Earlier this year, the U.S. Army published two volumes that amount to the most comprehensive official history of the Iraq war. They cover the conflict’s most important episodes: the U.S. invasion in 2003, the death spiral into civil war that took shape in the aftermath, the more hopeful period that began with the surge of U.S. forces in 2007, and the withdrawal that saw the last U.S. forces leave Iraq at the end of 2011.
Blandly titled The U.S. Army in the Iraq War and based on 30,000 pages of newly declassified documents, the study recounts a litany of familiar but still infuriating blunders on Washington’s part: failing to prepare for the invasion’s aftermath, misunderstanding Iraqi culture and politics and sidelining or ignoring genuine experts, disbanding the Iraqi army and evicting Baath Party members from the government, ignoring and even denying the rise of sectarian violence, and sapping momentum by rotating troops too frequently.
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Years in the making and admirably candid, the study has largely been ignored by the media and the policy community. That may be because of its daunting length and dry, “just the facts” narrative. Or because some understandably prefer independent accounts to authorized after-action reports. Or because, compared with other major conflicts in U.S. history, so few Americans experienced this one firsthand. Or because the study declines to focus on more timely and contested questions, such as whether it was ever in the realm of possibility to invade a large and diverse Middle Eastern country—one that posed no direct threat to the United States—at an acceptable cost. But the study also comes at a time when many of the supposed lessons of Iraq are increasingly contested, with significant implications for a debate that is raging between and within both major political parties over the most consequential foreign policy choice any country faces: when and how to use military force.
In this critical debate, the Iraq study does seem to take a side, intentionally or otherwise. For that reason, and to better understand what the institution charged with fighting the controversial war believes it has learned, two of the study’s claims are worthy of further reflection, particularly for those who believed that the Iraq debacle would lead to an era of American military restraint. The first claim, which runs through the study like a subplot, is that the war’s “only victor” was “an emboldened and expansionist Iran,” which gained vast influence over its main regional adversary when Iraq’s dictator was toppled and replaced by leaders with close ties to Iran. Washington “never formulated an effective strategy” for addressing this challenge, the study concludes, in part because it imposed “artificial geographic boundaries on the conflict” that “limited the war in a way that made it difficult to reach its desired end states.” Put more succinctly: the United States erred not by waging a war far more expansive than its national interests warranted but by failing to take the fight far enough, including into neighboring Iran.
The study’s second notable claim, mentioned only in passing in its penultimate paragraph, is even more controversial: that “the failure of the United States to attain its strategic objectives in Iraq was not inevitable.” Rather, it “came as a by-product of a long series of decisions—acts of commission and omission—made by well-trained and intelligent leaders.” In other words: the failure of the Iraq war—which cost somewhere between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, led to the deaths of nearly 4,500 Americans and perhaps half a million Iraqis, spawned a grave humanitarian crisis, and incubated the most virulent terrorist franchise the world has ever seen, all with no clear strategic benefit—was one of execution, not conception.
Couched as impartial assessments, these claims—about how the United States’ military restraint empowered its main regional adversary and about the supposed feasibility of fighting a better war—contribute to the deliberate and systematic erosion of what was once conventional wisdom: that, in the future, the United States should be far warier of potential conflicts like the one in Iraq. An alternative view of the Iraq war has flourished since the arrival of U.S. President Donald Trump, driven by both some of his most ardent critics and some of his closest advisers. And it may help bring about the next U.S. conflict in the Middle East.
MUNICH, SAIGON, BAGHDAD
What policymakers learn from history is of more than mere academic interest. Just as generals reputedly prepare to fight the last war, foreign policy officials lean heavily on historical analogies in addressing current threats. U.S. officials frequently use—and often abuse—history to help bolster their arguments during critical debates. In doing so, as the historian Ernest May put it, they become “captives of an unanalyzed faith that the future [will] be like the recent past.”
