<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB110713926540440786,00.html>
The Wall Street Journal
January 31, 2005
COMMENTARY
A Time for Humility
By ELIOT A. COHEN
January 31, 2005; Page A18
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 United
States 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,
to include 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 United States 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.
Mr. Cohen is Robert E. Osgood Professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies, at Johns Hopkins University.
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