AEI resident fellow Thomas Donnelly assesses the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. efforts in Iraq and their relevance for American aims in the broader Middle East in his new book Operation Iraqi Freedom: A Strategic Assessment (AEI Press, 2004). Donnelly finds that the military planned "regime removal" far more skillfully than "regime change," but that the counterinsurgency campaign has been far more successful than reported. The author judges the military means deployed as insufficient to achieve the political goals for the Middle East articulated by President George W. Bush.
Donnelly traces the development of the U.S. "balance-of-power" strategy in the last century. During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, the United States sought better relations with Saddam's regime as a buffer against Iranian fundamentalism. Even the Gulf War in 1991 became "an attempt to reestablish a balance of power in the region," with the allies ending hostilities once Iraqis troops withdrew from Kuwait. The allies then sought to contain Saddam's aggression by establishing no-fly zones, sending weapons inspectors to measure Saddam's commitment to destroy chemical and biological weapons, instituting an oil-for-food program to deliver humanitarian relief to the Iraqi people, and, at times, answering Saddam's provocation with targeted airstrikes. In 1998, U.S. policy in Iraq officially began to call for "regime change," yet little action followed.
The 2001 terrorist attacks ended the U.S. "balance-of-power" strategy. President Bush named Iraq as part of an "axis of evil," arguing that "Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies. . . . If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long." When Saddam failed to comply with the last in a long line of UN resolutions, "regime change" shifted from rhetorical flourish to military reality, with the president asserting that a free Iraq would become a beacon of freedom for the greater Middle East and help protect U.S. national security, since "stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defined mission goals as ending Saddam's regime, isolating and eliminating weapons of mass destruction, capturing terrorists and uncovering information on terrorist networks, delivering humanitarian aid to the Iraqi people, and assisting the Iraqi transition to representative self-government. Despite limited intelligence capabilities within Iraq, the U.S.-led coalition removed Saddam's regime within one month, a degree of success that seemed to signal a speedy withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Instead, Operation Iraqi Freedom entered its most dangerous and perhaps least plotted phase: providing security for Iraq's political transformation. With a pause in military operations once the regime fell, guerrilla resistance began to grow against the allied occupation. The insurgents targeted allied troops to damage public opinion on the home front and attempted to foment an Iraqi civil war to block democratization. In the face of mounting attacks, General John Abizaid, then nominated to become head of U.S. Central Command, conceded in June 2003 that a large number of U.S. troops would be required in Iraq "for the foreseeable future." After Saddam's capture in December, insurgents increasingly turned on Iraqi supporters of the allies, and the insurgency has never gained popular support among Iraqis.
Establishing an Iraqi democracy despite ongoing violence has the potential to open up new political possibilities for the Middle East, to affirm the American presence in the region as a liberating force, and, as Donnelly argues, to remove any doubt "that the Persian Gulf and the surrounding areas lie within the U.S. 'security perimeter.'" Failure in Iraq, however, could "excite a new competition for power" in the region, increase terrorism, and raise the probability of attacks against Americans involving biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. Operation Iraqi Freedom demonstrates the folly of waging conventional war against U.S. forces but may make terrorism and guerrilla warfare more attractive and potent options.
Iraq remains, as the president said, "the central front" in the war on terrorism. Counterinsurgency operations like those in Iraq will occur with greater frequency in the future, requiring an increase in military manpower. The task to spread democracy in the Middle East is a worthy mission; the greatest internal challenge to its success is, in Donnelly's words, "to rebuild a force adequate to the missions so clearly before it." Thus, while U.S. strategy has successfully transformed, U.S. capabilities must meet the challenges of strategic implementation.
