Here’s where the administration’s assumptions reached dizzying heights: The war would be waged so decisively by our “transformed,” high-tech force that reconstruction would be simplified to the point of handing over the reins of power to Chalabi and the “externals” in a political “shock therapy” married to an economic equivalent by which rapid-fire flows of foreign direct investment, in addition to jump-started oil revenue, would rescue the Iraqi economy from its decades of abuse (e.g., war, state control) and neglect (isolation, sanctions). Unlike the “incompetent” Clinton administration, Bush-Cheney would not be reduced to consulting opinion polls, placating allies, or submitting itself to a long-term babysitting job, for all of those “gives” represented failure—failure to lead decisively.
Did the Bush administration, in its extreme pride, have any difficulty locating military leadership that met its biases? Absolutely not. As I stated earlier, previewing Ricks’s analysis, our post-Vietnam generation leadership took great pride in fielding a “first-half team,” believing the “second half” lay beyond their logical purview. So Rumsfeld was right when he responded to complaining troops in Kuwait one afternoon in late 2004 that “you go to war with the Army you have” and not “the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” The army we took to Iraq was the army that the Army itself had wanted to use there, the one it had been buying and building for the previous thirty years, ignoring the mountain of operational experience accumulated since Vietnam. Colin Powell might have switched sides to the State Department, but his ethos lived on in his beloved military: We do war. We don’t do windows. Tell me which smoking holes you want and which bodies need snatching, and then tell me when I get to go home.
To say then that Bush-Cheney and the neocons abandoned the principles of realism is incorrect. They stuck to the narrow principles all right, but in their pride they vastly expanded the acceptable parameters: They would wage war with little responsibility for the peace, for their true goals (primacy and prerogative) brooked no such obligation.
Envy, Leading to the Misguided Redirect on Iran
Americans, in their natural state of ideological skepticism, love to debase our victories—military or otherwise—with the observation “We may have fought X, but Y won the war.” So America fought the Nazis only to have the Soviets win World War II. We fought the Soviets only to have the Taliban win Afghanistan. Most recently, we toppled Saddam only to have the Iranians win Iraq. To some, these realizations say, “Be careful with whom you align,” but to me they say, “Co-opt whom you must to win wars, but be realistic about what comes next.”
The Bush administration was supremely unrealistic about what came next in the Persian Gulf following our takedown of Saddam. As Vali Nasr argues in his brilliant 2006 book, The Shia Revival, what came next was completely predictable. When Bush-Cheney created the first Arab Shiite state in Iraq, they naturally unleashed a pent-up demand among the region’s long-suppressed Shia for more political power, in turn re-elevating Shiite Iran back to the role of regional kingpin, a position it had not truly enjoyed since the earliest days of the Islamic revolution there. Naturally, the Bush administration seemed aghast at this turn of events. Expecting some Iraqi version of Thomas Jefferson-cum-Ahmed Chalabi, instead we got Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a Nelson Mandela-like figure for Iraqi Shia whose veto power over every political solution we proposed was substantial. Born in Iran, Sistani speaks Arabic with a pronounced Persian accent, which naturally stokes fears of undue Iranian influence. But in truth, Tehran’s mullahs have more to fear from Sistani’s “quietism” philosophy, or the notion that religion is best practiced when it is removed from politics. Over time, a Shia-dominated Iraq that nonetheless grants significant autonomy to its Sunni minorities in the west and north (the non-Arab Kurds) could well play Poland to Iran’s Russia—that is, it could serve as the cultural conduit for liberalizing norms.
But that scenario requires that the United States acquiesce to the inescapable logic of Iran becoming a major sponsor of Iraq’s recovery, or at least that of its Shiite portion. Much as Turkey has—despite its separatist fears—quietly eased itself into becoming the external sponsor of the Kurdish region’s economic boom (with $10 billion in foreign direct investment), and spunky Jordan aspires to the same for the western Sunni provinces, Iran is the logical regional integrator of Shia Iraq, and thus the main beneficiary of its liberation from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Given America’s long-standing fixation on Iran’s nuclear program, as well as Tehran’s vigorous support for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, that simply was not an outcome that the Bush administration, in its envy of Iran’s improved regional fortunes, could accept.
