bush's new strategy. In effect, the president asked for a campaign to achieve regime change in Iraq, but what he got was a campaign of regime removal. This is not an academic distinction. Getting rid of Saddam and his henchmen was comparatively easy; replacing a well-entrenched dictatorship--in a region that knows little else--with a more democratic and pluralistic form of government is proving to be, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it, a "long, hard slog." In essence, the Pentagon's desire to fight a rapid war undercut its ability to fight a decisive war.
  
• The conduct of the invasion shaped the difficulties of the counterinsurgency campaign. The "just-in-time" nature of the plan magnified the challenges of even relatively minor problems, such as the heavy resistance of the Saddam fedayeen in the south of Iraq or the delays caused by an unexpectedly persistent sandstorm. Turkey's refusal to permit a northern front to the war likewise contributed to the difficulties of projecting force beyond Baghdad, into the notorious "Sunni Triangle," the most significant area of resistance. More fundamentally, however, counterinsurgency is a manpower-intensive undertaking, and the Pentagon simply did not have sufficient troops in the field--especially in the immediate aftermath of Saddam's fall--to prosecute this "small war" with the same primacy as it displayed during the "big war" that preceded it.
  
• Postwar Iraq, despite its many problems, is notable foremost for the "war that hasn't happened." Contrary to widespread predictions by the purveyors of conventional wisdom that Iraq was primed for sectarian civil war, the insurgents have failed to provoke Iraq's Shi'a majority or the Sunni or the Kurds, thus far, to large-scale violence against each other. A pluralistic, liberal-minded government has been installed in Baghdad, determined to hold democratic elections, with the support of the international community. Furthermore, the two essential ingredients for long-term victory--the standing up of Iraqi security forces and bipartisan, public support in the United States for continued engagement there--remain in place. Although the insurgency has succeeded in driving some lesser contributors to the international coalition from the country, the Bush administration has successfully persuaded the United Nations and NATO to contribute to the reconstruction of Iraq.

In the effort to transform the greater Middle East, our security interests and our political principles are in alignment. But while the Bush administration has charted the correct strategy in Iraq--indeed, the only course that offers America and the world some realistic hope for security, liberty, and prosperity--it has thus far failed to match its military means to its strategic ends. If the primary goal of the United States is to expand the liberal international order to the greater Middle East, abandoning its traditional power-balancing approach to the region, the American military is inadequately structured and sized for the long-term, constabulary, stability operations this requires. Although the Pentagon has been slow to acknowledge it, the U.S. military is increasingly engaged across the Muslim world in a series of low-level, open-ended counterinsurgencies against fundamentalist Islam--of which Iraq is the most visible and important. Simply put, these guerrilla wars are the operational reality of the global war on terrorism--and they cannot be won by a military only marginally changed from the force inherited from the Clinton administration.

If the United States is to succeed in creating a different kind of Middle East, it must create a different kind of military. Consequently, the experience of the Iraq war proves it is time to obligate the resources and create the institutions capable of achieving these ambitious objectives. Foremost, it is vital that the Pentagon recognizes that the present level of U.S. troop commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere in the Middle East is not a temporary, anomalous "spike," but rather, a new baseline of operations.

The global war on terrorism is a marathon, but the United States has a military--indeed, an entire foreign policy bureaucracy--built for sprints. The question now is whether America will transform itself for the generational struggle ahead or withdraw and consign itself to a more limited victory. But the latter is only a euphemism for defeat.

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