The Cheney-Bush legacy from the Iraq War

If things are going as badly as it sounds in Iraq, we are probably much closer to the end of the main American intervention than to the beginning. I hope enough Americans will be able to remember what a horrible thing Dick Cheney and George Bush and the Christian Right Republican supporters and neocon zealots did with this war, so that people will never allow authoritarians like this to come to power again.

Jeffrey Record wrote in 2004 in Dark Victory: America's Second War With Iraq:

Perhaps the most important lesson of America's second war with Iraq is that successful military operations are not to be confused with successful political outcomes — or to put it another way, the object of war is not military victory per se but a better peace.

Though Carl von Clausewitz correctly observed that war is a continuation of politics by other means, Americans have traditionally viewed war as a substitute for politics. They like their wars unadulterated by politics. For this reason they have tended to define war's success or failure in terms of combat outcomes rather than in broader grand strategic terms, and accordingly have discounted the importance of war termination and the transition to peace. This outlook is reflected in civilian decision-makers' failure to accord war termination adequate priority and in the professional military's disdain for so-called operations other than war, especially those entailing peacemaking and nation-building responsibilities.

Regrettably, the United States was no better prepared for war termination in the Gulf in 2003 than it was in 1991, and though the George W. Bush administration is rhetorically committed to rebuilding the Iraq state, it remains to be seen whether it is really prepared to go the distance in terms of time, resources, and blood. The record in Afghanistan is not encouraging. It is moreover clear that the Defense Department's civilian leadership, which is still running the show in Iraq, despite the replacement of Jay Garner by Paul Bremer, grossly underestimated the responsibilities, costs, and dangers the United States would encounter in a post-Saddam Iraq. The situation will surely and sorely test a White House and Pentagon that are viscerally opposed to nation-building, notwithstanding the administration's commitment to the Middle East's political transformation. (my emphasis)

Yes, the situation tested them. And they failed.

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