Learning lessons from the Iraq War

It's fascinating to me that many respected military analysts, including serving officers and civilians who support Bush's "stay the course", are out there making far more severe criticisms of the Iraq War and even of the performance of the Army itself than most Democratic politicians I hear. For instance: Revisions in Need of Revising: What Went Wrong in the Iraq War by David Hendrickson and Robert Tucker Dec 2005 (Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College).

This paper summarizines a number of the criticisms of the Iraq War and strongly suggest that even with the best planning and execution - which obviously didn't occur - the war would have inevitably been a long, bloody mess. Here's one paragraph on the relationship between means and ends in this situation:

It is notable, indeed, that the argument over "what went wrong" has seldom, if at all, brought into question the tactics employed by U.S. forces, but there was, in fact, a deep contradiction between the democracy the United States said it was trying to build and the methods it employed to battle the insurgency. Democracy, as it is commonly understood, is about more than free and fair elections. It requires "independent courts, equality before the law, and constitutional limits on the powers of government. It establishes independent institutions to control and punish corruption and abuse of power." No one in a democracy "may be arrested, imprisoned, or exiled arbitrarily. No one may be denied freedom without a fair and public hearing by an impartial court." Such restraints, however, had no bearing on the conduct of U.S. military forces, whose actions were governed formally by the law of armed conflict rather than the protection of individual rights typical of constitutional democracies. The U.S. military relied on military intelligence, often defective, rather than judicial warrants to conduct raids and pursue suspects. It arrested and imprisoned many individuals without even a pretense of fair and public hearings by impartial courts and often left family members with no knowledge of the whereabouts of their kin or the charges brought against them. There were few constitutional restraints on U.S. actions, and none reachable by Iraqi authorities. For all the effort that American officials put into enshrining various individual rights in the TAL [transitional law], the United States was equally insistent that the restraints on governmental power that the TAL incorporated did not apply to the coalition forces that actually held the police and military power in the country. Even if the plea is accepted that such measures were permitted by the laws of war and justified on grounds of military necessity, the flouting of such requirements by U.S. forces could not but undercut the U.S. case for democracy. Such conduct communicated to Iraqis that, while limitations on the power of the state ought to be enshrined in the constitution, they might easily be brushed aside by the appeal to national security. (my emphasis)

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