I’ve read a bit lately from some military experts who explain why starting the Iraq war made strategic sense, and the arguments are good ones.
We were already fighting a war in Afghanistan, which we considered to be a “just” war. Most of the world – the civilized world, anyway – backed our intent to take out the Taliban which had allowed Al Qaeda to flourish, and which supported and protected Bin Laden and his cohorts, and who had developed and carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks on the USA, as well as others before then. However, no one from “outside” wins wars in Afghanistan. The mountain pass into the country from Pakistan is known as the “Hindu Kush”, which means “killer of Hindus” from ancient Afghan / Indian conflicts. The British empire and all its might in the 19th century couldn’t conquer it. The Russians foundered and pretty much lost their entire empire on the gamble that they could take it over and somehow gain access to Indian Ocean bases.
Despite the easy going of the early part of the war for the United States and its allies: B52s using carpet bombs and smart bombs, and relatively inexpensive support for the Northern Alliance and some other homegrown opposition to the Taliban, a “boots on the ground” war was going to be every bit as expensive to the USA as it had been to anyone else who tried to take over the country from outside its borders.
The description for the strategy that had us invade Iraq was described as “accidentally brilliant”, and the rationale for that attack really was brilliant, if it actually occurred as described by the experts I’ve heard from. Baghdad, as one of Islam’s centers, and Iraq’s ancient civilization center at the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, was and is a psychologically important area to Muslims, especially the fundamentalist radical Muslims who had taken over Afghanistan’s government. Attacking there “affronted” the enemy in Afghanistan so much that it could not be ignored.
The brilliant strategy would have been to attack the Iraqi Army – as we did – and chew it up slowly while advancing on Baghdad. Saddam hardly mattered in this equation. The intent of the fight there should have been to bring the overwhelming might of US ground and air forces to ground of its choosing: flat and level, open, generally unpopulated in the southern part of the country, open to re-supply from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and sealift cabability to the Persian Gulf ports, and draw in a lot of the fighters who would have preferred to stay in the mountains, hills and caves in Afghanistan. Iraq was – clearly – ideal ground for the American tanks, artillery and infantry with all of the air support that the Air Force and Navy could also offer.
To a large extent that strategy worked, and many of the “deck of cards” ringleaders who were eventually captured or killed had been operating in Afghanistan before they were drawn into the fighting in Iraq.
Unfortunately, the civilian leadership of the entire operation screwed the pooch after the fall of Baghdad. One of the worst decisions was to fire the entire Iraqi Army. This created a huge pool of unemployed men, most of them still armed, and created a windfall for the insurgency.
No matter what strategic sense it might make to try to redo what we did once, or to retake the country, it’s unlikely in the extreme that we will attempt to do so. There is no support for that mission any more, and there’s no money for it, either.
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