Ten Year Anniversary of the Iraq War

Ten Year Anniversary of the Iraq War

Last week was the tenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. I did not support the invasion in 2003 because I lived in Belgium and barely knew anything about it. But I have supported since returning home, and after learning all I could about it (and while going to school I wrote a 56 page paper supporting the decision to invade; I cited more than 150 sources). In the end, here is my ten year, very quick, final analysis:

The arguments for either side can be classified as moral or strategic. The moral arguments against invading were perhaps the most widely discussed in the news and by pundits. I rarely found any of them compelling; they tended to be devoid of historic insight and scope (though they often pretended to be highly cognizant of history). Moral arguments for invading were more often compelling, yet less often heard. Strategic arguments were strong on both sides. The issues here are much more complex and when tied to US grand strategy the issues become quite vexing and difficult to clearly side with or against.

So, for my calculation, I sum up the two types of arguments and give them a score. The pro-invasion moral arguments get a score of 1, and the uncompelling anti-invasion moral arguments were zero. The pro-invasion strategic arguments are a 1; but the anti-invasion strategic arguments are also a 1. So, they cancel out, leaving me with only the positive 1 from the pro-invasion moral arguments, and so I continue to believe it was a good idea. It is too bad that in the real world decision makers cannot use my simplified system. It makes it so easy for me to pretend to analyze important events from a great distance.

From a ten year perspective, here are 2 insights I don’t think I've read in any news: The greatest intelligence failure on the US side had nothing to do with WMD. It was the failure to predict the scope of the insurgency which followed the toppling of the Baathist regime. There were really two wars: the US vs Iraq, which ended in 3 weeks of the initial invasion. Then, the US, allied with Iraq, vs the insurgents (as well as others who flooded into Iraq, such as al Qaeda). And that is the second insight: one of the main reasons al Qaeda degraded so much from 2006 to 2009 was that they all went to Iraq and then got destroyed by the US military. They came to Iraq to fight, and they lost and became a terrorist movement with franchises (AQAP, AQIM and Al Qaeda Iraq, the latter of which is now dismantled), rather than one big terrorist group. In other words, the Iraq War actually had a big part to play in defeating al Qaeda globally, putting it where it is today.

And of course, this mini-commentary of the ten year anniversary would be incomplete without mentioning that the biggest intelligence failure of Saddam was his belief that the US would not invade at all. Had he believed we were going to really invade, he might not have pushed us so far and deceived us so much, and he might still be there, destroying the lives of his people. Thank goodness he misread George W. Bush.

China: A Potential Superpower
This is a layman’s big picture analysis of China’s power status.

It was brought upon by a throw away comment from a friend who, in mentioning that the US and China have each been getting the most medals, noted that it is funny how "superpowers compete through the Olympics."

China, however, only has the potential to be a superpower, as do some other nations, such as Japan and India. The following explains why.

There are at least three areas in which a superpower must be globally formidable: military, economic and political.

Economy

China’s economy is large and expanding rapidly. While this rate of growth cannot endure forever, it is already placing it as the second largest economy in the world. It has fingers in every continent. It has an abundance of resources, and an abundance of the three fundamental aspects of an economy: land, labor and capital (though the latter is not as guaranteed for them as some other economies, as immense capital generation has its own set of constraints).

There are some powerful differences between China and the two superpowers of the last century, however. China’s economy is dominated by exports. It cannot survive without them, because, like any export-driven economy, its own people cannot consume all of its surplus. It literally must export or shrink. This is not a problem for the US, and was not a problem for the Soviets. A superpower’s economy cannot be so constrained and limited in scope. China is currently working to alter this, but it will take time, and will be difficult under the current global economic climate.

Military

Now, combine this critical conundrum of China’s economy to the current state of the oceans. The US navy dominates the world’s oceans to a degree unseen in the history of the world. Global trade is literally contingent upon the US navy’s permission. In a war against China, the US navy could catastrophically shut down their export-dominated economy by eliminating critical sea travel. In a hypothetical WWIII with the Soviets, this would not have been possible, as they were far more self-sufficient than China currently is. For historical precedent: the real unsung heroes of the Pacific War were the US submarines which destroyed Japan’s economy and its ability to continue the war beyond a certain point. China has no counterstrike to this, or similar tactic to use on America, despite many Americans' fears that China "owns all our debt."

Any power that has this sort of disadvantage should probably not be considered a superpower yet. There is a reason China has recently focused so heavily on their navy. They know their problem and want to rectify it. But it will take time (blue water navies with significant power projection take more than a generation to produce).

Military analysts believe that the US could prevent China from invading and conquering Taiwan, a tiny island right next door. China could certainly invade and dominate adjacent, small, continental nations - but this is well within the ability of a regional power, which is what China is.

China cannot militarily dominate significant nations at significant distances. The US has consistently done this since becoming a superpower; the Soviets consistently did so as well. The bottom line is that China’s military, despite its fearsome size, simply does not have the capabilities that the military of a superpower has.

Political

China’s political clout is heavy in some areas of the world. But, its own neighborhood is fraught with nations that have the ability to constrain it. By contrast, no nation in the entire western hemisphere can ultimately constrain the determined political goals of the US – nor could the nations surrounding the USSR.