No, there was never any doubt among Western regional experts that Iran would benefit from America’s decisions to topple both the Taliban and Saddam, its two neighboring enemies. But what truly amazes me to this day is that the Bush administration somehow managed to get nothing in return from Tehran for these favors, refusing from the start to acknowledge, much less offer compensation for, Iran’s repeated offers of substantive cooperation. Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had managed our World War II relationship with the Soviet Union in the same manner, when we had bigger fights to wage on Russia’s eastern and western borders? Instead of co-opting Iran in these two conflicts, Bush-Cheney chose to continue containing Iran in deference to the wishes of our regional allies, the Saudis and the Israelis, who likewise feared Iran’s further rise.
And so, just as Bush’s Big Bang strategy was yielding significant fruit all over the region a couple of years into our occupation of Iraq (e.g., the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon and Syria’s withdrawal, local elections in Saudi Arabia, early signs of a political thaw in Egypt, the first-ever free elections in Palestine), the White House began its slow but steady drum-beat on possible military strikes against Iran. Just when Bush-Cheney had their wish, and it seemed as though the region’s entire chessboard was in play, the administration redirected its entire strategy toward isolating Iran and rolling back its regional influence. By refusing direct bilateral talks until Tehran yielded—unconditionally—on its pursuit of the bomb, Bush-Cheney signaled Iran that it would continue targeting the country for regime change until the Iranians acquired a nuclear deterrent. Talk about a Catch-22! In effect, Bush-Cheney played the role of the cop who orders the suspect to drop his weapon while giving every indication that he plans to fire his own. After all, America’s military had just dispatched two neighboring “suspects,” so how could we then, in all good conscience, claim to be surprised by Tehran’s reach for the bomb?
Consider this more forceful analogy: I walk up to three guys sitting on a park bench and shoot the guy on the right through the forehead. Next I double-tap the one on the left. In the meantime, the fellow in the middle frantically fumbles for his handgun. My question for you is: Is this guy irrational? Or did I make this decision for him?
As for Iran’s assumption that getting the bomb will keep it safe from a U.S. invasion designed to topple the regime? Well, on that score the mullahs have only six-plus-decades-and-counting of world history that says they’re exactly correct. So again, who’s being irrational here? Who’s being unrealistic? Which side has lost control of its emotions?
Here’s the inescapable ground truth: America’s choices up to now have led to a region-wide Shia revival that has greatly empowered Iran, which as a result must be accommodated on some level if we’re going to stabilize both Iraq and Afghanistan. If we, in our strategic impatience, cannot stand Iran’s short-term gains, then we have no business attempting to transform the region. Grand strategy is not about what you can pull off by the end of your administration; it’s about how you systematically improve the global security environment for the next administration. By chasing the dream of America’s primacy while denying Iran’s regional version, Bush-Cheney stalled their own grand strategy of reshaping the Middle East. In the end, Tehran’s mullahs get everything Stalin achi
eved after World War II: the bomb plus hegemonic influence over half the region. What did we get? Too many American soldiers unnecessarily killed.
Sloth, Leading to the U.S. Military Finally Asserting Command
This strategic sin emanated naturally from the first five: The quest for primacy meant Bush-Cheney entered into the occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq with far too few allies and thus far too few troops. Their conflation of various enemies disallowed the effective regionalization of the solution after their arrogance in war translated into botched postwar execution. When things got bad enough, they located an effective scapegoat in Iran and began a painfully transparent countdown to war, to which Tehran responded by preemptively launching an “all-proxy” war in the region in the late summer of 2006, siccing its minions (Hezbollah, Hamas) against our own (Israel), all the while ratcheting up its mischief in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, as our body count grew higher and the institutional pain in both the Army and the Marine Corps grew too great for their leaders to bear, the Bush administration finally acquiesced and essentially outsourced the Iraq occupation to the generals with the decision to launch the surge in early 2007. What was Bush’s war to begin now became General David Petraeus’s war to end. For a presidency devoted to expanding its prerogatives, it was a stunning abdication of power engineered behind the scenes, according to Bob Woodward in The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008, by retired Army four-star general Jack Keane, Petraeus’s longtime mentor. After Petraeus’s historic testimony before Congress in September 2007, Keane told him privately, “What you have is beyond what any other leader has”—an ability to shape public opinion on the war even more than the President of the United States.
