Bad Strategies - Notes on Iraq

Choosing to Fail - When you fail to plan, you plan to fail

The cause of the internal conflicts now raging in Iraq was not the endstate that the Bush administration proposed for Iraq—although the endstate should have been modified to reflect the many cultural obstacles to establishing a democracy in the Middle East. The real problem was a failure to establish ways and means to reach that endstate. The only part of the ways and means to be realized was the first objective: eliminating the regime of Saddam Hussein through military invasion. Beyond that, the American concept was so vague that it could scarcely be called a strategy. Because the ways and means to establish a new democratic Iraq were never thought out, the U.S. military forces and civilian administrators in Iraq lost control of the situation the moment American forces occupied Baghdad in April 2003. (p.182)


The American civilian and military leadership suffered from a lack of critical thinking at the strategic level. From the first discussions in 2001 that led to the decision to invade Iraq, the methodology of strategic planning and decision making—the ways part of the strategic process—were faulty. The planning—or rather the lack of planning—for the postwar Iraq was driven by a set of monumentally bad assumptions. These assumptions, combined with a failure to understand the Iraqi context, led to chaos. The problems were exacerbated by the failure of the American leadership to quickly identify problems as they arose or to adapt American policy and strategy in the light of new conditions. Lacking a realistic plan, the United States was left with what can be described as a Peter Pan Strategy: “If you wish for it hard enough, it will come true.” Unfortunately, what worked in James Barrie’s play does not work in the modern Middle East. (p. 183)

The Bush administration’s two national security strategies asserted a new principle of America’s right to conduct preemptive attacks. In fact, this assertion tended to make America’s allies more nervous that her enemies. Beyond outlines of broad goals and principles, such as “promoting effective democracies,” the two strategies lack any specific discussion of ways and means to realize the rather grandiose endstate. For example, no priorities were set to guide agency leaders in funding or resource allocation... None of the Bush administration’s major strategic documents provide military commanders or senior civilian officials with specific, or even general, guidance for developing planning options. In 2007 I heard several generals express a common complaint: “We have no strategy.” (p.200)

The west, like McKiernan and most officers trained in the post-Vietnam army, had learned to focus so completely on conventional warfare that he could not grasp the concept of an enemy that used guerrilla tactics. It was a foretaste of what was to come all too often for the next few years—American commanders who understood only conventional war and were surprised by their enemies’ unconventional tactics and ability to rapidly adapt. (p.205)

With no plan to establish order and only 130,000 U.S. troops to control a country of 25 million, weeks of looting and chaos followed. The worst part for the Iraqis was the rise in crime. Saddam Hussein opened the prisons before the regime fell, and with little force to maintain order, criminal gangs had a golden opportunity to begin a wave of kidnappings and robberies that made life hell for the average Iraqi. The overwhelming majority of Iraqis were happy to see Saddam go, but even at this early date, the American occupation was clearly not working... One lesson from recent conflicts was the need to place a corps of trained civilian experts in place to administer a country in the aftermath of the war... In Iraq, a country of 25 million people, the U.S. brought in only 600 civilians to manage the rebuilding effort and to build an Iraqi administration. It was a ludicrously small figure. (p.206-207)