15 Years After Invading Iraq: Winning the War, But Still Fighting for Peace

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Monday marks 15 years since President George W. Bush announced the start of the Iraq war, followed by a ‘decapitation’ air strike on Baghdad meant to target Saddam Hussein. After a 48-hour deadline for Saddam to leave Iraq expired, ground troops from the U.S., UK, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq from Kuwait, launching a war that lasted from 2003 to 2011. The Cipher Brief asked its experts in the intelligence, diplomatic and military to assess the war’s impact. Their conversations are adapted for print below.

In the most basic of assessments, we accomplished our tactical goal of removing Saddam from power. In retrospect, and based on the comments of senior Iraqi officials from Saddam’s regime, the United Nations sanctions were being felt and, in their words, capitulation to full UN inspections and other International demands was not far away.

We failed on the strategic aspect of the aftermath of the invasion. We had no substantive plan for the day after Saddam fell. We allowed Iraqi opposition figures with no real linkages to, or support from the Iraqi people to influence our post-war decisions, with one of the most telling being the dissolution of the Iraqi military, police and security services.

This poorly thought out decision, opposed by the CIA and other involved foreign intelligence services, led to the subsequent development of the Sunni uprising, the following insurgency and ultimately to the birth of ISIS. The destruction of all of Iraq’s governance entities also led to the encroachment of Iran into Iraq – a presence which is now cemented in the south and central portions of the country.

In sum, we got rid of a man and his government. We left behind a country still in disarray, requiring significant U.S. military support, and an embassy where its occupants must live behind walls and fortifications. We allowed Iran to expand its presence and significantly increase its influence in the country and its governance.

The disarray led to the birth of ISIS, which in turn led much of the region to turmoil requiring the commitment of further U.S. military and related resources. Our military and our intelligence agencies performed well and to expectation in the prosecution of the war; what came after is and remains a failure of great consequence.

All was not a failure on Iraq. We succeeded with much help from Iraqis and occasionally some from international community in keeping the country unified, all but ending violence by 2009 (at least until ISIS’s rise), seeing oil production rise to about half of Saudi Arabia’s—number two in OPEC and a major reason for low oil prices since 2014, creating a constitutional democratic system despite flaws that survives, and military forces that – despite their initial failure against ISIS – saved Baghdad.

With much U.S. and coalition help, those Iraqi forces have destroyed ISIS as a ‘state’ and conventional army at least within Iraq. But those achievements, however important, are not why we went into Iraq in 2003, committed a million U.S. and allied troops over eight years, lost 5,000 U.S. military and civilians (with Iraqi loses as high as 100,000), and spent over $1 trillion.

We did all that to have a transformational effect not just on Iraq but on the region—re-read President Bush’s dramatic 2005 Second Inaugural speech—to use the forced import of Western values, especially democracy, as an antidote to the violence, extremism and dysfunction that had characterized not just Iraq and Afghanistan but the whole region for decades, and became existentially manifest with 9/11.

That mission was not accomplished, as the sorry end of the Arab spring, the rise of ISIS, Iran’s expansion and the horrific Syrian civil war all demonstrate. We replaced one set of accelerants to violence and hatred—the Saddam regime—with others, without fundamentally changing the course of the region for the better.

In that larger sense, thus, we failed.

If one believes, as I do, that the primary consideration for when and how to use the instruments of U.S. national power, including force, is how a situation intersects a set of prioritized national security interests, then the 2003 Iraq War stands in stark contrast with its 1991 predecessor.

I believe these interests include, in order: survival of our nation; prevention of catastrophic attacks on our nation; protection of the global operating system; maintaining secure, confident and reliable allies and partners; and preservation and extension of our values.

The degree to which a high interest is intersected, or many interests are intersected, or interests are intersected more deeply, then the nation would be more willing to use force to protect them, and the reverse is true. The use of force involves calculation of cost in blood and treasure, willingness to use force unilaterally, opportunity cost in terms of being less able to act elsewhere, and potentially a push against the strictures of international law. Overthrowing a regime should require an extremely high correlation with interests.

In this context, notwithstanding the tragic miscalculation made by Ambassador April Glaspie that essentially gave Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush used this method flawlessly in 1991. He determined that the intersection of the interests associated with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (a partner and friend threatened, a gross violation of the global order, and actions antithetical to our values) were relatively low, but the intersections were strong. Force was warranted to reverse Saddam’s aggression, but only with partners and in strict accordance with international law. Moreover, the conflict ended at the Iraqi border, keeping the ultimate cost in blood and treasure low.

Unfortunately, this method was not used so skillfully in the second war in 2003. Our true strategic interests remained fairly low, including fairly limited evidence of a program of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and suppression of the Shia and Kurdish populations (including limited use of chemical weapons against the latter). It is not hard to argue that the intersection with national security interests did not rise to the level of effort and risk associated with overthrowing a regime.

The costs in blood and treasure, and the extended impact on the rest of the Middle East, are now a matter of record. The conflict pushed very hard against the international legal standard that demands an imminent threat when citing self- or collective self-defense. And the nature of the conflict set the U.S. military back years in maintaining its competitiveness in a potential conflict with a more capable adversary.

While force may have been warranted, it would have been wiser to use it in a more graduated fashion in order to achieve the principal objective of eliminating Saddam’s WMD program. It was not worth trying to transform a resistant society into a western-style democracy. Hopefully we have learned from this strategic miscalculation.

I agree with the common assertion that the Iraq war initiated a period of unprecedented turbulence and destruction throughout the region but this also ignores the widespread, then-international view that Saddam and his sons led the most dangerous regime the world had ever known or at least in modern times.

