Selective Amnesia on the "Fruits" of Military Victory
When the Invasion of Iraq was still on Pentagon drawing boards, Colin Powell warned President George W. Bush to remember "Pottery Barn Rules." He cautioned that taking Saddam Hussein out may sound like a good idea right now but a country that destroys the government of another country has an obligation to replace it. In other words, "if you break it, you own it."
It turns out Powell was wrong about Pottery Barn. They don't require customers to pay for merchandise they accidentally break. But he was spot on about Iraq. The Iraq War began on March 20, 2003. Saddam's statue was removed from a public square in Baghdad less than 3 weeks later and President Bush declared "mission accomplished" on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln. At that point only 172 of the 4815 American soldiers that would die in Iraq had perished. Only 3.5 percent of the troops that died in Iraq died in the "Iraq War" the other 96.5 percent died in the "Iraq peace."
The Bush Administration remained in denial over the number of lives and the amount of money that would be necessary to comply with "Pottery Barn Rules" even after the invasion was over and U.S. troops were running the country from Saddam's old palace in central Baghdad.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, warned publicly, more than a month before the invasion that "something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be required to police Iraq. But it was not until September, more than 5 months after the invasion began that the Bush White House started facing up to the harsh realities that their actions had wrought.
Following reports that the occupation force was not only inadequate in size but lacked essential equipment such as body armor, the White House finally submitted a supplemental budget request to the Congress asking for an additional $87.5 billion. That money, on top of the $50.4 billion already appropriated for Iraq made it clear that Vice President Cheney's promise that the war would cost only $80 to $100 billion grossly underestimated the price of the full endeavor.
Economists and budget analysts are still arguing about how much the Iraq War cost and indeed many bills such as veteran post-traumatic stress treatment continue to arrive at the Treasury every day. But the lowest estimates are more than $800 billion and many argue that the real cost was more than several trillion. The vast majority of those funds were appropriated not to take out Saddam and his 375,000 man army consisting of 11 infantry divisions, 3 mechanized divisions, and 3 armored divisions but in the failed attempt to create a nation after we had destroyed the one we didn't like.
So here we are again. Much of the territory that we "liberated" from Saddam's harsh rule is now in the hands of a group that makes him look benevolent and the voices calling for another invasion are growing louder by the day. The focus of the discussion is increasingly directed to what would be required to capture and defeat the 20,000 to 30,000 troops now believed to be under the command of the Islamic State. That is a force less than half the size of Saddam's elite Republican Guard which accounted for only about a quarter of his entire military.
The question that the "lets blow them up crowd" never seems to ask is what happens after our tanks, bombers and artillery have finished mauling ISIS positions? Who runs the territory that they ran? Once again the answer is "Potter Barn Rules" -- we do.
We could go in and kill the bad guys and then abruptly pull out and see what happens. Perhaps President Assad of Syria could fill the vacuum. But the odds are strongly against it. Assad had lost control over that part of Syria well before ISIS had evolved into the force we know today.
We could let the Shia led government in Baghdad attempt to once again rule the Sunni regions of their country -- regions that have been in revolt against their leadership almost since the day they assumed power. The prospect of Baghdad regaining lasting control of the region is remote or non-existent. Much of what has sustained ISIS despite all of it flaws is that the Sunni's in Western Iraq so hate the prospect of domination by the Shias in Baghdad that the bloody rule of ISIS is seen to be preferable.
ISIS itself proves that eliminating a bad government can very possibly result in creating a worse one. If American lives and treasure are to expended to achieve an objective (i.e. political stability at the hands of a non-hostile government as opposed to "killing bad guys") shouldn't we know what the objective is and be given a semi-plausible plan for achieving it.
So what is the answer? I think we have had it all along. Rather than a quick and easy "blowing-up" of our adversaries with yet another show of U.S. military might we can encourage indigenous forces to take control and develop into a legitimate and acceptable alternative to ISIS.
As a solution, it is not at all satisfying to the American psyche. It is slow and frustrating. Some will argue that it will allow ISIS to survive longer and as a result subject the United States to a great threat of terror attacks. But the evidence is that destroying the command and control of terrorist organizations has not protected us from terror attacks. We cannot destroy the ideology of jihadism by destroying ISIS but we can create a vacuum that will require our young men and women in uniform to become easy targets of that ideology.
Anyone who offers a plan for dealing with ISIS and cannot offer a detailed blueprint for managing the territories now controlled by the organization is leading us down a path that we have been down far too often in recent decades. They should at least be willing to tell us why they were so wrong in the past but can be trusted to be right now.