With Rumsfeld cashiered by the 2006 midterm elections and the Iraq Study Group begging for some regional political dialogue, our military was finally given the go-ahead to embrace a non-kinetically focused and therefore lengthy counterinsurgency strategy of empowering the locals to police their own. This change took many forms, the most important one being that our troops increased their community visibility by getting out of their big, isolating bases and effectively living among the people, like cops on the beat. Coming at the time of the Anbar “awakening,” the surge created an immediate breathing space that the Bush administration made little effort to exploit through regional diplomacy, thus effectively acquiescing to Iraq’s soft partition into four spheres: Kurdish, Sunni, Shia, and the capital city of Baghdad. With the Kurds essentially autonomous from day one (really, since we started the northern No-Fly Zone more than a decade earlier) and the Sunni tribes effectively “flipped” through a combination of our bribes and their being fed up with al Qaeda’s brutality, General Petraeus turned next to quelling intra-Shiite conflict and slowly pacifying a Baghdad already “cleansed” in ethnic terms (hint: the Shia won), while continuing to prosecute al Qaeda’s lingering presence in the Sunni north.
That’s the CliffsNotes version of the timeline. What’s important for this discussion is how long it took the Bush administration to realize the folly of their grand strategic design. Transforming the Middle East was always going to be about connecting it to the world at large, but by demanding virtually unilateral control over the focal points of Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush-Cheney ended up isolating America in both the Persian Gulf and Central Asia more than any potential rivals—including the Iranians. What that forced our military to do was to fight both wars under the worst possible strategic conditions: progressively denuded of allies and increasingly beset by spoilers on all sides, we had simply no military solution to these inherently political problems. A “clear-and-hold” military strategy meant little if the follow-up consisted of sparse aid and virtually no economic reconstruction, two processes that would reach inflection point only if and when solutions were regionalized—admitting that neighboring powers would essentially drive economic integration leading to sustainable political relationships. So yes, Iran wins. So do Turkey and Jordan. Beyond them, so do China and Russia and India. Admit those “losses” and whatever breathing space your counterinsurgency strategy may create will eventually bear some fruit. Deny them and all you accomplish is to delay future civil wars, at the end of which we’ll still see the same “winners” collect their “earnings” while we contemplate our deeply sunk costs.
Inevitably as a result of the Bush administration’s poor strategic choices, our Army and Marine Corps were forced to climb a steep operational learning curve. Fortunately, the military’s tipping point roughly corresponded to the bankrupting of Bush-Cheney’s political capital across the summer of 2005 through the fall of 2006, or basically from the debacle of the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina until the Republicans lost both houses of Congress in the midterm elections. So while the Bush White House busied itself in redirecting its strategic attention from Iraq to Iran, the Army and Marines were studiously processing the lessons learned from returning military leaders, exemplified by then Major General David Petraeus’s return to command the Army’s primary “schoolhouse,” the Command and General Staff College in Leavenworth, Kansas, and then Major General James Mattis’s return to helm the Marine Corps’s primary schoolhouse, the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Virginia. Together, these two “monks of war,” as I dubbed them in an Esquire profile, oversaw the creation of the first-ever dual-designated Army-Marine Corps field manual on counterinsurgency operations, published formally in December 2006.
