America's strategic planning failures in Iraq
The ostentatious strategy for transforming Iraq was nothing less than ill-conceived
The question remains, “has the United States not learned the prudent lessons that they should have gleaned from their niche in global history?” The opportunities to learn and adjust should have come from being an extra-regional military force in distant lands, more than once in America's history of military endeavors.
Has the United States, and its ever dwindling repertoire of coalition partners, been so restricted in their recall, prior to embarking on the current mission to democratize Iraq?
Was being ensconced in Vietnam, for over twenty years, and its staggering cost, relegated to a dark corner in the sepulchral collective memory of national leaders and senior military war planners?
The ostentatious strategy for transforming Iraq, and the collective Middle East, was nothing less than ill-conceived, ill-planned, and incompetent. The strategic level assessment of Iraq, made by the United States, and its closest allies, was wrong in ways reminiscent of the blind-eye application of a legendary British Admiral of yore.
The players of the free-world were profoundly uninformed and inaccurate in their assessment as to how the Iraqi people would view the US and its swift moving invasion into their heartland.
Most particularly, strategic planners were far off the mark when it came to an accurate assessment as to the challenges of the future governance of post-invasion Iraq.
Tacit errors were present in the gross underestimation of both the challenges and stumbling blocks, yet to be encountered, in legitimatizing the new government on a broad acceptable scale in grass-roots Iraq, religious and regional allegiances and ascriptions notwithstanding.
Yet, larger obstacles began to factor in with increasing relevance. When the senior Military Intelligence Planners, CIA regional experts and analysts, and State Department experts grasped the fact that they had completely misjudged the legitimacy and deep-rooted influence that Iraqi exiles still held, the consequences began to drive action planning. All-important critical planning became reactive to the point of semi-panic.
Along with other important pre-mission strategy factors that were bypassed or otherwise ignored; Iraq's economic, ethnic, and demographic complexity and potential problems associated therewith, were not effectively considered to the point of effecting the overall mission analysis.
This plethora of significant factors has resulted in a volatile and multi-faceted level of discontentment. What we now see is a reaction to what is viewed as subjugation by the indigenous population. This comes at a time, when, for the first time in decades the citizenry has been close to gaining a collective influence over the political factors and national leadership that so affects their lives. We learned that once the leadership vacuum was created in Iraq, many factions grappled for control, some with barbaric brutal approaches who, to this day, are exacting their appalling toll on a wide range of symbolic victims.
The necessity to plan for long-term, and oft philanthropic, stability operations as well as robust and multinational nation building remained woefully lacking. Also, those entrusted with the responsibilities to plan, either did not see the risk of insurgency, or they did not accurately estimate the potential down, or upside, of a heretofore un-quantified insurgency in Iraq.
It is the ignored insurgency potential that has matriculated to its current form that will continue to hone their skills of resistance in their daily application of unconventional quasi-military tactics.
The distinction between, “military and civilian”, has been effectually blurred by the resistance; rife within Iraq. Tactics such as this are not unintentional. They are largely ideological but they are certainly fueled by other factors of disenchantment and the promotion of their beliefs, political and ideological.
We now face the sustained prosecution of defiance which is comprised of, “asymmetric”, resistance, responsible for the deaths of American Forces and Anti Insurgent Iraqi Forces, as well as countless innocents, on a daily basis.
Even more important, on a broader scale, these insurgents have challenged and affected the national will of America. As we know, wavering national will, can, indeed, lead to the collective failure of America's military effort, as in the past.
The coalition forces assumed that they were so justified in invading Iraq that our historical and potential future allies would clamber to follow our lead. Poor statesmanship failed to detect, effectively quantify, and broach this resultant vacuous growing rift.
The present overall structure of global alliances, and the world's overall opinion of the United States, can largely be blamed on planning failures, rife with lacking foresight.
