Iraq and the Objective Principle

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. It allows armchair strategists to second-guess those who make decisions that set the course of history. It isn't predictive, doesn't require a lot of insight, and there are no consequences if your second-guessing is wrong. With that said, allow me sit in my own easy chair, safely out of range to use my own hindsight to look at how we got to the sad state of affairs that is Iraq.

Harry Summers was an instructor at the Army War College. During his tenure there, he wrote critical analyses of two conflicts: Vietnam and the Gulf War. In each book, he used Clausewitz's tenets of war to analyze where decision-makers in each conflict got things right, and where they got them wrong. In both of works, Summers put the principle of the Objective ahead of all others. His reasoning was that if one doesn't have a clear objective (why are we here and what is our goal), and then all the other principles don't matter. The objective is a clear, decisive and attainable target. The objective also must be based on a larger political goal that may be tough to define.

In looking back at the current situation in Iraq, we need to go back to the not so distant past - the Gulf War. In this conflict, the objective was a simple one - the liberation of Kuwait from Iraq. To put a finer point on it, Colin Powell said we were going to do two things to Saddam Hussein's army - "we're going to cut it off, then we're going to kill it." That very brief statement is great in its simplicity. The objective was crystal clear, and it gave both the troops in 'the sandbox' and the American people a benchmark, something to tell us whether we won or lost. It gave all of us an endpoint, not an amorphous, open ended commitment. Once the Iraqis were out of Kuwait, our job was done. This last point is especially important. Once we cut off and killed Saddam's army, the road to Baghdad was open. Iraq was ours for the taking if we wanted it. As tempting as that thought was, George Bush didn't go for it. His advisors (Brent Scowcroft chief among them) advised against it, for they saw that if we took Baghdad, we'd have to occupy it for years. The occupation of Baghdad (and the rest of Iraq) was something George Bush didn't want to do, so he didn't. Then it was better to keep Saddam Hussein in box, all the better to keep an eye on him and to maintain some stability in the Middle East. To summarize, the objective was brief, clear and concise – get the Iraqis out of Kuwait. Once the objective was achieved, we went no further.

Fast forward twelve years to 2003, when the war drums started to beat again. The US and a “coalition if the willing” went to war with Saddam Hussein. What was the objective in the war? I found eight objectives that, if we satisfied them, we could declare victory and leave. The objectives as laid out by Donald Rumsfeld:

1. Regime change;
2. Eliminate Weapons of Mass Destruction;
3. Capture or drive out terrorists;
4. Collect intelligence on terrorist networks;
5. Collect intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction activity;
6. Secure Iraq's oil fields;
7. Deliver humanitarian relief and end sanctions;
8. Help Iraq achieve representative self-government and insure its territorial integrity.

Whatever happened to the KISS [“Keep It Simple, Stupid”] principle? To complicate matters, in 2007 Congress weighed in with a set of “benchmarks” contained in the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans’ Care, Katrina Recovery, and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act:

1. Forming a Constitutional Review Committee and then completing the constitutional review.
2. Enacting and implementing legislation on de-Ba’athification.
3. Enacting and implementing legislation to ensure the equitable distribution of hydrocarbon resources of the people of Iraq without regard to the sect or ethnicity of recipients, and enacting and implementing legislation to ensure that the energy resources of Iraq benefit Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds, and other Iraqi citizens in an equitable manner.
4. Enacting and implementing legislation on procedures to form semi-autonomous regions.
5. Enacting and implementing legislation establishing an Independent High Electoral Commission, provincial elections law, provincial council authorities, and a date for provincial elections.
6. Enacting and implementing legislation addressing amnesty.
7. Enacting and implementing legislation establishing strong militia disarmament program to ensure that such security forces are accountable only to the central government and loyal to the Constitution of Iraq.
8. Establishing supporting political, media, economic, and services committees in support of the Baghdad security plan.
9. Providing three trained and ready Iraqi brigades to support Baghdad operations.
10. Providing Iraqi commanders with all authorities to execute this plan and to make tactical and operational decisions, in consultation with U.S. commanders, without political intervention, to include the authority to pursue all extremists, including Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias.
11. Ensuring that the Iraqi security forces are providing even-handed enforcement of the law.
12. Ensuring that, according to President Bush, Prime Minister Maliki said ‘‘the Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of [their] sectarian or political affiliation.”
13. Reducing the level of sectarian violence in Iraq and eliminating militia control of local security.
14. Establishing all of the planned joint security stations in neighborhoods across Baghdad.
15. Increasing the number of Iraqi security forces’ units capable of operating independently.
16. Ensuring that the rights of minority political parties in the Iraqi legislature are protected.
17. Allocating and spending $10 billion in Iraqi revenues for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis.
18. Ensuring that Iraq’s political authorities are not undermining or making false accusations against members of the Iraqi security forces.

Whew! Did you get all that? In my 51 years, I’ve noted there are two things that our armed forces do well – break things and kill people. They’re not so good at “nation building,” which is what I see in this laundry list. I also see “requirements creep.” Did we have clear, concise objectives in Iraq? Were the objectives achievable?

You have to ask yourself a question – how well did we do? Regime change was the easy part. Saddam took the eternal celestial dirt nap in December 2006. His sons preceded him in July 2003. What about the other objectives? That is a mixed bag at best. We didn’t find any WMDs, and the terrorists we were supposed to eliminate weren’t a player in Iraq until we got there, but now that we’ve departed the scene they are there in abundance. We secured the oil fields, delivered humanitarian aid and ended sanctions. How about that “territorial integrity” thing? Given that the Syrian civil war has spilled over into Iraq and Sunnis have taken roughly 1/3 of the country away from Maliki’s control, I wouldn’t put that into the “mission accomplished” column. Iraq governs itself now, but how representative is that government? The Kurds in the north of Iraq have their act together, but the Sunni-Shiite schism that has existed since the passing of The Prophet is alive and well. Will Joe Biden’s solution of a three-way partition of Iraq become reality? To give the devil his due, it just might.

Our president is considering his options on what to do next. He and his advisors have to ask themselves this – what is the political objective? Once that political objective is defined, should there even be a military objective? Can the political objective be achieved by some means other than by military means? Will the objective be clear, concise, and achievable? Do we choose sides in the present conflict? Do we side with Maliki, who is very cozy with Iran? Do we side with a nation [Iran] that once provided the technical means to those people whose IEDs killed our own troops? Is there a “do nothing” option for us? I think there is. One thing I know is I don’t want to get involved in that Sunni-Shiite schism mess.