The USSR had a great many lesser powers that it had dominated militarily, and then pretended were in an alliance with them, called the Warsaw Pact. The only real comparison of this to China is its relationship with N. Korea. Though China could attempt to create its own version of a Warsaw Pact, it is far from it, and there are significant barriers to its potentiality. For example, Japan and India would move to prevent this – and their aggregate opposition would probably be enough. There were never two countries (or six or eight or twenty) in Russia’s neighborhood which could have prevented Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

China wants to, but simply doesn't have the sort of world class political clout that an actual superpower wields.

Comparisons

I know I’m such a hard critic of the UN. I mean, should I really expect them to have enough time to take care of the problems of the world when such critical work as the dissolving of Switzerland and the re-drawing of the borders of Italy, France and Germany are at stake?

Anyways…

When people often spoke of Iraq as a second Vietnam, there were typically two points, or dimensions, they were trying to show. The first is to say that both wars were misguided and wrong in design. The second is to say that we will lose in Iraq like we did in Vietnam (the moral being that we’d better pull out, because we’re gonna lose anyway).

In addressing only the latter dimension, I say phooey. Anyone who has read anything on the military aspect of Vietnam will tell you that the result was unexpected and very unlikely to have happened. The chances were extremely remote that the NVA, even with the Vietcong, would win. It was a great upset in the course of history. As my dad once mentioned to me, the South Vietnamese were a match militarily all by themselves for the North, before ever adding the US Army into the equation. Additionally, the US won every single battle, yet lost the war. Who could possibly account for that, on a military level? The answer is, no one because we didn’t lose the war on a military level.

Now, back to the Iraq war. The US had a much better trained, funded, equipped and prepared military in 2003 than in 1965. Comparing the two wars for the purpose of arguing that we will also lose the Iraq War is like saying ‘well, I got struck by lightning on a clear day on October 5th in 2008, and now it is another clear day on October 5th 2009, so I better not go outside because I imagine I’ll be struck by lightning.’ Who would say that?

One problem with comparing the two wars in order to show we will lose in Iraq is the fact that the casualty rates are extremely different. In six years of war we have lost about 4000 soldiers in Iraq. In the eight years of direct involvement of US troops in Vietnam fifteen times more soldiers died (about 60,000). Wounded rates show a similar disparity with Vietnam involving ten times more than the Iraq war (about 300,000 to 30,000).

I find it difficult to believe we’re going to militarily lose the Iraq war with such low casualty rates. As far as I understand, this is an unprecedentedly low death rate for any conflict of similar scale.

After all this, let me change my mind and state that the comparison arguments are correct: if we lose the post 2003 counter-insurgent portion of the Iraq War,* it will not be because our military failed, it will be because our politics and policies fail. And that is an accurate comparison to Vietnam.

*[because we must acknowledge that technically the US already won the Iraq War by demolishing the old Iraq army and regime in three weeks in 2003].

Now, if we are so awesome, how come we can’t just win these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? The answer is because we aren’t fighting a war with either Afghanistan or Iraq anymore. Both of these countries are great allies with us, since late 2001 and mid 2003 respectively. We are trying to a) stabilize their infant democracies, b) inoculate their governments against corruption, 3) eliminate the extremely evil and violent insurgents and jihadists who blow up schools, mosques and weddings, and 4) train armed forces and police to be self-sufficient in fighting these terrorists without the US.

In case you didn’t know, only the last half of those goals are what the US military does. In fact, only number 3 is what the military really does.
Not only is the military doing jobs it is not meant to do, but it is doing them under conditions that did not exist in other similar scenarios. Let me explain this by comparing the development of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan to that in Japan and the US.

Japan: after World War II it took seven years for the US to export democracy to Japan.

US: declared independence in 1776, but it wasn’t until 1791, fifteen years later, that both the Constitution and Bill of Rights had been created and ratified. However you interpret when the real birth of the US democratic republic was, it was necessarily several years after 1776.

So, as a first comparison, it takes time
Don't expect the current 'wars' which are actually counter-insurgencies coupled with nation building do do wonders instantly.

But there are also some differences to be appreciated:

• Neither Japan nor the US had severe poverty (both peoples at the two times actually being among the richest on earth (although Japan had been devastated by war)). Afghanistan nevertheless had far severer poverty and Iraq wasn’t exactly swimming in wealth, having been bankrupted by Saddam.
• Neither Japan nor the US had intense drug problems like Afghanistan.
• And most stunningly of all, neither Japan nor the US had violently radical factions who are willing to kill their own people in order to kick out the foreigners who are seeking to help their people (which in a word, is insanity).

I’d have to say that these are significant differences. Be patient. Don’t give up. Let the military have all the resources it needs. Let our allies in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan) have all the resources they need. We need more stable democracies in the Middle East.* Heck, we need more stable democracies in the world. We must succeed in Afghanistan because if we do not, then necessarily, yes necessarily, it will revert to the ultra-oppressive, international terrorist-sponsoring, major drug-producing cesspool it was.

*[it would be great to have more than one (Israel), wouldn’t it?]