Having miraculously survived the disastrous invasion of Kuwait, he routinely defied UN inspectors and threatened violence to his neighbors, all of which alarmed the region and many of the leaders of these countries pressed for his overthrow.

While there’s no question the Iraq war opened a Pandora’s box of devastation, many of the demons in that box existed prior to the invasion, and we should have worked harder to understand that before the operations commenced.

What did it do to U.S. intelligence – and the way the U.S. fights wars?The U.S. intelligence community got it wrong on Iraq’s nuclear program, but no one should doubt the integrity of the officers who worked on that assessment or the efforts in producing that view. Iraq richly deserved the world’s mistrust and the regime did much to exaggerate its malign capabilities. The intelligence community has worked very hard since then to improve its analytic tradecraft when dealing with what must be described as a very difficult and hard target.

But the intelligence community got it right on the broader threat posed by Saddam and his regime to the region, and that should be remembered.

What’s the legacy of this war for Iran’s influence in the region?

I think historians are going to wonder why the U.S. didn’t spend more time preparing to respond to Iran’s inevitable entry into the vacuum. We knew Iraq was important to Iran. We knew Iran worked with many of the Shia opposition.

Looking over the various narratives, one is struck by the similarity to today’s debate on Iran, as to whether we can work with Iranian officials on common threats, or whether such efforts only provide cover to Iran and its revolutionary hardliners as they achieve Iran’s hardline objectives in the region.

What’s the long-term legacy of the war in Iraq?

Along with the 9/11 attack, the Iraq and Afghan conflicts are going to be remembered for their transformative impact on the U.S. national security architecture. The U.S. intelligence community became more focused on sustaining the structure and integrity of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the security of their neighbors supporting their warfighters, and also changing the way that we handled counterterrorism operations worldwide.

This not only meant we had to change how we think but also how we train ourselves, how we handle resources, in a world where such strategic threats as Russia never went away.

Lost in the horrors of the region’s devastation, and the memory of the Iraq war, is the fact that the intelligence community routinely performed successfully in all of these goals and often with great heroism.

The wisdom of President Bush’s national strategic decision to launch the U.S. intervention into Iraq 15 years ago this week will be debated for many years to come. And while military officers, like their civilian counterparts, have opinions on that decision, once it was made, the U.S. Army and its sister services focused on achieving a successful outcome, which included removing Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime and enabling a stable and self-governing Iraq free of repression and one where all parties were represented.

The first part of that objective was indeed achieved, and rather quickly. The second part took longer and never fully materialized. The mission in Iraq was approaching success when another equally significant national strategic decision was made – President Barack Obama’s directive to withdraw U.S. military forces from Iraq. As the Chief of Staff for the Multi-National Force in Iraq at that time, I experienced the beginning of that withdrawal in summer and fall of 2009, just as the security environment was stabilizing and a reasonable expectation of success was at hand.

Just like the first decision – to enter Iraq – will be a topic of discussion and debate in war colleges and elsewhere for generations to come, so will the second one, to leave.

Beyond the political dimensions, the war in Iraq has had a profound effect on the U.S. Army and the other military services in some key areas. First, a hard lesson learned was that while the size, shape and performance of the forces that conducted the initial invasion validated American conventional warfighting capability, they proved inadequate and undersized to consolidate the battlefield victories – Phase 4, in military parlance.

The restricted size of the U.S. force, when coupled with other critical decisions like disbanding the remnants of Saddam’s army, de-Baathification of Iraqi institutions, and poor assumptions about the anticipated post-combat environment allowed an insurgency to metastasize – an environment that has dominated the U.S. experience in Iraq for a decade and a half.

The U.S. Army adjusted to all of those decisions and assumptions by conducting counterinsurgency warfare and stability operations, both of which came at a high cost in lives and treasure.

Secondly, the war in Iraq (and concurrently, Afghanistan) became – and still is – the longest continuous employment of the All-Volunteer Army since its formation in the post-draft days of the early 1970s. Many inside the Army and outside thought the back-to-back yearlong deployments to combat would break the force. This did not happen.

Today’s Army professionals proved to be far more resilient than anyone expected. To be sure, this extended period of conflict has taken its toll in a variety of ways, but America’s soldiers – and their families – continue to answer the call. That may be the most important lesson of the Iraq experience.

On the 15th anniversary of the second Iraq War, I think about the unstable relationship between the intelligence profession and policymaking. The goal of intelligence professionals is to provide decision advantage to our executive branch, and I think the record shows that on the micro level we are able to do so.

Much like weather forecasters, we can tell you what your immediate environment will be like for the next day. But ask us to go beyond a couple of weeks, and our accuracy declines. Despite the macro weaknesses of intelligence, policymakers still must make decisions that have long-term consequences. And sometimes policymakers believe they must act even when their chances for success are problematic. The Iraq War provides a textbook example of this dynamic.

I think historians will write that the U.S. entanglement in the Middle East and almost complete focus on terrorism created a “vacuum of opportunities” for other countries. Just to name two: Russian aggression and active measures and China’s cautious flexing of its new international muscles. I don’t believe either would have happened to the same extent if US foreign policy attention and energy had been balanced.

I believe Iraq brought the U.S. intelligence community and the U.S. military much closer together due to shared mission and the complexities of the region, people and the nature of the conflict. Military customers from the combatant commander to the special operator on the ground found value in the intelligence collection and analysis that allowed them to better perform their missions. Strong relationship were forged within the crucible of common mission between the U.S. intelligence community and the U.S. military giving new emphasis and depth to the term “joint operations”.