The British appeasement of Hitler in 1938 has been particularly compelling in policy debates, with allusions to “another Munich,” referring to the city where European powers acceded to some of Hitler’s earliest territorial claims, providing an easy caricature of supposed weakness. In 1965, as President Lyndon Johnson considered whether to deploy 100,000 U.S. troops to Vietnam, the National Security Council held a fateful meeting. His team in the Cabinet Room was divided on the issue, until the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., effectively ended the debate: “I feel there is a greater threat of World War III if we don’t go in. Can’t we see the similarity to [the British] indolence at Munich?”
U.S. officials frequently use—and often abuse—history to help bolster their arguments during critical debates about the next war.
By the 1970s, the Vietnam quagmire that resulted in part from that reading of history began to compete with Munich as the dominant historical analogy. Just as Munich became a shorthand for policy approaches that were overly passive, Vietnam became a warning against those deemed too interventionist. Reluctant to plunge the United States back into conflict, President Jimmy Carter pursued détente with the Soviet Union. In response, critics attacked him for “tapping the cobblestones of Munich” and fostering a “culture of appeasement.” In the decade that followed, President Ronald Reagan sought to overcome what he and others called “the Vietnam syndrome” and shake the United States free from what he believed was an excessive reluctance to confront global threats. But it was not until 1990 that the United States faced an act of aggression so stark that the debate shifted again.
In August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait. “International conflicts attract historical analogies the way honey attracts bears,” noted Alexander Haig, a former U.S. secretary of state and former supreme allied commander of NATO, in a New York Times op-ed that December. “Which analogy, Munich or Vietnam, . . . has more to tell us?” His answer was the former, which meant that Saddam had to be confronted. Rather than ignore or contest the Vietnam analogy, Haig twisted it to suit his purposes. And to leave no doubt, Haig also drew a somewhat contrarian lesson from Vietnam, arguing that it suggested the United States should not stop at liberating Kuwait: it must destroy the Iraqi regime entirely. “The Vietnam analogy instructs us not that we should refrain from using force,” he wrote, “but that if our purposes are just and clear, we should use it decisively.”
In the end, President George H. W. Bush followed only half of Haig’s advice, evicting Saddam’s army from Kuwait but stopping short of marching on Baghdad. In his victory speech, Bush boasted, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
WHICH IRAQ LESSON?
That cure cemented the United States’ status as the world’s sole superpower but had some unforeseen side effects. The country has now spent nearly three decades engulfed in Iraq in various ways. Iraq has provided the leading historical analogies for foreign-policy makers in the past four U.S. administrations and has informed their understanding of the extent and limits of American power, even as other crises have flared and faded.
President Bill Clinton quietly continued the conflict with Saddam after the end of the 1990–91 Gulf War by bombing Iraqi targets throughout his tenure, imposing unprecedented sanctions, and shifting the United States’ official policy to regime change. His secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, coined the phrase “the indispensable nation” to justify further U.S. intervention in Iraq. A few years later, to bolster the case for an invasion, officials serving President George W. Bush used his father’s supposed strategic error of not proceeding to Baghdad, along with a healthy dash of the Munich analogy. They also massively exaggerated the threats posed by Saddam’s weapons programs and the Iraqi leader’s purported ties to terrorist groups.
Repulsed by that sales job and the fiasco it helped promote, President Barack Obama, whose rise was fueled by his early opposition to the Iraq war, drew new lessons from his predecessor’s failures in Iraq. Obama’s understanding of what had gone wrong encouraged his wariness of wielding U.S. power, especially in the Middle East; his commitment to diplomacy as the tool of first resort and openness to engaging even the most difficult adversaries; and his conviction that U.S. military action should come only as part of the broadest possible coalition and in accordance with international law.
Those lessons guided Obama’s approach to the two most difficult problems he faced during the last several years of his term—the mounting Iranian nuclear threat and the Syrian conflict. On Iran, Obama resisted the drumbeat of another reckless war and instead made a deal that removed an immediate nuclear threat from the world’s most volatile region without the United States having to fire a shot. In Syria, Obama avoided a major military escalation in favor of a varied approach, with elements of diplomacy, humanitarian assistance, and force, which ultimately failed to quell a devastating conflict. In each case, the Iraq war weighed heavily in internal debates.
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