Contrary to the public perception that the new counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine represents our military’s adjustment to the grand strategic vision put forth by Bush-Cheney, it’s the exact opposite that’s true. For as Sarah Sewall, a Harvard human rights expert who collaborated in the COIN’s construction, states, “The field manual implicitly asks Americans to define their aims in the world and accept the compromises they require. COIN will not effectively support a revolutionary grand strategy. Counterinsurgency favors peace over justice. Revolution destabilizes the status quo in the name of justice. They are fundamentally at odds.” This is where the rubber of America’s grand strategy meets the road of globalization’s advance: We can respond to its friction (violent global insurgency) and we can facilitate its force (the integration of emerging economies), but what we cannot do is mandate their combined solution according to our preferred model (liberal democracy). In accepting the benefits of peace over justice, we accept a multiplicity of political outcomes: Sometimes our models will win, and sometimes other models will prevail. Either America submits to the dominant dynamics of this era’s aggressively expansive globalization, or we risk derailing the process as a whole. Or to put it another way, if we’re willing to go slow on the politics (multiparty democracy) while getting our way on the economics (expanding world middle class), we’ll eventually achieve the primacy of our ideals (pursuit of happiness). So America needs to ask itself: Is it more important to make globalization truly global, while retaining great-power peace and defeating whatever antiglobalization insurgencies may appear in the decades ahead? Or do we tether our support for globalization’s advance to the up-front demand that the world first resemble us politically?
If you favor the former route, then our military’s transformation via Afghanistan and Iraq has not been in vain. Judging by the new “COIN of the realm,” our military leaders have finally figured out what Abraham Lincoln once described as the “terrible math” involved in winning long wars such as this one.
But if you favor the latter route, then you have been doubly misled by Bush-Cheney’s attempted grand strategy of the last seven years.
Gluttony, Leading to Strategic Overhang Cynically Foisted upon the Next President
Gluttony is perhaps the most self-conscious of sins, because your transgressions become undeniably apparent both to yourself and to others. So it is with grand strategies, where the usual descriptor is “imperial overreach,” a phrase that has been bandied about by realist-school academics since the Soviet Union’s collapse rai
sed the possibility of its corollary among American strategists.
First, let us examine some facts. U.S. defense spending as a percentage of national GDP is smaller than it’s ever been since World War II, falling steadily downward from its high of just over one-third in 1945, dropping to the Korean War figure of 11.7 percent, to Vietnam’s 9.8 percent, to the Reagan buildup’s 6.0 percent, to the first Gulf war’s 4.6 percent, to our current mark hovering in the 4.3-4.4 percent range. Yes, the American military has spread itself out today to more nations than ever in terms of overseas bases and facilities, but in terms of what most Americans recognize as major bases, there our global footprint remains limited to about thirty or so foreign states. In effect, the hundreds of smaller facilities that now connect our forces to several dozen more nations worldwide reflect the same sort of in-neighborhood networking that Petraeus’s COIN strategy implemented in Iraq: Professional working relationships are established with local militaries, which in turn allow our small training and liaison units to set up small facilities inside their existing bases. If you use America’s military to engage the world primarily in local capacity building, that’s what the footprint looks like. Finally, consider this measure of individual burden: In 1968, at the peak of the Vietnam War, approximately one out of every 200 American citizens was in uniform, serving abroad. Today, that burden has dropped to roughly one out of every 800 Americans.
Having said all that, we can see that there are clear limits to how much we can employ U.S. forces abroad in de facto combat zones at high rates of rotation—in other words, keeping them there longer or sending them back there faster and thus more frequently. In a professional military that’s at once older, more educated, more married, and more burdened with children than your dad’s military once was, “quality-of-life” issues reign paramount for overall service readiness, meaning the capacity to suddenly gear oneself up for a new combat mission. As such, there is a level of effort, or maximum capacity, that our armed forces can sustain for any one period of time. When sizable numbers are involved in two lengthy interventions like Afghanistan and Iraq, our military is essentially tied down on a near-global basis. That means that, at best, we could muster two or three smaller contingency responses elsewhere around the planet, and could respond to a significant combat scenario at first only primarily with naval and Air Force assets. Simply put, America cannot place large numbers of boots on the ground anywhere right now, and to do so with any speed would be monumentally difficult.
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